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I'm disappointed of HN comments whenever cryptocurrency topics come up. People are forgetting that Nakamoto Consensus is a legitimate CS breakthrough concernin

by corv 8y ago

I'm disappointed of HN comments whenever cryptocurrency topics come up. People are forgetting that Nakamoto Consensus is a legitimate CS breakthrough concerning the Byzantine Generals Problem. Is it acceptable to bash every stock in the Nasdaq just because a second tech bubble popped and some SV companies are behaving unscrupulously? Frenzied speculation brought about inadvertent side effects but these should not detract from the fact that significant advancements are continuously being researched and implemented.

mindfulplay 8y ago
Well....There is a stark difference in appreciation for TCP/IP the computer science protocol versus the Cesspool that is the internet or the early AOL crap...
arcticbull 8y ago
Besides the battles over efficiency (it's bad) and novelty (it's not really), there are some truly fundamental blockers to adopting cryptocurrencies. For instance, this poor Redditor lost the keys to a wallet with $40,000 of crypto in it [1]. This happens all the time. Being your own bank is literally the worst. Plenty of jokes ensued: "It's just like the time I lost my car keys and need to buy a new car next day." "It’s just like the time that I lost my house keys and had to move into a homeless shelter." "It's just like the time I forgot my personal question to my 401k account and I got locked out forever, nobody could help me, and I lost the entire balance." Unlike all the efficiency and speed questions, this part here is a stated, inalienable objective of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is the expected behavior. Some clown designed it to work like this. Imagine grandma trying to use this. Remember that time PayPal locked your account and you were so mad you couldn't get at your $600 for a few weeks? Now imagine you lost your life savings because you can't remember your password and literally nobody can help you now, or ever again - and thats the point. I'd imagine it'll destroy itself anyways, it seems like any random walk ends in 100% of coins lost to human inability to preserve access. Who cares how amazing the system is technically? It's designed to be actively hostile to human users. [1] https://i.imgur.com/RP7ighy.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RP7ighy.jpg
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  I comment on these issues on Reddit all the time and get downvoted to hell. People there just don’t want to hear it.
- whiskers08xmt 8y ago
  Of course having access to the private key, need to be the most basic way to access funds. It's the only thing that's guaranteed to be uncensorable, while minimizing the requirement of trust. It is a big responsibility though, and should not be taken lightly. The crypto-currency community is partly at fault here, for blaring memes like "If you don't control your private keys, it's not your Bitcoin", without any regard for whether or not people are ready for that responsibility. That being said, there are number of ways you can store your crypto-currency, with varying degrees of trust-minimization: - Use a multi-signature smart contract wallet, where a master key has power to move the money. If the master key is lost, the money can be moved by X out of Y keys signing off on the transaction. You can then distribute the Y keys to your trusted associates, preferably without telling them who the other key-holders are. - Use a dead-hand smart contract wallet, where the money can be retrieved by a trusted associate, if the dead-hand switch hasn't been activated within Z amount of time. Can be combined with the above, in case further trust minimization is needed. - Store your crypto-currency at a FDIC exchange. Pretty much the same model as the banking world. This really should be the go to way for the average Joe, as it mirrors what you currently can expect from online-banking.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    The first two are way too complicated for retail banking customers. Do you really think you can explain to your parents how dead handed multi pantsed wallets work? I stopped reading half a line in and I’m well within the target customer group here. The third, an exchange, violates all the core principals of cryptocurrency and is basically no different than what we have today but way harder and less efficient. Exchanges don’t require crypto they just run a MySQL store and attribute fractional ownership as centralized, opaque records not protected by the blockchain. If everyone just did that because it’s the simplest and easiest and most secure way to hold on to your coins, cryptocurrency would just replace bank to bank transfers which by definition don’t require a trustless backing and all the worlds electricity. Plus to quote your fellow converts “not your keys, not your coins.”
michaelscott 8y ago
It's also incredibly important to note that Bitcoin (and really all current cryptocurrency implementations) are still very much in their early stages, like a child intuitively understanding the spatial dimensions of the world by bumping into furniture. The environment probably needs more rigorous and academic consideration in order to legitimise it (if for no other reason than that it does contribute to comp sci theory at least). I also do not think that Satoshi Nakamoto intended for his technology to be the last say in the crypto space. The implementation was given to the world to iterate on and improve the tech (just like every other tech ever). Environmental impact of mining, inefficiency, scalability etc. should all be considered candidates for improvement as opposed to armchair criticism alone.
simias 8y ago
