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

There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits.

> Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it.

Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.

> That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.

Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.

> Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things.

This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true.

> I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.

Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics.

> I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.

You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.

> There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.

It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.

I am a disillusioned early adopter. The Satoshi paper blew my mind and I still have my letter from the Japanese court liquidating Mt. Gox's assets.

I have in fact looked at all of the things GP mentioned, hoping to find something that might get me interested again, unsuccessfully.

I just can't get excited anymore by people trying to do mundane, perfectly solved things, but this time with Blockchain.

I'm not even sure I understand your hypothesis here. In the absence of the organisational units that engage in the mass killing of their citizenry in order to sculpt their polities to the ideology which holds sway within their murderous structure, those people will still die because "reasons". Please expand on "reasons" here.

> But also, in the last 50 years

Nobody ever did anything wrong if you can arbitrarily timeslice it in order to make your case. And even there, if you look at the things done under colour of political authority in the past 50 years, you'd still be hard pressed to find a bigger villain on the planet. It just looks good in comparison to the preceding 50 years.

> Again you only speak in terms of costs and refuse to speak to or quantify benefits.

Because once again, no benefit provided under the banner of political authority has ever failed to be provided absent the banner of political authority. When the apparatus in question reduces to an entity that has a monopoly on force in order to compel people to engage in transactions that they otherwise would not of their own free will, it is hardly surprising that all of the good things that apparatus has ever provided might in fact be easily done by the free will of the participants in question.

> I reject the former premise and the latter isn't a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system.

You can reject it all you like, but you're wrong based on the mean economic output per capita vs their debt calculated at birth plus their lifetime cost. And that is indeed a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system, the former basically guarantees collapse, it is only a matter of time, therefore moving to a system not so afflicted of your own free will is access to an easy yield in the meantime.

> Respectfully disagree. The overwhelming majority of participants are just speculators.

The participants in question is not the reason I say it's clearly what a whole lot of people want, it's because of the amount of times the exact conversation we're having about destroying the state being the exact reason any given participant in the cryptosphere is there, including myself. There is indisputably a great degree of desire to do away with political authority.