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?

#361

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:17 PM UTC

etherael wrote: post #341

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe audits and transparency are amongst the tools that can and do improve 'government' / 'democracy'. I can see ways that crypto (in it's old generic sense) can help but I don't particularly see any way that blockchain tech can help though?

Probably much the same way you can see that crypto in its old generic sense could do these things, with the additional security of the applications running on a blockchain, and the assurances about transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability etc. You can have a cryptographically secure platform for whatever governance platform you like, but if it's running on a traditional centralised server infrastruc…

That seems a bit of an unwarranted leap and very hand-wavy.

Why would blockchain be better than a decentralized, non-blockchain tech, hosted in multiple jurisdictions for transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability and so on?

And why is a blockchain a better alternative? If the blockchain assumptions fall (51% control) then it's game over. Even the founding fathers were a step ahead of that and trying to prevent tyranny of the majority (probably code for "the rich staying rich", but that makes it an even better analogy) It all feels a bit like wishful thinking to me.

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

#362

Post by giantg2 » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

mejutoco wrote: post #280

giantg2 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." If your argument is that there could be bugs in the code, then how is this different from the law today? The legal system is rife with abuses and injustices. It most certainly has bugs as-is.

The difference is the judge that applies the law and looks at the context. Not that it is perfect.

You could still have judges looking at the context. The blockchain would only be for the written statutes and code.

Judges can also be incompetent. Just look at how magistrates don't even need a law degree nor pass the Bar.

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

#363

Post by sirsinsalot » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #175

I’ll paste what I wrote in https://cryptologie.net/#article_555 The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order. Bloc…

All that text and still not a single, solid, real world application. Idealistic waffle.

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

#364

Post by tasuki » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

invalidname wrote: post #237

gregwebs wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

Despite all the hype. Very few people use Crypto. It doesn't matter if it's "just" 0.1% what matters is how much do all the banking and credit card systems in the world consume by comparison. I would bet it's less than that. So it's not tenable as a currency. It's also not very valuable as a commodity since it fluctuates too much and has no intrinsic value. It has no value to "disconnect from the banks/government" si…

> what matters is how much do all the banking and credit card systems in the world consume by comparison. I would bet it's less than that.

Thing is, with bitcoin the energy consumption is easily quantifiable and it's a single number. The banking system also uses a lot of energy to heat/cool the employees, builds lots of office buildings, and does many things which could be considered wasteful. It really is a little tricky to compare.

The banking system employs a lot of people. Depending on your point of view, this can be a bad thing (they could be doing something more productive instead!) or a good thing (the people are getting jobs, employment is good!).

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

#365

Post by vitalekj » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

The blockchain prevents double spending without a trusted party--that's its only TECHNOLOGICAL solution.

Where you "are going wrong" (your words--not mine) is not appreciating the value of what SOCIAL solutions can from that, and refusing to accept that these subsequent solutions may be valuable to others for purely non-technical reasons.

---

SOCIAL USE CASE #1: Cryptocurrency

If you're privileged enough to live your whole life without ever being denied access to any degree of financial services, I'm happy for you. However, Satoshi created cryptocurrency at a time when SOCIAL trust in traditional money networks was at its absolute lowest--this context is so important. Cryptocurrency (built on blockchains) offer global financial networks which anybody to participate in, and you are free to form a opinion around how valuable that is to you personally.

SOCIAL USE CASE #2: Permission-less Smart Contracts

If you have a digital payment network wherein anyone can transact, why not create programmable flows around that economic activity? Decentralized financial applications--savings accounts, payment channels, compounding interest, asset swaps, escrow--were all the lowest hanging fruit and so they came first because the network protocol they've been built upon includes a monetary asset natively.

Back in the Web1 days, there was an application called GameSpy. The service provided a way to find a list of community-owned gaming servers that hosted multiplayer sessions for various PC games. Technically speaking, it was the epitome of what the Internet was capable of and it failed because there was no viable monetization strategy for either the middleware or the server hosts that didn't involve centralizing the platform. A web3 version would survive with decentralized coordination, could stream payments to gaming servers, reward players for playing on the platform, and would make a good case for a DAO to provide upkeep of the middleware layer.

