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One of Blockchain's killer apps is...Bitcoin. There is no need to talk about "the crypto dream", people are using what they find useful (coinbase is currently #

One of Blockchain's killer apps is...Bitcoin. There is no need to talk about "the crypto dream", people are using what they find useful (coinbase is currently #5 top YC company), and I personally see it inevitable that everything in banking/finance will move to a decentralized model, with smart contracts as a driving force, because of autonomy. Humans haven't really evolved much from say other Apes (or many more other animals) in the way a group is organised. We haven't yet discovered a way to organise a group without the need for a central entity (an alpha male, a government, central banks, etc.) Smart contracts allowing for autonomous organisations might well be the first time a species is organising itself without a central entity.

Stevvo 7y ago
Smart Contracts are far more capable on Ethereum, so I don't see Bitcoin as the killer app.
- theboywho 7y ago
  Well bitcoin is a killer app, I didn't talk about it being _the_ killer app. I also don't think it's smart to compare and take sides when it comes to technology, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both interesting technologies, and one can learn a lot from both.
paulgb 7y ago
> We haven't yet discovered a way to organise a group without the need for a central entity (an alpha male, a government, central banks, etc.) Markets (at least, free markets) are exactly a way of organizing a group without the need for a central authority.
- arethuza 7y ago
  How many markets have there been in history that don't have some kind of central authority involved - to issue the money used if nothing else? Edit: Of course there have been barter based markets, but aren't markets actually more effective when there is a central authority?
  - theboywho 7y ago
    One can argue black markets don't have a central authority and are more effective
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - paulgb 7y ago
    Markets existed millennia before fiat currencies did. Even now, if you look at the world economy instead of an individual economy, there are lots of separate authorities rather than one central one (though, granted, the US government still has quite a bit of power.)
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's not the goal of markets. You don't get to have the Universal market. A market is a way to organize a group of people in a decentralized way, but its existence and correct operation requires a different, centralized group that manages it. Market participants are decentralized, market regulators are not. Now, the solution for the "what if I don't want centralization in the market regulation space?" problem is recursion. You create a market for markets. What happens if you don't centralize? You get something like global trade, which is a meta-market for national trade markets (which are centralized). Global trade is decentralized - in the sense that men with most guns tell everyone else what to do, because there's no central authority to prevent that.
democracy 7y ago
You saying like that is a bad thing, but in fact centralisation is something that let us survive through wars, hunger and other hardships.
- theboywho 7y ago
  Thinking is limited by intelligence, so just because you think it's the best solution, doesn't mean it's a universal truth, it only means that maybe the human level of intelligence can't think of a better solution.
Nursie 7y ago
> I personally see it inevitable that everything in banking/finance will move to a decentralized model, with smart contracts as a driving force, because of autonomy. People don't want autonomy. I don't want to be my own bank. My bank is insured, they are secure, they provide me with a ton of services, and there is an identifiable party to go to if it all goes wrong, or if liability needs to be established. This idea that decentralisation is amazing because people can free themselves from the shackles of financial institutions is just all backwards when you start to look at what those entities actually provide. And this - > Smart contracts allowing for autonomous organisations might well be the first time a species is organising itself without a central entity. Is just meaningless utopianism.
- theboywho 7y ago
  That's like saying "Open Source" won't work because I don't want to be my own maintainer. It's not about one person. You not wanting autonomy or being your own bank doesn't matter. People on coinbase aren't their own bank either.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nursie 7y ago
    It's not like that at all, and cryptocurrency systems, as you so ably point out, are already tending towards centralisation.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    People on coinbase are also throwing away a large part of what supposedly makes cryptocurrencies valuable. They're essentially day traders.
- chumali 7y ago
  To dismiss something as 'meaningless utopianism' just because it doesn't agree with your personal experience is incredibly naive and shortsighted. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting a decentralised alternative to banking. Just recently there was an article posted on here about how money is used as a system of control. [0] Even under the best case scenario of well regulated financial institutions in a functioning democracy there is still little recourse/accountability if these institutions or the government decides to freeze your accounts. [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043888 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044914
arcticbull 7y ago
Centralization and trust are massive efficiencies as demonstrated by the sheer unparalleled inefficiency of proof of work chains. It blows my mind that hipsters refuse to use single-use straws and try and pay with bitcoin which yields thousands of times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as the straw. 1 bitcoin transaction is 607kWh (is 288kgCO2 and 85g of ewaste). That’s enough spent power to drive a Tesla from SF to San Jose, round trip. Twice. 20 days power consumption for the average US home. At that rate you may as well take physical dollars and drive them to San Jose.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > It blows my mind that hipsters refuse to use single-use straws and try and pay with bitcoin which yields thousands of times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as the straw. I know, right? Humanity is insane. The world is heading towards a potentially civilization ending climate disaster of its own making, and someone goes and invents an over-complicated solution to largely imagined problems that is wasteful and getting more wasteful to counter efficiency gains by design.
- brycehamrick 7y ago
  If you're going to make the energy-usage argument you'll need to position it against a comparable alternative, not how far you can drive a Tesla. How much energy does the current financial industry use on a per transaction basis? If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction?
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    > If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction? Yes, on a per transaction basis. You can only have 7tx/sec which means only a tiny tiny number of people could ever use it, and yet it uses as much power as Denmark. Currently nobody uses it and it uses as much power as Denmark. I would rather another Denmark or Austria than an incredibly inefficient payments system. To underscore just how little bitcoin matters ask yourself, if it just disappeared one day would anyone outside the industry even notice? And on that you want to spend an entire nations energy budget? Visa processes 600,000 transactions in the same energy budget as a single bitcoin payment. Six hundred thousand times more efficient. I can’t understand why you’d compare it to the entire global financial system when it can’t possibly ever replace even a sliver of it. I could outperform it with a single AWS instance and one table in RDS or DynamoDB. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Stevvo 7y ago

