"...the marriage of excitement and ignorance..."
I guess I'm a polygamist.The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
321–330 of 340 posts
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#322Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies or starting a blockchain-based company. And plenty of people are excited about a grand vision for how it might transform society one day, or how it might solve problems they think other people might have.…
You are obviously living in a privileged, rich society. In many poor countries were inflation is insanely rampant, and banks are not trusted, everyone wants a way to store wealth without the government,bank,or person robbing them blind.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remember TCP/IP was developed in the 1970s so it took almost twenty years before HTTP came out, and another 5-10 years before people really started using it. There were significant barriers to entry – network connections were slow and enormously expensive into the 90s – but TCP already had significant value by the 80s (see e.g. FTP). Within a few years of the web arriving in the 90s, there were businesses using it…
IMO one of the best use cases is DNS records. Using a p2p blockchain means I don't need to make any external network calls to lookup addresses. It also means, that if I trust my local client hasn't been compromised then all address mappings are valid, as they required hard cryptography to set via a signed transaction that was accepted by the network.
DNS records change rather frequently. Wouldn’t this grow rather quickly, creating the same problems which lead to replacing /etc/hosts with the decentralized DNS model?
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is your salary in cryptocurrency, or is it really in USD/Euros/whatever, converted to cryptocurrency at the current exchange rate on payday?
For now it's tied to EUR amount and converted on the average exchange rate for the last 5 days before payday.
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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#325I don’t buy the hype of the blockchain as much as the average hacker news user, but this article lacks anything but anecdotal data. A bubble needs two things: 1. Misallocated hype 2. Real money As far as I can tell no one has done much digging on how much money blockchain ventures represent in terms of real world investment dollars. Can you call something a bubble if there isn’t much “real” money in it? If all the bl…
I mean, it's a billion-dollar industry, by any estimates I've seen at least. I don't know about you but I would classify that as "a lot" of money. this estimate for example says $1.3B was invested in 2018 alone! https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/with-at-least-1-3-billion-... this one is on a similar track: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43526618 plenty of cash to be lost!
> this estimate for example says $1.3B was invested in 2018 alone!
That's like 1/50th of an Enron (which had a 70 Billion dollar value and went to 0). Enron in itself wasn't a bubble.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are wrong, I did a lot of research, but you obviously did so much more that it would be easy for you to answer my questions. Hopefully, one day your busy schedule would allow you to do it. It is a pity for now it only allowed to post a content-free comment.
should get you thinking why there is so much hate for blockchain and at least be a contrarian here. What can I tell you? Read books about Bitcoin and Ethereum? The "how blockchain will help people" is a huge subject. Did you spend hours/days/months thinking about how this can affect governments, global title deeds, transparent balance sheets, supply chains and well...voting too? If you think you ever in your life had…
> should get you thinking why there is so much hate for blockchain
Where "there"? I haven't seen hate anywhere.
> Read books about Bitcoin and Ethereum?
I know what Bitcoin and Ethereum are. What I don't know is what they are useful for in the real world (except, obviously, speculating on Bitcoin or ETH prices. Well, I guess buying/selling drugs with them online must be pretty good too, and malware authors love it... what else?). If you know books that cover that, you are welcome to suggest.
> The "how blockchain will help people" is a huge subject
I do not ask you to cover 100%. I ask you (and anybody else, of course) to start with 0.01% and then we can proceed from there. But you're not giving me even 0.01% - you tell me "read books, it's huge!".
> Did you spend hours/days/months thinking about how this can affect governments,
I must admit I didn't spend months thinking about it. But people who claim they know answers to these questions surely did, didn't they? So where are those answers? I want to hear them. I want to see a good substantial proof why blockchain voting is better than plain old voting and how it is sustainable on the scale of a country like the US, in the long run.
> If you think you ever in your life had to deal with corruption or simple mistakes then you can think of a blockchain solution.
This is a point I know somebody tries to sell me a nice vial of snake oil. Corruption is human nature, and if you think some cleverly arranged crypto is going to fix it, you have some surprises coming your way. But ok, maybe I'm just stupid and cynical and you're smart - tell me how blockchain fixes corruption. Don't give 1000 examples - give three best ones you can think of.
