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>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/87801883904416153

>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.

nihonde 9y ago
I guess it's not surprising that untrustworthy people would flock to technologies that eliminate the need for trust.
- rpod 9y ago
  It's not necessarily the people who can benefit from a trustless network that cloud the ecosystem, it's shady people who want in on the hype solely to make money and apply blockchain to every conceivable use case just for the sake of applying blockchain. It's the kind of people who are an expert on fintech, blockchain, AI/machine learning and IoT all at the same time and seem to use the terms interchangeably.
- duxup 9y ago
  Anonymous and irreversible transactions help too.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy. The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
- darawk 9y ago
  There are solutions to that though, like Proof of Stake. If distributed systems really cared about that, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on blockchains, to make them more efficient.
  - EnFinlay 9y ago
    Just because people care about efficiency doesn't mean they ought to work on something that lacks it.
    - darawk 9y ago
      I think that's exactly what it means. If you want to help the environment right now, what field should you be in? Energy generation, storage, or consumption.
  - Taek 9y ago
    Most of the bitcoin researchers have thoroughly convinced themselves that Proof of Stake is not achievable with acceptable levels of security, and for good reason. The reason you don't see more active research on Proof-of-Stake is that it is thought to only lead to dead ends.
    - billmalarky 9y ago
      The Ethereum team is serious about proof of stake.
      - indigochill 9y ago
        Ethereum has not shown a particularly strong track record when it comes to security, so I think the comment stands until they address that or get replaced by the next hotness.
        patmcguire 9y ago
shepardrtc 9y ago
That's not true for all companies. Take Ripple or Coinbase, for example. Both have worked from the beginning to be legit. Ripple's various technologies (including their currency) are being adopted by banks across the world. And Coinbase has worked with the Feds from the beginning to make sure they were complying with regulations. Granted there are a lot of bad actors in crypto, but there are good ones, too.
problems 9y ago
The tech is legit for its application - but for many other purposes its very much not. It's being thrown around as a buzzword.
Taek 9y ago
> The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. I can't disagree too much about the immaturity, but you don't see too much more of that in the deeper technical circles than you might see on the Linux mailing list. Room for improvement? Plenty. But it's also not grossly out of line as long as you are in the right places. The 'unwelcoming' bit though is more justified. Blockchain design is like cryptography - security is very important, and one tiny mistake means that your design is completely unviable. And if that tiny mistake occurred early in your design process, it may be too deep to be easily routed around. Designing secure blockchains is very hard. As a result, the first year or so you try to improve on blockchain systems you usually end up with a bunch of broken stuff that nobody appreciates at all. The same is true if you are trying to make a better hashing algorithm, or doing quantum resistant cryptography. Except with blockchains people haven't learned to expect it to be this difficult to innovate yet, so it feels a lot more hostile. That will fix with time. As more things blow up in production, people are realizing more and more that blockchains are tricky, and that good designs take a lot of expertise, a lot of collaboration, and are very rare. That will make it seem less unwelcoming when your intro to blockchains is 'well, this thing you are proposing doesn't work for at least 10 reasons, and here they are...'
random3 9y ago
Anything that's related to profits and democratized will attract all kinds of characters. Democratization lowers the barrier and profits provide the incentive. The choice to corner cryptocurrencies and choose to see the shady characters in this combination is an artificial one based on what you can and choose to "see". The same shady characters are in finance, fund raising, and perhaps around your desk. They may be less obvious or you may be more tolerant towards the corporate backstabber, but they're still there.
KirinDave 9y ago
It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-anarcho-capitalists-type folks, which can be terribly tedious to deal with. For example, ask a btc engineer if they have byzantine fault tolerance. Then ask anyone else. Ask them if they have eventual consistency. Then ask anyone else.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    Pessimistically yes, but in my opinion its problems are magnified. In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      Some would say that the "wisdom of the crowd" and startups are things that so many people ascribed special superpowers to, it brought in a lot of people that normally wouldn't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
      - KirinDave 9y ago
        That's cool, but how is it relevant?
fokinsean 9y ago
> You just can't trust anyone Isn't that one of the reasons blockchain came to existence? I know you aren't using that in the same context, it just sounded funny in my head :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jliptzin 9y ago
This is true of any new burgeoning technology. Were you around for the Internet boom in the 90s?
- jethro_tell 9y ago
  I keep hearing this is like the internet from 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, there was no good way to do ecommerce or send an email. Today, there is a good way to pay for things and do all financial transactions in a simple low hastle way. The internet was sending instant, asyncronious communication vs letters (async) or phone (instant). Bitcoin is creating phone calls and post mail in the email age and using a metal envelope as an upgrade. Yeah I sent my first emails to a system that connected to neighboring systems via modem at a pre determined time to ftp mail bundles around.
  - jliptzin 9y ago
    I was talking about how scam artists flocked to the internet with pyramid schemes, chain emails, get rich quick schemes, etc. All that stuff is still here, but it's drowned out by people doing actual normal business now.
edge17 9y ago
I've spent a decent amount of time understanding blockchain at this point. Am I wrong in saying that it's really just a data structure for solving a problem (like a tree or array), but a lot of the hype seems to be people trying to find commercial applications to use the specific data structure? I mean, no one says 'lets go find a good use for an array,' you sort of pick the array after you have an idea
- jtmarmon 9y ago
  It's an approach to solving a problem that allows problems to be solved in totally new ways. I think it's understandable to be on a search for opportunities to apply it. The problem it seems to me is that, although the idea of trustless systems seem really cool and applicable to a lot of domains, it turns out that there are actually way fewer useful applications than people originally thought. But no one is letting go, and a lot of people are wrongly convincing themselves and others that most systems are better off trustless.
- tylersmith 9y ago
  Yes the blockchain is just a data structure. A fancy tree. The more interesting part of cryptocurrencies are the dynamic membership multiparty signature schemes they implement, but those don't make for as nice of soundbites.

