7 ms·

article is from 2018

nwah1 6y ago
The difference between then and now is that they have given up attempting to use blockchains for anything, and simply now claim it is a "store of value." In other words, they've embraced that it is a ponzi scheme, and learned to love it for what it is.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  >In other words, they've embraced that it is a ponzi scheme, and learned to love it for what it is. Sounds more like Stockholm syndrome rather than a loving embrace.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Nowadays it's also a "settlement layer".
- ostenning 6y ago
  If you had looked into the space with even just a small amount of depth, you’d find there are numerous applications. Decentralized finance, games, art, cdn networks, music distribution, video streaming alternatives. Some of them are promising and would address many issues we face; like the Audius project which aims to compete with Spotify and SoundCloud, but actually paying artists for their work. I think it’s fair to be sceptical and critical of speculative investments and get rich quick schemes, and eventually I imagine it will die down, and hopefully by the end of it all, we will have a more decentralised world.
  - nwah1 6y ago
    You can pay artists without a blockchain. No actual benefit is provided to this concept by adding one.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      That's can be only said by ignoring the giant blind spot of intermediaries skimming off the payment, traditional banks making it hard to process payments with automation, and foreign currency exchange.
      - zepto 6y ago
        > intermediaries skimming off the payment Unlike crypto?
        selfhoster11 6y ago
        Fair point, but the rest of my criticisms stand.
      - bastawhiz 6y ago
        What artists are setting up their own cryptocurrency payments automation system?
    - beiller 6y ago
      I think paying an artist is not so straight forward. The artist must set up a bank account. Now they must sign somewhere to accept credit cards. Now they must have art that is friendly to said card processor, or else you get deplatformed. Seems we found one use case.
      - bastawhiz 6y ago
        You still need a bank account to get actual cash out of cryptocurrency. From the perspective of an artist, cryptocurrency is indistinguishable from PayPal, Venmo, Cashapp, Transferwise, Zelle, Google Pay, or any of the other readily available ways to send money. Unless you're literally selling art by emailing photos of the art and accepting payments to your bitcoin wallet directly, you're still using a platform, and you're still able to be kicked off the platform.
        6y ago
  - smt88 6y ago
    Audius sounds like it's using blockchain for coins, which is exactly what GP said: it only works for coins. Please provide one other example of a functioning app or service that uses blockchain to do something it can't do just as well without blockchain.
    - Bluestein 6y ago
      I often think of Dijkstra's "only do what only you can do" ... ... and apply it to this, and wonder ... ... what is it that -it- and only -it- can do?
      - bastawhiz 6y ago
        Permanently and irrecoverably send large amounts of money into the void with a single one-character typo?
        Bluestein 6y ago
        Lovely! Lets call them "null transfers"!
    - wespiser_2018 6y ago
      Last time I looked into Audius (6-12 months ago), my impression was that they fell into the solution in search of a problem camp of blockchain developers. Good on them for getting some users, but the burden of programming a blockchain and competing against Spotify is very high. Nonetheless they do have users. A good write-up of how they are missing the mark from the music end is here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20905384/audius-blockchain-music-streaming-service-copyright-infringement-piracy https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20905384/audius-blockchai...
  - acdha 6y ago
    Do you have any examples of something which solves a real problem better than mature, scalable technologies? There's a lot of speculator money floating around which can give the illusion of something being promising until you do the math and realize that it's more expensive and slower than the alternatives or cannot grow outside of a small ideological community. For example, nothing is preventing paying artists more for music — that's been a solved problem since the late 1990s — but the problem comes back to licensing: people use services which have the music they want and it's brutally hard to bootstrap an indie-only business to the point where you can the deals you need to satisfy popular demand.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      > Do you have any examples of something which solves a real problem better than mature, scalable technologies? The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. It was far from mature and took two decades, but it revolutionised the delivery of information. Cryptocurrency is revolutionising delivery of cash. It will take a while to work out the development of it, but we didn't have a ready made plan for the internet either.
      - zepto 6y ago
        > The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. I see this repeated often, but it doesn’t seem remotely true. Look back to Englebart and the work done at Parc. The applications were very clear.
        nwah1 6y ago
        People were using the internet for useful things from pretty much day 1, and technology adoption curves have only compressed over time. It may have took a decade or two for the internet to become popular, but it only took a few years for smartphones to become popular, or social media, or for ridesharing to usurp the taxi industry.
