What do cryptocurrencies do again?
It is distributed application hosting.
It only becomes important once the community grows enough to start securing something valuable. Like for example a marketplace that connects online students and teachers may be holding $20M in credits and you are trusting every employee to not misappropriate these credits. With Web3, the marketplace is just a Web2 interface that sets up the transactions, but at the end each user signs them with their own private keys, so the marketplace site has no liability nor presents a risk to the participants. Its commissions, like all other business logic, is immutable on the blockchain.
Elections - you can make sure that no one can just go in the database and change all the votes, as they can with Stackoverflow moderator elections for example.
Contests
Escrow payments
Auctions
Recurring subscriptions
You can combine them, for example you can make videoconferencing slots on your calendar which people around the world can book, to do office hours with you or take your course. People would bid on the slots and you’d take the top 10 people.
Crypto takes care of all this and around the world. It is like if you asked “what does the Web do, since we have newspapers, magazines, radio, TV”? The answer is that it standardized communication on an open protocol called HTTP. So it allowed anyone to publish information for anyone else in the world to access.
Smart contracts also represent a rebellion against having to trust institutions and governments. Now we have an alternative. The Web 1.0 democratized access to information, Web 2.0 allowed people to communicate and collaborate (but sadly didn’t democratize it) and Web 3.0 is radically open source and allows people to exchange value and participate in programs that don’t require trusting middlemen. The more complex the application, the more you as a network win by trusting the blockchain and smart contracts alone.
Start by clicking the link above if you want to get more examples of applications. Cryptocurrency by itself is just a first generation toy like space invaders or personal home pages. The space will evolve, and you can bury your head in the sand or you can spend 3 mins to click a link.
Here are some more applications that increase donor and investor confidence and break down global barriers:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/
https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...
All of the examples you list require external trust outside the blockchain, making its use moot.
(Perhaps recurring subscriptions could be done without external trust, but I don’t think it helps the domain much.)
What makes you think I haven’t researched the oracle problem and hundreds of other things related to this space? Vitalik writes about tons of things in crypto, and so do I. I have been building solutions for years.
They are FREE. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. If you don’t have time to even read a summary digest of what they do, please don’t patronize others. I don’t have time to read about how GPT transformers work in detail, and you won’t find me condescendingly telling people to please read up on the AI alignment problem. And certainly not knee-jerk dismissing and downvoting EVERYTHING related to AI without even spending a minute reading answers to mu own questions !
I recently left a company that pivoted hard to building blockchain infrastructure because I couldn't find any way I could ever recommend my friends or family interact with the services the company was building. A lot of people are holding out for technical vaporware to solve these problems. I can't hold out anymore.
But you’d be wrong. First of all, each participant can control a small portion of the overall value (eg one vote in an election, or one student paying one teacher). Even if their keys are hacked, the real value is for the network itself to be secured. And the business logic to be followed no matter what! No corruption of the database, ever!
For example, UniSwap is a smart contract factory and you trust every instance that comes out of it to be an battle tested and heavily audited piece of code you can trust. As of right now we are forced to trust the value and control of YOUR ENTIRE NETWORK to a big tech company that has all the infrastructure. That’s the best we have today, like how we trusted the Post Office to deliver mail and not tamper with it, until SMTP got adopted over the Internet.
For more info, click here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
Different people have different threat models.
Sure different people have different threat models. Perhaps some classes of users don’t have good solutions, but we are building apps for the mainstream.