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It's those fat Goldman Sachs paydays. No, here you go, actual reasons: * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along t

It's those fat Goldman Sachs paydays. No, here you go, actual reasons: * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative. * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.) * Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself. * Bitcoin ideology, which has carried through to its descendants, is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong". * Cryptocurrency advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone. * Cryptocurrency advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or - best of all - suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted. * Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise. * Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case. * Literally everything about smart contracts is bad. The DAO (and the fallout from the DAO, i.e. smart contracts are inviolate until the moment the whales might lose money) should have conclusively buried the idea and I'm still amazed it didn't. * Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service. * I feel like it.

sayurichick 10y ago
what about the silk road? I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie. I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Quite a lot of local dealers get their merchandise from darknets in bulk. I doubt it's made a huge difference to the conventional supply chains, though - there really just isn't that much volume in cryptos.
heliumcraft 10y ago
Thank you for your reply. Personally I despise the currency aspect and 'get-rich-quick' types that plague the space. However, not everyone is into blockchain tech for those reasons. I personally I got into Bitcoin and later Ethereum due to what happened to wikileaks.org A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. I have been fascinated ever since on how to create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible, and while Ethereum is not quite there, it's making progress torwards it, specially the upcoming release of its domain system and decentralized storage.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  WikiLeaks being cut off struck me as a powerful use case for Bitcoin too. The "decentralised storage" - do you mean IPFS? So far it looks a lot like BitTorrent entirely on magnet: links, but not as good.
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    By decentralized storage I mean ipfs, ethereums own swarm( https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/15/swarm-alpha-public-pilot-basics-swarm/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/15/swarm-alpha-public-pilo... ), maidsafe, storj, etc.. IPFS is quite popular in the Ethereum comunity (since swarm was delayed), it does need an incentivation layer which they will be implementing soon last I checked. I have no ilusions that all these techs will need to be battletested and might even have flaws, but they are a step in the right direction.
_coldfire 10y ago
I'd call myself an enthusiast and would disagree on a few things, can agree the hype and scams are out of control. Seems like there's an ICO every 2 weeks, selling unfinished products with little demonstrated purpose other than adding a blockchain to something. There's a deep misunderstanding in some parts of the community about what a distributed ledger is good at doing. Some counter-points though: >Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" BTC was $20 in 2013 and under $400 at the start of 2016. >Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies >disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level Immutable peer-to-peer ledgers have numerous use-cases, currency was the low hanging fruit. Put an Ubuntu iso checksum or your PGP key into the blockchain, its there for everyone to see, uncensorable and immutable, now compare that to hosting the checksum on the same server as the iso. All the computing resources in the world can't change the bitcoin blockchain, so while the energy usage claim has some merit, the thermodynamics of undoing all that hashing provides the security in a trustless environment. And people won't use Bitcoin if its unsecure. On top of that miners have concentrated in places where energy is cheap and plentiful, the big ones strike deals with electricity providers to soak up excess transient electricity from renewables at very cheap prices.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  >Immutable peer-to-peer ledgers have numerous use-cases And that's why we have git. The only good bit is the Merkle trees, which were invented in 1979. ("Why yes, Mr Buzzwordsusceptible Uppermgt, we've been using blockchain technologies for years! Even before Bitcoin was invented!" i.e. git has Merkle trees in) Seriously, I've been looking into "business blockchain". There are zero use cases except for the Merkle trees. I commend to you this blog post from the R3 project: https://www.r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distributed-ledger-designed-for-financial-services https://www.r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-d... It details why every aspect of Bitcoin and its clones was designed to do the opposite of what financial services want. The punchline is that R3 Corda, their "blockchain" product, does not in its default configuration ... contain a blockchain.
  - reddytowns 10y ago

sayurichick 10y ago

what about the silk road? I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie. I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.

davidgerard 10y ago
Quite a lot of local dealers get their merchandise from darknets in bulk. I doubt it's made a huge difference to the conventional supply chains, though - there really just isn't that much volume in cryptos.

heliumcraft 10y ago

Thank you for your reply. Personally I despise the currency aspect and 'get-rich-quick' types that plague the space. However, not everyone is into blockchain tech for those reasons. I personally I got into Bitcoin and later Ethereum due to what happened to wikileaks.org A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. I have been fascinated ever since on how to create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible, and while Ethereum is not quite there, it's making progress torwards it, specially the upcoming release of its domain system and decentralized storage.

davidgerard 10y ago
WikiLeaks being cut off struck me as a powerful use case for Bitcoin too. The "decentralised storage" - do you mean IPFS? So far it looks a lot like BitTorrent entirely on magnet: links, but not as good.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  By decentralized storage I mean ipfs, ethereums own swarm( https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/15/swarm-alpha-public-pilot-basics-swarm/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/15/swarm-alpha-public-pilo... ), maidsafe, storj, etc.. IPFS is quite popular in the Ethereum comunity (since swarm was delayed), it does need an incentivation layer which they will be implementing soon last I checked. I have no ilusions that all these techs will need to be battletested and might even have flaws, but they are a step in the right direction.

_coldfire 10y ago

I'd call myself an enthusiast and would disagree on a few things, can agree the hype and scams are out of control. Seems like there's an ICO every 2 weeks, selling unfinished products with little demonstrated purpose other than adding a blockchain to something. There's a deep misunderstanding in some parts of the community about what a distributed ledger is good at doing. Some counter-points though: >Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" BTC was $20 in 2013 and under $400 at the start of 2016. >Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies >disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level Immutable peer-to-peer ledgers have numerous use-cases, currency was the low hanging fruit. Put an Ubuntu iso checksum or your PGP key into the blockchain, its there for everyone to see, uncensorable and immutable, now compare that to hosting the checksum on the same server as the iso. All the computing resources in the world can't change the bitcoin blockchain, so while the energy usage claim has some merit, the thermodynamics of undoing all that hashing provides the security in a trustless environment. And people won't use Bitcoin if its unsecure. On top of that miners have concentrated in places where energy is cheap and plentiful, the big ones strike deals with electricity providers to soak up excess transient electricity from renewables at very cheap prices.

davidgerard 10y ago
>Immutable peer-to-peer ledgers have numerous use-cases And that's why we have git. The only good bit is the Merkle trees, which were invented in 1979. ("Why yes, Mr Buzzwordsusceptible Uppermgt, we've been using blockchain technologies for years! Even before Bitcoin was invented!" i.e. git has Merkle trees in) Seriously, I've been looking into "business blockchain". There are zero use cases except for the Merkle trees. I commend to you this blog post from the R3 project: https://www.r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distributed-ledger-designed-for-financial-services https://www.r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-d... It details why every aspect of Bitcoin and its clones was designed to do the opposite of what financial services want. The punchline is that R3 Corda, their "blockchain" product, does not in its default configuration ... contain a blockchain.
- reddytowns 10y ago