As you may know, a dApp is an app that uses the blockchain for some reason. But for what reason? Why would you choose to build an application on relatively new technology, that quite honestly does a number of things very poorly? What entirely unique advantages does the blockchain bring to your app, that it simply could not operate without?
These are the questions that dApp developers should be asking themselves before diving into building on the blockchain, any blockchain (admittedly we’re partial to one in particular — start building on WAX here).
In William Quigley’s latest episode of WAX ON, our CEO waxes on app versus dApps, what developers should be asking themselves when considering that decision, and what a blockchain even does in the first place.
“App works for 99% of things, except when a middleman is truly NOT needed,” says YouTuber Omar Bham, AKA Crypt0. dApps work best when they cut costs by removing the trusted middleman responsible for taking custody of assets and transferring ownership, such as when you buy a house. Another interesting use case would be using elements of dApps and blockchain to verify someone’s identity, instead of using traditional privacy custodians like Google or Facebook. The data they hold becomes a honeypot for hackers.”
Watch the video and subscribe to the WAX YouTube channel for more episodes of WAX ON with William Quigley each week.
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Video Transcript: App or dApp? I get this question a lot. You’re a developer. You’re curious about this new technology, the blockchain, but you don’t know whether it’s something you should consider. I’m going to give you a simple framework to help you make that decision. But first, what’s a dApp? Okay, so a dApp, which is just an app with a D — that D is decentralized app — is just an app that uses the blockchain for some reason. The key is for some reason, if you’re going to build a dApp; you need to answer that question. What do you want your dApp to do that can’t be done any other way, that can’t be done without some other existing technology other than the blockchain? What capability do you want to embed in what you’re building to make it a killer product? And that capability requires the blockchain. Now this begs the question of course, what does a blockchain do? What does a blockchain do well? Let me share something with you. I’ve been thinking deeply about that very question for 7+ years and I’ve come away with a few conclusions. The first — blockchain is the worst possible way to do just about anything and I really mean that. And maybe at some future date we’ll go into all the reasons why. It’s the worst possible way to do just about anything except… and I think there are five exceptions. There are five things a blockchain does better than anything else on earth. Now in the next video right here, I’m actually going to go into what those five things are and maybe it’ll spur you to think about what a sixth or a seventh great thing you can do on a blockchain that hasn’t yet been done. I’ll talk to you soon.
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Originally published at https://wax.io.
