At the same time, the amount of coverage and attention it is getting and for a sustained period makes me believe I am missing something.
After all there are few instances of technology fads that have sustained such serious interest for a prolonged period of time (approaching a decade now) with little to show for in terms of investment returns or societal impact.
I am talking committees formed in parliaments and central banks around the world to discuss its benefits, serious universities dedicating whole programs on the subject, elite investors pouring money into its potential, and the list goes on.
So far the most charitable explanation I could come up with for the craze is that it is an effective rebranding for marketing purposes of database technologies, similar to how "data science" rebranded statistics and business analytics.
On the other hand "data science" even if it is merely rebranding did arguably lead to significant change in tooling/workflows in how data is consumed and presented in corporates around the world, no such thing could be said of blockchain.
Where am I going wrong? I am particularly keen to hear from people who underwent the journey from skeptics to believers in the space.
Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone
If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)
Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless.
The whole blockchain, web3, crypto, NFT, DeFi, DAO ecosystem is a massive ponzi scheme. The proponents keep cooking up new buzzwords to keep the pot boiling and to attract new starry eyed idiots who will bring in real money into the system to keep the ponzi going.
Blockchain is a hammer in search of nail. A solution for problems that do not exist.
Some examples IMHO are logs of participation (e.g. voting), agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), and auditing (e.g. compliance).
A blockchain can be public or protected i.e. private just to the participants. A blockchain can store plain text information or access-controlled information i.e. encrypted information or links to sign in systems.
All of these capabilities provide massive trust advantages over a traditional database as managed by a central administrative entity, which requires the participants must trust the central administrative entity to be truthful, unbiased, secure, and with sufficient high availability and disaster recoverability.
For the most part, it doesn't work.
An extremely small number of crypto trades are done without trusting some 3rd party.
For example, what is your crypto worth? Most people trust unregulated crypto exchanges to tell them. Exchanges that can and do engage in minting their own crypto and using it (and other means) to manipulate the "free" market.
Blockchain solves a problem that most people don't have --- it eliminates trust in banks and government --- and replaces it with trust in unregulated exchanges that are free to scam and collude at will.
Blockchain applications don't necessarily need to use existing cryptocurrencies. However in that case you need to find some other incentive to get people to mine your blockchain, which is hard. And consequently having a small mining pool makes you vulnerable to a 51% attack defeating the entire purpose of a "tamper-proof" log. Thus it's easier to just use Ethereum, which in turn drives up demand for that cryptocurrency.
It's been more than 10 years. Where's the cool stuff that those supposed technology breakthroughs enabled?
I think we all know what the proponents would point to. Are we really impressed by any of that?
You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power. It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked.
Fundamentally though it isn't about the technology it's about the transition. It's about money transitioning to a purely digital form which people will use.
In the past entire industries have been revolutionised multiple times by such transitions. Music moved to digital via mp3. TV, Movies via efficient video codecs and streaming. In both cases those shifts caused massive and unpredictable changes to how we consume and buy music/tv.
Now that money is making the same transition, people are jumping on it hoping to profit from it and money is much much more important a technology than music or tv/movies, it's the fundamental technology of society.
Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono...
Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout...
Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut...
Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...
Myanmar: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-13/myanmar-s...
We had a close look. It cannot solve most problems it claims to solve. The only thing it might be useful for is digital collectible tickets. This may be interesting for a tiny fraction of events and attendees.
Full detailed analysis here:
https://medium.com/@ticketpark/nft-tickets-a-realistic-look-...
Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
knowledge, reputations, information markets,
black markets, collapse of governments.
- the possibility to hide some transactions out of the traditional system (monero / zcash). I mean you may disagree, it's mostly ideological for some honest people and practical to some dishonest / drug dealers / evaders.
- the fact they are decentralised currencies that are now an actual alternative to people's national currency. this may look silly to you if you live in europe / usa, but a LOT of less developed countries such as lebanon, turkey, and a lot in south america and africa have seen the value of their currency decrease steadily wrt the dollar. So ANY of this people would have been better of buying either dollars (which may be hard locally / with taxes), and even better off any crypto in the past 10 years instead and they would have better life savings.
tlrd The biggest value of bitcoin now is to be alternative store of value, which you can acess pretty much anywhere in the world in a decentralised fashion. Even if the tech were useless, its DE FACTO an alternative now which doesn't have less value that 80% of local / national currencies.
Even if Russia or France decide that they no longer allow Ethereum (just an example), this does not affect computations anywhere else.
This is a massive shift in power balance toward participants. No other computational platform before the blockchain has provided all these features at the same time.
In short, their government is corrupted, and they can't trust government or some standard centralized private company, because centralized mean, it could been easily corrupted.
