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

#331

Post by acdha » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

plebianRube wrote: post #326

acdha wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. This is a common marketing claim which doesn't hold up if you think about it even a little. It's like saying that no entity can prevent you from saying something because you define “prevent” as whether there's a cop following you around ready to punch you if you open your mouth — almost all real-world censorship happens after…

I'm not reporting shit. They will have to physically track me down. Even then they cannot seize it, and a transaction script is already in place to send to a trusted address if no spend within a certain time. I don't give a fuck about living lavishly. I will be living free or dead.

This is like thinking that you can avoid paying taxes if you do all of your work using cash, except using something more easily traced by the authorities. You might think it sounds bold as internet tough-guy talk but increasingly it just means you're self-isolating as increasing fractions of the economy are unavailable to you. Since real businesses don't use Bitcoin, you're either going to lock yourself out of normal life or have all of this information at exchanges where the authorities set legal requirements.

The problem with this is the fringe libertarian fantasy of thinking that you can be a society of one. It's not just you reporting transactions but everyone you do business with, and these things chain — e.g. maybe you can do work under the table for a while but then you want to buy things like cars or houses and your lack of visible income catches up with you, or someone you do business with gets caught and opts for a lower sentence by identifying their partners. The level of risk and lifestyle restrictions mean this isn't appealing for most people, especially given the entirely philosophical benefits.

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

#332

Post by acdha » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

plebianRube wrote: post #327

game-of-throws wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just responding to the specific question I quoted. More broadly I agree with you that it's a risky idea to immortalize your criminal activity on a public, immutable ledger.

Since it is public, what is my address? Tell me the last 5 lightning transactions I made.

If your devices are compromised or you ever make a mistake, you can identify yourself.

Even if your opsec is perfect, any transaction partner can identify you.

The problem with the public ledger is that it is, well, public and permanent — maybe you're able to fly under the radar for years, but then your records turn up in an exchange's data breech or an investigation into the services you're using to launder real money, etc. and then your full history is revealed detailing exactly how much money you weren't paying in taxes.

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

#333

Post by dorgo » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #244

gitanes wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina. 100% of annual inflation. People use crypto everyday to get money in and out of the economy.

Argentina does look like the most interesting country to dig deeper into here. As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press. Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 It does note…

> now that the crypto market has crashed.

I don't understand this "crypto market has crashed" narrativ. Ether is +60% in the last month... It's crypto. It never really crashs. A crypto crash would be something like -99.99%. Everything else is business as usual.

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

#334

Post by dorgo » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

caskstrength wrote: post #295

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.

> I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges. You are correct. First thing that National Bank of Ukraine did when the war started is they banned buying foreign currency electronically (theoretically people could still buy actual physical foreign currency, but nobody would sell except for very high markup), transferring money outside of Ukraine…

So the 20 million immigrants from Ukraine left their crypto in Ukraine, because the National Bank of Ukraine said so?

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

#335

Post by RestlessMind » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #56

chrisabrams wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What country do you live in? Because I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year. When you say “in 10 years” when did that 10 year time frame start and end? Are talking about the 1960s or the 1990s? Because most people I knew didn’t start using the internet regularly until the mid to late 90s or about 30 or so years a…

I hear this a lot. I want details: - Which countries? - What portion of the population are benefiting from crypto? Is it a tiny portion of nerds or has it become more mainstream now? - With the crash in cryptocurrency over the last few months are these people in those countries still glad that they used this, or are they regretting it? I don't doubt that there exist individuals in countries with high inflation who ha…

Afghanistan, from a reputed source like Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/crypto-currency-afghanistan- idUSL8N2QU39A

> I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.

Why? What if there is not widespread trend and it is only anecdotes? Why should every new technology be "widely adopted or bust" instead of simply being a new interesting tech which a hacker can tinker with just because? Blockchains, NFTs and smart contracts are far more interesting than yet another iteration of a web framework or yet another way to track user data.

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

#336

Post by seibelj » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #266

seibelj wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

Just my opinion: Central banking is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of inflation and corruption in central banking, and other bad things like telling society to stop using energy to "sAvE tHe PlaNeT" and be cold all winter (while I seriously doubt the rich politicians are keeping their thermostats low!), are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of central banking doesn't actually stop the individual from revolting anyway.

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

#337

Post by seibelj » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #314

seibelj wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a bit of a leap to go from “sure we steal your money and everyone is poor” to “hey we are going back 20 years and stopping all communication”. I think it’s a bridge too far outside of North Korea. Even China has a die hard and widespread crypto base despite their “banning” of exchanges and their great firewall. I worked previously on tech to get around it (rapidly cycling domains that are registered often and fl…

It's partially the ideology but also the fact that as a very weak fiat currency everyone who bought in early has no way to cash out unless they can convince other people to buy their tokens instead of something else. All of those VCs, early adopters, etc. have a massive financial incentive both to talk it up constantly and create pump-and-dump schemes around things like NFTs because the alternative is walking away fr…

I am friends with people with tens of millions of dollars in crypto and they aren't cashing out. If you listened to people on HN none of them would have stuck by their investment. Crypto is a multi-generational project.

And some people like NFTs just like they enjoy baseball and Pokemon cards - it's for collecting, except they can also be used programmatically in software. NFTs are for entertainment.

I think you are just woefully misinformed and know essentially nothing about what is going on here, but the HN karma is pretty nice.

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

#338

Post by andirk » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 7:33 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #311

labrador wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest we stick to the technical aspects and what ideas people have for using the technology. it rather than veering off into money and fraud, which are highly charged topics. I'm genuinely curious about how this new tech will change things.

How can you possibly discuss Bitcoin without the topics of money and fraud ? It's intrinsic to what Bitcoin is.

Money, sure. Fraud? No. That is too broad of a topic to require its inclusion with BTC. Almost every scam/phish/SPAM I receive is USD-desiring. And you are aware of this yet insist BTC is the main fraud coin.

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

#339

Post by dang » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

t6jvcereio wrote: post #283

dang wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've never seen you make such a comment on an account that repeats pro crypto nonsense.

It's not as if we're tracking that, but I'm sure I have. It's all equally tedious, and the principle applies regardless of polarity.

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

#340

Post by dang » Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

GauntletWizard wrote: post #272

dang wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If both sides are just repeating the same points, then there's no diff, and if there's no diff then it's off topic for this site. Diffs are what's interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Then ban positive promotion of crypto, as a whole. You can't, because you want a site that values free speech. But any site that values free speech is going to have to repeatedly answer the same basic questions on Crypto and Communism. It's going to have to repeatedly say "No, we're not trying to censor you because of chosen group X that claims to be innate , we're banning you because of actual crimes you have commit…

You're making some incorrect assumptions here. The kind of site we want is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The sort version is we want curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. That rules out excessive repetition, among other things.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...