Title: The HN attitude about blockchain is overwhelmingly negative.<p>Yet what I see with smart contracts on blockchain, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a huge potential for change and opportunity.<p>If you don&#x27;t know what that is:<p>You can run code on the Ethereum blockchain. 
The user pays to run your code, instead of you paying to run the server that serves them the code.
This is because everyone who&#x27;s running an Ethereum node actually has a copy of your code in the blockchain.<p>This is called a &quot;smart contract&quot; but enough people have experimented with it that they&#x27;ve actually built decentralised applications - dApps for short.<p>There are now real world examples of decentralised applications in Finance - DeFi - which includes a Decentralised exchange - uniswap - and decentralised finance like Compound, Balancer and Yield Finance. So there are apps. You can get a loan from a DeFi app today.<p>This seems like it has huge disruptive potential. Mark Cuban has talked about how he could sell tickets as NFTs on the blockchain, and get a percentage of resell, forever.<p>You could in theory build something similar for Airbnb or Uber on the blockchain - just NFT a house&#x2F;day and then sell it on the blockchain. Same thing with Uber - drivers could auction off their time in a blockchain dApp.<p>Because devs don&#x27;t pay to keep their code in the ETH blockchain, you can just build software and it will &quot;run&quot; forever, at no cost to the developer. You can also set up the smart contract to give you a percentage every time it runs - see uniswap. Thus user - pays the dev + network on usage.<p>This is a radical change and imo a huge avenue for new innovation.<p>But this is hardly talked about here in HN.<p>Let&#x27;s ignore, if possible, the whole &quot;proof of work is bad for the environment&quot; question (all I&#x27;ll say about that is proof of stake is real and in production with DOT&#x2F;ALGO and that&#x27;s a 99% reduction in energy consumption). I know it&#x27;s tempting to go in this direction but again - let&#x27;s assume all crypto is proof of stake for the sake of argument.
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