Bitcoin is an immutable ledger of ... kWh wasted on calculating hashes.
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
61–70 of 202 posts
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#62More bad takes from people who don't understand the point of Bitcoin and its blockchain. It's all so... tiresome. The fact that the author is comparing to services like Venmo or PayPal really goes to show how much they don't understand about what Bitcoin was built to achieve. Also goes to show that people like the author should also check their financial privilege: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-finan…
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How does crypto solve that problem? Bitcoin has had a 1 year minimum of $30,000 and a maximum of $68,000. Etherium has had a 1 year minimum of $1200 and a 1 year maximum of $4800. I don't know about you but putting all my savings into a "currency" that is so volatile. "Stablecoins" don't seem all that stable either. Plus you have the high cost of transactions for many of these "currencys".
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#63More bad takes from people who don't understand the point of Bitcoin and its blockchain. It's all so... tiresome. The fact that the author is comparing to services like Venmo or PayPal really goes to show how much they don't understand about what Bitcoin was built to achieve. Also goes to show that people like the author should also check their financial privilege: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-finan…
Tbf, blockchain is the dark matter of technology. People are never allowed to criticize it without the same, repeated feedback “If that’s what you think blockchain is, then you don’t understand it.” Why doesn’t someone, then, who actually understands their almighty blockchain god, illuminate us, mere mortals, on the wonders of blockchain and how it can be good for society in the foreseeable future. You know what’s re…
> Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros.
the issue is that we show the things being made and hn calls them all scams and ponzis and fraud.
we show the rates adoption, and the growth in use and hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal.
we point out that crypto is in many ways doing better than other industries to represent marginalized communities and we all get labelled cryptobros and any of us who arent that get erased from the picture.
if we post anything positive linking to a twitter account that account starts getting endless abuse.
there are very few people who bother coming to hn anymore, pretty much everyone working in the space has given up on it.
We have automated stable currencies, permission-less loans and lending, streaming payments, UBI experiments, co-ops governing land use, automated taxation and public goods funding experiments, sybil resistance mechanisms for 1p1v governance, resilient p2p infrastructure that people are using every day to pay each other and run their businesses. Composability for all of these things to quickly build your own business logic on top of it. Standards for tokenising royalties/payments/tickets... All running on p2p infrastructure anyone can participate in. Thats pretty amazing imo.
At what point will what we've been building be considered useful? If you took any of these things and wrap it in a saas startup connected to stripe hn would eat it up and claim its the greatest startup of the decade. but because its built on crypto it can only ever be world destroying disaster capitalist alt-right incubating cartoon villain fraudulent vc led scammers right? its just so tiring.
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#64This article contains the best explanation of what a blockchain is that I have ever seen: A blockchain is a specific data structure: a linear transaction log, typically replicated by computers whose owners (called miners) are rewarded for logging new transactions. There are two things that are cool about this particular data structure. One is that a change in any block invalidates every block after it, which means th…
With a caveat for hard forks and attacks using large amounts of mining power.
vitalik buterin has entered the room
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#65More bad takes from people who don't understand the point of Bitcoin and its blockchain. It's all so... tiresome. The fact that the author is comparing to services like Venmo or PayPal really goes to show how much they don't understand about what Bitcoin was built to achieve. Also goes to show that people like the author should also check their financial privilege: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-finan…
Tbf, blockchain is the dark matter of technology. People are never allowed to criticize it without the same, repeated feedback “If that’s what you think blockchain is, then you don’t understand it.” Why doesn’t someone, then, who actually understands their almighty blockchain god, illuminate us, mere mortals, on the wonders of blockchain and how it can be good for society in the foreseeable future. You know what’s re…
Blockchain is being used in supply chains (IBM tradelens) for immutable record keeping, NFT's (outside of selling URLs to jpgs...) are a good application for certificates of authenticity (some artists are selling their NFTs WITH a physical copy and using the NFT as the certificate of authenticity).
Any application where you need an immutable ledger is a good application for blockchain. Just because crypto enthuisiasts are trying to shoe horn this technology into anything and everything doesn't mean the above isn't true.