      - acdha 6y ago
        > The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. It was far from mature and took two decades, but it revolutionised the delivery of information. This is a standard talking point but it's not an accurate comparison because it ignores the barriers to adoption related to computing in general. Internet adoption in the very early years was constrained by the need to use expensive computers and network connections. Despite that, in the 1980s many people paid for commercial services like CompuServ, GEnie, or later AOL which were popular enough to be profitable despite the limitations of dialup non-general access because those provided useful ways to chat, research, or shop. By the time the Web arrived in the early 1990s, GUIs were becoming common and internet connectivity was still limited in speed and availability (modems weren't just slow, they also incurred long-distance charges if you didn't have a local ISP, which most people didn't) but that situation was improving. By 1995 or so businesses were jumping online because it had already changed how they reached customers, took orders, and provided support. If you weren't around back then, there was tons of popular media discussion about how this was changing everything — news, education, shopping, travel, job hunting, etc. — and while there was certainly plenty of hype there were also real changes affecting all kinds of businesses, not just people trying to sell the technology to each other. People you knew who weren't computer fans would still be talking about checking sports coverage, trading stocks, making travel plans, etc. because it was faster, easier, and/or cheaper. In contrast, by the time blockchains were introduced computers were cheap and ubiquitous, and software was much easier to build and install. Adoption has never been easier — but only if you make something which provides actual value. Bitcoin has been around for 12 years and failed so hard at the original “revolutionising delivery of cash” goals that proponents switched to claiming the goal was being a “store of value” despite having nothing but fiat value. Despite all of that time and money, if it disappeared tomorrow nobody whose business isn't speculating in Bitcoin would have reason to care because it doesn't give any significant advantage for anything. Maybe we could write that off as an early failure except that nobody has come up with a successor which a) does anything normal people want at a competitive rate and b) doesn't share its problems with scalability. The use-cases most people come up with are all better served by other technologies and purveyors have had a hard time making the case that you should spend more to give control of your business to them. This is completely unlike the early web era, where so many people saw an opportunity to make a business which was using the technology to do something else and were able to be profitable against competing industries (e.g. Amazon started selling books in 1995 and was profitable in that sector a couple of years later despite having substantial brick-and-mortar competition).
- Bluestein 6y ago
  Indeed. It is finding its niche(s). I thought the then/now comparison interesting ...

The difference between then and now is that they have given up attempting to use blockchains for anything, and simply now claim it is a "store of value." In other words, they've embraced that it is a ponzi scheme, and learned to love it for what it is.

NoOneNew 6y ago
>In other words, they've embraced that it is a ponzi scheme, and learned to love it for what it is. Sounds more like Stockholm syndrome rather than a loving embrace.
imtringued 6y ago
Nowadays it's also a "settlement layer".
ostenning 6y ago
If you had looked into the space with even just a small amount of depth, you’d find there are numerous applications. Decentralized finance, games, art, cdn networks, music distribution, video streaming alternatives. Some of them are promising and would address many issues we face; like the Audius project which aims to compete with Spotify and SoundCloud, but actually paying artists for their work. I think it’s fair to be sceptical and critical of speculative investments and get rich quick schemes, and eventually I imagine it will die down, and hopefully by the end of it all, we will have a more decentralised world.
- nwah1 6y ago
  You can pay artists without a blockchain. No actual benefit is provided to this concept by adding one.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    That's can be only said by ignoring the giant blind spot of intermediaries skimming off the payment, traditional banks making it hard to process payments with automation, and foreign currency exchange.
    - zepto 6y ago
      > intermediaries skimming off the payment Unlike crypto?
      - selfhoster11 6y ago
        Fair point, but the rest of my criticisms stand.
    - bastawhiz 6y ago
      What artists are setting up their own cryptocurrency payments automation system?
  - beiller 6y ago
    I think paying an artist is not so straight forward. The artist must set up a bank account. Now they must sign somewhere to accept credit cards. Now they must have art that is friendly to said card processor, or else you get deplatformed. Seems we found one use case.
    - bastawhiz 6y ago
      You still need a bank account to get actual cash out of cryptocurrency. From the perspective of an artist, cryptocurrency is indistinguishable from PayPal, Venmo, Cashapp, Transferwise, Zelle, Google Pay, or any of the other readily available ways to send money. Unless you're literally selling art by emailing photos of the art and accepting payments to your bitcoin wallet directly, you're still using a platform, and you're still able to be kicked off the platform.
