7 ms·

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "i

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train. - low tx rate? not for long - high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake). - high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. not everyone needs to run a full node (but anyone can). - no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow. openbazaar does this very nicely If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes.

zilian 9y ago
Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.
- endymi0n 9y ago
  Confirmation Bias at work. You're invested, so you want it to take off. Yet none of those blockchain enthusiasts could tell me a single USP that blockchains had over storage in a normal database on any concrete use case, with the sole exception of cryptocurrencies. And the reason is simple: all those applications have none of the properties and problems the blockchain solves - which is an elegant niche solution tailor made for mutually mistrusting entities working together on a distributed ledger. That barely exists in real life. Centralized systems are what you want in 99% of cases. They're more reliable, better controlled, have infinitely more throughput and usually, you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions (fraud, mistakes, etc.) Sure, you could store anything in a blockchain. Sure, something yada yada blockchain could "replace Netflix". It's just that apparently nobody can tell me _why_. My only concern right now is that I can't short Blockchain technology because the relation of hype to actual usefulness and potential is so incredibly large that it will drag a big chunk of the tech sector down the drain. In stark contrast to AI which is just as hyped, but isn't just supposed to "change everything" since years - it's actually starting to do so on a spectacular timeline.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    > you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions Yup, refunds are the basis of customer service.
    - josh2600 9y ago
      Ok look, I have a stake here because I run a crypto fund but let's just be clear: in the beginning of money, refunds involved going to the person you wanted a refund from and demanding the return of your currency. It's not that different from how crypto works right now except that the transaction is much more provable. Over time, institutions that look a lot like banks will provide the refund abstraction on top of crypto, BUT that doesn't change the value of an immutable changelog for money. Think of it this way, if you were building money for computers, it would have atomic transfers and a changelog. Those properties, it turns out, are very useful, mostly because people dramatically underestimate how many transactions are between semi-untrusted parties (I would argue it is the majority of transactions). Yes, right now, crypto is a step backwards for many transactions, but that's because institutions that would traditionally support currency can't properly model the risk so only the brave entrepreneurs who accept unbounded risk participate. Over time, like any technology, traditional institutions will accept it as the regulatory regime becomes more clear. The analogy to the beginning of the internet is obvious (the only real question is whether governments decide to ban it).
      - chrisco255 9y ago
        Refunds not a big deal and no different than paying cash. Online stores have a reputation and reviews so if there's retailers out there scamming people the internet will find out quickly.
    - HillRat 9y ago
      To be fair -- and I'm no blockchain booster -- transactional rollbacks should be modeled as separate operations and replacement transactions on an immutable log (or loggish thing, anyway). You can use bitemporal tracking to model invalid belief states, but your system should never be allowed to drop transactions.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > where have all innovators gone They have enough sense to see that blockchain ecosystem is 1% innovation, 99% hype.
  - zilian 9y ago
    Just dig in the interesting 1% then. What do you think was teh internet back then ? Dot-com bubble anyone ?
- prostoalex 9y ago
  Blockchain is only innovative if you ignore the decades of DBMS development. There are very few cases where distributed consensus is needed (versus master/slave relationship), and even those cases can be served by a variety of consensus protocols with better throughput and performance characteristics.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake). Those chains don't exist yet in any meaningful sense; at this point, AFAIK, it's not been proven that an energy-efficient PoS system even can be created theoretically. If it turned out it could be done and then if it was done, I'm sure lot of the negativity would disappear. The underlying sentiment behind pessimism, at least for me, is that it seems that in the blockchain ecosystem, all the incentives are aligned in such a way to have the market push us into stupidly wasting huge amounts of electricity, storage and bandwidth for no tangible benefit. No need to wait for energy-efficient PoS or other things - you can earn your money right now.
- wildsatchmo 9y ago
  There are actually lots functional proof of stake coins like byteball and NEM for example (but I share your skepticism about long term viability of proof of stake BECAUSE it doesn't cost anything). I think the energy "waste" isn't waste because it serves a purpose. For someone to forge a transaction they would need to control a huge amount of hash power which would cost a fortune. On the other hand, there's always ideas like gridcoin that use that hash power to do scientific computations at the same time (best of both worlds?).
simias 9y ago
I don't think the parent is a luddite for questioning very emphatic and rather baseless claims. The strawman you build is unwarranted IMO. Household computers were a thing in science fiction long before they were possible and I don't recall anybody doubting you could eventually transmit movies over the internet in a reasonable amount of time. Then you continue with the usual hand waving when people point out weaknesses in the bitcoin architecture. Because the last thing we want is for the hype to die and the speculation to crash, am I right? >If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train. You can do things programmatically without using the blockchain. Actually nowadays I'm pretty sure that for the vast majority of transactions online no human is the loop. >- low tx rate? not for long What makes you say that? If you think about segwit/lightning and friends I'll wait until I see them working in practice. I'm still skeptical that these solutions will manage to reach high amounts of transaction without losing the decentralized nature of bitcoin. >- high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake) You make it sound as if proof of stake was actually a thing. Has any serious blockchain successfully implemented PoS at this point? I know many people are talking about it but it's still very much theoretical as far as I know. >- high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. I don't understand this argument. Nodes and miners are two different things. If you do serious transactions on the network you should run a full node. Are you saying that people who run full nodes should invest in a mining rig to offset the cost? What if they live somewhere electricity is not cheap enough to turn a profit? >- no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow Yeah by using a... trusted third party. How would you scale this? Well, I can think of a way, you could set up organization who would take a small fee to act as trusted third parties. With a high enough volume of transactions these organizations would have a low incentive of cheating for any given arbitration since loss of trust would mean the end of their business and they could be sued. They could also offer loans and other things the blockchain can't provide on its own. You know, like a bank. >If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes. The bitcoin network takes its cut as well and these days it's not exactly cheap. And what do you mean by "selling you out behind the scenes"? Privacy issues?