I don't think anybody denies that Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper was novel and extremely clever. At least I don't. But being novel and clever is not enough to justify the "frenzied speculation" that followed IMO. You seem to root for cryptocurrencies so I can understand your frustration when faced with naysayers like me but understand that the feeling is mutual. Ten years that we hear the same promises, ten years that we're told that "it's being researched", ten years that we only see half-assed solutions to fundamental problems that create as many issues as they solve (e.g. Segwit, PoS) or basically give up on the whole ideal of cryptocurrencies by introducing centralization or trusted peers (Ripple and many others). Ten years on, billions of dollars speculatively invested, "clever people" supposedly working on these issues and what do you have to show for it? People basically reinventing the current banking system on top of an inefficient, wildly speculative asset. "Fidelity just made it easier for hedge funds and other pros to invest in cryptocurrencies". New ways to speculate with cryptocurrencies! The conversation is frustrating because all's been said. We all know where we stand and at this point the only way to move forward would be for the cryptocurrency scene to come up with something truly novel and useful, not something that reinvents the current banking system but worse. Ten years on, and with as much intellectual honesty I can muster, I still see only two worthwhile uses of cryptocurrencies: buying drugs online and serving as some sort of notary to timestamp documents. For these two things Bitcoin is actually very competitive. For the rest as far as I'm concerned it's either "reinventing the wheel but worse" (re-creating current infrastructure only less efficiently) or "software cold fusion" (pipe dreams that would require major breakthrough in computer science to achieve their stated goals). >Frenzied speculation brought about inadvertent side effects but these should not detract from the fact that significant advancements are continuously being researched and implemented. The frenzied speculation is basically the only actuality surrounding cryptocurrencies these days. Maybe this research you speak of is going to bear fruits and revolutionize the world as we know it or maybe it's going to fizzle out gently as hype dies. This is not a small startup in a garage, this is supposedly a trillion dollar market cap industry, "we're working on it" doesn't cut it for me anymore.
esotericn 8y ago
"If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry" - Satoshi Nakamoto Our job is to keep on grinding to bring these things into fruition. It's a shame that scammers in the space have turned most technologists against Bitcoin. But really, there's nothing that can be done other than to keep pushing. Keep up the fight. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But really, this mud flinging is distraction. And yeah, there's a bloody lot of it.
Novashi 8y ago
We don't have to keep current cryptocurrencies around just because there was a CS breakthrough in its first implementation. Should keep all of these shitcoins and ICO scams around because 1/100 might be legit while 99/100 of them do real damage to investors? Or do you want to keep them around because a CS breakthrough being implemented takes precedence over enforcing financial fraud?
helen___keller 8y ago
Why wouldn't people be irrationally angry at crypto? Every mainstream use case marketed online has turned out to be an extreme dud. Online payment system through bitcoin? High confirmation times, sometimes high fees, and very few accepting vendors Deflationary store of value through bitcoin? Nope, just speculative frenzy. "Ethereum World Computer"? More like platform for ERC20 token fraud. Top dapps get low thousands of users, so Etherum has thus far failed to turn up anything of note to the mainstream. "Will be ready for mainstream once (SegWit / block size increase / lightning / PoS) is done"? None of these have materialized into any mainstream value. On top every mainstream use case being a dud, the goalposts move every single time there's a discussion about crypto. If you bring up the transaction time, you get "it's supposed to be digital gold". If you bring up the speculative frenzy, you get the "it's supposed to be a foundational technology, not immediately useful". It's exhausting, and it's predictable that there can be no good faith discussion since the speculative price varies based on public opinion & new user buy-in (ie shilling galore). It's great that some people in Venezuela have found blockchain actually useful for avoiding the collapse of their currency, rather than hypothetically useful like it is for the rest of the world. Personally, I would be happy to not hear from any blockchain project ever again unless it has say 100,000 daily users that actually use it "as intended" - say as a payment system rather than as a speculative investment, or as a decentralized computing platform rather than as a speculative investment disguised as a token.
DennisP 8y ago
I don't mind the skepticism. What's disappointing to me is that the comments usually rehash the same tired arguments and ignore the actual article. What's the point?
jjcm 8y ago
For those of us less aware of the crypto space, can you ELI5 the Byzantine Generals problem and how the Nakamoto Consensus fixes it?
- seibelj 8y ago
  The problem is how to achieve agreement (“consensus”) on the truth when at least one person is actively lying and trying to disrupt the truth. In the context of digital money, it’s how you prevent the same coin being spent twice when manipulating digital information is easy. A related problem is a Sybil attack, where a decentralized peer-to-peer system that is truly open makes it easy to generate new identities and overwhelm the system, so simply relying on the majority of accounts to agree on truth can still be subverted by a motivated attacker. Bitcoin was a novel solution to this problem by using “mining”, or raw computation power, as a mechanism for enforcing consensus. This made Sybil attacks worthless as the only thing that truly matters in Bitcoin is computation power, which is expensive, and an attacker would need 51% of the power to attack the network.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Which several actors have actually had over the course of bitcoins existence, as far as I’m aware.
    - jlborxes 8y ago
      At the moment, accumulating 51% of the Bitcoin network's hash rate is prohibitely expensive. An attacker would be better off just using that massive hash power to legitimately mine bitcoins. This is the game theory behind bitcoin mining. Having said that, smaller PoW coins have been recently hit by 51% attacks, as renting the needed hash power for them is cheaper than the profits from selling the double spent coins.
      - arcticbull 8y ago
