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Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

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Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#61

Post by kethinov »

jonwalch wrote: post #18

I 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…

At this point the enthusiasts need to start getting very specific about how blockchains or cryptocurrency is making the world a better place if they want people to stop calling for it to be banned globally, because the explicit harms caused by it are piling up really fast.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#62

Post by ctvo »

ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #36

I disagree with your assumptions. There are many conflicting views, and to me it is an objective fact that barely anyone really understands the technology and what its ramifications will be. Morality and development is a very tricky thing. As an analogy, all of AI tech to me is leading toward a horrific future, but I don't see how anyone can stop that and Chinese autonomous military drones, mass surveillance etc; the…

> There are many conflicting views, and to me it is an objective fact that barely anyone really understands the technology and what its ramifications will be.

This isn't a new paper on quantum computing. Many of us understand the technology quite well.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#63

Post by tomiplaz »

I don't think you understand what Bitcoin has brought to the table. Consider its fundamentals and its network effect. Other blockchain tech, most prominently permissioned blockchains, should be reprobated, since they don't require blockchain tech and could be better implemented using tech that relies on standard database systems.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#64

Post by 300bps »

rschachte wrote: post #28
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

The word immutable has a meaning.

Blockchain does not fit that meaning.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”.

I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#65

Post by pcthrowaway »

agilob wrote: post #39
jonwalch wrote: post #18

I 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…

> none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet

How is Solana bad for the planet exactly? I don't use Solana, or particularly like it, but it's proof of stake, so if you'd resist the urge to jump to conclusions, you'd find with a couple of minutes of research that its energy usage is comparable to a few average households.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#67

Post by sudosysgen »

ohazi wrote: post #32

Like 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…

Capital in general is a paperclip maximizer, not just Bitcoin. All investors are slaves to their capital that takes a mind of its own, a sort of real-world Egregore.

Bitcoin is a flagrant example of this property of capital.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#68

Post by logicalmonster »

> what a nightmarish step backwards it is for developers concerned with cost, speed, privacy, safety, and ease.

1) There's a lot of research and development into blockchain technology by very smart people. The systems are improving. What technology we'll have 5, 10, or 25 years from now is going to be much different than what exists now. It's a lack of imagination to think that because crypto is "slow" now (and not all of it is by the way), that it will always be the case. The equivalent is looking at a 5.25" floppy disk in the early 80s and thinking that all physical media is forever going to be too small and too slow to be usable.

2) Low cost, speed, privacy, safety, and usability are great attributes to have: and in many cases are currently superior on established centralized systems. But don't other important attributes exist?

* What about resistance to censorship? A centralized system can ban you because of what you say or even because of who you are. Maybe a purely decentralized system cannot. I guess that's one reason why a lot of people fear it.

* And what about trust? Many people do not trust a lot of centralized systems from powerful groups: such as how many shares of stock are even in existence given the practice of naked shorting. Check out this story.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/rsaevv/in_march...

> In March of 2005 this guy bought 100% of shares (1.1M shares) in a traded company to prove the corruption. The next two days that same stock traded 50 million times and dropping the price 99% in two hours. All this with LITERALLY NO SHARES AVAILABLE TO BORROW OR SHORT.

Isn't it possible that the drawbacks of blockchains might be worth it if they can prove perfectly transparent and reduce or eliminate corruption? Imagine a stock market that ran on some next generation blockchain tech that was perfectly transparent without any doubt about the number of shares in existence. No more dirty tricks or fraud possible. Are the upsides of this not worth any discussion?

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#69

Post by rschachte »

300bps wrote: post #64
rschachte wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The word immutable has a meaning. Blockchain does not fit that meaning. Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”. Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”. I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.

The statistical likelihood of a 51% attack happening on the blockchain seems statistically way less likely than a hack targeting our existing financial system.

I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code.

To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#70

Post by ArnoVW »

Charlie_26 wrote: post #58
throwhauser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Crypto is hot because there's some greater fool to sell to. Eliminate that greater fool (by informing) and the whole pyramid scheme comes tumbling down.
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