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Generally I would say that for the average HN'er software is our life, it's not just a field in which exciting things happen (the internet, ML and blockchains e

by tombh 5y ago

Generally I would say that for the average HN'er software is our life, it's not just a field in which exciting things happen (the internet, ML and blockchains etc) but also, indeed perhaps more so, a "boring", day-in day-out livelihood. Personally, I feel the trouble with the blockchain is that it has attracted a lot of "fair weather" supporters, people that have only become geeky due to the allure of money, not because of an inherent love of software. Yes blockchains are indeed an exciting development and present a lot of potential, but "true" hackers are probably as excited by blockchains as they are by say Rust. The thing is that generally speaking we can have informed conversations about Rust, because those that understand the novelty of Rust have come to that understanding through a genuine interest in the technology, not because of how Rust can make them rich. So yes, blockchains are indeed very interesting, but unfortunately the conversations around them are overwhelmingly distorted by the superficialities of what I would cynically describe as dilettantes. Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise :/

sprafa 5y ago
This is 100% true and the reason why made this post. I think people are missing the signal for the noise - the noise being all the absurd people and ideas the space has indeed attracted. The signal being - dApps are huge.
rawtxapp 5y ago
> Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise. 100%, seeing people who just learned the word blockchain explain to me how I can make 100x my money on crypto is pretty annoying. My recommendation would be to stick to github, the technical parts of bitcointalk.org and whitepapers at most. Those tend to have better signal to noise ratios.
- sprafa 5y ago
  Decrypt is pretty good too.
codetrotter 5y ago
Agreed. And I think that those of us who truly believe in cryptocurrency are not really interested in the USD/your-flavor-of-cryptocurrency exchange price. Yet that is exactly the main thing that almost everyone who cares about cryptocurrency seems to care about. And sure, making money would be nice so I can’t directly blame them. But if you are really really into cryptocurrency then you should be dreaming of a future where we can sell and buy services and products for cryptocurrency and where we can pay our taxes in cryptocurrency directly, and where we never have to exchange our cryptocurrency into fiat again. That is the real end goal of cryptocurrencies. Because as of today cryptocurrency has not yet reached the point where it makes sense for most merchants to accept payment in cryptocurrency. Because we are still paying other people and entities and the government in fiat and the exchange rates are fluctuating wildly. And also furthermore in agreement with what you are saying, a lot of the fairweather supporters will be like let’s put this and that on the blockchain, and yet those people have no real understanding of the trade-offs that come with choosing to do so. Thirdly something that I find annoying is when someone describes proof-of-work as “solving difficult maths problems”. A cryptographic hash is computationally expensive to find a collision for unless it is flawed, true. But the mathematics behind for example SHA-256 are not really “difficult”. It’s just time-consuming. And it has the property of being fast to verify. But to me when someone describes it as solving difficult maths problems it seems probable that they don’t really know at all what is being done.
- sprafa 5y ago
  Most of the stuff people talk about in crypto space is really meaningless. Gotta focus on the signal!
astoor 5y ago
But what can you actually do with blockchains, outside of cryptocurrencies? The "oracle problem" means they can only interact with themselves, so all these ideas about Airbnb or Uber or whatever on the blockchain will never be able to go anywhere without an off-blockchain element, at which point you have to ask - what value does the blockchain part of the solution add (apart from increasing the value of people's hodlings)?
- sprafa 5y ago
  Why do you need an off blockchain element? You can just have reputation tokens running on the blockchain.
  - astoor 5y ago
    And how does that reputation token change value? Human input, i.e. information which starts outside the blockchain but which has to be recorded onto the blockchain. In which case, what is the point of the blockchain? Maybe making it impossible to fix mistakes in human input, but most professional developers would call that a bug not a feature.
    - oefnak 5y ago
      What about an AI controlled by contracts on a bockchain?
    - sprafa 5y ago
      The point of the blockchain is that it’s a computing platform that would allow you to write decentralised software. Having something on the blockchain doesn’t mean it can never be fixed. It’s just data and that data can never be deleted, but it can be amended and superseded.
- mariusor 5y ago
  > But what can you actually do with blockchains, outside of cryptocurrencies? I have not explored this idea fully, but I think blockchain technology would be a good candidate for something like a community members ledger. Ie, a public list of people that belong to a group. Based on this ledger then you can derive new ones for individual issues that the members can cast votes on. This would form the basis for a type of electronic voting.