markkat 9y ago
I feel the same. I can't fathom the lack of imagination, and IMHO that's what it is. I've loaded Lemonade Stand on an audio cassette, and with the same fingers, I now type this on a black wafer on a plane.
acdha 9y ago
> I'm on the hype train That’s the intellectual blind spot which is making this so hard to understand: you’re invested in the technology and want to see it succeed, which means you’re inclined to minimize every downside and boost every possible use without asking whether something is better in addition to being possible. Being old enough to remember when the internet was starting to go mainstream, there were op-eds like that but they got plenty of pushback because there were so many new things which you could do on the internet which were either impossible, unaffordable, or too cumbersome before. Yes, a modem connection was too slow to play a movie but you could read newspapers around the world, send email to anyone and have it arrive in seconds, download software or photos instead of having to drive to the store, research and trade stocks, chat, etc. and there was a clear path for technological improvements making that experience better over time. The average person could easily see things they’d like to do and the costs were getting more approachable every year. In contrast, we have a ton of blockchain hype without a single legal use which solves a problem normal people care about better than existing, well-tested technology. There’s a lot of “that’ll change once these fundamental design flaws are solved in a way we don’t yet know how to do” hype being peddled by people who stand to profit if everyone buys in but, as during the dotcom bubble, that should inspire more rather than less skepticism.
- notahacker 9y ago
  I think the key thing is that even without understanding the technology most consumers could see "before I couldn't get access to this information/correspondence/map/ticket/catalogue/advice/news/opinion/porn and now I can" as an obvious life enhancement in a way which having anonymous miners as counterparties rather than the company providing the service and their bank isn't (not even if expressed in terms of a 3% fee reduction). Whereas with blockchain it seems like it's often the evangelists not understanding the consumers: to use examples from the article, I really care that flight delay information is easily available which is why the internet was much better than call centres but I really don't care whether it uses a distributed database or not and wouldn't fly with anyone I worried wouldn't honour the terms of my ticket. I care that ridesharing services have good availability, routing and safety, I really don't want them to be transparent about my location and payments to any interested party. Now, there are many technologies which are very useful for certain use cases despite the consumer failing to grasp what's going on behind the scenes, from Java VMs to graph databases to torrents, but certain things tend to be true of them (i) they weren't as exciting opportunities as the internet even if billion dollar businesses were built on them (ii) the developers explaining why existing solutions were good enough if not more optimal in many respects were often right.
spookthesunset 9y ago
> If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes. The free market sure seems to be okay with this. Those middle men provide valuable services like chargebacks, lines of credit, the ability to quickly provide large sums of money without using wheelbarrows to cart them around. > I'm on the hype train. You, and almost every other blockchain proponent are so blinded by hype and greed you can't see the very real, very fundamental flaws in bitcoin and "the blockchain". Bitcoin attracts the perfect intersection of people who don't understand economics, math, computer science, finance, business, sociology, or politics. Bitcoin is deeply flawed in all those areas.
- volkk 9y ago
  > Bitcoin attracts the perfect intersection of people who don't understand economics, math, computer science, finance, business, or politics. Bitcoin is deeply flawed in all those areas. i can somewhat +1 this just based on anecdotal evidence. a bunch of guys released an ICO and gathered about 15 mil in funding who ive met. i expected them to be extremely smart but i've found that they lucked out and simply wrote up some docs coding barely anything. the idea...seems cool? but i think they're in way over their heads based on what i've gathered from speaking with them. ICOs seem like a crazy scam
  - wildsatchmo 9y ago
    This one makes me a little sad. I was very into bitcoin and blockchain ideas early on and the ICO fever has poisoned the well a bit. The money is attracting the types you're describing but IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy. It seems obvious to me that the intersection of these things informed bitcoin's core design concepts. Some people think the system we have now is deeply flawed and needs a redesign, others don't. Those who don't might find it hard to see the utility in bitcoin.
    - xiphias 9y ago
morogop 9y ago
> high computational cost? Security feature This is a cargo cult claim, repeated by shallow-thinking crypto-promoters. The high computational cost is the reason that proof-of-work systems are doomed to the dustbin of history, as it undermines economies of scale, and ensures perpetually increasing costs. Fortunately there are other ways to solve the problem, but I feel comfortable that one can safely disregard anything said after the claim that the high computational costs are a good thing; because only a complete fool would ever consider such an argument to be valid. > If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes. Instead, in the crypto world, you have... a distributed autonomous organization taking their cut; and they continuously make changes to the protocol which can change that cut or sell you out behind the scenes. Again. Only extremely shallow thinkers believe that current crypto is worth a damn. These are the same people who would've looked at the first ever web search engines and thought "this search engine will win", because they're not smart enough to differentiate between a good idea generally, and a terrible implementation. Today's cryptocurrency implementations are terrible; and are beloved only by dumb, out of touch nerds who repeat nonsensical shit they've heard. Unfortunately, these nerds think they 're geniuses because they rode a bull market in their asset class, and history shows that such people will literally never be capable of recognizing that they're just lucky idiots, nothing more.

