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

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

#391

Post by D13Fd » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:49 PM UTC

JulianHC wrote: post #298

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…

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…

Which is great, unless the “fees” include taxes. In which case the short version of this comment is “you can use it for tax evasion.”

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

#392

Post by D13Fd » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

jeegsy wrote: post #340

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.

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

“I don’t think something is good just because every alternative is worse.”

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

#393

Post by dangerwill » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

mritchie712 wrote: post #379

dangerwill wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

1. I looked up bitcoin transaction fees dog, that's where those numbers came from (just converting the btc cost into dollars for ease of discussion). And yeah I don't care about whichever "low cost" blockchain is being talked about this week. Every single time one of those begins to become popular the scale problem shows itself and transaction times or fees (or both) go up as more nodes are added. Even proof of stake suffers from this.

2. Sure but none of these projects are run by reputable people and have shown deep misunderstandings of financial systems and human nature. Why would I trust any of these to be a replacement for my bank? And like, just from a tech perspective, doesn't the Hacker News community love talking about solving problems at scale, maximizing transactions per second at the minimum cost? How can you look at how absolutely, nightmarishly dog shit crypto networks are by design at handling high throughput and think that they are cool? You have traded every single engineering best practice away and are using brute computing power to solve the distributed double spend problem. I'm frankly deeply ashamed at how many engineers are willing to put up with this.

3. There is a fundamental difference between a 3 year planned migration and a migration that is stalled for 3 years with a fresh delay announcement every couple of months. You can say I'm being overly harsh but given how 95-99% of people in crypto are scammers and vaporware vendors I am forced to have a default pessimistic view of everything in the scene.

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

#394

Post by cdiddy2 » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:54 PM UTC

Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money.

Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...

Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789

Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono...

Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout...

Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut...

Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...

Myanmar: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-13/myanmar-s...

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

#395

Post by narrator » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

I did research for a Blockchain class a few summers ago. One of the use cases for private Blockchain is if multiple competitors want to cooperate to provide a single service. The most successful example is Maersk's Tradelens. Multiple competitors can hand off a package between each other and a customer or customs official can see the whole journey of that package and sensitive data like invoices without all competitors having access to that data or having to trust a central authority to keep everyone's secrets.

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

#396

Post by Niksko » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

throwawayh878 wrote: post #65

Niksko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a single trusted party. You're trading trust for one entity for trust for many entities.

I don't think I have to trust anyone when I run my own Bitcoin node and sign transactions. What entities do you mean?

Don't you need to also trust all of the other nodes on the network to come to consensus?

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

#397

Post by dangerwill » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

dangerwill wrote: post #384

dageshi wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

For the average person there is no difference between entering credit card info into a web page and using a wallet manager to enter your crypto info into an app, except that the wallet manager is infinitely more insecure and much more cumbersome. Going from a walkman to an ipod/itunes was an actual improvement in storage capacity, usability, accessibility etc. As for holding out hope something will come out of crypto…

And before I get a response about the insecurity of metamask: https://twitter.com/wakaflocka/status/1475709903184412675

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

#398

Post by FR10 » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

Yes, to me blockchain at this moment is more a solution looking for a problem. Regarding the biggest implementation, aka, Cryptocurrencies, what if they are "Too big to fail"? Should we as a society just let it happen to avoid a negative net economic welfare (in the short run)?

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

#399

Post by libertine » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

GaelFG wrote: post #376

libertine wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The morality isn't about the perceived value, or the utility, but rather the motivation behind the purchase:

When you buy an Apple product, you aren't speculating on the value of it in the future (unless you're a scalper) - you're not buying it because you'll be able to sell it for more, or because of it's rarity and you'll get some sort of social boost.

You buy the product, and you use it, that's your motivation (could be a tool for work, could be for self expression, you could even choose it because you want to be one of the cool guys as well).

When it comes to NFTs, or some trading card games, or even scratch off tickets with prizes, you're buying it because you're expecting to bank on it later, and you hope what you get is extremely rare... the problem is that the majority of this stuff is "rare" for the sake of being "rare", that has no value.

A Black Lotus is rare and valuable because the kids that were playing the game 20+ years ago, now have buying power and can finally get a piece of nostalgia, the problem is that there aren't that many around because people used/wore off/destroyed the card. There's an organic process in this that sustained itself for decades -> that's valuable, it's a cultural artifact.

Now they want to shorten the length of this organic process to some weeks. How is that sustainable?

>You are probably right about no one never did wanted to pay, and that's natural.

I didn't say people didn't want to pay, I think they simply couldn't afford it. But there's still value in that: if I didn't get a pirate copy for GTA Vice City I would have never become a fan of the series. There's brand value in that, don't you think? Why not offset the "cost of piracy" as part of the marketing budget :) ?

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

#400

Post by tasuki » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

todd3834 wrote: post #331

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…

Agreed about the domains. To add to this, for me the main problem aren't even the domain registrars, but rather the certificate authorities. It is madness that any certificate authority can issue certificates for any domain!

With blockchain domains, you can put the public part of your certificate on the blockchain and no one has to trust any third party to issue certificates - the domain owners issue their own certificates and they're guaranteed by the blockchain. A whole useless industry would become obsolete!

(Eg https://handshake.org/ attempts to do this. Disclaimer: I'm not a totally disinterested party :)