Also corrupted officials usually limit usage of gold and other material things, but thanks to western tech, it is easy to hide flash with crypto and ignore those limitations.
Because of this very high share of people in exUSSR use crypto.
Sure, in developed countries of old democracies, all these things are not so important as their governments works much better than in developing countries, they just have not such problems, so in G7 talks about crypto transforms to lazy talks of sharp end of egg vs other end.
We can't just say "let the users run the servers" because most users can't do that, thats why they trust centralised services. We need to split people to two groups of people: people who simply use a service, and people who can sustain a service.
I'm seeing a potential future where apps and services are run on separate, individual blockchains. It will work similarly like the Tor network except now the permissionless, decentralised network can hold *state*! I envision a world where people running the network can be incentivised within the service itself, this doesnt have even to be tied to fiat money, like "honor" or "trust".
Too bad the current crypto community isn't exploring this much yet, because there's a few cryptographic problems thats yet to be solved, but I see people also trying like this : https://github.com/stellar/slingshot
Also just yesterday, a very low turn out in discussion about it [1], even less when they announced their Stripe Crypto post [2]. Why? Where is the scam? How exactly is Stripe scamming? Or is it because Stripe is spared somehow?
Or most likely, they waited for regulations to be clearer first and then re-entered back in with their crypto payouts products. Perhaps they still see some value in it.
So when it is Stripe that actually releases something, there is zero instant extreme outrage of predictable 'crypto is scam', 'snake oil' comments to be found like the ones I see here.
[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
I will say though, the more I dug into crypto the more I see a lot of actually amazing things. I moved into the Avalanche chain, and it's a radically differenent experience from Bitcoin and ETH frankly. I don't think ETH or Bitcoin got close to accomplishing their vision, but AVAX is different. I'm making transactions all the time (I made almost 700 transactions last year... the taxes part absolutely sucks). I'm not going to try enumerate the ways I think crypto is useful but i'd question the sources you're using.
One big thing i'd point out, the vision of crypto is still pretty far out. There are many infrastructure pieces missing. DAPP's Development seems WAY slower than centralized services. A smart contract is like hardware development. You basically want to get it perfect before you release it. Move fast and break things could mean a 50 million dollar hack in crypto. That doesn't make crypto useless or bad. Just a thing you need to think about.
EDIT: I went back about 3 seconds after positing this to fix a spelling mistake, and I was downvoted. It would be nice to get a comment with each of your downvotes. In the past upvotes and downvotes were signal of quality (not agreement)
To be honest, I think this glamorization of digital crime is rather naive. Even if someone takes the very niche position that drugs should be fully decriminalized, Bitcoin is also used for truly fucked up things like human slavery.
In this thread, you can see an example by golergka, who uses bitcoin as I believe it was originally intended:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132987 "Drug trade, tax avoidance, banking for the unbanked and sanctioned. I'm currently living from airbnb to airbnb, with all my Russian banks banned from SWIFT, and crypto is the only way I'm abe to access my money."
What is strange and I think you are rightly confused about is why did a very niche crypto-anarchist technology enter mainstream society in a big way? I think it's primarily a speculative bubble BUT there's a chance that it could be a bubble that never pops. Think of diamonds - we now have the technology to very affordably make beautiful synthetic diamonds, so from a first principles standpoint the price of diamonds should collapse any day now but it hasn't, and probably won't. Diamonds being expensive is too deeply baked into our culture, and it is possible that cryptocurrency could similarly become a bubble that never pops if it becomes a point of cultural agreement that crypto "should be" valuable, not for fundamental reasons but because of mass belief that is strong enough that it persists indefinitely, even across centuries.
ask_111: How can having a public log that is extremely tamper resistant not have value?
Let's look at a concrete example: Bitcoin.
You can write something into the Bitcoin blockchain and be very sure that the information you wrote into it will stay there pretty much forever.
Is that enough, or do we also have to discuss why having such a tamper proof log has value?
The rep said they had implemented it, but didn't have a clear use case and were interested in seeing what customers might use it for.
I've heard that Audi have a Blockchain to record car service history, so I believe we'll see more niche applications like that in future.
Private blockchains, such as for cross company account clearances, complex asset exchanges (planes, land) may help dislodge the rent seeking lawyers.
They can be publically readable also which could be useful, e.g. For querying a land registry.
The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order.
Blockchains that support smart contracts allow for people to install programs to that computer, which will add a bit more logic than simply debiting/crediting accounts. Others can then just send transactions to this computer to make a function call to any program (smart contract) that was installed on the computer.
The cool thing really is that we’re all using the same computer with the same database and the same programs.
