I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To • Hacker News Board

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#261

Post by hnthrow1010 » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:11 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #257

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges. Or if the government is really nasty, shut down the national internet. And if you think they could set up a satellite connection and a mesh net in response to this, they could also use that kind of setup to transact strictly in USD, with an offshore bank. No crypto required.

A lot of poor countries with socialist / corrupt governments like Argentina rely extensively on informal money transmitter networks as well as money remittances. Exporters earn hard currency which is stolen by the central bank and converted into disgustingly inflated fiat, and then politically favorited importers get access to whatever hard currency hasn’t been looted outright by politicians. Small people have to get…

Ok, you can think that, but there's still no explanation here as to why they can't do it. You should read some other comments further down in the thread, like this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32292222

If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#262

Post by seibelj » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:11 AM UTC

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #255

seibelj wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been in this space for a long time, know a lot of people. Lebanon is another country that is heavily using crypto. You will see a lot of countries with corrupt governments and central banks become bottom-up crypto centric, but this won’t be reported for a long time until suddenly the NYT will release an article and only then it is “actually” happening. Here’s an informative episode on a podcast if you actually c…

I don't have time to listen to this podcast (I'll read a transcript if you have it) but just to respond to your comment: I've never seen the question of what happens after a society becomes "bottom-up crypto centric" get addressed. You have a country where the central bank is suddenly not doing anything, tax fraud is rampant, and the local currency is now further on the brink of collapse. All the citizens' money is e…

I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil. Politicians have been able to steal from common people via inflation for a century while the rich are easily protected.

This is a long topic but to summarize I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto. If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.

Of course I’m a minority but like all movements crypto is selling something to average people but the grand plan is only understood by a minority. Countries like Argentina have been basket cases for decades despite endless bailouts and IMF shenanigans. It’s time for something new that I believe is a valuable experiment with clear theoretic and ideological underpinnings that couldn’t possibly be worse than the socialist nightmare destroying billions of common people.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#263

Post by rvz » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:12 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #202

rzwitserloot wrote: post #38

I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.

> I keep saying this, but: Please don't do this. We want curious conversation, not repetitive talking points. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... I don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a serious problem with all threads on this topic.

It is a problem indeed. We do not want the same: 'crypto is scam', 'ban all of crypto', 'no use case', or 'it's early days', 'adoption is round the corner' and 'it will take over the current system' etc sort of responses that have been recycled from other critics and maximalists and parroted here.

Given this keeps happening, the fact is, there are no new arguments from both those totally for and those totally against it and they keep having to repeat themselves or at worst their arguments are not in good faith and they are not attacking the best representation of it in each crypto-related thread.

I'm lead to believe that in all these threads, it isn't 100% going to get destroyed no matter how upset and angry the anti-crypto folks are or how much they want it to, but it is neither going to take over the world as well; a narrative made by the delusional and aggressive pro-crypto folks. Both of them will be very disappointed in their utopian goals.

Posts like this one only confirm this, and both maximalists and the critics are giving very narrow extreme responses which sounds like both of them are trying to boost replies and clickbait.

Either way, it is inevitably going to get regulated and crypto will continue to survive with 90% of the meme coins and useless projects dead and with the rest of the useful ones being here to stay.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#264

Post by Daishiman » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #222

aordano wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few people here in Argentina actually hedged against inflation with cryptocurrency, it's always USD, EUR, precious metals or high-ticket items (like guns). Regarding the subset of people that actually engages with cryptocurrency, most of them are in it to make a buck, not prevent their money from losing value. Similar story for some Venezuelan folks i know. To be fair, cryptocurrency as a way for transferring mo…

Not if you want to transfer value to the other side of the world..? (which admittedly is quite a niche use case)

There's a ton of people in those countries offering financial services that consist of triangulating operations inside and out of the country.

