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I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology to the point t

by Sargos 8y ago

I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology to the point that we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come. The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. That's something that future generations will take for granted but HN is largely ignoring right now. Even Google goes down (sometimes once or twice a month). Take a moment to imagine a few of the things you could do better if you had 100% reliable hosting that was safe and private. And basically free. (Either the user pays a penny or two when using your app or you pay a penny or two for each user). You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages on Usenet which take a while to appear. The tech was being improved. Those short pieces of messages evolved into images and then later video and now we have the internet of today. This isn't going to happen overnight but it's going to happen faster than the improvement of the internet since Ethereum is just software and no hardware needs to be rolled out. Go ahead and ignore it right now. It's still building time. But don't assume it's useless or beanie babies. In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful and I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.

tialaramex 8y ago
More succinctly than most of the replies: They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan
- mamon 8y ago
  Offtopic, but people actually had a good reason to laugh at Columbus: he made a simple error in his calculations that lead him to believe Earth is much smaller that it really is. Most of the nobles he asked for money were actually better educated than him, so the error was obvious to them. And since noone could know about America's existence it was reasonable to assume that Columbus will simply run out of supplies and starve to death in the middle of the ocean. Which almost happened, they've found the land at the very last moment.
sorenjan 8y ago
Hacker News' own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment was when Dropbox was introduced: > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- belltaco 8y ago
  Same with Slack/Discord vs. IRC. I think geeks tend to underestimate the power of polish, ease of use and integration of populist new social media features(auto expand/play gifs). The flip side is handing over control over everything to Silicon Valley which is slowly coming to roost. Wonder what'll happen if the Discord store doesn't make enough money to pay for servers and investors demand RoI?
  - askafriend 8y ago
    IRC is irrelevant in today's world. No serious, innovative community is still on IRC.
    - simias 8y ago
      IRC is niche these days but I'd be interested to hear your methodology to reach the conclusion that "No serious, innovative community is still on IRC".
    - jackfraser 8y ago
      I've heard Amazon uses IRC internally?
      - mypalmike 8y ago
        Amazon uses Chime (https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/) internally.
robterrell 8y ago
Didn't CryptoKitties bring the Etherium network to its knees? Not saying the issues aren't solvable, but can't we agree that nothing "never goes down," especially complex distributed systems.
- ErikAugust 8y ago
  Also: “Proof if Weak Hands” was successful in making a game out of spamming the network to the point of DoS. When ETH was hundreds of dollars, the cost of running code on the blockchain (gas price) could get up to $50 during these attacks. Imagine adding a column in a database table cost $50. Forget about it.
  - ErikAugust 8y ago
    I created and run a cryptocurrency trading game called Cache (https://www.cachethegame.com https://www.cachethegame.com) that uses ERC20 tokens in the “coin-op” sense. The solution when transaction fees go wild is to simply enable free play. Nobody wants to play $1+ in fees for something that costs a few cents.
- xur17 8y ago
  It did become more expensive to use (on the order of 10x), but it didn't go down.
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  No thats not what happend. Nothing ever went down but if you wanted a tx to go through fast you had to pay more.
  - robterrell 8y ago
    I was thinking of this story: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162 (Which, I understand, is for a general audience and might not be very accurate.) I recall the founder of CryptoKitties saying that the transaction cost was significantly higher than the kitty cost. Isn't that a failure state for the network?
root_axis 8y ago
> HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology HN dislikes the never ending and unsubstantiated breathless hype surrounding cryptocurrency, this is painfully obvious if you actually engage genuinely instead of pretending that everyone is an idiot because they don't fawn over what has amounted to a novel and interesting but mostly useless technology. > No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. Using hindsight to cherry-pick historical examples of when naysayers were wrong is obviously terribly flawed logic yet it is a routinely common defense among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It should be obvious to any engineer that this proves nothing and I personally take this reasoning as a sign that you might be arguing in bad faith. > Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. A base layer for apps that nobody cares about. Give one example of a useful Ethereum app. I define "useful" as a product or service that has demonstrated market success but is cheaper or somehow improved through cryptocurrency. I don't count it as useful if its a niche use-case that is impractical or has no market demand (e.g. avoiding taxes). Also, the idea that these systems never fail is laughably absurd as they have failed to the tune of multiple millions of dollars at this point (i.e. badly written code that failed to do what it claimed, resulting in funds being stolen). > You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages This absurd comparison of cryptocurrency to the early internet has been so thoroughly debunked that it barely merits a response. Please stop saying this. > In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful Only in cryptocurrency software land is "in a few more years it might be useful" a defensible explanation of why cryptocurrency is the greatest innovation since the internet. Why can't you wait till its actually useful before broadcasting your condescendingly cliche cryptocurrency judgements regarding how HN is full of Luddites who are incapable of understanding technology? I'm sure cryptocurrency is just so complex and so new that todays engineers are just too dumb to understand it, it takes a special breed of elite hacker to fully grok the amazing potential of this new technology, Luddite software engineers be damned.
belltaco 8y ago
> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. That's something that future generations will take for granted but HN is largely ignoring right now. The iPod was released at that point and you could hold it in your hands and see for yourself. Can you give me some examples of real world applications of Ethereum's protocol that you think are being undercounted? I recently looked for some using smart contracts but all I see is hype and a lot of VC/bitcoin money thrown at things that haven't been able to deliver and don't even need blockchain. I saw Dubai putting property records into a blockchain but not sure it has smart contracts. Perhaps something will come up in the future, but what does it have to do with excessive crypto-profit and hype money being put into startups that lack fundamentals? I am not saying experimentation is bad, but I felt like we were/are reaching dotcom pets.com levels of hype and mania. If you ask me, HN mostly seems to be saying that the hype has been out of control over blockchain. I don't see people saying blockchain technology is lame or unreliable, do you? I have seen comparisons of bitcoin to tulip mania and ponzis, but that's not the same as discounting blockchain technologies.
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  https://medium.com/cryptolinks/maker-for-dummies-a-plain-english-explanation-of-the-dai-stablecoin-e4481d79b90 https://medium.com/cryptolinks/maker-for-dummies-a-plain-eng... A stablecoin run in a contract is pretty amazing and becoming more and more popular.
  - ac29 8y ago
