Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing A16Z Crypto

a16zcrypto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 312 posts

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#161

Post by Felz »

dperfect wrote: post #113
Felz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is inescapable. You've simply shifted yours from reputational trust to trust in the decentralization of the computing frontier of a specific hashing problem. But while reputational trust is cheap and a well-solved problem, the trust you're using _requires_ large amounts of computing value to be burned continuously, in the hopes that electricity and computation are decentralized enough in the real world that mul…

I agree mostly with the point you're making, but there's an important distinction between "reputational trust" and an assumption that game theory and market forces will continue to provide the necessary levels of decentralization for Bitcoin to operate as intended. I'm not sure it's fair to put those two ideas on equal ground as if all forms of trust should be embraced because it's "inescapable". Reputational trust (…

In other words, you think that the blockchain setup is more trust _worthy_ than political accountability. That's fine (if not my cup of tea). My point was that you're still extending the same amount of trust; i.e. you have to accept things without direct proof in an environment that may attempt to manipulate you for its own benefit.

It's worth considering what these things are. What you essentially want is:

- There should be a limited total amount of money

- Iff people want to give money to somebody else in exchange for something, they should be able to do so in a timely fashion

- People should only be able to give away their money

- There should be no possibility of double-spending.

- People should generally be willing to accept money for things you want at a stable rate.

Given that you cannot personally examine every transaction ever made and ask people if they _really_ wanted to do that at the time, and that you also cannot control what people want, where does the abstraction you use start leaking?

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#162

Post by madeofpalk »

elyobo wrote: post #96
madeofpalk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, what problems are being solved? Real estate, oil and gas exploration/drilling/royalties are all things that have existed without problem for many decades. Saying "real estate, but with blockchain" doesn't actually say what problem you're solving.

I think I'd have to argue that real estate has existed for much, much longer than a few decades :D I'm a pretty big sceptic on all of this crypto BS, but the ownership of real estate assets seems like a pretty archaic system of not easily inspected pieces of paper. Having a public, provable system for recording this information (and possibly other related info, e.g. liens) seems like it would be of some use. The syst…

THIS PROBLEM DOES NOT NEED BLOCKCHAIN TO BE SOLVED

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#163

Post by s73v3r_ »

chrisco255 wrote: post #14

I totally agree with A16Z here. Blockchain skepticism is not hard to find on HN and beyond. First, the ecosystem is vast and evolving quickly. If you've "tuned out" by dismissing blockchain, then don't be surprised when your industry gets disrupted in 5-10 years. I think we'll begin to see business logic open-sourced on the blockchain. For example, existing SaaS model incentivizes closed-source, centrally managed rep…

" 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."

If I'm making a CRM, why do I want this?

"A CRM built in this way might enable multiple "thin clients" to build and an ecosystem to develop around it."

Ok. How do I, the CRM maker, make money off this?

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#164

Post by nikolay »

I cannot think of a single a mass-market problem, which a blockchain tries to solve, which can't be implemented more elegantly and efficiently WITHOUT a blockchain!

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#165

Post by tomc1985 »

dd36 wrote: post #155
tomc1985 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can fix distributed trust you could probably reshape global trade however you see fit. Lack of systemic trust creates mountains of complexity to deal with -- look at how many parties have to be involved just to have a product manufactured in another country

Are you sure that’s a problem? Doesn’t seem to be. Moreover blockchain doesn’t solve it.

Uh.... oh it is. It's an old one. There are at least a dozen parties and counterparties involved in most trade because of currency, political, legal, and delivery risks.

You, your trade partner, your bank, your bank's correspondence bank, their bank, their bank's correspondence bank, customs at ports of entry, shipping agents, and others, and they're all taking their time and their cut to manage your risks for you.