nihonde 9y ago

I guess it's not surprising that untrustworthy people would flock to technologies that eliminate the need for trust.

rpod 9y ago
It's not necessarily the people who can benefit from a trustless network that cloud the ecosystem, it's shady people who want in on the hype solely to make money and apply blockchain to every conceivable use case just for the sake of applying blockchain. It's the kind of people who are an expert on fintech, blockchain, AI/machine learning and IoT all at the same time and seem to use the terms interchangeably.
duxup 9y ago
Anonymous and irreversible transactions help too.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy. The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.

darawk 9y ago
There are solutions to that though, like Proof of Stake. If distributed systems really cared about that, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on blockchains, to make them more efficient.
- EnFinlay 9y ago
  Just because people care about efficiency doesn't mean they ought to work on something that lacks it.
  - darawk 9y ago
    I think that's exactly what it means. If you want to help the environment right now, what field should you be in? Energy generation, storage, or consumption.
- Taek 9y ago
  Most of the bitcoin researchers have thoroughly convinced themselves that Proof of Stake is not achievable with acceptable levels of security, and for good reason. The reason you don't see more active research on Proof-of-Stake is that it is thought to only lead to dead ends.
  - billmalarky 9y ago
    The Ethereum team is serious about proof of stake.
    - indigochill 9y ago
      Ethereum has not shown a particularly strong track record when it comes to security, so I think the comment stands until they address that or get replaced by the next hotness.
      - patmcguire 9y ago

shepardrtc 9y ago

That's not true for all companies. Take Ripple or Coinbase, for example. Both have worked from the beginning to be legit. Ripple's various technologies (including their currency) are being adopted by banks across the world. And Coinbase has worked with the Feds from the beginning to make sure they were complying with regulations. Granted there are a lot of bad actors in crypto, but there are good ones, too.

problems 9y ago

The tech is legit for its application - but for many other purposes its very much not. It's being thrown around as a buzzword.

