14 ms·

Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

301 points by dotcoma 6y ago

aaron695 6y ago
Blockchain is good for LARPing. And if you think LARPing is pathetic then that's on you. While you go to your billion dollar church or watch your billion dollar sport or analyse your String theory or do your medieval sword fights in dress-up at castles.
cheez 6y ago
Responding to title only: of course, but the things it _is_ a solution for will be world changing.
- peteretep 6y ago
  When will they be world changing? I have a client who insists on paying me in crypto and the whole thing is dramatically more expensive and complicated than using TransferWise with a 10,000x increased risk that someone fat fingers something and the money disappears into the ether forever
  - dotcoma 6y ago
    But he's clearly on the cutting edge of something, or so he thinks.
  - cheez 6y ago
    My opinion is that it's like tcp/ip, new plumbing (ethereum). So expect protocols and apps to be built on top of it, similar to HTTP and browsers. You just need one killer app to make all the hype worth it. That killer app might be elections or possibly decentralized trading of electronic assets like stock ownership.
centimeter 6y ago
There are precisely two legitimately useful applications of the blockchain data structure that have been invented: 1. Money 2. Zooko's Triangle Your prior should be that anything else is some kind of delusion or scam.
- drpixie 6y ago
  And the cost of bitcoin has naturally been inflating to the cost of the power needed to do the mining ... so the whole thing looks a lot like a bubble, great if you got in and out early, bad news for everyone else.
  - rdbell 6y ago
    Are you arguing that price chases hash rate instead of hash rate chasing price?
peteretep 6y ago
Can we add Graph Databases to the list of things that are kinda cool but with very limited applications too?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  Facebook's entire backend is built on a graph database. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/tao-the-power-of-the-graph/10151525983993920/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/tao-the-...
  - peteretep 6y ago
    Yes. Social networks and categorising artistic output both seems like great uses and then ... very little else.
Causality1 6y ago
It's the evolution of buzzwords. Back in the day people used buzzwords that were nonspecific enough you could apply them to almost any solution. Synergy, paradigm, leverage, etc. Today's buzzwords have very specific meanings but are flexible enough you can convince people they're the solution to any problem. Blockchain, AI, machine learning, etc.
fouc 6y ago
> But isn’t it strange that you won all those awards, even though you aren’t actually using the blockchain? Kinda like all those AI startups that aren't actually using AI.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Artificial Artificial Intelligence?
  - jethro_tell 6y ago
    We're working on the air for our start up. In the mean time the interns are matching stuff in spread sheets.
    - rudiv 6y ago
      So your analysis has been created by neural nets?
  - paul_f 6y ago
    AI in 2020 is large numbers of if-the-else statements, unless you have fancy developers, who use switch statements
    - sireat 6y ago
      Or extra fancy Scala developers who use pattern matching...
Sargos 6y ago
An article about blockchain where the thesis is that it doesn't solve any problems and it doesn't even mention Ethereum? This article is extremely poorly researched (maybe on purpose) and reads like clickbait.
- bschwindHN 6y ago
  It does mention ethereum: > So much energy that the two biggest blockchains in the world – bitcoin and Ethereum – are now using up the same amount of electricity as the whole of Austria.
  - ikt 6y ago
    Ethereum developers have been working extremely hard to move to proof of stake to remove this massive power requirement. It's too bad that wasn't mentioned in the article.
    - jamil7 6y ago
      Slide side track but I never get the complaints about power usage. It’d be great if crypto used less energy obviously but doesn’t fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        No. Proof of work is insane and uses too much energy by design.
      - coolgod 6y ago
        Can you explain why you think fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?
        vageli 6y ago
        Transporting physical currency requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure.
programmarchy 6y ago
Ctrl+F proof of stake. Author didn’t do much homework. Just retreading the same criticisms about energy consumption and this-could-just-be-a-postgres-db-hosted-on-cloud-megacorp. Crypto is a bubble but it’s also a space solving difficult problems that will shape how the world transacts. It’s volatile because it’s difficult and hard to understand, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value.
kordlessagain 6y ago
The 402 response code in HTTP might be a useful thing to "hook up" to Lightning, which itself is useful because of the Bitcoin blockchain. Having fast micropayments payments running on data requests is useful for a wide variety of cloud applications, including but not limited to data transfer costs and queries to machine learning models, all without the need for "users" on the systems being accessed. The way I'd put it is that the killer use case for Bitcoin is yet to come, which doesn't make it a solution for nothing, but more like a solution before its time. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  I can’t tell if your post is jest or serious, given the article.
  - kordlessagain 6y ago
    I'm quite serious.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  That would change the dopamine cycle of content consumption. I really don't see that happening. And its not like this couldn't have happened without bitcoin.
  - kordlessagain 6y ago
    Micropayments are actually very difficult to implement without accounts and some type of payment system. With Bitcoin, and Lightning, it makes it work.
- zelly 6y ago
  For a regular user to use Lightning, they would have to run an always-online instance of lnd--a very memory-intensive Go program that also requires a Bitcoin fullnode (300GB) or the experimental Neutrino light node either of which also has to be always-online. The average internet user has never typed a bash command so this is a pipe dream. Or you could have the alternative which is to push people onto centralized Lightning-like (but better, more polished) services run by the likes of JP Morgan. (It's my suspicion that focusing hype on Lightning instead of scaling Bitcoin Core was a way to sabotage it in favor of paid services of a certain company that most Bitcoin developers are employed by but I digress.) Micropayments in general is a bad idea which the market has rejected time and time again. If you really want to do something like that, just do it the same way all billing works, add it up and notify the user with an invoice at the end of the month or year. That could be integrated into browsers without being tied to a specific payment method or forcing payment. I don't even want to imagine how rich hackers would get if every web browser had a code path that transferred real money.
spir 6y ago
This article is misinformed. The past two years have seen a Cambrian explosion of apps on ethereum. financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/ https://augur2.eth.link/ non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/ https://decentraland.org/ popular newsletter - https://weekinethereumnews.com/ https://weekinethereumnews.com/
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  Yeah thanks to COVID there is a ton of new interest in defi as a form of unregulated gambling.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    I don't know if you've seen the stock market lately... clearly the largest casino in the world is on Wall Street. But anyways, DeFi has tons of use cases including automated crop insurance based on weather events, decentralized money markets for car loans, tokenized rental real estate, synthetic derivatives, standard savings and loans utilizing stablecoins, etc etc. The notion that blockchain hasn't found product market fit in 2020 is laughably outdated.
    - vmception 6y ago
      If you notice, the primary arguments against blockchain and crypto require holding it to a standard higher than any asset class in existence. Its a mixture of “I don't respect this market and thats the only actual distinction” along with “I have no idea these criticisms are present in actual currencies as well as the stock market and commodities spot markets and credit market and derivatives market and collectibles market” Eventually they move the goal post so far that they are giving actual relevant criticisms of blockchain technology, like scalability concerns And then they get flipped into realizing they can actually contribute to the solution and spread awareness And then in a few short years they have enough clout to raise capital in the space
ultramundane8 6y ago
According to this article: Blockchain, big data, cloud computing, AI, and magic are roughly equivalent. Don't waste your time reading it even if blockchain is weak.
Animats 6y ago
Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  >- Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper. What are the transaction costs like on BTC these days? I'm surprised many people still bother with BTC given the enormous costs I've seen.
  - bb88 6y ago
    Looks like it's US$4.614/transaction. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee#:~:text=Bitcoin%20Average%20Transaction%20Fee%20is,242.8%25%20from%20one%20year%20ago https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f....
  - kabacha 6y ago
