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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

#191

Post by tchock23 »

econeuler wrote: post #75

It is important to inform people about the potential dangers with the technology and investing in it, especially since there are no regulations to create, e.g., new tokens. There are scams going on and it is easier to get away with it because it is an unregulated market. However, blockchain technology is an emerging area and it's bound to be chaotic in the beginning. We should highlight the risks but not condemn the…

How is it an "emerging area?" It came out in 2008. In the tech world that is a lifetime.

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

#192

Post by 300bps »

rschachte wrote: post #69
300bps wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It isn’t as expensive as you think to 51% attack various coins.

https://www.crypto51.app/

You only mentioned BTC but that’s just one coin. Several alt coins (with multi billion market caps) have had 51% attacks including ETC and BSV.

But anyway the original point was that it is literally wrong to say that blockchains are immutable. You didn’t address that point at all, so I guess you agree with it?

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

#193

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

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.

If 51% of miners could change anything everyone would be spinning up Alpine Virtual Machines with minuscule hash power. You fundamentally misunderstand how blockchain works.

Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.

You do not know what you are talking about. The fact that grifters often don't know what they are talking about and use that to whip up positive spin on blockchain tech does not give you any good excuse to do the opposite - you are both morons.

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

#194

Post by runarberg »

rschachte wrote: post #128
CamperBob2 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much abo…

yah, I have actually thought about this. Tbf, I'm not advocating strongly for or against blockchain. I'm just keeping an open mind in the same way when web 1.0 was being developed and researched. I think it's fairly destructive to just discount new technology based on feeling. It really is a fun technology to learn and the more minds like we see on HN that research the topic, the more likelihood we will have in expan…

No, but you can discount the technology based on it’s historical records compared to it’s promises. Web 1.0 promised to be a good system of exchanging documents which could refer to each other. It delivered that pretty nicely and later improved on it.

Bitcoin promised to be a decentralized alternative to fiat currency and failed when it couldn’t scale to be even a tiny fraction of the global transaction. When people tried to improve on the original proposal they also failed at the very same thing while inventing new problems in the mean time. As of yet the only realized potentials of the technology are scams (which were never promised—at least to my knowledge).

Compared to Web 1.0 I think it is pretty safe for you to discount the technology based on a history of scams and failure to realize promised potentials.

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

#195

Post by betwixthewires »

zanzibar735 wrote: post #7
unkulunkulu wrote: post #2

My brother is currently working in the field. It brings him good money. Now, really good money. His work is 100% clean per se (infrastructure for mining). I don't feel any moral grounds to say anything to him, he does it for engineering and fun and really actualizes himself. He is my older brother finally creating something meaningful for people and having rightful rewards. He is hidden in the moral waves, harvesting…

I have friends who have made millions from crypto. But every dollar they made is a dollar that someone else paid into the system, that that person is going to lose when the bubble bursts. Enabling that loss is not morally clean.

By that logic, anything with downside risk is not morally clean. If you buy anything with the plan, secondary or not, to sell it later for some profit of some kind, you're taking from a sucker. Housing, the used car market, commodities, the stock market, everything is a greater fool scam.

But when you look at these things from the individual perspective, we all take a risk when buying things. The people that don't assess their risk when they buy lose, the ones that do don't lose.

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

#196

Post by adam_arthur »

nus07 wrote: post #16

I mean I graduated top 5% of my class and make early 6 figures. My friend who graduated bottom 5% is now a crypto millionaire living in Dubai. Meanwhile I can write complex Scala code but I have no idea what blockchain , NFT , crypto is all about apart from the fact that it made my friend rich and made early adopters rich . How , why , when I don’t know . What’s the gain, purpose of it - I don’t know . Then again I d…

If you make money, it means you were right

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

#197

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

Comevius wrote: post #179
logicalmonster wrote: post #68

> 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 a…

The entire crypto landscape is dirty tricks and frauds already. The blockchain is just an immutable data structure (a hash or vector commitment tree). It works like ink on a paper, but it's publicly verifiable. What happens on it, and how that's interpreted is a different question. A blockchain is like having an append-only log in someone's house. Everyone can look at it, nobody can erase from it, and everyone can bu…

Why be afraid of fraud on blockchain? In the case of DeFi the contracts are technically readable (though EVM is not a good platform for readability; if you can't name projects which have fixed this you don't have the right to make fun of "its early"), and those that cannot read contracts for whatever reason are fully aware of the risk they take - when more versed people agree in unison there are no inbuilt scams the laymen can remove their risk.

The same applies to blockchain in general. If a new layer-1 is released you audit the code, the token supply, distribution - if its not put out clearly to you its suspicious, otherwise you go through the same process. Those who can read first hand what the risks are can get in early, those who cannot wait. Its not rocket science.

If you cared so much about fraud victims, you would drill into new, atomic contracts and protocols, but instead you take the lazy, spiteful approach of calling the whole space a fraud and expect people to believe you because you work with computers. Can you fix my printer while you rationalize your position?

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

#198

Post by betwixthewires »

tchock23 wrote: post #185
betwixthewires wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm about an hour in now, the video doesn't actually present a compelling case so far as to the validity of it's premise. I'm entering NFT land in the video and they appear to be overall right about the NFT market, not right about a lot of the technical details but right about the market being an empty hole, but up until this point it's all been hand wavy self supporting nothingness. And even though I agree with their premise on NFTs, I have yet to see an explanation of the premise on them.

All in all it seems the guy is preaching to the choir and grinning along with head nodders and not actually educating anyone on anything.

Edit: finally finished the video, the guy did a pretty good job criticizing the current state of affairs, the relative uselessness of organization on blockchains, NFTs in particular, web3 and the tokenization of the universe, but I think he's wrong about the utility of cryptocurrency as currency, and the potential to tokenize real world assets that are already bought and sold, for record keeping purposes.

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

#199

Post by arcticbull »

dvt wrote: post #174
arcticbull wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is the crystal meth of finance. Capital completely divorced from labor.

In that sense, crypto is exactly the same as forex, money markets, equities markets, futures markets, derivatives markets, etc. We haven't been coupling markets with labor for like 300 years now.

Not at all.

Forex yes, futures yes, derivatives yes - these are speculative or hedging instruments. Not investments. I've never heard anyone advocate people HODL /NQ futures in their investment account and borrow against them as an investment strategy. Let alone calling them "the future of money." But this is basically what crypto is.

Money market funds aren't investments, they're cash equivalents, but they still facilitate lending. They're the present of money.

Equities are positive-sum instruments where you purchase a fractional ownership stake in a business that employs people and uses the revenue from their business to return capital to investors in the form of dividends, buybacks or intrinsic value appreciation. Their performance is inherently tied to labor.

These are not at all the same thing.

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

#200

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

johnday wrote: post #33
exolymph wrote: post #6

Alright, 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 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.

I don't think you realize how much the laughably obtuse skeptic and the crypto die-hards have in common. Both agree that 98% of the space is a scam (though not in market cap terms), its just some people actually look in to find the pockets of progress and value, while others ignore it all and stay poor and resentful. I hate using the term "stay poor," but when I continually see these forever skeptics less versed in blockchain space and current progress than those who simply read and make a moderate effort its hard to conclude that these skeptics are drawing conclusions from their deep understanding of what is going on; it must be something more shallow, like missing out.
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