Ask HN: Should I Learn Blockchain?

I am half way learning it, through the MIT lectures. But, most of the reddit is against it. I asked a question on reddit about it and many were against it. I sometimes feel that might me true and what i am learning might me totally useless in the future. Should i really continue or leave it?

Luckily there's a decision framework that can help: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/0*850OATxY...

It's not a very useful data structure, despite all the hype and investment. You'd be better off learning general programming with an emphasis on data structures that are widely used. The book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann is a mind-blowing modern survey of data structures and their applications.

Blockchain technologies are interesting in their own right as the application of math to a perceived problem. But they're even more interesting in how a technology can be hyped beyond belief. And the sociological aspects of how easy it was to convince people to part with their money for a dubious "investment."

I think to understand the human / sociological aspects, you should grok the underlying tech, even if you don't plan to use it. Maybe not at a detailed implementation level. Like understanding how people use ETH to spin up their own coins is a good level of abstraction to understand. (i.e.-why are ETH and BTC different.)

And I would love for all the eCos / Mark Miller / Nick Szabo e-contracts stuff to be useful someday.

Totally depends on your desires! I think what’s cool about the tech is that it touches so many different areas. Ignore the grifters…those happen in any sector (albeit, web3 has definitely had its issues).

Look into the core infrastructure layer. It incorporates generally useful, interesting topics that are hard problems to solve, including: computer science, cryptography, game theory, distributed systems, p2p networks, finance (tokenomics), social engineering, etc. There’s a lot you can learn from that alone, and you can always apply it elsewhere. Plus, most of the industry is open source, which helps with the learning aspect.

The more interesting protocols and applications imo are in the “DePIN” space (physical infra networks), which take advantage of web3’s permissionless nature (open identity framework with cryptographic, payments, consensus-based rules, run your own nodes, etc.). These can be built on top of chains like Ethereum or totally standalone blockchains. Plenty of companies are building things like decentralized satellite imaging, weather data, compute, storage, IoT, renewables, etc. Admittedly, it’s still very early; the user/dev experience is subpar, but abstractions will continue to improve things (e.g., no common user should need to worry about private keys).

The difference here with traditional web2 infra is that web3’s incentivized p2p network allows applications to take more of a crowdsourced approach, in a sense. Users can contribute but also earn for their contributions through protocol fees or reward mechanisms, which helps scale a protocol itself while—in the long term—changing how data moves on the internet.

Also—slight tangent, but calling blockchains a database is a misnomer. For example, Ethereum is a global state machine that provides shared state & execution, allowing anyone to run arbitrary programs on it. There is definitely (expensive) data storage as part of this, so you can only store a limited amount of data using smart contracts. Also, databases process data a bit differently and more efficiently. The native query features for blockchains (RPC calls) are nothing like that of a database (e.g., SQL), to the point where new networks on top of blockchains are built solely for indexing and querying that data (Tableland, The Graph, etc.).

And of course—there are other benefits like censorship resistance, but the tech itself is more intriguing!