I don't think blockchain solves anything remotely close to all problems but I think it could have its uses in providing services for escrow and a gigantic, tamper-proof distributed log.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#166

Post by alonmower »

unabridged wrote: post #79
hacknat wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people on hacker news, myself included, aren’t skeptical of the technologicy of block chain. I grant Block Chain’s central technical premise, no other medium/platform/whatever can create decentralized trust wherein all you have to trust is the network. Where I think most of the criticism comes from is that many of us don’t see why this decentralization is actually all that valuable. Currency seems like th…

Decentralized trust is a way to "open source" a customer/merchant database. If centralized trust is required the company controlling it can charge people to use it, for example think of listing fees as ebay charging people for access to their seller ratings. Or uber charging people to access its driver ratings. With decentralized trust we could create a decentralized uber, where drivers get 99% of the money and 1% go…

I would question the viability of a decentralized uber when non-idealistic consumers need to use it. In a decentralized uber where do consumers go if they feel that they were charged in error, or their driver took too long of a route, or... It's not enough for a lot of people to just give someone bad feedback, they want to know that there's a (hopefully) reasonable human on the other end that they can reach out to in case things go sideways.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#167

Post by foota »

cornholio wrote: post #106
TrevorAustin wrote: post #70

Speaking as a longtime skeptic, A16Z has actually produced the single clearest answer I've seen to that question: blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate. Pure utility tokens can be like call options on the eventual value of the network if it gets off the ground. It's a novel way of solvi…

Except the early adopters don't need to actually participate in the network, just acquire and hoard tokens. There's almost no connection between the profits and the actual advocacy, resources and risks required for the network to succed. So the incentive structure is quite different from, say, the stock market or even a kickstarter. It's more like a tradeable Ponzi with strong incentives to overpromise and overhype i…

You could find a way to associate someone's activity with positive signals, like give them credits for generating positive value in the network.

Detecting positive value is difficult though.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#168

Post by leppr »

sarcasmic wrote: post #72

There's some serious kool-aid going on here, which is unfortunate, because they at least wrote that they're focused on non-speculative use cases. Contrary to the announcement's characterization, crypto-powered platforms don't inherently fulfill the promise of equitable decentralization and immutability. Ethereum has already demonstrated that one is wise to worry if the rules of the game will change later on. And bloc…

Your conclusion is fair, but at the same time, a certain number of these "minor variations" will one day be assembled into something just as revolutionary as Bitcoin and Ethereum were.

If I had to guess I'd say some technology made out of the combination of blockchain, ZK-snarks, and an homomorphic computation enabler such as SGX enclaves, will probably be very disruptive to many many fields.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#169

Post by s73v3r_ »

chrisco255 wrote: post #34
vorpalhex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Why.. would you need to put those on a blockchain across a bunch of disparate consumers? In theory isn't my business logic fairly, you know, secret sauce? Blockchain is vaguely "A spreadsheet everyone gets a copy of." There are some cases where that can be…

Traditionally, yes. But in the same way that Windows OS logic is Microsoft's secret sauce and yet thriving companies build products and services around Linux...so too will business-logic be open sourced and compete directly with existing SaaS players. Just because you use blockchain to power the engine and business logic of your application, does not mean you also have to use it to store data. Data can be stored anyw…

Wait, if the blockchain isn't storing the customer data, then what's the point of it? Exactly what is it doing?

"They can be private sidechains that occasionally interact with the main chain."

Again, why do I want any of my business logic interacting with the public at any time?

"Why would you? Because it allows communities of smaller open-source contributors to effectively compete with big, established players."

But as the maker of the CRM, why do I want this?

"Also, through crypto, you could incentivize domain experts to contribute to the business logic rules."

How? Literally how? Like, those two things are completely orthogonal.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#170

Post by dd36 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #165
dd36 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that’s a problem? Doesn’t seem to be. Moreover blockchain doesn’t solve it.

Uh.... oh it is. It's an old one. There are at least a dozen parties and counterparties involved in most trade because of currency, political, legal, and delivery risks. You, your trade partner, your bank, your bank's correspondence bank, their bank, their bank's correspondence bank, customs at ports of entry, shipping agents, and others, and they're all taking their time and their cut to manage your risks for you. I…

How does it tamper-proof better than existing solutions?
Post reply on HN