zilian 9y ago

Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.

endymi0n 9y ago
Confirmation Bias at work. You're invested, so you want it to take off. Yet none of those blockchain enthusiasts could tell me a single USP that blockchains had over storage in a normal database on any concrete use case, with the sole exception of cryptocurrencies. And the reason is simple: all those applications have none of the properties and problems the blockchain solves - which is an elegant niche solution tailor made for mutually mistrusting entities working together on a distributed ledger. That barely exists in real life. Centralized systems are what you want in 99% of cases. They're more reliable, better controlled, have infinitely more throughput and usually, you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions (fraud, mistakes, etc.) Sure, you could store anything in a blockchain. Sure, something yada yada blockchain could "replace Netflix". It's just that apparently nobody can tell me _why_. My only concern right now is that I can't short Blockchain technology because the relation of hype to actual usefulness and potential is so incredibly large that it will drag a big chunk of the tech sector down the drain. In stark contrast to AI which is just as hyped, but isn't just supposed to "change everything" since years - it's actually starting to do so on a spectacular timeline.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  > you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions Yup, refunds are the basis of customer service.
  - josh2600 9y ago
    Ok look, I have a stake here because I run a crypto fund but let's just be clear: in the beginning of money, refunds involved going to the person you wanted a refund from and demanding the return of your currency. It's not that different from how crypto works right now except that the transaction is much more provable. Over time, institutions that look a lot like banks will provide the refund abstraction on top of crypto, BUT that doesn't change the value of an immutable changelog for money. Think of it this way, if you were building money for computers, it would have atomic transfers and a changelog. Those properties, it turns out, are very useful, mostly because people dramatically underestimate how many transactions are between semi-untrusted parties (I would argue it is the majority of transactions). Yes, right now, crypto is a step backwards for many transactions, but that's because institutions that would traditionally support currency can't properly model the risk so only the brave entrepreneurs who accept unbounded risk participate. Over time, like any technology, traditional institutions will accept it as the regulatory regime becomes more clear. The analogy to the beginning of the internet is obvious (the only real question is whether governments decide to ban it).
    - chrisco255 9y ago
      Refunds not a big deal and no different than paying cash. Online stores have a reputation and reviews so if there's retailers out there scamming people the internet will find out quickly.
  - HillRat 9y ago
    To be fair -- and I'm no blockchain booster -- transactional rollbacks should be modeled as separate operations and replacement transactions on an immutable log (or loggish thing, anyway). You can use bitemporal tracking to model invalid belief states, but your system should never be allowed to drop transactions.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> where have all innovators gone They have enough sense to see that blockchain ecosystem is 1% innovation, 99% hype.
- zilian 9y ago
  Just dig in the interesting 1% then. What do you think was teh internet back then ? Dot-com bubble anyone ?
prostoalex 9y ago
Blockchain is only innovative if you ignore the decades of DBMS development. There are very few cases where distributed consensus is needed (versus master/slave relationship), and even those cases can be served by a variety of consensus protocols with better throughput and performance characteristics.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake). Those chains don't exist yet in any meaningful sense; at this point, AFAIK, it's not been proven that an energy-efficient PoS system even can be created theoretically. If it turned out it could be done and then if it was done, I'm sure lot of the negativity would disappear. The underlying sentiment behind pessimism, at least for me, is that it seems that in the blockchain ecosystem, all the incentives are aligned in such a way to have the market push us into stupidly wasting huge amounts of electricity, storage and bandwidth for no tangible benefit. No need to wait for energy-efficient PoS or other things - you can earn your money right now.

