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Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

nytimes.com

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Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#131

Post by iamwil »

bigdubs wrote: post #115
v64 wrote: post #108

It's strange to me how there are many among the Hacker News crowd who can read an article like this and have doubts about its thesis. You lived through the 80s and 90s right? I can't count how many times in my life I was told no one would ever need a computer in their house, we've gotten along for decades just fine without them. No one will ever buy books online, that's ridiculous, you can go to the store and have on…

Not sure the parallels are as strong as you're making them out to be; there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed. There will probably be a better end state for distributed trust, but we're legitimately not there yet.

Proof of Stake is already on the horizon for 2018 for Ethereum.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#132

Post by CryptoPunk »

aoro wrote: post #118
bigdubs wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure the parallels are as strong as you're making them out to be; there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed. There will probably be a better end state for distributed trust, but we're legitimately not there yet.

They already exist. Check out the stellar consensus mechanism. https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...

Stellar is not decentralized.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#133

Post by jhbadger »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #14

Is anyone else tired of hearing the word 'bubble' applied to everything? Whether we're talking about tech stocks, chicken futures, tulips, or Bitcoin, it's become a really tired and meaningless term. You can't know if an asset is in a 'bubble' until long after the bubble has burst. Bitcoin is far from having burst, so this article and all those that came before it offer nothing new or insightful. Please, let's move p…

You certainly can guess whether an asset in in a bubble with reasonable accuracy, though. Is the asset inherently valuable or is it only being valued because it is currently trendy? Some tech companies provide valuable products but most in the dot-com bubble didn't even have a working product for sale.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#134

Post by api »

v64 wrote: post #108

It's strange to me how there are many among the Hacker News crowd who can read an article like this and have doubts about its thesis. You lived through the 80s and 90s right? I can't count how many times in my life I was told no one would ever need a computer in their house, we've gotten along for decades just fine without them. No one will ever buy books online, that's ridiculous, you can go to the store and have on…

I lived through the 80s and early 90s. The difference is that I could do stuff with the early Internet. I could do stuff with BBSes. I could do stuff with early PCs. These things were almost immediately very useful to a lot of people.

The reason I've become a bear on cryptocurrency is that I don't see the utility to justify the monstrous amounts of money pouring into it. It's almost 10 years old and today it's actually less useful than it was a few years ago due to runaway fee growth. The feedback system works in the wrong direction. Did the Internet get less useful the more people used it?

That and I see a ton of scams. Almost all cryptocurrency projects seem like either scams or delusional vaporware projects akin to badly thought out Kickstarters or over-funded boil-the-ocean startups. These things rarely accomplish anything other than to blow a lot of money.

Want to change my mind? Show me the cryptocurrency killer app that people are climbing over each other to use.

... and no, gambling and virtual MLM / pyramid schemes don't count. I mean utility in the real world.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#135

Post by starlust2 »

v64 wrote: post #108

It's strange to me how there are many among the Hacker News crowd who can read an article like this and have doubts about its thesis. You lived through the 80s and 90s right? I can't count how many times in my life I was told no one would ever need a computer in their house, we've gotten along for decades just fine without them. No one will ever buy books online, that's ridiculous, you can go to the store and have on…

The point isn't that existing technology can already do what new technology provides. There has to be some increased value from using the new technology. E-commerce took over because it's more convenient and offers a wider selection of products.

The end user doesn't care what database you're using. They care about utility.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#136

Post by decentralised »

bildung wrote: post #117
decentralised wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so people make money by running mining hardware that keeps a blockchain network decentralised and trustworthy. The value of the token increases with the number of people who participate in the network (Metcalfe's ...) and due to speculation on the underlying value of having trust and consensus without a centralised authority. The problem with centralised authority is that, despite the very best intentions of thos…

I think this is clear to pretty much anyone interested in this. The technicalities are not the point. Question is, what is the actual problem to solve? That doesn't get solved by postgres? Not a potential one, but a real, existing one.

I don't have detailed knowledge of the project but from memory, the proposition was to leapfrog the govTech infrastructure needed for land registries. Traditional infrastructure can be expensive to maintain and in many regions the paperwork is still just that; paper.

A move from paper copies to a digital format would already be a good enough solution, which I think is your point, but here there is an opportunistic use of a single tool to avoid the costs of a couple of servers with remote backups times the number of locations needed for full coverage.

edit: I was responding to the wrong thread but I'll leave it anyway. This refers to the use of blockchain for land registry in Ghana.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#137

Post by Rebelgecko »

v64 wrote: post #119
bigdubs wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure the parallels are as strong as you're making them out to be; there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed. There will probably be a better end state for distributed trust, but we're legitimately not there yet.

