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Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-va

by nadam 5y ago

Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics today.

bob33212 5y ago
If you find it a good store of value for yourself that is fine, but you need to understand that value is defined by social norms not by technical features. Picasso paintings are currently a very good store of value. Gold has been a decent store of value for thousands of years. People bought beanie babies in 1998 because they thought the price would go up and stay up for a long time. Obviously they were wrong, but the same thing could happen to GOLD, BTC, or even Picasso paintings. It totally depends on what society values in the future.
- nadam 5y ago
  I understand this. While you are right, there are some properties of these assets that can help us predict what could become a store of value: is it durable? is it easy to transfer? is it easy to censor? is it inflationary? also you can examine the network effect related to the asset. By developing new technical features, you can increase the chance of an asset to become a store of value. That's why researching proof-of-stake algorithms is meaningful. Not as important as to find cure for cancer? Maybe. But still meaningful. Lots of people on HN claim that it is totally bullshit, which is a strong opinion imho...
  - bob33212 5y ago
    Do you mean proof of stake? If so, yes there is potential for new technologies to come out which could cause crypto to have more real world use cases and then cause the value of crypto to society to be higher. But we have been hearing about how crypto is "the future" for 10+ years. At what point is this future actually going to exist?
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > but the same thing could happen to GOLD, BTC, or even Picasso paintings In fact, it has happened to the first two, at least temporarily. Someone who bought gold in 1980, say, is probably not particularly happy with it as a store of value today (adjusted for inflation, they _may_ just about be breaking even now assuming that they paid no transactional or storage fees); the same goes for someone who bought bitcoin in May. Or, er, an hour ago. Picasso's time will presumably come, too.
gjulianm 5y ago
> an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology As the other commenter said, "censor resistant" is impossible to achieve. It's society the one that gives value to things, and society can decide to censor you and stop you from storing/getting value from that network. Not to mention that most blockchains are traceable, so it's not that difficult to know how money is flowing. > potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far Why? This always happens in crypto: somehow it's going to fix a lot of issues even if the features that differentiate it from existing solutions don't have anything to do with those issues.
- nadam 5y ago
  >Why? Are you a gold investor? I am. There are lots of problems with gold: 2-3% inflation, hard to store, hard to transfer, hard to divide, hard to examine whether it is really gold. BTC has some advantages (and some disadvantages). Proof of stake ETH have even more advantages (but also some more disadvantages). It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit.
  - gjulianm 5y ago
    > There are lots of problems with gold Most people don't deal with those problems because they use banks and official currency. If the target of the blockchain is to replace gold, then I don't know why people insist on regular people using it. > It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit. Of course it is. But it's also meaningful to not treat it as the revolution as the crypto community does, or say that the people who don't think crypto is great is just uneducated.
Jasper_ 5y ago
> In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Neither of those things are true about Bitcoin (it will not become deflationary until 2140, and "censor-resistant" requires a lot of extra elaboration). But then what's the economic basis for that being a good store of value? I'm mostly upset with crypto because it hasn't delivered on any promise, while still causing untold ecological damage, and has tilted the price of computing equipment so already rich industrialists can earn even more. Up until recently that was just GPUs, but the latest invention in the space is they made a cryptocurrency based around using up hard drives. The joy.
- freemint 5y ago
  It could become deflationary before 2140 by more Bitcoins bring burned then created by schedule.
jshen 5y ago
I have two responses to this. First, I am very crypto skeptical, but I don't have any problem with "research continuing". However, that's not what I am experiencing. If crypto enthusiasts were off in a lab trying to figure out how to make it solve a real problem then great! Instead, I am the "tech expert" for many of my friends and family, and frequently have them reach out to me as they are on the verge of putting a non trivial amount of money into crypto that they can't afford to lose. Most of these people can barely keep their passwords safe, so I have to spend a lot of time talking them out of it because I care about them. A similar thing happens at work. Some random business exec has a great idea to "use blockchain" for some thing that frankly would be better solved with a regular database. I've had to spend a lot of time convincing business people to not use crypto or NFTs yet. Second, what you're doing, and many crypto people do this, is identify real problems that would be great if we could solve them. And then you go, "and isn't crypto great because it hasn't solved these problems, but maybe it could". Yeah, maybe, but it hasn't yet. Crypto reminds me of the semantic web people in a lot of ways. They said, "wouldn't it be great if semantic information were embeded in data and APIs could be machine understandable". Sounds a lot like smart contracts doesn't it? Yes, it would be great if we solved that problem, but we never did. The most we got from the semantic web was the semi-useful json-ld you seen in HTML headers for SEO optimization. Here's the thing, the vast vast majority of new ideas don't pan out. It's a lot easier to identify legit problems than it is to solve them. Crypto people get super excited because it would be amazing to solve those problems, BUT there's no good reason to believe it's likely that it will. I say this as someone who spent years trying to get teh semantic web to work. It never did.