    DAI, like other stablecoins, isn't really all that stable - right now it costs about $1.02 to buy $1 worth. And, it's frequently been over 5% away from $1: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/#charts https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/#charts Most "stable" coins are trading at over $1 right now, presumably as people try to flee sinking cryptocurrencies and have no practical and/or legal means to turn them into real money.
    - chrisco255 8y ago
skyraider 8y ago
> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems. Blockchains solve only one problem, which is consensus formation on ontrusted networks. They do not solve politics, governance, downtime, and certainly not application failure.. these things all exist on blockchains. Essentially none of the application ported from centralized systems to Ethereum or even Bitcoin actually face Byzantine consensus issues when deployed as centralized systems. Bitcoin can be used as a 24x7x365 global collateral and value transfer instrument - such a system would face consensus problems if implemented on top of traditional banking infrastructure. That's hugely valuable, but pretty much the only problem-solving application to date. For things like asset ownership and transfer, any kind of voting, real estate, IPOs, etc, most people still have to deal with incredibly bad centralized systems, that would be amazing if rebuilt as centralized node.js apps that talk to a MySQL database. This stuff is low hanging fruit that's a huge pain for massive swathes of humanity. And despite the fact that no Palo Alto real estate broker is talking to the city's land deed system over unreliable networks, where enemy messengers might swoop in and assign your deed to the wrong buyer, there's this myth that we need distributed consensus for this and other problems best solved by... databases.
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  >>Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems Nobody denies its slow, its a waste of resources, its buggy, its hyped. its a lot of things many early systems was. Its all challenges that people try to solve. What is interresting is if those things can be solved. And i dont understand Why so many dont see a benefit if we could one day build true decentralized systems... its not the distributed or avalibility thats important. Its not like goverments or companies always have the peoples best interrest when they make decissions.
  - SalMonella 8y ago
    Nathaniel. I can see what your saying... Paul`s remark is neat, on thursday I got a top of the range Nissan GT-R: after making $6612 this last four weeks and just a little over ten-k last munth. this is certainly the easiest work Ive had. I started this five months/ago and almost straight away began to make more than $71 per-hour. I work through this website, www.Mesalary.com
api 8y ago
The underlying tech is potentially powerful and useful. The current popular implementations are slow, have very wonky hyperdeflationary economics (which makes them Ponzis whether intended or not), and are surrounded by a toxic ecosystem that is shockingly riddled with scams and fraud. HN has, like many other circles, gotten sick of the breathless vaporware hype and scams.
throwawaymath 8y ago
> we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come. That quote is a product of its time, and only seems foolish or misguided with the benefit of hindsight. There is no shame in skepticism, even if it ultimately ends up being incorrect (likewise I'd have no misgivings about making a wrong decision rationally). There is also an element of survivorship bias: many such quotes about things which did fail were wagered on similar amounts of information, but have since fallen into obscurity. I don't think it's fair to call the author of that quote a Luddite. Speaking as someone well acquainted with the technicalities of distributed systems and cryptography, I am deeply skeptical of blockchain technology. I think the vast majority (but not all) of it is "lame"[1], for lack of a better word. I would happily accept being quoted for a decade or two if I'm wrong. ___________________________ 1. I'm skeptical for reasons I'm not going to try to defend, because they've been rehashed on Hacker News over and over. The justifications will likely not convince anyone who remains unconvinced.
- albedoa 8y ago
  > That quote is a product of its time, and only seems foolish or misguided with the benefit of hindsight. "Only"? There were top-level comments in that very thread [1] that pointed out why it was misguided and foolish. Hindsight is not the requirement that some want it to be. 1. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
  - dingaling 8y ago
    Yet wireless and large capacity proved, in the long run, to be exactly what the market wanted and Apple had to incorporate those features into later iPods.
    - kemiller 8y ago
      I think that’s sort of OP’s point. The criticisms that come up may be valid, but that doesn’t mean the whole enterprise is doomed.
tomp 8y ago
> Ethereum [...] apps [...] are fully trusted Haha you're funny. On a more serious note, I don't think the current generation of blockchains is "The Future". They offer basically nothing more than what you can achieve with a publicly hosted git repository with post-commit hooks that enforce signatures. Actually, Ethereum is far worse, because all computations are repeated by every node (as far as I know), which is a huge waste of energy. If you want reliable distributed computation, you need to make sure there's some way of smart distribution of work... e.g. offer exponentially diminishing returns for each "duplicated" evaluation of the same piece of code beyond the 2nd.
- cloud_man 8y ago
  The replication is for secure non-censorable trusted code execution. For high-throughput computations, Golem is being developed, where there is (generally) no computation replication. www.golem.network. The repository is here: https://github.com/golemfactory https://github.com/golemfactory
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Even better: > Ethereum [...] apps [...] never fail Just... wow. Listen, distributed ledgers are useful. Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful. These people just can't seem to see the difference.
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    > Listen, distributed ledgers are useful. > Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful. > These people just can't seem to see the difference. To be clear, are you claiming the GGP (Sargos) can't see the difference between these two things?
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    They didn’t say such apps exist, they said Ethereum provides the protocol for such apps.
na85 8y ago
>Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. Are you suggesting that Ethereum apps can have 100% uptime (never go down, never fail), and are completely secure (fully trusted)? Because if so I've got some shares of a bridge to sell you.
- codeka 8y ago
  I don't even understand the benefit of 100.00% uptime, over 99.99% anyway? I mean, I probably spend more time in a parking garage with no internet available to me at all, than google spends being down in any given month. I mean, I understand the idea that Google wants to increase their uptime because every lost query is lost revenue, but OP seemed to imply there's some intrinsic benefit that's more than just the incremental benefit...
  - na85 8y ago
    Moving the goal posts.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    Regardless of the marginal benefits of 100% uptime vs 99.99...the entire point of ETH is that once the contract is posted to the block chain, it continues to operate in perpetuity...and no centralized service provider or government can take it down. That's powerful, and in our age of creeping power consolidation by big tech cos and overreaching governments, I applaud the development of censorship-resistant tech.
- swampthinker 8y ago
  What's the vesting schedule of these shares?
- hanniabu 8y ago
  I'm not saying I agree, but I'd be interested in hearing your argument
  - empath75 8y ago
gurumeditations 8y ago
Electronic communication services have a linear path of development any idiot can see: more bits per second, more information, more possibilities. Blockchains don’t have that simple path of development. They fundamentally don’t make practical sense compared to centralized services. There’s a reason that everyone gets their power from a small number of centralized power plants instead of everyone throwing a few solar panels on their roof and trading their power on the marketplace to create a decentralized power grid. It sounds really cool but it’s just wildly illogical in the real world. That’s blockchain.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Actually solar panels and distributed grids make a lot of sense and what was holding them back was the state of the technology. Unlike the blockchain, which is fundamentally broken for 99.999% of all use cases, distributed power grids could actually work with the right engineering.