        Not too expensive if you're Beijing. 75% of hashpower is centralized within the PRC. All Beijing has to do is inform the miners they now do their bidding. This kind of thing happens all the time in the PRC. The 'community' lost this fight ages ago, at this point Bitcoin effectively operates at the pleasure of Beijing, and one day that may very well change.
gotocake 8y ago
The comments seem to honestly reflect the state of the technology, its environmental impact, the annoyance factor of its extreme adherents, the total lack of a really compelling non-ideological or criminal use case after more than a decade, and a deflating bubble. The insane gulf between the promises made by the “every day brings a new breakthrough” crowd and the reality of ICO’s and Bitcoin is vast, and hard to ignore. Blockchain is a neat idea, but presently it is used in ways that are far from compelling, and I’m yet to hear of a non-hypothetical application that could change that (apart from buying drugs, or money laundering). It’s also hard to forget the last few years of relentless evangelism, which was equal parts annoying and ethically challenged.
- colordrops 8y ago
  "money laundering" is a feature, not a bug. To bucket all forms of monetary subversion as a bad is like saying all drugs are bad. There is too much control exerted by various authorities and companies over transactions and Bitcoin creates a much needed outlet.
- csomar 8y ago
  This "I don't see a use-case for my very limited life/experience/work" is very toxic. I use Bitcoin to get paid and to pay. That is legitimate. I know a lot of people that uses it for the same reason. There is also a whole lot people using it to evade capital controls; which is modern day repression on freedoms. Also what is wrong about buying "drugs"? Would you say the same about an encrypted messaging platform that operates in China. That the user should not use it since China did not approve that?
- basch 8y ago
  >I’m yet to hear of a non-hypothetical application that could change that shared accounting systems between collaborates. complete replacement of ap/ar and every company in a consortium not needing to keep their own, isolated, audit requiring, double entry books. the amount of duplication reduction potential is staggering.
- corv 8y ago
  The comments reflect the (perceived) state of the technology. One has to admit that the reputation of the entire space has been tarnished by snake oil salesmen. For some historical context it is worth looking at countless examples such as the Railway Mania[1] of the 1840s or the more recent Dot-Com bubble[2]. For more depth one can read Mackay[3]. Some of the most promising advancements in payment channels were only published as papers in 2016[4] and are understandably still being implemented. If anything the speed at which enthusiasts are willing to deploy experimental software at their own risk is breathtaking. Regarding the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network, while being widely derided for its energy use, it is in fact using less electricity than the major credit card networks. It is also using less energy than global gold mining. There are ways to reduce consumption should a consensus accept the tradeoffs. The term "Blockchain" as it is currently used often refers to private chains which are in vogue with corporate stakeholders. This appears to be a solution in search of a problem–I have not been able to identify a compelling use case here either. Most ICOs are outright scams. It is truly unfortunate that promising advancements of micropayments, smart contracts and the world's closet thing to an incorruptible currency are lumped together with so much rubbish. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... [4]https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
Kinnard 8y ago
Working on it!
Theodores 8y ago
> I'm disappointed of HN comments whenever cryptocurrency topics come up. Couldn't agree with you more, however, this story is not about a significant advancement in technology and people are reading too much blockchain into it. This new investment product is nothing to do with 'proof of stake' or the ethics of bitcoin mining. In essence it is a fund that is backed by bitcoin that has been purchased privately without going through exchanges people know about, e.g. Coinbase. People investing in this fund do not have their transactions recorded on the blockchain. The bank simply have bitcoin in cold storage to back the fund in a similar way to how banks used to have gold in a vault. With legacy banking the gold did not physically move every time someone used the ATM. Same here, no bitcoins get moved. This is not a difficult story to understand. There is no need for people to be getting uppity about it and to downvote those that bring information to the story that is obfuscated by how the crypto-media have described it thus far from their understanding of the press releases made available.
billions 8y ago
HN is incredibly homogenious across certain verticals, crypto being one of them. The earth is flat and you'll be downvoted if you suggest otherwise. All ideas should be up for fair debate and, at worst, let the "wrong" side choose to believe what they please, unless you think your thoughts need external censoring as well.
- CaptainZapp 8y ago
  No, I would never downvote for opinions expressed. But I certainly downvote ludicrous and dishonest statements like Visa consumes more energy than bitcoin and here's why. While theoritcally true here's the thing: While one bitcoin transaction consumes 1'005 kWh of energy 100'000 visa transactions require 169 kWh.[1] Trying to frame that in a way that Visa is more expensive than Bitcoin, energy wise, is a deeply dishonest sleight of hand, which absolutely deserves to be downvoted into oblivion. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
  - billions 8y ago
    What are the heuristics for computing your chart? How much energy was it to make the plastic on the credit card terminals? Do bankers drive Priuses or Cadillacs? What if Bitcoin eliminates 50,000 bankers's air-conditioned office desks? Is Bitcoin's cost per transaction a fixed number or improving in efficiency? What if planes were "downvoted" 10 years after invention due to inefficiency over rail transport? Which side of history will you be on? https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/1057022650919337984 https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/1057022650919337984