    You don't pay in BTC for drugs though. Montero is usually preferred and transactions are much cheaper and private.
    - zelly 6y ago
      It's not, the dominant currency on darknet is still Bitcoin. Even Litecoin is more used than Monero. Criminals are stupid.
  - ShorsHammer 6y ago
    Perhaps delve into this tx from 2 weeks ago: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/d56ae8052711ac81cb68a0ccf340f3a1f818cb315426253cfa67066323ec1804 https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/d56ae8052711ac81cb68a0ccf3...
  - knocte 6y ago
jjordan 6y ago
Blockchain is easy to criticize. Hell, I've done it plenty and I worked in the space full time for a good year and a half. But the problems that they're trying to solve, decentralization, censorship resistance, sound money, true democratic governance, etc. are hard ones to solve. Maybe it turns out that they are inherently unsolvable for the foreseeable future. I think the promise that a solution to some of these problems may exist is what drives curious developers to keep pushing the envelope, because, much like fusion power, if we eventually "get it", it'll change the world. Blockchain innovation is a lot like that. Keep pushing.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  > But the problems that they're trying to solve, decentralization, censorship resistance, sound money, true democratic governance, etc. Noble goals. Still, blockchains are inherently limited to the digital world. No amount of digital freedom or security stops you from being oppressed by an unjust government, or robbed at gunpoint. Taking Bitcoin as an example, there have been many cases of bitcoins being seized or stolen. The reasons behind these losses were much the same as the reasons people lose fiat currency. Someone with authority came and took it. Frankly, I don't really understand what there is to "get". You can create a perfect system, but people have to operate within it. That means laws, and it means ceding authority to regulation. None of this is to say that I am not interested in blockchain tech, and am not open to it as a solution. I just haven't seen a problem solved by it yet. I would be happy to be proven wrong.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I'm somewhat of a cautiously optimistic skeptic that finds the blockchain stuff really interesting and potentially important (I've been playing with it since 2010), but not super useful at the moment. I think these are some of things people think about it: - Your country's financial system is unreliable or run by tyrants and the currency is bad. It might be hard to get a stable currency. Moving income into bitcoin could help you (people were doing this in Venezuela). - Your country was invaded and crossing the border requires you to interact with corrupt guards that steal anything of value you try and get out. Putting your wealth into a bitcoin wallet can allow you to escape with it intact if you memorize your seed words (there was a story about someone in Ukraine that did this crossing the border patrolled by Russian guards). - Bitcoin is deflationary, the coins are limited and scarce, but the currency is divisible. This means they should hold value over time. Fiat currencies are vulnerable to monetary policy of governments, bitcoin is less so. Bitcoin may increase in value in part because other currencies are decreasing in value. - Ability to move money more easily than other deflationary assets like gold (which have other problems). Universal currency across different governments that can be converted into local currency. All of this is primarily just BTC. I think there are other potential interesting things with ability to have an audit log of immutable transactions of a block chain generally. I think some of the other things are cool (urbit is using ethereum for IDs), but a lot of the other things don't seem to have much purpose beyond being cool. Faster transaction times? The strategy Dai uses to stay pegged to 1 USD is neat.
kumarvvr 6y ago
As a distributed ledger, that does not require a consolidated authority, it has the potential to have many uses. Many think blockchain as a synonym for BitCoin and the like, while the central technology seems to be the distributed ledger. However, with anything distributed, the network is only as good as it's participants. Which means, when thinking long term, it fails to give confidence in the system, because who knows, 20 years from now, will there by any participants in the distributed ledger?
godelski 6y ago
Looking at all the comments here I have a single response to most of them: I'll call it a solution when it is implemented. You can talk all you want about solutions to some of the (minor) problems addressed here (ignoring the rest of the problems) but unless it is in use then the article's commentary still stands. Unless it has a ton of users, the article's commentary still stands. If you really do believe in block chain, prove us all wrong and implement the changes.
- malikNF 6y ago
  Take a look at cardano. They have implemented a blockchain that is backed by peer reviewed [1] research, the article here talks about how the blockchain takes a huge amount of resources to run. The people at the cardano project has managed to enable people to even run a full block producing node on something as small as a pi[2][3]. So far from all the blockchain projects I am interested in, this is my favorite one so far. If you got a few hours of free time you should really check out this project out.[4] Disclaimer I am a cardano(ada) holder and I actively take part in this project as a pool operator. [1]https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ [2]https://twitter.com/BetterStake/status/1296217244217868289 https://twitter.com/BetterStake/status/1296217244217868289 [3]https://twitter.com/search?q=cardano%20Raspberry&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=cardano%20Raspberry&src=typed_q... [4]https://github.com/input-output-hk https://github.com/input-output-hk
  - fourstar 6y ago
    Why is being peer-reviewed what Cardano fans always lede with? That doesn’t automatically make something “better”, IMO. Also, what even uses Cardano? Project has been “in progress” for years and all I’ve seen are photos of Hoskinson with his mouth open taking selfies in various parts of the world. Algorand is probably the best project right now in crypto aside from ZCash that’s an actual contender against ETH (disclaimer: I hold none of either).
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Zcash had this which wasn't great: https://bitcoinist.com/zcash-inflation-bug-infinite-tokens/ https://bitcoinist.com/zcash-inflation-bug-infinite-tokens/ You also only get privacy with transactions between two z-addresses, and those require a fair amount of resources to generate (I think HW wallets can't sign those transactions due to computational limitations). Most zcash transactions are between t-addresses which don't have any benefits over BTC (they're public). https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49115/whats-the-difference-between-z-addr-and-t-addr-type-addresses https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49115/whats-the-... As far as cardano, I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake compared to proof-of-work (though I might just not understand it fully). Proof-of-work seems like the main BTC innovation against abuse and a lot of the coins that use stake (stellar lumens, tezos) seem like they drop the defining characteristic of BTC decentralization in order to get faster transactions. Without proof of work you don't really get true decentralized protection from the system itself, you have to put trust somewhere. At least the tezos putting coins at risk approach is interesting. The cardano website also really sets off my bullshit alarms: https://cardano.org/ https://cardano.org/
tehranifar 6y ago
It's been a good solution for authentic digital arts! Check out https://knownorigin.io/ https://knownorigin.io/ https://superrare.co/ https://superrare.co/ There are also virtual worlds to see the art in https://www.cryptovoxels.com/ https://www.cryptovoxels.com/
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  What is authentic digital art? Does that mean that I own it, and no one else can claim to own it? How is that different from a bill of sale?
  - ikt 6y ago
    > How is that different from a bill of sale? Ctrl+c and ctrl+v Take Gods Unchained for example: https://godsunchained.com/ https://godsunchained.com/ It's as close to a real trading card game as possible, simply because when they produce 5 cards there are only 5 cards.
- Rotten194 6y ago
  Yay, we can reproduce the worst part of physical art on the internet now... art is interesting because it's art, not because rich people can speculate on it. In an ideal world everyone could have a Monet on their wall. With digital art, that's possible. Why the heck do we want to change that?
  - tomcam 6y ago
    My experience with Monets is drastically different IRL than digitally. Did not care for Monet until I saw the water lilies museum in France.
dang 6y ago
Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24181586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24181586
dotcoma 6y ago
Funny how this post went from #1 on the homepage to #22 in a couple of minutes...
onelastjob 6y ago