      - 6y ago
- smt88 6y ago
  Audius sounds like it's using blockchain for coins, which is exactly what GP said: it only works for coins. Please provide one other example of a functioning app or service that uses blockchain to do something it can't do just as well without blockchain.
  - Bluestein 6y ago
    I often think of Dijkstra's "only do what only you can do" ... ... and apply it to this, and wonder ... ... what is it that -it- and only -it- can do?
    - bastawhiz 6y ago
      Permanently and irrecoverably send large amounts of money into the void with a single one-character typo?
      - Bluestein 6y ago
        Lovely! Lets call them "null transfers"!
  - wespiser_2018 6y ago
    Last time I looked into Audius (6-12 months ago), my impression was that they fell into the solution in search of a problem camp of blockchain developers. Good on them for getting some users, but the burden of programming a blockchain and competing against Spotify is very high. Nonetheless they do have users. A good write-up of how they are missing the mark from the music end is here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20905384/audius-blockchain-music-streaming-service-copyright-infringement-piracy https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20905384/audius-blockchai...
- acdha 6y ago
  Do you have any examples of something which solves a real problem better than mature, scalable technologies? There's a lot of speculator money floating around which can give the illusion of something being promising until you do the math and realize that it's more expensive and slower than the alternatives or cannot grow outside of a small ideological community. For example, nothing is preventing paying artists more for music — that's been a solved problem since the late 1990s — but the problem comes back to licensing: people use services which have the music they want and it's brutally hard to bootstrap an indie-only business to the point where you can the deals you need to satisfy popular demand.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    > Do you have any examples of something which solves a real problem better than mature, scalable technologies? The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. It was far from mature and took two decades, but it revolutionised the delivery of information. Cryptocurrency is revolutionising delivery of cash. It will take a while to work out the development of it, but we didn't have a ready made plan for the internet either.
    - zepto 6y ago
      > The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. I see this repeated often, but it doesn’t seem remotely true. Look back to Englebart and the work done at Parc. The applications were very clear.
      - nwah1 6y ago
        People were using the internet for useful things from pretty much day 1, and technology adoption curves have only compressed over time. It may have took a decade or two for the internet to become popular, but it only took a few years for smartphones to become popular, or social media, or for ridesharing to usurp the taxi industry.
    - acdha 6y ago
      > The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. It was far from mature and took two decades, but it revolutionised the delivery of information. This is a standard talking point but it's not an accurate comparison because it ignores the barriers to adoption related to computing in general. Internet adoption in the very early years was constrained by the need to use expensive computers and network connections. Despite that, in the 1980s many people paid for commercial services like CompuServ, GEnie, or later AOL which were popular enough to be profitable despite the limitations of dialup non-general access because those provided useful ways to chat, research, or shop. By the time the Web arrived in the early 1990s, GUIs were becoming common and internet connectivity was still limited in speed and availability (modems weren't just slow, they also incurred long-distance charges if you didn't have a local ISP, which most people didn't) but that situation was improving. By 1995 or so businesses were jumping online because it had already changed how they reached customers, took orders, and provided support. If you weren't around back then, there was tons of popular media discussion about how this was changing everything — news, education, shopping, travel, job hunting, etc. — and while there was certainly plenty of hype there were also real changes affecting all kinds of businesses, not just people trying to sell the technology to each other. People you knew who weren't computer fans would still be talking about checking sports coverage, trading stocks, making travel plans, etc. because it was faster, easier, and/or cheaper. In contrast, by the time blockchains were introduced computers were cheap and ubiquitous, and software was much easier to build and install. Adoption has never been easier — but only if you make something which provides actual value. Bitcoin has been around for 12 years and failed so hard at the original “revolutionising delivery of cash” goals that proponents switched to claiming the goal was being a “store of value” despite having nothing but fiat value. Despite all of that time and money, if it disappeared tomorrow nobody whose business isn't speculating in Bitcoin would have reason to care because it doesn't give any significant advantage for anything. Maybe we could write that off as an early failure except that nobody has come up with a successor which a) does anything normal people want at a competitive rate and b) doesn't share its problems with scalability. The use-cases most people come up with are all better served by other technologies and purveyors have had a hard time making the case that you should spend more to give control of your business to them. This is completely unlike the early web era, where so many people saw an opportunity to make a business which was using the technology to do something else and were able to be profitable against competing industries (e.g. Amazon started selling books in 1995 and was profitable in that sector a couple of years later despite having substantial brick-and-mortar competition).
Bluestein 6y ago
Indeed. It is finding its niche(s). I thought the then/now comparison interesting ...