by corv 8y ago

mindfulplay 8y ago

Well....There is a stark difference in appreciation for TCP/IP the computer science protocol versus the Cesspool that is the internet or the early AOL crap...

arcticbull 8y ago

Besides the battles over efficiency (it's bad) and novelty (it's not really), there are some truly fundamental blockers to adopting cryptocurrencies. For instance, this poor Redditor lost the keys to a wallet with $40,000 of crypto in it [1]. This happens all the time. Being your own bank is literally the worst. Plenty of jokes ensued: "It's just like the time I lost my car keys and need to buy a new car next day." "It’s just like the time that I lost my house keys and had to move into a homeless shelter." "It's just like the time I forgot my personal question to my 401k account and I got locked out forever, nobody could help me, and I lost the entire balance." Unlike all the efficiency and speed questions, this part here is a stated, inalienable objective of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is the expected behavior. Some clown designed it to work like this. Imagine grandma trying to use this. Remember that time PayPal locked your account and you were so mad you couldn't get at your $600 for a few weeks? Now imagine you lost your life savings because you can't remember your password and literally nobody can help you now, or ever again - and thats the point. I'd imagine it'll destroy itself anyways, it seems like any random walk ends in 100% of coins lost to human inability to preserve access. Who cares how amazing the system is technically? It's designed to be actively hostile to human users. [1] https://i.imgur.com/RP7ighy.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RP7ighy.jpg

