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In many ways, blockchain tech is the stupidest thing that has ever existed. It is a colossal monument to the inefficiency of human behavior. You are literally t

In many ways, blockchain tech is the stupidest thing that has ever existed. It is a colossal monument to the inefficiency of human behavior. You are literally throwing energy and immensely valuable computation time out of a window simply because people can't trust each other. It is a massive sink for the destructively self-interested behavior of mankind. The problems that blockchains are trying to solve are not inherent difficulties involved in the tasks that they're being applied towards, they're problems with us. We can design an astronomically more efficient system for accounting, but it would be have to be one that is not being run by stupid, short-sighted apes. The entire overhead of the blockchain is devoted to dealing with a problem that we shouldn't even have, the whole thing is basically made of market failure. If there's any value in it, it's that we can use it to establish objective metrics for just how much value is destroyed by human irrationality and information deficits. We don't need to fix centralized accounting, centralized accounting works fine. We need to fix human beings. Meanwhile, imagine if every GPU used for mining right now was being used for training neural nets instead. The value in that is nearly unimaginable; we could be making massive leaps in almost every field and industry, because the applications of deep learning to making tasks marginally more efficient are essentially endless.

mido22 9y ago
FYI: when you talk about GPU/mining/energy, you are talking about Proof of Work (pow) and not blockchain. You can look up about Proof of Stake among other ways for consensus
- mido22 9y ago
  While you are at it, you can also read up about "triple ledger accounting"
  - mkirklions 9y ago
    I looked this up, what is your point(if you dont mind)? It seems like a feature with ~0 benefits. Can you explain?
    - oaeide 9y ago
      I think you should look it up again.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  Even just the concept of the blockchain itself is based on a massively inefficient use of resources to have a public ledger that can't be tampered with. This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it!
  - dorgo 9y ago
    >This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it! :O, the only possibility for that which comes to my mind is a world in which everybody is infinetly rich?
    - aalleavitch 9y ago
      Compared to any point in the human past, this is already largely the case in many countries. The problem is that it has been uneven.
    - webmaven 9y ago
      Even that would only address financial incentives (and just the rational ones, at that). There are - unfortunately - others.
- mkirklions 9y ago
  Lets see proof of work be used for 9+ years and millions of people. I worry about russian hackers(spamming) stakes or pulling off attacks. It took me long enough to believe that BTC wasnt going to break.
otakucode 9y ago
I am perplexed. If I wanted to, say, record licenses for a piece of software and enable people to transfer the licenses to others, why wouldn't a blockchain ledger be the perfect solution? Sure I could require them to physically buy a disc and then have them physically give the disc to a person they want to transfer it to, and it's just overcoming our human limitation of being meat-based creatures that exist in physical space that is particularly difficult to move through... but what's wrong with that? Every technology exists to overcome human limitations. Technology serves human beings, human beings do not serve technology. Human beings are messy and unreliable. Making them non-messy and reliable would make them not human.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  Or, what if you didn't have to worry about making money off of your software and you could just do the massively more efficient and socially beneficial thing and give away your software for free to everyone as soon as it's created? What is human? Is dying from diseases and starving to death human? Is waging war and inflicting massive suffering on each other for little real gain human? Maybe there's some aspects of being human we're willing to give up.
mkirklions 9y ago
This is nearly entirely my opinion of blockchain. If you were a logistics company would you rather- >Total control of fees and servers >Directly working with companies to solve their problems or >Writing something open ended so other companies can develop their own uses >Get paid with supporting software >Big cost increase because of miners I completely understand Bitcoin and currencies. But I think most blockchain is going to be bad for the environment and not needed. Centralized servers are superior for most uses.
clarkmoody 9y ago
> We need to fix human beings. As a non-utopian, I understand that human beings cannot be "fixed." Thus, we must create systems that cannot be corrupted by humans. Creating a money outside of state control may be the smartest thing that humanity ever does. We'll need maybe a century to see how it plays out. That said, most of the blockchain projects out there are scams. If your project can run on a centralized database, then you don't need a blockchain.
- tCfD 9y ago
  > creating money outside state control Which if successful enough to constitute a counterweight with enough force to push back against "the state" will yield merely... another state, but conveniently one with "Our Guys" in control of all the economic leverage. You call yourself non utopian, yet Bitcoin - a tool to deleverage the state by sapping its power of taxation - is a nakedly self serving utopian project. And yet tax rent (in the form of landowner's premiums like mining rewards and tx fees, and soon by lightning network channel brokering fees, not to mention off chain but indispensable infrastructural scaffolding like exchange fees and fiat ramps) doesn't just disappear, it merely flows to the pockets of a different cabal composed of early adopters and wealthy latecomers who were able to buy large tracts of influence and infrastructure in bitcoinland.
  - clarkmoody 9y ago
    Yet nothing those in power do will ever change the monetary base or inflation rate of Bitcoin.
    - tCfD 9y ago
      These are fig leaf constraints which do nothing to curb the ability for highly leveraged, anonymous individuals in the ecosystem to severely and without warning or accountability alter the purchasing power of the Bitcoins in circulation.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  And yet, as we've come to better understand ourselves, human behavior actually has become better. The statistics actually bear this out. We need to stop thinking of "human nature" as some inviolable fundamental quality and start thinking of it as the behavior of an animal in an environment.
klibertp 9y ago
> We need to fix human beings. I admire your optimism. Meanwhile, we have quite a few millennia of trying and failing in this, so I'd rather try fixing the system instead. > Meanwhile, imagine if every GPU used for mining right now was being used for training neural nets instead With what, MNIST? For the billionth time? ML and the current incarnation of AI don't need more CPUs, they need more data and better algorithms.
- hudon 9y ago
  > we have quite a few millennia of trying and failing in [fixing human beings] Actually, research is showing that brutality is declining and empathy is on the rise [0]. We may be living in the most peaceable times in history. Maybe the optimism is warranted? [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583...

