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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?

#371

Post by FabHK »

gregwebs wrote: post #273
FabHK wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said electricity, not energy. Energy use encompasses industry, transport (oil), heating, and electricity. As for the rise, as I said, I think money spent on energy and electro waste is largely proportional to BTC price, since unscrupulous miners will be incentivised to come in and mine if mining profits become larger due to a higher price (since they are unconcerned about the externalities. Private gain, socialised…

Do you have a source for the electricity usage? 26% of US energy usage is for transportation. For your math to work, 90% of energy usage would have to be non-electrical. If you read the article I linked about Bitcoin, it explains how Bitcoin mining stops producing coins over time and instead miners have to make their money in transaction fees- this is a very different model for mining incentive. Again, it would be gr…

Sorry, no complete source, I’ve calculated it myself.

The discrepancy arises from several issues:

1. The article you quote is from last year. Current estimates for BTC are around 200 TWh/a, not 140 as in the article.

2. The article looks at BTC only. My statement was BTC + ETH.

3. Energy vs electricity

4. There is also the issue of energy production vs consumption (differences arise from energy used for the production of energy, as well as transport losses).

5. It is plausible that electricity is “just” 10% to 35% of energy usage, would need to look that up.

With all that, I stand by my statement that crypto uses 1% or more of the world electricity consumption.

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

#372

Post by vvpan »

Automatic market makers, Argent, RAI, multi-sig wallets, Baseline Protocol, Helium, FOAM Space, lending, digital ownership (say of in-game items), anonymity (I donate to Russian opposition in crypto only), improved payment UX.

All things that work well and do it better than non-blockchain.

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

#373

Post by dageshi »

dangerwill wrote: post #301
dageshi wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed of iteration/development/experimentation. You can't fork EUR/USD, experiment with it and see if it works better than the existing EUR/USD. You can with online currencies and people are doing just that. Most will be failures in the same way that most new businesses/startups are ultimately failures. BUT the difference is there is actual experimentation with money now in a way that there never was before.

None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse. 99.9% of this "experimentation" is simply companies tying ownership of a token to a permission to access a web service. And the remainder of it are clueless tech brained morons finding ways to re-invent financial instruments (like residuals, profit splitt…

Yeah and mp3 didn't fundamentally change the fact that you still listen to music with your ears. Video codecs didn't change the fact you watch moving pictures with your eyes. But they did change an awful lot about existing industries and invented new ones.

I personally have never been involved in crypto or bought anything crypto related. I have no incentive either way in its success or failure. I've just lived long enough to see what happens when stuff suddenly goes 100% digital, the pace of iteration, exploration and adoption rapidly speeds up while the costs of doing all three decreases.

I think something interesting will come of it, even if I cannot say what that will be.

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

#374

Post by FabHK »

derbOac wrote: post #358
pclmulqdq wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secure and efficient. Money should be a medium of transfer, not a store of value. The fact remains that you can't really get "efficient" with proof of work, and claims about "secure" are dubious with proof of stake.

I think maybe "valuable" meant "scalable" or something? I can't speak for the OP though. I think there's something to the idea of some proof of an efficiency-security tradeoff or lack thereof though. Seems like something that should be out there in the literature.

With “Valuable” I meant that a lot of value is on-chain (in terms of market cap or transactions - basically whatever makes it worth stealing it).

Nobody would bother mounting an attack on some random shitcoin, so it can be secure (for all practical purposes) without wasting massive amounts of energy.

A public blockchain that carries a lot of value must burn a significant proportion of available hash power to guard against interference, so it’s either wasteful or insecure.

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

#375

Post by cableshaft »

kingkool68 wrote: post #157
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.

Exhibit A https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1517680400142716929?s=21...

Yikes. Wasn't aware of that one. Thanks for sharing it.

I like smart contracts but you really have to be super careful with them, and ideally they should all be audited by a third party before launch, to help catch stuff like this. But even that's not a guarantee crap like this won't happen sometimes.

