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Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

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Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#361

Post by logicalmonster »

ShamelessC wrote: post #297
logicalmonster wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof of work combined with the deflationary nature of these currencies is literally the antithesis of efficiency. 1) First of all, are we discussing crypto as a currency or blockchains as a technology? Your criticisms seem all over the place here. 2) Maybe talking negatively about the dangers of deflationary currencies while we're in a period of economic inflation and peoples' purchasing power is being deliberatel…

> If an oracle relies on a single source of truth (centralized), that can lead to issues: the data source can be hacked in a man-in-the-middle attack, or altered by its owner, in order to sway smart contracts. Decentralized oracles (consensus oracles) increase the reliability of the information provided to smart contracts by querying multiple data sources, thus distributing trust between participants. However, this d…

If this is a topic you're curious about, look into some of Sergey Nazarov's interviews and/or pay attention to the topic of "cryptoeconomic security" in relation to oracles. Basically the idea is to have a system where the cost of corrupting the information on a network is always far more than the potential gain. Whether or not this is possible or will succeed is a question mark, but I'd think many potential objections and question marks have been addressed.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#362

Post by dorgo »

jstnwill wrote: post #264
jonwalch wrote: post #18

I find it strange that people keep promoting that YouTube documentary. Ignoring tone issues, there is a lot of cherry picking and other logical fallacies. For example, he talks about how terrible Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. It seems to me that people that do an hour of re…

I argue that the whole blockchain approach is a solution designed for the needs of the early adopter... and is just seeking a mass market problem to solve. I reach this conclusion, not as a cynic, but as a skeptical advocate. I ask everyone I can this line of question and have yet to get an answer that doesn't involve magical thinking. Question: Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that c…

>Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do?

My opinion: The problem is not that traditional technology can't provide the same value. It could, but it doesn't. The world is still in the process of mapping all societal/legal/finacial rules and procedures to a digital framework. In germany it is called "digitalization". And (at least) germany mostly sucks at doing this. In a way, blockchains provide a playground to explore possibilities no traditional framework i know of does.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#364

Post by yrral »

arcticbull wrote: post #119
yrral wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer is pretty straight-forward. Every time we tried this before it collapsed into a giant ball of flame. This is availability heuristic. Many financial innovations work out well and power everything we do today without a second thought. Credit cards, internet banking, mobile banking, etc etc etc. Should we ban all financial innovations because a subset can cause collapse? For stablecoins, the difference here…

> This is availability heuristic. Many financial innovations work out well and power everything we do today without a second thought. Credit cards, internet banking, mobile banking, etc etc etc. Should we ban all financial innovations because a subset can cause collapse? All of these tools are strictly regulated specifically to avoid that collapse. Because we learned from when they collapsed before not to let them ru…

> All of these tools are strictly regulated specifically to avoid that collapse. Because we learned from when they collapsed before not to let them run wild and do whatever they wanted because it's a bad time.

But regulations didn't come before the credit card did right? Only after they were invented were regulations built. Let builders build.

> Only some fraction of the data is open.

We're talking past each other here. I'm talking about a subset of algorithmic stablecoins

> They're not good investments because they're overpriced, but they're not zero-sum. They have customers and the intrinsic value of the shares increases (ideally) through dividends, buybacks and capital reinvestment over time.

They're not zero sum. AMC, GME do not make money, so profits don't cover corporate expenses. They are quickly bleeding money.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#365

Post by spopejoy »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #257
thisisbrians wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite example of late is http://royal.io . You can purchase a token (NFT) that represents fractional ownership in the licensing rights of a musician's song or album, and also comes along with other perks (such as free or discounted merch and concert tickets). The proceeds from the NFT sales help fund the artist's project, and then you participate in the upside by receiving a share of royalties for holding the t…

Thanks for the reply. Royal looks interesting, but I may be missing why an NFT is needed for this. Fractional ownership was existed for a long time before crypto. What does the part NFT provide?

NFT for this use-case provides

- the uncorruptible chain of custody. While it's well known for decades that "just a database" would solve ASCAP/BMI robbing countless artists because "it's too hard to track them down", they're not going to do it. A royalty is meaningless if there's no mechanism to enforce it, and an autonomous one is simply superior. If you're then going to say "but I could do that with XYZ" then now the rhetorical burden is yours to explain to me why it NEVER caught on.

- fractional ownership is a doodad, but a particularly hard doodad to set up, especially alongside a royalty mechanism. Once again "but you can do that with" -- what? A Delaware corp? With specialized technology? Some combination of buggy lambdas on AWS? And _how_ are you going to offer this to artists and still make money?

