It’s not still the early days of blockchain • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by magicjosh » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:19 AM UTC

obstacle1 wrote: post #118

Dwolb wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more precision in the scale and performance targets you’re seeking prior to discussing blockchain analogs. It’s tough to respond when “serious financial application” or “revolutionary technology backing all finance” aren’t well-defined.

Sorry, thought my last paragraph covered that. Can any blockchain-backed tech handle the number of transactions per second that current major credit card/payment networks do? One benchmark is 1,700 tps for VISA. https://phemex.com/blogs/what-is-transactions-per-second-tps If not, why not? Especially after 10+ years of development and intense VC funding (as is the parent article's point).

1,700 tps for VISA is a good benchmark. I recall VISA's technical capability is 10x or 100x that number,

Ethereum 1.0 can handle 30 transactions per second.

Part of the development dubbed "Ethereum 2.0" is focused on scaling the number of transactions via sharding. Each shard will be able to handle 2,400 tps. As more shards are deployed up to 64, Ethereum 2.0 will reach 160,000 tps.

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

#162

Post by neiman » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:19 AM UTC

hubraumhugo wrote: post #33

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…

It seems you are looking for a product blockchain enables you, but there are activities the blockchain enables which are not products, and are very difficult up to impossible without.

One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible. You get a bunch of people all over the world, many of them are identified only by Internet handles. There's no investment to handle all the legalities of establishing a business, and anyway there's no legal framework for international businesses with psuedo-anonymous people.

But with blockchain we've been using DAOs and online voting tools etc. since 3-4 years now, and it works great. It handles the governance and the finance in a way the traditional system cannot offer.

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

#163

Post by bb88 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:20 AM UTC

larsiusprime wrote: post #38

Kelsey Hightower said it best: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/14778718907230781... "If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize."

Not if you have a heavy investment and depend upon other investors (or greater fools) to buy your shares.

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

#164

Post by smokey_circles » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:21 AM UTC

I just can't take the power and pollution argument seriously. There's just nothing salient about it. I might have otherwise agreed with the author on their other points but if you can't see the issue with this argument it disqualifies your opinion (which js just my opinion).

"Bitcoin requires lots of electricity". No, nowhere near the scale human activity sans blockchain does and to provide it we burn coal. Like we've done for a looong time before bitcoin. Removing bitcoin doesn't remove the coal we burn. Genuinely daft argument.

And that's before we get into looking at the numbers from areas like the mining sector. Aluminum smelting isn't cheap from a power perspective, yet I don't see this argument leveled against coke.

The answer is renewable energy. Obviously.

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

#165

Post by laurent92 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:21 AM UTC

rsanheim wrote: post #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?

When I was a young engineer in 2006, the marketing about Web 2.0 was in every tender for IT projects, so much that my boss created the “Web 4.3 dev community” in my city to point out the ridiculousness of it.

Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.

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

#166

Post by eco » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:21 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #97

deanCommie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’d say most of the coins today are proof of stake

Most of the "proof of stake" coins are some form of delegated proof of stake, usually with an opaque and shady set of highly compensated validators with hidden connections to the project. Effectively proof of authority masquerading as proof of stake. This lets them have big TPS bragging rights while maintaining the appearance that they are running a decentralized blockchain rather than a centralized database with extra steps.

Real, decentralized proof of stake is a hard problem that has only just started to become reality.

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

#167

Post by galaxyLogic » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:22 AM UTC

ryandamm wrote: post #112

systemvoltage wrote: post #41

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…

The primary difference is that basic research is conducted with everyone's money -- mostly via grants, and a lot of it in the US underwritten by the federal government -- for everyone's benefit. Even the venture capital industry is largely averse to basic research; they want more Ubers, or companies that can bring University tech to market. Blockchain? The money flowing in is substantially from retail investors. And…

If Bitcoin is like gold, then there's really not much money going into it, into how to make better bit-coin, how to make better gold. All the money just goes into buying the bit-gold itself, or perhaps buying more mining equipment. But Bitcoin is not a replenishable resource so mining it will have diminishing returns, and like with every mining industry the nature is at risk.

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

#168

Post by Dwolb » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:24 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #152

baby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of leverages, margin calls, derivatives, put options, etc.? DeFi is pretty much the same level of complexity but implemented on top of cryptocurrencies.

This https://youtu.be/8CAafjodkyE?t=104 is a recent thing I found mind blowing; 2020 iPhone can do on-device image processing and object recognition and speak a description of what the camera sees. Just quietly a builtin feature. 2010 iPhone, I was mind-blown by the Word Lens app which could do OCR on text in the camera feed, translate the words into another language, and overlay the results on the image in near-real…

Personally the reason it blows my mind is because it’s now permissionless to craft a unique structured product or derivatives protocol, deploy it globally, and anyone on the planet can participate in that market.

It’s fully customizable and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

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

#169

Post by rvz » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:24 AM UTC

gcampos wrote: post #24

Following the same logic, the late 90s were not the web “early days” because the web started in the early 90s

Only due to the internet existing in the first place, which by the author's own logic, 'that wasn't new either'.

The World Wide Web was the 'killer app' for the internet (which that has been there for years before) in the early 1990s; perhaps even fuelling the dot-com boom. A decade after that, the whole market crashed.

The critics were celebrating, did the utility of the web stop? Nope. Only the scams and useless, overvalued websites died.

The same thing applies to just blockchain technology even beyond 'Bitcoin or Ethereum' where when the concept of that is not new. The regulations will come and eliminate the coins that do not comply and the useless cryptocurrencies or meme coins will be extinguished - probably will cause another crash again and eliminating more useless unregulated cryptocurrencies.

That is even before the regulatory framework has been even properly implemented. A few of these cryptocurrencies will survive all of that.

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

#170

Post by TekMol » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:24 AM UTC

joosters wrote: post #101

TekMol wrote: post #45

Depends on how you define early. When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public. The usability of crypto solutions also reminds me of 1997. It is still so bad that it makes them almost unusable. Reminds me of acoustic couplers where you had to manually plug your cable bound phone in…

TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public. Is that really your belief about how to define when a technology became useful ?

The IPO of a company makes a nice reference point for several reasons:

- It is a specific point in time which is easy to look up

- To go public, a company needs a big amount of traction already

- A lot of data is published for the IPO

"Useful" is in the eye of the beholder. But how much the company is "used" can be approximated by its revenue.

Yahoo had $1.4 million in yearly revenue the year before it IPOed. Coinbase had $1.14 billion. So about a thousand times more. Even when adjusted for inflation, this should be one or two orders of magnitude more.