  - gurumeditations 8y ago
    I know they sound really cool. I’m saying that it’s illogical to do so in the real world. Centralization is almost always cheaper, faster, and stronger.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      They still have a place as a 'competitor of last resort' to force reasonability on centralized powers. They would essentially do to power what satellite dishes did to cable - and that was just another centralized power! Sure satellite dishes are worse in latency and cost than running a cable but if the cable gets too unreasonable in comparison you can tell them to get bent and switch to satellite.
smudgymcscmudge 8y ago
I’ve typically ignored crypto related posts, just like you said HN does. Thus I don’t know anything about ethereum other than it involves contracts and blockchains. However I somehow ended up in this thread and your comment about ethereum as an app host is interesting. So know that you made at least one person google ethereum and read about it.
simias 8y ago
We only remember those who ended up working. Remember color.com? Remember Theranos? There are probably hundreds of others in old HN posts we have long forgotten. Sometimes skepticism is warranted. Instead of playing on our heartstrings to convince us that cryptocurrencies are useful, how about actually making something useful? We've been told for years that it was about to pay off, that "it's still building time". You've had billions poured in ICOs and pre-mined coins and you have nothing to show for it besides glorified pyramid schemes and currencies that are useless as currencies. Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early internet is frankly absurd. Maybe people didn't imagine how huge is was going to become but the practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA (and then the world) is obvious. Besides the Internet grew fast and was useful almost from day 1, even though it involved a complex and expensive hardware infrastructure. By the 90's the Internet wasn't mainstream but it was definitely very useful. Sci-fi writers had expected something like the Internet long before ARPA, it's just immediately obvious that being able to connect to the entire world in real time would be greatly valuable. Furthermore what prevented a more mainstream adoption were mainly hardware limitations. Internet on dial-up wasn't fun at all. Remember having to wait for a full minute to have a progressive JPEG load up? I do. It was clunky but there was nothing else like it. Once technology improved and got faster and cheaper adoption exploded. What's slowing down progress in CryptoCurrency? The infrastructure is there, yet hardly anybody wants to use it. And unlike the Internet, there are plenty of alternatives for the vast majority of the services offered through a blockchain. >I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed. That's faith, not reason.
- LAMike 8y ago
  > practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA Replace "data" with "money", and "USA" with "anywhere in the world"... do you see any value in that?
  - beefield 8y ago
    Funny. I have been able to send money cross-border relatively cheaply and relatively fast for quite some time. So yes, obviously I see value in that. But actually it has never been any kind of issue that would have even crossed my mind that it would need some fancy new solutions to enable me to do that. Would you be willing to share some more details on which kind of money transactions this is an actual unsolved problem? Where from/to are you trying to transfer the money and what are you buying/selling with that money?
lazyjeff 8y ago
I think the same arguments can be said about P2P during the file sharing era. File sharing was often used for sketchy purposes most of the time, like cryptocurrencies, and people argued the underlying technology (P2P) was the key breakthrough especially for legal applications. While there are some minor cases of using P2P these days, it really hasn't made the impact that was expected. I don't see why the same won't happen for blockchain and technology underlying cryptocurrencies.
- dragandj 8y ago
  Torrents and other P2P networks literally redefined how people consume music and movies. And people used p2p a lot for quite a time. Is there anyone that uses blockchain for anything, other than speculation? Any dapp used by more than 100 people?
kakarot 8y ago
Are you talking about Etherium, or blockchain tech? Because one is likely headed nowhere and one is here to stay.
imhoguy 8y ago
> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that [...] are fully trusted. Wait, wait, I thought the hype peak is far behind us. Ever heard about 51% Attack?
ziont 8y ago
> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. dapps nobody uses? ICO pump and dumps? you lost the crowd there Sir. We are not luddites, I don't think you fully comprehend what that word means. You are assuming blockchain right now, in it's current shape and form, a ReallSlowDatabase(tm), with no real Fortune 500 or the military using it to power their major operations, the so called ledger already exists in Datomic and now AWS, the alleged decentralized PoW tx verification process is bullshit, mining pools have centralized, every fucking meetup I go to I get people like you getting in my fucking face telling me why im a fucking idiot for not buying to their pump and dump schemes that SEC is looking into, it's litearlly the ultimate hyperereality-using social media accounts to shill and attack unbelievers for not HODL, blindly calling any piece of fact or reality as FUD or FakeNews(tm) Shut the fuck up. Seriously. We are not luddites, HN users range from NASA engineers to lawyers, who all exercise common sense and have seen this type of pump and dump of technological hype probably far far longer than most blockchain thumpers. God. I don't care if dang bans me for this post, I just had to get this off my chest. A fucking cult has hijacked the internet.
- flagfeedingusa 8y ago
  fuck you too buddy
- zamalek 8y ago
  > dapps nobody uses? ICO pump and dumps? you lost the crowd there Sir. That's human behavior, not technology. Fiat cash could easily (and has) replace cryptocurrency for this purpose. The argument is irrelevant either way: it doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies are bad and doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies have use.
ashelmire 8y ago
How many decades do we need to wait for it to be useful? The iPod took markets by storm that very year. Blockchain has had a decade.
ineedasername 8y ago
You seem to be argiing from the position of "previous skepticism of new technologies was proved false, so we should assume this skepticism will prove false too" That doesn't seem reasonable. Some skepticism has been proven accurate. There's enough enthusiasm for crypto blockchain to carry it forward if there's a future in it. We don't all need to back that vision when plenty of valid criticisms exist for the skeptical viewpoint as well.
EthanHeilman 8y ago
Disclaimer: I've co-founded a company building cryptographic protocols for existing cryptocurrencies. I'm also a cryptocurrency security researcher. I believe in Bitcoin and the recent developments in both cryptography and distributed systems which are underlying many cryptocurrency projects. I think the skepticism of Hn is rational, valuable to the community and often correct. The cryptocurrency space is a great space to work in, but it requires a constant investment in skepticism and critical thought. I hope Hn always remains skeptical of technology. > The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. I disagree with this statement. Ethereum DApps can fail, Ethereum can be rendered unavailable via: scalability issues, forks, bugs or failures in the P2P network. Furthermore the additional infrastructure that many DApps rely on can fail as well. Ethereum is not a solution for achieving high-availability, high-availability is probably harder to achieve with a DApp. Ethereum is a solution for building and managing assets outside the control of a single party or company. This intentional loss of control comes with many costs and does not provide universal business benefits.
- wtvanhest 8y ago
  I cannot find a good analogy, but I am starting to look at Ethereum as a really good proof of concept, but one that probably won't survive. I cannot put my finger on exactly why, but I am starting to feel like nothing will survive that is not built on Bitcoin itself.