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

#376

Post by GaelFG »

libertine wrote: post #246
GaelFG wrote: post #232

I think "effective rebranding for marketing purposes of database technologies" alone justify all the fuss, business wise. 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 stea…

>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. This mechanic works because people have something to gain from promoting the thing, because the mindset is t…

I also think the 'client side' mechanic is bad, but why does it should mater for investors and companies ?

Is it morally so different than say an Apple fan (I pick a random exemple of more expensive products than average where not everyone would agree they are technically superior, whoever may be right) who will argue the brand is worth the value, because if he don't, that mean he is an idiot ? (you may say at least here there is a physical good, but in gaming, nft are technically nothing more than DLC).

You are probably right about no one never did wanted to pay, and that's natural. The thing is companies want (and need) you to pay. Making people pay for games is hard and mainly a thing of the past, no wonder they try new things in case they catch up no ?

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

#377

Post by FabHK »

tasuki wrote: post #364
invalidname wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite all the hype. Very few people use Crypto. It doesn't matter if it's "just" 0.1% what matters is how much do all the banking and credit card systems in the world consume by comparison. I would bet it's less than that. So it's not tenable as a currency. It's also not very valuable as a commodity since it fluctuates too much and has no intrinsic value. It has no value to "disconnect from the banks/government" si…

> what matters is how much do all the banking and credit card systems in the world consume by comparison. I would bet it's less than that. Thing is, with bitcoin the energy consumption is easily quantifiable and it's a single number. The banking system also uses a lot of energy to heat/cool the employees, builds lots of office buildings, and does many things which could be considered wasteful. It really is a little t…

This is a good point, and the banking system is certainly bloated - just before the GFC more than a third of US GDP went to the financial sector, WTF.

However, the traditional banking system also performs way more functions than crypto and DeFi, and I very much doubt that DeFi can provide them.

Lastly, disrupting banking with good old Fintech would be great, as it is vastly more efficient than blockchain.

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

#378

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

kybernetikos wrote: post #368
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so ... which courts of which legal jurisdictions can correct which contracts? Are courts in Guinea-Bissau allowed to correct contracts between counterparties in the US?

This stuff is all normal when you're dealing with international contracts - it's not like nobody thought of doing international deals before satoshi. Some of the answers do depend on the specifics of course. If the asset being traded is US real estate for example I would expect the smart contract to be set up so it requires a US court decision to correct the register.

My point is that there's an entire subbranch of the law, generally called private international law, that has been created to deal with conflict of laws and jurisdictional issues. You're implying that there are simple deterministic rules to determine those kinds of questions but in fact it's a meta-problem.

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

#379

Post by mritchie712 »

dangerwill wrote: post #343
mritchie712 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1. At current fees, if you were to attempt to send less than ~$85 worth of btc then you are paying more than 2%. A year ago, fees skyrocketed such that you would need to transfer ~$3000 to have the fees amount to less than 2%. Not to mention the implicit potential fee of how much the price of BTC may change from when the transaction is started to when it is completed. 2. BTC, created in 2009. Eth, created in 2013. Th…

1. Fees on chains made for transactions are pennies (Google "X transaction fees" where x = solana, polygon, bitcoin lightning, etc.)

2. I'd expect a project trying to create digital money to take a bit more time then a JS framework[1]. Does that seem reasonable? It took React 6 years to "go mainstream" and had the backing of Facebook. It's hard to do consequential things in the real world, it will take time.

3. Why do you think it won't happen? Just because it's taking a long time? It's a big change with a ton at risk if it goes wrong. It's going to take a while to happen.

1 - https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-react-js-on-a-ti...

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

#380

Post by hocuspocus »

occamrazor wrote: post #345

Currency exchange. In the banking system it’s hard to exchange currencies for a fee lowe than ~0.5%, even for amounts in the tens of thousands USD.

I regularly exchange currencies using Wise or Revolut for a lot less than that.

If adding another layer was somehow more efficient, then all the companies in this space would do it under the hood. Yet almost none of them do.

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