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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?

#331

Post by todd3834 »

The use case that opened my mind is blockchain domain registrars. You can buy a domain and own it forever without a monthly payment. Everyone knows it is owned by a wallet and you can update the blockchain with your DNS info.

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.

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

#332

Post by booleandilemma »

swalsh wrote: post #69

You say you've done research, i'm curious how you did the research? The standard go to reference from people who don't like crypto is now is a 2 hour video that makes zero effort to look for any good. It's not alone, there are hundreds of videos that make bad faith effort to "investigate" crypto. On the progressive left, for some reason it is becoming part of their culture to hate crypto (which is ironic considering…

You say you've done research, i'm curious how you did the research? The standard go to reference from people who don't like crypto is now is a 2 hour video that makes zero effort to look for any good.

Responses such as this one make me think of the crypto-scene as some sort of weird techno-religion.

Imagine writing something like this about using REST, a relational database, or a high-level language vs assembly.

Imagine talking about a certain political faction “hating” dynamic typing.

I’ll admit I had to stop reading your comment after the first paragraph.

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

#333

Post by mritchie712 »

dangerwill wrote: post #291
dageshi wrote: 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…

1. 2% is not low.

2. Crypto is mostly open source software. Most open source software gets better quickly. Writing off crypto completely because of its current state is a bit short sighted.

3. Could you say more about proof of stake? Vitalik[1] supports it and so do most eth devs. Seems to be a matter of time and implementation.

1 - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

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

#334

Post by woodruffw »

kayamon wrote: post #105
yashg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party That is most accurate description of blockchain I have read. Unfortunately, the mechanism for that (Proof-of-work) is slow, expensive and planet destroying at scale. And while we may remove a trust provider third party, we aren't getting rid of centralization with blockchain anyway.

It's supposed to be slow. That's what secures it. The production speed comes from layer 2 solutions built on top of it (analogous to how a secure VM can go faster with a JIT while still maintaining security). It's not expensive. Transaction fees are just fine and getting cheaper over time. It doesn't destroy the planet. You're thinking of the fossil-fuel industry.

> analogous to how a secure VM can go faster with a JIT while still maintaining security

…what? You can’t JIT your way out of the underlying machine being slow. The machine is a watch; JITs typically achieve performance by speeding up an interpreter running on the machine (in other words, taking advantage of missed performance opportunities).

This analogy doesn’t work for POW schemes, since wasting energy is the entire point. My understanding of “L2” solutions is that they’re really just pseudo-verified batching techniques, where transactions are rolled up off-chain and settled in bulk. That doesn’t “solve” PoW; it fundamentally undermines the original integrity promise.

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

#335

Post by ZeroGravitas »

etherael wrote: post #319
HWR_14 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary. > Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than g…

I believe audits and transparency are amongst the tools that can and do improve 'government' / 'democracy'. I can see ways that crypto (in it's old generic sense) can help but I don't particularly see any way that blockchain tech can help though?

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

#336

Post by Spooky23 »

etherael wrote: post #266
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #160

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,…

That’s the marketing pitch.

The nihilist position that e everything is broken, except for a highly volatile system of digital signatures that require massive “fiat” capital investments to function.

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

#337

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

giantg2 wrote: post #202
lmohseni wrote: post #140

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.

"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." If your argument is that there could be bugs in the code, then how is this different from the law today? The legal system is rife with abuses and injustices. It most certainly has bugs as-is.

No post body was provided.

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

#338

Post by woodruffw »

Tenoke wrote: post #296
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nature abhors a vacuum: if you kill the most popular PoW scheme, the little ones will dutifully step up and use just as much power. I don’t think there’s any world we can live in where PoW schemes will have “negligible impact,” which only heartens the justification for banning all of them, now.

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

#339

Post by kybernetikos »

thfuran wrote: post #295
kybernetikos wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> There is no external trusted documentation that says what the intention of the code is.

No, if someone fraudulently updated a canonical record of ownership, then the legal system can provide remedies. If it were me, I'd write the smart contract to enable corrections in case of a legal decision but that's at the choice of whomever sets up the smart contract that provides the canonical record of ownership.

Same situation for if someone loses their keys. All these problems can be solved with appropriately written smart contacts.

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

#340

Post by jeegsy »

HWR_14 wrote: post #300
etherael wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dont think its much of a selling point in favor of government that the considered so far "anarchistic alternatives" are worse. That is by no means a recommendation
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