Content-based addressing has already been shoehorned into traditional web architecture (e.g. hashing your dependencies for CDN compatibility), so it’s refreshing to see tech built with it as a first class citizen.
Filecoin definitely seems like more of a moonshot, but compared to e.g. NFT marketplaces, it seems like a web3 project with a lot more substance
This is THE crowning example of why web3 has no usecase even though they have been 'building' and it is 'early days' for almost 15 years.
I don't know anyone using filecoin, but I can bet $100K the person next to me knows or has used ChatGPT.
It failed.
Even if we go back to other AI projects: (DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, GPT-3, LensaAI, etc) all of these projects have been used by hundreds of millions of real people, in a short space of time.
I have never seen a crypto project with a clear usecase ever go mainstream and we are still waiting for it.
Ethereum is extremely primitive at the moment. You reveal your address, and all of your transactions, to the entire world, when you use it. Scalability of L1 is limited to 30 transactions per second, while L2 is still in beta, with centralized coordinators.
With more development, people can conduct transactions while maintaining total privacy, and the public blockchain can, with the use of temporary data layers (EIP-4444 in Ethereum), sharding and Rollups, process 100,000 transactions per second while maintaining the decentralization, tamper-resistance and permissionless-ness characteristic of blockchains.
We are not in the 1960's anymore, 15 years for something that was made in 2008 and isn't used for its intended use case is not early days at all.
It is a failure.
Ethereum’s had more time where it’s had global availability at much lower prices but it’s hard far less impact because it doesn’t solve problems almost any people have.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ukraine-selling-nft-military
And to buy weapons/medical-supplies:
https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy/status/1605248783192887298
It's used by artists to make a living:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/this-36-year-old-made-over-1...
And it's used to transact with over a hundred billion dollars worth of stablecoins, in countries like Argentina where the currency is unreliable:
https://cryptonews.com/news/stablecoins-lead-charge-as-crypt...
And this is when it's in a primitive state, with very limited scalability, and zero privacy. Once the technology is more developed, to allow something substantially greater than 30 transactions to be processed per second, and to allow people to conduct transactions on the blockchain without revealing their financial assets and activity to the world, it will likely gain more adoption, especially in the realm of stablecoins.
Similarly, the privacy things are both a huge change and something only needed due to having built the system on the wrong architecture. Solving that problem means very expensively reaching the point where its competitors started.
Adding privacy makes transactions on the order of 4X more computationally expensive.
Once Ethereum has EIP-4844 and EIP-4444, such a transaction would cost less than a penny in fees on a Rollup. Stablecoin payments would be substantially better than centralized e-wallet payments for many mainstream use-cases if Ethereum developers pull off these upgrades and if crypto advocates manage to convince the major powers to legalize the zk-proof cryptographic methods needed to provide blockchain transactions with privacy.
It’s trendy sure, but sparkling autocomplete has a limited number of use cases, and zero shipped products.
Who go so far as to never shut up about it.
And make me sit and watch them fumble with it for minutes in screen sharing codepair sessions as they construct lengthy prose descriptions of trivial code snippets to coerce it into being "helpful".