  - EthanHeilman 8y ago
    Some projects will die in this during this current crash. The most likely force to kill off projects will be: 1. lack of developers to adapt to cheap 51% attacks, 2. cheap 51% attacks will lead to those coins getting delisted from exchanges since attacks will cheat exchanges via 51% double spending attacks (something which has happened a few times already) 3. With no ability for people to safely buy or sell coins those coins will die. I don't think this will happen to BTC or ETH. I think Ethereum will look very different in 5-10 years.
WAthrowaway 8y ago
> In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful and I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed. Care to make an actual wager? longbets.org
esalman 8y ago
Similar things were said about neural networks in the 90's, funnily enough. I also believe the underlying blockchain technology is important. It's just that many tech-savvy fraudsters are using the cryptocurrency hype for scamming the general population.
beefield 8y ago
> I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology to the point that we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come. Well, as long as the underlying monetary policy of the cryptocurrencies is well tried and failed directly from the medieval times, I would personally: 1. Be quite careful who I blame being luddites. 2. Not holding my breath waiting for any kind of success as a currency.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
I think it's Luddite (specifically sheep mentality) to believe their claims without skepticism when their results are worse than the things they say we need to replace. My model, which predates Bitcoin in various projects/products, is to generate signed, hashed logs that can be checked in a decentralized fashion all using high-performance databases and fast checkers. Check the results more often than computational steps to reduce unnecessary re-computation. If format and protocols are open, using common tech can allow for diverse implementations to reduce one-attack-to-rob-them-all setups. Also, where possible, do hashes of hashes like one, checkable report per day per bank to reduce overall size of chains over time. This model can work with existing tech producing just some logs that can be hosted on CDN's, checked with hardware acceleration on commodity hardware, and even hosted on $5 VPS's if you want. That's a total cost of $5 per suspicious party running checks if minimizing costs and energy use. Current payment methods work at POS with 16-bit MCU's and such. The signed checks can themselves be sent in as just extra database transactions. The organizations should be non-profits or public-benefit companies whose charter, licensing agreements, and contracts make specific behaviors either mandatory if good or prohibited if bad. Possible sign auditing agreements with organizations that defend consumers with severe penalties for anything shady. Start with credit unions, though, combined with non-profit, payment processors with lean operations. If you're wondering, the common pattern of my methods is to use the simplest, fastest, most-proven components, whether technical or legal, to build the improved version of current tech that solves the specific problems most people worry about. Nine times out of ten, it's just a shady, for-profit company being assholes due to their incentives. Just changing the model over to a public-benefit Paypal or Venmo with multinational implementation cross-checking each other by itself gets past most of that. Plus, using existing databases, crypto acceleration, and tamper-resistant smartcards keeps performance high with checking cost, hardware and energy, very low. As I read cyptocurrency and blockchain stuff, it's like they never thought about any of this before going onto solve problems 99% of people with checking accounts and credit cards don't have. Volatile currencies, exchanges getting robbed, and no chargebacks allowed are good examples where most people wouldn't trade their bank and plastic. The folks working on these things should start with user requirements, look at existing solutions, enumerate problems, find simplest changes that fix those problems, deploy solutions, and iterate from there. Strangely, the exact advice YC gave to the startup founders that made it big.
bdcravens 8y ago
> "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." And yet the iPod has been totally supplanted by products that came afterward.
aerovistae 8y ago
> Even Google goes down (sometimes once or twice a month) I have been using Google since 1999 and I've never seen it down once in more than 19 years.
- nodesocket 8y ago
  YouTube including YouTube TV recently went down for hours.
  - aerovistae 8y ago
    Wasn't referring to their many other acquired services, only the titular domain.
inoop 8y ago
> Go ahead and ignore it right now. It's still building time. I've been hearing this argument for years, but you that doesn't take away that global broadcast doesn't scale to any kind of useful TPS rate unless you're willing to decrease the network diameter, which implies centralization. All the wishful thinking in the world can't change the laws of mathematics and physics.
bb88 8y ago
> I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology Or we were just chalking it up to "Irrational Exuberance." Instead of addressing initial concerns economists had about it, most proponents were arrogant in their belief that old school economics wouldn't apply to cryptocurrency. And that gets me to the second point. The people arguing for cryptocurrency weren't transparent in their holdings of it. And that seems to be what created the bubble. Now people are questioning where the basement price is on bitcoin, and it seems like there's nothing but arguments like "It's the money of the future".
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  There are also matters that it is operating fundamentally at cross purpose with itself. It tried to be both the next thing for the gold-bugs who are angry with the very concept of inflationary currency despite the fact relative value really does go down compared with sustained production and being a medium of exchange outside the arbitrary control and rent-seeking of banking systems. Well being a medium for exchange is what gives bitcoins value. Rising in value makes it not worth it as a medium of exchange because everybody is holding onto their pogs instead of trading them making them useless. That is the exact thing that everybody warns about for deflationary currencies so of course they were skeptical about it. Combine the gratuitous use of processing and power for speculation you can see why they would be less than sanguine about it even before money laundering got involved.
  - bb88 8y ago
    I too began to detect a hatred of US monetary policy from the most hardcore cryptocurrency supporters. > Well being a medium for exchange is what gives bitcoins value. I do want to separate out the concepts of "utility" vs "market value". Probably a good example for this is a hammer. It has a great amount of utility for pounding in nails, securing lumber, etc. It's just not valued on the market though. $5 bucks maybe? You will save a bunch of time using one. However, being able to pound in nails doesn't justify a high cost in and of itself, since the market is flooded with them. If, however, the utility of bitcoin(medium of exchange) is the only thing that is lifting bitcoin's market value (price), then its price depends upon it outperforming other cryptocurrencies and instruments of money. And the marginal cost of creating another cryptocurrency is maybe a weeks worth of time? Because there appears to be an unlimited supply of numbers and algorithms, the market value of any cryptocurrency should approach zero over time even if it has great utility.
gaius 8y ago
And yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18572482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18572482 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_finds_0_per_cent_success_rate/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_fi...
malmsteen 8y ago
>> Take a moment to imagine a few of the things you could do better if you had 100% reliable hosting that was safe and private. Literally nothing more.. its why it doesnt work financially. The idea is cool though indeed
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xwvvvvwx 8y ago
Exactly this. HN bitched about platform risk for years. All of a sudden something comes along and solves the issue (and happens to be open source) and they get all mad.