Now in practice, nobody would trust a single point of failure like that. What if the computer crashes, or burns in a fire? Distributed systems to the rescue! We use distributed system protocols to run the same database on many computers distributed around the world. These distributed system protocols effectively simulate a single database/computer so that a few computers failing doesn’t mean the end of the blockchain.
On top of that, we refuse to trust the computers that participate in this protocol. They could be lying about the balance in your account. We want the computers to police one another and agree on the database they are simulating. That’s where consensus protocols are used: to make the distributed database secure even when some of the participants are malicious.
And that’s it. That’s blockchain tech for you. The obvious application is money, as the secure and simulated single computer is useful to simplify a payment system, but really any distributed database that cannot trust some of its participants can benefit from the advances there.
Where you "are going wrong" (your words--not mine) is not appreciating the value of what SOCIAL solutions can from that, and refusing to accept that these subsequent solutions may be valuable to others for purely non-technical reasons.
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SOCIAL USE CASE #1: Cryptocurrency
If you're privileged enough to live your whole life without ever being denied access to any degree of financial services, I'm happy for you. However, Satoshi created cryptocurrency at a time when SOCIAL trust in traditional money networks was at its absolute lowest--this context is so important. Cryptocurrency (built on blockchains) offer global financial networks which anybody to participate in, and you are free to form a opinion around how valuable that is to you personally.
SOCIAL USE CASE #2: Permission-less Smart Contracts
If you have a digital payment network wherein anyone can transact, why not create programmable flows around that economic activity? Decentralized financial applications--savings accounts, payment channels, compounding interest, asset swaps, escrow--were all the lowest hanging fruit and so they came first because the network protocol they've been built upon includes a monetary asset natively.
Back in the Web1 days, there was an application called GameSpy. The service provided a way to find a list of community-owned gaming servers that hosted multiplayer sessions for various PC games. Technically speaking, it was the epitome of what the Internet was capable of and it failed because there was no viable monetization strategy for either the middleware or the server hosts that didn't involve centralizing the platform. A web3 version would survive with decentralized coordination, could stream payments to gaming servers, reward players for playing on the platform, and would make a good case for a DAO to provide upkeep of the middleware layer.
SOCIAL USE CASE #3: NFTs
Our lives continue to move towards fully digital experiences, and NFTs are key to commemorating moments in the metaverse.
To be clear: a NFT is a single number (ID index) sitting in a 256-bit address space, which is recorded to belong to some cryptographic data that you keep secret. It MAY have a visual representation you can find with a URL, but that is not a requirement.
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That's my 2 gwei.
All things that work well and do it better than non-blockchain.
Publish the hash of the content to the chain. This can be scaled by combining an arbitrary number of items into the same hash using a merkel tree (https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement#how-o...).
It's not a new idea - you could also publish the hash in a bunch of newspapers, but it's not as easily scalable, still relies somewhat on a third party, and the cost of independent verification is much higher.
How useful it actually is and if it's worth the cost is another question.
However, the killer app for blockchain already exists... currency.
The societal benefits and implications from that alone are tremendous.
All the activities that regulators are designed to prevent are very successful in the crypto world.
I don't think crypto will fail or go bust; but I do think retail investors are completely abandoned by regulators who have a democratic mandate to protect them.
I suppose they don't want to be seen as stifling an innovative technology and politicians don't want to get blowback for efforts that would fail anyway.
Anyway, until we have global governance there will not be global regulation of the space so it will go on for many more decades.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is my favorite aspect. It's honestly outstanding how far behind the curve of DeFi knowledge HN is and so few are willing to debate and learn.
I work at a company called Balancer, we've built an app that allows you to essentially invest in index funds of tokens. You can put money into a pool of say 40% ETH, 30% Bitcoin, 20% LINK, 10% USD. Then instead of you paying fees for someone else to manage this fund, you get paid - often 5% - 20% per year, to have this fund.
How? Traders use your funds as an arbitrage opportunity when the ratios go out of wack. There are a lot of day traders in crypto right now and every time they make a trade through your pool they pay a 0.3% - 1% fee.
These tokens are mostly crypto coins right now but they can be anything, including tokens that track oil, gold, share prices, or even housing index funds. Other companies build these tokens and as they are standardized they can be used in Balancer pools.
Balancer the app is completely decentralized and open access to all. Your money is yours, we have no access to user funds.
This is barely the tip of the iceberg, eventually the entire financial system is going to be overtaken by open, permissionless systems and they will be much bigger than today because there are far fewer rent seekers, and entire world gets to participate.
Where I see devs making cool stuff:
- AI/ML
- traditional coding
Where I don't see devs:
- Blockchain tech
- AR/VR
Ultimately I think what happened is the hype cycle made crypto seem like the next Internet, when it's really just fintech. It's interesting to Wall Street, not engineers.
