Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

My understanding is that it originally came out of the cyberpunk & anarchist subcultures (e.g. the use of the Japanese nom de plume Satoshi Nakamoto is in my view a call-out to the glamorization of Japan in cyberpunk and cypherpunk culture). I believe Bitcoin really was indeed meant as an anarchist or libertarian way to have something like gold but digital - something that could be used to buy & sell anything forbidden by governments. Illegal online activity has been highly glamorized since before the start of the tech boom in culturally-foundational novels like Neuromancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer - where the main hero is a suicidal amphetamine-addicted criminal hacker and his frenemies / semi-allies are an arms dealer and an assassin.

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.

> It doesn't destroy the planet. You're thinking of the fossil-fuel industry.

But the fossil-fuel industry has had very real benefits (whether we like it our not!). It's surely debateable whether fuelling crime, scams, and what is tantamount to a massive casino is of any benefit to humanity. Especially when running it consumes more energy than Argentina [1]

Of course there are plenty of other aspects of human existence that requires energy, and therefore has an impact on our home. That doesn't give individuals who are engaged in this casino an 'out'. It is an entirely greed driven exercise right now.

Perhaps something will come along that makes blockchain and other crypto concepts viable and valuable to society, it ain't here yet though. So I don't see how anybody can justify an Argentina's worth off energy usage.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56012952

I won't attempt to enumerate the ways that crypto is useful. But i'll tell you how I want to use it.

But first, it's important to understand this. The actual foundations for what crypto can enable is still being built, so if you're expecting me to show you some "killer app"... i'm not going to show you a working version today. Is that because Crypto is vaporware? No, i'm seeing important stuff deployed all the time. It's because the underlying infrastructure is being built as we speak. One example, today ETH transactions are expensive. I bought an ENS domain (which hey, that's cool) the domain cost $5, but the gas cost $200. That's a problem. Fortunately, that's a problem people are working on. ETH is building out L2. AVAX (the chain I am most heavily invested in) is using something called subnets. A subnet for example allows you to have a custom VM, and isolate chain traffic (gas cost is a function of supply and demand for blockspace, if you both increase supply of blockspace, and decrease demand for specific blockspace you can reduce gas prices). The early examples of subnets are demonstrating this theory is true.

With cheaper transactions, and custom VM's the application space will widen. On my preferred chain AVAX, that's stuff that is JUST now being released (like first one was deployed a few weeks ago). The stuff that is becoming popular today (Defi, NFT's etc) are foundational components.

So with that laid out, here's my use case. I want to run a SaaS. How is a blockchain superior to "traditional" methods? A saas managed by a DAO has a central advantage. No employees. As a corporation i'm limited by the resources I have employed for me. Need a feature? Let me prioritize it, add it to a sprint etc. Corporations have employees, and they can only move as fast as those employees allow it. A DAO with zero employees has the entire internet as a potential contribution source. But unlike open source development, it's not done by "good will". You can pay people for their contributions in a trustless way that allows ANYONE to contribute and earn. Also, and this IS a benefit, in a future of GPT3 and AI assisted coding. There's probably going to be swarms of bots searching the space for work. Posting work, providing a way to pick it up, and integrate it into your project is going to be WAY faster in the blockchain space, than what corps will be able to acheive. But there's a few missing pieces before this can work. We have services like Akash, so throwing services into the blockchain is possible today. But managing a repository on the chain is not. I was contemplating using stateful precompiles in a Subnet VM to do this. The next problem is bridging SUCKS, but all these raw components are scattered around. That makes it difficult, even with the pieces defined to be combined. Solvable problems, but things that need to be solved.

Blockchain-like distributed concensus mechanisms do have a few practical applications: https://slightknack.dev/blog/chain/.

To the extent that blocks are assembled and validated not by one node (which is all that would be necessary), but by (tens? hundreds? of) thousands, there is massive duplication of the actual work by a factor of 1e4 or 1e5 or more.

But, you are right, even that enormous inefficiency is peanuts compared to the Proof of Waste, which ramps it up to unimaginable proportions. (A single BTC transaction uses up as much electricity as a 2 person household in Germany in a year, and produces 2 iPhones worth of electronic waste.)