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

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531–540 of 576 posts

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

#531
post #107

One of the most hyped use cases of blockchains is event ticketing. We had a close look. It cannot solve most problems it claims to solve. The only thing it might be useful for is digital collectible tickets. This may be interesting for a tiny fraction of events and attendees. Full detailed analysis here: https://medium.com/@ticketpark/nft-tickets-a-realistic-look-...

We do ticketing, no need for blockchain. Ownership of the tickets is in a regular mysql db.

How do I resell my ticket? How can a company give lifetime tickets to all future shows? Do you have an API so I as a new indie startup can find people who have bought tickets to similar shows and give them special offers?

These are the benefits NFT tickets unlock.

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

#532
post #217

This is not a debate that has to be had in the abstract anymore. It's been more than 10 years. Where's the cool stuff that those supposed technology breakthroughs enabled? I think we all know what the proponents would point to. Are we really impressed by any of that?

You've seriously never heard of DeFi? There are literally hundreds of apps processing billions of dollars now and new innovative things are launching every day. I work 24/7 in this space and can't even keep up.

Defillama had a list of the biggest apps, just work your way through the list. Or listen to the bankless podcast.

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

#533
post #370
post #217

This is not a debate that has to be had in the abstract anymore. It's been more than 10 years. Where's the cool stuff that those supposed technology breakthroughs enabled? I think we all know what the proponents would point to. Are we really impressed by any of that?

Automatic market makers, Argent, RAI, multi-sig wallets, Baseline Protocol, Helium, FOAM Space, lending, digital ownership (say of in-game items), anonymity (I donate to Russian opposition in crypto only), improved payment UX.

I bet he'll never look into these either. Crypto haters on here never seem to want to learn, just close their eyes and pretend it doesn't exist.

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

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock answer to this question from Crypto proponents is that the internet also took decades to bring about societal changes. Initially the internet was bulletin boards and poor quality online versions of print shopping catalogues, news articles with no images or low-res images, etc. It took a while for internet-enabled capabilities to noticeably surpass things you could do by dialing an 800-number or mailing a ch…

It took decades because people couldn't afford computers, nor could they manufacture at today's modem scale, that's what took long. In terms of adaptation, once someone had access to a computer, with few exception people found some utility in their daily lives for it. IMHO, folks who have access to crypto are not finding any immediate use for it in their daily lives. And further, it doesn't seem to scale very well. S…

I work in decentralized finance and use it every single day, so do thousands of other people. It's already scaling with layer 2's. For anyone willing to learn I'm happy to explain more.

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

#535

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

How do you build Alchemix with a hashing / digital signature algorithm? How about Uniswap? Balancer? Curve? Aave?

Don't know these names? Together they hold over $100B in assets. It's crazy how out of touch with what's going on in DeFi HN is. That you can say there is nothing useful meanwhile there are tens of thousands of people using billions of dollars with these apps all of which depend on a Blockchain to function.

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

#536
I'm going insane reading these replies and seeing not a single mention of DeFi. It's the fastest growing startup sector maybe of all time, going from nothing to half a trillion dollars in 3 years and yet somehow HN has completely missed the boat and still thinks nothing is being built on blockchains.

I guess all the crypto folk got sick of the pessimism on here and went to build with more optimistic open minded communities.

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

#537
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume rich countries of the world (e.g. G7) set up a climate change fund in a smart contract. They could just lockup some funds there to be claimable after x months/years for any country (except the G7) proportionally to how far they managed to reduce their CO2 emissions. This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries (Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustl…

> Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustless way to the blockchain via some clever oracle mechanism). > Instead of having a handwritten weak contract like the Paris climate act, you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed. I'm having trouble reconciling these two ideas.

On the one hand, I guess we could imagine that the block chain plays an integral role in the "clever oracle mechanism". On the other hand, I think that turns this discussion into "imagine it's useful; in that case, it's useful!"

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

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary. I think the fact that 7 billion people live overwhelmingly under a multi-hundred-year improving standard of living [1], leveraging low-friction global trade, commerce and communication in among the most peaceful per…

Nothing that is the largest cause of unnatural death in the last century should be considered as "working". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Aut... . Blockchain based systems over the duration of their existence by contrast have killed nowhere near as many no matter how you scale it, and although I believe the sys…

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing that is the largest cause of unnatural death in the last century should be considered as "working". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Aut... . Blockchain based systems over the duration of their existence by contrast have killed nowhere near as many no matter how you scale it, and although I believe the sys…

It’s the largest preventer of death lol. Citation needed there. People will always die. Government minimizes this to the best of our abilities. How many do not die each year because of government? As in software testing we don’t often measure the impact of our work in terms of things that don’t happen because our system exists. It is far easier to count instead the failures. But this misses the whole point. Count the…

Citation originally provided. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

> How many do not die each year because of government?

I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul of the point that the government was responsible for promoting leaded fuel to begin with, right up to the point of suppressing alternatives. Which in turn begs the question, what will the government actually do generally speaking? And as far as I can tell the answer is work in its own interests and accrue benefits to those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, and that's all. If hundreds of millions die in the process, that's totally fine.

That almost everybody accepts that entity should have a monopoly on violence and basically unlimited power strikes me as increasingly crazy as every year goes by and it does progressively more insane stuff and we slide closer and closer to the possibility of an extinction level event war.

> Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing.

I'm not interested in defending BTC generally speaking, as I despise it. I should however point out that proof of work has no intrinsic "thirst for coal". Merely the lowest possible cost of energy, right up to the point of subsidising alternative renewable low cost energy projects, which many POW miners have done and why hydroelectric power is such an oft-constituted part of their energy supplies.

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the largest preventer of death lol. Citation needed there. People will always die. Government minimizes this to the best of our abilities. How many do not die each year because of government? As in software testing we don’t often measure the impact of our work in terms of things that don’t happen because our system exists. It is far easier to count instead the failures. But this misses the whole point. Count the…

Citation originally provided. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide > How many do not die each year because of government? I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul…

My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits - unless you evaluate both you can’t make a meaningful judgement on the efficacy of a system. Yes for sure the government is the largest source of death — but only because the government stamped out all other sources of death. Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it. And if history is anything to go by, dramatically amplify it. That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.

Re: renewables in bitcoin, it’s all greenwashing. Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things. While generating inordinate quantities of e-waste. I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.

I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.

There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.

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