Even the whole DAAP thing is DoA. Can't think of a single app that is more than a tiny demo.
What makes sense is for governments and other societal trust anchors to run federated ledgers with cheap APIs, that everyone involved take local backups of and can verify, but go through specialised adapted write APIs (i.e. consensus through regulations, governance, checks and balances etc). Because that is useful and can automate notaries for example.
Everything else so far is either a decentralised Ponzi scheme (no clear owner/central figure, everyone can profit by luring in more suckers, but unlike the trust based economy no actual value is produced and the system would collapse if the trust based economy shut down the inflow of new capital - while even Venezuela and north Korea still produce things under heavy sanctions and could maybe be fine if they got rid of their cleptocrats and went back to an agrarian society, albeit with a lower QOL than the rest of the world) and/or derives it's value from using the Ponzi driven price of the currencies to launder money or provide tools to speculate/keep the game going. It's all recursive and contingent on going to the moon, with no there there. The epitome of default dead.
The market can stay irrational longer than we can bet against it. It is fully possible (and I'm afraid of it happening) that crypto bros get enough lobbying power to regulatory capture and insert themselves as "decentralised middlemen" into governmental processes. If this happens, they might point to the "value added" by Cryptos in the same way TurboTax in the US currently claims its usefulness. Bug we should not believe these lies, cryptocurrency is pure rent seeking.
That's why you're not going insane, nor missing something. There is simply no there there, just a bubble big enough to capture the very state it claims to dislike while it uses energy and IT infrastructure only that state and its society enabled
But just as easily as a knife can cut a slice of bread, it could be used to slice a jugular. In short, don't confuse the technology with the use cases. It's just a tool, some people will misuse it.
I'm working in gaming, and in pc gaming today, when you ask 5$ pretax and preplatform fee, customers think you own them to dedicate your entire company to support the product fot the next 10 years for no additional fee, you will never heard of 90% of your customers, 5% will insult you on your steam page for any trouble they encountered, 4% will insult you and your game on youtube and social media for entertainement and self promotion, and maybe 1% will have positive feedback.
Meanwhile with a good marketing, you can potentially sell low effort proceduraly generated random png 30$ to 3000$ piece in blockchain collection/games and each of your customer will probably actually spend time promoting your game even if he disliked it, if nothing to resell that it bought or earn interests.
Of course i'm greatly exaggerating, but no wonder gaming company dream to develop the market.
And I think video game market today is awfull. Every one want everything for free and no one want to actually pay. It's probaly a big part of why VR market is nearly empty : investing what is required to make good content is probably nearly impossible to recover on sales.
It need a way to reinvent itself and allow content maker to make profits, and it may be the blockchain where it's 'normal' to pay around 100$ to try a new game and be ready to see it fail more often than not.
The fact it's purely psychological is irrelevant marketing and business wise. I even think today the console market exist for purely commercial reasons. Console player accept to spend more on video game than computer players. Then developping for console make sense, even if probably today you could probably have exactly the same game on a same price range computer.
Here are some questions that you can test your hypothesis with:
* Can you get distributed and trust-less settlement mechanisms with a centralized database?
* Can you seamlessly send value across jurisdictions and closed borders without meddlers and middlemen with traditional database technology (regulation resistance and unconfiscatableness)?
* Can you escape coercion and control with a centralized database (regulation and coercion resistance), while at the same time attaining great protection against criminal coercion and theft (resistance against crime and corruption)?
* Can a centralized database offer the same and relative anonymity as cash?
* How would any of the above be valuable without markets and speculation? I.e. how would you know the value of what is being sent or traded with you without something else to compare it to?
If you want to answer without merely saying yes or no, then I'd love to see your answers! Perhaps you can convince me to update some of my beliefs. :)
Starting with issuance process then secondary trading.
On secondary trading side the economic value comes from participants being able to transact with each other, with instant settlement and no delivery risk.
Still exploring this concept with a few others but. Email me if interested in this use case.
What it solves?:
- Sending money from Alice to Bob without the need of a trusted party like Venmo/Paypal/Bank.
- Vehicle registration / House title deeds are maintained by the local government. A decentralized application can potentially mint an NFT (ERC-721) and maintain such a DB. (Although, the physical society would need to come with laws to tie up physical good's with NFT's)
- In today's Gaming Economy all the digital goods bought/earned are controlled by the company (Zynga/Roblox). A blockchain powered game will allow the owners to have actual control of the digital goods ( money - tokens, wearables - NFT's) bought/purchased that they can sell/exchange in the open market. Imagine buying a souvenir from Disney Land and then not being able to sell/exchange it.
