Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
What’s a fundamental non-currency infrastructure affordance of blockchains that can’t be delivered with web2 or older stacks easily? A near-example is NFTs bought on one site showing up on another, which you can’t do in web2 (closest is walled garden/game badges). Things like this but more infrastructurey in flavor, and neither finance related, nor fun and games. Maybe like DeFi for nonFi things?
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raulonastool.eth 🏰 pfp
raulonastool.eth 🏰
@raulonastool
The core unlock imho is that blockchains are permissionless execution layers with built-in trust guarantees. In contrast to web2, where infrastructure depends on closed APIs, standard bodies, and institutional agreements, blockchains let anyone write to shared state governed by code, not gatekeepers. This changes what's possible across industries. In music, artists can publish NFTs with embedded royalty logic that enforces itself without intermediaries. In supply chains, provenance, custody, and fulfillment can be tracked immutably and verified by any participant with no central database or EDI agreement required. In healthcare, patients could manage access to their encrypted medical records without relying on vendor-led “interoperability” initiatives that have dragged on for decades. You could technically build many of these systems on traditional cloud infra. But you'd be recreating the same permissioned bottlenecks.
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Dan Romero pfp
Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
You can't offer credibly neutral PKIM where I can guarantee the only thing that can update my entry in the database is my private key. This is the design for the Farcaster registry. Every web2 version has some server you could rip out of the wall.
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0xmons ✝️ pfp
0xmons ✝️
@xmon.eth
ens being global namespace is sorta this also being able to track your in-flight txs no matter where you (e.g. technically any bridge site can show you a pending bridge tx) also stuff like streaming interest anywhere you want from anything you want (e.g. paying creators with eth yield, buying tokens with sdai yield)
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sardius.eth pfp
sardius.eth
@sardius
Getting micropayments for shitcasting
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Tony D’Addeo pfp
Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
provable ordering sign message and put it in a blockchain and you know when it happened in a non-spoofable way would be interesting for scientific discoveries
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Tony D’Addeo pfp
Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
decentralized name registries
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Patrick Atwater pfp
Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Less tongue and cheek Ive long felt that games have some nice options particularly stuff that's cross platform where you want to keep your special hammer of DnD whatever
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Patrick Atwater pfp
Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Motivate lots and lots of ppl to enjoy chewing glass ux 😝
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sahil pfp
sahil
@sahil
reputation scores/ratings (can argue this also fits into the NFT example you shared). blockchains allow these to be verifiable and composable, allowing devs to leverage across any apps. this can't be delivered in web2 cause of proprietary data, opaque algos/compute.
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Sam Ragsdale pfp
Sam Ragsdale
@samrags
shared DB with programmable auth
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Mark Beylin ⏻↑ pfp
Mark Beylin ⏻↑
@beylin
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking here but I’ll take a stab at it My favorite example for why smart contracts are civilizationally important is - imagine a game of rock paper scissors where two players want to bet on the outcome but don’t trust each other to pay fairly if they lose. They need a third party to escrow the funds and take a % cut of the winnings. With smart contracts, you no longer need a human being to escrow the execution of your game logic to determine who wins. “Game” here is also intentionally vague because it can range from basic R/P/S all the way to real business logic based on specific (real world) data inputs. Zooming out, a surprisingly large % of our economy is made up of businesses whose entire job is charging an escrow % for managing logical execution of logic between two parties (or “brokering the relationship”).
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wz pfp
wz
@wz
- trusted timestamping (aka being able to prove you knew/held X earlier/at specific time), usable eg for bets/patents/certificate expiration - public/private voting (assuming the voter pool is set up in advance; the pool part is not yet ready for nation-scale voting) - permissionless name registration (not just vanity-like but also seeds for other p2p networks etc) - almost here: permissionless publishing/web2 hosting (storj/filecoin provide much better perf and guarantees vs ipfs)
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