I'm not blaming the tool. I'm pointing out its inadequacy. I am saying there is an interesting and very hard problem here that severely limits the adoption of these technologies, and that solving it would be both interesting and important.
The darknet problem as defined by most techies is solved, yet almost nobody uses these systems. Why?
I agree that it is a solution in search of a problem, but it was able to find a problem, namely, facilitating darkmarket transactions; that's a real use-case that wasn't practical before blockchain tokens. Unfortunately, that use-case does not satisfy the enthusiasts and they have been determined to find some other use-case that has yet to materialize. The closest they've come up with are smart-contracts but those are generally useless as well because a smart-contract is only capable of enforcing rules on a blockchain and nowhere else.
As the person said, it is not a problem with crypto because there are indeed solutions to the problem. The tool you are referring to are the set of crypto currencies, of which there are many, which do not compensate data handling.
That can apply to other apps and products, but much less so to crypto tools. It's basically one of the reasons why new crypto algorithms only start being used after 5 years of being in the wild, and many more in pre-release research.
I spent about 2 years harping on everyone I know to use this, including clients, bosses, friends, colleagues, and everyone else I would send more than 2 or 3 emails. I was only able to get a couple of people using it (and that was probably mostly because they were worried I would be able to get them fired if they didn't keep me happy). I eventually gave up.
Crypto is super important, but it's way too hard to get practically anyone, even technical people, to use it. This area is ripe for disruption I think, especially as more and more high-profile leaks get released. Someone could sell some great, easyish-to-use crypto software and get a lot of money.
These tools are actually great and useful though, right now. I wasn't as into crypto, but I mostly remember the tools being "neat right now, and very useful in the future."
Stable Diffusion in particular has a huge community using it clustered around CivitAI, its just flying under the radar.
I don't see how any feature specific to crypto contributed here? The only coordination required is to get the requisite number of people to contribute - and that's a social problem, not a technical one.
They built something and turns out that no one wants to use it. Happens all the time.
Happens all the time, especially if no one sees a point in using it. In other words, it didn't solve anyone's serious valuable problem. Which is something that those people that have been saying "couldn't you just do the same thing with a database" already knew.
Crypto went thru a lot of hype-memes, like NFTs, staking etc etc. But I still remember the older "nonono this is about blockchain as an underlying technology" meme.
Because cryptocurrency is clearly the wrong solution to this problem. If they actually wanted to make a decentralized marketplace non-technical people can use they would not have used cryptocurrency.
Which has basically failed, probably because of complexity for regular users. I don't know much about the crypto version of this, but it is probably more complex for a new user to get started with.
It's worse than that; there is no compelling reason to use it for the vast majority of people. It's a strictly worse experience in nearly all respects compared to centralized options except in the case of dark net commerce where it's the only option.
We're on the same page but we're looking at different metrics. I'm talking about daily usage which, even if you assume that every wallet is a unique user, is in the tens of thousands at most.
The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.
Indeed. But the learning curve for the current set of crypto wallets and tools is too high to allow any widespread adoption.
These cannot be products for devs only or they will never take off. If you want a $1B product to pursue, someone should built decent tooling for crypto.
The problem, for me (and I'm hardly an expert) is that you need a considerable amount of double speak to work through it.
Anonymous? No, this isn't going to help with censorship.
Crypto that's world changing? How we all forget history.
My problems with crypto run deep, but it's really a high-level poker game. I know I'm a sucker that doesn't know the rules, but 99% who's diving in aren't aware of this fact.
Distributed / decentralized internet? Ugh... Let's talk when our cell phones have 100tb of storage.
I've had the misfortune of working on crypto contracts. I'll never do it again. If you honestly believe your information is safe or if you believe the developers working on this stuff are l33t, I'm sorry, but I have to burst your bubble.
In my opinion, the tech is interesting in it's own right for research, but real-world uses has shown it to be dangerous, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Yes, I completely agree. There's plenty of tech available to achieve many of the goals of functionality, affordability, and privacy a motivated team of developers could have. Just that it's often unnecessarily difficult to build and use. Probably things will be much better in a(nother) decade, but the whole thing is still a work in progress. In the meantime, why pay the cost 100% of the time for avoiding a bad thing that happens 1% of the time? Cryptocurrency has its utility, but much less when minimizing trust isn't a requirement.
The darknet problem as defined by most techies is solved, yet almost nobody uses these systems. Why?
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