44 ms·

Decentralized Woo Hoo

233 points by amin 5y ago

keymone 5y ago
this guy automatically associates for me with crypto-fudster and of course the very next post of his i see is more "criticism" of crypto. not that there's nothing to criticize crypto projects for, but this particular argument is very meh. projects that advertise as being decentralized but aren't will eventually collapse. projects that advertise as decentralized and do attempt to be decentralized - are solving some truly hard problems, both technically and socially. something to learn from, not dismiss hand-wavingly.
DerekBickerton 5y ago
Seen many people conclude the low hanging fruit of technology has all been obtained, and there's little left to build. But with web3 we're only getting started. There's so much you can do with it. PS: Is it not `woo woo` instead of `woo hoo`? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woo-woo https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woo-woo
Fckd 5y ago
The big two, India and China account for 3B people would never need Crypto at all. Their own mobile payment systems are thriving. India's system which was launched in 2016 clocks in 4B+ transcations per month, grows 100% YOY. A lot of developing countries have their mobile systems which are far better than Crypto.
- spiralx 5y ago
  Another half billion or more in Africa have been happily using mobile payment systems such as M-Pesa for years now as well, sending more money than the Bitcoin "market cap" each year.
jollybean 5y ago
There's a lot less woo around decentralization than around crypto. The cryto woo I can't stand, but I don't mind at least a bit of decentralization woo. Within reason.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nathias 5y ago
Why does hn love this fud so much? I haven't read anything that wasn't completely intellectually dishonest from him.
kethinov 5y ago
This is on point. I've been saying for years that while decentralization is good in many contexts, it's not necessarily good in every context. This is why I'm bullish on Matrix and Mastodon but remain skeptical of cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc. The former seems like real power transfer to the people from centralized platform owners. The latter seems more like a speed run to teach Libertarians why we got all our financial regulations.
- seibelj 5y ago
  The libertarians have been going full speed ahead, and their system has not crashed yet. You can regulate the margins and the connections to tradfi but many teams and projects are anonymous, and cannot be stopped easily. The experiment is happening right now.
whitepaint 5y ago
OP seems to have no idea about DeFI. You can lend and borrow on compound.finance, aave. You can play no-loss lotteries like PoolTogether. You can bet on your beliefs and hedge your investments on markets platforms like Polymarket. You can gamble. More on: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/. All of this without any arbitrary restrictions imposed by governments or companies, you just need an internet connection. How can you look at it and not be in awe? Especially if you're into technology.
- amin 5y ago
  In DeFi, most of the yield comes from speculators who are using your money as leverage to bet which cryptocurrencies will go up. It's not like a regular loan, whereby a company uses your money to expand, innovate, hire and train new employees, to build and sell something people want.
  - whitepaint 5y ago
    So? You still earn way way more than what banks offer and you can withdraw at any point. It's been working very well for quite some time now.
    - amin 5y ago
      1. If you think about it, there is no reason why banks should always offer free money to cash hoarders in the form of interest. During a recession, central banks lower interest rates to incentivize spending and productive investment, which benefits the rest of society. 2. DeFi yield relies on Greater Fools essentially gambling their money on cryptocurrency pairs. It might not last forever. I'd rather have 5% yield in corporate bonds, denominated in a currency that I can pay rent and groceries with, than 20% in a shitcoin which might be worthless tomorrow.
      - whitepaint 5y ago
        You can lend stablecoins such as USDC and have 3-10% APR returns.
krisrm 5y ago
Mirrors my feelings on the crypto-craze. As "decentralized" as some may want crypto currency to be, there are some inherently "central" activities (exchanges being one of them) that tend to be skirted around by proponents. Also, Decentralized Woo Hoo sounds like a great band name. Or something naughty from The Sims.
- capableweb 5y ago
  That centralized exchanges exists doesn't somehow make decentralized cryptocurrencies less decentralized. Just like how centralized social media doesn't make decentralized social media less decentralized.
  - Xorlev 5y ago
    Crytocurrencies are effectively useless without centralized exchanges. Change my mind. Social media doesn't need to interop between centralized and decentralized, but currencies do if they want to be useable. At the end of the day, someone will want to actually _buy_ something, and unfortunately I can't go to Petco and use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.