This author is way behind the times. Bitcoin is obsolete. Nano (nano.org) is what the author should be looking at as the future of p2p digital currency. Nano transactions are feeless and take under 1 second, fully confirmed. If you send 1 Nano the recipient receives 1 Nano. There is no mining involved so it is green and it is decentralized. These features make microtransactions possible. You could use it to pay a fraction of a sent to stream a song or read an article. Or us it to log in to websites. Npass is doing both. https://npass.dev/npass https://npass.dev/npass Robocash is using Nano to prevent robocalls. https://www.myrobocash.com/ https://www.myrobocash.com/ Smart contract coins like Ethereum will have tons of uses, especially for digital goods. You could easily cut escrow.com (and all escrow fees) out of the process of transferring domain names (and other digital goods) with smart contracts if a domain registrar got with the times.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  I'm using NANO for microtransactions in browser-based multiplayer rougelikelike. Bid for your character and cashout if you survive. Bid again from the same account to resume your saved game. https://playerkillers.exchange/KILL https://playerkillers.exchange/KILL
- ac29 6y ago
  I'm not sure a cryptocurrency that has lost ~95% of its value in the past couple years is a good counterexample to this article.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Valuation isn't necessarily a measure of utility. Usually it is correlated with hype and marketing. Most people interested in cryptocurrencies have little to no interest in actual use cases. Investors simply want the price to go up. This is usually criticized as a "greater fool" investment strategy. The article speaks to this. If there is any value in an cryptocurrency, it is up to the developers to divine it. Investors will eventually find a price equilibrium, but for now the ecosystem seems driven by hype, buzzwords, pozi-dapps and bubbles. NANO doesn't have any of that.
  - 6y ago
danschumann 6y ago
The block chain is what? An array of objects? The real tech is deciding who gets to push to the array. So, it's just about permissions. How do you know who to trust in a crowd? Assuming the crowd is more trustworthy than a centralized authority. "Power corrupts", yadda yadda, centralized power is certainly corrupting, but so is dark money that can be used for drugs, human trafficking, etc. I guess it depends which is the larger evil where you come from, the government or the criminals, whether to trust the central or the decentric authority.
fossuser 6y ago
The Correspondent is such a huge disappointment. I contributed to the start because they pitched themselves as 'unbreaking news', instead they're just another weak publication writing bad articles with catchy headlines (of which this is a good example). Persuasion is everything The Correspondent was supposed to be and isn't: https://www.persuasion.community/ https://www.persuasion.community/ If you want to actually learn more about bitcoin, I'm part way through this and it's really good: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-Comprehensive-Introduction/dp/0691171696/ https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-C...
peterthehacker 6y ago
Bitcoin has a large (100M+) user base (or at least it seems like it) but I can’t think of another blockchain app that has reached that level. Ethereum is more like a framework or platform as I understand it so I don’t think it counts in the same way. Besides bitcoin are there any other blockchain apps that have large user bases?
- seibelj 6y ago
  Ethereum has more transactions per week that bitcoin by a large margin. Most new projects are built on Ethereum.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
luhn 6y ago
This article really hits the nail on the head: All these problems blockchain are supposed to solve are problems of coordination. And you don't need blockchain for that, you need buy-in.
- ASlave2Gravity 6y ago
  Very true. We need to show the world how to do that! Got any ideas!?
aww_dang 6y ago
Who here is actually using blockchain as a developer? I'd like to hear from people who have actually created solutions, not speculation about potential use cases or price action.
Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. If you want to buy a 4chan pass, you'll find there is no option to pay in EUR or USD. Cryptocurrency only. Is this because 4chan is operating an illegal business? No. It's because they cannot process payments using the traditional means. Controversial websites get financially censored all the time. Here are a few that come to mind: Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks, Backpage, 8chan, Bitchute, American Renaissance. I'm sure other commentators can chime in with more. Calling blockchains a solution to nothing is pretty offensive to the those who rely on it to pay their expenses without another realistic option. Not to mention, anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero protect both the recipient -and- the sender from financial censorship. I wouldn't want to end up on a public list or have my bank account closed for donating to a controversial person or organization. And Monero could not provide the excellent privacy that it does without a distributed ledger authenticated by proof of work. When a Monero user spends money, he randomly samples the blockchain until ten dummy transactions can be found and combined with his real transaction in a construct called a ring signature used to obscure the true sender. This only works because the user can secure his own copy of the blockchain. If he had to ask someone else for those dummy transactions, that someone else could use process of elimination to identify the authentic transaction in the user's ring signature.
- stagas 6y ago
  I would say this its biggest advantage. It doesn't have to be a controversial or fraudulent transaction. Regular digital money ownership and exchange, especially across countries, is severely policed and most of the time impossible for a huge portion of the population, not because they're criminals, but because they happen to be living in or coming from a place where these freedoms are just not there. Cryptocurrencies take away these and numerous other problems that are caused by ordinary financial institutions and the way societies are structured.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Agreed. The tech is there, but gatekeepers have set up shop around the last mile. Onerous regulations like KYC surround exchanges in the first world. In regions with tight capital controls, it can be even more difficult. The people who stand to benefit the most have the biggest hurdles to adoption.
ajcodez 6y ago
Saifedean Ammous writes pretty convincingly how a fixed money supply would be a good thing. I don’t know of any other unique benefit. It will be interesting to see how it plays out with nation states and diminishing block rewards. I’m holding a little bit just in case.
- tomcam 6y ago
  We had a solution to that problem for thousands of years: gold.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    Sort of, new gold mines keep showing up and if asteroid mining takes off it's really going to push gold value down by a lot.
biolurker1 6y ago
Been a while since a denialist article appeared here. It is in stark contrasts with governments, nasdaq,banks, people using etc and many others. But hey the right to say computers are worthless is always there
- tomcam 6y ago
  And yet you didn’t provide a single example contradicting the articles thesis.
  - biolurker1 6y ago
    Again, China usa and eu governments are using it to deploy digital currencies. Nasdaq plans to build the new financial infra on blockchain. What do you need Jesus to come down and tell you it has value as technology?
dk8996 6y ago
I'm really surprised by how uneducated most of HN are about blockchain. This means we're still early. Few big things that are coming out of blockchain; 1) ICO - a way to raise money in a distributed manner outside the traditional financial system (think Banks and VCs). 2) Defi - a way to borrow and lend (and much more) outside the traditional financial system. One example, Banks get as much as 16-20% return on your depoiste -- you might see 1% of that. Defi solves that by removing the Bank and you can capture all of that yield. You can lend literally with a click of a button and see returns with every mined block. Take the money back any time you want. 3) Governance - there is a big social benefit if we figure out all the edge cases and the correct implementation. Many benefits in voting, real-world governance, and open source (what to work on next, what gets funding). 4) Many many Comp. Sci. and Cryptology advances; see byzantine general problem, zero-knowledge proof, and many more. Just one example of a company doing lots of research: https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ https://iohk.io/en/research/library/
- malikNF 6y ago
  What even surprising is lots of HNers are really strongly against blockchain projects while YCombinator themselves have invested in several blockchain projects[1] [1]https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=cryptocurrency https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=cryptocurrency
  - rainbow-road 6y ago
    Interestingly, all of those either use cryptocurrencies as an investment, or merely provide cryptocurrency-based tools (of questionable utility), and leave the problem-solving to their users. Why mine (fool's) gold when you can sell shovels?
    - dk8996 6y ago
      Most Crypto projects are raising money via ICO route without dealing with VCs, cap tables, and board seats. Most of these projects will fail, just the nature of innovation. Few will succeed and change the world, I will argue that Eth (one of the first ICOs) already changed the world.
saurabhnanda 6y ago
Honest question. When someone says the blockchain can be used for anything OTHER than financial transactions, for example - supply chain, health records, etc. what is the actual underlying data that will be stored on the blockchain? When it comes to a quasi-banking or quasi-wallet system, I find it easy to visualize that the blockchain holds accounts with balances, and there are transactions which move money between accounts. Blockchain's decentralization and write-only properties help because no single entity can make your money disappear, and no entity can rollback a transaction. What is going on with other use-cases of blockchain? What does a supply-chain system actually store on the blockchain? The SKU list? The price of SKUs? The stock level of each SKU in each warehouse? What?