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
I comment on these issues on Reddit all the time and get downvoted to hell. People there just don’t want to hear it.
whiskers08xmt 8y ago
Of course having access to the private key, need to be the most basic way to access funds. It's the only thing that's guaranteed to be uncensorable, while minimizing the requirement of trust. It is a big responsibility though, and should not be taken lightly. The crypto-currency community is partly at fault here, for blaring memes like "If you don't control your private keys, it's not your Bitcoin", without any regard for whether or not people are ready for that responsibility. That being said, there are number of ways you can store your crypto-currency, with varying degrees of trust-minimization: - Use a multi-signature smart contract wallet, where a master key has power to move the money. If the master key is lost, the money can be moved by X out of Y keys signing off on the transaction. You can then distribute the Y keys to your trusted associates, preferably without telling them who the other key-holders are. - Use a dead-hand smart contract wallet, where the money can be retrieved by a trusted associate, if the dead-hand switch hasn't been activated within Z amount of time. Can be combined with the above, in case further trust minimization is needed. - Store your crypto-currency at a FDIC exchange. Pretty much the same model as the banking world. This really should be the go to way for the average Joe, as it mirrors what you currently can expect from online-banking.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  The first two are way too complicated for retail banking customers. Do you really think you can explain to your parents how dead handed multi pantsed wallets work? I stopped reading half a line in and I’m well within the target customer group here. The third, an exchange, violates all the core principals of cryptocurrency and is basically no different than what we have today but way harder and less efficient. Exchanges don’t require crypto they just run a MySQL store and attribute fractional ownership as centralized, opaque records not protected by the blockchain. If everyone just did that because it’s the simplest and easiest and most secure way to hold on to your coins, cryptocurrency would just replace bank to bank transfers which by definition don’t require a trustless backing and all the worlds electricity. Plus to quote your fellow converts “not your keys, not your coins.”

michaelscott 8y ago

It's also incredibly important to note that Bitcoin (and really all current cryptocurrency implementations) are still very much in their early stages, like a child intuitively understanding the spatial dimensions of the world by bumping into furniture. The environment probably needs more rigorous and academic consideration in order to legitimise it (if for no other reason than that it does contribute to comp sci theory at least). I also do not think that Satoshi Nakamoto intended for his technology to be the last say in the crypto space. The implementation was given to the world to iterate on and improve the tech (just like every other tech ever). Environmental impact of mining, inefficiency, scalability etc. should all be considered candidates for improvement as opposed to armchair criticism alone.

simias 8y ago

I don't think anybody denies that Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper was novel and extremely clever. At least I don't. But being novel and clever is not enough to justify the "frenzied speculation" that followed IMO. You seem to root for cryptocurrencies so I can understand your frustration when faced with naysayers like me but understand that the feeling is mutual. Ten years that we hear the same promises, ten years that we're told that "it's being researched", ten years that we only see half-assed solutions to fundamental problems that create as many issues as they solve (e.g. Segwit, PoS) or basically give up on the whole ideal of cryptocurrencies by introducing centralization or trusted peers (Ripple and many others). Ten years on, billions of dollars speculatively invested, "clever people" supposedly working on these issues and what do you have to show for it? People basically reinventing the current banking system on top of an inefficient, wildly speculative asset. "Fidelity just made it easier for hedge funds and other pros to invest in cryptocurrencies". New ways to speculate with cryptocurrencies! The conversation is frustrating because all's been said. We all know where we stand and at this point the only way to move forward would be for the cryptocurrency scene to come up with something truly novel and useful, not something that reinvents the current banking system but worse. Ten years on, and with as much intellectual honesty I can muster, I still see only two worthwhile uses of cryptocurrencies: buying drugs online and serving as some sort of notary to timestamp documents. For these two things Bitcoin is actually very competitive. For the rest as far as I'm concerned it's either "reinventing the wheel but worse" (re-creating current infrastructure only less efficiently) or "software cold fusion" (pipe dreams that would require major breakthrough in computer science to achieve their stated goals). >Frenzied speculation brought about inadvertent side effects but these should not detract from the fact that significant advancements are continuously being researched and implemented. The frenzied speculation is basically the only actuality surrounding cryptocurrencies these days. Maybe this research you speak of is going to bear fruits and revolutionize the world as we know it or maybe it's going to fizzle out gently as hype dies. This is not a small startup in a garage, this is supposedly a trillion dollar market cap industry, "we're working on it" doesn't cut it for me anymore.

esotericn 8y ago

"If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry" - Satoshi Nakamoto Our job is to keep on grinding to bring these things into fruition. It's a shame that scammers in the space have turned most technologists against Bitcoin. But really, there's nothing that can be done other than to keep pushing. Keep up the fight. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But really, this mud flinging is distraction. And yeah, there's a bloody lot of it.

