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

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

#741

Post by magicjosh » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

landslide wrote: post #281

smokey_circles wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. There's no pyramid shape, which is kind of crucial. "Just look at the whales" uh huh, you mean like the dollar? It's just a value store. Debating the efficacy of the value store is fine, labeling it a ponzi scheme seems reductive to absurdity. The real problem (unsurprisingly) is with fiat currencies. These are heavily regulated, nearly made up values. That crash, oft…

I think most people don't get the dichotomy, and misconstrue things by attempting comparisons to a historic precedence. The truth is there is none. The breakthrough is fundamentally a trusted centralised store, which is decentralised in topology. No single person or organisation is in control, a self sufficient network, gamed into existence. I am still surprised people continue to be still so enamoured by the financi…

Have you found anyone talking or writing about this "trusted centralized store"? I could even see reading fictional use cases for the year 2030 or something. Bitcoin will be twice as old at that point. What happens to the petrodollar in 2030? Speculative is fine, even encouraged. Dystopian futures are in general easy to imagine ("and then everyone dies!!"). These stories I want require hard thinking and analysis instead.

Here's an example of what I want more of - a blockchain analysis by Institute for the Future from 2017: https://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/blockch...

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

#742

Post by chx » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

mw888 wrote: post #714

chx wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to create decentralised, permissionless value Since when do we call a Ponzi value?

Right when it wasn’t subject to centralized control which could actually, easily, and covertly scam people. Just because you say something doesn’t mean it’s true or smart. Being short in the delusion of being clever is a sin of rationality and you should repent to Hitchens as soon as you can.

2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco...

More current:

https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...

https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...

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

#743

Post by fragmede » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

nly wrote: post #443

olalonde wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> but ultimately everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange, otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard.

This is one place that there is something interesting in the crypto space, but because it's so "inside baseball"/esoteric, it doesn't usually get any mention on skeptic's forums. Given asset A and asset B, given individual A with asset A, B with asset B, and C who wants to trade their asset A for B, how do you get all three to come together and make it all work. The fact that there must be exchanges is obvious, what's less obvious is how they actually work, how individuals A and B incentivized to participate, and what sort of payment they get out of it. Well, that's one of the not-entirely-trivial usages of smart contracts I've seen, where A and B get a payout and C gets what they want, but with more than 3 individuals involved. It's not actually important to anyone outside of the crypto space but it's interesting to take a look at the implementation details for the curious.

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

#744

Post by hooande » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

mw888 wrote: post #712

saalweachter wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to call you out personally, but this is itching my brain something fierce so I have to blurt it out, and hey, it's the internet. A little derailing never hurt anyone. It's amazing to me how universal the "I used to be a non-believer" line is in evangelism. From the classic "I used to be an atheist but I've been born again" to all the members of political party A claiming to have been a membe…

That’s a nice little Kafka trap you’ve constructed to disregard the people who change their minds away from what you think. So every time someone changes their mind and uses their previous opinion as informative you are going to non-committally imply it’s “evangelism?”

stating that you used to be a non believer isn't necessary. he could have made all those points about blockchain without that piece of information. the GP's point is that the decision to add it is worthy of suspicion

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

#745

Post by bufferoverflow » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

nly wrote: post #443

olalonde wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange

No, everyone does not. You can easily exchange the coins you don't like for the coins you do. It's that simple.

