Decentralized Woo Hoo • Hacker News Board

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#141

Post by Destiner » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #44

21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re supposed to believe the “good ones” ar…

Let me name a few. Note there's a bias toward Ethereum-based projects, since I'm more well versed with those.

Projects like Uniswap, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc provide financial services similar to traditional exchanging and lending.

There are also things like ENS and TheGraph that provide more infrastructural benefit (i.e. name server and data indexing layer).

And many, many more in the space of games & collectibles.

Many of these had been used for years. Some of that usage is speculative, sure, but not all of it.

It's already there. It's just way too early to do 1:1 comparisons with established non-crypto projects.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#142

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

shoto_io wrote: post #118

cslarson wrote: post #103

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change…

I've been a huge skeptic myself until a friend almost forced me into going down the rabbit hole. I have since been wondering why we tech people are so unbelievably critical. "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases. I have no answer. Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? "What's the val…

Part of the problem is that much of the cryptocurrency hype, some might even say most, actually is just a bunch of scams and pump and dump nonsense. The people who are in it for a get rich quick scheme are the enemy, and most of the people who expect to get rich quick will end up on the bottom of the pyramid.

But that isn't to say that there's nothing there. It's like saying that the internet is worthless and should be destroyed because it has pornography and copyright infringement. It's not that it doesn't; it's that there are still things it's good for even though it does.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#143

Post by tenuousemphasis » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

starclerk wrote: post #119

martin_drapeau wrote: post #97

History replays itself every new invention or enlightment humans have. Over the past centuries many have been persecuted for studying chemistry, astronomy, physics and even biology. Think of Galileo who was persecuted for advaing the theory that the Earth was round. Crypto embodies a new paradigm whereby rules can be programmed and enforced by computers. Instead of relying on centralized human authorities to measure,…

> but only if we all agree. "we all" in this case refers to the top single-digit percent of holders [1]. It's no small feat to get consensus there! But it's also not very decentralized/democratized and sounds a lot like our existing financial (or societal) systems. [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/analysis-shows-bitcoin-whales-are-s... -- which optimistically states that only 71% of BTC is held by the top 2%.

That is false. If some small subset of Bitcoin users wanted to or were coerced to change the rules, all they would do is fork themselves into their own copy of the Blockchain. Everyone else would continue using it as they had been previously.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#144

Post by jw1224 » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

billjings wrote: post #132

cslarson wrote: post #103

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change…

> This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change to the status quo, or they choose not to educate themselves (try it) - neither is really valid response if you want to…

Fiat currency, in essence, is equally valueless. It only has inherent value because enough people agree that it does.

Bitcoin is no different (and in fact has several advantages over fiat, giving it further value).

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#145

Post by Kalium » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

newacc9 wrote: post #131

Kalium wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. That's great! Could you provide some details on what these projects might be and how they aim to reshape political and economic life to be more open, formal, and participatory?…

One idea is that whatever you build on top of a platform like Ethereum will persist; if you build on top of Facebook or IOS your app can be removed without recourse. Bankless | 90 - 5 Mental Models for Web3 | Chris Dixon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jezH_7qEk50

The idea of non-deletion seems to keep coming up again and again in technology. From Usenet spam to abusive Facebook apps, I find myself wondering if being forever saddled with every abusive smart contract someone ever wrote is really a desirable trait in a long-term planetary-scale system.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#146

Post by cslarson » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

billjings wrote: post #132

cslarson wrote: post #103

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change…

> This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change to the status quo, or they choose not to educate themselves (try it) - neither is really valid response if you want to…

you are stuck on NFTs and Bitcoin then. many would agree that these don't hold fundamental value and worth debate. but does usdc on Ethereum have value - probably if you pay taxes. does a token representing a share of a house, or a leverage protocol that's making bank? the token that makes that all possible (ETH), does it now have value because it enables things of value? yes!

anyone can publish a website or a blog post but not all the websites or blog posts are valuable. this does not invalidate the web. the signal/noise simply changes because now it is permissionless and low cost.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#147

Post by Kalium » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

dqpb wrote: post #82

Kalium wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. That's great! Could you provide some details on what these projects might be and how they aim to reshape political and economic life to be more open, formal, and participatory?…

Look up Turing award winner Silvio Micali.