ccortes 6y ago
>And it would be a lot less complicated if you trusted someone to manage your data (a bank, for instance). It must be nice living somewhere where you can trust banks
stagas 6y ago
> I have never heard of a bank simply taking money from someone’s account. If a bank did something like that, they would be hauled into court in no time and lose their license. Technically it’s possible; legally, it’s a death sentence. cough Cyprus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Wells Fargo has been involved in a multi-year scandal over deducting millions of fake fees, to inflate their stock price. Fined $3 billion so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan... How it worked was the top executives set targets for tellers to meet, or the tellers were fired. To meet the targets, tellers had to upsell clients whether the clients wanted the service or not. It's kind of like how cable companies, etc. pretend to not hear cancellation requests, but Wells Fargo was actively doing fake transactions.
skinnyasianboi 6y ago
A year ago I might have upvoted the post but after reading like 60% of it it felt very biased and I couldn't finish it. Disclaimer I'm also biased. A few things that I was missing: no mention of smart contracts(?), no mention of inflation and countries/banks that you can't trust your money and transactions doesn't have to take 7minutes-7days. For example in my experience a transaction on the Tron network goes quicker than a debit card transaction. But a valid reason was the massive energy consumption and I hope we will solve that with e.g. fusion energy.
mbrodersen 6y ago
Blockchain, the solution for getting funding from ignorant investors.
vaibhawc 6y ago
I would rather believe a word on this by an investor/entrepreneur or a tinkerer like that kid instead of Journalist. Tech journalism is more crappy than blockchain/bitcoin hype market.
quotz 6y ago
Millions of citizens from countries that have abusive governments would disagree with this. Its digital gold. In Yugoslavia where I am from originally, gold was banned, and that was the case too in Romania during dictatorship times. People were smuggling gold to preserve their means of survival, and being seen carrying gold would result in one being killed by a firing squad or jailed. BTC doesn’t have that problem
- zucker42 6y ago
  Can't they just ban you from making connections to known Bitcoin nodes at the network level, or use a Honeypot to detect when you access Bitcoin specific services?
  - kikimora 6y ago
    No they cannot because it is a decentralized system. Whenever they try people would quickly post tin of material how to access bitcoin over TOR/VPN. And since it is money people do care to learn these things to be able to transact freely.
  - quotz 6y ago
    The moment a country bans Bitcoin, it legitimizes it.
xg15 6y ago
My personal theory is that most of the hype around "Blockchain technology" is simply an aftereffect of the valuation spike Bitcoin went though in 2017/2018. That was the point were Bitcoin reached the public consciousness and people realized you could make money with it. To do so you have to convince others to sink their money into the sector, hence all the grandiose proposals, opaque jargon and solutions is search of problems...
BTCOG 6y ago
This is very straight forward in that the blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto to solve the Byzantine General's Problem, double-spending, and a decentralized ledger. We can go much deeper into what Bitcoin can do, but all other chains wishing to do other things this guy mentions always were a cheap piggy back on Bitcoin. I'm here to tell you Bitcoin works, and does not need anything else. Bitcoin is not slow like many folks will tell you all day long, either. Bitcoin does not have high fees, either. Bitcoin is very sound "money," and not a great currency. If someone wishes to transfer money to someone else anywhere in the world, they simply tailor their fee to be low, and they send it for 40-60 cents and understand that it will confirm over the next day. (Yes, the mempool surges during times of heavy use, and yes it may take a little while longer, but just the same, millions of dollars can be sent with no third party for under $1 fee) The time itself for this does not really matter, as this could never be done prior to Bitcoin. Ask those sending money home to the Philippines or folks who are unbanked how many days a wire transfer takes, and how many third parties take a massive chunk in fees. Nobody controls your money in Bitcoin, and nobody takes a fee. (Nobody is taking your money from a BTC fee, the paltry amount is paying into the system to keep the miners mining) It's nothing else beyond this, and nothing else is needed. Anyone can argue about this endlessly but Bitcoin solved it's problem it was designed for, and all else is just garbage tacked on by other people trying to strike it rich. I have used Bitcoin regularly since 2011. I have purchased real, legal goods from folks in other countries over forums in escrow that could not be done otherwise without incurring very large fees. I've paid 30 people simultaneously with one multisend transaction, and one fee. Everything else is irrelevant. Bitcoin is revolutionary. Just Bitcoin. It works and it works very well. You can continue to beat around the bush and apply fetishism all day, and Bitcoin still works the way it was intended.
ThePowerOfDirge 6y ago
Quadratic voting might be useful https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html
kobasa 6y ago
I just want to say I'm shocked a community who's supposed to be as technologically adept as HN still "doesn't get it". I have no intention or interest in changing anyone's mind...if you know, you know.
nojvek 6y ago
Blockchain is based on Merkle trees and well, merkle trees definitely made their impact via git and other immutable log structures. Blockchain is cool datastructure as an immutable log with proof work where integrity can be verified in a distributed manner by multiple parties. It’s like quantum computers. Heavily hyped but only useful for a specialized set of problems.
LukeEF 6y ago
Cryptographic stamps on hash chains to understand who made specific entries to a layered & immutable database is super useful. I don't know who needs to hear that as it isn't blockchain, but it borrows the best ideas!
kikimora 6y ago
Surprised to see so much misunderstanding here. “Byzantine fault tolerant consensus” problems have been solved with a trusted party since many many centuries. Entire modern monetary system is based on a trusted party - a central bank. Blockchain provides a way to remove trusted party out of equation. One can argue that existing system just works, why would you want to change something that works? Answer is simple - it does not work in many countries and trusted parties/authorities abuse their powers, sometimes in a ways that is not so easy to see. First application of a blockchain is digital money which is free from a central authority. Here is real world scenario that happened in so many places. Your domestic currency is crushing, has lost 30% of it value already and is about to loose another 80%. You want to by US dollars and save what is left but you cannot because government temporary prohibited purchase of a foreign currency. I’m thinking about Russia, Belorussia, Venezuela and many many others. Political activists get blocked by a banking system all the time. For example in Russia there is a “list of terrorists”, people on this list excluded form the banking system. This list probably has some terrorists in it but it also has quite a few activists in it as well. You can go to a protest, grabbed by a police and next day find yourself out of the banking system. Decentralized money is at least partially a solution to issues arising form an authority abusing it powers as cryptocurrency cannot be blocked so easily. It does not have to be used much, it just has to be around. Second blockchain application is smart contracts to simplify value transfer. For example shares offerings - when a company sells it shares to a bunch of investors. It often happens outside of an exchange, without IPO (search for Reg-A, Reg-D offerings). In this process a bank holds investor money until offering completes and a “transfer agent” hold stock in the name of an investor after. Bank and transfer agent are there only because of trust issues, someone has to guarantee that investor pays and receives shares. Investor cannot directly hand over cash to a company because it can fail to pay or company can fail to deliver it shares and then they will have to spend time and money in court. Both bank and transfer agent take their commission just because they trusted and licensed to hold value during and after transaction. These commissions are not small, a bank may take few percents for organizing an offering. Shares can be issued on a blockchain and a smart contract can govern entire value transfer starting from escrow, to enforcing offering conditions and then to transfer of shares and money to counter parties. You can imagine banks might not be happy about loosing their profits but competition in democratic countries slowly but surely drives process in a right direction. Similar examples arise all the time in international trade, trade clearing, interbank relationships, etc, etc. blockchain is a solution to all of this but maybe we need another financial crisis (when “trusted parties” became not so trusted) to speed up it adoption.

