Live data from Hacker News

Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

as1ndu.xyz

281–290 of 330 posts

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penny stock is a utility token redeemable for an unproduced good?

Penny stock is a utility token representing governance in a company as well as the privilege of taking its profits — much like crypto governance tokens are.

Wrong. Utility token gives you no equity. It's a gift card voucher to use a network

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penny stock is a utility token redeemable for an unproduced good?

Penny stock is a utility token representing governance in a company as well as the privilege of taking its profits — much like crypto governance tokens are.

The ICO scammer often markets the tokens as equity or money but they are gift cards to use the network

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#283

I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…

> the technology is broken beyond fixability.

Saito fixes it (https://saito.io/arcade). There is no 51% attack and no scalability trilemma. So you have a network that pays for itself and generates a quantifiable cost-of-attack in all situations.

This doesn't answer your final question -- what the use cases are for a public network that cannot exclude users -- but isn't claiming there is no difference between that and permissioned networks the same as saying that Linux will never catch on because it is competing with Windows?

Openness is the bazaar.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#284
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the typical argument on a very technical board such as HN where blockchain is synonymous with a specific implementation. But that's an outdated way to think about blockchains. Yes, Bitcoin's implementation is a huge resource hog and slow. But for most newer projects "blockchain" just means an auditable trail of state changes. Whether you implement this with the shiniest newest db paradigm or some simple SQL d…

> However the fact that we now have a global consensus over the ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable. It's also completely contrived. Being digital means infinitely replicable, or thereabouts. Do we really need this game of artificial scarcity? People used to talk about things like property records, but if this realm of artificial scarcity is going to interface with the realm of actual scarci…

> Code is law

Oh please! Remember the Ethereum fork? It's mob rule at best.

If code was law then the founders of Ethereum would be broke having lost their fortunes to the genius that exploited a bug in their code.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#285
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, I've read everything, including the article by Nic Carter [1] (which I highly recommend) and all his related articles on the subject. The comparison with gold mining is quite apt actually - one of the use cases for Bitcoin is to act as a store of value and hedge against inflation, precisely like gold. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...

> The comparison with gold mining is quite apt actually - one of the use cases for Bitcoin is to act as a store of value and hedge against inflation, precisely like gold. Ahem, the primary use of gold is jewellery , not a hedge value against inflation. That's where the vast majority of all mined gold ends up (plus some in electronics and medical applications).

That's not entirely correct. Less than half of the demand for gold is for jewellery, and only a tiny percentage is used for technology. Almost half of it is held in vaults to act as a store of value. [0]

Regardless of what the percentages are, the price of gold is mostly determined by speculation. It varies wildly during periods of economic uncertainty. Arguably, not because there's more or less demand for its industrial use cases, but precisely for the reason I mentioned: a big part of its value derives from being perceived as a safe haven for storing wealth and as a hedge against inflation.

Bitcoin positions itself as a direct competitor in that sense. Its main narrative in the past few years has been "digital gold" or "gold 2.0". It has some of the same properties of gold (scarce, difficult to produce) and some better ones (fast and easy to transfer, easily auditable, impossible to steal or confiscate).

I don't think Bitcoin is suited to be used as a currency to i.e. buy coffee. But it doesn't have to do that in order to succeed. Stablecoins are a better tool for that use case.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEXs and PLFs still lack integration into the traditional finance infrastructure. Outside of escrowed p2p sales of cryptocurrency, centralized exchanges are the only FIAT on and off ramps. If stablecoins, custodial or noncustodial gain widespread adoption, DeFi will remain as a niche for hardcore crypto fans.

> If stablecoins, custodial or noncustodial gain widespread adoption, DeFi will remain as a niche for hardcore crypto fans. Why? It seems the exact opposite to be — if stablecoins gain widespread adoption, there will be a lot more exposure to DeFi because you have stablecoins already and can directly partake in DeFi. Right now the biggest hurdle is fiat -> crypto conversions and back, stablecoin or not. If you alread…

I ought to proofread my comments before submitting, apologies.