Within the crazy insanity that's the system, it does end up working out somehow.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#265

Post by SMVS » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

Google has repeatedly restricted crypto advertising and down ranked legitimate Cerrito enterprises. Building this article using search visibility is going to give you local (US) results, and suppress a lot of the important ones who don't use that phraseology to describe what they do. Americans build your own biases always, then act like they don't exist

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#266

Post by hnthrow1010 » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:25 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #262

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have time to listen to this podcast (I'll read a transcript if you have it) but just to respond to your comment: I've never seen the question of what happens after a society becomes "bottom-up crypto centric" get addressed. You have a country where the central bank is suddenly not doing anything, tax fraud is rampant, and the local currency is now further on the brink of collapse. All the citizens' money is e…

I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil. Politicians have been able to steal from common people via inflation for a century while the rich are easily protected. This is a long topic but to summarize I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto. If the government wa…

>I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto

I described a situation where this wouldn't happen though.

>If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.

I'm sorry, this seems contradictory. I thought the possibility of this was already discarded when the idea of reform was thrown out. The assumption with the "bottom-up" idea seems to be that the government will always stay corrupt. If you take that approach then can't you see how this probably will end up like another failed bailout where nothing changes? Effectively all that's happening is more foreign money is being dumped into the system, except now it's just coming from offshore crypto speculators instead of from other governments. Try to look at this from a macro view.

Just my opinion: Crypto is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of fraud and scams in crypto, and other bad things like ransomware, are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of crypto doesn't actually stop a government from collecting taxes anyway.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#267

Post by drpixie » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:38 AM UTC

The author's criteria for 'good' projects seem very reasonable. So all you blockchain yeah-sayers, convince me that sensible, useful, REAL applications exist - things that make the author's criteria (no vague "in xxx they use it" statements, please).

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#268

Post by hnthrow1010 » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:38 AM UTC

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #210

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there not an entire currency speculation market? [0] > When speculative investing involves the purchase of a foreign currency, it is known as currency speculation. In this scenario, an investor buys a currency in an effort to later sell that currency at an appreciated rate, as opposed to an investor who buys a currency in order to pay for an import or to finance a foreign investment. [0] https://www.investopedia.c…

I don't think it's reasonable to think about it in such a simplistic way. BTC has been subject to massive swings. Just looking at CoinDesk, it was easy to find a time where it doubled in value in less than a month. Why would any reasonable person spend that sort asset? I think the dynamics of the market are as important as the technical features that some digital currency has.

But for the average crypto investor who isn't a whale and isn't insider trading on the whales, the dynamics of the market are effectively just random. This isn't like a stock where you can objectively look at the company, compare it to other companies and understand how it derives profit. It can't work either as a currency or as a reliable investment.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#269

Post by seanhunter » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

You have to understand some nuances of the technology to be able to fully appreciate the emptiness of the claim made by BurstIQ to have a “blockchain-enabled big data” system.

Based on the tech, this claim just makes no sense, and it doesn’t surprise me that all of their job ads are for normal sql skills. Trying to query a blockchain you are trying to reconstruct the state of an event-sourced system by replaying all the events (ie without using CQRS). It is incredibly painful to answer even basic questions, so anyone with an analytic question to answer ends up building/using an indexer and writing the results to a sql database so they can actually use the data is a flexible way (ie they use CQRS effectively). Source: I recently wrote a blockchain indexer to answer queries because I couldn’t do what I wanted directly by querying the chain even though all the data is there. It walks a chain using RPC queries and writes the results to a postgres database.

In and of itself this doesn’t invalidate the potential niche usefulness of a blockchain btw (say you need to share data between parties who don’t trust each other without having a central party because noone would trust that party) but the blockchain doesn’t in any sense enable the “big data”, in actual fact you are managing to achieve data analysis in spite of the blockchain.

Also, it’s 2022, can we just let the term “big data” have a decent burial at this point?

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#270

Post by GauntletWizard » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #202

rzwitserloot wrote: post #38

I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.

> I keep saying this, but: Please don't do this. We want curious conversation, not repetitive talking points. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... I don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a serious problem with all threads on this topic.

Some talking points get repetitive because the scams are so common.