Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

eisfunke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 392 posts

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#41

Post by rvz »

onebot wrote: post #3

It amazes me how polarizing blockchain and cryptocurrency is. It is to black/white, love/hate. I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people. I personally, believe there is a quite novel concept behind the trust-less consensus mechanisms. It amazes me that computers can come to an agreement in a hostile environment--fully decentralized. How that is put to use in pract…

> How that is put to use in practicality maybe debatable. But I think arguments like this tend to just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Maybe is that why companies like Stripe are still using it then for crypto payouts? [0]

What is nonsense is totally thinking that it is going to go away 100% due to the scam projects, fraud, etc like what the author has said AND totally thinking ever project is going to survive or go for mass adoption.

This is where you get complete nonsense [0] from HN users who reply back and have admitted they have not read the article and scream 'CrYPtO IS SCaM' and either cannot answer basic questions or reply back with another question without given a concrete answer to the first.

Perhaps there is a reason why in particular Stripe ignored everyone and looked at a select few cryptocurrencies / blockchain technologies again despite all the other scams going on.

[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132996

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#43

Post by ddjsn111 »

bbno4 wrote: post #25

i am so sick and tired of hackernews upvoting every single "blockchain bad" article to the top that contains non-sensical and wrong information

Yep, I think it's because the HN archetype is a person who held the moral high ground on early crypto being a "scam" for normies, despite understanding it fundamentally, and those same folks are now feeling upset they didn't "get in" in time.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#44

Post by [deleted] »

ulzeraj wrote: post #2

> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. > More precisely: The trust in institutions controlled by humans and bound by established laws and rules is instead replaced — by unconditional trust in the infallibility of code (“in code we trust” is a popular phrase in the scene…

[deleted]

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#46

Post by phase5 »

The author doesn't understand the value of distributed censorship resistant consensus that's secured by energy.

Also the author fails to consider the situation of 80% of humanity who live in countries that experience hyperinflation frequently. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#47

Post by JohnGB »

Grustaf wrote: post #18

I'm very sceptical of blockchain (though I've been in crypto off and on since 2013) but most of the arguments in this article are non-sensical. For example: > But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer. I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds…

> Normally, cases of fraud or mistakes could be rectified or reverted by the bank or similar institutions after a review of the situation by humans.

This "could" happen, but in practice it rarely happens because the money has moved on as soon as it hits the account. Additionally, for many types of fraud, there has to be an actual court order to get a bank to take action. So the argument is predicated on a false assumption.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#49

Post by anonymousDan »

civilized wrote: post #13
karxxm wrote: post #6

> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. What if a group of trusted organizations run a blockchain together?

They could also just run a SQL database together and it'd be much less complicated and more efficient.

I mean this is just a dumb argument. Who hosts the database? How do you trust them? It's as if people are being wilfully ignorant when they use this as a line of attack. Go learn about Byzantine fault tolerance and think a bit about what problems it attempts to solve

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#50

Post by andrepd »

cloutchaser wrote: post #22
Eisfunke wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As explained in the text: the point isn't that these problems aren't solved by blockchain, they're amplified. E.g.: scams existed without blockchain, but now they're forever and permanently engraved into the blockchain. Code was always flawed, but now a bug isn't just a bug, it's a bug in a smart contract with potentially disastrous consequences that can never be properly fixed.

This is almost a political argument. Because it's the same argument about free speech. In the end, you either believe in the individual's choice, and individuals will do really stupid and bad stuff, and they will also fall for scams, but do you give the individual freedom of choice to fall for scams and speak freely? This is a high risk option, perhaps. But it is also likely to be most effective at delivering progres…

You're making the fallacy of conflating two unrelated concepts and drawing conclusions from that.
Post reply on HN