by Sargos 8y ago

tialaramex 8y ago

More succinctly than most of the replies: They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan

mamon 8y ago
Offtopic, but people actually had a good reason to laugh at Columbus: he made a simple error in his calculations that lead him to believe Earth is much smaller that it really is. Most of the nobles he asked for money were actually better educated than him, so the error was obvious to them. And since noone could know about America's existence it was reasonable to assume that Columbus will simply run out of supplies and starve to death in the middle of the ocean. Which almost happened, they've found the land at the very last moment.

sorenjan 8y ago

Hacker News' own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment was when Dropbox was introduced: > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

belltaco 8y ago
Same with Slack/Discord vs. IRC. I think geeks tend to underestimate the power of polish, ease of use and integration of populist new social media features(auto expand/play gifs). The flip side is handing over control over everything to Silicon Valley which is slowly coming to roost. Wonder what'll happen if the Discord store doesn't make enough money to pay for servers and investors demand RoI?
- askafriend 8y ago
  IRC is irrelevant in today's world. No serious, innovative community is still on IRC.
  - simias 8y ago
    IRC is niche these days but I'd be interested to hear your methodology to reach the conclusion that "No serious, innovative community is still on IRC".
  - jackfraser 8y ago
    I've heard Amazon uses IRC internally?
    - mypalmike 8y ago
      Amazon uses Chime (https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/) internally.

robterrell 8y ago

Didn't CryptoKitties bring the Etherium network to its knees? Not saying the issues aren't solvable, but can't we agree that nothing "never goes down," especially complex distributed systems.

ErikAugust 8y ago
Also: “Proof if Weak Hands” was successful in making a game out of spamming the network to the point of DoS. When ETH was hundreds of dollars, the cost of running code on the blockchain (gas price) could get up to $50 during these attacks. Imagine adding a column in a database table cost $50. Forget about it.
- ErikAugust 8y ago
  I created and run a cryptocurrency trading game called Cache (https://www.cachethegame.com https://www.cachethegame.com) that uses ERC20 tokens in the “coin-op” sense. The solution when transaction fees go wild is to simply enable free play. Nobody wants to play $1+ in fees for something that costs a few cents.
xur17 8y ago
It did become more expensive to use (on the order of 10x), but it didn't go down.
simonsaidit 8y ago
No thats not what happend. Nothing ever went down but if you wanted a tx to go through fast you had to pay more.
- robterrell 8y ago
  I was thinking of this story: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162 (Which, I understand, is for a general audience and might not be very accurate.) I recall the founder of CryptoKitties saying that the transaction cost was significantly higher than the kitty cost. Isn't that a failure state for the network?

root_axis 8y ago

> HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology HN dislikes the never ending and unsubstantiated breathless hype surrounding cryptocurrency, this is painfully obvious if you actually engage genuinely instead of pretending that everyone is an idiot because they don't fawn over what has amounted to a novel and interesting but mostly useless technology. > No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. Using hindsight to cherry-pick historical examples of when naysayers were wrong is obviously terribly flawed logic yet it is a routinely common defense among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It should be obvious to any engineer that this proves nothing and I personally take this reasoning as a sign that you might be arguing in bad faith. > Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. A base layer for apps that nobody cares about. Give one example of a useful Ethereum app. I define "useful" as a product or service that has demonstrated market success but is cheaper or somehow improved through cryptocurrency. I don't count it as useful if its a niche use-case that is impractical or has no market demand (e.g. avoiding taxes). Also, the idea that these systems never fail is laughably absurd as they have failed to the tune of multiple millions of dollars at this point (i.e. badly written code that failed to do what it claimed, resulting in funds being stolen). > You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages This absurd comparison of cryptocurrency to the early internet has been so thoroughly debunked that it barely merits a response. Please stop saying this. > In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful Only in cryptocurrency software land is "in a few more years it might be useful" a defensible explanation of why cryptocurrency is the greatest innovation since the internet. Why can't you wait till its actually useful before broadcasting your condescendingly cliche cryptocurrency judgements regarding how HN is full of Luddites who are incapable of understanding technology? I'm sure cryptocurrency is just so complex and so new that todays engineers are just too dumb to understand it, it takes a special breed of elite hacker to fully grok the amazing potential of this new technology, Luddite software engineers be damned.

belltaco 8y ago

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. That's something that future generations will take for granted but HN is largely ignoring right now. The iPod was released at that point and you could hold it in your hands and see for yourself. Can you give me some examples of real world applications of Ethereum's protocol that you think are being undercounted? I recently looked for some using smart contracts but all I see is hype and a lot of VC/bitcoin money thrown at things that haven't been able to deliver and don't even need blockchain. I saw Dubai putting property records into a blockchain but not sure it has smart contracts. Perhaps something will come up in the future, but what does it have to do with excessive crypto-profit and hype money being put into startups that lack fundamentals? I am not saying experimentation is bad, but I felt like we were/are reaching dotcom pets.com levels of hype and mania. If you ask me, HN mostly seems to be saying that the hype has been out of control over blockchain. I don't see people saying blockchain technology is lame or unreliable, do you? I have seen comparisons of bitcoin to tulip mania and ponzis, but that's not the same as discounting blockchain technologies.

simonsaidit 8y ago
https://medium.com/cryptolinks/maker-for-dummies-a-plain-english-explanation-of-the-dai-stablecoin-e4481d79b90 https://medium.com/cryptolinks/maker-for-dummies-a-plain-eng... A stablecoin run in a contract is pretty amazing and becoming more and more popular.
- ac29 8y ago
  DAI, like other stablecoins, isn't really all that stable - right now it costs about $1.02 to buy $1 worth. And, it's frequently been over 5% away from $1: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/#charts https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/#charts Most "stable" coins are trading at over $1 right now, presumably as people try to flee sinking cryptocurrencies and have no practical and/or legal means to turn them into real money.
  - chrisco255 8y ago

skyraider 8y ago

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems. Blockchains solve only one problem, which is consensus formation on ontrusted networks. They do not solve politics, governance, downtime, and certainly not application failure.. these things all exist on blockchains. Essentially none of the application ported from centralized systems to Ethereum or even Bitcoin actually face Byzantine consensus issues when deployed as centralized systems. Bitcoin can be used as a 24x7x365 global collateral and value transfer instrument - such a system would face consensus problems if implemented on top of traditional banking infrastructure. That's hugely valuable, but pretty much the only problem-solving application to date. For things like asset ownership and transfer, any kind of voting, real estate, IPOs, etc, most people still have to deal with incredibly bad centralized systems, that would be amazing if rebuilt as centralized node.js apps that talk to a MySQL database. This stuff is low hanging fruit that's a huge pain for massive swathes of humanity. And despite the fact that no Palo Alto real estate broker is talking to the city's land deed system over unreliable networks, where enemy messengers might swoop in and assign your deed to the wrong buyer, there's this myth that we need distributed consensus for this and other problems best solved by... databases.

