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It's important to understand that buying cryptocurrency powerfully shapes your beliefs. All incentive systems have this property, and since blockchains give us
by natrius 10y ago
It's important to understand that buying cryptocurrency powerfully shapes your beliefs. All incentive systems have this property, and since blockchains give us the ability to program with scarcity, most blockchain-based applications can shape your beliefs in powerful ways, too. Knowing this, participating in communities who hold the same incentives you do is almost guaranteed to reinforce false beliefs, like the belief that blockchains are useless without Bitcoin. It's a common belief in the Bitcoin community because the whole community is incentivized to believe it and spread that belief.
If you've ever worked in a startup, you'll see the same incentives at work. Everyone holds equity in the company. Everyone is incentivized to believe that equity will be valuable and to convince others—especially new hires—that the equity will be valuable as well. Even when a company is clearly failing, paths to success will be invented, and belief in those paths will be spread.
If you want to think clearly about blockchains, you have to realize that they can make you crazy, no matter how rational of a person you are. It's not a character flaw. It's the human flaw that makes the incentive systems our society is built on actually work.
- beaner 10y agoThere is no evidence that the commenter holds or trades bitcoin, and you also didn't provide any reasons for a blockchain being more valuable than private databases in the contexts he talked about.
- natrius 10y agoName a product that is widely used as a private, shared database and isn't based on blockchains. It was possible to build these things before Bitcoin, but they were uncommon. Now they're common and people call them private blockchains. This same conversation will happen over and over because there are thousands of people who must believe that Bitcoin is special. It is special, just not in all the ways people claim. If the commenter doesn't hold Bitcoin, he's free to deny it. But the comment wasn't about him as an individual. It was about how blockchains make people crazy, including me.
- nadaviv 10y ago> like the belief that blockchains are useless without Bitcoin It would be more accurate to describe the community's attitude as "blockchains are useless without a native currency to incentivize network security", which is definitely correct in my opinion. Having a native currency is crucial for the only true innovation in Bitcoin/blockchain - obtaining distributed consensus among non-trusting peers. The various "blockchains" out there without a native currency cannot achieve this goal, and therefore are not really blockchains [0] in my opinion. [0] "blockchain" is really becoming an empty word nowadays and does not really have a clear definition, so each to his own... for me, "blockchain technology" represents the breakthrough that Satoshi came with - proof-of-work-based distributed consensus. For others, it means an append-only hash-linked data structure, but this existed long before Bitcoin and was possible since forever, and so not very interesting to me.