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Whenever I hear someone like Andreessen who is still a cryptocurrency believer, I go and really look for what he's talking about. I find nothing. I also have a

by api 7y ago

Whenever I hear someone like Andreessen who is still a cryptocurrency believer, I go and really look for what he's talking about. I find nothing. I also have a routine search that I do when I look for something built on cryptocurrency or the cryptocurrency ecosystem (e.g. Ethereum "dapps") that I might want to actually use. I always come up empty handed. Yet there are many smart people that believe in this stuff. Are they in a parallel universe? Where is it being transformational? All I see is gambling, speculation, scams, solutions in search of a problem, and a ton of vaporware. Beyond the core use cases of easier international wire transfer and black/grey market commerce, I don't see anything in this space that people actually use (excluding gambling and speculation). I'm puzzled when I hear them compare it to the Internet. The Internet had immediate real world use cases everywhere. I saw people all around me start to get online and actually use the Internet for a huge variety of things. I don't see any of that with cryptocurrency. Nobody is using this stuff for anything. It's got that classic worst-case solution in search of a problem vibe: you can't give it to people. I get why bag holders and speculators sound bullish on cryptocurrency. They're hoping more will buy in so they can dump at a higher price. I am genuinely and deeply puzzled when I hear bright people who aren't in those groups who are still believers. What do they see that I don't?

corporateslave5 7y ago
The real issue with blockchain is it doesn’t work yet. It doesn’t scale, and complex trustless scalable guarantees aren’t possible yet. The technology is also really new. Bitcoin coin is only ten years old.
- api 7y ago
  I think there's some validity to that view. The Internet was actually 30 years old when it went public. I find it hard to believe though that VCs are playing that long a game. That's way too long a time horizon for any conventional VC investment.
- xkjkls 7y ago
  The iPhone is also 10 years old. It changed the world and has been the most profitable product in human history. What is Bitcoin's excuse?
  - pedalpete 7y ago
    A few problems I see with your argument. 1) The iPhone wasn't the start of the curve. It was building on the history of mobile phones, PDAs, WAP/mobile internet, portable music players, etc. It was a convergent device which brought together all of these other things, many of which had been successful in their own right. But you couldn't make the same argument about the Newton, or PalmPilot, could you? 2) iPhone is a product, Blockchain/Bitcoin is a network and protocol. Networks need mass adoption to be successful. You only needed one iPhone for it to be useful. Protocols are infrastructure to be built on top of. The iPhone didn't release with Apps (as we know them today) and could have still been successful without them. I'm not saying Bitcoin will be a success, and what would it be a success at is still the open question. But you can't put it in the same bucket as the iPhone.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>They're hoping more will buy in so they can dump at a higher price. We're seeing, right in this moment, why the ability to increase the supply of currency is a necessity for a functioning economy, especially in times of crisis. Somehow the hodlers take the exact opposite lesson from what's happening.
- api 7y ago
  You're referring to what I call "pop Austrianism," and that's definitely an adjacent issue. Austrianism is a rationalistic theory of economics. By rationalistic in this context I mean it's not empirical. It's the sort of thing you get when smart people sit around and reason through something and come to a conclusion based on that alone without bothering to observe, experiment, or evaluate their ideas in practice. A wonderful classical example of this kind of rationalism is Aristotle reasoning that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. Of course they do! Heavier objects are subject to more force, therefore they fall faster. It's perfectly rational. BTW I'm not saying that other economic schools of thought have it all correct either. They clearly continue to make incorrect predictions all the time. I really don't think anyone understands economics very well. It's a subset of complex auto-adaptive systems, but with an added layer of adversarial behavior. In economics when a major economist, government, central bank, or business makes a prediction, the market acts so as to attempt to invalidate that prediction. Economic systems actively attempt to invalidate theories about them.
  - felipeko 7y ago
    I may be way of my field here, but my understanding is that the whole point of the Austrian school is that human behavior is (purposeful, but) unpredictable. This is a testable claim, and you can bother to observe, experiment and test this claim. Austrians should accept they are wrong if you can empirically prove that humans behavior is predictable. But if this claim is correct, there's no reason for you to do empirical economic observations to prove or disprove economic laws. Any empirical conclusion will have no predictive power as a law, only as a trend. Not only that, but any logical consequence of human behavior being purposeful and unpredictable is as correct as the original claim. Is anything here that I am missing?
thisisbrians 7y ago
I am totally in your camp on this...I'm very interested in crypto from a technology standpoint, but I don't see any viable applications (other than those you mention) on the horizon. Also, I don't really believe "trustless" is possible, as close as blockchain may get. I'm not an expert here, but don't you still have to trust DNS, certificate issuers, code maintainers, etc.? Can't any of these be compromised with a big enough profit motive?
- tomrod 7y ago
  The use cases that work best would be - Slow transaction need - Accounting-related items. In my mind Supply Chain on a batch scale looks to be the the most promising area, but there don't seem to be many places that can't, or don't want to, manage this centrally. Ergo the network trust is not necessary. dApps are promising, but why add the extra expense?
_zamorano_ 7y ago
Shouldn't the blockchain be the best approach to handle public goverment data? I mean, project requirements to build infrastructures, for the private sector companies to bid. The results of those adjudications. Civil servants payroll and bonuses... That would mean no suspicios document shredding when a new party enters the goverment. An open standard way for everybody to access the data. Even different applications on top of those databases. Setting aside political considerations, what would be the drawbacks of this approach?
- nickik 7y ago
  All of these things could already be improved by 1000% if the government wanted to. Its not a lack of tools, but a lack of will.
gwern 7y ago
> Whenever I hear someone like Andreessen who is still a cryptocurrency believer, I go and really look for what he's talking about. I find nothing. This interview was in 2014 (not 2018 or 2020, read the introduction). He might have a different opinion now.