wildsatchmo 9y ago
There are actually lots functional proof of stake coins like byteball and NEM for example (but I share your skepticism about long term viability of proof of stake BECAUSE it doesn't cost anything). I think the energy "waste" isn't waste because it serves a purpose. For someone to forge a transaction they would need to control a huge amount of hash power which would cost a fortune. On the other hand, there's always ideas like gridcoin that use that hash power to do scientific computations at the same time (best of both worlds?).

simias 9y ago

I don't think the parent is a luddite for questioning very emphatic and rather baseless claims. The strawman you build is unwarranted IMO. Household computers were a thing in science fiction long before they were possible and I don't recall anybody doubting you could eventually transmit movies over the internet in a reasonable amount of time. Then you continue with the usual hand waving when people point out weaknesses in the bitcoin architecture. Because the last thing we want is for the hype to die and the speculation to crash, am I right? >If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train. You can do things programmatically without using the blockchain. Actually nowadays I'm pretty sure that for the vast majority of transactions online no human is the loop. >- low tx rate? not for long What makes you say that? If you think about segwit/lightning and friends I'll wait until I see them working in practice. I'm still skeptical that these solutions will manage to reach high amounts of transaction without losing the decentralized nature of bitcoin. >- high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake) You make it sound as if proof of stake was actually a thing. Has any serious blockchain successfully implemented PoS at this point? I know many people are talking about it but it's still very much theoretical as far as I know. >- high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. I don't understand this argument. Nodes and miners are two different things. If you do serious transactions on the network you should run a full node. Are you saying that people who run full nodes should invest in a mining rig to offset the cost? What if they live somewhere electricity is not cheap enough to turn a profit? >- no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow Yeah by using a... trusted third party. How would you scale this? Well, I can think of a way, you could set up organization who would take a small fee to act as trusted third parties. With a high enough volume of transactions these organizations would have a low incentive of cheating for any given arbitration since loss of trust would mean the end of their business and they could be sued. They could also offer loans and other things the blockchain can't provide on its own. You know, like a bank. >If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes. The bitcoin network takes its cut as well and these days it's not exactly cheap. And what do you mean by "selling you out behind the scenes"? Privacy issues?

markkat 9y ago

I feel the same. I can't fathom the lack of imagination, and IMHO that's what it is. I've loaded Lemonade Stand on an audio cassette, and with the same fingers, I now type this on a black wafer on a plane.