As far as I can tell it might be a little while before some of the TLD are supported by major browsers without an extension but I do believe support is inevitable.
Domains are a great blockchain product in my opinion.
Another aspect is products that can be tokenized without a company controlling things. The smart contracts are really cool in that you can make it so that you get paid a percentage of future sales. Forget about digital photos but think of it from owning a musicians album (royal does this).
These are things that can be done without the blockchain but you end up paying companies to manage it for you. They also set rules and they can also cancel you. Free from management fees and no company dictatorship.
Like for example a distributed federate ledger is useful for checking/auditing/simplifying some federated tasks, like around supply-chain or to e.g. make it a bit more viable to interlink to game servers of the same game operated by different entities which have a real-mony related in-game economy (non of this are silver bullets, just make abuse harder).
> At the same time, the amount of coverage and attention it is getting and for a sustained period makes me believe I am missing something.
What you are missing is people gaining money through high risk investments, pyramid schemes. As well as rich people which hope this tech allows them to further avoid state control and taxes. I also have seen a bunch of times that some problems the US has are believed by tech, especially crypto people to be fundamental problems which need tech to be solved, while they pretty clearly are 100% fault of bad politics. Like personal banking in the US is crazy bad (for anyone not wealthy) that some very poor very unstable countries do a better job. I was competently shocked when I realized that in the US it's not the norm for poor people to have a bank accounts and neither is it trivial to safely send money between two private bank accounts in a not too long amount of time. If you either don't want to accept that such problems are caused by politics or accept it but don't think it can't be changed it's not hard to see crypto currencies as a good idea.
Also crypto can be good to avoid government control, in a stable countries this is quite often related to crime but if you life idk. in a autocratic country while still being crime technical it might be ethically "good" from a western point of view. Like sending money into an embargoed country for you family to live from is still technically circumventing an (lets assume for a moment) reasonable embargo, but is ethically ok because you help your family to survive.
I like this well-know NIST flowchart as a starting point: https://images.app.goo.gl/wsK2e2zPUnQW5agRA
It’s a bit pessimistic perhaps, but it kind of gets to the point: a blockchain is an interesting technology for solving problems where you need to achieve some sort of shared, trustless ledger. That’s useful in some cases, including the implementation of digital currencies.
Having some concept of money that isn't tied to a government is compelling. Take Lebanon for example which has seen 90% inflation in the last 2 years, the worst economic collapse in modern history... People's savings have been wiped out. This may not have been the case had there been a global alternative to keeping your money safe.
Big trading firms now make billions of dollars trading crypto. In some sense they are "keeping the networks alive"...
There's a ton of creativity in the entire space. I think maybe 98% of it goes away and we're left with the few gems that are useful or truly change society. In that sense there's a benefit.
However, I've worked for a successful startup in the blockchain space. Blockchain was instrumental in generating interest and securing funding for the first rounds of financing. If blockchain had not been part of the company elevator pitch, it worked never have gotten off the ground.
If adding shiny object Y to solution X is what causes your product to succeed at having the largest market share of X, then Y has value. Many companies have succeeded by having the most customers, not the best technology.
Nonetheless, the vision of having a shared consensus truth that the whole world can rely on for transacting I find very compelling.
I like the way Anatoly from Solana puts it:
"Global information symmetry"
I guess all the crypto folk got sick of the pessimism on here and went to build with more optimistic open minded communities.
Numbers in a computer merely signify what you are willing for them to signify. In that sense, blockchain tech is no different from fiat currency. That piece of colored paper in your pocket is merely a promise of worth. People can renege on their promises, either because they want to or because they are forced to.
So tell me, how many hamburgers have you bought with Confederate Dollars or Nazi Reichsmarks lately?
1) Noone can arbitrarily change the contents of the blockchain, the concensus is needed to even append to it.
2) Blockchain solves the Byzantine generals problem.
3) Blockchain doesn't have one central authority (only the code that governs it, but the code must be first accepted by the participants). So if you build a payment system on top of a blockchain, there's no single entity that can freeze or seize your money.
Blockchain "currencies" feature:
- high costs and slow speed of clearing transactions;
- volatility WRT to other stores of value;
- routine abuse and theft (with little chance of being made whole);
- association with criminal enterprise
These are pretty good reasons not to invest in blockchains.
At the time people thought it was also going to change the world and usher in a new era of decentralisation.
It's possible to use a blockchain as a distributed identity store, where people prove their ownership of an address by signing with the private key.
This is an interesting application because it's an ownerless identity system that works because of the distributed consensus mechanism.
I want few things from future technology.
I want permissionless payments, including robotic payments, just so I can run several companies worldwide, accepting and reinvesting money with, like, no accounting besides internal, no taxes besides blockchain rewards, no corporations.