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

#746

Post by twiceaday » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

Sparyjerry wrote: post #241

ryandamm wrote: post #119

The central problem in this entire debate is two groups talking past each other. The skeptics say "what is it for?" expecting a detailed answer, and the response from crypto enthusiasts is vague and high level; most of what I hear is heavy on words like "revolutionize" and "decentralize" but very, very short on specifics. Or I get argument by analogy to other technologies. If I heard a single use case where blockchai…

The crux of what makes it popular is decentralization which is a fantastic feature and I'd argue the single feature that it has that regular currencies can't ever have. However, everyone doesn't have a wallet and about 60% of all bitcoin is in the hands of only about 10,000 wallets. It's one of those things, if everyone had it then it would work great but because no one has it, it doesn't work at all. In order to get…

I don't buy this framing for a second. Crypto is popular, I mean actually popular amongst most people on the ground, only because the price keeps going up; with the implicit promise that it will keep going up. Everything else is creative story telling. On-paper benefits are trotted out only to post-hoc explain the growth (which is mostly there from pumping and people seeing past growth) and to pump the coin further. "Decentralized" is only as important as it keeps the "this is still crypto right?" identity in lay-peoples minds that is tied to magic money out of nowhere. Otherwise it can be weakened arbitrarily.

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

#747

Post by oneoff786 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #113

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…

I have wondered for awhile why the crypto mega-whales in my vicinity are trading USDT at par or better over the last year or two. My conspiracy theory is that when insiders trade a distressed asset at par or better it’s often a bailout expectation that’s really being traded. Who has unimaginable access to financing, a “stablecoin” going so/so, and a primary line of business critically dependent on Tether, like, I don…

It’s not that hard. When Bitcoin goes down, people like tether because it’s “safe” at $1. So bitfinex makes more tethers and trades them for bitcoins. When Bitcoin goes up, bitfinex sells the Bitcoin and gets dollars.

It’s fractional reserve banking swapped around, with no reserve requirements. The market is the bank.

And because bitfinex is not obligated to redeems tokens for $1 they have no risk. It’s in their interest to keep the market price at $1 because the longer it runs the more money they make but if there’s a run on the currency they can just shrug and go home with their bag of dollars.

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

#748

Post by bufferoverflow » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

doomrobo wrote: post #718

tim333 wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is somewhat disruptive to banks. You can invest stable coins and get interest for example which is higher than bank interest. And the operator doesn't need to spend a fortune applying for banking licenses for each country they operate in.

Absolutely not. The reason bank interest is lower is because the FDIC ensures that you get your money if the bank stops existing. If the company backing your stablecoin stops existing, what are you left with? Nothing, of course This not disruptive. This is just normal investing with all the risks attached

FDIC doesn't have enough money to cover everyone in case of some really bad event. And FDIC is useless when your currency is devalued / hyoerinflated.

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

#749

Post by nudpiedo » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

I don’t think the “early days” will be over until we can in fact see a few of the big projects crash and fail AND THEN some new projects survive and take over with killer products as we saw with the dot com bubble.

At the moment there are already some successful private blockchains, some of those the end user interacts without knowing about them.

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

#750

Post by saalweachter » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

mw888 wrote: post #712

saalweachter wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to call you out personally, but this is itching my brain something fierce so I have to blurt it out, and hey, it's the internet. A little derailing never hurt anyone. It's amazing to me how universal the "I used to be a non-believer" line is in evangelism. From the classic "I used to be an atheist but I've been born again" to all the members of political party A claiming to have been a membe…

That’s a nice little Kafka trap you’ve constructed to disregard the people who change their minds away from what you think. So every time someone changes their mind and uses their previous opinion as informative you are going to non-committally imply it’s “evangelism?”

It's not really a trap -- it's more a rhetorical tactic.

The trick is that when you say "I used to believe X, but now I've realized I was wrong and believe Y", you can get away without giving evidence for why X was wrong and Y is right. You appeal to a commonality between you and your audience (your audience believes X, you used to believe X) and by presenting your change you imply that they are being left behind, that they have missed something you have seen.

It's such an effective rhetorical tactic that speakers will sometimes make up a conversion experience to use in their evangelism, even if they have always been a member of the faith.

There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, with adapting to new evidence. But you shouldn't confuse someone's declaration that they have changed their mind with evidence for the position they have adopted; that's where logic and rhetoric diverge.

(And again, I'm not trying to start something with the GP; I am fascinated by the universal utility of the rhetorical device more than this specific case.)