5 ms·

I don’t understand why you would be anti- something so new at all. To me it’s preposterous that you would evaluate a new technology based on how many problems i

I don’t understand why you would be anti- something so new at all. To me it’s preposterous that you would evaluate a new technology based on how many problems it and only it can solve. Don’t you get that new technology has an incubation period where its fundamental challenges must be overcome? What problem could early steam powered cars solve that horses couldn’t solve better? I doubt the earliest ones performed better than the animal based solutions for ANY specific use. Yet writing off automobiles at that stage would’ve been a mistake only obvious in retrospect. Especially for something as truly bizarre as Ethereum, why write it off at this early stage?

chickenfries 8y ago
There are so many advantages to early cars, are you kidding me? They don’t eat hay and shit for one. Is there anything that your argument wouldn’t work for? Do you truly have to wait a decade before making any judgements about the hype around a technology? When will we be able to say if smart contracts have been overhyped?
- pfisch 8y ago
  They eat coal/gasoline which is probably more expensive. Also they worked on almost no terrain at all compared to horses and constantly broke down. The only reason they would even make sense to pursue would be because of how successful the train was. Similar to how this bitcoin stuff makes more sense when you look at the success of the internet/paypal/amazon.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    You know you can research this stuff right? Gasoline was a waste product in the refining of crude oil (specifically, into Kerosene [itself a replacement for whale oil] they were making anyways). It used to be considered garbage. [1] It really only became valuable once they realized they could power cars with it. They used to dump it in rivers, making them catch fire. [2] In what - concrete - way is bitcoin related to the success of Amazon or the internet? Please be specific and don't hand-wave if you're going to make such bold claims. [1] https://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/24/gasoline-used-to-be-considered-garbage/ https://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/24/gasoline-used-to-be-con... [2] http://www.attendly.com/rockefellers-unconventional-approach-to-getting-rid-of-waste/ http://www.attendly.com/rockefellers-unconventional-approach...
    - pfisch 8y ago
      The internet and amazon displaced the old business models with e-commerce. Bitcoin could do that with money/gold. This is similar to train->car.
lifthrasiir 8y ago
> Especially for something as truly bizarre as Ethereum, why write it off at this early stage? If a new invention is truly transformative, it will thrive even after long doubt. At this stage the public, forced demonstration of cryptocurrencies deserve to be criticized no matter it will be successful or not. (I don't want to criticize general cryptocurrency researchers of course, because, well, they are just studying.)
thecatspaw 8y ago
I am not anti-blockchain, there are applications where it makes sense. But 90% of the time when I hear about a blockchain related application its a regular application which just so happens to use the blockchain as storage because its a buzzword. It feels like the world suddenly discovered the hammer, and now we think everything is a nail
- arcticbull 8y ago
  Like what? Everyone seems to hand-wave this, but nobody in the full decade long history of bitcoin and blockchain has come up with a single good use case that isn't better solved by MySQL.
  - lalaland1125 8y ago
    Illegal gambling and illegal transactions tend to be good Bitcoin usecases that are trickier to solve with MySQL due to trust issues. Now, you may not be particularly enamored with illegal activity, but it is the one use case where Bitcoin really excels.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      That’s a good use case but it doesn’t feel like a good flagship product to spur mass adoption haha
  - jsutton 8y ago
    MySQL doesn't guarantee message integrity, so anything involving shared data among separate entities that could be attractive for manipulation would be better solved with blockchain tech than MySQL.
tomc1985 8y ago
You're praising innovation blindly. Not all innovation is good, and many supposed innovators are crocks. I understand blockchains enough to where I could build one of my own (note that I say blockchain, and not cryptocurrency) and I really don't see much use for this particular datastructure outside certain niche applications. What are these truly innovative uses for a nested chain of data blobs whose contents include a hash of the previous link?
- merlincorey 8y ago
  What defines a blockchain for you? I agree that a token based currency is not required, I'm just interested in what people define a blockchain as for intellectual curiosity.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    > What defines a blockchain for you? A (potentially distributed) datastructure of some kind, which resembles a linked-list, and ensures its integrity using some sort of cryptographic hash of the previous link such that changing any link but the most recent invalidates the whole chain. Literally -- a chain of (data) blocks. A non-engineering description of a "blockchain" should be considered to be misleading. edit - also, I'd take cryptocurrencies more seriously if they could stay out of the headlines for a while
    - diegocerdan 8y ago
      Is utterly funny to read people's opinions bashing against blockchain technology and when asked about a simple definition they fail to mention the use of consensus protocols which was, already 10 years ago, the huge innovation that lead to this revolution.
      - jon_richards 8y ago
        I prefer the "proof of work != blockchain" comments when people include the most common consensus protocol in their simple description of blockchain.
arcticbull 8y ago
It's not new, BTC is a full decade old. At this point the internet had a billion users.
- xorcist 8y ago
  The web wasn't invented until the internet was more than a decade old. This narrative that "Internet time" transforms the world every other year should have died in the 90s. Real work takes time. Building the infrastructure for the Internet took decades. Even after it won, most people used modems over badly insulated copper wire for the better part of ten years.
  - jon_richards 8y ago
    But no one person or company made billions off the invention of the web. I wonder if investors are pushing developers away from infrastructure plays, towards consumer apps and sub-platforms. I imagine that's happening in VR. I hear a lot about headsets, games, medical applications, etc, but I haven't heard anyone get excited about research into better Fresnel lens production.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Bitcoin is a “product” like the web and it’s existed for a decade. Blockchain is just hashing, infrastructure that’s already existed for decades. Nobody has found a good use for either yet. They may. But that doesn’t mean any particular cryptocurrency should have any value. Or that we should particularly value the blockchain yet. The reason nobody has found a good use for block chain yet is that the only time it offers any benefits over a traditional relational data store is when you cannot trust anybody. The truth is you can trust someone almost all the time. And even if you can’t really, it might be more efficient to just pretend. The truth is that trust is a substantial optimization and it eliminates vast quantities of waste and inefficiency in the proof of work model. That’s why people don’t want blockchains. A really clean way of expressing this idea is that when you deposit a paper check at the bank they don’t check the signature. They don’t check the signature because they trust you, or rather it’s more efficient to just assume the money is being deposited legitimately. The amount of effort signature verification takes makes it more expensive than just eating the fraud losses. The same is true in many of these block chain powered proof of work situations. The cost of computing the proof of work outweighs the cost of managing fraud. Not to mention all the ridiculous fraud perpetrated on this unregulated market but that’s neither here nor there.
simias 8y ago
How long do we have to wait before we can consider blockchains not so new? Bitcoin is 10yo, the whole field has received literal billions in founding in the past few years (anybody with a good looking website and a three page whitepaper could make millions in an ICO last year). Furthermore anybody coming up with an actual innovation in the field is sure to make millions so the incentive to innovate is huge. So, where are the results? Your car analogy doesn't add up, for quite a while horses were undoubtedly more convenient than automobiles. Then automobiles improved and took over. We have a similar situation with electric cars today. Blockchain technologies are not a few cycles of optimizations away from being able to compete with PostgreSQL, they work fundamentally differently and they have fundamentally, per design, strong limitations about how efficient they can be. That's the cost of trustless decentralization. To overcome these limitations you don't need "a blockchain but more better", you need a fundamental breakthrough in the way these things work. I suppose you could hope for such a breakthrough but that's akin to hoping that we're going to figure out cold fusion and solve the energy crisis. Sure, it can happen but it's not unreasonable to be skeptical of it.
drb91 8y ago
Well, you need a use case.

