You should print this on a big poster and walk on the street carrying ringing bell in your arm, trying to attract attention.
Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
261–270 of 393 posts
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> In total, the entire Solana network — with 1,196 validator nodes and an estimated 20,000,000,000 transactions — uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households. https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
How much does AWS use for a comparable number of transactions? Your numbers don’t mean anything without additional context.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#263Earlier 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.
The internet and world wide web were both useful immediately since they were both a solution to a problem. Blockchain seems like a solution searching for a problem.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#264I 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 argue that the whole blockchain approach is a solution designed for the needs of the early adopter... and is just seeking a mass market problem to solve.
I reach this conclusion, not as a cynic, but as a skeptical advocate.
I ask everyone I can this line of question and have yet to get an answer that doesn't involve magical thinking.
Question:
Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do?
My sense is that the answer is "nothing" (except decentralization).
If that's correct, then all of the technical complexity is to be able to achieve decentralization.
However...
The mass market (everyone to the right of the chasm... early majority, late majority and laggards) has proven with our dollars that we don't care about a goal of decentralization. In fact we make sacrifices to have more centralization because we love it. It simplifies our lives.
So if the major market doesn't care about the only real value, then there is no real mass market value.
In that case, blockchain would be just another early adopter solution trying to not die off in the chasm.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#265Earlier 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/
Why is this useful? I assume it is, but I don’t know why…
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#266Earlier 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…
Anecdotal, but I hosted a friend and her husband at my place a few months ago (Facebook Product Manager). She was telling me that her team of brilliant engineers are all either leaving to go to TikTok or crypto startups. Don't kid yourself, people follow the money.
Well FB is the new Phillip Morris so it's relative
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#267I 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 argue that the whole blockchain approach is a solution designed for the needs of the early adopter... and is just seeking a mass market problem to solve. I reach this conclusion, not as a cynic, but as a skeptical advocate. I ask everyone I can this line of question and have yet to get an answer that doesn't involve magical thinking. Question: Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that c…
I always come back to this detail :
> For example, in April and May alone, more than 30 thousand unique wallets bought NFTs from popular marketplaces such as nonfungible.com on any given day this month! This is down slightly from the 39,000 buyers throughout March.
I've heard on a podcast that there are only 400 000 wallets owning NFTs. It's a minuscule market, and it's not getting invariably hotter. It's very possible we're hearing so much about them now because the market is already contracting.
And this terrible detail coming from a scourge of the Earth website all in on NFTs and other scams: https://earthweb.com/nft-statistics/
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don’t think the logic is this simple. Tools and technology might not be inherently bad, but they may still be dangerous. Proponents of some dangerous technology often want said technology to become public policy, which increases the risk significantly for everybody. Think guns, nuclear weapons, lottery, and even the stock market. These all have varying levels of risk and utility. When the risk outweighs the utility perhaps there should be a public policy which warns against their use, outright bans them when the risk is severe and the utility minuscule. Especially so if the industry is growing bigger and bigger.
Here there is no public policy, and there is unlikely to be any for most countries in the near future. This is why OP voices their concerns that we should step in and advocate for people’s safety. Not because the technology it self is inherently evil, but because it is dangerous and—as the linked video argues—had little utility outside of harmful activity.
Ps. There are indeed some of us that do think the stock market is a scam and the world would be better of without one. In the mean time at least it is highly regulated and financially literate folks do talk loudly about fishy stuff that happens there.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
> Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized. So... you’re saying it’s mutable.
You both are talking from the unsaid point of view that an immutable public ledger is a good thing. The reality of our world disagrees with your unsaid compact.
Nothing needs an immutable public ledger. Any fraud due to shipping, or banking, or taxes, is a problem of inaccurate entry of data into a ledger, not nefarious changes to what already exists.
Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies
#270I 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 had millions why would you pick Dubai to live in?
It’s become a fancy place for rich people with no taste or ethics.