You can think of it as of HFT, but for everyone.
I want tamper-proof, censorship-resistant identity built-in my browser. A pseudonim, which enables everything else, like delegation of some rights to another pseudonim. With identification and authorization out of the way, in turn, backend-as-a-service - like cloudflare, but with actual data and state - will be possible. This will enable all kind of global permissionless cooperation, including robotic one. Removal of every login button on the web will be a nice side-effect.
The third thing I want is open secure computing. You can think of it like Intel Management engine, but for everyone. Anti-treacherous computing, if you like it that way. Hardware, which bricks if it detects code running without my signature, down to microcontrollers. With transparent transfer of rights and revocation, of course.
I don't think the last one is possible without some global blockchain of sorts, from my point of view.
I don't know if web3 and blockchain will bring me any of these, but I like where they are moving and their rhetoric and what they did so far.
It reduces the overhead of checking hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds, and cuts down the time it takes for notification of new episode of a show. It can currently update everyone in the system in under 40 seconds from hitting publish.
You can watch new podcasts get published live at podping.watch.
So right now we are stuck with the scammy nfts of jpgs we have now.
This worries me too. These people don't understand much beyond a 3 minute sales pitch
you're not missing anything.
both bombs and blockchain tech are destructive for most people -- not positive/additive.
but bombs and blockchain tech can also make megafortunes for the people that own, control, and use them.
there are some edge cases where bombs and blockchain tech could theoretically be more useful than the alternatives, but a sane/decent world would save those experiments for the philosophy lecture room.
https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/2WNUAK_DuQsxj3Ei3CY-IlWyVb8V...
The value is all baseless speculation and hoping a central government won't class it as illegal once they get to do their own "crypto" to control their citizens better.
The main value in BTC is that it's at the moment less regulated than the financial mess we have in the standard market.
I think a better model would be to have tons of small private banks without a central banks and use a currency 100% backed by a basket of goods of prime necessity (wood, wheat, iron, gold).
That said, I hope will somehow they will succeed in replacing central banks and I hope some of the revolutionaries who got rich with crypto will topple governments and create a decentralised society without (or better - with less) central points of failures.
Whereas there is no central point of hack for a well designed and tested blockchain. Distributed custody in an adversarial environment with mutual trust and dis-trust.
Yes it's not everything, but tradfi solutions are not 150% bulletproof either - they may only seem that way to the outside, but there are massive hazards lying just under the surface waiting to blow up. See: GME settlement risk end of Jan 2020.
EDIT: I used to be a huge skeptic of Eth and smart contracts. But I knew basically nothing about how they actually worked in practice. I learned a lot more and now I am a big believer.
The reality is you just likely do not know enough. Your skepticism of the space prevents you from learning and seeing the value that's sitting right in front of your eyes. You also have baked in presumptions that existing systems are somehow... workable or great, when they are not.
I wonder if there is another way to create an information network that simplifies the user experience by scraping website code and reformatting it into a simple template with defined ux-patterns like navigation, font, text size, colors, buttons, links, media, etc. and excluding unwanted content like ads, filler bg images and such.
So basically creating a design system that you apply to all websites. The scaping/tagging would need to be smart and there would probably be a need for separate templates for some use cases (could twitter work?) but maybe the focus should be on information-driven sites like blogs, wiki, search, media, etc.
But I think it’s more rigged than the stock market, insider trading and rug pull are too many
This quality also makes it actually pretty unsuitable for capitalism: capitalism premises enclosure of the commons through the enforcement of the state. It desires strong identity and legibility everywhere. So it becomes "pointless" by definition - a bad database - if the state or some other body is assumed in control. Thus the commonplace scenario of blockchains being a legitimizing veneer for scams has taken hold: actually using their best qualities is anti-capitalistic, but using them to obscure a scheme can be done if you tinker around with the financing enough so that you stay a step ahead of regulation.
But there is genuine activity, gradually increasing over time, through the contrasting role of blockchain stewardship. This starts with the role of miners in the technical substrate; and it proceeds towards more general ideas around governance and solving decentralized coordination problems. Markets often appear in the midst as a way of ranking things by price as well as by name or category, but markets aren't necessarily special. The speculative market does has a role in building up these ideas, though, because each time the tide goes out, those projects that have done the best at addressing coordination issues become survivors. There's a holistic element to the tech really working well that is just barely being touched upon.
So what i read here is bitterness that something without value displaces what you do know that has no value.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1V7UGmTw1pR6HsT8kF8dh...
TL;DR: All the current stuff is flaming garbage, but that's ok, we're basically where the web was in 1995. Just with a lot more scams instead of VC pitches.