acdha 9y ago

> I'm on the hype train That’s the intellectual blind spot which is making this so hard to understand: you’re invested in the technology and want to see it succeed, which means you’re inclined to minimize every downside and boost every possible use without asking whether something is better in addition to being possible. Being old enough to remember when the internet was starting to go mainstream, there were op-eds like that but they got plenty of pushback because there were so many new things which you could do on the internet which were either impossible, unaffordable, or too cumbersome before. Yes, a modem connection was too slow to play a movie but you could read newspapers around the world, send email to anyone and have it arrive in seconds, download software or photos instead of having to drive to the store, research and trade stocks, chat, etc. and there was a clear path for technological improvements making that experience better over time. The average person could easily see things they’d like to do and the costs were getting more approachable every year. In contrast, we have a ton of blockchain hype without a single legal use which solves a problem normal people care about better than existing, well-tested technology. There’s a lot of “that’ll change once these fundamental design flaws are solved in a way we don’t yet know how to do” hype being peddled by people who stand to profit if everyone buys in but, as during the dotcom bubble, that should inspire more rather than less skepticism.

notahacker 9y ago
I think the key thing is that even without understanding the technology most consumers could see "before I couldn't get access to this information/correspondence/map/ticket/catalogue/advice/news/opinion/porn and now I can" as an obvious life enhancement in a way which having anonymous miners as counterparties rather than the company providing the service and their bank isn't (not even if expressed in terms of a 3% fee reduction). Whereas with blockchain it seems like it's often the evangelists not understanding the consumers: to use examples from the article, I really care that flight delay information is easily available which is why the internet was much better than call centres but I really don't care whether it uses a distributed database or not and wouldn't fly with anyone I worried wouldn't honour the terms of my ticket. I care that ridesharing services have good availability, routing and safety, I really don't want them to be transparent about my location and payments to any interested party. Now, there are many technologies which are very useful for certain use cases despite the consumer failing to grasp what's going on behind the scenes, from Java VMs to graph databases to torrents, but certain things tend to be true of them (i) they weren't as exciting opportunities as the internet even if billion dollar businesses were built on them (ii) the developers explaining why existing solutions were good enough if not more optimal in many respects were often right.

spookthesunset 9y ago

> If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes. The free market sure seems to be okay with this. Those middle men provide valuable services like chargebacks, lines of credit, the ability to quickly provide large sums of money without using wheelbarrows to cart them around. > I'm on the hype train. You, and almost every other blockchain proponent are so blinded by hype and greed you can't see the very real, very fundamental flaws in bitcoin and "the blockchain". Bitcoin attracts the perfect intersection of people who don't understand economics, math, computer science, finance, business, sociology, or politics. Bitcoin is deeply flawed in all those areas.

volkk 9y ago
> Bitcoin attracts the perfect intersection of people who don't understand economics, math, computer science, finance, business, or politics. Bitcoin is deeply flawed in all those areas. i can somewhat +1 this just based on anecdotal evidence. a bunch of guys released an ICO and gathered about 15 mil in funding who ive met. i expected them to be extremely smart but i've found that they lucked out and simply wrote up some docs coding barely anything. the idea...seems cool? but i think they're in way over their heads based on what i've gathered from speaking with them. ICOs seem like a crazy scam
- wildsatchmo 9y ago
  This one makes me a little sad. I was very into bitcoin and blockchain ideas early on and the ICO fever has poisoned the well a bit. The money is attracting the types you're describing but IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy. It seems obvious to me that the intersection of these things informed bitcoin's core design concepts. Some people think the system we have now is deeply flawed and needs a redesign, others don't. Those who don't might find it hard to see the utility in bitcoin.
  - xiphias 9y ago

morogop 9y ago

> high computational cost? Security feature This is a cargo cult claim, repeated by shallow-thinking crypto-promoters. The high computational cost is the reason that proof-of-work systems are doomed to the dustbin of history, as it undermines economies of scale, and ensures perpetually increasing costs. Fortunately there are other ways to solve the problem, but I feel comfortable that one can safely disregard anything said after the claim that the high computational costs are a good thing; because only a complete fool would ever consider such an argument to be valid. > If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes. Instead, in the crypto world, you have... a distributed autonomous organization taking their cut; and they continuously make changes to the protocol which can change that cut or sell you out behind the scenes. Again. Only extremely shallow thinkers believe that current crypto is worth a damn. These are the same people who would've looked at the first ever web search engines and thought "this search engine will win", because they're not smart enough to differentiate between a good idea generally, and a terrible implementation. Today's cryptocurrency implementations are terrible; and are beloved only by dumb, out of touch nerds who repeat nonsensical shit they've heard. Unfortunately, these nerds think they 're geniuses because they rode a bull market in their asset class, and history shows that such people will literally never be capable of recognizing that they're just lucky idiots, nothing more.