301 points by dotcoma 6y ago

Blockchain is good for LARPing. And if you think LARPing is pathetic then that's on you. While you go to your billion dollar church or watch your billion dollar sport or analyse your String theory or do your medieval sword fights in dress-up at castles.

cheez 6y ago

Responding to title only: of course, but the things it _is_ a solution for will be world changing.

peteretep 6y ago
When will they be world changing? I have a client who insists on paying me in crypto and the whole thing is dramatically more expensive and complicated than using TransferWise with a 10,000x increased risk that someone fat fingers something and the money disappears into the ether forever
- dotcoma 6y ago
  But he's clearly on the cutting edge of something, or so he thinks.
- cheez 6y ago
  My opinion is that it's like tcp/ip, new plumbing (ethereum). So expect protocols and apps to be built on top of it, similar to HTTP and browsers. You just need one killer app to make all the hype worth it. That killer app might be elections or possibly decentralized trading of electronic assets like stock ownership.

centimeter 6y ago

There are precisely two legitimately useful applications of the blockchain data structure that have been invented: 1. Money 2. Zooko's Triangle Your prior should be that anything else is some kind of delusion or scam.

drpixie 6y ago
And the cost of bitcoin has naturally been inflating to the cost of the power needed to do the mining ... so the whole thing looks a lot like a bubble, great if you got in and out early, bad news for everyone else.
- rdbell 6y ago
  Are you arguing that price chases hash rate instead of hash rate chasing price?

peteretep 6y ago

Can we add Graph Databases to the list of things that are kinda cool but with very limited applications too?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mgraczyk 6y ago
Facebook's entire backend is built on a graph database. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/tao-the-power-of-the-graph/10151525983993920/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/tao-the-...
- peteretep 6y ago
  Yes. Social networks and categorising artistic output both seems like great uses and then ... very little else.

Causality1 6y ago

It's the evolution of buzzwords. Back in the day people used buzzwords that were nonspecific enough you could apply them to almost any solution. Synergy, paradigm, leverage, etc. Today's buzzwords have very specific meanings but are flexible enough you can convince people they're the solution to any problem. Blockchain, AI, machine learning, etc.

fouc 6y ago

> But isn’t it strange that you won all those awards, even though you aren’t actually using the blockchain? Kinda like all those AI startups that aren't actually using AI.

dylan604 6y ago
Artificial Artificial Intelligence?
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  We're working on the air for our start up. In the mean time the interns are matching stuff in spread sheets.
  - rudiv 6y ago
    So your analysis has been created by neural nets?
- paul_f 6y ago
  AI in 2020 is large numbers of if-the-else statements, unless you have fancy developers, who use switch statements
  - sireat 6y ago
    Or extra fancy Scala developers who use pattern matching...

Sargos 6y ago

An article about blockchain where the thesis is that it doesn't solve any problems and it doesn't even mention Ethereum? This article is extremely poorly researched (maybe on purpose) and reads like clickbait.

bschwindHN 6y ago
It does mention ethereum: > So much energy that the two biggest blockchains in the world – bitcoin and Ethereum – are now using up the same amount of electricity as the whole of Austria.
- ikt 6y ago
  Ethereum developers have been working extremely hard to move to proof of stake to remove this massive power requirement. It's too bad that wasn't mentioned in the article.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    Slide side track but I never get the complaints about power usage. It’d be great if crypto used less energy obviously but doesn’t fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      No. Proof of work is insane and uses too much energy by design.
    - coolgod 6y ago
      Can you explain why you think fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?
      - vageli 6y ago
        Transporting physical currency requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure.

programmarchy 6y ago

Ctrl+F proof of stake. Author didn’t do much homework. Just retreading the same criticisms about energy consumption and this-could-just-be-a-postgres-db-hosted-on-cloud-megacorp. Crypto is a bubble but it’s also a space solving difficult problems that will shape how the world transacts. It’s volatile because it’s difficult and hard to understand, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value.

kordlessagain 6y ago

The 402 response code in HTTP might be a useful thing to "hook up" to Lightning, which itself is useful because of the Bitcoin blockchain. Having fast micropayments payments running on data requests is useful for a wide variety of cloud applications, including but not limited to data transfer costs and queries to machine learning models, all without the need for "users" on the systems being accessed. The way I'd put it is that the killer use case for Bitcoin is yet to come, which doesn't make it a solution for nothing, but more like a solution before its time. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
I can’t tell if your post is jest or serious, given the article.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  I'm quite serious.
Skunkleton 6y ago
That would change the dopamine cycle of content consumption. I really don't see that happening. And its not like this couldn't have happened without bitcoin.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  Micropayments are actually very difficult to implement without accounts and some type of payment system. With Bitcoin, and Lightning, it makes it work.
zelly 6y ago
For a regular user to use Lightning, they would have to run an always-online instance of lnd--a very memory-intensive Go program that also requires a Bitcoin fullnode (300GB) or the experimental Neutrino light node either of which also has to be always-online. The average internet user has never typed a bash command so this is a pipe dream. Or you could have the alternative which is to push people onto centralized Lightning-like (but better, more polished) services run by the likes of JP Morgan. (It's my suspicion that focusing hype on Lightning instead of scaling Bitcoin Core was a way to sabotage it in favor of paid services of a certain company that most Bitcoin developers are employed by but I digress.) Micropayments in general is a bad idea which the market has rejected time and time again. If you really want to do something like that, just do it the same way all billing works, add it up and notify the user with an invoice at the end of the month or year. That could be integrated into browsers without being tied to a specific payment method or forcing payment. I don't even want to imagine how rich hackers would get if every web browser had a code path that transferred real money.

spir 6y ago

This article is misinformed. The past two years have seen a Cambrian explosion of apps on ethereum. financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/ https://augur2.eth.link/ non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/ https://decentraland.org/ popular newsletter - https://weekinethereumnews.com/ https://weekinethereumnews.com/

mgraczyk 6y ago
Yeah thanks to COVID there is a ton of new interest in defi as a form of unregulated gambling.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  I don't know if you've seen the stock market lately... clearly the largest casino in the world is on Wall Street. But anyways, DeFi has tons of use cases including automated crop insurance based on weather events, decentralized money markets for car loans, tokenized rental real estate, synthetic derivatives, standard savings and loans utilizing stablecoins, etc etc. The notion that blockchain hasn't found product market fit in 2020 is laughably outdated.
  - vmception 6y ago
    If you notice, the primary arguments against blockchain and crypto require holding it to a standard higher than any asset class in existence. Its a mixture of “I don't respect this market and thats the only actual distinction” along with “I have no idea these criticisms are present in actual currencies as well as the stock market and commodities spot markets and credit market and derivatives market and collectibles market” Eventually they move the goal post so far that they are giving actual relevant criticisms of blockchain technology, like scalability concerns And then they get flipped into realizing they can actually contribute to the solution and spread awareness And then in a few short years they have enough clout to raise capital in the space

ultramundane8 6y ago

According to this article: Blockchain, big data, cloud computing, AI, and magic are roughly equivalent. Don't waste your time reading it even if blockchain is weak.