chickenfries 8y ago

There are so many advantages to early cars, are you kidding me? They don’t eat hay and shit for one. Is there anything that your argument wouldn’t work for? Do you truly have to wait a decade before making any judgements about the hype around a technology? When will we be able to say if smart contracts have been overhyped?

pfisch 8y ago
They eat coal/gasoline which is probably more expensive. Also they worked on almost no terrain at all compared to horses and constantly broke down. The only reason they would even make sense to pursue would be because of how successful the train was. Similar to how this bitcoin stuff makes more sense when you look at the success of the internet/paypal/amazon.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  You know you can research this stuff right? Gasoline was a waste product in the refining of crude oil (specifically, into Kerosene [itself a replacement for whale oil] they were making anyways). It used to be considered garbage. [1] It really only became valuable once they realized they could power cars with it. They used to dump it in rivers, making them catch fire. [2] In what - concrete - way is bitcoin related to the success of Amazon or the internet? Please be specific and don't hand-wave if you're going to make such bold claims. [1] https://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/24/gasoline-used-to-be-considered-garbage/ https://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/24/gasoline-used-to-be-con... [2] http://www.attendly.com/rockefellers-unconventional-approach-to-getting-rid-of-waste/ http://www.attendly.com/rockefellers-unconventional-approach...
  - pfisch 8y ago
    The internet and amazon displaced the old business models with e-commerce. Bitcoin could do that with money/gold. This is similar to train->car.

lifthrasiir 8y ago

> Especially for something as truly bizarre as Ethereum, why write it off at this early stage? If a new invention is truly transformative, it will thrive even after long doubt. At this stage the public, forced demonstration of cryptocurrencies deserve to be criticized no matter it will be successful or not. (I don't want to criticize general cryptocurrency researchers of course, because, well, they are just studying.)

