Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

Well since you asked.

Blockchain is the world's worst database, created entirely to maintain the reputations of venture capital firms who injected hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology whose core defining insight was "You can improve on a Ponzi scam by making it self-organizing and distributed; that gets vastly more distribution, reduces the single point of failure, and makes it censorship-resistant."

That's more robust than I usually phrase things on HN, but you did ask. In slightly more detail:

Databases are wonderful things. We have a number which are actually employed in production, at a variety of institutions. They run the world. Meaningful applications run on top of Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, etc etc.

No meaningful applications run on top of "blockchain", because it is a marketing term. You cannot install blockchain just like you cannot install database. (Database sounds much cooler without the definitive article, too.) If you pick a particular instantiation of a blockchain-style database, it is a horrible, horrible database.

Can I pick on Bitcoin? Let me pick on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is claimed to be a global financial network and ready for production right now. Bitcoin cannot sustain 5 transactions per second, worldwide.

You might be sensibly interested in Bitcoin governance if, for some reason, you wanted to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a software artifact; it matters to users who makes changes to it and by what process. (Bitcoin is a software artifact, not a protocol, even though the Bitcoin community will tell you differently. There is a single C++ codebase which matters. It is essentially impossible to interoperate with Bitcoin without bugs-and-all replicating that codebase.) Bitcoin governance is captured by approximately ~5 people. This is a robust claim and requires extraordinary evidence.

Ordinary evidence would be pointing you, in a handwavy fashion, about the depth of acrimony with regards to raising the block size, which would let Bitcoin scale to the commanding heights of 10 or, nay, 100 transactions per second worldwide.

Extraordinary evidence might be pointing you to the time where the entire Bitcoin network was de-facto shut down based on the consensus of N people in an IRC channel. c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9320989 This was back in 2013. Long story short: a software update went awry so they rolled back global state by a few hours by getting the right two people to agree to it on a Skype call.

But let's get back to discussing that sole technical artifact. Bitcoin has a higher cost-to-value ratio than almost any technology conceivable; the cost to date is the market capitalization of Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin enters through a seigniorage mechanism, every Bitcoin existing was minted as compensation for "security the integrity of the blockchain" (by doing computationally expensive makework).

This cost is high. Today, routine maintenance of the Bitcoin network will cost the network approximately $1.5 million. That's on the order of $3 per write on a maximum committed capacity basis. It will cost another $1.5 million tomorrow, exchange rate depending.

(Bitcoin has successfully shifted much of the cost of operating its database to speculators rather than people who actually use Bitcoin for transaction processing. That game of musical chairs has gone on for a while.)

Bitcoin has some properties which one does not associate with many databases. One is that write acknowledgments average 5 minutes. Another is that they can stop, non-deterministically, for more than an hour at a time, worldwide, for all users simultaneously. This behavior is by design.

I can go on, and probably will some other day. This is a bit of a hobby for me.

Bitcoin allows you to buy all sorts of exotic drugs from strangers, safely and securely from your couch.

Exactly. The most valuable part of the blockchain technologies for most big news announcements tend to be the Merkle DAG piece not the distributed consensus.

Frankly the distributed consensus part of blockchains has always seemed more than a tad bit wasteful of energy and computation.

Blockchain evangelists promise the world and deliver nothing except hype and political grandstanding in return.

When we discuss the cryptocurrency concept, specifically bitcoin, I think reasonable people can agree that blockchain technology has yielded something unique, interesting and worthy of technical merit, despite it not living up to the insane prognostications of bitcoin fanatics . On the whole, I think it's fair to call bitcoin a success because it continues to exist and has been self sustaining more or less within the parameters of the original design for quite a few years. Although it is small, there is some real commerce that occurs in the bitcoin world, and even among some of the alt-coins that followed it. A self-sustaining mini-economy based on computer code is fascinating, and without all the breathless evangelists talking about how bitcoin will end all wars and liberate the masses from the tyranny of taxation and government, I think we'd see a lot more meaningful technical discussion of bitcoin and the other potential uses for blockchain technology.

But that is not the world we live in. We live in a world where every conceivable problem is met with an overwrought and unworkable blockchain solution. We live in a world where startups can drain 100 million dollars on a clearly stupid idea because "blockchains are the future", we live in a world where bitcoin evangelists refuse to face the reality that the incumbent financial system is not at all threatened by bitcoin and concepts like "smart contracts" and that people with common sense aren't ignorant or misunderstanding blockchains just because they're trying to tell you that throwing millions of dollars into a "decentralized autonomous organization" (a misnomer which exemplifies blockchain insanity) is a dangerous and terrible idea.

Blockchain enthusiasts need to put up or shut up. Storing land deeds and stocks on the blockchain is unworkable. Using the blockchain to power smart-locks and self-driving cars and autonomous drones and autonmous AI VCs is unworkable and unnecessary. Bitcoin, bitcoin copycats, and RNG roulette are the only examples of blockchains working mostly as intended and providing at least a marginal utility (in that cryptocurrency can be converted into spendable money). All the rest of it is demonstrably pointless (see literally every project created with etherum besides decentralized gambling software).

This is leaving aside all the political nonsense and all the bitcoin hesits, thefts, scams, and buzzword swindling. The bottom line is that people are tired of hearing about the amazing capabilities of blockchains when nobody can seem to actually demonstrate their utility (besides bitcoin) in practice.

An addendum from the UX side: bitcoin is not usable by anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time learning about it. It basically requires users to understand what the blockchain is and the limitations of it, whereas other currencies don't require regular users to understand the backend machinery. It can't ever be more than a niche tool, because the general public isn't interested in learning backend machinery for currency.