NFT for royalties just makes sense. It's no wonder it's not making anywhere near the money that art NFTs do -- but that's art: you'd have to look far and wide to find a more contemptible and corrupted marketplace than fine art. It's no wonder they like crypto :)

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#366

Post by spopejoy »

scott_s wrote: post #133
thisisbrians wrote: post #117

Your assessment of affairs is drenched in obvious bias. The downsides of these new technologies get plenty of airtime (your post included), but completely fail to acknowledge the genuine and useful innovations that are now possible (yes, there are many). Why was there no similar outcry from the technology community over the invention and proliferation of machine learning? It can be used for good or evil (there are pl…

BitCoin is 13 years old. The blockchain is not a new technology, and it is not extremely early days. We have over a decade of people trying to use blockchain and cryptocurrencies to solve real problems - and not just from startups, but also from large, international tech companies with research divisions. They have tried to use blockchain to solve real problems, and they have failed.

Bitcoin is also a laughably primitive blockchain, and Ethereum is holding back potential applications with it's innumerable flaws. You're right that "it's not early" as crypto hasn't been able to progress as fast as other tech because it's being hampered by its own success, in the time-honored worse-is-better tradition.

Blockchains are unusual tech in that it's strangely hard to upgrade them. In 2017-18 it was a common belief that some Bitcoin fork would "win" and become the "real Bitcoin", under the moniker "it's not the network, it's the ledger". Turns out it _is_ the network AND the ledger, unfortunately.

However, I maintain that the technology is still _immature_ and in that sense "it's still early": there is still some extremely low-hanging fruit in scalability, safe computing and cryptography that Bitcoin/Eth can't touch. BTC and ETH can absolutely be dethroned with better tech just like other giants that seemed unstoppable at the time.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#367

Post by scrubs »

slater wrote: post #229
blunte wrote: post #220

> the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes With this statement the author shows bias and a lack of serious interest in discussion. Indeed most cryptocurrency projects are frankly illegitimate, but certainly not all.

Which are which?

Yah, which? And why?

A needlessly open ended statement when multiplied by -1 yields the same nonsense just with a different sign. Right?

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#368

Post by brian_cloutier »

SebastianKra wrote: post #306
brian_cloutier wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filecoin offers an S3-like service for a radically lower price: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back... You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.

I don't get it. Why does this need crypto to work? From what I've seen, its an auction to provide a service. Why would I ask my neighbour to host data, rather than two or three expert companies that understand backups, power- and temperature requirements?

I'll start by saying it doesn't matter whether you get it. The GP made a claim that there is no use for the technology which is not a scam. But people, today, are using filecoin to store files and are not being scammed. It doesn't matter whether you personally would want to use Filecoin; the point I'm trying to make is that claims of the form "the entire space is a giant scam" are simply false.

But I'll also try to answer your new question: You're right that it's just an auction to provide a service, but crypto enables the auction!

S3 can charge such high margins because they're a trusted brand, the chance they'll lose my data is much lower than the chance I'll lose my own data, but this makes it hard for anyone else to enter the market without spending a lot of time proving themselves. Filecoin includes fancy cryptography and incentive schemes which, if you trust them, allow you to trust any storage provider using Filecoin.

Crypto payments means that anybody, anywhere in the world, can participate in the auction without spending any time negotiating contracts or setting payment rails. They can turn their computer on and start storing files.

This turns file storage into a commodity service and allows you to store your files for commodity prices, that's an incredible win!

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#369

Post by brian_cloutier »

300bps wrote: post #335
brian_cloutier wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchains are not immutable because nothing made of matter is immutable. If you wanted something to be immutably published you probably want to get it into a major print newspaper; it would be extremely difficult to find and destroy every single copy of the WSJ for 2022-01-28. Even that is not immutable though, finding and destroying every single copy is possible . Hopefully you agree that it is nice to have the wo…

You seem to be assuming that I am making the mistake of robotically defining the word "immutable" to some impossible level of unchanging. I assure you I am not. I am simply pointing out the ridiculousness of someone stating that blockchains are immutable when they are changeable and have changed. In contrast, your example of snatching up every copy of a major print newspaper for a single day has never happened and wi…

You've been kind enough to make a testable prediction here! Let me make it a little more concrete. Currently Bitcoin block 700000 has the hash 0000000000000000000590fc0f3eba193a278534220b2b37e9849e1a770ca959, I'm very confident that 5 years from now it will have the same hash. What do you think is the chance that history will have been rewritten?
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