thecatspaw 8y ago

I am not anti-blockchain, there are applications where it makes sense. But 90% of the time when I hear about a blockchain related application its a regular application which just so happens to use the blockchain as storage because its a buzzword. It feels like the world suddenly discovered the hammer, and now we think everything is a nail

arcticbull 8y ago
Like what? Everyone seems to hand-wave this, but nobody in the full decade long history of bitcoin and blockchain has come up with a single good use case that isn't better solved by MySQL.
- lalaland1125 8y ago
  Illegal gambling and illegal transactions tend to be good Bitcoin usecases that are trickier to solve with MySQL due to trust issues. Now, you may not be particularly enamored with illegal activity, but it is the one use case where Bitcoin really excels.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    That’s a good use case but it doesn’t feel like a good flagship product to spur mass adoption haha
- jsutton 8y ago
  MySQL doesn't guarantee message integrity, so anything involving shared data among separate entities that could be attractive for manipulation would be better solved with blockchain tech than MySQL.

tomc1985 8y ago

You're praising innovation blindly. Not all innovation is good, and many supposed innovators are crocks. I understand blockchains enough to where I could build one of my own (note that I say blockchain, and not cryptocurrency) and I really don't see much use for this particular datastructure outside certain niche applications. What are these truly innovative uses for a nested chain of data blobs whose contents include a hash of the previous link?

merlincorey 8y ago
What defines a blockchain for you? I agree that a token based currency is not required, I'm just interested in what people define a blockchain as for intellectual curiosity.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  > What defines a blockchain for you? A (potentially distributed) datastructure of some kind, which resembles a linked-list, and ensures its integrity using some sort of cryptographic hash of the previous link such that changing any link but the most recent invalidates the whole chain. Literally -- a chain of (data) blocks. A non-engineering description of a "blockchain" should be considered to be misleading. edit - also, I'd take cryptocurrencies more seriously if they could stay out of the headlines for a while
  - diegocerdan 8y ago
    Is utterly funny to read people's opinions bashing against blockchain technology and when asked about a simple definition they fail to mention the use of consensus protocols which was, already 10 years ago, the huge innovation that lead to this revolution.
    - jon_richards 8y ago
      I prefer the "proof of work != blockchain" comments when people include the most common consensus protocol in their simple description of blockchain.

arcticbull 8y ago

It's not new, BTC is a full decade old. At this point the internet had a billion users.

xorcist 8y ago
The web wasn't invented until the internet was more than a decade old. This narrative that "Internet time" transforms the world every other year should have died in the 90s. Real work takes time. Building the infrastructure for the Internet took decades. Even after it won, most people used modems over badly insulated copper wire for the better part of ten years.
- jon_richards 8y ago
  But no one person or company made billions off the invention of the web. I wonder if investors are pushing developers away from infrastructure plays, towards consumer apps and sub-platforms. I imagine that's happening in VR. I hear a lot about headsets, games, medical applications, etc, but I haven't heard anyone get excited about research into better Fresnel lens production.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  Bitcoin is a “product” like the web and it’s existed for a decade. Blockchain is just hashing, infrastructure that’s already existed for decades. Nobody has found a good use for either yet. They may. But that doesn’t mean any particular cryptocurrency should have any value. Or that we should particularly value the blockchain yet. The reason nobody has found a good use for block chain yet is that the only time it offers any benefits over a traditional relational data store is when you cannot trust anybody. The truth is you can trust someone almost all the time. And even if you can’t really, it might be more efficient to just pretend. The truth is that trust is a substantial optimization and it eliminates vast quantities of waste and inefficiency in the proof of work model. That’s why people don’t want blockchains. A really clean way of expressing this idea is that when you deposit a paper check at the bank they don’t check the signature. They don’t check the signature because they trust you, or rather it’s more efficient to just assume the money is being deposited legitimately. The amount of effort signature verification takes makes it more expensive than just eating the fraud losses. The same is true in many of these block chain powered proof of work situations. The cost of computing the proof of work outweighs the cost of managing fraud. Not to mention all the ridiculous fraud perpetrated on this unregulated market but that’s neither here nor there.

simias 8y ago

How long do we have to wait before we can consider blockchains not so new? Bitcoin is 10yo, the whole field has received literal billions in founding in the past few years (anybody with a good looking website and a three page whitepaper could make millions in an ICO last year). Furthermore anybody coming up with an actual innovation in the field is sure to make millions so the incentive to innovate is huge. So, where are the results? Your car analogy doesn't add up, for quite a while horses were undoubtedly more convenient than automobiles. Then automobiles improved and took over. We have a similar situation with electric cars today. Blockchain technologies are not a few cycles of optimizations away from being able to compete with PostgreSQL, they work fundamentally differently and they have fundamentally, per design, strong limitations about how efficient they can be. That's the cost of trustless decentralization. To overcome these limitations you don't need "a blockchain but more better", you need a fundamental breakthrough in the way these things work. I suppose you could hope for such a breakthrough but that's akin to hoping that we're going to figure out cold fusion and solve the energy crisis. Sure, it can happen but it's not unreasonable to be skeptical of it.

drb91 8y ago

Well, you need a use case.