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> though estimates seem to be ~50-70% of BTC energy use is from renewables Bullshit. When one coal mine in a remote region of China flooded, the Bitcoin hash r

• throwslackforce 5y ago
  Just because it doesn't serve a clear purpose doesn't mean it should be banned. If governments simply allowed cryptocurrencies to exist outside of any regulation except the obligation to pay taxes on transactions and gains, eventually participation would decline as users of the currencies lost their money to scams or mismanagement, in the absence of a state interest in protecting participants. If the system is designed to resist state intervention, maybe letting it run as designed, and suffer the consequences, is the best approach. There's no need to regulate it out of existence just because it serves no apparent purpose. This is one case where the market will sort that out if we let it.
• jrm4 5y ago
  Not even that there is absence of evidence -- but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Moreover, your cherrypicking of "Internet-type" inventions that develop very quickly are definitely outliers. By contrast, the answering machine was invented in the 1930's, and didn't take off until 50ish years later. It's absurdly and ignorantly early to declare "crypto has no utility."
  • aww_dang 5y ago
    Utility is subjective. If you don't find utility in something, don't use it. Compare these voluntary relationships to the coercive government solutions, like the CBDCs favored by the author.
  • Jasper_ 5y ago
    You mean the answering machine didn't take off until after the wars and great depression ended, suburban life started becoming the default for large groups of people, and they were starting to be away from home for long periods of time, and that before then it saw only limited use by the fairly small numbers of people who were away from their home for long periods of time? Well now I'm convinced. Guess I better buy tickets to El Salvador because clearly crypto is going to the mooooon.
    • underseacables 5y ago
      To be fair, the answering machine was suppressed by Bell Labs, even though magnetic tape recording was invented in the 1930s. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106703 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106703
  • trident5000 5y ago
    You're on HN. Crypto isnt liked because it might steal jobs/shake up the status quo. More threads will be posted as user adoption continues and especially when price rises. Last temper tantrum was like 6 months ago so its probably about that time.
    • agloeregrets 5y ago
      Crypto in general isn't liked because it generally is BS propped up by holders to others to help their position like an MLM coworker. It isn't green (in it's current form for most). It doesn't solve real world problems(in it's current form for most). And it has effectively no avenue to ever being supported by major governments because lol, shocker, they would rather regulate money. The thing about it all is that it has use, but 98% of all who are pro-crypto are just trying to get in on the gold rush rather than actually make it useful. Diamond hands is good for your position but awful for making it an actual currency. I'm sure I'll get some five paragraph long response to this pin pointing little bits here and there that might make it possible but the fact of the matter is that as it currently exists and is being propped up, it is just burning our planet for a potential goldrush.
• anonorant58327 5y ago
  > I've said this so many times: But what does it doooooo??? It lets me transact value online without sacrificing my privacy.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• itake 5y ago
  > I've said this so many times: But what does it doooooo??? Name one project that isn't "speculation" or "loans" built on cryptocurrency that has seen any uptick or utility. NFTs sure ain't it. DAOs sure ain't it. Supply chain tracking sure ain't it. In developing nations where the residents do not have access to regulated and "safe" investment vehicles like stock exchanges, where can they invest their saves? Physical bullion that can get stolen or damaged? Cash (and then real estate)?
  • lmohseni 5y ago
    Those are all much better options than a Ponzi scheme/ financial bubble.
    • itake 5y ago
      This bubble has been going on for 11 years. When does it cease to be a bubble?
      • nullsmack 5y ago
        Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme started at least as early as 1991 and he was arrested 17 years later in 2008. So I guess these scams can go on quite a while.
  • Jasper_ 5y ago
    Cryptocurrency does not help with this. Also, I asked people to name a project that isn't speculation or loans.
    • cbthrow91 5y ago
      https://cointelegraph.com/news/synthetix-is-already-tokenizing-real-world-markets-through-defi https://cointelegraph.com/news/synthetix-is-already-tokenizi... "The Synthetix (SNX) project, one of the biggest ecosystems in decentralized finance (DeFi), recently launched the Hadar upgrade, which enabled tokenized real-world assets like Brent oil and the Nikkei stock index."
• briefcomment 5y ago
  > I've said this so many times: But what does it doooooo??? Are you asking about Bitcoin or Crypto? Bitcoin doesn't do much atm, but Ethereum does stuff, and Bitcoin Cash is pretty practical as a currency at the moment. There's plenty that can be done, but the market will have to decide what to converge on.
  • abeppu 5y ago
    Does Ethereum do stuff well or efficiently? My understanding is that gas prices have been both high and unpredictable, and as such even for use cases where smart contracts make sense in the abstract, it can be impractical to use it b/c the overhead would be too high.
