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

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

#211

Post by gregwebs » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #177

gregwebs wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get the notion that the energy usage is planet destroying? Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage I'd say that BTC + ETC use up about 1% of world electricity. That is significant, given that the main value is to make a few miners rich ($50m a day). > and won’t increase too much. The energy usage (more precisely: the amount of money spent on energy and electro waste) is roughly proportional to BTC price, I posit (until the next halving),…

> I'd say that BTC + ETC use up about 1% of world electricity

Where did you get that figure? If you read the researched article I linked, the estimate is around 0.1%.

> would go up dramatically if BTC went up dramatically

Not as dramatically as you think: if BTC goes up to 1 million per coin it will still be using less than 1% of global energy consumption (again relying on the article I previously cited as my source). 1% is no longer a rounding error that we can just dismiss, but a price of 1 million per coin would imply that Bitcoin-based financial systems have become incredibly valuable and are displacing other financial systems.

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

#212

Post by giantg2 » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #19

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)

"The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party"

I agree with this. I would add that by removing the need for a trusted party, it can increase speed.

For example, stock trades are currently T+2 to handle settlement through the various institutions. There is a push to start using blockchain to speed it up to T+1 or faster.

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

#213

Post by kybernetikos » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

lmohseni wrote: post #140

pcthrowaway wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've developed smart contracts, I'm surprised you don't consider the capability of trustless financial instruments (peer-to-peer lending and pooled lending, for example) to be pretty useful as well

If you’ve ever written code, and if you’ve ever written a bug, then you will understand that code as law is terrible idea, especially when it comes to finance.

> code as law is terrible idea

I don't know exactly what you mean by 'code as law', and I'm sure there are extremists that think smart contracts make law obsolete, but they are just wrong. Fraud via smart contract is still fraud. Theft via smart contract is still theft.

There's nothing about having automatic processing of transactions that means you get to just ignore the legal system in your country.

And that's fine, proper and good. Automatic processing of complex transactions is phenomenally useful, even if it doesn't make legal systems obsolete.

Simplest example - with smart contracts transacting assets where the canonical record of ownership is on the blockchain, you can have a smart contract act as escrow for you, making sure that the transaction happens atomically without having to pay someone to hold the assets for you and release them once they have both. It is a better, more efficient solution than any that the traditional financial system has been able to come up with.

In fact, it is exactly linking the legal world and the blockchain world that means that you can apply some of the same benefits of immediacy and atomicity to more assets in the real world. All that is needed is for the legal system to recognise blockchains as the canonical record of ownership of real assets. The real world legal system makes blockchain technology more useful, not less.

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

#214

Post by drunkpotato » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #176

mypastself wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read several technical, non-fluff books on the topic, and I’ve developed smart contracts on Ethereum for decent hourly wage (paid out in fiat). And I’ve still come to roughly the same conclusion as you. Either my reading comprehension is poor, or there is little actual value in the vast majority of blockchain applications. Digital cash, as defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, still seems like the only real use cas…

> Digital cash, as defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, still seems like the only real use case. IMO the big breakthrough of crypto past bitcoin is that we figured out that cryptocurrencies can use money incentives to run other applications than just payments. People are doing all sorts if things, many scams but also many useful applications.

I don’t believe the OP was asking if people are doing things or if there are useful applications, but rather if there are useful applications that can only be done, or done better, in crypto.

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

#215

Post by user3939382 » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:46 AM UTC

The best proposal I’ve seen for it is accounting for shares on the stock market, there are some talks by the DTCC about this years ago before the GME fiasco.

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

#216

Post by dropnerd » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:46 AM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #19

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)

immutable storage must come with an incentive layer or no one would serve the files.

for piracy, it was private tracker seed ratio. for web3, it's either on a blockchain or ipfs/arweave.

it's not a good fit for most applications, but when you want a file to probabilistically last forever, now there are options.

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

#217

Post by svara » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:46 AM UTC

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?

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

#218

Post by pluc » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:46 AM UTC

Once everyone gets over the cryptocurrency feature of blockchain tech we may start to have actual interesting technology. Right now - and ever since it started - the scene is filled with financial types who heard they could make a buck or fuck over some neophytes. Just go to a blockchain/crypto conference and you will see exactly what I mean. Once that phase goes away we may get actual technical folks with actual decent ideas.

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

#219

Post by FabHK » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:48 AM UTC

forum_ghost wrote: post #68

hyperman1 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting the nation state to just sit there and watch seems naive. When it becomes a big enough threat to make them notice, the nation state will regulate it stone dead.

you mean, fully embrace it to front-run the laggards, like El Salvador did?

A journalist that went to El Salvador and tried to use BTC to pay begs to differ:

> By Friday the final tally looks grim for crypto fans. Only 10 of almost 50 businesses had taken Bitcoin, amounting to $485 out of $1,700 I’ve spent. And only four crypto transactions—at the pool hall, the peanut vendor, a Starbucks, and a Caterpillar-brand T-shirt store—had been entirely seamless. My experience isn’t a fluke. In a recent Chamber of Commerce survey of 337 businesses, only 14% said they’d transacted in Bitcoin since September.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-bitcoin-travel-probl...

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

#220

Post by danuker » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:48 AM UTC

antihero wrote: post #199

mypastself wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read several technical, non-fluff books on the topic, and I’ve developed smart contracts on Ethereum for decent hourly wage (paid out in fiat). And I’ve still come to roughly the same conclusion as you. Either my reading comprehension is poor, or there is little actual value in the vast majority of blockchain applications. Digital cash, as defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, still seems like the only real use cas…

When I first heard about Ethereum I figured the value it would bring was incentivising everyone to create a worldwide supercomputer of the sorts we've never even seen before that can do really amazing computational work as opposed to bitcoin which just seems to crunch numbers entirely pointlessly. Any ideas why that never happened?

For one, the computational work for checking everyone's transactions on everyone's computer (i.e. blockchain) is consuming the computing power of the people interested.

Until sharding provides a tunable level of security, we will see this waste of computing power.

Then, that might enable more payments for cheaper, which might let you pay by the minute and such.

But the second main brake in adoption is legal. Many countries' jurisdictions require lots of bureaucracy to earn money from various places of the world. For example, EU has VAT, which requires bureaucracy for EU country-to-country payments even if you are exempt (Register of Intra-Community Operators). This negates pretty much all the advantage of trustless/decentralized businesses (ease of payments).