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

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

#241

Post by dropnerd »

swalsh wrote: post #145
strken wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a different experience? How is it actually amazing? I don't want you to enumerate the ways crypto is useful, I want you to give me one or two concrete use cases that aren't money laundering or buying illegal things.

I won't attempt to enumerate the ways that crypto is useful. But i'll tell you how I want to use it. But first, it's important to understand this. The actual foundations for what crypto can enable is still being built, so if you're expecting me to show you some "killer app"... i'm not going to show you a working version today. Is that because Crypto is vaporware? No, i'm seeing important stuff deployed all the time.…

in my experience volunteering at a dao, daos increase coordination effort required and have yet to yield additional productivity.

i wonder which pieces we are missing to get to your theoretical world of increased efficiency.

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

#242

Post by Freestyler_3 »

mypastself wrote: post #110
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)

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…

If you have digital cash, you might want to spend it somewhere. Services tailored to work with the system from the ground up, then later they can be absorbed into conventional companies.

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

#243

Post by FabHK »

gregwebs wrote: post #211
FabHK wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

I said electricity, not energy. Energy use encompasses industry, transport (oil), heating, and electricity.

As for the rise, as I said, I think money spent on energy and electro waste is largely proportional to BTC price, since unscrupulous miners will be incentivised to come in and mine if mining profits become larger due to a higher price (since they are unconcerned about the externalities. Private gain, socialised costs).

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

#244

Post by hamilyon2 »

I can share my perspective on it. It might not be correct or very popular or even coherent. But here you go.

I want few things from future technology.

I want permissionless payments, including robotic payments, just so I can run several companies worldwide, accepting and reinvesting money with, like, no accounting besides internal, no taxes besides blockchain rewards, no corporations.

You can think of it as of HFT, but for everyone.

I want tamper-proof, censorship-resistant identity built-in my browser. A pseudonim, which enables everything else, like delegation of some rights to another pseudonim. With identification and authorization out of the way, in turn, backend-as-a-service - like cloudflare, but with actual data and state - will be possible. This will enable all kind of global permissionless cooperation, including robotic one. Removal of every login button on the web will be a nice side-effect.

The third thing I want is open secure computing. You can think of it like Intel Management engine, but for everyone. Anti-treacherous computing, if you like it that way. Hardware, which bricks if it detects code running without my signature, down to microcontrollers. With transparent transfer of rights and revocation, of course.

I don't think the last one is possible without some global blockchain of sorts, from my point of view.

I don't know if web3 and blockchain will bring me any of these, but I like where they are moving and their rhetoric and what they did so far.

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

#245

Post by unsupp0rted »

svara wrote: post #217

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?

The stock answer to this question from Crypto proponents is that the internet also took decades to bring about societal changes.

Initially the internet was bulletin boards and poor quality online versions of print shopping catalogues, news articles with no images or low-res images, etc.

It took a while for internet-enabled capabilities to noticeably surpass things you could do by dialing an 800-number or mailing a cheque to a PO Box.

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

#246

Post by libertine »

GaelFG wrote: post #232

I think "effective rebranding for marketing purposes of database technologies" alone justify all the fuss, business wise. I'm working in gaming, and in pc gaming today, when you ask 5$ pretax and preplatform fee, customers think you own them to dedicate your entire company to support the product fot the next 10 years for no additional fee, you will never heard of 90% of your customers, 5% will insult you on your stea…

>Meanwhile with a good marketing, you can potentially sell low effort proceduraly generated random png 30$ to 3000$ piece in blockchain collection/games and each of your customer will probably actually spend time promoting your game even if he disliked it, if nothing to resell that it bought or earn interests.

This mechanic works because people have something to gain from promoting the thing, because the mindset is that this "lottery" only works if people hop on their train.

It's gambling on steroids: your perceived odds of success increase with how many players are playing the game. So you better hype it.

>Every one want everything for free and no one want to actually pay.

I think it has always been like that, only now you found ways to monetize on players that wouldn't otherwise play your games. Back in my days it was people that used piracy to play games, because they couldn't afford it. Now with micro-transactions, kids can make purchases that wouldn't make in the past.

The problem might be rooted further down, like the cult of getting rich and famous easy and quickly, even while playing games (imagine).

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

#247

Post by igorkraw »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #118
ak_111 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Blockchains are excellent for logging with peer participation, distributed append, and tamper resistance. For example, each peer can add their own chain links, and also see all the chain links added by other peers, and also be sure that the log hasn't been corrupted by any of the peers." This sounds very close to a git repository, which Linus wrote using only SHA libraries.

Except with git repositories there's no built-in consensus mechanism, and we have the potential for a double spend. Say we're assuming the git repo includes gpg signing and users can make commits attesting that they've sent some amount of their balance to another user. John makes a commit saying he sends his entire balance to Alice. John pushes that to a central repository, and Alice gives him her house in return. Jo…

No it's not. If you run a trust based economy without clear property rights, this whole scenario doesn't exist. If you have property rights, you have a state to enforce them, so that state has a court, sues Alice (or Bob), sues John, the state punishes John, done. If you try to establish property rights without a state, then ans only then does it become interesting, but why would you do that? Establishing a democratic "state" is so simple and cheap that people do it all the time (associations, shareholder agreements), and in the end you need to physically enforce the property rights anyway, so why bother with the whole decentralised, anonymous rigamarole?

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

#248

Post by FabHK »

paulsutter wrote: post #171
FabHK wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the extent that blocks are assembled and validated not by one node (which is all that would be necessary), but by (tens? hundreds? of) thousands, there is massive duplication of the actual work by a factor of 1e4 or 1e5 or more. But, you are right, even that enormous inefficiency is peanuts compared to the Proof of Waste, which ramps it up to unimaginable proportions. (A single BTC transaction uses up as much elec…

The transactions don’t use the power, the power is used to protect the contents of the chain (sorry i intended this as a reply to a different comment, not yours, not sure how i did that!)

We agree. Around 0.000001% of the power is used for transactions, which is way more than necessary due to duplication, and 99.999999% for "protection".

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

olejorgenb wrote: post #240

One interesting application is the ability prove that something existed at a specific point in time (at scale). Publish the hash of the content to the chain. This can be scaled by combining an arbitrary number of items into the same hash using a merkel tree ( https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement#how-o... ). It's not a new idea - you could also publish the hash in a bunch of newspapers, but it's not…

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by nazka »

There will be value when we can break the increasing time and complexity of each transaction on a math level. Not with all the current solutions that really break the whole purpose of the blockchain. Until that not really. Only for special cases and still (like maybe big transfer for banks between banks or to manage gold exchange at a Gov level…) Stuff like this. After that yes sure! For now the ecosystem is really full of greedy people with scammers and criminals…
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