simonsaidit 8y ago
>>Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems Nobody denies its slow, its a waste of resources, its buggy, its hyped. its a lot of things many early systems was. Its all challenges that people try to solve. What is interresting is if those things can be solved. And i dont understand Why so many dont see a benefit if we could one day build true decentralized systems... its not the distributed or avalibility thats important. Its not like goverments or companies always have the peoples best interrest when they make decissions.
- SalMonella 8y ago
  Nathaniel. I can see what your saying... Paul`s remark is neat, on thursday I got a top of the range Nissan GT-R: after making $6612 this last four weeks and just a little over ten-k last munth. this is certainly the easiest work Ive had. I started this five months/ago and almost straight away began to make more than $71 per-hour. I work through this website, www.Mesalary.com

api 8y ago

The underlying tech is potentially powerful and useful. The current popular implementations are slow, have very wonky hyperdeflationary economics (which makes them Ponzis whether intended or not), and are surrounded by a toxic ecosystem that is shockingly riddled with scams and fraud. HN has, like many other circles, gotten sick of the breathless vaporware hype and scams.

throwawaymath 8y ago

> we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come. That quote is a product of its time, and only seems foolish or misguided with the benefit of hindsight. There is no shame in skepticism, even if it ultimately ends up being incorrect (likewise I'd have no misgivings about making a wrong decision rationally). There is also an element of survivorship bias: many such quotes about things which did fail were wagered on similar amounts of information, but have since fallen into obscurity. I don't think it's fair to call the author of that quote a Luddite. Speaking as someone well acquainted with the technicalities of distributed systems and cryptography, I am deeply skeptical of blockchain technology. I think the vast majority (but not all) of it is "lame"[1], for lack of a better word. I would happily accept being quoted for a decade or two if I'm wrong. ___________________________ 1. I'm skeptical for reasons I'm not going to try to defend, because they've been rehashed on Hacker News over and over. The justifications will likely not convince anyone who remains unconvinced.

albedoa 8y ago
> That quote is a product of its time, and only seems foolish or misguided with the benefit of hindsight. "Only"? There were top-level comments in that very thread [1] that pointed out why it was misguided and foolish. Hindsight is not the requirement that some want it to be. 1. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
- dingaling 8y ago
  Yet wireless and large capacity proved, in the long run, to be exactly what the market wanted and Apple had to incorporate those features into later iPods.
  - kemiller 8y ago
    I think that’s sort of OP’s point. The criticisms that come up may be valid, but that doesn’t mean the whole enterprise is doomed.

tomp 8y ago

> Ethereum [...] apps [...] are fully trusted Haha you're funny. On a more serious note, I don't think the current generation of blockchains is "The Future". They offer basically nothing more than what you can achieve with a publicly hosted git repository with post-commit hooks that enforce signatures. Actually, Ethereum is far worse, because all computations are repeated by every node (as far as I know), which is a huge waste of energy. If you want reliable distributed computation, you need to make sure there's some way of smart distribution of work... e.g. offer exponentially diminishing returns for each "duplicated" evaluation of the same piece of code beyond the 2nd.

cloud_man 8y ago
The replication is for secure non-censorable trusted code execution. For high-throughput computations, Golem is being developed, where there is (generally) no computation replication. www.golem.network. The repository is here: https://github.com/golemfactory https://github.com/golemfactory
bilbo0s 8y ago
Even better: > Ethereum [...] apps [...] never fail Just... wow. Listen, distributed ledgers are useful. Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful. These people just can't seem to see the difference.
- antidesitter 8y ago
  > Listen, distributed ledgers are useful. > Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful. > These people just can't seem to see the difference. To be clear, are you claiming the GGP (Sargos) can't see the difference between these two things?
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  They didn’t say such apps exist, they said Ethereum provides the protocol for such apps.

na85 8y ago

>Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. Are you suggesting that Ethereum apps can have 100% uptime (never go down, never fail), and are completely secure (fully trusted)? Because if so I've got some shares of a bridge to sell you.

codeka 8y ago
I don't even understand the benefit of 100.00% uptime, over 99.99% anyway? I mean, I probably spend more time in a parking garage with no internet available to me at all, than google spends being down in any given month. I mean, I understand the idea that Google wants to increase their uptime because every lost query is lost revenue, but OP seemed to imply there's some intrinsic benefit that's more than just the incremental benefit...
- na85 8y ago
  Moving the goal posts.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Regardless of the marginal benefits of 100% uptime vs 99.99...the entire point of ETH is that once the contract is posted to the block chain, it continues to operate in perpetuity...and no centralized service provider or government can take it down. That's powerful, and in our age of creeping power consolidation by big tech cos and overreaching governments, I applaud the development of censorship-resistant tech.
swampthinker 8y ago
What's the vesting schedule of these shares?
hanniabu 8y ago
I'm not saying I agree, but I'd be interested in hearing your argument
- empath75 8y ago

gurumeditations 8y ago

Electronic communication services have a linear path of development any idiot can see: more bits per second, more information, more possibilities. Blockchains don’t have that simple path of development. They fundamentally don’t make practical sense compared to centralized services. There’s a reason that everyone gets their power from a small number of centralized power plants instead of everyone throwing a few solar panels on their roof and trading their power on the marketplace to create a decentralized power grid. It sounds really cool but it’s just wildly illogical in the real world. That’s blockchain.

spookthesunset 8y ago
Actually solar panels and distributed grids make a lot of sense and what was holding them back was the state of the technology. Unlike the blockchain, which is fundamentally broken for 99.999% of all use cases, distributed power grids could actually work with the right engineering.
- gurumeditations 8y ago
  I know they sound really cool. I’m saying that it’s illogical to do so in the real world. Centralization is almost always cheaper, faster, and stronger.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    They still have a place as a 'competitor of last resort' to force reasonability on centralized powers. They would essentially do to power what satellite dishes did to cable - and that was just another centralized power! Sure satellite dishes are worse in latency and cost than running a cable but if the cable gets too unreasonable in comparison you can tell them to get bent and switch to satellite.