Unless stablecoins, custodial or noncustodial, gain widespread adoption, DeFi will remain as a niche for hardcore crypto fans.*

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#287
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This claim is often made and it just makes no sense to me. Let’s say I’m invoicing someone abroad for $100k USD. Today they send me a wire transfer. It costs about 25 USD (fixed fee, but in this case 0.025% of the transaction, i.e. negligible) and normally completes the same day. The payment is made in the currency of my invoice, so I’m guaranteed to receive the right amount. (Any currency exchange is the sender’s re…

As someone who has had to make international payments in the US$20-50k range semi-frequently, Bitcoin is by far the easiest way to do it. Your story about it being easy and cheap to do via remittances or whatever is pure fiction. Any traditional mechanism is at least two of slow, expensive, and onerous.

I'm genuinely curious where you're sending money that a wire transfer using IBAN+SWIFT doesn't work but Bitcoin does.

What country has the banking infrastructure to support easy $50k-equivalent withdrawals from a local Bitcoin exchange, but not for receiving wires?

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think smart contracts are actually extremely novel in the form they take in Ethereum EVM, Tezos, Cardano, DAML and Pact (I'm author of the latter). TBH I'm a little frustrated with the evolution of smart contract langs post-2017, as I think Ethereum's dominance has made most engs/projects uninterested in innovating. If you look around, it's actually very hard to find a genuinely small language you can embed in your…

>But this is already too long :) Not at all, I appreciate the info. Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort. What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model? What sort of applications most excite you? Are there places the distributed model works better than the traditional? Are there applications the distributed model enables that the tra…

> Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort.

Yes, but smart contract languages (Plutus in Cardano's case) generally are unrelated to the specific consensus algorithm of the blockchain platform.

> What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model?

In general, public blockchain platforms run by incentivizing the operators within the system itself. PoS and PoW are different versions of this (staking v mining).

> Are there applications the distributed model enables that the traditional does not?

Crypto, and DeFi (decentralized finance), is conducting a huge "live beta" in decentralized corporate governance and finance. There is a crapton of innovation happening with financial engineering and exchanges, completely new models like Uniswap (constant product DEXs) or new versions of existing things, like on-chain options.

Is it world-changing? No, or not yet certainly. But by construction, DeFi can only happen on a decentralized smart-contract blockchain, so it's genuinely new.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think smart contracts are actually extremely novel in the form they take in Ethereum EVM, Tezos, Cardano, DAML and Pact (I'm author of the latter). TBH I'm a little frustrated with the evolution of smart contract langs post-2017, as I think Ethereum's dominance has made most engs/projects uninterested in innovating. If you look around, it's actually very hard to find a genuinely small language you can embed in your…

>But this is already too long :) Not at all, I appreciate the info. Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort. What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model? What sort of applications most excite you? Are there places the distributed model works better than the traditional? Are there applications the distributed model enables that the tra…

> What sort of applications most excite you?

Outside of crypto, there are many areas within industries which require the sharing and use of data across multiple organizations, markets, and even intra-industry. Think of Healthcare and the multitude of data sources, processes, and interaction between parties. In areas like this, where multiple parties have many different roles and responsibilities in a shared business process, I think the opportunity for private blockchains is promising. I admit that these are niche use cases and the use of these type of applications has not taken off yet.

Do note that these types of applications are very different from the decentralized implementations seen in the crypto sphere. These are the private, permissioned models that people speak of.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get recognition as the coin with the highest market cap, you’d need to have it actually traded on an exchange. How many people on the open market are going to buy your coin for $1 on an exchange? There you go, your coin is worthless and has a market cap of roughly zero as determine by the open market exchange.

> How many people on the open market are going to buy your coin for $1 on an exchange? Even if 1 client per year buy it (let's say my token purpose is to give to access to private content on my website), then my marketcap is still 10^32 $, because marketcap is just the number of supply x the last traded price of my coin. And yes, we both agree, marketcap has 0 value. It was just to make a point that using the marketc…

> Even if 1 client per year buy it

What about the people who try to sell it after buying it? If they have to sell it for 10^-32 $ before someone buys it then that immediately drops your market cap to just about nothing.

> And yes, we both agree, marketcap has 0 value

No, I just explained why marketcap correctly values your coin as absolutely worthless.

Post reply on HN