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

Well... Here we are then... I completely agree. I've never been subtle about how stupid and useless I find blockchain technologies. Let's not fool ourselves, they are a quick way to make a buck off the back of someone naive. I've been saying this from the start, and so was a guy I used to work with in the past who had taken part in building one of the largest crypto mining operations. He also holds crypto but for the exact same reason - piggyback on someone naive when the time is right. To be clear, the fact that it takes effort to compute a hash does not add any value to the said hash. It's equally hard to compute pi, count the atoms in the universe or something like that. If anything, atoms and pi have a lot more value than 0x3df421daf43c if you ask me. Everything around crypto is purely mythical and Utopian - it's not anonymous, and it's not really a currency. It can be regulated extremely easily should governments desire to do so. Fact of the matter is that you can't buy your groceries with bitcoin in 99.999999999999999999999999999999999% of shops. And that is not going to change either. So whether you have 1 or a billion bitcoins, you need to exchange that for actual money. All a government needs to do is block the exchanges from operating and issuing transactions and you are done. Not to mention the inevitable and unquestionable existence of hash collisions which have the potential to take down any blockchain by rendering it useless. It's unlikely to find such but "Unlikely" != "Impossible" and in that sense it's a question of "when", not "if". Several years ago I had built a system, thinking that uuid4's would be a sufficient mechanism to prevent collisions. 2 years down the line with 5000 requests/second later, there I had it: 2 people on the opposite ends of the planet ended up with the exact same identifier, and me and 5 other people spent a week trying to work out how.

The other problem is the actual value and what the concept around blockchain implies: people buy crypto with the idea that it's value will exponentially grow so they can sell it, for, you guessed it, actual money. They sell it to their neighbors, who are also waiting for it's price to grow exponentially and make a profit. All while the world operates with a somewhat finite amount of cash. For example: someone buys a bitcoin for 1 dollar, sells 10 shares to 10 people for 10 dollars, he makes a 9 dollar profit. 9 people each wait for the price to rise, they sell each of their shares to another set of 100 people for a dollar, giving them each a 9 dollar profit. I'm scaling down the numbers for the sake of simplicity but that's not the point. Take a step back and tell me how this doesn't have every characteristic of a pyramid? Something which is outlawed in most countries and for a very good reason. I've been saying this from the very beginning: there are billions of ways to utilize this computational power for something meaningful and constructive but no, "{some}chain to the moon". /End of rant.

> but I do think the technology already has applications that are useful to many

For example?

The only blockchain I'll ever accept is one with a guaranteed 1:1 identity/wallet as in you can only ever have one bank account. That has mechanisms for reversals in case of fraud, like the system collects insurance fees and maybe if there's verified fraud accepted by an elected board then you get like 50% paid back... or something at least not a total loss.

Furthermore your account can never hold more than 10 million dollars (or 50, ...but something reasonable) ... if this became the default currency it would basically outlaw billionaires from the start. It'd also stop money laundering since you can't have fake accounts, etc.

Finally it'd need to have progressive taxes baked in, or simply you pay a transaction fee which is determined by your average daily holdings / avg monthly transactions or something...(needs tweaked) but someone hodling hordes of cash would essentially pay monthly hodling taxes (storage fees), and larger transaction fees, of which this gets divied back to those who maybe never have more than 10k in their account and spend most of their money each month..

The currency would also have some UBI worked into it.

Essentially it'd make it so people could get the bear minimums, are rewarded for utilizing the currency as a normal currency, and penalized for using just as a store of value, and it ensures whales don't control everything, in fact I think the more you hodl the weaker your vote should be.

Well said. These POW/ energy waste arguments are getting really old. They act as if there aren't existing solutions. Take Algorand for an example, which is carbon negative and (Pure) Proof of Stake...

Decentralized lending markets like Algofi which went through YC