    - emerongi 5y ago
      I will add my own: cryptocurrencies are useless without a legal framework, which requires a central entity with power ensuring that there is fairness, i.e. the government. Change my mind. P.S. Banking will also still be needed. In any case, these are social issues and Decentralized Woo Hoo is a great name for it, as decentralization does not solve any of these issues. There is value to "digital cash", but not in the capacity that all these projects claim.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - k__ 5y ago
      Right now that is obviously true. If I want to pay for something, I need Euros here in Germany. But if I can pay with crypto that could change. DAI and MIM are some examples of decentralized stable coins that could be used for payment.
capableweb 5y ago
Maybe the title should be updated. It doesn't have anything to do with decentralization per se, but about cryptocurrencies, which is just a technology that happens to use decentralization as a technology. I actually thought the article was gonna be about decentralization (as in P2P technology, like BitTorrent), but instead it's about the authors distaste for cryptocurrencies. Edit: Maybe it's just me, but the article feels less and less honest the more I look into it. "Stephen Diehl" (the author) apparently founded a company that has the following tagline on GitHub "Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates." (https://github.com/adjoint-io https://github.com/adjoint-io) but I didn't find this disclosed in the post. There is a clear conflict of interest, but it's not highlighted for some reason.
- kethinov 5y ago
  The article is about how the term decentralization has become a generic buzzword for good and in fact could describe a range of technologies that are either good or bad, hence we should be immediately skeptical whenever we see the term decentralized used to describe something as good and innovative and look more closely at the details.
- tantalor 5y ago
  > clear conflict of interest That's not a conflict of interest.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    The company (Adjoint, Inc) is described as "digitises cash and settlement processes", something that cryptocurrencies aim to do as well. His company clearly doesn't use decentralization (since why would he make a post against it?), which cryptocurrencies do. How is that not a conflict of interest in this specific blogpost? Reading the post it seems like he has no stake in the outcome of what people think about cryptocurrencies and decentralization, but that's not true, as a founder he has a huge stake in the outcome.
    - gipp 5y ago
foobarbecue 5y ago
The argument that "observer" as used in physics is misunderstood by laypeople makes sense. He then argues the same is happening with the word "decentralized" which makes no sense because laypeople don't know that word. I guess he's arguing that people see "decentralized" and read "democratized," but he fails to make that argument.
- lysecret 5y ago
  He makes more an analogy of quantum woo and decentralization woo, and i kind of agree with that. Honestly, this idea that you can pinpoint 1 similarity in a very humanly important thing and a technincal complicated, precise and solvable problem (like the consciousness and quantum or like social issues and decentralization (as he writes here) also, human intelligence and AI comes to mind) and then blow that similarity way out of proportion is a very interesting thing to think about and a thought this article presents quite well.
  - foobarbecue 5y ago
    Yes, I certainly agree that there's woo going on in both, and enthusiastic misunderstanding of technical things is a powerful and problematic phenomenon. I watched a video by a surf instructor the other day who kept talking about the Bernoulli Principle breathlessly and it was clear that the instructor had no idea what it was (he was actually talking about cohesion / adhesion of water)... and I'm sure most of his audience just ate it up and will be repeating it.
xipho 5y ago
Read the first paragraph, thought, interesting, I hear this type of thing in conversations with fellow scientists but instead it's "blockchain woo". Then read on...
jrm4 5y ago
Criticisms here are correct: Look, decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest. I think for - not just the people he's critcizing, but ALSO FOR HIM, "decentralized" really means "centralized differently." True "decentralization" means letting go of (at least some) exclusivity and ownership; and the current flavor of the crypto craze can't even conceive of it. Ironic, since a lot of it is built on free/open source (which is true decentralization). (Which is to say, cryptocurrency isn't valueless, bills gotta get paid and I think fungible crypto can help. But trying to leverage to create new forms of ownership, which is centralization, is exactly backward.)
- fragmede 5y ago
  > decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest. That's a bit much. There is a bunch of weird crypto hype surrounding web3, but when I can use a website without having to create a login, and my data that its showing doesn't exist on their servers, that's fundamentally a different Internet than the one we've come to know.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    But not fundamentally different from the one we had 20 years ago! Maybe that's my issue here. So many of these Web3 clowns are promising slightly worse versions of the web we already had a while ago (which, fair, might be necessary) -- but while pretending it's something new and, perhaps this is the worst part, apparently aggressively ignoring the extent to which "Information wants to be free"/ GNU Manifesto/etc" type ideas are at least PARTLY true.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Same thing happened when VPS hosting started being branded as this brand new thing called the cloud and now look at where we are with that. Go figure out how and where smart contracts get executed, and how web3 does decentralize things via a wallet, and tell me there isn't something there, hidden behind all of the marketing fluff of crypto conmen.
- 5y ago
peter_retief 5y ago
He has some good points, I am also very suspicious of crypto but also a fan of IPFS, I guess I am conflicted.