    • noxer 5y ago
      Does it matter? BTC and ETH are the version 1 of something "new". The version one is the playground. There is plenty demand for ETH/BTC like systems without the inefficiencies and so people are building better systems. Flare is an new project that will (maybe, probably, who knows) be able to run everything ETH can because it uses the EVM but it does not use PoW or PoS and thus will not have the fees and slowness. Maybe Flare will still not cut it and die like the countless other projects then something else will come. Its just tech/code in the end. When it comes to real utility people will use whatever there is that delivers. Unlike with the whole gambling where people mostly set their money on the big coins regardless of if its actually useful (its mostly not). There are some big companies out there building amazing stuff. Crypto people especially bitcoin people often hate them because they represent the "real world" with banks and regulations and all that. And ofc they dont build anything on BTC because its tech s*cks and is p much useless for anything beside speculation Both BTC and ETH could be gone some day, the technology however will not go away. Most of the "bad" thing people point out is exclusively to PoW system anyway, like the whole energy wasting things. Its completely irrelevant for 99% of all other projects. Its kinda like if people would yell at cars because there are these huge diesel trucks that blow out black smoke in a world where ~99% of all cares are EVs. And then comes an article like this one here calling for banning cars because of the black smoke he saw the other day. Reality check: We dont ban cars because some cares blow out black smoke. We dont ban crypto because some (one) uses whole coal mines of energy.
• rspeele 5y ago
  Crypto democratizes and decentralizes finance, banking the unbanked, debanking the overbanked, and rebanking the debanked. Using lightning network crypto eliminates middlemen and the annoying experience of transacting money between businesses and customers. With brain wallet seeds you can take your wealth with you anywhere as long as you can remember it or write it down where nobody else will see it, ever. For maximum security you can send your funds to a burner address, withdrawing them from circulation and ensuring nobody can ever steal them. I know you said no loans, but I can't skip mentioning DeFi which enables anybody to borrow their own money from themselves, anytime, fully electronically and without centralization. Then you have smart contracts, which are like a computer, but on everybody's computer at the same time. You can write full programs with complexity nearing that of FizzBuzz and run them worldwide for only hundreds of dollars. Just imagine a world without crypto. It would be like a world without hackysack, or a world without mail order swords on the shopping channel. Unrecognizable and primitive.
  • Jasper_ 5y ago
    You seem like someone very "plugged in" (ha!) to the cryptocurrency world, so I have to ask: what's the best kind of epoxy to fill my ethernet ports with?
    • rspeele 5y ago
      I don't know, but I'll sell you a synthetic asset that mimics epoxy brands, tracking their prices using an oracle[0]. Instead of buying, say, a tube of JB Weld, you can buy 2 $JBW[1] and take out an overcollateralized loan to get the cash to buy your 1 tube of actual epoxy. Because cryptos go up, your $JBW collateral will probably have doubled in value by the time you need to pay back the loan, making the purchase completely free. This technique can be used to end poverty worldwide. [0] website [1] $JBW tokens are not redeemable for epoxy. However, I pinky promise that every time you buy one, I buy a tube of actual epoxy and throw it in the garbage, creating value that your token represents.
  • skytreader 5y ago
    Pretty please be satire because that flew over my head the first time and I'm still not really sure if you are sarcastic or serious. What an exemplar of the cultish enthusiasm and logical inconsistencies I consistently get from crypto enthusiasts, which is exactly why I'm wary of the whole thing.
• snejad123 5y ago
  just because you don't use it or put in the effort to look at different decentralized projects doesn't mean there are "no use-cases". I think with the amount of activity on AAVE and yearn, plus the growth these projects have received have killed that argument. Very 2017 argument that no longer makes any sense and is presented by luddites. Most the bottlenecks right now to why you don't have day-to-day apps deployed on ecosystems like ethereum is because of the gas prices. You have hundreds of very intelligent developers working to decrease this to fractions of a cent. There are legit architectural changes like proof-of-staking and L2-proposed changes that will for sure reduce the price of a function invocation in ethereum. But you probably don't care about this, because you'd rather hang your nose high and pretend that you're much smarter than a whole ecosystem of extremely talented developers (including some award winners). Enjoy that feeling mate, it's not going to last long and it's all entirely ego-based.
  • neurotrace 5y ago
    I'm not OP but this doesn't seem to answer the question. You presented a lot of speculation and mentioned two things that I've never heard of
    • snejad123 5y ago
      the onus is not on me to hand-deliver you information. I'm just here to say OP is wrong, speaking emotionally/egotistically, and spreading trite arguments that have been debunked time and time again. Go ahead and google "L2 ethereum" and "ethereum proof-of-staking migration". If you want to dive deep into the ecosystem it's all in plain sight for you to do so. There is a lot going behind the scenes and I simply don't have time to regurgitate the information.