Animats 6y ago

Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

alasdair_ 6y ago
>- Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper. What are the transaction costs like on BTC these days? I'm surprised many people still bother with BTC given the enormous costs I've seen.
- bb88 6y ago
  Looks like it's US$4.614/transaction. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee#:~:text=Bitcoin%20Average%20Transaction%20Fee%20is,242.8%25%20from%20one%20year%20ago https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f....
- kabacha 6y ago
  You don't pay in BTC for drugs though. Montero is usually preferred and transactions are much cheaper and private.
  - zelly 6y ago
    It's not, the dominant currency on darknet is still Bitcoin. Even Litecoin is more used than Monero. Criminals are stupid.
- ShorsHammer 6y ago
  Perhaps delve into this tx from 2 weeks ago: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/d56ae8052711ac81cb68a0ccf340f3a1f818cb315426253cfa67066323ec1804 https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/d56ae8052711ac81cb68a0ccf3...
- knocte 6y ago

jjordan 6y ago

Blockchain is easy to criticize. Hell, I've done it plenty and I worked in the space full time for a good year and a half. But the problems that they're trying to solve, decentralization, censorship resistance, sound money, true democratic governance, etc. are hard ones to solve. Maybe it turns out that they are inherently unsolvable for the foreseeable future. I think the promise that a solution to some of these problems may exist is what drives curious developers to keep pushing the envelope, because, much like fusion power, if we eventually "get it", it'll change the world. Blockchain innovation is a lot like that. Keep pushing.

Skunkleton 6y ago
> But the problems that they're trying to solve, decentralization, censorship resistance, sound money, true democratic governance, etc. Noble goals. Still, blockchains are inherently limited to the digital world. No amount of digital freedom or security stops you from being oppressed by an unjust government, or robbed at gunpoint. Taking Bitcoin as an example, there have been many cases of bitcoins being seized or stolen. The reasons behind these losses were much the same as the reasons people lose fiat currency. Someone with authority came and took it. Frankly, I don't really understand what there is to "get". You can create a perfect system, but people have to operate within it. That means laws, and it means ceding authority to regulation. None of this is to say that I am not interested in blockchain tech, and am not open to it as a solution. I just haven't seen a problem solved by it yet. I would be happy to be proven wrong.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I'm somewhat of a cautiously optimistic skeptic that finds the blockchain stuff really interesting and potentially important (I've been playing with it since 2010), but not super useful at the moment. I think these are some of things people think about it: - Your country's financial system is unreliable or run by tyrants and the currency is bad. It might be hard to get a stable currency. Moving income into bitcoin could help you (people were doing this in Venezuela). - Your country was invaded and crossing the border requires you to interact with corrupt guards that steal anything of value you try and get out. Putting your wealth into a bitcoin wallet can allow you to escape with it intact if you memorize your seed words (there was a story about someone in Ukraine that did this crossing the border patrolled by Russian guards). - Bitcoin is deflationary, the coins are limited and scarce, but the currency is divisible. This means they should hold value over time. Fiat currencies are vulnerable to monetary policy of governments, bitcoin is less so. Bitcoin may increase in value in part because other currencies are decreasing in value. - Ability to move money more easily than other deflationary assets like gold (which have other problems). Universal currency across different governments that can be converted into local currency. All of this is primarily just BTC. I think there are other potential interesting things with ability to have an audit log of immutable transactions of a block chain generally. I think some of the other things are cool (urbit is using ethereum for IDs), but a lot of the other things don't seem to have much purpose beyond being cool. Faster transaction times? The strategy Dai uses to stay pegged to 1 USD is neat.

kumarvvr 6y ago

As a distributed ledger, that does not require a consolidated authority, it has the potential to have many uses. Many think blockchain as a synonym for BitCoin and the like, while the central technology seems to be the distributed ledger. However, with anything distributed, the network is only as good as it's participants. Which means, when thinking long term, it fails to give confidence in the system, because who knows, 20 years from now, will there by any participants in the distributed ledger?

godelski 6y ago

Looking at all the comments here I have a single response to most of them: I'll call it a solution when it is implemented. You can talk all you want about solutions to some of the (minor) problems addressed here (ignoring the rest of the problems) but unless it is in use then the article's commentary still stands. Unless it has a ton of users, the article's commentary still stands. If you really do believe in block chain, prove us all wrong and implement the changes.

malikNF 6y ago
Take a look at cardano. They have implemented a blockchain that is backed by peer reviewed [1] research, the article here talks about how the blockchain takes a huge amount of resources to run. The people at the cardano project has managed to enable people to even run a full block producing node on something as small as a pi[2][3]. So far from all the blockchain projects I am interested in, this is my favorite one so far. If you got a few hours of free time you should really check out this project out.[4] Disclaimer I am a cardano(ada) holder and I actively take part in this project as a pool operator. [1]https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ [2]https://twitter.com/BetterStake/status/1296217244217868289 https://twitter.com/BetterStake/status/1296217244217868289 [3]https://twitter.com/search?q=cardano%20Raspberry&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=cardano%20Raspberry&src=typed_q... [4]https://github.com/input-output-hk https://github.com/input-output-hk
- fourstar 6y ago
  Why is being peer-reviewed what Cardano fans always lede with? That doesn’t automatically make something “better”, IMO. Also, what even uses Cardano? Project has been “in progress” for years and all I’ve seen are photos of Hoskinson with his mouth open taking selfies in various parts of the world. Algorand is probably the best project right now in crypto aside from ZCash that’s an actual contender against ETH (disclaimer: I hold none of either).
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Zcash had this which wasn't great: https://bitcoinist.com/zcash-inflation-bug-infinite-tokens/ https://bitcoinist.com/zcash-inflation-bug-infinite-tokens/ You also only get privacy with transactions between two z-addresses, and those require a fair amount of resources to generate (I think HW wallets can't sign those transactions due to computational limitations). Most zcash transactions are between t-addresses which don't have any benefits over BTC (they're public). https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49115/whats-the-difference-between-z-addr-and-t-addr-type-addresses https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49115/whats-the-... As far as cardano, I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake compared to proof-of-work (though I might just not understand it fully). Proof-of-work seems like the main BTC innovation against abuse and a lot of the coins that use stake (stellar lumens, tezos) seem like they drop the defining characteristic of BTC decentralization in order to get faster transactions. Without proof of work you don't really get true decentralized protection from the system itself, you have to put trust somewhere. At least the tezos putting coins at risk approach is interesting. The cardano website also really sets off my bullshit alarms: https://cardano.org/ https://cardano.org/

tehranifar 6y ago

It's been a good solution for authentic digital arts! Check out https://knownorigin.io/ https://knownorigin.io/ https://superrare.co/ https://superrare.co/ There are also virtual worlds to see the art in https://www.cryptovoxels.com/ https://www.cryptovoxels.com/

Skunkleton 6y ago
What is authentic digital art? Does that mean that I own it, and no one else can claim to own it? How is that different from a bill of sale?
- ikt 6y ago
  > How is that different from a bill of sale? Ctrl+c and ctrl+v Take Gods Unchained for example: https://godsunchained.com/ https://godsunchained.com/ It's as close to a real trading card game as possible, simply because when they produce 5 cards there are only 5 cards.
Rotten194 6y ago
Yay, we can reproduce the worst part of physical art on the internet now... art is interesting because it's art, not because rich people can speculate on it. In an ideal world everyone could have a Monet on their wall. With digital art, that's possible. Why the heck do we want to change that?
- tomcam 6y ago
  My experience with Monets is drastically different IRL than digitally. Did not care for Monet until I saw the water lilies museum in France.

dang 6y ago

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24181586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24181586

dotcoma 6y ago

Funny how this post went from #1 on the homepage to #22 in a couple of minutes...

onelastjob 6y ago

This author is way behind the times. Bitcoin is obsolete. Nano (nano.org) is what the author should be looking at as the future of p2p digital currency. Nano transactions are feeless and take under 1 second, fully confirmed. If you send 1 Nano the recipient receives 1 Nano. There is no mining involved so it is green and it is decentralized. These features make microtransactions possible. You could use it to pay a fraction of a sent to stream a song or read an article. Or us it to log in to websites. Npass is doing both. https://npass.dev/npass https://npass.dev/npass Robocash is using Nano to prevent robocalls. https://www.myrobocash.com/ https://www.myrobocash.com/ Smart contract coins like Ethereum will have tons of uses, especially for digital goods. You could easily cut escrow.com (and all escrow fees) out of the process of transferring domain names (and other digital goods) with smart contracts if a domain registrar got with the times.