In the case it's digital currency: Saying blockchain technology is nothing more a distributed database is like saying TCP/IP is nothing more than flipping voltages on a wire. It misses the point of what the technology can be used for.
Blockchain technology is the underylying mechanism for digital currency. Digital currency in the short term will allow less friction for online payments and has the potential to allow for easier banking options and a unifying global currency in the long term.
For places that have a strong banking system, the need for digital currency isn't so apparent. For places that have failing banking infrastructure or are building new banking infrastructure, digital currency is an attractive option as we're steadily becoming more connected and "wired".
There's a lot of hype, much of which is unwarranted, but behind that hype is the realization that digital currency and the implications of implementing it worldwide and having it widely available will have far reaching consequences for many aspects of our digital lives.
In the case you're talking about blockchain without the digital currency aspect then I agree with you to a certain extent. My generous read on the situation is that businesses want to modernize their supply chain infrastructure and are looking for some standard to adopt that will provide them with guidance and "best practices". This could allow them to use something that can be implemented and maintained with lower costs and potentially even be used for outside audits and federation/communication with other entities.
Personally, I think this is more akin to the Java/XML "craze". XML was adopted as a sort of standard but the underlying reason wasn't that XML was any panacea, it just happened to be the technology that was in vogue for businesses and was an excuse to modernize/digitize their infrastructure. The move to digitize data instead of either having a hap-hazard scheme or using paper was the motivation, not that XML was any great technology. Using XML also created it's own hap-hazard data schema realizations and, in the end, JSON provides more of the spirit of what XML promised but the move from pre-digitization to post-digitization provided such a strong incentive that it didn't really matter.
In other words, we're seeing businesses try to modernize different aspects of logistics. The current trend is blockchain because it provides enough key words that they can rally around it. The motivation, in my opinion, is more that they want to modernize/digitize their supply chain so they're looking for something/anything that provides guidance, standards or other infrastructure to that effect.
But to focus on the first one: homeopathy was invented in 1796 and is still going strong, with national health systems having committees on how to deal with it, even some accredited universities offer courses at least covering homeopathy too. And that's despite its impressive 200-year record of complete absence of evidence that it has any effects. Various forms of alchemy were complete vapourware and yet courted and sponsored by monarchs. Also in our enlightened days there are people building (and crashing with) rockets to 'prove' that our earth is flat, newspapers print horoscopes and the previous US president touted things worse than vapourware as cures for a global pandemic. Looking at the history of ideas, I'd almost say we're living the exception, with so many ideas that actually work.
Re blockchain, if you take it to include the whole "crypto" (web3) space, it's gone from implementing papers from 20+ years prior (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) to papers from a few years ago (Zero Knowledge Proofs). It's had societal impact in creatig a global subculture of crypto 'bros' that donated (at least) $100m to Ukraine (and also to other causes like India Covid relief), and created outlandish investment returns for early adopters.
In terms of the tech or what it can do, blockchains allow trustless peer-to-peer transactions, and smart contracts allow making trustless binding future commitments. The latter is no small feat if you consider that the difference between cooperative and non-cooperative game theory is precisely the ability to make binding commitments (think of what the rational action in a prisoner's dilemma would be if you had a third move of entering a smart contract that plays the cooperative move on behalf of both parties if and only if both sides committed, and defects on behalf of that player if only one committed - would you still choose to defect unilaterally, or would you rather enter the contract?). You might say that we already have a legal system and courts that can enforce commitments, but in reality not everyone on this planet has equal access to such a system. Smart contracts will always be "beneath" the courts (as in, if someone wants to renege on their commitment, eg because the contract didn't do what they thought it would, the courts will always have the final word), but they can remove a lot of friction, especially for smaller projects and if parties are in muliple countries.
First of all it functions as a currency which inherently brings with it a lot of value. You can exchange and hold virtual currency with minimal fees. This applies primarily to proof-of-stake blockchains (Algorand, Tezos, Cardano). Ethereum/Bitcoin have due to proof-of-work become less a currency and more an investment. There's more value just holding them than actually converting them.
Blockchain tech is trustless and decentralized both of which is very valuable to me personally. I've lost trust in the modern banking system. I guess the turning point at which I became more attent to what the financial salarymen are doing was the 2008 financial crisis. But I'd say that's just the tip of the iceberg. Between all the tax havens hiding billions in plain sight, various scandals such as Wirecard, disappearing money balance on my bank accounts, evaporating loans for large defunct companies, there is just so much crime based around hidden centralized systems. I see blockchain as having the potential to level the field in a system where (centralized) banks are just trying to ripoff the average Joe.