Novashi 8y ago

We don't have to keep current cryptocurrencies around just because there was a CS breakthrough in its first implementation. Should keep all of these shitcoins and ICO scams around because 1/100 might be legit while 99/100 of them do real damage to investors? Or do you want to keep them around because a CS breakthrough being implemented takes precedence over enforcing financial fraud?

helen___keller 8y ago

Why wouldn't people be irrationally angry at crypto? Every mainstream use case marketed online has turned out to be an extreme dud. Online payment system through bitcoin? High confirmation times, sometimes high fees, and very few accepting vendors Deflationary store of value through bitcoin? Nope, just speculative frenzy. "Ethereum World Computer"? More like platform for ERC20 token fraud. Top dapps get low thousands of users, so Etherum has thus far failed to turn up anything of note to the mainstream. "Will be ready for mainstream once (SegWit / block size increase / lightning / PoS) is done"? None of these have materialized into any mainstream value. On top every mainstream use case being a dud, the goalposts move every single time there's a discussion about crypto. If you bring up the transaction time, you get "it's supposed to be digital gold". If you bring up the speculative frenzy, you get the "it's supposed to be a foundational technology, not immediately useful". It's exhausting, and it's predictable that there can be no good faith discussion since the speculative price varies based on public opinion & new user buy-in (ie shilling galore). It's great that some people in Venezuela have found blockchain actually useful for avoiding the collapse of their currency, rather than hypothetically useful like it is for the rest of the world. Personally, I would be happy to not hear from any blockchain project ever again unless it has say 100,000 daily users that actually use it "as intended" - say as a payment system rather than as a speculative investment, or as a decentralized computing platform rather than as a speculative investment disguised as a token.

DennisP 8y ago

I don't mind the skepticism. What's disappointing to me is that the comments usually rehash the same tired arguments and ignore the actual article. What's the point?

jjcm 8y ago

For those of us less aware of the crypto space, can you ELI5 the Byzantine Generals problem and how the Nakamoto Consensus fixes it?

seibelj 8y ago
The problem is how to achieve agreement (“consensus”) on the truth when at least one person is actively lying and trying to disrupt the truth. In the context of digital money, it’s how you prevent the same coin being spent twice when manipulating digital information is easy. A related problem is a Sybil attack, where a decentralized peer-to-peer system that is truly open makes it easy to generate new identities and overwhelm the system, so simply relying on the majority of accounts to agree on truth can still be subverted by a motivated attacker. Bitcoin was a novel solution to this problem by using “mining”, or raw computation power, as a mechanism for enforcing consensus. This made Sybil attacks worthless as the only thing that truly matters in Bitcoin is computation power, which is expensive, and an attacker would need 51% of the power to attack the network.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Which several actors have actually had over the course of bitcoins existence, as far as I’m aware.
  - jlborxes 8y ago
    At the moment, accumulating 51% of the Bitcoin network's hash rate is prohibitely expensive. An attacker would be better off just using that massive hash power to legitimately mine bitcoins. This is the game theory behind bitcoin mining. Having said that, smaller PoW coins have been recently hit by 51% attacks, as renting the needed hash power for them is cheaper than the profits from selling the double spent coins.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Not too expensive if you're Beijing. 75% of hashpower is centralized within the PRC. All Beijing has to do is inform the miners they now do their bidding. This kind of thing happens all the time in the PRC. The 'community' lost this fight ages ago, at this point Bitcoin effectively operates at the pleasure of Beijing, and one day that may very well change.

gotocake 8y ago

The comments seem to honestly reflect the state of the technology, its environmental impact, the annoyance factor of its extreme adherents, the total lack of a really compelling non-ideological or criminal use case after more than a decade, and a deflating bubble. The insane gulf between the promises made by the “every day brings a new breakthrough” crowd and the reality of ICO’s and Bitcoin is vast, and hard to ignore. Blockchain is a neat idea, but presently it is used in ways that are far from compelling, and I’m yet to hear of a non-hypothetical application that could change that (apart from buying drugs, or money laundering). It’s also hard to forget the last few years of relentless evangelism, which was equal parts annoying and ethically challenged.

