181–190 of 192 posts
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The coins went down hard in march along with the financial markets...
Doesn't matter. If capital controls get put in place and bitcoin also loses 80% of its value, you still have 100x the liquidity that you would have without it.
Blockchain solves one fundamental problem: trust. If you have a solution that fundamentally relies on trust and you want to get rid of that, Blockchain is the answer. If you're OK with trusting someone/thing, then Blockchain wont add any value. The obvious and biggest application of this is money. The original Bitcoin use case. Today the banks handle all our monetary transactions and we trust that they don't act mali…
But mostly, again: your answer is all about hypotheticals, not about the 'now'.
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The internet and smartphones were popular and we understood the applications. The tech was not good enough to make the visions come true. With blockchain it’s reversed: we have suddenly tech but after 11 years still no idea other than use it to sell drugs, and boil the oceans.
> The internet and smartphones were popular and we understood the applications. Who is "we?" A small group understood the applications early on and was way ahead of the curve. Obviously costs coming down in the 90s enabled a wider audience to access the technologies - but most were clueless of its potential until they were already using it. This is the case for Bitcoin now. Selling drugs has little to do with it, oth…
We knew what we wanted, but the interface was a problem and Apple solved it.
We knew what we wanted but we could not get there, until then.
None of the bitcoin/blockchain people can exactly explain why blockchain or bitcoin is relevant. Even after 11 years they can't.
> than demonstrating the future role of the State meddling in people's personal finance.
A citizen pays their due taxes, as required to run a decent society. Cryptopeople just want to have a means for tax evasion: to support criminal behaviour.
> Are you just another Krugman, who still didn't realise the internet's potential in 1998?
Haha, I don't think so. The purpose of the internet was very clear. It was just too hyped. But it recovered. crypto and blockchain are hyped, but the purpose is not clear at all. Big difference.
> Oh, and "cryptocurrencies" are like the Intranets of the 90s. Everyone wants their own, for now, until they realize that being part of the global digital money network has far more advantages than trying to work with walled gardens.
We have already money. And we already have means to pay people in other countries. And they are overall more convenient and the transaction costs are not an issue for most applications.
The author of this post seems to dislike “blockchain” as a concept https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703081
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I find your examples / analogies not convincing. Email and digital photography have very clear benefits and those where totally transparent from the beginning . I can see none for bt.
Hindsight is 20/20. You probably never lived in the age where people were convinced that digital photography would never reach the quality of "real" photography. If blockchain ever takes of, I'm sure it was all obvious from the start to everyone. I've lived long enough to know human reasoning.
You know, it was immediately clear why digital photography would be so beneficial: no film. Instant gratification / feedback. So less hassle.
It would be only a matter of years before the tech - as with moore's law - would catch up. Which it did.
Blockchain is not obvious at all. It doesn't seem to solve a problem we have.
Maybe blockchain shows that we do trust each other more than we think.
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Bitcoin is imho a terrible solution because it’s unstable / volatile and it’s totally a ponzi scheme + piramid scheme. I want my money to be backed up by a government that wants to keep society stable. Sad to see that bc is always so tied to distrust of governments. That way of thinking seems so naive.
Bitcoin isn't "unstable". It's very stable, as money is released on a very predictable and predetermined schedule. You know precisely how much inflation is going to occur and when it will end. The only "volatile" is the exchange rate market of Bitcoin to USD. Obviously, this is going to be volatile for some time because demand varies from day to day. What's obvious, however, is that the trend in demand is continuing…
That's exactly what I would say if I have cryptocoins
That is the pyramid scheme part. Convincing people to buy as not to miss out.
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1) Arguably it is centrally controlled but technically its not centralized there is no SPOF. So the kind of centralization you refer too may be unwanted for valid reasons but does not affect its function. 2) That's not an inherent property of web search at all. Its the business model of some web search provider. 3) All true but again has nothing to do with web search. The whole privacy things in general is a problem…
1) Of course, there are SPoF =) One is called google =) 2) Not exactly, it's the follow up of a closed semantics field and the client-server model. The internet can be very different. As it was intended to be 3) Again, we are talking about the semantics field. Web search doesn't work, as in barely 4) No, you cannot. You are searching through blackbox intermediaries. Always. Its called a knowledge graph. Moreover, you…
You try really hard to intentional misunderstand me so I won't reply any further. Like I said it my first post "It solves a niche problem for cyperliberalism" all your arguments go straight in that direction. The real world don't care. And no I don't like that but I accept it as a fact. You probably should too.
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> The internet and smartphones were popular and we understood the applications. Who is "we?" A small group understood the applications early on and was way ahead of the curve. Obviously costs coming down in the 90s enabled a wider audience to access the technologies - but most were clueless of its potential until they were already using it. This is the case for Bitcoin now. Selling drugs has little to do with it, oth…
Everybody wanted a pocket computer and when that finally became viable with the iPhone, the market exploded. We knew what we wanted, but the interface was a problem and Apple solved it. We knew what we wanted but we could not get there, until then. None of the bitcoin/blockchain people can exactly explain why blockchain or bitcoin is relevant. Even after 11 years they can't. > than demonstrating the future role of th…
The relevance of Bitcoin has already been explained to you: it provides for the first time in history, a form of money which is inflation-proof, censorship-resistant, easily verifiable and possibly private (or at least plausibly deniable), making it potentially unconfiscatable.
Bitcoin isn't merely about transaction costs or means of paying people. It is about having sound money. It has a use case for anybody who wants to save money, which is impossible to do with fiat money, because it is rapidly devalued due to the monetary policy of central banks.
Other "crypto" or "blockchain" is irrelevant. We can agree on that. Only Bitcoin matters.
Just because you have not seen the need for Bitcoin yet, does not mean there is no need for it. You are like those who would mock the mobile phone or the dial up internet of the '80s, with very little insight into what value Bitcoin can bring to the world. Bitcoin will be used to bypass warrantless surveillance and State-enforced restrictions, and yes, even to avoid paying taxes - which you might consider "criminal behavior," but this merely highlights your state-worshipping world view. Tax is theft - and a significant amount of "criminal behaviour" is coming directly from the State itself.
Yes. Decentralized finance is coming and it's maybe the most important technology of the 21st century. If you want anything resembling autonomy and liberty in the future, and if you want to avoid ending up in a world straight out of a Black Mirror episode, I recommend supporting open-source monetary blockchain systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. There will be an attempt at some point by governments to centralize block…
The OP specifically asked to leave cryptocurrencies out of it and judging by the post does not consider finance to be a 'substantial' example. Are there any concrete examples where blockchains are both useful and necessary?
Git uses, in fact, a "blockchain". There's no mining involved (although, given how hard some code reviews can get I'd argue there is still "proof of work" lol) and anyone can create new blocks and is free to accept or reject them. Like someone else already said I think it's less about the "blockchain" and more about finding ways to decentralize traditionally centralized services.
I really don't like the idea that a blockchain is just a chain of objects that commit to eachother by hashing. That is not what anyone in the industry is referring to when they say "blockchain". A blockchain is a trust minimizing, independent network which allows participants to interact with eachother such that: 1. Everybody knows who did what, in what order 2. Significant confidence exists that the order is fixed /…
At the end of the day distributed trust literally means we all trust each other to do the right thing because, at the end, it's more cost effective and more beneficial for everyone. Directly from the Bitcoin whitepaper:
"The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."