Like how they spoke up about surveillance, misinformation, manipulation, tracking, walled gardens, monopolies, dark patterns, demonetization, censorship, encryption? Technologists don't rely on voice and speaking up, code is louder
Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
51–60 of 393 posts
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Many are using the technology to facilitate scams and overpromising, but that doesn't make the technology fundamentally useless or bad. True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam.
Blockchain is an immutable ledger. Sure there are scams, just like there are on the regular internet, however, I think there is a lot of potential for blockchain. We're in the early phases of it, but there is more to blockchain that just the currency aspect of it.
«We're in the early phases of it»
I've been hearing this for years now.
How long can something stay in early phases ?
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#53Like many people back then, I also found the whole proof-of-work / blockchain concept to be interesting from a theoretical computer science / distributed systems perspective. But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as…
The leviathan is loose and it's never going back in a pen until the whole thing collapses under the weight of the fraud. Even legal restrictions on it will only help a little bit as enough moneyed interests are invested in keeping the hype train rolling.
I've consulted for several companies trying to do blockchain based non-money things and can't emphasize to them enough that no one outside computer science and math fields will ever associate them with anything but cryptocurrency (and thus scams) for the rest of our lifetimes.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#54This is hyperbole. We know private permissioned blockchain solves real world problems.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#55I find it strange that people keep promoting that YouTube documentary. Ignoring tone issues, there is a lot of cherry picking and other logical fallacies. For example, he talks about how terrible Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. It seems to me that people that do an hour of re…
>Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. This is very frequent tone on many subreddits, whether you used it intentionally or not, you became part of the problem: none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is? This week Solana had…
Why is Proof of Stake bad for the planet?
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#56This isn't even just a question of individual responsibility. Yes, suckers will get fleeced and we will have to cope with that as a society. Yes, we should minimize that harm to the extent possible. However, there is a much broader systemic risk involved. In 1997, Albania was transitioning from a communist state to a market economy. This created a power vacuum and a distrust in the institutions of government and fina…
Romania had something similar going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caritas_(Ponzi_scheme)
> An estimate of Romanian newspaper România Liberă gives the amount of money involved as 1.4 trillion lei or about 20% of the 1993 expenditures of the Romanian government of 6.6 trillion. The New York Times estimated the scheme attracted between $1 billion and $5 billion
Anecdotally, people got involved in it fully knowing it was a Ponzi scheme, but hoping they could get their money out before the music stopped playing. And some of them did!
In fact, my first computer was bought by my parents with Caritas money.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
survivorship bias?
None of the people I know involved with crypto, including miners, daytraders, and HODLers, have not crushed the market in the last nine years. Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?
> None of the people I know involved with crypto, including miners, daytraders, and HODLers, have not crushed the market in the last nine years.
This is what we call survivorship bias.
> Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?
This is utter nonsense.
Fractional reserve lending means that money enters the supply on loan. It has to be returned to the issuer, and once its returned, it blinks out of existence. The demand for repayment of the loan is what backs every dollar out there. Each dollar is fully backed by the demand to repay the loan that issued it and the social and institutional mechanisms that enforce this including the courts.
The attributes of a Ponzi scheme are:
1. People invest into it because they expect substantial profits, and ...
2. ... that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. And...
3. ... there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead...
4. ... the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while ...
5. ... the operators take away a large portion of this money.
Go ahead and explain how that maps to the world's reserve currency. After all category (1) is patently invalidated because nobody holds USD expecting a return in USD. They expect to lose 2% on average to inflation.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#58Alright, go for it. Speak out all you want. Cryptocurrency users will continue ignoring and/or deriding you. Telling people that you don't like what they're doing is not an effective way to modify their behavior. You need to provide competing incentives, and somehow I doubt y'all are up to that.
The point isn't to convince cryptocurrency users, the point is to convince the average person ("the public").
But aren't the current users the problem?
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#59I really don't follow. Can anyone enlighten me? I used to go with the casual notion 'tech isn't evil' / 'even a chair can be used as a weapon'. What have I missed here for blockchain?
A chair's proof of concept doesn't burn the energy of a small industrialized nation?
Nuclear energy vs nuclear bombs? How you use it makes a difference?
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#60Of course you're right. It's also a massive energy sink, in an era when the question of how that energy is produced matters more than almost anything else on the planet, for the very future of that planet.
And do you think anybody in the tech industry gives a shit? It makes easy money, and that's literally the only thing that matters to most people in our industry. The tech industry's general attitude is that all tech is morally and ethically neutral, and that we have no responsibility as to how people use or misuse it. If that's your initial position, what on Earth is going to make you care that most of the people in the blockchain world are sketchy and that it serves no practical purpose other than feeding into bullshit ancap ideology and making it easier to buy coke online?
HN is built off a VC incubator, which means that most of the people here buy thoroughly into free market capitalism and entrepreneurship as the heroic model thereof. So who's going to speak out about something they can pimp to Main Street as the new hotness and make a quick turnaround on?
I'm with you, man, but I doubt many other people are. But don't stop trying, by all means. Just from reading this, I know you have infinitely more faith in people, and people in tech especially, than I do, after 25 years in the industry.
Vaya con Dios, dude. Good luck.