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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#181

Post by sudosysgen »

dnautics wrote: post #171
sudosysgen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For social capital, the statement is tautological and has no meaning. Social capital is generally defined as the set of all interpersonal relationships and shared or individual ideas. This isn't a paperclip maximizer nor is it meaningful that groups of people are compelled to act in ways that follow what people in that group believe, do, and how they interact with each other; it's a tautology. I think that the fact t…

If you don't think that maximization of social capital doesnt lead people to do dumb shit things allow me to introduce you to real stuff with escalating degrees of real consequence over millennia like TikTok, eating competitions, luxury yachts, most of Hollywood, Jeffrey Epstein, various wars over the course of milennia like Assad murdering his citizens in Syria to dumb wars in Europe for centuries, crusades, pol pot…

Yeah I just don't understand how any of those things are bizarre or non-obvious. People want to be entertained, have power over other people, have more resources, etc...

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

#182

Post by adam_arthur »

RedBeetDeadpool wrote: post #178
adam_arthur wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intrinsic value of pokemon is the enjoyment you get out of playing. Thus people are willing to pay money to play it. "Investments" in crypto tend to have value because you can sell it to somebody else for more, not because the intrinsic value increases over time. E.g. like a cashflowing business increasing their cashflow, or raising rents on a rental property. This is self referential, people aren't paying more b…

People buy expensive art because its popular. They also do nothing but stare at it every once in a while. Is that intrinsic value? Because if that is, then so is crypto.

People buy expensive art because it's an exclusive item, and they value the bragging rights it confers to them (generally).

It's different from NFTs, which are just pointers to an item rather than the actual item itself.

But I agree with you that crypto bears some similarity to art/gold/collectibles. However crypto can be spawned out of thin air and these other things can't.

Why would the world settle on using a Blockchain where a few whales hold huge percentages of the coins? People will just invent a new one and standardize on that. If decentralized apps become the new norm.

This would devalue existing blockchains and their tokens greatly. The only ones motivated to stay on a Blockchain with enormous inequality are the few early adopters. The public would create a standard and adopt that in longer run if Blockchain backed decentralized apps are truly the future.

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

#185

Post by tchock23 »

betwixthewires wrote: post #159
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…

I've begun to watch the video, I'm about 15 minutes in. Already I've seen an admission of bias against "hypercapitalism" as a cornerstone to the entire viewpoint, several obvious attempts to gloss over inconvenient details that the filmmaker is clearly aware of and understands, and a sequence of ad hominem attacks against prominent capitalist figures in the industry. Still, I'll hold judgment on the documentary as a…

There are definitely some weak spots in the video that are easy to attack, but it doesn't discredit the overall premise. Also, it's too long which is unfortunate because few people will watch to the end.

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

#186

Post by quinnjh »

I read a paper called "the internet bond" discussing "smart contracts" (cringey name) and how they can be used to lay out and agree to conditions for workers to be paid.

I think this is interesting when /r/antiwork has blown up and gen z is brainwashed against their bosses "opressive" leadership extracting their labor. Orgs running on good will are crumbling, corps with iron fist rules are doing okay - what if the future is in getting gen z to write out what their preferred labor -> compensation function is, and commit it to the cloud instead of scapegoating your evil bougie boss for why you hate your contract?

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

#187

Post by jupp0r »

tablespoon wrote: post #170
jupp0r wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives are key to bring the technology back into the realm of usefulness (in the grand scheme of things). Externalities need to be priced into energy costs. In principle there is no problem with using the electric power of a small country for proof of work purposes, as long as the production of that energy is not harmful to everybody via global warming or pollution. In the end, more efficient ways of achieving th…

> Incentives are key to bring the technology back into the realm of usefulness (in the grand scheme of things). Externalities need to be priced into energy costs. In principle there is no problem with using the electric power of a small country for proof of work purposes, as long as the production of that energy is not harmful to everybody via global warming or pollution. I disagree. Pricing externalities into energy…

You convinced me. Eventually it should be forbidden (or made prohibitively expensive) to use fossil fuels for energy generation or transportation purposes because the reserves that are left should be used in the chemical industry and others. I didn't want to defend mining (it is wasteful, even when powered by 100% renewables), just wanted to point out that most of the current harm to society is caused by its fossil fuel electricity generation needs.

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

#188

Post by dns_snek »

SCLeo wrote: post #169
dns_snek wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything needs to happen immediately, Proof of Work isn't some existential threat to human kind and Ethereum is already moving to PoS. It's still early days for blockchain/crypto world. Alarmist comments don't really add anything to the discussion.

I am willing to bet in 5 years time, the largest crypto currency will still be BTC and it will still be POW.

Maybe, maybe not. If you're worried about the climate change impact, you can start now by charging additional taxes on all energy consumption.

Why should cryptocurrency be singled out? Just because some people dislike it? We haven't done much about climate change and the big pollutants in decades, but as soon as cryptocurrencies come up, it's suddenly treated as an existential threat to human kind - I don't buy it.

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

#189

Post by systemvoltage »

RedBeetDeadpool wrote: post #167
johnday wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP doesn't say complain to crypto users. It says that we need to inform the general public so that they are immunised against the draw of these schemes.

Immunized against what exactly though? Is there even one thing about owning crypto that people need protection from? Its an asset class like any other and if you want an NFT buy an NFT. If you want to buy a pokemon card, buy a pokemon card. If you'd rather spend it on a car, buy a car. You're gonna get fraudsters with any asset. People will sell you houses that have bug problems hidden from you. Car dealerships will…

You don’t understand the real reason behind all this. The true naked reason is that people want more regulation and government interference. Step 1 is to paint a dire picture of the need for regulation.

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

#190

Post by runarberg »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #72
invaliduser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

«We're in the early phases of it» I've been hearing this for years now. How long can something stay in early phases ?

Defi is roughly 2-3 years old, and smart contracts are less than 7. To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.

Yeah, but wen the World Wide Web was 7 years old we already had MSN, Google, imdb, geocities, the Space Jam website, etc.

Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after.

Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.

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