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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?

#61

Post by paulsutter »

FabHK wrote: post #44
paulsutter wrote: post #19

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)

> The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party. Yes, and avoiding the trusted party makes it more inefficient by a factor of around 100,000,000 (-ish), if you consider that BTC uses around 23 GW and can do no more (5 transactions a second) than a single trusted PC could do. What are use cases were you actually need this and the high cost is worth it?

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)

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

#62

Post by icelancer »

>> I am talking committees formed in parliaments and central banks around the world to discuss its benefits, serious universities dedicating whole programs on the subject, elite investors pouring money into its potential, and the list goes on.

Most of this is indeed nonsensical. However, I think you may be letting the hype train move the goalposts in your mind.

The vast majority of "blockchain tech" out there is indeed a scam, useless, and of no value. The same was true about what people promised about the Internet. Pets.com and all that. This is nothing new.

I've owned a small amount of cryptocurrency for a long time, because to own $0 in a modern portfolio is probably not too smart if you're an index-type investor, given the market cap of BTC + ETH. However, I am no zealot of the tech and was very skeptical for a long time. I still am skeptical, but the thing that convinced me to give cryptocurrency a bit more run was the concept of decentralized financial instruments. I know the HN poster reading this can't wait to reply with any number of links of scams and rugpulls after I mention this, and it's true, scams abound. This happened on the Internet big time when people would "never put their credit card online," for example.

All I can say is that the applications of decentralizing financial instruments and methods appeals to me in a way no other derived technology from cryptocurrency/blockchain has. Maybe it won't ring true for you, but I can see some novel services and products coming out of this area of blockchain technologies that will be a benefit for global payments and humans in general.

Plenty will disagree, and that's fine. I'm not saying I am definitively correct. Just saying I was in a similar spot to you, and with an open mind, eventually found something.

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

#63

Post by armada651 »

ak_111 wrote: post #26
armada651 wrote: post #20

A lot of people pushing Blockchain technology have a vested interest in making it a more pervasive technology. Because Blockchain applications drive up the value of their crypto assets and offer more opportunities for speculation using crypto. Blockchain applications don't necessarily need to use existing cryptocurrencies. However in that case you need to find some other incentive to get people to mine your blockchai…

The funny thing is that I don't believe there is a "blockchain lobby" that is driving hype similar to bitcoin and other fads, that would at least make it more compressible. In fact it is not clear who benefits if it gets "adapted", whatever that means. It just seems collective delusion in pushing the technology by people who have little stake in it if at all, and sensible people have just given up trying to point out…

> In fact it is not clear who benefits if it gets "adapted", whatever that means.

People who hold cryptocurrency benefit from increased demand and hype around it. It drives up the value of their assets even if indirectly.

Not everyone may even be aware that they have this conflict of interest. They may genuinely buy into the hype, which is why they hold cryptocurrency in the first place. However as always we should be skeptical of technology advice from people who stand to make money from you choosing one technology over the other.

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

#65

Post by throwawayh878 »

Niksko wrote: post #33
paulsutter wrote: post #19

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)

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?

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

#66

Post by matthewmacleod »

There is for sure some value in blockchain technology, but you’re not insane for being baffled by the attention being paid to it. The whole space is riddled with nonsense, with very few concrete and practical use-cases being put forward. Cryptocurrencies in particular are awash with outright scams that just drown out the interesting and useful stuff.

I like this well-know NIST flowchart as a starting point: https://images.app.goo.gl/wsK2e2zPUnQW5agRA

It’s a bit pessimistic perhaps, but it kind of gets to the point: a blockchain is an interesting technology for solving problems where you need to achieve some sort of shared, trustless ledger. That’s useful in some cases, including the implementation of digital currencies.

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

#67

Post by pjc50 »

cburgdorf wrote: post #48
ak_111 wrote: 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…

> This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries

Classic blockchain advocacy: it works great provided we solve this unsolved problem of communicating "trustlessly" with the real world!

> you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed

People keep "gaming" smart contracts all the time. Just recently there was a defi attack where someone simply flash-borrowed all the tokens, voted themselves a reward, and returned the tokens.

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

#68

Post by forum_ghost »

hyperman1 wrote: post #57
tern wrote: post #31

It's all in Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list: Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments. The key concept is: sovereignty. In the end, this will reshape the nation state.

Expecting the nation state to just sit there and watch seems naive. When it becomes a big enough threat to make them notice, the nation state will regulate it stone dead.

you mean, fully embrace it to front-run the laggards, like El Salvador did?

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

#69

Post by swalsh »

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 a huge amount of their goals could be achieved easier using it)

I will say though, the more I dug into crypto the more I see a lot of actually amazing things. I moved into the Avalanche chain, and it's a radically differenent experience from Bitcoin and ETH frankly. I don't think ETH or Bitcoin got close to accomplishing their vision, but AVAX is different. I'm making transactions all the time (I made almost 700 transactions last year... the taxes part absolutely sucks). I'm not going to try enumerate the ways I think crypto is useful but i'd question the sources you're using.

One big thing i'd point out, the vision of crypto is still pretty far out. There are many infrastructure pieces missing. DAPP's Development seems WAY slower than centralized services. A smart contract is like hardware development. You basically want to get it perfect before you release it. Move fast and break things could mean a 50 million dollar hack in crypto. That doesn't make crypto useless or bad. Just a thing you need to think about.

EDIT: I went back about 3 seconds after positing this to fix a spelling mistake, and I was downvoted. It would be nice to get a comment with each of your downvotes. In the past upvotes and downvotes were signal of quality (not agreement)

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