Smart Contracts are far more capable on Ethereum, so I don't see Bitcoin as the killer app.

theboywho 7y ago
Well bitcoin is a killer app, I didn't talk about it being _the_ killer app. I also don't think it's smart to compare and take sides when it comes to technology, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both interesting technologies, and one can learn a lot from both.

paulgb 7y ago

> We haven't yet discovered a way to organise a group without the need for a central entity (an alpha male, a government, central banks, etc.) Markets (at least, free markets) are exactly a way of organizing a group without the need for a central authority.

arethuza 7y ago
How many markets have there been in history that don't have some kind of central authority involved - to issue the money used if nothing else? Edit: Of course there have been barter based markets, but aren't markets actually more effective when there is a central authority?
- theboywho 7y ago
  One can argue black markets don't have a central authority and are more effective
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- paulgb 7y ago
  Markets existed millennia before fiat currencies did. Even now, if you look at the world economy instead of an individual economy, there are lots of separate authorities rather than one central one (though, granted, the US government still has quite a bit of power.)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That's not the goal of markets. You don't get to have the Universal market. A market is a way to organize a group of people in a decentralized way, but its existence and correct operation requires a different, centralized group that manages it. Market participants are decentralized, market regulators are not. Now, the solution for the "what if I don't want centralization in the market regulation space?" problem is recursion. You create a market for markets. What happens if you don't centralize? You get something like global trade, which is a meta-market for national trade markets (which are centralized). Global trade is decentralized - in the sense that men with most guns tell everyone else what to do, because there's no central authority to prevent that.

democracy 7y ago

You saying like that is a bad thing, but in fact centralisation is something that let us survive through wars, hunger and other hardships.

theboywho 7y ago
Thinking is limited by intelligence, so just because you think it's the best solution, doesn't mean it's a universal truth, it only means that maybe the human level of intelligence can't think of a better solution.

Nursie 7y ago

> I personally see it inevitable that everything in banking/finance will move to a decentralized model, with smart contracts as a driving force, because of autonomy. People don't want autonomy. I don't want to be my own bank. My bank is insured, they are secure, they provide me with a ton of services, and there is an identifiable party to go to if it all goes wrong, or if liability needs to be established. This idea that decentralisation is amazing because people can free themselves from the shackles of financial institutions is just all backwards when you start to look at what those entities actually provide. And this - > Smart contracts allowing for autonomous organisations might well be the first time a species is organising itself without a central entity. Is just meaningless utopianism.

theboywho 7y ago
That's like saying "Open Source" won't work because I don't want to be my own maintainer. It's not about one person. You not wanting autonomy or being your own bank doesn't matter. People on coinbase aren't their own bank either.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Nursie 7y ago
  It's not like that at all, and cryptocurrency systems, as you so ably point out, are already tending towards centralisation.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  People on coinbase are also throwing away a large part of what supposedly makes cryptocurrencies valuable. They're essentially day traders.
chumali 7y ago
To dismiss something as 'meaningless utopianism' just because it doesn't agree with your personal experience is incredibly naive and shortsighted. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting a decentralised alternative to banking. Just recently there was an article posted on here about how money is used as a system of control. [0] Even under the best case scenario of well regulated financial institutions in a functioning democracy there is still little recourse/accountability if these institutions or the government decides to freeze your accounts. [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043888 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044914

arcticbull 7y ago

Centralization and trust are massive efficiencies as demonstrated by the sheer unparalleled inefficiency of proof of work chains. It blows my mind that hipsters refuse to use single-use straws and try and pay with bitcoin which yields thousands of times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as the straw. 1 bitcoin transaction is 607kWh (is 288kgCO2 and 85g of ewaste). That’s enough spent power to drive a Tesla from SF to San Jose, round trip. Twice. 20 days power consumption for the average US home. At that rate you may as well take physical dollars and drive them to San Jose.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> It blows my mind that hipsters refuse to use single-use straws and try and pay with bitcoin which yields thousands of times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as the straw. I know, right? Humanity is insane. The world is heading towards a potentially civilization ending climate disaster of its own making, and someone goes and invents an over-complicated solution to largely imagined problems that is wasteful and getting more wasteful to counter efficiency gains by design.
brycehamrick 7y ago
If you're going to make the energy-usage argument you'll need to position it against a comparable alternative, not how far you can drive a Tesla. How much energy does the current financial industry use on a per transaction basis? If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction?
- arcticbull 7y ago
  > If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction? Yes, on a per transaction basis. You can only have 7tx/sec which means only a tiny tiny number of people could ever use it, and yet it uses as much power as Denmark. Currently nobody uses it and it uses as much power as Denmark. I would rather another Denmark or Austria than an incredibly inefficient payments system. To underscore just how little bitcoin matters ask yourself, if it just disappeared one day would anyone outside the industry even notice? And on that you want to spend an entire nations energy budget? Visa processes 600,000 transactions in the same energy budget as a single bitcoin payment. Six hundred thousand times more efficient. I can’t understand why you’d compare it to the entire global financial system when it can’t possibly ever replace even a sliver of it. I could outperform it with a single AWS instance and one table in RDS or DynamoDB. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption