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

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

#761

Post by jcbrand » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #754

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…

You know, it's funny. I've worked in and around analytics for a long time now, and I've had the thought that blockchain enables the following. 1) A common "universal" transaction data source 2) A shared, readable format So the thought occurred to me that as soon as blockchain apps/currencies became popular, people would want analytics on them. There would thus be a startup opportunity for unprecedented analytics visi…

You were right, blockchain analytics was a great startup opportunity and there are already a bunch of companies, like Glassnode, doing blockchain analytics.

You also seem to be missing a lot of interesting stuff happening with cryptos if you think it's exclusively price speculation.

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

#762

Post by baby » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #448

baby wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Depends on the people I’d say. There’s definitely a market.

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

#763

Post by meowkit » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #743

nly wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Automated Market Makers (AMM) and Liquidity Staking/Providers are terms for what you have described.

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

#764

Post by baby » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

yashg wrote: post #619

baby wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither do consensus protocols not based on proof of work. How many times do people have to comment that bitcoin is not the only crypto?

PoW is what makes Blockchains of BTC truly permissionless and decentralized. It's a solution to the 51% attack. Yes PoW is resource hungry and expensive but it's a feature not a bug. If we remove PoW to reduce cost and stop wasting energy, it just makes it another centralized system. PoS or FPoS is centralization in the hands of a few whale coin holders. Many other VC backed blockchains like Solana are not even decen…

Your comment makes no sense technically. PoW is not a solution to the 51% attack, 51% attack is an attack on PoW.

Furthermore your analysis of PoS makes no sense as well. I guess you have a lot of BTC?

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

#765

Post by baby » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #630

baby wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither do consensus protocols not based on proof of work. How many times do people have to comment that bitcoin is not the only crypto?

Talk to us when there are no major blockchains on a massively-energy-hungry technology, and then maybe we'll believe that your complaint is relevant. As it stands, the only blockchains that are relevant are just colossal energy sinks, and it's devastating.

I couldn’t care less :) if you want to pretend the rest of the ecosystem doesn’t exist it’s up to you. But it’s a bit like China looking at democracies in the west and only looking at the US and being “democracies don’t have universal healthcare, what’s the point lol”.

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

#766

Post by barnabee » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #742

mw888 wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme because IF it successfully achieves a certain level of adoption or usage it WILL have some intrinsic value. The current value can be seen as a view of the average expected future value. A risky bet/investment is not the same as a Ponzi scheme, even if _some_ people are talking it up like scammers.

The fact that YOU do not believe that future will happen doesn't make it a Ponzi, just a bad investment in your eyes. And yes, some people talking up their book and trying to manipulate it's price — a pump and dump — is still a scam on their part, but it doesn't make the underlying asset a Ponzi scheme.

At a bare minimum there are some fringe use cases (no matter how unsavoury - dark web, ransomware, etc.), so I'd argue that barring a major security flaw, even if bitcoin was banned everywhere, the floor price would be >0. (I am considerably more optimistic for long term use cases, but we're just talking about whether it's a Ponzi or not here, which doesn't require any extra optimism.)

I honestly don't know if BTC will end up above the current price in 2, 5, 10, 50 years time, but I do still think it's incredibly cool that we were able to create something with a demonstrable non-zero value and no centralised control.

The challenge now is to keep iterating the ideas, make new weird and wonderful things, throw them all at the wall, and see if anything sticks. Luckily plenty of people seem as excited about that research and exploration for the sake of it as me, so I think we're going to get to find out :)

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

#767

Post by baby » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

democracy wrote: post #580

baby wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how it happened. Crypto is seeing a lot of technical advances. At the same time, people find different ways to build on top of it.

One man's advance is another man's dead end.

One man observes while the other keeps moving

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

#768

Post by Kbelicius » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #753

dmitriid wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation. Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc. But sure, there are a lot of "innovations" with recursive circular "innovations" (like currency speculation, HFT and flash loans, all of "innovatively…

> Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc. I just named a rather massive one in my comment.

> I just named a rather massive one in my comment.

You named one that was envisioned by the creator(s) of Bitcoins 13 years ago and was subsequently abandoned. Today bitcoin is marketed as a store of value, not money. Also the idea that it is a P2P money without intermediaries is laughable. What are miners other than intermediaries in a transaction?

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

#769

Post by baby » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

foepys wrote: post #84

baby wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are doing research and deploying cool stuff that others are actively using. You can criticize that as much as you want but it won’t do much.

Can you show some examples?

I work on Mina, check it out

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

#770

Post by baby » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

Dwolb wrote: post #128

obstacle1 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Solana’s on the same order of magnitude as Visa. Some people dispute the exact figure, but it’s basically there: https://www.benzinga.com/amp/content/25031541 Next long term target is speed and energy efficiency of a Google search. Edit: Avalanche says they’re around 4.5k tps: https://support.avax.network/en/articles/5325146-what-is-tra...

Fastpay can pretty much do infinite transactions/s