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Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#401

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #318
FabHK wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether one can postulate an impossibility theorem (call it SEV, similar to CAP) for public blockchains (at least using PoW, and whether one can overcome it with PoS or similar is an open question): You can't have a (PoW) public blockchain that is Secure, Efficient (=not planet destroyingly wasteful), and Valuable. Pick any two.

Secure and efficient. Money should be a medium of transfer, not a store of value. The fact remains that you can't really get "efficient" with proof of work, and claims about "secure" are dubious with proof of stake.

From my economics training, Money needs to have all 3 of the following characteristics. 1. A medium of transfer 2. A unit of account 3. A store of value

Cryptocurrency generally does well on the first and not at the others.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#402

Post by baby »

hurflmurfl wrote: post #235
baby wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re wrong because you’re talking about database when we’re talking about distributed databases.

> You're wrong Can I just say, on a rather unrelated note, that this just sounds very toxic and will trigger most people into "defense mode". I understand that "wrong" thoughts and opinions don't come out of nowhere, someone must have produced them, but it just reads so much nicer when the attack is explicitly targeting the opinion, and not the author. In your other comments in this very thread you're using "Your com…

Reading all the comments here is infuriating

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#403

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

tsimionescu wrote: post #125
dageshi wrote: post #75

You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use. You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power. It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked. Fundament…

People were using money online just fine well before Bitcoin, and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority. What exactly makes a dollar or euro less "online/digital" than a bitcoin?

Serious answer: The supply of the digital currency. For euro/dollars that supply is dictated by a handful of individuals. For Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, that supply is dictated by code and consensus that anybody can participate in.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#404

Post by baby »

FabHK wrote: post #195
baby wrote: post #175

I’ll paste what I wrote in https://cryptologie.net/#article_555 The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order. Bloc…

Yes, it is a slow computer that uses the resources of about a billion modern computers. (Note that you could achieve basically any desired fault tolerance with a minuscule fraction of that with a trusted central authority.)

"trusted central authority"

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#405

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

dangerwill wrote: post #291
dageshi wrote: post #75

You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use. You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power. It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked. Fundament…

No, BTC is not functionally a currency and hasn't been since the silk road era. Effectively no one is buying goods and services with BTC, it is a speculative asset. Even Musk stopped taking BTC payments for Tesla because of the astronomical fees and incredible long settle times. "You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central…

The “Silk Road era” is not over. It never has been and it never will.

Speculation may have become the reason for a large portion of blockchain transaction volume but don’t for a second doubt that the actual velocity of money on dark net markets has been steadily growing.

Put in an extreme way, if all the speculators left tomorrow, Bitcoin isn’t going to 0 because people are actually using it.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#406

Post by kseifried »

Web3 - The sequel nobody wanted but the studio had to make

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1V7UGmTw1pR6HsT8kF8dh...

TL;DR: All the current stuff is flaming garbage, but that's ok, we're basically where the web was in 1995. Just with a lot more scams instead of VC pitches.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#407

Post by _5uxp »

yashg wrote: post #43

Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless. The whole blockchain,…

What exactly is fiat based financial system to you? Can you say it's abs. not a ponzi scheme for baby boomers and corporate America?

Because I can't. It's wealth oppur. destrying system only to create wealth for certain age group with assets and their friends.

Millennials and newer gener. are out of most of the "real "financial oppr. by design. So they create their system. It's that simple.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#408

Post by myownpetard »

kybernetikos wrote: post #328
myownpetard wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With smart contracts there is only the code. There is no external trusted documentation that says what the intention of the code is. If the contract allows for an action to occur, then that action is permissible. It's the old quote taken to an extreme, "The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do." If there is a 'bug' that allows anybod…

> There is no external trusted documentation that says what the intention of the code is. Working out what both parties intended a contract to mean and what it should mean, sometimes in contradiction of what it actually says is exactly what the legal system does. You can't evade the legal system by writing your contract in a different form. Weirdly I think this idea comes from thinking law is code when it isn't.

A judge is supposed to read the smart contract source code and determine the intent?

The parties are frequently anonymous and have never interacted outside of the publication the smart contract to the blockchain and another party interacting with it. There is no basis for determining intent besides the code itself.

Are you thinking that the contracts have analogs to legal contracts? Usually (exclusively?) they only mediate transactions and behavior that is contained within the blockchain itself. There isn't an exchanging of assets that exist externally to the blockchain like real estate.

Although I think crypto fanatics think that the world will trend that way. Truly programmable money has never existed before. If more of our monetary infrastructure migrates to blockchains it will be interesting to see how current contract law adapts and is applied.

If you want to argue with 'code is law' proponent, ask them how they feel about the DAO hack and ensuing hard fork of Ethereum. That was an interesting case where the ETH community as a whole decided that code was not in fact law.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#409

Post by simne »

Ask ordinary people in developing country, and you will know, why they need decentralized money.

In short, their government is corrupted, and they can't trust government or some standard centralized private company, because centralized mean, it could been easily corrupted.

Also corrupted officials usually limit usage of gold and other material things, but thanks to western tech, it is easy to hide flash with crypto and ignore those limitations.

Because of this very high share of people in exUSSR use crypto.

Sure, in developed countries of old democracies, all these things are not so important as their governments works much better than in developing countries, they just have not such problems, so in G7 talks about crypto transforms to lazy talks of sharp end of egg vs other end.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#410

Post by yashg »

_5uxp wrote: post #407
yashg wrote: post #43

Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless. The whole blockchain,…

What exactly is fiat based financial system to you? Can you say it's abs. not a ponzi scheme for baby boomers and corporate America? Because I can't. It's wealth oppur. destrying system only to create wealth for certain age group with assets and their friends. Millennials and newer gener. are out of most of the "real "financial oppr. by design. So they create their system. It's that simple.

I suggest you read about history of money. How it came to be, why humans needed money and what all things have been used as money and why eventually we ended up with money being issued by a sovereign (by a fiat). Then read up on the history of banking. The idea of cryptocurrency and its underlying ideology goes against the fundamental principles of finance and economics that have evolved naturally over past thousands of years ever since humans stopped being hunter gatherers.
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