Yeah, I'm mainly referring to those you mentioned. But smart contracts in general allow tons of new use cases, which are furthered by those types of ground-level advancements. It will take years to sort out, there will be scams and useless schemes that repeat the mistakes of history as the article claims, but then there will be others.
If predicting that unimaginable benefits will flow from this space, analagous to the early days of the web when people's understandable first ideas were to put newsletters & mail-order catalogs online, makes me sound like a naive blockchain cultist, so be it; but then again, what forum am I on right now?
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
> [...] most people have nothing to say to each other!
Funny how this premise is completely true but his prediction fell completely flat.
It turned out that most economic impact didn't come from people talking to each other but making it possible for people to part with their money when "talking" to machines.
In that regard I see a very bright future cryptocurrencies that enable machines to pay other machines automatically and programmaticaly.
"Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price.
Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims!
It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over." - Charles Ponzi
I too can quote the thing I believe Bitcoin is most like. I can even reason about it: Bitcoin is like a Ponzi scheme because the only value comes from selling at a higher price than you buy it for before it hits zero. Because no value is being created, only moved around, for anyone to make money they have to get out before everyone left loses everything.
Why do you think Bitcoin is like the internet, aside from the fact that the internet was not believed to be valuable, and it turned out to be; and Bitcoin is not believed to be valuable? Many things are not believed to be valuable, they do not all become the internet.
Take most any statement about why the Internet was revolutionary and replace "message" with "money".
You can sent [it] anywhere in the world at a reduced cost and faster speed vs the old way.
You can send [it] to anyone without anyone's permission*
You can back [it] up in multiple electronic locations.
[it] is resistant to censorship*
. . . and so on. Like the Internet, it's not invincible. States can degrade it if they choose to make the effort. But why would they, if it were valueless? Just to protect investors from an evil Ponzi scheme? OK - let's assume that's the case.
Isn't gold a Ponzi by your definition? If you say no, it's not because of the collective idea that gold is a store of value, it's because of this or that industrial/practical application, I respectfully disagree.
I'm sure if you think hard enough about it you can imagine some actual value from programmable money. Here's a start, this guy does a better job than me of articulating just some of them:
I am keeping a close eye on smart contracts, but so far it seems like there needs to be new primitives to make them really interesting. So far they can only really act on tokens on the same blockchain. And still I haven't seen almost any new financial instruments, e.g. options, hedge funds of tokens.
There's obviously interesting things you can do with smart contracts when they're actually tied to real world events, but for that you need oracles. That hasn't been figured out as far as I can tell.
If predicting that unimaginable benefits will flow from this space, analagous to the early days of the web when people's understandable first ideas were to put newsletters & mail-order catalogs online, makes me sound like a naive blockchain cultist, so be it; but then again, what forum am I on right now?