what is the difference between blockchain and blockchain service?

[cryptokangaroo]

they say it is good to invest in blockchain projects, as they have economies of scale and sponge off some value of the dapps built on them. is investing into blockchain services inferior ROI?

[Slava79]

I suppose by blockchain service here you meant infrastructure projects built on blockchain technology but not necessarily  cryptocurrencies.

For example, one could think about implementing an in-house database of users payments transactions which stores it's copies on several company servers and guaranties the data is consistent.

Or, a tool to make a distributed decision, say, in trading area, where you need to come to decision to sell or to buy together with a set of participants and do it securely and effectively.

One could think of a toolchain which allows creating this kind of applications (dapps), even without "balances" and "accounts" in it's core.

My personal opinion is yes, the future belongs to this type of projects, in other words to blockchains, not to cryptocurrencies.

Ah, and also there is the DAG thing, so probably even not to blockchains, but to "distributed ledgers" would be more accurate.

[paxmao]

they say it is good to invest in blockchain projects, as they have economies of scale and sponge off some value of the dapps built on them. is investing into blockchain services inferior ROI?

Ok, let´s make an analogy to clarify. Let´s say you are in 1992. Would you rather invest in internet providers, e-commerce platforms or in e-commerces? Well, if you invested in Worldcom you would have lost all your money. If you invested in AOL, you would have made good profit. If you invested in many, many e-shops you would have lost you money. If you invested in Amazon or Google, you would have made a great result. No rule, just solid business logic.

Does the fact that Amazon sells a lot on-line make telecom companies sponge value from it? Yes, but very little in comparison.

It is the same case for Blockchain. We are in a stage in which every one is creating chains of all flavours land then, there are many projects built on top of these infrastructures, typically commercialised as tokens.

Both chains and services can be profitable and both can dive into oblivion. However the way they succeed or fail is different: Chains will fail if other newer ones get greater adoption (by means of technological superiority or by means of better marketing and alliances) , whereas services will relate more to traditional business logic, that is the ability to buy cheap, sell expensive and have low costs between the two.

It is true that chains sponge value of the projects built on top, but while the network sponges value for the transactions, the project acquires value based on real-world value generation for customers. The network requires a large number of projects generating transactions, the services require users paying.

No rule here, you can make a great profit on both (and go broke too), but my intuition dictates that in the short term, chains have more potential for growth (in average terms, individual chains may fail spectacularly) and in the long term, this is going to be about how good are business at becoming better using blockchain, while the blockchain technology becomes a commodity and thus not as profitable.