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Also apart from Ethereum switch to PoS planned soon (hopefully), there is a lot of PoS blockchains in production today. Cosmos (ATOM) [O], for instance, is live since march 2019 and going very well, spawning a whole ecosystem of PoS blockcains using Cosmos SDK [1]
[0] https://cosmos.network/
What problem does Mastodon solve? Just non-Twitter shortform social networking? What about Diaspora, PeerTube, etc?
Not being beholden to a central authority (whether that authority be Twitter, PayPal, or the US government) is intrinsically valuable to a lot of people. Blockchains are just a convenient and proven way of enabling that sort of independence.
Granted, decentralization is a bit of a niche, and the cryptocurrency gold rush has made it way more mainstream than it has any right to be at this point in time given it's current drawbacks. But that doesn't mean it's not valuable.
As for blockchain specifically: yes, decentralized payments seems to be the primary use case. But once you have a decentralized payments system, that enables the creation of a whole bunch of other decentralized applications that would not have otherwise been possible. That's why most "blockchain" projects start with a currency and then build from there: it's hard to build [decentralized cloud storage][1] or [decentralized DNS][2] without first having a decentralized way to pay for those services.
[1]: https://sia.tech/
[2]: https://www.namecoin.org/
What problem does Mastodon solve? Just non-Twitter shortform social networking? What about Diaspora, PeerTube, etc?
Not being beholden to a central authority (whether that authority be Twitter, PayPal, or the US government) is intrinsically valuable to a lot of people. Blockchains are just a convenient and proven way of enabling that sort of independence.
Granted, decentralization is a bit of a niche, and the cryptocurrency gold rush has made it way more mainstream than it has any right to be at this point in time given it's current drawbacks. But that doesn't mean it's not valuable.
As for blockchain specifically: yes, decentralized payments seems to be the primary use case. But once you have a decentralized payments system, that enables the creation of a whole bunch of other decentralized applications that would not have otherwise been possible. That's why most "blockchain" projects start with a currency and then build from there: it's hard to build [decentralized cloud storage][1] or [decentralized DNS][2] without first having a decentralized way to pay for those services.
[1]: https://sia.tech/
[2]: https://www.namecoin.org/