- yokem55 5y ago
  The solution crypto assets propose is creating incentives for collaboration. Items on IPFS only remain lively as long as someone is willing to pin a particular bit of content and is ultimately doing so on a charitable basis. That's not nothing, but you can't scale to the whole internet that way. If you can create incentives to collaborate and participate in the storing and caching of those bits, now you've got a mechanism to scale far beyond what you could achieve on benevolence alone.
scyclow 5y ago
I think the best examples of Decentralized Woo Hoo is the phrase "ownership over your data". When most people hear this they think of facebook selling their data to third parties, using it for targeted advertising, etc. But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source. I have sole discretion to send you an NFT, but facebook is still free to use that sale data to sell me things. This distinction appears to be lost on a lot of people who are new to the space, and leads to a lot of marketing fluff around projects that make no sense.
- kertoip_1 5y ago
  > From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source Unless you encrypt things you put on blockchain. Or use clever ways to hide information from others. There are cryptocurrencies like Monero.
  - scyclow 5y ago
    This is true! But it's also hard to think of a situation in which you would need to store that encrypted data on chain. Why not store it on a central server? Or, encrypted on a p2p network? And if order of events is important, you could just store a hash of the data on chain.
- timdaub 5y ago
  > But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. I disagree in parts. In e.g. an app on Ethereum you own your and the app's data more than e.g. you do on Facebook. It's because there are no gatekeepers that'd stop you from creating an interoperable app using the original data or straight up downloading the data. There's sufficient historical precedence of FAANG platform risk. But then also "just owning the right to writes" may sell the concept cheap considering that in the realm of "owning data," there isn't many concepts besides "reading", "writing" and "accessing". "Owning the write" may be as good as it gets? We tend to look at data from a materialistic view and represent it in our heads as .zip files or csvs. But data really isn't that. Data is continuous and owning "the right to write" is pretty cool IMO.
typon 5y ago
Can't wait for the day when crypto becomes a footnote in history and the Deepak Chopras of this world are resigned to obscurity where they belong.
21eleven 5y ago
I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals is not the same as "decentralization" but more about a concept where you start from a decentralized and open base (blockchain) and build structures atop that base that are appropriately balanced between centralized and decentralized. This is all very ambitious and may fail utterly and completely. But if it does succeed there will be a period where people have wild ambitious visions about what could be while the technology progresses to actualize those visions at what appears to be a slow pace. To provide a specific ambitious vision: you could have a world where appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract and everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status. Actually creating a system that allows for this and doesn't have tons of other problems will take time.
- CJefferson 5y ago
  Your last point (everything in smart contracts) I just can't understand. I personally wouldn't want to live in a world where the "computer says no", and even if a court and Jury disagrees, it's impossible to change. Similarly (and it's already happened several times), what happens when someone finds a loophole and drains the entire GDP of a country into their account? Do we say "Oh, well that's what the smart contract said, so bye bye country?"
  - deweller 5y ago
    The smart contracts you are seeing now are relatively simple programs and are woefully insufficient for nation-state level use. Imagine a future with multiple levels of smart contracts that allow for court intervention and arbitration. It starts to resemble the checks and balances we have in place now, but the rules are public and codified.
Zababa 5y ago
I liked the Haskell content on his blog, I'm not sure about his new political line against crypto. This started a bit more than a year ago with this post https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/crypto.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/crypto.html, which ends on a bizarre claim about a link between crypto and right-wing extremism: > David Golumbia’s excellent book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism outlines the rabbit-hole effect that this ecosystem is having on software engineers onboarding them into deeper forms of right-wing extremism. This is not crypto-specific, I'd rather read software blogs than political blogs in general. In the spirit of Drew DeVault (https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...), I'll disclose my stake in cryptocurrency: I currently own ~1000€ in Bitcoin, that I bought for something like 800€ earlier in the year. Those ~200€ are the only profit I made on crypto. I use Monero from time to time for stuff where Monero is useful.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
When honest articles draw ire, it is a tell-tale sign. Like Walter from The Big Lebowski, crypto fans claim "Calmer than you" while internally seething at The Dude's honest callout of their inconsistencies. Maybe rather than coming at the author from every possible angle to somehow discredit his observations, stop and consider he's making an extremely valid analogy: all of us have encountered at least one "quantium woo" acolyte in our lifetime, and realizing that you might be that person but with a different woo is upsetting, but important. The most potent statement of the article: "There is no meme that you won’t find an answer for because how someone sees decentralization is like a Rorschach for their fears and tragic flaws."