aww_dang 6y ago
I'm using NANO for microtransactions in browser-based multiplayer rougelikelike. Bid for your character and cashout if you survive. Bid again from the same account to resume your saved game. https://playerkillers.exchange/KILL https://playerkillers.exchange/KILL
ac29 6y ago
I'm not sure a cryptocurrency that has lost ~95% of its value in the past couple years is a good counterexample to this article.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Valuation isn't necessarily a measure of utility. Usually it is correlated with hype and marketing. Most people interested in cryptocurrencies have little to no interest in actual use cases. Investors simply want the price to go up. This is usually criticized as a "greater fool" investment strategy. The article speaks to this. If there is any value in an cryptocurrency, it is up to the developers to divine it. Investors will eventually find a price equilibrium, but for now the ecosystem seems driven by hype, buzzwords, pozi-dapps and bubbles. NANO doesn't have any of that.
- 6y ago

danschumann 6y ago

The block chain is what? An array of objects? The real tech is deciding who gets to push to the array. So, it's just about permissions. How do you know who to trust in a crowd? Assuming the crowd is more trustworthy than a centralized authority. "Power corrupts", yadda yadda, centralized power is certainly corrupting, but so is dark money that can be used for drugs, human trafficking, etc. I guess it depends which is the larger evil where you come from, the government or the criminals, whether to trust the central or the decentric authority.

fossuser 6y ago

The Correspondent is such a huge disappointment. I contributed to the start because they pitched themselves as 'unbreaking news', instead they're just another weak publication writing bad articles with catchy headlines (of which this is a good example). Persuasion is everything The Correspondent was supposed to be and isn't: https://www.persuasion.community/ https://www.persuasion.community/ If you want to actually learn more about bitcoin, I'm part way through this and it's really good: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-Comprehensive-Introduction/dp/0691171696/ https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-C...

peterthehacker 6y ago

Bitcoin has a large (100M+) user base (or at least it seems like it) but I can’t think of another blockchain app that has reached that level. Ethereum is more like a framework or platform as I understand it so I don’t think it counts in the same way. Besides bitcoin are there any other blockchain apps that have large user bases?

seibelj 6y ago
Ethereum has more transactions per week that bitcoin by a large margin. Most new projects are built on Ethereum.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

luhn 6y ago

This article really hits the nail on the head: All these problems blockchain are supposed to solve are problems of coordination. And you don't need blockchain for that, you need buy-in.

ASlave2Gravity 6y ago
Very true. We need to show the world how to do that! Got any ideas!?

aww_dang 6y ago

Who here is actually using blockchain as a developer? I'd like to hear from people who have actually created solutions, not speculation about potential use cases or price action.

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago

Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. If you want to buy a 4chan pass, you'll find there is no option to pay in EUR or USD. Cryptocurrency only. Is this because 4chan is operating an illegal business? No. It's because they cannot process payments using the traditional means. Controversial websites get financially censored all the time. Here are a few that come to mind: Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks, Backpage, 8chan, Bitchute, American Renaissance. I'm sure other commentators can chime in with more. Calling blockchains a solution to nothing is pretty offensive to the those who rely on it to pay their expenses without another realistic option. Not to mention, anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero protect both the recipient -and- the sender from financial censorship. I wouldn't want to end up on a public list or have my bank account closed for donating to a controversial person or organization. And Monero could not provide the excellent privacy that it does without a distributed ledger authenticated by proof of work. When a Monero user spends money, he randomly samples the blockchain until ten dummy transactions can be found and combined with his real transaction in a construct called a ring signature used to obscure the true sender. This only works because the user can secure his own copy of the blockchain. If he had to ask someone else for those dummy transactions, that someone else could use process of elimination to identify the authentic transaction in the user's ring signature.

stagas 6y ago
I would say this its biggest advantage. It doesn't have to be a controversial or fraudulent transaction. Regular digital money ownership and exchange, especially across countries, is severely policed and most of the time impossible for a huge portion of the population, not because they're criminals, but because they happen to be living in or coming from a place where these freedoms are just not there. Cryptocurrencies take away these and numerous other problems that are caused by ordinary financial institutions and the way societies are structured.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Agreed. The tech is there, but gatekeepers have set up shop around the last mile. Onerous regulations like KYC surround exchanges in the first world. In regions with tight capital controls, it can be even more difficult. The people who stand to benefit the most have the biggest hurdles to adoption.

ajcodez 6y ago

Saifedean Ammous writes pretty convincingly how a fixed money supply would be a good thing. I don’t know of any other unique benefit. It will be interesting to see how it plays out with nation states and diminishing block rewards. I’m holding a little bit just in case.

tomcam 6y ago
We had a solution to that problem for thousands of years: gold.
- ric2b 6y ago
  Sort of, new gold mines keep showing up and if asteroid mining takes off it's really going to push gold value down by a lot.

biolurker1 6y ago

Been a while since a denialist article appeared here. It is in stark contrasts with governments, nasdaq,banks, people using etc and many others. But hey the right to say computers are worthless is always there

tomcam 6y ago
And yet you didn’t provide a single example contradicting the articles thesis.
- biolurker1 6y ago
  Again, China usa and eu governments are using it to deploy digital currencies. Nasdaq plans to build the new financial infra on blockchain. What do you need Jesus to come down and tell you it has value as technology?

dk8996 6y ago

I'm really surprised by how uneducated most of HN are about blockchain. This means we're still early. Few big things that are coming out of blockchain; 1) ICO - a way to raise money in a distributed manner outside the traditional financial system (think Banks and VCs). 2) Defi - a way to borrow and lend (and much more) outside the traditional financial system. One example, Banks get as much as 16-20% return on your depoiste -- you might see 1% of that. Defi solves that by removing the Bank and you can capture all of that yield. You can lend literally with a click of a button and see returns with every mined block. Take the money back any time you want. 3) Governance - there is a big social benefit if we figure out all the edge cases and the correct implementation. Many benefits in voting, real-world governance, and open source (what to work on next, what gets funding). 4) Many many Comp. Sci. and Cryptology advances; see byzantine general problem, zero-knowledge proof, and many more. Just one example of a company doing lots of research: https://iohk.io/en/research/library/ https://iohk.io/en/research/library/

malikNF 6y ago
What even surprising is lots of HNers are really strongly against blockchain projects while YCombinator themselves have invested in several blockchain projects[1] [1]https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=cryptocurrency https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=cryptocurrency
- rainbow-road 6y ago
  Interestingly, all of those either use cryptocurrencies as an investment, or merely provide cryptocurrency-based tools (of questionable utility), and leave the problem-solving to their users. Why mine (fool's) gold when you can sell shovels?
  - dk8996 6y ago
    Most Crypto projects are raising money via ICO route without dealing with VCs, cap tables, and board seats. Most of these projects will fail, just the nature of innovation. Few will succeed and change the world, I will argue that Eth (one of the first ICOs) already changed the world.

saurabhnanda 6y ago

Honest question. When someone says the blockchain can be used for anything OTHER than financial transactions, for example - supply chain, health records, etc. what is the actual underlying data that will be stored on the blockchain? When it comes to a quasi-banking or quasi-wallet system, I find it easy to visualize that the blockchain holds accounts with balances, and there are transactions which move money between accounts. Blockchain's decentralization and write-only properties help because no single entity can make your money disappear, and no entity can rollback a transaction. What is going on with other use-cases of blockchain? What does a supply-chain system actually store on the blockchain? The SKU list? The price of SKUs? The stock level of each SKU in each warehouse? What?