SOCIAL USE CASE #3: NFTs

Our lives continue to move towards fully digital experiences, and NFTs are key to commemorating moments in the metaverse.

To be clear: a NFT is a single number (ID index) sitting in a 256-bit address space, which is recorded to belong to some cryptographic data that you keep secret. It MAY have a visual representation you can find with a URL, but that is not a requirement.

---

That's my 2 gwei.

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

#366

Post by jqpabc123 » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

Blockchain is all about eliminating trust in transactions.

For the most part, it doesn't work.

An extremely small number of crypto trades are done without trusting some 3rd party.

For example, what is your crypto worth? Most people trust unregulated crypto exchanges to tell them. Exchanges that can and do engage in minting their own crypto and using it (and other means) to manipulate the "free" market.

Blockchain solves a problem that most people don't have --- it eliminates trust in banks and government --- and replaces it with trust in unregulated exchanges that are free to scam and collude at will.

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

#367

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

kebman wrote: post #236

tsimionescu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were using money online just fine well before Bitcoin, and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority. What exactly makes a dollar or euro less "online/digital" than a bitcoin?

tl;dr: Nothing. But there are some big caveats to that. Sure, we already have tons of currency transactions going on digitally and on-line, but Bitcoin offers something that the centralized entities cannot, and these are (in no particular order): Unconfiscatable: Because nobody can take your bitcoins away from you unless you give away your keys. Regulation resistant: Because nobody can stop you from trading or transa…

None of your examples work as easily as you say.

Unconfiscatable: a judge may order you to hand over your bitcoin, or face jail time for contempt of court etc.

Regulation resistant: see above. Also, depends crucially on anonimity, which doesn't hold up either.

Crime resitance: much worse than digital money, which is insured and much better protected by the state.

Relative privacy: only works for btc-to-btc transactions, or if you spend significant effort. Otherwise, the moment you order somethibg at home using BTC, the entity that you ordered from knows exactly whose wallet this is, and everything else they do or have done with their money.

Corruption resistance: maybe, since privacy is really bad.

And the heyday of people using BTC for actual transactions I think has mostly gone. It used to be that you could buy games on Steam or a Tesla with BTC, but no more.

Note as well that Lightning Network is not BTC - it rarely touches the BTC block chain and offers much weaker guarantees than BTC (in particular, it's easy to double spend on LN if your node is unreliable). And lots of people in El Salvador (the only country that has been crazy enough to do this) are not even using the LN, they are using an app which does most transfers on their own servers, and only used LN for interoperation with other apps.

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

#368

Post by kybernetikos » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #355

kybernetikos wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no external trusted documentation that says what the intention of the code is. No, if someone fraudulently updated a canonical record of ownership, then the legal system can provide remedies. If it were me, I'd write the smart contract to enable corrections in case of a legal decision but that's at the choice of whomever sets up the smart contract that provides the canonical record of ownership. Same situa…

OK, so ... which courts of which legal jurisdictions can correct which contracts? Are courts in Guinea-Bissau allowed to correct contracts between counterparties in the US?

This stuff is all normal when you're dealing with international contracts - it's not like nobody thought of doing international deals before satoshi.

Some of the answers do depend on the specifics of course. If the asset being traded is US real estate for example I would expect the smart contract to be set up so it requires a US court decision to correct the register.

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

#369

Post by tasuki » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:34 PM UTC

yashg wrote: post #164

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/

Please. This one is not even up for debate. Crypto mining is a waste of electricity.

Yes it is. I have a friend who thinks heating his apartment in winter is a waste. He puts on a lot of layers, drinks warm beverages, and exercises to keep warm.

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

#370

Post by vvpan » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

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?

Automatic market makers, Argent, RAI, multi-sig wallets, Baseline Protocol, Helium, FOAM Space, lending, digital ownership (say of in-game items), anonymity (I donate to Russian opposition in crypto only), improved payment UX.