Can you point me to something more specific? It looks like he was part of some major cryptographic advances before sailing off into snowballscheme land.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#148

Post by throwawaygh » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #100

uncomputation wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually a rare breed excited about the potential about cryptocurrency here on HN. That said, when I go through your example, I don’t see much difference from the current system despite the illusion that it’s different. > appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract So, like sales tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. Or income tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. > every…

"So, like sales tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. Or income tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for." Laws are not mechanisms, proof of transaction, records etc.. 'Smart Contracts' as something unassailable in courts are ridiculous obviously. But 'smart contracts' that facilitate micro-transactions, every day purchases, and flow through the system without human interaction seem like a good idea. Imag…

> Imagine when you buy that thing on your Business Visa, and the 'smart contract' is signed, sent to head office, sent to your accounting software, balanced, money in your bank account immediately etc.. All with a series of signed elements.

This already happens at every company I've ever worked for, modulo the "in your bank account immediately" part. But that's down to how cash flow works, which is fundamental to most businesses/industries and can't be solved by anything other than time travel or teleportation. No amount of crypto is going to change the fact that the restaurant needs to sell a completed before it can pay the cook for their prep work. Even if bank transactions were immediate, most people would have to wait until their next paycheck to get reimbursements.

The underlying technology is a 90s relational database, some html/javascript/php, a bunch of java, and probably some cobol somewhere.

> And maybe importantly: to skip VISA and classical banks while we're at it.

As much as I hate the privacy invasion of cc companies and banks knowing everything I buy, the idea of my entire financial life being published on a public chain is waaay more creepy. Like most normal humans, I am mildly creeped out by big companies knowing things about me but would be seriously angry if my manager, pastor, or mother-in-law knew those same things.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#149

Post by ddeyar » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

delaaxe wrote: post #88

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re supposed to believe the “good ones” ar…

The projects reshaping the economy are named. The good ones are Ethereum and L2s. Their goal is to become planetary infrastructure for the global economy. There's such an abundance of VC money that funding isn't scarce. Developer talent is however.

Tezos will be a big competitor. Its self amending mechanism allows developers to inject proposals on which the bakers are invited to vote on. Every ~3 months improvements are made. Its language allows formal verification. But the most important of all it upgrades itself without forks. It is liquid PoS since the beginning. Transactions or contract calls cost below 1 cent, due to steady implemented gas fee optimizations. This month 30M contract calls will be reached whereof almost all were done this year. More and more serious businesses are joining. https://tezos.com/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/15/entrepreneur-first-launche...

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#150

Post by foobarbecue » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

lysecret wrote: post #30

foobarbecue wrote: post #12

The argument that "observer" as used in physics is misunderstood by laypeople makes sense. He then argues the same is happening with the word "decentralized" which makes no sense because laypeople don't know that word. I guess he's arguing that people see "decentralized" and read "democratized," but he fails to make that argument.

He makes more an analogy of quantum woo and decentralization woo, and i kind of agree with that. Honestly, this idea that you can pinpoint 1 similarity in a very humanly important thing and a technincal complicated, precise and solvable problem (like the consciousness and quantum or like social issues and decentralization (as he writes here) also, human intelligence and AI comes to mind) and then blow that similarity…

Yes, I certainly agree that there's woo going on in both, and enthusiastic misunderstanding of technical things is a powerful and problematic phenomenon.

I watched a video by a surf instructor the other day who kept talking about the Bernoulli Principle breathlessly and it was clear that the instructor had no idea what it was (he was actually talking about cohesion / adhesion of water)... and I'm sure most of his audience just ate it up and will be repeating it.