If a strong explanation is difficult to find by a proponent of crypto already familiar with the issues then Ethereum, Web3, and crypto in general have a serious communications issue.
I agree with you that crypto often makes things unecessairly complicated sometimes. Every heard of hypercore protocol? They're a force against that. Ethereum should take note there.
I don't think that throwing a blockchain at this problem is helping because the problem is the complexity and impossibility to understand for non crypto experts.
Ehh... I have quite similar issues with the Ethereum crowd. Nobody understands in which situations they need distributed consensus on some state, and what the other available solutions to various similar problems are. Blockchains solve a very niche (but previously difficult-to-solve!) problem, and given that they literally cost money to use, it's good to use other tools to solve problems when you can.
People like you are exactly the problem..provide a real use case where crypto and Blockchain have revolutionized something and then talk. You can't seem to do that.
I think it is more a fundamental philosophical problem with Ethereum. They have fascinating ideas and workarounds for all sorts of issues, but in the end they keep layering complex solutions on more complex solutions.
Maybe a bit like enterprise software, just add another abstraction layer...
The problem is that people don’t see a problem and go looking for solutions.
People see a technology and go looking for ways to apply it.
Sure, a blockchain can be used to solve this problem. But should it? Probably not. It’s hard to find technical information but it seems like the same could have been accomplished with an easier solution.
Cryptocurrencies impose some complex constraints on themselves that require complex solutions.
Conceptually banks and exchanges solved the consensus problem decades ago and they did it with a highly secured simple database and lots of crosschecks.
But if you trust nobody (except some developers somehwere) then things get tricky
The problem is not the blockchain, but the cryptocurrency with it's harmful consent-mechanism, also all the scams happening with it. These are two different technologies. And only one of them is highly problematic.
It seems that for years now whenever people try to justify the usefulness of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts there are always 10 different, jargonic, and barely-understandable answers. There is no shortage of excuses given for why they haven't busted banks, credit cards, and payment apps.
For years decentralized technologies have been pushed as the future for the internet and yet they still aren't used by anybody outside hardcore enthusiast communities, while bringing ruin to many others as volatile 'investments'. Goes to show that the problem is in the technology itself, no matter how you present it. Unless it is changed to reflect people's actual needs (i.e: reject the ideology of decentralization for convenience and easy payments) it will never gain traction.
You're talking about a different problem - not having a trusted third party or authority. I agree that blockchain solves that problem (well, it tries).
I think people in the crypto currency world understand that pretty well. The problem is that blockchain solutions don’t actually do anything useful yet.
In most cases it seems that the existing technologies have been adopted and the people advocating for blockchain-based solutions just aren't aware that it's a solved problem.
Refer back to my comment where I explicitly said that I'm not advocating for blockchain / DLT, nor did I say that Ethereum / IPFS provide any value.
But, there are millions of dollars in investment and research being poured into these pieces of technology that attempt to address the problem stated in the article. I'm not saying they do or do not solve anything - my point was that it just struck me as odd that an article explicitly talking about crypto and the problems of centralization, didn't so much as mention that there are folks out there trying to fix it.
It would be like saying "fracking is a problem" without mentioning any group that's trying to address that problem. It's pointing out a problem without a call to action. Whether or not that call will actually fix that problem is a different story.
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