> there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed What is the energy consumption of all the bank offices and computer systems in the world? Even without this comparison, I think the amount of energy required is not a flaw in itself, but rather an aspect of the technology we should seek to improve upon (for instance, proof of stake is an attempt at this). I don't think it's su…

Bitcoin mining (not even counting other cryptocurrencies) uses more electricity than most countries in the world. If you look at transactions per Watt, I would guess that the banks are doing better by multiple orders of magnitude

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#138

Post by chrisco255 »

v64 wrote: post #123
gist wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying that it's more rational to simply think 'anything is possible' even though the available evidence and information seems to point to the fact that that isn't the case? After all you don't go around thinking that a country like (insert small insignificant country) is ever going to pass the United States in ability but sure 'anything is possible'. It could happen after all the US surpased Europe in man…

> So are you saying that it's more rational to simply think 'anything is possible' even though the available evidence and information seems to point to the fact that that isn't the case? At what point do you believe the internet had made its case as a technology? 1975? 1985? 1995? 2005? In each of those years, you had naysayers saying the internet would never become something people use in their daily lives, but here…

I have to agree with your overall sentiment. After the Bitcoin boom in 2013 (and its subsequent bust in early 2014), I kind of stopped paying attention to the crypto space for a while. Little did I know that Buterin & Co. were busy building and launching Ethereum, which has profound implications of its own, some entirely orthogonal to Bitcoin's implications. We are definitely in Geocities days.

I sold cell phones to senior citizens in the early 00's, and that was a HARD SELL. Most of the ones that did buy, bought the minimal $20 / month, 60 minutes + nights & weekends plan because they thought "they would only use cell phones for emergencies". Don't even get me started on mobile web WEP browsers. It was unusable crap 15 years ago. And I would have to convince people that surely they would be checking their stocks, the news, etc. on their cell phones. The scoffs I got were unbelievable today.

Now, 15 years later, everyone and their grandmother has an iPhone / Android.

Where are all the hackers and dreamers on HN? I thought that's what this site was for. Irrational optimism is the fuel that feeds technological revolutions. So much negativity with crypto.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#139

Post by v64 »

starlust2 wrote: post #135
v64 wrote: post #108

It's strange to me how there are many among the Hacker News crowd who can read an article like this and have doubts about its thesis. You lived through the 80s and 90s right? I can't count how many times in my life I was told no one would ever need a computer in their house, we've gotten along for decades just fine without them. No one will ever buy books online, that's ridiculous, you can go to the store and have on…

The point isn't that existing technology can already do what new technology provides. There has to be some increased value from using the new technology. E-commerce took over because it's more convenient and offers a wider selection of products. The end user doesn't care what database you're using. They care about utility.

> The end user doesn't care what database you're using. They care about utility.

I agree, but this isn't just about the end user. Many businesses incur costs to third parties that could be reduced or eliminated by trustless systems whose validity of data can be verified mathematically without an auditing team. The blockchain of today can't do that yet, just like the internet of 1985 didn't allow you to buy books, but I think we're headed in the direction of progress.

Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

#140

Post by v64 »

api wrote: post #134
v64 wrote: post #108

It's strange to me how there are many among the Hacker News crowd who can read an article like this and have doubts about its thesis. You lived through the 80s and 90s right? I can't count how many times in my life I was told no one would ever need a computer in their house, we've gotten along for decades just fine without them. No one will ever buy books online, that's ridiculous, you can go to the store and have on…

I lived through the 80s and early 90s. The difference is that I could do stuff with the early Internet. I could do stuff with BBSes. I could do stuff with early PCs. These things were almost immediately very useful to a lot of people. The reason I've become a bear on cryptocurrency is that I don't see the utility to justify the monstrous amounts of money pouring into it. It's almost 10 years old and today it's actual…

> I lived through the 80s and early 90s. The difference is that I could do stuff with the early Internet. I could do stuff with BBSes. I could do stuff with early PCs. These things were almost immediately very useful to a lot of people.

You must have hung out with a nerdier crowd than I did :) I was the only person I knew who owned a personal computer until well into the late 90s.

> The reason I've become a bear on cryptocurrency is that I don't see the utility to justify the monstrous amounts of money pouring into it. It's almost 10 years old and today it's actually less useful than it was a few years ago due to runaway fee growth.

So I think cryptocurrency here is getting conflated with the underlying technology, just like Geocities came to be the poster child of the early web. I agree with you that the current systems have much work to be done, and that many of them will be abandoned before they're fixed. But cryptocurrency is not the blockchain anymore than gopher was the internet. Services like Bitcoin built on blockchains may cease to exist in their current state, but just like we still have TCP/IP, I think the blockchain piece will be essential moving forward.

> That and I see a ton of scams. Almost all cryptocurrency projects seem like either scams or delusional vaporware projects akin to badly thought out Kickstarters or over-funded boil-the-ocean startups. These things rarely accomplish anything other than to blow a lot of money.

I get a lot of scams via postal mail, telephone, and the email, but that doesn't negate the purpose of the technology :)

> Want to change my mind? Show me the cryptocurrency killer app that people are climbing over each other to use.

I think you misunderstand my viewpoint. I don't think the technologies of today are the solutions anymore than Geocities was the be-all-end-all of the web. My comments are more directed toward those who believe this technology leads to a dead end and that reducing the reliance on third party trust is not a problem that needs to be worked on.

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