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Good riddance. Hopefully this will serve as a reality check for regular people who are tempted by the siren song of quick riches. Crypto never provided any real

by gizmo 8y ago

Good riddance. Hopefully this will serve as a reality check for regular people who are tempted by the siren song of quick riches. Crypto never provided any real economic value, so this was bound to happen sooner or later. With a bit of luck crypto will stay dead this time. Fingers crossed.

leumas 8y ago
I do agree that most have been trying to solve the wrong problems with blockchains, but to write off the technology in it's entirety seems rather ridiculous... Is immutability not a powerful programming concept? Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised?
- PeterisP 8y ago
  This doesn't need cryptocurrencies, a centralized public ledger applying hashes/signatures with something like a Merkle tree can do the same while avoiding the necessity to constantly burn proof-of-work proportional to how valuable your data integrity is.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  What you're describing are immutable, crypto-protected logs. They go way back before blockchains without blockchains problems. One was a big business: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-t... I mentioned some random examples below showing that people stayed exploring and pushing the useful concepts again without all the bad stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776837
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised? Use Git. It doesn't even require a small nation's worth of electricity to operate and it probably even has a substantially higher transaction throughput!

by gizmo 8y ago

leumas 8y ago

I do agree that most have been trying to solve the wrong problems with blockchains, but to write off the technology in it's entirety seems rather ridiculous... Is immutability not a powerful programming concept? Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised?

PeterisP 8y ago
This doesn't need cryptocurrencies, a centralized public ledger applying hashes/signatures with something like a Merkle tree can do the same while avoiding the necessity to constantly burn proof-of-work proportional to how valuable your data integrity is.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
What you're describing are immutable, crypto-protected logs. They go way back before blockchains without blockchains problems. One was a big business: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-t... I mentioned some random examples below showing that people stayed exploring and pushing the useful concepts again without all the bad stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776837
spookthesunset 8y ago
> Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised? Use Git. It doesn't even require a small nation's worth of electricity to operate and it probably even has a substantially higher transaction throughput!