      • verdverm 5y ago
        L2 has been delayed years, still years out, and optimistic rollup seems to be following the course of delays
        • 5y ago
• heurist 5y ago
  The credit markets being built on top of crypto have been useful to me personally. Rather than going through the lengthy and invasive credit application/approval processes required by lenders, I can take out a cash loan against my crypto in 1 day with zero hassle. Early last year (prior to building my crypto position) I shut down my startup and had no cash to rely on. I ended up burning through credit while looking for work. It was very stressful. If I'd had the options I do now then I would have taken out a balloon loan against my crypto and taken more time to search for my next gig, rather than jumping on the first decent position I was offered because I needed the money. It has really opened a new world for me financially. I rest much easier knowing that I have this tool available.
• coralreef 5y ago
  >Bullshit. When one coal mine in a remote region of China flooded, the Bitcoin hash rate measurably dropped by 30%. Keep in mind this was just one coal mine. Not all of China's production. FYI, China kicked out crypto miners, which is why hash rates tanked in the last few months: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate So we don't know what percentage of mining is even left in China. Also, dirty energy is a regulatory issue. Externalities should be captured in the price with taxation, and coal mining should not be subsidized by a nation state. When you do those things, energy consumers won't want to use dirty energy, they'll flock to renewables.
  • Jasper_ 5y ago
    > FYI, China kicked out crypto miners, which is why hash rates tanked in the last few months: The coal mine flood happened about a month before the widespread ban of Bitcoin in China, and we can see both events on the hashrate over time chart.
    • coralreef 5y ago
      Sure, but that means any estimate on clean/dirty energy usage is harder to make now.
      • verdverm 5y ago
        If BTC uses clean energy, someone else has to use the dirty energy because BTC took the renewable they could have used. Mining has also driven up costs for communities that had cheap renewables. BTC is a waste of energy because it doesn't do any of the things it claims to do. It's highly centralized, far more wealth imbalance, and trending towards custodial accounts if it ever wants to reach mass adoption.
        • nyrosis 5y ago
          That would depend on where the financial motivation to produce renewable energy is coming from. A logical argument could be made that bitcoin encourages the production and advancment of green energy technologies by rewarding such efforts with wealth generation.
• mouzogu 5y ago
  > But what does it doooooo??? The blockchain is just a platform. You have to build projects on top of the platform. Asking what does it do doesn't make any sense. It's like asking what does a piece of paper do. The real question to ask is not what does it do but whether the trade offs of using decentralised tokenised platform for building real world apps is useful or scalable. The answers to which are still being discovered.
  • mdoms 5y ago
    What has been built on Blockchain? Specifically I'm looking for examples of things that solve a problem that couldn't be solved without Blockchain, or at least were unsolved before.
    • cwkoss 5y ago
      Portable assets is one. You can buy and NFT on one market, use it within a game, display it in your virtual home, then sell it on a different market. Blockchain allows individuals to actually own digital assets. (Whether those digital assets are valued correctly is a totally separate discussion - personally I think there are many that are grossly overvalued...) World of warcraft items, amazon video or ebook purchases, etc. - you don't actually own those things: you are locked in and subject to the whims of the platform. If the platform wants to kill your account or remove your items, they can.
      • drdeca 5y ago
        On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, if some centrally-run MMO were to use NFTs that they issue for its items (or, I guess probably maybe they shouldn’t be non-fungible really, because one “hammer of smiting” should probably be equivalent to any other “hammer of smiting”, no point keeping track of them as separate entities when you can just keep track of who owns how many of each. But that is beside the point), Well, the game devs still control how these items actually behave in-game. If they want to take away someone’s mystic scepter of lightning, they can just make the game cease to acknowledge the existing “mystic scepter of lightning” token, and give everyone other than that person a new token for “mystic scepter of lightning” and have the game recognize this new token. So, sure, this person gets to keep their token, but it no longer has the in-game effect or appearance. So, what’s the point? If the salt loses its saltiness, it is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. Someone could make another game which does use the token, but, if this is an mmo, a large part of the value requires the other players. (As, otherwise, why bother making it an online game at all? Just make a local single player game, where the developers can’t change what is on the player’s computer (unless the player chooses to update) anyway, so unless this other game can get a substantial player base, why would this make the old token for the lightning scepter useful again? So, for [this strategy of using tokens for items in the game with the goal of making people really possess the items, not at the mercy of the people running the game] to make sense, the entire game would have to be decentralized, or something like that. (The Cryptokitties thing was kind of like that iirc, in that the page to render them and whatnot was just released as a self-contained thing over IPFS, and while the developers could, of course, release a modified version of it later if they wanted, the original version would still be available and working as long as people wanted to continue using it. Also iirc other people made alternative clients for it which rendered the cats in different ways? So, that kind of fits the idea of “some other game including the scepter token” I guess?) But if an mmo game is to have like, continuing updates, for new content and such, that doesn’t really seem compatible with the “you really own the items in a meaningful way”. I suppose it could be set up such that players who didn’t want to update could continue to play an old version, with some degree of compatibility between earlier and later versions? But you can’t trade a Lugia from pokemon Silver to pokemon Blue (though you can trade a Paras from Silver to Blue).