Taek 9y ago

> The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. I can't disagree too much about the immaturity, but you don't see too much more of that in the deeper technical circles than you might see on the Linux mailing list. Room for improvement? Plenty. But it's also not grossly out of line as long as you are in the right places. The 'unwelcoming' bit though is more justified. Blockchain design is like cryptography - security is very important, and one tiny mistake means that your design is completely unviable. And if that tiny mistake occurred early in your design process, it may be too deep to be easily routed around. Designing secure blockchains is very hard. As a result, the first year or so you try to improve on blockchain systems you usually end up with a bunch of broken stuff that nobody appreciates at all. The same is true if you are trying to make a better hashing algorithm, or doing quantum resistant cryptography. Except with blockchains people haven't learned to expect it to be this difficult to innovate yet, so it feels a lot more hostile. That will fix with time. As more things blow up in production, people are realizing more and more that blockchains are tricky, and that good designs take a lot of expertise, a lot of collaboration, and are very rare. That will make it seem less unwelcoming when your intro to blockchains is 'well, this thing you are proposing doesn't work for at least 10 reasons, and here they are...'

random3 9y ago

Anything that's related to profits and democratized will attract all kinds of characters. Democratization lowers the barrier and profits provide the incentive. The choice to corner cryptocurrencies and choose to see the shady characters in this combination is an artificial one based on what you can and choose to "see". The same shady characters are in finance, fund raising, and perhaps around your desk. They may be less obvious or you may be more tolerant towards the corporate backstabber, but they're still there.

KirinDave 9y ago

It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-anarcho-capitalists-type folks, which can be terribly tedious to deal with. For example, ask a btc engineer if they have byzantine fault tolerance. Then ask anyone else. Ask them if they have eventual consistency. Then ask anyone else.

stcredzero 9y ago
It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Pessimistically yes, but in my opinion its problems are magnified. In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Some would say that the "wisdom of the crowd" and startups are things that so many people ascribed special superpowers to, it brought in a lot of people that normally wouldn't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      That's cool, but how is it relevant?

fokinsean 9y ago

> You just can't trust anyone Isn't that one of the reasons blockchain came to existence? I know you aren't using that in the same context, it just sounded funny in my head :)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jliptzin 9y ago

This is true of any new burgeoning technology. Were you around for the Internet boom in the 90s?

jethro_tell 9y ago
I keep hearing this is like the internet from 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, there was no good way to do ecommerce or send an email. Today, there is a good way to pay for things and do all financial transactions in a simple low hastle way. The internet was sending instant, asyncronious communication vs letters (async) or phone (instant). Bitcoin is creating phone calls and post mail in the email age and using a metal envelope as an upgrade. Yeah I sent my first emails to a system that connected to neighboring systems via modem at a pre determined time to ftp mail bundles around.
- jliptzin 9y ago
  I was talking about how scam artists flocked to the internet with pyramid schemes, chain emails, get rich quick schemes, etc. All that stuff is still here, but it's drowned out by people doing actual normal business now.

edge17 9y ago

I've spent a decent amount of time understanding blockchain at this point. Am I wrong in saying that it's really just a data structure for solving a problem (like a tree or array), but a lot of the hype seems to be people trying to find commercial applications to use the specific data structure? I mean, no one says 'lets go find a good use for an array,' you sort of pick the array after you have an idea

jtmarmon 9y ago
It's an approach to solving a problem that allows problems to be solved in totally new ways. I think it's understandable to be on a search for opportunities to apply it. The problem it seems to me is that, although the idea of trustless systems seem really cool and applicable to a lot of domains, it turns out that there are actually way fewer useful applications than people originally thought. But no one is letting go, and a lot of people are wrongly convincing themselves and others that most systems are better off trustless.
tylersmith 9y ago
Yes the blockchain is just a data structure. A fancy tree. The more interesting part of cryptocurrencies are the dynamic membership multiparty signature schemes they implement, but those don't make for as nice of soundbites.