ccortes 6y ago

>And it would be a lot less complicated if you trusted someone to manage your data (a bank, for instance). It must be nice living somewhere where you can trust banks

stagas 6y ago

> I have never heard of a bank simply taking money from someone’s account. If a bank did something like that, they would be hauled into court in no time and lose their license. Technically it’s possible; legally, it’s a death sentence. cough Cyprus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...

redis_mlc 6y ago
Wells Fargo has been involved in a multi-year scandal over deducting millions of fake fees, to inflate their stock price. Fined $3 billion so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan... How it worked was the top executives set targets for tellers to meet, or the tellers were fired. To meet the targets, tellers had to upsell clients whether the clients wanted the service or not. It's kind of like how cable companies, etc. pretend to not hear cancellation requests, but Wells Fargo was actively doing fake transactions.

skinnyasianboi 6y ago

A year ago I might have upvoted the post but after reading like 60% of it it felt very biased and I couldn't finish it. Disclaimer I'm also biased. A few things that I was missing: no mention of smart contracts(?), no mention of inflation and countries/banks that you can't trust your money and transactions doesn't have to take 7minutes-7days. For example in my experience a transaction on the Tron network goes quicker than a debit card transaction. But a valid reason was the massive energy consumption and I hope we will solve that with e.g. fusion energy.

mbrodersen 6y ago

Blockchain, the solution for getting funding from ignorant investors.

vaibhawc 6y ago

I would rather believe a word on this by an investor/entrepreneur or a tinkerer like that kid instead of Journalist. Tech journalism is more crappy than blockchain/bitcoin hype market.

quotz 6y ago

Millions of citizens from countries that have abusive governments would disagree with this. Its digital gold. In Yugoslavia where I am from originally, gold was banned, and that was the case too in Romania during dictatorship times. People were smuggling gold to preserve their means of survival, and being seen carrying gold would result in one being killed by a firing squad or jailed. BTC doesn’t have that problem

zucker42 6y ago
Can't they just ban you from making connections to known Bitcoin nodes at the network level, or use a Honeypot to detect when you access Bitcoin specific services?
- kikimora 6y ago
  No they cannot because it is a decentralized system. Whenever they try people would quickly post tin of material how to access bitcoin over TOR/VPN. And since it is money people do care to learn these things to be able to transact freely.
- quotz 6y ago
  The moment a country bans Bitcoin, it legitimizes it.

xg15 6y ago

My personal theory is that most of the hype around "Blockchain technology" is simply an aftereffect of the valuation spike Bitcoin went though in 2017/2018. That was the point were Bitcoin reached the public consciousness and people realized you could make money with it. To do so you have to convince others to sink their money into the sector, hence all the grandiose proposals, opaque jargon and solutions is search of problems...

BTCOG 6y ago

This is very straight forward in that the blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto to solve the Byzantine General's Problem, double-spending, and a decentralized ledger. We can go much deeper into what Bitcoin can do, but all other chains wishing to do other things this guy mentions always were a cheap piggy back on Bitcoin. I'm here to tell you Bitcoin works, and does not need anything else. Bitcoin is not slow like many folks will tell you all day long, either. Bitcoin does not have high fees, either. Bitcoin is very sound "money," and not a great currency. If someone wishes to transfer money to someone else anywhere in the world, they simply tailor their fee to be low, and they send it for 40-60 cents and understand that it will confirm over the next day. (Yes, the mempool surges during times of heavy use, and yes it may take a little while longer, but just the same, millions of dollars can be sent with no third party for under $1 fee) The time itself for this does not really matter, as this could never be done prior to Bitcoin. Ask those sending money home to the Philippines or folks who are unbanked how many days a wire transfer takes, and how many third parties take a massive chunk in fees. Nobody controls your money in Bitcoin, and nobody takes a fee. (Nobody is taking your money from a BTC fee, the paltry amount is paying into the system to keep the miners mining) It's nothing else beyond this, and nothing else is needed. Anyone can argue about this endlessly but Bitcoin solved it's problem it was designed for, and all else is just garbage tacked on by other people trying to strike it rich. I have used Bitcoin regularly since 2011. I have purchased real, legal goods from folks in other countries over forums in escrow that could not be done otherwise without incurring very large fees. I've paid 30 people simultaneously with one multisend transaction, and one fee. Everything else is irrelevant. Bitcoin is revolutionary. Just Bitcoin. It works and it works very well. You can continue to beat around the bush and apply fetishism all day, and Bitcoin still works the way it was intended.

ThePowerOfDirge 6y ago

Quadratic voting might be useful https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

kobasa 6y ago

I just want to say I'm shocked a community who's supposed to be as technologically adept as HN still "doesn't get it". I have no intention or interest in changing anyone's mind...if you know, you know.

nojvek 6y ago

Blockchain is based on Merkle trees and well, merkle trees definitely made their impact via git and other immutable log structures. Blockchain is cool datastructure as an immutable log with proof work where integrity can be verified in a distributed manner by multiple parties. It’s like quantum computers. Heavily hyped but only useful for a specialized set of problems.

LukeEF 6y ago

Cryptographic stamps on hash chains to understand who made specific entries to a layered & immutable database is super useful. I don't know who needs to hear that as it isn't blockchain, but it borrows the best ideas!

kikimora 6y ago

Surprised to see so much misunderstanding here. “Byzantine fault tolerant consensus” problems have been solved with a trusted party since many many centuries. Entire modern monetary system is based on a trusted party - a central bank. Blockchain provides a way to remove trusted party out of equation. One can argue that existing system just works, why would you want to change something that works? Answer is simple - it does not work in many countries and trusted parties/authorities abuse their powers, sometimes in a ways that is not so easy to see. First application of a blockchain is digital money which is free from a central authority. Here is real world scenario that happened in so many places. Your domestic currency is crushing, has lost 30% of it value already and is about to loose another 80%. You want to by US dollars and save what is left but you cannot because government temporary prohibited purchase of a foreign currency. I’m thinking about Russia, Belorussia, Venezuela and many many others. Political activists get blocked by a banking system all the time. For example in Russia there is a “list of terrorists”, people on this list excluded form the banking system. This list probably has some terrorists in it but it also has quite a few activists in it as well. You can go to a protest, grabbed by a police and next day find yourself out of the banking system. Decentralized money is at least partially a solution to issues arising form an authority abusing it powers as cryptocurrency cannot be blocked so easily. It does not have to be used much, it just has to be around. Second blockchain application is smart contracts to simplify value transfer. For example shares offerings - when a company sells it shares to a bunch of investors. It often happens outside of an exchange, without IPO (search for Reg-A, Reg-D offerings). In this process a bank holds investor money until offering completes and a “transfer agent” hold stock in the name of an investor after. Bank and transfer agent are there only because of trust issues, someone has to guarantee that investor pays and receives shares. Investor cannot directly hand over cash to a company because it can fail to pay or company can fail to deliver it shares and then they will have to spend time and money in court. Both bank and transfer agent take their commission just because they trusted and licensed to hold value during and after transaction. These commissions are not small, a bank may take few percents for organizing an offering. Shares can be issued on a blockchain and a smart contract can govern entire value transfer starting from escrow, to enforcing offering conditions and then to transfer of shares and money to counter parties. You can imagine banks might not be happy about loosing their profits but competition in democratic countries slowly but surely drives process in a right direction. Similar examples arise all the time in international trade, trade clearing, interbank relationships, etc, etc. blockchain is a solution to all of this but maybe we need another financial crisis (when “trusted parties” became not so trusted) to speed up it adoption.