smudgymcscmudge 8y ago

I’ve typically ignored crypto related posts, just like you said HN does. Thus I don’t know anything about ethereum other than it involves contracts and blockchains. However I somehow ended up in this thread and your comment about ethereum as an app host is interesting. So know that you made at least one person google ethereum and read about it.

simias 8y ago

We only remember those who ended up working. Remember color.com? Remember Theranos? There are probably hundreds of others in old HN posts we have long forgotten. Sometimes skepticism is warranted. Instead of playing on our heartstrings to convince us that cryptocurrencies are useful, how about actually making something useful? We've been told for years that it was about to pay off, that "it's still building time". You've had billions poured in ICOs and pre-mined coins and you have nothing to show for it besides glorified pyramid schemes and currencies that are useless as currencies. Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early internet is frankly absurd. Maybe people didn't imagine how huge is was going to become but the practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA (and then the world) is obvious. Besides the Internet grew fast and was useful almost from day 1, even though it involved a complex and expensive hardware infrastructure. By the 90's the Internet wasn't mainstream but it was definitely very useful. Sci-fi writers had expected something like the Internet long before ARPA, it's just immediately obvious that being able to connect to the entire world in real time would be greatly valuable. Furthermore what prevented a more mainstream adoption were mainly hardware limitations. Internet on dial-up wasn't fun at all. Remember having to wait for a full minute to have a progressive JPEG load up? I do. It was clunky but there was nothing else like it. Once technology improved and got faster and cheaper adoption exploded. What's slowing down progress in CryptoCurrency? The infrastructure is there, yet hardly anybody wants to use it. And unlike the Internet, there are plenty of alternatives for the vast majority of the services offered through a blockchain. >I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed. That's faith, not reason.

LAMike 8y ago
> practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA Replace "data" with "money", and "USA" with "anywhere in the world"... do you see any value in that?
- beefield 8y ago
  Funny. I have been able to send money cross-border relatively cheaply and relatively fast for quite some time. So yes, obviously I see value in that. But actually it has never been any kind of issue that would have even crossed my mind that it would need some fancy new solutions to enable me to do that. Would you be willing to share some more details on which kind of money transactions this is an actual unsolved problem? Where from/to are you trying to transfer the money and what are you buying/selling with that money?

lazyjeff 8y ago

I think the same arguments can be said about P2P during the file sharing era. File sharing was often used for sketchy purposes most of the time, like cryptocurrencies, and people argued the underlying technology (P2P) was the key breakthrough especially for legal applications. While there are some minor cases of using P2P these days, it really hasn't made the impact that was expected. I don't see why the same won't happen for blockchain and technology underlying cryptocurrencies.

dragandj 8y ago
Torrents and other P2P networks literally redefined how people consume music and movies. And people used p2p a lot for quite a time. Is there anyone that uses blockchain for anything, other than speculation? Any dapp used by more than 100 people?

kakarot 8y ago

Are you talking about Etherium, or blockchain tech? Because one is likely headed nowhere and one is here to stay.

imhoguy 8y ago

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that [...] are fully trusted. Wait, wait, I thought the hype peak is far behind us. Ever heard about 51% Attack?

ziont 8y ago

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. dapps nobody uses? ICO pump and dumps? you lost the crowd there Sir. We are not luddites, I don't think you fully comprehend what that word means. You are assuming blockchain right now, in it's current shape and form, a ReallSlowDatabase(tm), with no real Fortune 500 or the military using it to power their major operations, the so called ledger already exists in Datomic and now AWS, the alleged decentralized PoW tx verification process is bullshit, mining pools have centralized, every fucking meetup I go to I get people like you getting in my fucking face telling me why im a fucking idiot for not buying to their pump and dump schemes that SEC is looking into, it's litearlly the ultimate hyperereality-using social media accounts to shill and attack unbelievers for not HODL, blindly calling any piece of fact or reality as FUD or FakeNews(tm) Shut the fuck up. Seriously. We are not luddites, HN users range from NASA engineers to lawyers, who all exercise common sense and have seen this type of pump and dump of technological hype probably far far longer than most blockchain thumpers. God. I don't care if dang bans me for this post, I just had to get this off my chest. A fucking cult has hijacked the internet.

flagfeedingusa 8y ago
fuck you too buddy
zamalek 8y ago
> dapps nobody uses? ICO pump and dumps? you lost the crowd there Sir. That's human behavior, not technology. Fiat cash could easily (and has) replace cryptocurrency for this purpose. The argument is irrelevant either way: it doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies are bad and doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies have use.

ashelmire 8y ago

How many decades do we need to wait for it to be useful? The iPod took markets by storm that very year. Blockchain has had a decade.

ineedasername 8y ago

You seem to be argiing from the position of "previous skepticism of new technologies was proved false, so we should assume this skepticism will prove false too" That doesn't seem reasonable. Some skepticism has been proven accurate. There's enough enthusiasm for crypto blockchain to carry it forward if there's a future in it. We don't all need to back that vision when plenty of valid criticisms exist for the skeptical viewpoint as well.

EthanHeilman 8y ago

Disclaimer: I've co-founded a company building cryptographic protocols for existing cryptocurrencies. I'm also a cryptocurrency security researcher. I believe in Bitcoin and the recent developments in both cryptography and distributed systems which are underlying many cryptocurrency projects. I think the skepticism of Hn is rational, valuable to the community and often correct. The cryptocurrency space is a great space to work in, but it requires a constant investment in skepticism and critical thought. I hope Hn always remains skeptical of technology. > The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. I disagree with this statement. Ethereum DApps can fail, Ethereum can be rendered unavailable via: scalability issues, forks, bugs or failures in the P2P network. Furthermore the additional infrastructure that many DApps rely on can fail as well. Ethereum is not a solution for achieving high-availability, high-availability is probably harder to achieve with a DApp. Ethereum is a solution for building and managing assets outside the control of a single party or company. This intentional loss of control comes with many costs and does not provide universal business benefits.

wtvanhest 8y ago
I cannot find a good analogy, but I am starting to look at Ethereum as a really good proof of concept, but one that probably won't survive. I cannot put my finger on exactly why, but I am starting to feel like nothing will survive that is not built on Bitcoin itself.
- EthanHeilman 8y ago
  Some projects will die in this during this current crash. The most likely force to kill off projects will be: 1. lack of developers to adapt to cheap 51% attacks, 2. cheap 51% attacks will lead to those coins getting delisted from exchanges since attacks will cheat exchanges via 51% double spending attacks (something which has happened a few times already) 3. With no ability for people to safely buy or sell coins those coins will die. I don't think this will happen to BTC or ETH. I think Ethereum will look very different in 5-10 years.