• kragen 5y ago
  That coal-mine flood was in Xinjiang, and Xinjiang has now kicked out all its Bitcoin miners, because the only way it's profitable to mine Bitcoin with fossil-fuel power is when it's subsidized, and it was being subsidized. But subsidizing Bitcoin mining is unprofitable for any government, so these subsidy-exploitation setups tend to be short-lived. 90% of Bitcoin mining in the PRC got shut down permanently last month with little warning, dropping the hashrate by half: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226598.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226598.shtml. Presumably it will nose back up over the next few months once deals have been signed and the mining hardware has been installed in new places with cheap unsubsidized electricity—necessarily from renewable sources. I agree with your skepticism about non-currency uses of blockchains. Some people do seem to be using ENS now, and I think smart contracts might become usable eventually, but I'm not confident blockchains will be part of smart contracts as they actually get deployed. As for the 12-years-into-the-internet thing, well. The ARPANET started running in 01969. The first version of the FTP protocol we use today (USER, PASS, SOCK, TYPE, BYE) was standardized in RFC 354 in 01972. The "Internet Transmission Control Program" (TCP), featuring SYN/ACK/FIN bits, but 20-bit host numbers (divided into a 4-bit network ID and a 16-bit "TCP address") and 24-bit port numbers, is specified in RFC675 in 01974, and experimental deployments started in 01975. Version 2 of TCP is IEN 2 from 01977. Version 3 of TCP, with a separate IP layer so you could use it for voice over IP, is from 01978. 12 years after the ARPANET's launch was 01981, which is when the Internet Protocol was finally standardized (in RFC 791, IEN 128, replacing the 01980 RFC 760) as a future replacement for NCP. The switchover from NCP to TCP/IP was January 1, 01983. So 12 years after the internet's launch was, depending on where you count from, either 01981, 01987, or January 1, 01995. Even on January 1, 01995, most of the US still had no for-profit ISPs; the closest thing most people could get was AOL over dialup (probably 14400 bps), which had three million users (1.5% of the US population) and wouldn't let you browse the WWW. AOL added an email gateway to the internet in 01992, Usenet access in September 01994, and web browsing later in 01995, all paid by the hour. At some later point AOL started providing actual internet access (so you could, for example, use telnet and ssh and upload files via FTP). It was clear to me what the internet's utility was as soon as I got on it in 01992, 23 years after it started. But in 01995 Bill Gates's The Road Ahead dismissed the internet as a primitive precursor to the "information highway" he imagined, so it wasn't obvious to everyone, even 12 years after the switchover of the ARPANET to TCP/IP. Similarly, the utility of Bitcoin is obvious to me, too, and to millions of other people. I've written about it here before, for example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744.
• sravaka 5y ago
  > I've said this so many times: But what does it doooooo??? It does exactly what it set out to do in the first sentence of the original white paper. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."[0] [0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
• nscalf 5y ago
  You really seem like you're not open to having your mind changed here. You took many of the current use cases and threw it out for no reason. What would change your mind here? I'm not making these estimates, so you can call bullshit but I'm just saying the numbers that have been reported. It doooooes a lot actually. There are a lot of financial transaction tools, which are not reasonable to throw away. Ethereum alone is on pace to settle trillions this year in transactions. NFT's are a substantial market, and are more than just selling a jpeg (which is a massive business in and of itself). They're the more abstract idea of introducing uniqueness through scarcity into a system that is fault tolerant, distributed, and secure (without having to build that system). Some of the best use cases I've seen are from Vechain (I invested in this project). Vechain does supply chain tracking, which you also threw away for no good reason, and they're currently live in the real world working with real companies. You can go into a Walmart in China and interact with their food supply chain tracking system today. They also just launched a covid vaccine passport for the San Marino government. There are video games being built on their ecosystem, just like there are on many other cryptocurrencies. Comparing incremental advancements in technology to the fundamental creation of the internet and ecommerce isn't a valid argument for saying crypto isn't useful. Electric vehicles are junk because it's not a personal spaceship. No one is saying we'll find a use case eventually. People were saying that 5 years ago, there are already use cases and people are building billion dollar companies in those spaces faster than Amazon grew to a billion dollars. You clearly have not been keeping up with this field, and throwing out anything that didn't fit into your narrative. You should try to revisit it with an open mind.