doedoedoedoe

Right on, are there any actual projects out there that do / use any of this?

Regarding my account, I'll happily admit I am not a fan of speaking publicly about basically anything. If blockchain tech was confined to a bunch of gamblers loosing money amongst themselves and making wild speculative bets it wouldn't matter to me so much - The real issue is that it has gained too much support from people with MASSIVE financial incentives to push these scams onto the general population, and it ends up having two effects that I am strongly against:

First, from the financial and social perspective, cryptocurrencies and NFT's are straight up Greater Fool scams - theres really no way to argue it; The coins are only valuable if you are able to convince a greater fool to buy them. I understand that there are hundreds of categories where this is true, from beany-babies to diamonds, but fraud in one category does not justify rampant fraud in another. The major issue here is that, at their core, digital assets are (practically) infinitely available, and these systems exist to add false scarcity to an asset that legitimately has none.

The second part, which is why I'm so vocal about the issue, is that from a technological perspective blockchain is total garbage. There really is no nice way to say it, if a software engineer is a proponent of blockchain as the driver for "Web 3.0" they are either totally ignorant of how the technology works, or are blatantly lying so they can push a scumbag Ponzi scheme they are personally invested in. The technology has been around for as long as the iPhone, and I have yet to hear a single legitimate use case (besides wild speculative gambling and driving more crypto-related schemes) that can't be implemented cheaper, faster, safer, more private, and more secure using existing technologies. You'll hear the phrase "It's still in it's early stages" a lot, with proponents giving vague promises that one day it will work well - that is simply not how actual technological progress is made.

Mix these issues with the fact that there are only two ways to drive the technology - one that creates so much waste it uses more energy than Argentina (that is a legitimate fact, not an exaggeration), and the other is that we literally give the ultra-rich a system that rewards more money with more power and greater returns - and it should be pretty clear that blockchain and it's related assets are super, super dangerous.

It seems like you maybe could have provided just one example based on the length of your reply...

I can't quite tell if you're being serious or not, but just in case you are:

Literally every technology you listed there was a massive step forward technologically and was a significantly better solution for the problems they addressed...

You also skewed the question into a completely non-sensical argument - Obviously there are lots of websites that provide purpose beyond self-promotion.

I'm looking for one example of blockchain technology that isn't circular or self-promoting, and solves any problem better than existing technologies. Not some theoretical future use case, just one existing project.

This strikes me as a pretty bizarre argument, like a reverse slippery-slope fallacy, and I've heard it repeated by advocates. You are staying that yes, the technology is awful and scam ridden, but maybe sometime in the future in some way no one can think of it will be ok. This is obviously not a meaningful argument.

In regards to censorship, trust, and any other perceived benefit of blockchain technology for applications, those benefits rely solely on the organization that controls the application - ultimately landing users in the exact same space. Blockchain is hailed as a way to build decentralized applications without any regard to the fact that those applications would still need to be built by a central organization.

The final note that advocates seem to profess as some great proof of why blockchain is ok is that other systems are flawed, as if proving that some other system is flawed is proof that it's ok for their system to be a sesspool of fraud and waste.

I think that there is still time to inform general consumers so the vast majority are aware of the dangers before cryptocurrencies are made friendly enough to use for the average non-tech or finance folk. We are definitely hitting a point where these scams have to reach out beyond crypto-bros, finance gamblers, and the tech-savvy so that they can sustain the pyramid - and if people are aware before that happens, hopefully the bubble will burst and the fad will end.