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

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

#351

Post by janjongboom » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

cmews wrote: post #252

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…

Helium network is an example of a successful blockchain project/application in my opinion. They created the biggest decentralized lorawan network in the world that is used by more internet of things companies everyday. Also they are trying the same thing for creating a decentralized 5G network. It’s still early days for them because I think they started in the end of 2020 or the start of 2021, but they have grown to…

The math for Helium just does not make any sense. Looking at forum threads every gateway makes about $50 in rewards / month. That's $294,000,000 per year in rewards paid out to gateway owners.

Sending one packet costs $.00001 (100K packets for $1 according to their website). So we need to see 29,400,000,000,000 packets yearly on the Helium network for data fees to cover the gateway rewards.

Looking at data from The Things Network - who operate another LoRaWAN network - from their conference last year they mention routing 600 packets/second using 30,000 gateways => that's 630,720 packets per gateway per year.

Assuming that Helium sees the same ratio of packets, and that every packet is unique, and that every packet is meant for the Helium network (and thus paid) this yields an expected (630,720 * 490,000) 309,052,800,000 paid packets => 309,052,800,000 * 0.00001 = $3,090,528 in data fees.

So ~3 million $ in revenue (in very best case scenario) from data fees, but paying out ~294 million $ to gateway owners.

Naturally the only way this works is because they give out their own invented tokens rather than dollars. This does not make any sense, and will never make any sense. I read that the gateway manufacturers pay the Helium company 50$ per gateway (to provision a private key) which probably pays for some stuff (and to pump up their own coin), but if that's the case then it just looks like a pyramid scheme.

Also scale doesn't help if you pay out 100x more for every gateway than you can potentially earn per gateway. But that should be obvious. You're paying a gateway for 600$ and then you get >600$ in rewards per year. This does not make any sense.

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

#352

Post by yashg » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

3825 wrote: post #304

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks. This alone trumps any arguments against bitcoin. Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their oper…

> Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries? > Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor. Does this make it easier for the wea…

> How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries?

Exactly my question. Exchanges where you can sell the crypto for real money are still regulated and require KYC.

> My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees.

High fees are required to pay for the insane electricity bills and specialized hardware. PoW cryptos are expensive and inefficient by design so there will always be more transactions waiting in the queue to get on the chain than the processing power required to mine the next block.

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

#353

Post by olalonde » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

> A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed.

I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency critics commit the "fallacy fallacy". That is, they have the following reasoning: people believe crypto is good because of X, X is false, therefore crypto is not good.

Yes, there are a lot of people who are into crypto because they think it's a way to get rich quick. Yes, there are a lot of guru technical analysts who sell bullshit dreams on their Youtube channels. Yes, there are a lot of criminals who use cryptocurrency. Yes, crypto attracts a lot of charlatans and snake oil men. Yes, there are a lot unbacked stablecoins and shitcoins.

Given the above, it's easy to dismiss all cryptocurrencies as a scam. But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation. For me, Bitcoin's potential to be a programmable money without government or central authority is a very powerful idea. The idea that you can be your own bank and do p2p electronic money transfers without an intermediary. That has never been possible before.

I could go on but my point is that even if there are many wrong reasons people like X, it doesn't necessarily mean that X is wrong/bad.

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

#354

Post by meheleventyone » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:06 AM UTC

ique wrote: post #318

tjs8rj wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does blockchain tech prevent monopolies exactly? Any environment that respects property rights and has activities that can be done more efficiently with scale and concentration will have centralization. Cryptocurrencies themselves are centralized by almost every dimension because mining exhibits those characteristics. Nearly any interesting on chain technology is centralized in that a minority disproportionately…

You are using a very different meaning of centralisation and decentralisation than blockchain people do. That's neither here nor there though. The way you kill Facebook, Google and any Web2 company is to kill their business model. These are all 100% ad-funded businesses. Kill the advertising funded internet and these monopolies categorically die with it. The only _attempt_ I've ever seen at addressing the issue that…

The question is how does additional fund sources prevent people from also using advertising or collecting data? For example subscription services for newspapers often still show ads. Usually additional revenue streams are used to capture more revenue.

If the answer to killing the ad funding business model was individuals pay directly it’s going to face a steep uphill battle because right now for most people the cost to read is free. What improved experience does it provide for the additional cost?

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

#355

Post by danschuller » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:08 AM UTC

usrbinbash wrote: post #267

yata69420 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc.. Yeah, but this actually works. Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public. This isn't theoretical. I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.

> Yeah, but this actually works. Exchanging public keys worked for decades before blorkchains were even a word.

This depends what you mean "works", if it's meant on the technical conceptual level that yes, of course, I think no one would disagree. If it's taken to mean had widespread and growing usage at the social level, then I think that's hard to argue.

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

#356

Post by chucke » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:08 AM UTC

tomputer wrote: post #261

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…

> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that pers…

Not to say your completely wrong, just that the purpose of car tokens on the blockchain is to replace perhaps your insurance, but not the keys.

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

#357

Post by throwawaylinux » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:09 AM UTC

axg11 wrote: post #269

tomputer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that pers…

Couldn’t you say the same thing about the deed for a house?

The government enforces property rights though, so it's not a matter of distributed consensus, it's a matter of who the government views as the rightful owner. In a property dispute, a court might look at a number of factors: occupation and use, maintenance and upkeep of the property, paying bills associated with the property, registration of a deed with a title office, etc.

A digital signature on a blockchain somewhere means nothing. How do you connect it with the real property? All of the other above things go some way to demonstrating a real connection to the property. A block chain does not. It's the same problem all blockchain solutions have: verifying the data at the point of entry to the block chain. If that is distributed and can not be trusted and verified remotely, then the existence of it in a block chain does not help.

I'll create PropertyBlock™ blockchain tomorrow and sign a block with your property address it over to myself. Worthless.

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

#358

Post by yashg » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:09 AM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #325

galaxyLogic wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying real estate with bit-coin, isn't that close to money laundering?

If you bought your bitcoin with legit money, and then you exchanged the bicoin for a house, and you're doing your taxes correctly, how could that be money laundering?

Why shouldn't I buy the house directly with legit money then? Why add one more layer and pay some amount in commission and also deal with volatility in BTC prices?

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

#359

Post by democracy » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:09 AM UTC

"Crypto" shat itself in the area of payments (noone really needs or wants it and it provides 0 value), so now they are trying other angles - NFT, DeFi. The problem is the crypto influencers are losing touch with reality. You could at least bullshit someone clueless about cryptocurrency and payments, but it's really hard to sell the idea of collecting JPEGs or investing into DeFi (which aggressively described in the terms of a classic ponzi scheme for some reason) to the general public.

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

#360

Post by ique » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:10 AM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #347

ique wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopolies like Google and Facebook exist because of advertising. Remove advertising and they don't exist. The fact that they're processing a lot of data is in large part because they need to for advertising. Still, your understanding of blockchain tech is misleading here. Ethereum is public key registry at best and is not and should not be used to store or process data. In a blockchain world you can still have servi…

> Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit No they are not. That is, they will need just as "free" to switch in the non-blockchain world. Why? Obvious, isn't it? - Blockchains can't store the amounts of data required (Youtube/Instagram/TikTok on blockchain? What a nice joke) - Even if you somehow can, companies will store data in their own proprietary ways incompatible with each other - And, of cour…

Data will never be stored on blockchains, its not what they’re for. It’s amusing that you’re so vehemently against something you know nothing about.