by nadam 5y ago

bob33212 5y ago

If you find it a good store of value for yourself that is fine, but you need to understand that value is defined by social norms not by technical features. Picasso paintings are currently a very good store of value. Gold has been a decent store of value for thousands of years. People bought beanie babies in 1998 because they thought the price would go up and stay up for a long time. Obviously they were wrong, but the same thing could happen to GOLD, BTC, or even Picasso paintings. It totally depends on what society values in the future.

nadam 5y ago
I understand this. While you are right, there are some properties of these assets that can help us predict what could become a store of value: is it durable? is it easy to transfer? is it easy to censor? is it inflationary? also you can examine the network effect related to the asset. By developing new technical features, you can increase the chance of an asset to become a store of value. That's why researching proof-of-stake algorithms is meaningful. Not as important as to find cure for cancer? Maybe. But still meaningful. Lots of people on HN claim that it is totally bullshit, which is a strong opinion imho...
- bob33212 5y ago
  Do you mean proof of stake? If so, yes there is potential for new technologies to come out which could cause crypto to have more real world use cases and then cause the value of crypto to society to be higher. But we have been hearing about how crypto is "the future" for 10+ years. At what point is this future actually going to exist?
rsynnott 5y ago
> but the same thing could happen to GOLD, BTC, or even Picasso paintings In fact, it has happened to the first two, at least temporarily. Someone who bought gold in 1980, say, is probably not particularly happy with it as a store of value today (adjusted for inflation, they _may_ just about be breaking even now assuming that they paid no transactional or storage fees); the same goes for someone who bought bitcoin in May. Or, er, an hour ago. Picasso's time will presumably come, too.

gjulianm 5y ago

> an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology As the other commenter said, "censor resistant" is impossible to achieve. It's society the one that gives value to things, and society can decide to censor you and stop you from storing/getting value from that network. Not to mention that most blockchains are traceable, so it's not that difficult to know how money is flowing. > potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far Why? This always happens in crypto: somehow it's going to fix a lot of issues even if the features that differentiate it from existing solutions don't have anything to do with those issues.

nadam 5y ago
>Why? Are you a gold investor? I am. There are lots of problems with gold: 2-3% inflation, hard to store, hard to transfer, hard to divide, hard to examine whether it is really gold. BTC has some advantages (and some disadvantages). Proof of stake ETH have even more advantages (but also some more disadvantages). It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  > There are lots of problems with gold Most people don't deal with those problems because they use banks and official currency. If the target of the blockchain is to replace gold, then I don't know why people insist on regular people using it. > It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit. Of course it is. But it's also meaningful to not treat it as the revolution as the crypto community does, or say that the people who don't think crypto is great is just uneducated.

Jasper_ 5y ago

> In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Neither of those things are true about Bitcoin (it will not become deflationary until 2140, and "censor-resistant" requires a lot of extra elaboration). But then what's the economic basis for that being a good store of value? I'm mostly upset with crypto because it hasn't delivered on any promise, while still causing untold ecological damage, and has tilted the price of computing equipment so already rich industrialists can earn even more. Up until recently that was just GPUs, but the latest invention in the space is they made a cryptocurrency based around using up hard drives. The joy.

freemint 5y ago
It could become deflationary before 2140 by more Bitcoins bring burned then created by schedule.

jshen 5y ago

I have two responses to this. First, I am very crypto skeptical, but I don't have any problem with "research continuing". However, that's not what I am experiencing. If crypto enthusiasts were off in a lab trying to figure out how to make it solve a real problem then great! Instead, I am the "tech expert" for many of my friends and family, and frequently have them reach out to me as they are on the verge of putting a non trivial amount of money into crypto that they can't afford to lose. Most of these people can barely keep their passwords safe, so I have to spend a lot of time talking them out of it because I care about them. A similar thing happens at work. Some random business exec has a great idea to "use blockchain" for some thing that frankly would be better solved with a regular database. I've had to spend a lot of time convincing business people to not use crypto or NFTs yet. Second, what you're doing, and many crypto people do this, is identify real problems that would be great if we could solve them. And then you go, "and isn't crypto great because it hasn't solved these problems, but maybe it could". Yeah, maybe, but it hasn't yet. Crypto reminds me of the semantic web people in a lot of ways. They said, "wouldn't it be great if semantic information were embeded in data and APIs could be machine understandable". Sounds a lot like smart contracts doesn't it? Yes, it would be great if we solved that problem, but we never did. The most we got from the semantic web was the semi-useful json-ld you seen in HTML headers for SEO optimization. Here's the thing, the vast vast majority of new ideas don't pan out. It's a lot easier to identify legit problems than it is to solve them. Crypto people get super excited because it would be amazing to solve those problems, BUT there's no good reason to believe it's likely that it will. I say this as someone who spent years trying to get teh semantic web to work. It never did.