> Asking about "how the internet will affect our lives" in 1995 would be the same
If you asked me how internet will affect our lives in 1995, I could talk to you for days with specific examples. Surely, some of them would be wrong, and some of what happened I couldn't predict in my wildest dreams. But by then it was clear there's a big thing coming, even if not as big as "old economy does not apply anymore". I don't see why a series of hashes plus a good marketing strategy allowing to sell those hashes to people who hope to resell them to the next greater fool equals big thing. Maybe it's because I'm stupid - in this case, it'd be easy to show me some conclusive examples. So far I've see a lot of vague handwaving and very little specifics. Which makes me even more suspicious.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't wish for myself or others to escape the bounds of society and government (ok, maybe some of the bounds but that's another talk). Indeed my premise is that individuals, society and government must all be bound to each other in order to have a desirable society, and the sin qua non of this is respect for the truth. As for government, I happen to prefer democracies, and they are especially beholden to truth. Whe…
Nothing of what you are saying is something blockchain technology addresses.
Hi, excuse the delay.
I was saying that blockchain might help address fraud, against untruth or deceit. For example I believe that yes, the American Indians would have been better off with unalterable titles to their lands. Would it have changed history? I don't know, but in other situations it might, and for that I point you to Hernando de Soto Polar's site. https://desoto.com
I was also saying that the claim that "nobody cares about the 'truth'" (and so blockchain is not useful) is misplaced, and that in this case there's no good point for using the word truth in quotes as if it were something illusory. There are times when quotes around the word truth make sense, like in philosophy, but this is not one of them. An exception is if you are talking about the potential to use the blockchain to make lies permanent.
And third I was responding to your statement that people who support the blockchain are often hoping to be freed "from the constraints of governments and society", and that my comment was a good example of this. Your comment might be correct about others, but I'm not a libertarian or anarchist. Rather, I'm a bit worried that technology like machine learning and even just social media have the potential to weaken and even destroy our democracies by using lies (doctored video, for example) as political tools.
But you don't even need machine learning and social media. In Russia, lies have undermined what began as democracy under Yeltsin to such a degree that it is now for all intents and purposes a dictatorship. In Russia the playbook is basically as follows: an event occurs that makes the Kremlin look bad. The Kremlin uses its media outlets to make up alternative truths (lies), several versions, some more implausible than others. The person seeking the truth, what actually happened, is now looking into a hall of mirrors. Not being able to see anything clearly and having to spend their energy disproving several false versions, no meaningful discourse happens. The event, in this way, has been neutralized by lies. If a blockchain can help with this kind of problem, then I'm interested.
Edit: Btw, I'm not like a cryptocurrency enthusiast, don't program Ethereum contracts, own no BTC or any other crypto, and believe and have argued here at HN that BTC is a bad currency because of volatility with makes credit and debt impossible. Additionally BTC is used for crime and as a way to cash in on fraud, malware, threats and so on, and I'm not interested in any of that.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing of what you are saying is something blockchain technology addresses.
Hi, excuse the delay. I was saying that blockchain might help address fraud, against untruth or deceit. For example I believe that yes, the American Indians would have been better off with unalterable titles to their lands. Would it have changed history? I don't know, but in other situations it might, and for that I point you to Hernando de Soto Polar's site. https://desoto.com I was also saying that the claim that "…
So specifically on addressing fraud, this only helps the merchant. You could make an argument that decreased fraud decreases costs but human greed overtakes that assumption. So then what’s left from the consumer side? What if the merchant send you a bad product? They have no incentive to make it right. You could argue that eventually it will put them out of business from bad reviews however this doesn’t always work in practice and you’re still out of your money for the original bad product. With a centralized system we can just reach in their account and take it, refunding you your money and costing the merchant more in the long run, further making them want to do legit business. This permanent contract you speak of is a double edged sword that cuts the consumer more than the merchant.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
With bitcoin, what would stop governments from passing laws making certain addresses tainted resulting in people that send coins to or receive coins from them to be audited and having to explain why and how they linked to certain causes. What makes you think if bitcoins (or any *coin) becomes the main currency in a country or region, we would not have laws were all addresses would need to be linked to people (or comp…
Well, for one, the government would actually have to make such a law, and then suffer the political consequences. I would much prefer that the government is forced to actually follow the legal process, instead of what happened in 2010 with WikiLeaks, where the government made vague illegal threats against the banks, in order to censor transactions between people who broke zero laws. It forces everything out in the op…
Read up on money services business and the various regulations they must follow, including the anti money laundering regulations. You may find yourself surprised at what laws exist.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#330Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies or starting a blockchain-based company. And plenty of people are excited about a grand vision for how it might transform society one day, or how it might solve problems they think other people might have.…
Hmm... I don't know. The more I think about blockchain, the more I get excited about quicker app creation because the payments channel is less hard. Though, I'm idealizing blockchain here, I haven't looked into the technicalities of how to integrate bitcoin, for example, into an app. But ideally this ease of use for developers would be a thing.
I'd get excited about that.