81–90 of 139 posts
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Greed appears to me to be fundamentally intrinsic to human behavior and culture. I don't think it's realistic to try to get rid of it. Rather I think it would be more effective to use it as an incentive and actively limit its negative externalities.
There are lots of "fundamentally intrinsic" harmful elements of human behavior and culture but civilization is slowly getting them under control.
This is a hell of an effort and everyone who is using this 'feature' needs a very good reason and use case which justifies the costs.
Every new ICO should answer the question if a distributed BFT database is required. If yes is the benefit big enough? If not then just forget it. Or invest and sell the first minute this scam is on an exchange.
About Storj and similar coins: why do I want a decentral Dropbox? If I want to host my files in the cloud, what is the benefit of having a distributed decentral BFT db?
I understand the appeal of ICOs and cryptocurrencies and distributed storage that is automatically shared, decentralized, etc etc. But a part of me says "is this complexity necessary?". The appeal of a service like Dropbox is that it is simple. Most engineer friends I had at the time when services like Box and Dropbox started popping up, laughed at the idea... "It is just a fancy ftp". Now they all use these services…
Unfortunately for the author of this amazing (and cringeworthy) exercise, skeptics often put in a lot of effort, but receive practically no reward compared to the con artist. Even the people who agree with and appreciate the effort of the skeptics are few compared to the number of irrational people who gladly follow the cons. This is a bit radical (and probably outside the interest of HN), but if we somehow could rem…
A "scam" implies intent, it's very possible/likely that a lot of icos have good intentions, but are inherently complicated and hard to implement.
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People didn't leave the Internet because of the dot com bubble burst. If blockchain has an advantage over more centralized approaches, it will bounce back as well.
In the dotcom bust investors lost their money, not the users. In the crypto world you are an user when you are invested (in smaller or larger extent). I agree, if blockchain apps really prove to be more powerful a possible bust won't really hurt, but in this state we are right now (no real world adoption for most of the stuff) a bust would be toxic.
Unfortunately for the author of this amazing (and cringeworthy) exercise, skeptics often put in a lot of effort, but receive practically no reward compared to the con artist. Even the people who agree with and appreciate the effort of the skeptics are few compared to the number of irrational people who gladly follow the cons. This is a bit radical (and probably outside the interest of HN), but if we somehow could rem…
What bugs me the most about the whole ICO game is that it casts a long dark shadow about the whole blockchain stuff. Storj as well as other ideas in the realm are based on great ideas and I'd love to see them succeed. However, that Storj was able to obtain $30M in funding is really just awful. Sooner or later the cryptocoin market will crash and when this day comes and those projects still have no inherent value a lo…
Presumably that money will keep circulating once it's spent, so is it really so bad?
The fact that "money will keep circulating" is irrelevant. It's like saying, "Sure, the thief took your money, but you shouldn't say it's 'gone'. He spent the money on booze and cigarettes, and then the store owner spent it on rent and food. So you see? The money isn't really gone, it's circulating and increasing value for everyone!"
I understand the appeal of ICOs and cryptocurrencies and distributed storage that is automatically shared, decentralized, etc etc. But a part of me says "is this complexity necessary?". The appeal of a service like Dropbox is that it is simple. Most engineer friends I had at the time when services like Box and Dropbox started popping up, laughed at the idea... "It is just a fancy ftp". Now they all use these services…
> And this is exactly the polar oppossite of that!
I totally agree but this project seems to be still in alpha state. Have they advertised any kind of stable end-user friendly release yet? It doesn't look like it and therefor attacking the user-friendliness of the project seems a bit pre-mature, I'm sure the first alpha version of dropbox was unusable too by common people it's just that this project is open source and therefor anyone can give it a try before it gets stable.
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Only give power to people who don't want it.
There's an SF writer I really like for his books in the vein of this. His name is L. E. Modesitt, and some of his books that discuss this are the "Parafaith War" and probably the best "Adiamante."