WAthrowaway 8y ago

> In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful and I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed. Care to make an actual wager? longbets.org

esalman 8y ago

Similar things were said about neural networks in the 90's, funnily enough. I also believe the underlying blockchain technology is important. It's just that many tech-savvy fraudsters are using the cryptocurrency hype for scamming the general population.

beefield 8y ago

> I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology to the point that we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come. Well, as long as the underlying monetary policy of the cryptocurrencies is well tried and failed directly from the medieval times, I would personally: 1. Be quite careful who I blame being luddites. 2. Not holding my breath waiting for any kind of success as a currency.

nickpsecurity 8y ago

I think it's Luddite (specifically sheep mentality) to believe their claims without skepticism when their results are worse than the things they say we need to replace. My model, which predates Bitcoin in various projects/products, is to generate signed, hashed logs that can be checked in a decentralized fashion all using high-performance databases and fast checkers. Check the results more often than computational steps to reduce unnecessary re-computation. If format and protocols are open, using common tech can allow for diverse implementations to reduce one-attack-to-rob-them-all setups. Also, where possible, do hashes of hashes like one, checkable report per day per bank to reduce overall size of chains over time. This model can work with existing tech producing just some logs that can be hosted on CDN's, checked with hardware acceleration on commodity hardware, and even hosted on $5 VPS's if you want. That's a total cost of $5 per suspicious party running checks if minimizing costs and energy use. Current payment methods work at POS with 16-bit MCU's and such. The signed checks can themselves be sent in as just extra database transactions. The organizations should be non-profits or public-benefit companies whose charter, licensing agreements, and contracts make specific behaviors either mandatory if good or prohibited if bad. Possible sign auditing agreements with organizations that defend consumers with severe penalties for anything shady. Start with credit unions, though, combined with non-profit, payment processors with lean operations. If you're wondering, the common pattern of my methods is to use the simplest, fastest, most-proven components, whether technical or legal, to build the improved version of current tech that solves the specific problems most people worry about. Nine times out of ten, it's just a shady, for-profit company being assholes due to their incentives. Just changing the model over to a public-benefit Paypal or Venmo with multinational implementation cross-checking each other by itself gets past most of that. Plus, using existing databases, crypto acceleration, and tamper-resistant smartcards keeps performance high with checking cost, hardware and energy, very low. As I read cyptocurrency and blockchain stuff, it's like they never thought about any of this before going onto solve problems 99% of people with checking accounts and credit cards don't have. Volatile currencies, exchanges getting robbed, and no chargebacks allowed are good examples where most people wouldn't trade their bank and plastic. The folks working on these things should start with user requirements, look at existing solutions, enumerate problems, find simplest changes that fix those problems, deploy solutions, and iterate from there. Strangely, the exact advice YC gave to the startup founders that made it big.

bdcravens 8y ago

> "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." And yet the iPod has been totally supplanted by products that came afterward.

aerovistae 8y ago

> Even Google goes down (sometimes once or twice a month) I have been using Google since 1999 and I've never seen it down once in more than 19 years.

nodesocket 8y ago
YouTube including YouTube TV recently went down for hours.
- aerovistae 8y ago
  Wasn't referring to their many other acquired services, only the titular domain.

inoop 8y ago

> Go ahead and ignore it right now. It's still building time. I've been hearing this argument for years, but you that doesn't take away that global broadcast doesn't scale to any kind of useful TPS rate unless you're willing to decrease the network diameter, which implies centralization. All the wishful thinking in the world can't change the laws of mathematics and physics.

bb88 8y ago

> I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology Or we were just chalking it up to "Irrational Exuberance." Instead of addressing initial concerns economists had about it, most proponents were arrogant in their belief that old school economics wouldn't apply to cryptocurrency. And that gets me to the second point. The people arguing for cryptocurrency weren't transparent in their holdings of it. And that seems to be what created the bubble. Now people are questioning where the basement price is on bitcoin, and it seems like there's nothing but arguments like "It's the money of the future".

Nasrudith 8y ago
There are also matters that it is operating fundamentally at cross purpose with itself. It tried to be both the next thing for the gold-bugs who are angry with the very concept of inflationary currency despite the fact relative value really does go down compared with sustained production and being a medium of exchange outside the arbitrary control and rent-seeking of banking systems. Well being a medium for exchange is what gives bitcoins value. Rising in value makes it not worth it as a medium of exchange because everybody is holding onto their pogs instead of trading them making them useless. That is the exact thing that everybody warns about for deflationary currencies so of course they were skeptical about it. Combine the gratuitous use of processing and power for speculation you can see why they would be less than sanguine about it even before money laundering got involved.
- bb88 8y ago
  I too began to detect a hatred of US monetary policy from the most hardcore cryptocurrency supporters. > Well being a medium for exchange is what gives bitcoins value. I do want to separate out the concepts of "utility" vs "market value". Probably a good example for this is a hammer. It has a great amount of utility for pounding in nails, securing lumber, etc. It's just not valued on the market though. $5 bucks maybe? You will save a bunch of time using one. However, being able to pound in nails doesn't justify a high cost in and of itself, since the market is flooded with them. If, however, the utility of bitcoin(medium of exchange) is the only thing that is lifting bitcoin's market value (price), then its price depends upon it outperforming other cryptocurrencies and instruments of money. And the marginal cost of creating another cryptocurrency is maybe a weeks worth of time? Because there appears to be an unlimited supply of numbers and algorithms, the market value of any cryptocurrency should approach zero over time even if it has great utility.

gaius 8y ago

And yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18572482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18572482 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_finds_0_per_cent_success_rate/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_fi...

malmsteen 8y ago

>> Take a moment to imagine a few of the things you could do better if you had 100% reliable hosting that was safe and private. Literally nothing more.. its why it doesnt work financially. The idea is cool though indeed

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

xwvvvvwx 8y ago

Exactly this. HN bitched about platform risk for years. All of a sudden something comes along and solves the issue (and happens to be open source) and they get all mad.