colordrops 8y ago
"money laundering" is a feature, not a bug. To bucket all forms of monetary subversion as a bad is like saying all drugs are bad. There is too much control exerted by various authorities and companies over transactions and Bitcoin creates a much needed outlet.
csomar 8y ago
This "I don't see a use-case for my very limited life/experience/work" is very toxic. I use Bitcoin to get paid and to pay. That is legitimate. I know a lot of people that uses it for the same reason. There is also a whole lot people using it to evade capital controls; which is modern day repression on freedoms. Also what is wrong about buying "drugs"? Would you say the same about an encrypted messaging platform that operates in China. That the user should not use it since China did not approve that?
basch 8y ago
>I’m yet to hear of a non-hypothetical application that could change that shared accounting systems between collaborates. complete replacement of ap/ar and every company in a consortium not needing to keep their own, isolated, audit requiring, double entry books. the amount of duplication reduction potential is staggering.
corv 8y ago
The comments reflect the (perceived) state of the technology. One has to admit that the reputation of the entire space has been tarnished by snake oil salesmen. For some historical context it is worth looking at countless examples such as the Railway Mania[1] of the 1840s or the more recent Dot-Com bubble[2]. For more depth one can read Mackay[3]. Some of the most promising advancements in payment channels were only published as papers in 2016[4] and are understandably still being implemented. If anything the speed at which enthusiasts are willing to deploy experimental software at their own risk is breathtaking. Regarding the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network, while being widely derided for its energy use, it is in fact using less electricity than the major credit card networks. It is also using less energy than global gold mining. There are ways to reduce consumption should a consensus accept the tradeoffs. The term "Blockchain" as it is currently used often refers to private chains which are in vogue with corporate stakeholders. This appears to be a solution in search of a problem–I have not been able to identify a compelling use case here either. Most ICOs are outright scams. It is truly unfortunate that promising advancements of micropayments, smart contracts and the world's closet thing to an incorruptible currency are lumped together with so much rubbish. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... [4]https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

Kinnard 8y ago

Working on it!

Theodores 8y ago

> I'm disappointed of HN comments whenever cryptocurrency topics come up. Couldn't agree with you more, however, this story is not about a significant advancement in technology and people are reading too much blockchain into it. This new investment product is nothing to do with 'proof of stake' or the ethics of bitcoin mining. In essence it is a fund that is backed by bitcoin that has been purchased privately without going through exchanges people know about, e.g. Coinbase. People investing in this fund do not have their transactions recorded on the blockchain. The bank simply have bitcoin in cold storage to back the fund in a similar way to how banks used to have gold in a vault. With legacy banking the gold did not physically move every time someone used the ATM. Same here, no bitcoins get moved. This is not a difficult story to understand. There is no need for people to be getting uppity about it and to downvote those that bring information to the story that is obfuscated by how the crypto-media have described it thus far from their understanding of the press releases made available.

billions 8y ago

HN is incredibly homogenious across certain verticals, crypto being one of them. The earth is flat and you'll be downvoted if you suggest otherwise. All ideas should be up for fair debate and, at worst, let the "wrong" side choose to believe what they please, unless you think your thoughts need external censoring as well.

CaptainZapp 8y ago
No, I would never downvote for opinions expressed. But I certainly downvote ludicrous and dishonest statements like Visa consumes more energy than bitcoin and here's why. While theoritcally true here's the thing: While one bitcoin transaction consumes 1'005 kWh of energy 100'000 visa transactions require 169 kWh.[1] Trying to frame that in a way that Visa is more expensive than Bitcoin, energy wise, is a deeply dishonest sleight of hand, which absolutely deserves to be downvoted into oblivion. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
- billions 8y ago
  What are the heuristics for computing your chart? How much energy was it to make the plastic on the credit card terminals? Do bankers drive Priuses or Cadillacs? What if Bitcoin eliminates 50,000 bankers's air-conditioned office desks? Is Bitcoin's cost per transaction a fixed number or improving in efficiency? What if planes were "downvoted" 10 years after invention due to inefficiency over rail transport? Which side of history will you be on? https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/1057022650919337984 https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/1057022650919337984