mido22 9y ago

FYI: when you talk about GPU/mining/energy, you are talking about Proof of Work (pow) and not blockchain. You can look up about Proof of Stake among other ways for consensus

mido22 9y ago
While you are at it, you can also read up about "triple ledger accounting"
- mkirklions 9y ago
  I looked this up, what is your point(if you dont mind)? It seems like a feature with ~0 benefits. Can you explain?
  - oaeide 9y ago
    I think you should look it up again.
aalleavitch 9y ago
Even just the concept of the blockchain itself is based on a massively inefficient use of resources to have a public ledger that can't be tampered with. This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it!
- dorgo 9y ago
  >This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it! :O, the only possibility for that which comes to my mind is a world in which everybody is infinetly rich?
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    Compared to any point in the human past, this is already largely the case in many countries. The problem is that it has been uneven.
  - webmaven 9y ago
    Even that would only address financial incentives (and just the rational ones, at that). There are - unfortunately - others.
mkirklions 9y ago
Lets see proof of work be used for 9+ years and millions of people. I worry about russian hackers(spamming) stakes or pulling off attacks. It took me long enough to believe that BTC wasnt going to break.

otakucode 9y ago

I am perplexed. If I wanted to, say, record licenses for a piece of software and enable people to transfer the licenses to others, why wouldn't a blockchain ledger be the perfect solution? Sure I could require them to physically buy a disc and then have them physically give the disc to a person they want to transfer it to, and it's just overcoming our human limitation of being meat-based creatures that exist in physical space that is particularly difficult to move through... but what's wrong with that? Every technology exists to overcome human limitations. Technology serves human beings, human beings do not serve technology. Human beings are messy and unreliable. Making them non-messy and reliable would make them not human.

aalleavitch 9y ago
Or, what if you didn't have to worry about making money off of your software and you could just do the massively more efficient and socially beneficial thing and give away your software for free to everyone as soon as it's created? What is human? Is dying from diseases and starving to death human? Is waging war and inflicting massive suffering on each other for little real gain human? Maybe there's some aspects of being human we're willing to give up.

mkirklions 9y ago

This is nearly entirely my opinion of blockchain. If you were a logistics company would you rather- >Total control of fees and servers >Directly working with companies to solve their problems or >Writing something open ended so other companies can develop their own uses >Get paid with supporting software >Big cost increase because of miners I completely understand Bitcoin and currencies. But I think most blockchain is going to be bad for the environment and not needed. Centralized servers are superior for most uses.

clarkmoody 9y ago

> We need to fix human beings. As a non-utopian, I understand that human beings cannot be "fixed." Thus, we must create systems that cannot be corrupted by humans. Creating a money outside of state control may be the smartest thing that humanity ever does. We'll need maybe a century to see how it plays out. That said, most of the blockchain projects out there are scams. If your project can run on a centralized database, then you don't need a blockchain.

tCfD 9y ago
> creating money outside state control Which if successful enough to constitute a counterweight with enough force to push back against "the state" will yield merely... another state, but conveniently one with "Our Guys" in control of all the economic leverage. You call yourself non utopian, yet Bitcoin - a tool to deleverage the state by sapping its power of taxation - is a nakedly self serving utopian project. And yet tax rent (in the form of landowner's premiums like mining rewards and tx fees, and soon by lightning network channel brokering fees, not to mention off chain but indispensable infrastructural scaffolding like exchange fees and fiat ramps) doesn't just disappear, it merely flows to the pockets of a different cabal composed of early adopters and wealthy latecomers who were able to buy large tracts of influence and infrastructure in bitcoinland.
- clarkmoody 9y ago
  Yet nothing those in power do will ever change the monetary base or inflation rate of Bitcoin.
  - tCfD 9y ago
    These are fig leaf constraints which do nothing to curb the ability for highly leveraged, anonymous individuals in the ecosystem to severely and without warning or accountability alter the purchasing power of the Bitcoins in circulation.
aalleavitch 9y ago
And yet, as we've come to better understand ourselves, human behavior actually has become better. The statistics actually bear this out. We need to stop thinking of "human nature" as some inviolable fundamental quality and start thinking of it as the behavior of an animal in an environment.

klibertp 9y ago

> We need to fix human beings. I admire your optimism. Meanwhile, we have quite a few millennia of trying and failing in this, so I'd rather try fixing the system instead. > Meanwhile, imagine if every GPU used for mining right now was being used for training neural nets instead With what, MNIST? For the billionth time? ML and the current incarnation of AI don't need more CPUs, they need more data and better algorithms.

hudon 9y ago
> we have quite a few millennia of trying and failing in [fixing human beings] Actually, research is showing that brutality is declining and empathy is on the rise [0]. We may be living in the most peaceable times in history. Maybe the optimism is warranted? [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583...