Then we have the stablecoins which work as a safe haven for hyperinflation. While I'm not affected I find this a very serious use case. There's a constant set of countries that are failing to stabilize their local currency and who knows when this is going to hit the reader. Being able to keep value to your monthly wage is a use case in a failing economy. Stablecoins have been found to be an essential part for decentralized finance and pretty much every smart contract-capable cryptocurrency is/has added them.
Also note that having a wallet for a cryptocurrency does not incur monthly charge. Banks charge you for just keeping a balance if you have more than X amount of currency on you account. There's also no maintenance costs which are common for some types of accounts. And plenty of crypto currencies allow you to stake and get a passive income that is higher than what you get on any bank account.
Then there's the DeFI loans. You can basically take a loan as long as you lock a collateral. That's the only condition. Now feel free to go read any of the contracts you signed for a leasing/loan and compare the user experience. DeFI loans are risky due to possibility of liquidation but I see this tech improving and maturing moving on.
While this may sound like I'm the greatest fan I'm more of realist. Blockchain does have a lot of issues. Account recovery is a impossible. Scams are rampant. Transaction speeds are a lot slower than non-blockchain tech can do. Also the immature community praying for a 10x is a pain to follow. But saying it's just a bad DB is plain false.
Society needs to officially recognizes something through government and law.
Libertarians don't like this, but it's true.
Technically, there could be some value in an append-only datastore that can be distributed - such as verifying where some product has come from throughout its supply chain and tracking evolution of various data series over time. Of course, there's nothing to prevent someone from entering malicious data into the chain anyways (e.g. if people did that with COVID vaccinations and recorded someone as vaccinated after taking a bribe, who's to say that someone couldn't do that with "ethically" sourced coffee, for example).
> At the same time, the amount of coverage and attention it is getting and for a sustained period makes me believe I am missing something.
We largely live in a post-factual world, so as soon as there is some supposedly advanced technology (the blockchain, machine learning, AI, serverless, Kubernetes, a while ago cloud computing also fit the bill) that nobody understands all that well, people tend to conflate speculation with fact and claim that every potential problem could be solved with this technology, oftentimes to extract resources from potential investors or other people with decision making powers (e.g. software engineers striving for resume driven development).
To those people, it doesn't actually matter whether the technology will solve the problems or actually even work, even the people that believe that these things will work oftentimes only do so due to deluding themselves, because it's not like you can easily test those claims.
In my eyes:
- the blockchain (in any its form, excluding event-sourcing which is an architectural pattern and basically a generalization of the approach) isn't preferable to a MariaDB instance most of the time.
- machine learning is good for a few problems but in many cases linear regression and simple algorithms are enough
- we are decades if not centuries away from "true" generalized AI, most of the current progress is simply research, not products that solve complex problems, use cases will be limited for now
- serverless is still someone else's machine, there is merit to the approach, but it's not suited for all systems
- Kubernetes is cool when you have the resources to support it, which is more than many companies out there are willing to spend (many don't even need it)
- cloud computing is cool for certain systems but in the end just boils down to the CapEx/OpEx question, it's just a different set of tradeoffs
- you can apply the same reasoning to other advanced yet hard to "test" technologies, like full self driving cars and the "hyperloop" and other concepts like that
In our current world, it's really easy to end up in the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" which will also make plenty of millionaires out there, which also should be recognized - so at worst, it doesn't hurt to explore even the improbable technologies and maybe work for a well funded startup every now and then, unless you're not about that life. You might not always solve all of the problems that you chase after, but the money in your bank account will still be very real.
At the same time, it kind of hurts to see speculants get rich off of projects like "Earth 2" and empty promises.
Most of this is indeed nonsensical. However, I think you may be letting the hype train move the goalposts in your mind.
The vast majority of "blockchain tech" out there is indeed a scam, useless, and of no value. The same was true about what people promised about the Internet. Pets.com and all that. This is nothing new.
I've owned a small amount of cryptocurrency for a long time, because to own $0 in a modern portfolio is probably not too smart if you're an index-type investor, given the market cap of BTC + ETH. However, I am no zealot of the tech and was very skeptical for a long time. I still am skeptical, but the thing that convinced me to give cryptocurrency a bit more run was the concept of decentralized financial instruments. I know the HN poster reading this can't wait to reply with any number of links of scams and rugpulls after I mention this, and it's true, scams abound. This happened on the Internet big time when people would "never put their credit card online," for example.
All I can say is that the applications of decentralizing financial instruments and methods appeals to me in a way no other derived technology from cryptocurrency/blockchain has. Maybe it won't ring true for you, but I can see some novel services and products coming out of this area of blockchain technologies that will be a benefit for global payments and humans in general.
Plenty will disagree, and that's fine. I'm not saying I am definitively correct. Just saying I was in a similar spot to you, and with an open mind, eventually found something.