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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People don't exchange public keys on the blorkchain, they use username/password to access their wallets, and these have a public key. That in itself doesn't authenticate anyone to anything, the only guarantee is that it is unique.

How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information.

So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?

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

#442

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…

I think PartChain of BMW is the only one i know of: https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T030716...

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

#443
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…

Everyone doing P2P transfer and bypassing traditional banking institutions is a powerful idea... but ultimately everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange, otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard.

And it's debatable whether fiat will ever whither and die. The Government will ultimately have to endorse a currency for tax purposes, and they'll always seek to control the inflationary environment so they can maintain a workable budget and keep public services afloat.

Just a century ago or so, banking was only for large corporations. Commoners and small businesses all used cash and exchanging bits of valuable metal was the norm. I mean, believe it or not, we had good reasons to abandon that simpler system in the first place. Things are better now. Markets are more efficient.

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

#444
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adoption of the Internet had serious pre-requisites in terms of the availability of computers in the general population so it’s not really surprising. One thing that was amazing about it was our ability to reuse existing networks to connect them all together.

I would say the pre-requisites are just as high this time. Just very different. At least you could buy a computer in the 90s. In my country, you cannot buy crypto anywhere. You have to go through some shady KYC process of a foreign company. Me and almost none of my friends are willing to do that. And the very few who do are not willing to sell crypto to the others "Uuhhh no, go make your own Coinbase account." The ba…

I thought that crypto was supposed to be easy money transfer to absolutely anyone in the world. For nearly "free". A member of unfounded Amazon rainforest tribe could buy it and send it to for some service a Somalian farmer... For very tiny fee... Then somehow each would be able to convert it from their local currency...

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you inagine "giving you bitcoins" will work without you doing something equivalent to sending bills or charging credit cards? Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?

I'm not very far on my project at all but I assume that a public ledger could tell me that somebody transferred money to the wallet associated with my application. I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it. I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfe…

Yes, but how is this different from charging a credit-card or publishing an IBAN?

The webshop exposes some way of receiving value tokens, be that USD, EUR or BTC, and has some way to tell which user transferred how many tokens.

So technically there is no difference.

The difference is, I can be pretty sure that EUR won't lose 20% of their value overnight.

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

#446
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are all kinds of limitations in how exactly you are allowed to use your money. And settlement of such a large amount of funds between two parties is not simple and fraught with danger if you "do it alone". Bitcoin or your blockchain of choice has no such issues though! You can prove to your seller that you have the funds, as well as even pre-commit the money in a smart contract, or a multi-sig transaction. Doin…

> There are all kinds of limitations in how exactly you are allowed to use your money.

Where are you getting that from? If the money has been earned in a legit manner and you want to spend it on a legitimate thing, who's stopping you from spending it?

Yes if your source of money isn't legal or you want to spend on something illegal, that's a different story.

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

#447
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Black market p2p exchanges will rise inevitably.

You don't even need black market. On one the largest crypto exchanges in India (WazirX), P2P is the only viable option left to get money into exchange because most banks have stopped dealing with them.

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

#448
post #402

In the same time, India & China got mobile payment revolution. 4b+ transcations per month are done in India. Well which means 3B people dont ever need crypto.

Ah they can send money abroad easily?

How often they need to? How often average person actual does that? Maybe there just isn't that big of an market there outside things like web payments. Or a market that doesn't involve complexities of dealing with money...

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more

I actually would prefer riding horses if it were feasible and safe in my community, thank you very much =). I've learned enough at this point to know a scam when I see one, and I definitely don't need to go thru my history w/ software and tech bubbles and cryptocurrencies to explain why web 3.0 is full-on bullshit.

I like your reasoning here and in other comments. Please consider adding an RSS feed to your blog, I want to subscribe to it in Web 1.1 style.

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

#450
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…

> NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again. The problem with this an many similar examples is that there already exists a solution for this sort of authenticity problem: digital signatures. Basically, the university creates a public and secret key pair, makes the public key available on its website, and signs all diplomas with i…

Or is that a problem in first place. If someone really wanted to check your diploma. They could ask a proof of permission from you and then contact the issuer...
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