Live data from Hacker News

It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

51–60 of 1001 posts

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#51

The article suggests that using the phrase "it's early days" is incorrect in blockchain technology because Bitcoin and Ethereum have been around for 13 and 6 years respectively. The author goes on to give examples like smartphones, Uber, and Tesla, all of which have had serious developments in terms of impact and usability in around the same time period. Then given that Bitcoin and Ethereum have not made similar prog…

It will always be "early days". Crypto requires a constant influx of marks who genuinely believe that they are early, as a ponzi scheme only ever benefits early entrants. No crypto enthusiast is ever going to tell that you are late.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#52
I'm increasingly seeing "web 3.0" as basically a two headed beast:

1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out

2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance

In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#53
post #48

IMO L1 (Ethereum, Solana, Fantom, etc.) development is closer to building out a communications or telco network. From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace. So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on p…

Good stuff, so you would suggest to the author that their examples are too narrow. Perhaps that smartphones, Uber, and Facebook all represented somewhat minor "time has come" type innovations, whereas you see Bitcoin as a development more like the internet itself, and that instead we are in the Arpanet days.

(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#54
How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment".

https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado...

This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applications of machine learning became industrial tools.

I'm personally in agreement with the author that crypto is probably a waste of energy and a way to scam people, but I can look at the 30,000 foot view and admit there might be some applications in the future as we climb the "slope of enlightenment".

My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#55

I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like stori…

This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this. Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probab…

Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#56
people have the tendency to quickly categorise things into "good" or "bad". as scammy as the crypto world is, there are a lot of potential uses for the blockchain. think fault-resistant backends, think open and transparent data flow and storage. "the early days" is subjective but in my opinion there are still so many things that'd run better if it were run on a blockchain instead of a traditional centralised server

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#57
post #54

How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment". https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado... This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applicatio…

A cryptographically signed diploma could be sufficient for this use case, no specific need to commit it to a ledger. Certainly the transferability property of NFTs is not desired in this case.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#58

> All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009. A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a dis…

Do we have proof of stake or do we have a lot of bitcoin folks avoiding criticism about the wasteful nature of most chains by claiming that proof of stake will fix all this.

How many coins are actually using proof of stake?

Why haven't the biggest including Ethereum done so?

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#59
post #54

How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment". https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado... This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applicatio…

Did Moore ever talk about the time length of such cycles? I imagine it differs from industry to industry. Is blockchain on a 10 year cycle like Uber/Facebook, or a longer cycle?

(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this. Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probab…

Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.

I don’t understand your point. So if University research makes it out to the world - but the world decides to create scams from it, is it University’s fault?

I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.

Post reply on HN