Will blockchain tech find a killer app by the end of 2023?

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resolved Jan 1

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Examples of things that would make this resolve to YES:

Crypto as an actual currency goes mainstream, like normal people buying actual things with it, not just speculating
DAOs emerge as a common/better way to run organizations
Blockchain becomes a common/better way to track property ownership
Manifold moves to crypto?

FAQ

1. By when exactly?

December 31, 2023.

2. Doesn't such-and-such already count?

I'm arbitrarily saying that nothing as of April 2022 counted yet. If there's something since then that you think should count, make your case in the comments.

3. What does "going mainstream" or "normal people" mean?

I have in mind to poll my less technical friends and family and say it counts if at least 10% of them are using the killer app. So far this is 0% as far as I know but, again, make your case or suggest a specific thing to poll about in the comments. (See also question 6 about the bias here.)

4. What does "a common or better way to run organizations" mean?

For this I have in mind to poll my startup friends and say this counts if I can find 2 examples of people I know personally opting for a DAO in lieu of the traditional Delaware corp + English-language incorporation documents, etc. And they have to have opted for it because it was actually the business-savvy decision.

5. And "common/better" in the context of tracking property ownership?

I'll count it if I can find 2 examples of blockchain-based tracking of ownership that is treated as canonical. Canonicalness means that if the blockchain-based records were to disagree with other records, there's reason to believe that the blockchain version is the one that would win out. And, again, only examples where I know the people involved and they're using the blockchain tech because it's what's actually most practical. The idea is to use this as a proxy for being such a killer app that it's very widespread.

6. What if it's very widespread, just outside your bubble?

Penetrating my bubble is how I'm operationalizing the question. I'm an American, living in Oregon, startup founder and former academic. I know lots of people into crypto, lots of AI people, rationality people, I'm an investor in Manifold -- I think penetrating my bubble is a fine proxy for this question.

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25 Comments

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predicted NO

It's been over a year now! I suspect if there are no candidates even on the horizon now, with 2023 almost half over, then there won't be time for anything to explode in popularity in time. I mean, if ChatGPT were blockchain tech, that exploded fast enough. But of course it's not.

I'm still sympathetic to the argument that there are plenty of killer apps, just not in my circles. But this market is about an app so killer as to permeate my circles. If there's anything I'm being blind to, definitely let me know!

bought Ṁ13 of NO

@dreev there's still time! Let's wait and see :)

predicted NO

@LEVI_BOT_1 Agreed. I'm just hoping those bullish on crypto will chime in with candidates and why they're still bullish. I hope they do so even if they end up conceding that the killer app, as this market defines it, won't happen in this time frame. If they don't think such a killer app will appear in any particular time frame then I'm also eager to hear the reasons for their bullishness.

sold Ṁ2 of YES

I just added an FAQ to the market description that hopefully pins this question down better. But do ask more clarifying questions if you have them!

predicted YES

I really like Scott Alexander's take on this question: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile

(But it also really highlights how ill-defined this prediction market is!)

Estonia uses blockchain as part of their gov ID which allows them to deliver the best government digital services in the world

This seems hard to confirm yes or no. Right now, Filecoin has storage that is 10,000x cheaper than S3. Literally what would cost $1,000,000 on S3 is $100 on Filecoin. Does this not count as a "killer app"?

@EvanConrad Woah can you cite this? Arweave is a lot more expensive.

@agrippa I would, but it appears their stats website is having an outage: https://file.app But as a not-citation, https://estuary.tech has so far given out 161 Tib of data for free. As a qualifier, one part of the reason for this price is "filecoin number go up", but another very real part is that it's just a commodity market for storage that did what commodity markets do.

predicted YES

@EvanConrad Ah, thank you! This is absolutely a candidate. Also I agree this seems hard to resolve fairly but I'm going to do my best to adhere to the spirit. In the case of Filecoin, I think it would count if more than one organization that I personally know to be smart/competent switches from S3 (or similar) to Filecoin.

predicted YES

Alright well Manifold is currently storing your avatar images on Firebase Storage, but now it's time to switch to Filecoin~

@Austin pitch for IPFS/Filecoin: you can upload all the images straight from the browser. You'll get back a "CID" (a hash of the file used as an ID), that you can then attach to the user. It can, sometimes, be much simpler than using another system.

I'm skeptical. In my experience sites that try to use ipfs seriously have slow loading assets

@Sinclair ipfs is an insane memory hog in my experience

Mayker should resolve YES as of 2011 with the advent of Silk Road

Market*

predicted YES

@agrippa Good example of a candidate killer app! (See also my reply to Evan Conrad about Filecoin in a parallel thread.) My reason to not count Silk Road is that it wasn't common or killer enough that anyone I know ever used it. I know it must seem frustrating that I'm saying "not killer enough" to every application of crypto so far. But compare me to a skeptic of the new-fangled "World Wide Web" in the 90s. I could only have been like "nah, that's just a niche nerd thing" for so long before the ubiquity and utility of the internet became undeniable, sometime in the early 90s. (Definitely by the mid-90s with eBay and Google going mainstream, for example.) So that's what this market is about. Is it going to become undeniable by the end of 2023?

predicted YES

Yeah actually - if Stripe wants to focus on being digital money, then we can focus on all the cool stuff we can do with digital money (prediction markets, public goods funding, creator ISAs...)

@Austin yeah, one killer app seems to be that it's handled differently than the financial regulators, as compared to the same thing but not blockchain. See Haus making unrelated home equity derivatives cause it's a HausCoin

predicted YES

Ha, yes, we were one of Stripe's first customers and I've long predicted that they're going to end up eating the whole financial industry. But I think Manifold is safe! I think you're absolutely right to say you'll support cryptocurrency if and only if Stripe makes that easy. That's our stance: we'll support exactly the payment methods Stripe supports. (Currently we still support PayPal separately but we're dropping it because it's so much nicer to only integrate with Stripe.)

predicted YES

Oh dang, thanks for forwarding! Maybe that means we can easily take crypto payments on Manifold now. Need to think through what other implications are. Also: this is a bit scary from a Manifold Existential Risk perspective, I think Stripe is the competitor I'd be most worried about (but also: most excited to partner with haha)