by api 7y ago

corporateslave5 7y ago

The real issue with blockchain is it doesn’t work yet. It doesn’t scale, and complex trustless scalable guarantees aren’t possible yet. The technology is also really new. Bitcoin coin is only ten years old.

api 7y ago
I think there's some validity to that view. The Internet was actually 30 years old when it went public. I find it hard to believe though that VCs are playing that long a game. That's way too long a time horizon for any conventional VC investment.
xkjkls 7y ago
The iPhone is also 10 years old. It changed the world and has been the most profitable product in human history. What is Bitcoin's excuse?
- pedalpete 7y ago
  A few problems I see with your argument. 1) The iPhone wasn't the start of the curve. It was building on the history of mobile phones, PDAs, WAP/mobile internet, portable music players, etc. It was a convergent device which brought together all of these other things, many of which had been successful in their own right. But you couldn't make the same argument about the Newton, or PalmPilot, could you? 2) iPhone is a product, Blockchain/Bitcoin is a network and protocol. Networks need mass adoption to be successful. You only needed one iPhone for it to be useful. Protocols are infrastructure to be built on top of. The iPhone didn't release with Apps (as we know them today) and could have still been successful without them. I'm not saying Bitcoin will be a success, and what would it be a success at is still the open question. But you can't put it in the same bucket as the iPhone.

aguyfromnb 7y ago

>They're hoping more will buy in so they can dump at a higher price. We're seeing, right in this moment, why the ability to increase the supply of currency is a necessity for a functioning economy, especially in times of crisis. Somehow the hodlers take the exact opposite lesson from what's happening.

api 7y ago
You're referring to what I call "pop Austrianism," and that's definitely an adjacent issue. Austrianism is a rationalistic theory of economics. By rationalistic in this context I mean it's not empirical. It's the sort of thing you get when smart people sit around and reason through something and come to a conclusion based on that alone without bothering to observe, experiment, or evaluate their ideas in practice. A wonderful classical example of this kind of rationalism is Aristotle reasoning that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. Of course they do! Heavier objects are subject to more force, therefore they fall faster. It's perfectly rational. BTW I'm not saying that other economic schools of thought have it all correct either. They clearly continue to make incorrect predictions all the time. I really don't think anyone understands economics very well. It's a subset of complex auto-adaptive systems, but with an added layer of adversarial behavior. In economics when a major economist, government, central bank, or business makes a prediction, the market acts so as to attempt to invalidate that prediction. Economic systems actively attempt to invalidate theories about them.
- felipeko 7y ago
  I may be way of my field here, but my understanding is that the whole point of the Austrian school is that human behavior is (purposeful, but) unpredictable. This is a testable claim, and you can bother to observe, experiment and test this claim. Austrians should accept they are wrong if you can empirically prove that humans behavior is predictable. But if this claim is correct, there's no reason for you to do empirical economic observations to prove or disprove economic laws. Any empirical conclusion will have no predictive power as a law, only as a trend. Not only that, but any logical consequence of human behavior being purposeful and unpredictable is as correct as the original claim. Is anything here that I am missing?

thisisbrians 7y ago

I am totally in your camp on this...I'm very interested in crypto from a technology standpoint, but I don't see any viable applications (other than those you mention) on the horizon. Also, I don't really believe "trustless" is possible, as close as blockchain may get. I'm not an expert here, but don't you still have to trust DNS, certificate issuers, code maintainers, etc.? Can't any of these be compromised with a big enough profit motive?

tomrod 7y ago
The use cases that work best would be - Slow transaction need - Accounting-related items. In my mind Supply Chain on a batch scale looks to be the the most promising area, but there don't seem to be many places that can't, or don't want to, manage this centrally. Ergo the network trust is not necessary. dApps are promising, but why add the extra expense?

_zamorano_ 7y ago

Shouldn't the blockchain be the best approach to handle public goverment data? I mean, project requirements to build infrastructures, for the private sector companies to bid. The results of those adjudications. Civil servants payroll and bonuses... That would mean no suspicios document shredding when a new party enters the goverment. An open standard way for everybody to access the data. Even different applications on top of those databases. Setting aside political considerations, what would be the drawbacks of this approach?

nickik 7y ago
All of these things could already be improved by 1000% if the government wanted to. Its not a lack of tools, but a lack of will.

gwern 7y ago

> Whenever I hear someone like Andreessen who is still a cryptocurrency believer, I go and really look for what he's talking about. I find nothing. This interview was in 2014 (not 2018 or 2020, read the introduction). He might have a different opinion now.