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

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

#291
post #75

You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use. 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. Fundament…

No, BTC is not functionally a currency and hasn't been since the silk road era. Effectively no one is buying goods and services with BTC, it is a speculative asset. Even Musk stopped taking BTC payments for Tesla because of the astronomical fees and incredible long settle times.

"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." Credit cards run 100% of online transactions and do a fantastic, quick, and cheap job of it. Crypto isn't creating something wholly new, it is attempting to compete with a network that charges 1-2% fees, works in seconds, and handles 1 BILLION transactions a day. With BTC you can't predict the fees or the transaction time and the network handles ~40k transactions a day, at extreme cost. Crypto currencies get more inefficient as more nodes come online (hence the proliferation of "side-chains" for games that need to actually, you know, make a non trivial number of transactions per second) and so they fundamentally break at scale. And don't try to spout some line about Proof of Stake, Ethereum will continue to push back the migration until the heat death of the universe.

Now you will probably respond that credit cards use existing currencies and the fundamental shift here is that this is an "online currency" vs "online payments". To the average person this is a distinction without a difference. Really this is fundamentally political, an (openly stated!) war on the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, etc and the associated governments by anarcho capitalist Libertarians who want to trade bureaucratic government services with profit-driven corporate services

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party NIST's Blockchain Technology Overview is really good explainer: * https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final See especially Figure 6 ("p. 42", 53 of the PDF), which is a flow chart to help you decide on whether blockchain matches one's use case. Extracted: * https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed

I love it: Do you need ? No -> consider DATABASE

Future historians will laugh and cry knowing we invested trillions and boiled the oceans for the sake of a useless append-only log.

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

#293
The most valuable commodity in the world is trust. You can't buy it, it can't be manufactured, and it can vanish in an instant. Crypto currencies are used to take advantage of trust. Shamans have existed since the beginning of recorded history to take advantage of gullible people. Blockchain technology enables that on a global scale. P. T. Barnum was right.

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

#294

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party 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)

>> Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided,

That is the key. Crypto currency is a thing. I don't think that has a future either but whatever. All other uses are just hype and those applications make no sense except to fool investors.

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve ever written code, and if you’ve ever written a bug, then you will understand that code as law is terrible idea, especially when it comes to finance.

> code as law is terrible idea I don't know exactly what you mean by 'code as law', and I'm sure there are extremists that think smart contracts make law obsolete, but they are just wrong. Fraud via smart contract is still fraud. Theft via smart contract is still theft. There's nothing about having automatic processing of transactions that means you get to just ignore the legal system in your country. And that's fine…

>All that is needed is for the legal system to recognise blockchains as the canonical record of ownership of real assets.

Then theft via smart contract can't be theft because it acted on the canonical record of ownership. This also causes tons of other problems. What happens if someone loses access to their wallet? Now there's a house that simply can't ever be sold?

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power is used to secure the system, not to perform transactions. The transaction rate has always been the same, the power use has gone up with the value of the contents (to resist a 51% attack) Some people feel strongly this security is worth it. Some feel strongly that it isn’t (but one suspects their objection is really to the lack of central control)

Climate change may be the problem that defines our generation. In that light, and given the ludicrous power estimates that blockchains use, are we not morally obligated to kill all the blockchain projects if these estimates are in the right ballpark?

At most we might be obliged to kill the worst (and a lot of other non-crypto things) but killing all makes no sense when there's many with fairly neglible impact.

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read several technical, non-fluff books on the topic, and I’ve developed smart contracts on Ethereum for decent hourly wage (paid out in fiat). And I’ve still come to roughly the same conclusion as you. Either my reading comprehension is poor, or there is little actual value in the vast majority of blockchain applications. Digital cash, as defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, still seems like the only real use cas…

But even 'digital cash' doesn't need this, for most definitions and use cases. Even if we're talking about smuggling money out of authoritarian regimes, or buying soft drugs, or hiring hitmen online, I'm not sure it makes any actual sense compared with alternatives. Feels like a way for people who've been convinced that government doesn't work to feel like they're re-inventing government with extra steps, mixed with…

You can also use it to buy goods from oversea retailers without paying exorbitant fees, bad conversion rate. If you live outside of America and Europe, banks charge a hefty amount of fees for international transactions.

The world is volatile. Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, and in the future who know if China and Taiwan won't become a crappy place to be. The needs to store your wealth and get out of the country quickly is very real. You can't just queue for ATM and holding dollars and gold bars come with significant risk of confiscation or being robbed.

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

#299
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this sentiment, I am not calling it useless. In fact I think it makes perfect sense as an "experimentalist technology", it is just the disproportionate attention it is getting by serious people over a long period of time that I find most baffling ("blockchain to fight climate change/ improve vaccination/ ease supply chain bottlenecks/ destroy oligarchs")

Let's assume rich countries of the world (e.g. G7) set up a climate change fund in a smart contract. They could just lockup some funds there to be claimable after x months/years for any country (except the G7) proportionally to how far they managed to reduce their CO2 emissions. This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries (Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustl…

> Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustless way to the blockchain via some clever oracle mechanism).

> Instead of having a handwritten weak contract like the Paris climate act, you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed.

I'm having trouble reconciling these two ideas.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even 'digital cash' doesn't need this, for most definitions and use cases. Even if we're talking about smuggling money out of authoritarian regimes, or buying soft drugs, or hiring hitmen online, I'm not sure it makes any actual sense compared with alternatives. Feels like a way for people who've been convinced that government doesn't work to feel like they're re-inventing government with extra steps, mixed with…

I was convinced government doesn't work and indeed that is the only reason I am interested in blockchain applications. Watching first hand how badly the entire affair has gone has been very useful into getting insight into why government doesn't work, which I still firmly believe. However I am no longer under the illusion doing away with it and replacing it with a blockchain based substitute is either cheap or easy,…

So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government, and then didn't do the (to me) obvious thing if updating your "government can be good" possibility.
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