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> I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane. I agree with this, the amount

> I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane. I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly shit. > There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital transactions". It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. The distinction is important, because that's why Proof of Work exists and is energy intensive in the first place. Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.

danShumway 6y ago
> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distributed payments, and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter. Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps least suited for technologically. I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy. I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about technology.
- capableweb 6y ago
  > I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy. To be fair, a large part of the ecosystem doesn't actually deal with Bitcoin at all. The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies seems to reach up to 1.5T USD at this point. Bitcoin is 1T USD of that, with the rest of the ecosystem quickly catching up[1] It's really hard to generalize that everyone in any given ecosystem are the same way or act with the same interest. Yes, most people in the oil industry probably don't care about the environment either, but I'm sure there are many in the oil industry who actually care about the environment as well. Same goes for cryptocurrencies. - [1] "Percentage of Total Market Capitalization (Dominance)" graph - https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
  - danShumway 6y ago
    That's fair, but how much of that 33% of the overall cryptocurrency ecosystem is going onto forums and arguing specifically about Bitcoin? I don't necessarily want to generalize about all cryptocurrencies or all crypto-enthusiasts -- there is genuinely interesting technology here. But I find it increasingly hard not to generalize about the subset that shows up in these discussions arguing that Bitcoin is the future.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    BTC at times has had less than 50% of the total market value, so if it is now 2/3, then the rest of the market has lost ground, the opposite of catching up
- smashem 6y ago
  > Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. Who's claiming this? The Lightning Network is gaining popularity as a decentralized Layer 2 solution, for example. You mean like Cash App and PayPal?
agumonkey 6y ago
I believe that this will follow the usual technobubble pattern, pump energy (money) until it blows, gather the remaining working bits on the ground afterwards and come back in 10 years.
- pyinstallwoes 6y ago
  Agreed. Only concern is that irrationality can last longer than rationality and the longer that happens the bigger the attack vector becomes.
jebeng 6y ago
> Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell. Proof of Stake as a theory and concept is probably almost 10 years old at this point. And as an actual real-money-in-production blockchain Proof of Stake will actually be 10 years old in the next couple of years or so. I wish I could confidently remember specific names and dates here, but on bitcointalk I remember SunnyKing coding and launching a real in production a PoS coin almost 10 years ago now...I want to say it was something like "NuCoin" but I could be off on the name there. I do speicifically remember he made Primecoin which was an alternative PoW function based on discovering the world's highest prime numbers(kind of cool, which is why I remember it I guess) after he was done with his initial PoS coin. He(SunnyKing) was also endlessly trolled and mocked due to the theoretical threat PoS posed to those invested in Bitcoin and other PoW coins like Litecoin at the time. There was also a larger PoS coin called NXT from that era(again, almost 10 years ago, 2013 maybe?) that I suppose never really caught on, perhaps it was technically flawed? There were lots of legitimate criticisms of PoS regarding whether or not it was a truly viable decentralized consensus mechanism. And I don't claim to after the answer to whether or not it is, or was sufficiently viable. But historically there was also lots of trolling and suppression from people trying to protect their investments. It apparently may be finally getting its time, given PoS as a technology seems to have only recently become a mainstream topic of interest, despite how old the tech and theories themselves are. Perhaps that's just because the problems were only recently solved? But regardless, I find it funny how much play PoS gets these days now that mainstream media is reporting on how PoW mining as a whole is using more power than many nation states, as if there was any other path for PoW to scale given its fundamental design.
pyinstallwoes 6y ago
Trusted third parties: 1. Those who wrote the encryption and understand the math (very small %). 2. Those who write the software powering the blockchain (small %) 3. Those who write the wallet software you use to use the blockchain (small %) 4. Those who build the software you use on the same platform you use your wallet. 5. The operating system you use implementing all of the above. 6. The hardware you use implementing all of the above. Yeah, tons of no trust....

danShumway 6y ago

> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distributed payments, and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter. Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps least suited for technologically. I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy. I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about technology.

capableweb 6y ago
> I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy. To be fair, a large part of the ecosystem doesn't actually deal with Bitcoin at all. The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies seems to reach up to 1.5T USD at this point. Bitcoin is 1T USD of that, with the rest of the ecosystem quickly catching up[1] It's really hard to generalize that everyone in any given ecosystem are the same way or act with the same interest. Yes, most people in the oil industry probably don't care about the environment either, but I'm sure there are many in the oil industry who actually care about the environment as well. Same goes for cryptocurrencies. - [1] "Percentage of Total Market Capitalization (Dominance)" graph - https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
- danShumway 6y ago
  That's fair, but how much of that 33% of the overall cryptocurrency ecosystem is going onto forums and arguing specifically about Bitcoin? I don't necessarily want to generalize about all cryptocurrencies or all crypto-enthusiasts -- there is genuinely interesting technology here. But I find it increasingly hard not to generalize about the subset that shows up in these discussions arguing that Bitcoin is the future.
- verdverm 6y ago
  BTC at times has had less than 50% of the total market value, so if it is now 2/3, then the rest of the market has lost ground, the opposite of catching up
smashem 6y ago
> Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. Who's claiming this? The Lightning Network is gaining popularity as a decentralized Layer 2 solution, for example. You mean like Cash App and PayPal?

agumonkey 6y ago

I believe that this will follow the usual technobubble pattern, pump energy (money) until it blows, gather the remaining working bits on the ground afterwards and come back in 10 years.

pyinstallwoes 6y ago
Agreed. Only concern is that irrationality can last longer than rationality and the longer that happens the bigger the attack vector becomes.

jebeng 6y ago

> Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell. Proof of Stake as a theory and concept is probably almost 10 years old at this point. And as an actual real-money-in-production blockchain Proof of Stake will actually be 10 years old in the next couple of years or so. I wish I could confidently remember specific names and dates here, but on bitcointalk I remember SunnyKing coding and launching a real in production a PoS coin almost 10 years ago now...I want to say it was something like "NuCoin" but I could be off on the name there. I do speicifically remember he made Primecoin which was an alternative PoW function based on discovering the world's highest prime numbers(kind of cool, which is why I remember it I guess) after he was done with his initial PoS coin. He(SunnyKing) was also endlessly trolled and mocked due to the theoretical threat PoS posed to those invested in Bitcoin and other PoW coins like Litecoin at the time. There was also a larger PoS coin called NXT from that era(again, almost 10 years ago, 2013 maybe?) that I suppose never really caught on, perhaps it was technically flawed? There were lots of legitimate criticisms of PoS regarding whether or not it was a truly viable decentralized consensus mechanism. And I don't claim to after the answer to whether or not it is, or was sufficiently viable. But historically there was also lots of trolling and suppression from people trying to protect their investments. It apparently may be finally getting its time, given PoS as a technology seems to have only recently become a mainstream topic of interest, despite how old the tech and theories themselves are. Perhaps that's just because the problems were only recently solved? But regardless, I find it funny how much play PoS gets these days now that mainstream media is reporting on how PoW mining as a whole is using more power than many nation states, as if there was any other path for PoW to scale given its fundamental design.

pyinstallwoes 6y ago

Trusted third parties: 1. Those who wrote the encryption and understand the math (very small %). 2. Those who write the software powering the blockchain (small %) 3. Those who write the wallet software you use to use the blockchain (small %) 4. Those who build the software you use on the same platform you use your wallet. 5. The operating system you use implementing all of the above. 6. The hardware you use implementing all of the above. Yeah, tons of no trust....