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Criticisms are okay, but this isn't a good criticism. From the article: > Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Yet after I wrote an article last December saying bitcoin had no use, someone responded that Venmo and Paypal are raking in consumers’ money and people should switch to bitcoin. Not everyone has access to Venmo or PayPal. For instance, sex wo…
My company operates in a highly international business area. The whole industry is moving towards using crypto for B2B payments. Every provider and partner offers payment by crypto - because international bank payments are slow, expensive and complicated (gets stuck, countries blocked, unclear KYC etc, opaque AML blockers etc).
except those KYC and AML laws still apply to the companies making the transfers. And some of the regulators are extremely aggressive in their enforcement.
so your company either has to set up its own KYC/AML compliance department (noting that this is often a regulated profession) or it is probably breaking the law.
International bank payments are slow, but they are also reversible and compliance is not your problem.
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#67Let's be real. The vast majority of pro-cryptocurrency arguments break down to something like this: "I have Bitcoin, I want it to become the currency of the future so that the price will go up an I will become rich. Here are $reasons why that should become true, which all my fellow Bitcoin hodlers agree are very good reasons". We are now many years past not only the creation of Bitcoin but also past it going "mainstr…
> All the interest in Bitcoin is in the price going up.
For years I have been interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies for what they are technically and what they could enable, not what profit I can make. There are certainly others like me.
There's some really fascinating stuff being worked on in the cryptocurrency community, things like ZK-SNARKS or automated market makers. The original bitcoin paper is at the very least an interesting and novel solution to the double spend problem.
I think I could make a similar argument to yours about how the vast majority of people in the hackernews community are just there because they want to become rich. Or perhaps how the vast majority of anti-cryptocurrency arguments break down to soemthing like "I didn't buy bitcoin, so I don't want it to become the currency of the future since I will have missed out on being rich". There are elements of truth to both of those, but they're both pretty uninteresting takes on an interesting topic.
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#68"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve." - Satoshi Nakamoto - 1721 Mississippi…
Satoshi vanished more than a decade ago. He didn't get to comment on what became of his creation.
The current state is:
* Bitcoin (BTC) development is driven by a very small development team.
* Main discussion spaces (eg, /r/bitcoin) are owned by a small team.
* NFTs are almost exclusively sold on centralized marketplaces with the capability of banning a NFT from it if they don't like it.
* Miners aggregated into something like a dozen relevant mining pools.
* The main way of obtaining BTC is at large, centralized exchanges. Who often hold your balance in a database and not in the blockchain, because BTC transactions are expensive.
Yup, he completely fixed it. Rather than trusting an elected government in BTC people put their trust in whoever now gets to commit to the github repo.
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#69>>Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Is the author really unaware of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts? Articles like this want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own mone…
> There is no other conceivable reason why
Perhaps there is no other reason you can (or are willing to) conceive, but that does not make it fact.
A major issue with cryptocurrency and blockchain discussions is that vocal proponents speak as if they’re arbiters of truth with perfect knowledge of the the world and everyone who doesn’t subscribe to their view is an envious dunce. They speak in insults and talking points and seem to be more interested in sounding superior than having a conversation.
Humility and openness to be wrong are sorely lacking, but both are needed for a good-faith dialogue.
Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
#70More bad takes from people who don't understand the point of Bitcoin and its blockchain. It's all so... tiresome. The fact that the author is comparing to services like Venmo or PayPal really goes to show how much they don't understand about what Bitcoin was built to achieve. Also goes to show that people like the author should also check their financial privilege: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-finan…
Tbf, blockchain is the dark matter of technology. People are never allowed to criticize it without the same, repeated feedback “If that’s what you think blockchain is, then you don’t understand it.” Why doesn’t someone, then, who actually understands their almighty blockchain god, illuminate us, mere mortals, on the wonders of blockchain and how it can be good for society in the foreseeable future. You know what’s re…
with money everyone has an agenda.
the biggest thing i've seen from blockchain is the emergence of stablecoins.
we will definitely see digital currencies being normalised globally.
but since bitcoin doesn't have any central authority it's not really fair to conflate the purpose/value of btc, blockchain tech with idea of cryptobros/scams/ponzis.