by tombh 5y ago

sprafa 5y ago

This is 100% true and the reason why made this post. I think people are missing the signal for the noise - the noise being all the absurd people and ideas the space has indeed attracted. The signal being - dApps are huge.

rawtxapp 5y ago

> Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise. 100%, seeing people who just learned the word blockchain explain to me how I can make 100x my money on crypto is pretty annoying. My recommendation would be to stick to github, the technical parts of bitcointalk.org and whitepapers at most. Those tend to have better signal to noise ratios.

sprafa 5y ago
Decrypt is pretty good too.

codetrotter 5y ago

Agreed. And I think that those of us who truly believe in cryptocurrency are not really interested in the USD/your-flavor-of-cryptocurrency exchange price. Yet that is exactly the main thing that almost everyone who cares about cryptocurrency seems to care about. And sure, making money would be nice so I can’t directly blame them. But if you are really really into cryptocurrency then you should be dreaming of a future where we can sell and buy services and products for cryptocurrency and where we can pay our taxes in cryptocurrency directly, and where we never have to exchange our cryptocurrency into fiat again. That is the real end goal of cryptocurrencies. Because as of today cryptocurrency has not yet reached the point where it makes sense for most merchants to accept payment in cryptocurrency. Because we are still paying other people and entities and the government in fiat and the exchange rates are fluctuating wildly. And also furthermore in agreement with what you are saying, a lot of the fairweather supporters will be like let’s put this and that on the blockchain, and yet those people have no real understanding of the trade-offs that come with choosing to do so. Thirdly something that I find annoying is when someone describes proof-of-work as “solving difficult maths problems”. A cryptographic hash is computationally expensive to find a collision for unless it is flawed, true. But the mathematics behind for example SHA-256 are not really “difficult”. It’s just time-consuming. And it has the property of being fast to verify. But to me when someone describes it as solving difficult maths problems it seems probable that they don’t really know at all what is being done.

sprafa 5y ago
Most of the stuff people talk about in crypto space is really meaningless. Gotta focus on the signal!

astoor 5y ago

But what can you actually do with blockchains, outside of cryptocurrencies? The "oracle problem" means they can only interact with themselves, so all these ideas about Airbnb or Uber or whatever on the blockchain will never be able to go anywhere without an off-blockchain element, at which point you have to ask - what value does the blockchain part of the solution add (apart from increasing the value of people's hodlings)?

sprafa 5y ago
Why do you need an off blockchain element? You can just have reputation tokens running on the blockchain.
- astoor 5y ago
  And how does that reputation token change value? Human input, i.e. information which starts outside the blockchain but which has to be recorded onto the blockchain. In which case, what is the point of the blockchain? Maybe making it impossible to fix mistakes in human input, but most professional developers would call that a bug not a feature.
  - oefnak 5y ago
    What about an AI controlled by contracts on a bockchain?
  - sprafa 5y ago
    The point of the blockchain is that it’s a computing platform that would allow you to write decentralised software. Having something on the blockchain doesn’t mean it can never be fixed. It’s just data and that data can never be deleted, but it can be amended and superseded.
mariusor 5y ago
> But what can you actually do with blockchains, outside of cryptocurrencies? I have not explored this idea fully, but I think blockchain technology would be a good candidate for something like a community members ledger. Ie, a public list of people that belong to a group. Based on this ledger then you can derive new ones for individual issues that the members can cast votes on. This would form the basis for a type of electronic voting.