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Decentralized Woo Hoo

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#151

Post by hhmc »

cslarson wrote: post #137
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…

in the last 24hrs i, - funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account. - joined a dao to bid on the last privately held copy of the US Constitution. - claimed an airdrop representing some control of a protocol i had used - borrowed stables against volatile collateral - repaid loans, shored up collateral (market went down) - many token swaps (stable stable, volatile stable) the hn crowd…

- funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account.

If they have no bank account, how do they convert ETH into something actually useful to them (presumably Turkish Lira)?

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#152

Post by throwaway6977 »

api wrote: post #124
shoto_io wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not everyone got the web, chat, or social networks, but loads of people did and people from all backgrounds. Things like Geocities, AIM, MySpace, early Facebook, early search engines, etc. had millions of users very rapidly. They penetrated beyond the tech-savvy early adopters within years. Cryptocurrency is more than 10 years old and hasn't seen anything like this. The vast majority of what I see in cryptocurrency i…

I strongly suggest doing a comparison of O(log n)-style adoption curves between Bitcoin, and say- cell phones, computer networking, or really any innovation that became ubiquitous and for which we have the data... I think you'd be surprised at the similarities.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#153

Post by tenuousemphasis »

pyentropy wrote: post #32
capableweb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company (Adjoint, Inc) is described as "digitises cash and settlement processes", something that cryptocurrencies aim to do as well. His company clearly doesn't use decentralization (since why would he make a post against it?), which cryptocurrencies do. How is that not a conflict of interest in this specific blogpost? Reading the post it seems like he has no stake in the outcome of what people think about crypto…

The repo/company you linked is about utilizing zero knowledge proofs which is literally the best we've got in regards to decentralization. If anything, that gives him credentials to talk about it?

All you'd have to do to look at their website and see that they offer a product to banks, it has nothing to do with decentralization. http://adjoint.io/

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#154

Post by twic »

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…

> Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive?

No, it would have been obviously cool. Those of us who were online already had IRC and newsgroups, and later instant messaging, home pages on GeoCities, etc. A service which rolled all of that up together and made it easy to use would have been rad as hell.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#155

Post by skybrian »

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…

It's not that there's no value, it's that the intrinsic value is unknown and can't be derived from investor speculation.

When investors get over-enthusiastic it usually ends when the fundamentals don't turn out the way they hoped. Nothing like that seems to be going on here. Prices seem to be essentially indeterminate and disconnected from non-financial use cases.

(When people do talk about use cases they are typically "inside the casino," essentially another game for investors to play.)

Casinos and gaming are big businesses so clearly there is some value. But normally there's a way to calculate the value of a gaming business that's independent of the quirks of the in-game economy. Not so here.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#156

Post by cableshaft »

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…

> I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named.

I don't know about politics, but there are definitely coins reshaping the economy. Hell, bitcoin by itself is reshaping the economy, being considered by many major institutions to officially be a new asset class now[1]. It doesn't mean a total replacement of the economy, if that's what you're thinking, but it's definitely reshaping it.

DeFi is already taking a nice chunk out of central banks' lunch. Celsius, USDC, BlockFi, etc, are able to credibly offer 6% or higher yield[2], whereas banks can only offer, at best 0.6%, nowhere close to beating inflation.

That's just two use cases, and if I had more time this morning I could go into more (didn't even touch on smart contracts at all). Wouldn't be surprised if you'll dismiss them out of hand as bad projects according to whatever internal criteria you have, and if so, I don't think you'll ever be able to convinced that anything a good project.

It just gets annoying to hear people dismiss the entire space all the time without spending more than a few minutes looking into it, and/or assuming that the space never evolved from 4-5 years ago, where you could safely make those claims.

[1]: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-officially-a-ne...

[2]: https://defirate.com/usdc/

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#157

Post by didericis »

api wrote: post #124
shoto_io wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not everyone got the web, chat, or social networks, but loads of people did and people from all backgrounds. Things like Geocities, AIM, MySpace, early Facebook, early search engines, etc. had millions of users very rapidly. They penetrated beyond the tech-savvy early adopters within years. Cryptocurrency is more than 10 years old and hasn't seen anything like this. The vast majority of what I see in cryptocurrency i…

There are huge regulatory and societal roadblocks for crypto to be used as envisioned not as present during those other cases of wide technological adoption.

For crypto to be valuable, merchants need to use it. Transactions need to be cheaper. A stable decentralized financial system needs to emerge.

The use case is a world without central banks and central currency manipulation.

People who don’t see the use case don’t understand the scope of what direct exchange of currency without central management entails.

There are arguments against that world and in favor of central currencies. The roadblocks are enormous, maybe insurmountable. And perhaps that world would be worse or lead to more authoritarian control rather than less. But I don’t think anyone who believes in the potential denies crypto will take time to have a lot of mainstream use simply because the main use case is so large.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#158

Post by kertoip_1 »

scyclow wrote: post #29

I think the best examples of Decentralized Woo Hoo is the phrase "ownership over your data". When most people hear this they think of facebook selling their data to third parties, using it for targeted advertising, etc. But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source. I have sole discretion to send you an NFT, but f…

> From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source

Unless you encrypt things you put on blockchain. Or use clever ways to hide information from others. There are cryptocurrencies like Monero.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#159

Post by cslarson »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #84
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…

Mark my words, Tech people believing they can solve political problems with technology will doom us all.

this tech will present many challenges. it could make many political problems much worse. but it is also unstoppable.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#160

Post by shawnz »

I think it's wrong to say that technology can't affect societal problems. Isn't all encryption technology a workaround for the societal problem of maintaining privacy? As another specific (but admittedly contentious) example, consider how Uber supplanted the taxi monopoly with a technological workaround.
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