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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

#251

Post by dns_snek »

doedoedoedoe wrote: post #230
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…

This strikes me as a pretty bizarre argument, like a reverse slippery-slope fallacy, and I've heard it repeated by advocates. You are staying that yes, the technology is awful and scam ridden, but maybe sometime in the future in some way no one can think of it will be ok. This is obviously not a meaningful argument. In regards to censorship, trust, and any other perceived benefit of blockchain technology for applicat…

> the technology is awful and scam ridden

The technology is perfectly legitimate and mostly not awful as long as you stick to big reputable projects such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Monero, Litecoin and others who have been on the market for a long time with a proven track record.

> In regards to censorship, trust, and any other perceived benefit of blockchain technology for applications

These are not "perceived" benefits, they are in fact benefits.

Monero represents digital, anonymous, fungible, untraceable, censorship-resistant cash, the same properties that real world cash provides. It can be transacted worldwide with extremely low transaction fees.

> those benefits rely solely on the organization that controls the application - ultimately landing users in the exact same space

Who is the organization that "controls" the "application"? As cliche as it is, "code is law".

> as if proving that some other system is flawed is proof that it's ok for their system to be a sesspool of fraud and waste

You may not like crypto, but it does have use cases that people in the real world are relying on and find useful. The crypto space indeed has many scam projects, but not every project is a scam. That's just the nature of open source software - people will copy an idea and use it for their own personal gain if it proves to be profitable.

There are so many things that are far less useful and far more wasteful than cryptocurrency. I could start taking this argument seriously if we first ban all addictive social media platforms, the whole adtech industry, gas-guzzling trucks and so on.

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

#252

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #76
reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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) How so? "Private blockchains" (with no general access + cryptographic proof of commitment) are practically indistinguishable from plain old Merkle trees, and yet I don't see many people arguing that git is some sort of "scam" even outside the CS and math comm…

See that's my point. People who understand what Merkle trees are mostly understand the various utilities in using them, but that has very little to do with what "normal people" think of when they hear blockchain.

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

#253

Post by PretzelPirate »

kethinov wrote: post #61
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.

The issue is with what it means to “make the world a better place”. Many people think blockchains are working towards that while others don’t see value in what is offered.

As long as we transition to Proof of Stake networks, people who aren’t interested in blockchains should just ignore them and governments can go after anyone who uses blockchain (or any other technology) to scam people.

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

#254

Post by dashwehacct »

epolanski wrote: post #245
emtel wrote: post #226

I dislike this kind of consensus-building rhetoric and I don't like seeing it on the front page of HN. By all means present critiques of crypto/web3, but don't make false claims along the lines of "all right-thinking people agree that X is a scourge upon the earth". It's equivalent to starting a conversation off with a loaded question - a useful tactic if you're trying to score points, but not likely to lead to anyon…

He's not talking to people that have to learn, but people that already made up their mind and share what he says.

I think there’s something to be said about this sort of approach on communication and the site guidelines, but I’m sure someone else would word it better than I.

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

#255

Post by blunte »

slater wrote: post #229
blunte wrote: post #220

> the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes With this statement the author shows bias and a lack of serious interest in discussion. Indeed most cryptocurrency projects are frankly illegitimate, but certainly not all.

Which are which?

Therein lies the challenge.

As far as blockchains themselves, I feel that Algorand is a very legitimate serious project. There are others, like Harmony, but with both projects you can have scam coins built on top of them.

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

#256

Post by sergnio »

dashwehacct wrote: post #254
epolanski wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not talking to people that have to learn, but people that already made up their mind and share what he says.

I think there’s something to be said about this sort of approach on communication and the site guidelines, but I’m sure someone else would word it better than I.

Is blockchain inherently bad?

Asking a tangential question, is a data store like Oracle DB, Postgres, or MongoDB inherently bad?

If you answered yes to one and NOT the other, please rethink about how you view blockchain or any data store. Because perhaps your intention was to be extremely polarizing, which is fair, but I also think your wording is dishonest.

> the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes

I agree there are endless frauds, scams, and Greater Fool schemes every single day, but these types of generalizations are almost always strictly false, especially when talking about a global multi-trillion dollar industry.

The stock market has had its fair share of scams since its inception, but that doesn't mean EVERYONE who traded in the stock market in the 1700/1800s was a scam, hack, ponzi-schemer. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/09/hi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stock_Exchange_Fraud_of_... https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/02/12/385...

Yet here we are today with several stock markets.

Do people get scammed in the stock market? every day. For millions of dollars? definitely. Is there a lot of GOOD regulation to help with that? 100%

And guess what - that GOOD regulation that exists to help control scams doesn't exist in crypto, so it's like we're back in the 1700s where the stock market is brand new and people are figuring out what you can and can't do.

But don't blame the technology, you're being completely dishonest with yourself by doing so and dishonest to those who read this.

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

#257

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

thisisbrians wrote: post #244
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the genuine and useful innovations that are now possible (yes, there are many) Not trying to troll, but can you explain some of them? Not in the abstract, but in end-user/product terms.

My favorite example of late is http://royal.io . You can purchase a token (NFT) that represents fractional ownership in the licensing rights of a musician's song or album, and also comes along with other perks (such as free or discounted merch and concert tickets). The proceeds from the NFT sales help fund the artist's project, and then you participate in the upside by receiving a share of royalties for holding the t…

Thanks for the reply. Royal looks interesting, but I may be missing why an NFT is needed for this. Fractional ownership was existed for a long time before crypto. What does the part NFT provide?

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

#258

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

thisisbrians wrote: post #249
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the genuine and useful innovations that are now possible (yes, there are many) Not trying to troll, but can you explain some of them? Not in the abstract, but in end-user/product terms.

Perhaps an even more germane example for the crowd would be the use of blockchain to manage cap tables: https://balajis.com/mirrortable/

Maybe I'm just too old, but I just don't understand what stuff like this is saying:

> A mirrortable is a way to take a legally compliant cap table held in a system like Carta and mirror it on the blockchain. It consists of an on-chain smart contract and a bidirectional interface that syncs changes made on-chain to the off-chain cap table and vice versa. In this it is similar to a stablecoin, which similarly links an on-chain asset like USDC to a legally compliant set of off-chain USD bank accounts.

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

#259

Post by saurik »

SCLeo wrote: post #152
dns_snek wrote: post #135

Labeling the entire sector as dangerous and fraudulent is incredibly short-sighted, dismissive, and at the end of the day, a lie. I don't buy into the crypto craze of Web 3.0 and NFTs (in terms of digital art), but I do think the technology already has applications that are useful to many, and many that still remain to be discovered. I agree that we should inform people about the risks and scams that are currently co…

Literally everyone (100%) I knew that are into cryptocurrencies are primarily using them as speculative asset. That alone is not a problem. The problem is when they advocate cryptocurrencies or blockchains, they always talk about "decentralization", "uncensorable", "privacy", "future of web" or some other crap that they are not use the cryptocurrencies primarily for. That is what makes cryptocurrencies fraudulent. If…

Yes, dumb people exist; and, apparently, you are even surrounded them! However, that doesn't mean that an entire concept of technology is inherently without substance: it just means that when something involves money and the world is in an uncertain time that lots of people are going to go overboard with it without any real understanding.

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

#260

Post by chairmanmow »

tchock23 wrote: post #191
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.

Smart contracts came out in 2015 on Ethereum apparently. What came out in 2008? Bitcoin 1.0? Things do move fast in tech, you may want to keep up with the latest versions before writing off the web saying you've got it figured out based on your experience with the Mosaic browser. Sometimes opinions need updating too, everything evolves.
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