Introducing A16Z Crypto

If you have specific concerns you are welcome to email them to hn@ycombinator.com, so we can look into it. But please don't break the site guidelines, which ask you not to post insinuations of astroturfing like this. (Such insinuations poison internet forums and most often turn out to be groundless. I've posted a ton about this if anyone wants to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> For example, a CRM-focused blockchain might place the business logic for managing customer relations and sales on-chain and enable competing clients to build on the protocol.

We can already do this with traditional APIs. The only benefit of blockchain code, or smart contracts, is trust. It assures users that the code they think is running is in fact running.

For most existing apps, including CRM, users can trust their provider because incentives are aligned.

Or crypto is just another hype that will burst like the dot com bubble. However, I have to say, compared with the companies of the dot com bubble the blockchain space has very little to offer. The other day I saw an ad for an IoT ML ICO.

> This trust emerges from the mathematical and game-theoretic properties of the system, without depending on the trustworthiness of individual network participants.

I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of game theory as the base of trust. Mathematics as used in cryptography is a pretty solid base, but game theory feels like something entirely different.

How do I know that there isn't a participant in the game that is willing to just smash the board? The existing blockchains like Bitcoin do have a certain amount of centralization, so this is not about a very large number of individuals where you could find some comfort in statistics. What if a state actor decides to smash the board, they could probably exert enough pressure on the large players?

What if there are more subtle ways to extract short term gains that game theory didn't anticipate?

The skepticism of blockchain technology is borne out of a lack of specific problems it solves. Which happens to also be the bedrock of the conventional startup wisdom -- value derived from solving a problem or exploiting an opportunity.

So much of the blockchain hype is focused purely on the technology and the valuation of the tokens / coins. Not the problem it solves.

It's distributed trust. That's the problem it solves. It's incredibly cool technology. That solves a specific problem.

The analogy to the early internet is not a good one. The internet solved a huge number of problems -- of distribution, of speed to deliver value to the customer, of freedom of information, of transparency, of fidelity of communication, and more. That's why it's changed society.

I would love to know which societal problems can be reduced to a distributed trust problem. That would convince me that I'm wrong about blockchain technology.