pezzana 5y ago
> ... But crypto assets come with an attached narrative economics that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either libertarian politics or technology. If we venture down the technology arguments, at this point the discussion of intrinsic value of crypto assets reduces down to a rhetorical word salad of decentralized woo making all manner of appeals to alleged ideals of decentralization and networks, yet like with quantum woo, without a reference to a mechanism. Decentralization by itself has no value. In fact, it has negative value because decentralized systems by their nature tend to be less efficient and more complicated than their centralized counterparts. Bitcoin's value proposition rests not on decentralization, but on censorship resistance. Censorship resistance means that in Bitcoin, it's difficult to impose rules designed to prevent specific groups or individuals from transacting. This approach is the polar opposite of the one taken by most of the world's governments. This is the point that zooms over the heads of just about every Bitcoin critic. They either don't grasp the value of censorship resistance or reject it because they've lived a life of financial and/or political privilege. Their world view tells them that censorship only happens to those who deserve it. By definition, only criminals and evil-doers seek censorship resistance. Financial repression and censorship are on the rise. The worlds governments now have not only the motive but the means for large-scale control by selectively shutting off access to financial services. Those who don't subscribe to this view are some of the harshest critics of Bitcoin.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I don't think critics don't "get it", it's just that money exists in meatspace and if you're goal is to stop people with guns then you're gonna have a rough time unless you also have guns. All that would be needed to completely destroy Bitcoin's censorship resistance is, say the US for example, creating and mandating the use of a blacklist of addresses (that updates on xfers). So if you found yourself on it no above-board business would legally be able to transact with you and no individual would dare touch you because their wallet would get poisoned, and your coins would be stuck in limbo. You couldn't send your coins to another wallet because that would be immediately blacklisted as well. Money you can't spend anywhere except black markets is basically the same as having your assets frozen for basically everyone. Edit: You could destroy it even more with KYC requirements.
jamespitts 5y ago
I have been participating in the Ethereum community for many years and I agree that there is a widespread belief that decentralized tech and economies run on smart contracts can substantively address social problems. Additionally, in the wider crypto community there is a widespread belief that these networks are a way to restore fair money. In most cases I don't think that these beliefs are post-hoc rationalization. Rather, it is simply motivating to think this way. "woo" is a longstanding feature of any new human endeavor because most of us are psychologically wired to think that what we work on is going to be helpful, and we build a little religion with each other in order to cohere and quickly get the work done. Regarding the question whether decentralized tech will make the world "better": it can and will in some cases -- for very specific reasons -- but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems. As is the case for every major technology unleashed on our world. Focusing on the over-positive views of enthusiasts won't stop them, and certainly won't stop the progression of the tech. People will keep building on something new when it can be built, when it is wildly interesting, and when the endeavor is sustainable. What we need to put more attention on is what to do with the outcomes. It is our responsibility to do so! How to replace the services the tech will disrupt with options that have qualities we desire: more fair, less expensive, more secure, less arbitrarily alterable, etc. And we need to put more attention on the ways it could all go wrong and bring widespread harm.
- cslarson 5y ago
  > but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems So glad you said this - I've also been in the Ethereum community for a while and have significant trepidation about the impact of this technology. But also I see it as unstoppable so we have a duty to participate and try to ensure the positive outweighs the negative.
- elwell 5y ago
  > but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems I suspect this as well. Would be curious to see your list of possible issues.
hamburga 5y ago
I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third.[1] A blockchain tends to require centralized logic/code/data structures so that agents can communicate with the same protocol. Architectural means servers. As the OP mentions, this is really the only way in which blockchains are currently decentralized. Governance is about how the rules and decisions are made. I guess fairly linked to the logical/code layer. Also heavily centralized in the blockchain world. [1] https://youtu.be/LKbOPYnUlXs?t=369 https://youtu.be/LKbOPYnUlXs?t=369
- jrm4 5y ago
  And they never will the third. Never. Once again, this is thinking you can make humans act like robot computer code. You can't. So-called "smart contracts" (which are neither) will never helpfully substitute for humans doing dispute resolution by talking to each other.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third. This is even worse than it sounds. Crypto projects like DAOs actually make hidden centralization a breeze for well-funded adversaries. If someone has enough money, they can simply take over a DAO by buying enough tokens to swing the votes in the direction they want. Thanks to the way most blockchain solutions are implemented, they can even accumulate all of these tokens in ways that appear decentralized across many unique wallets that are nevertheless controlled by a central party. Big players can acquire centralized control of decentralized projects in ways that consumers and regulators wouldn't even be able to detect. Decentralized, tokenized ownership structures are definitely not "power to the people" structures. They are "power to the money" structures, where whoever can spend the most money is guaranteed to win and all of the participants have given up their ability to ever even know when it's happening.
  - crypto_is_king 5y ago
stickfigure 5y ago
The exposition on quantum woo was lovely, but the analogy to decentralization falls flat. The difference is that when lay people talk about decentralization, they seem to have a pretty decent - though often imperfect - idea what they're talking about. I think most folks who throw around the word "decentralized" use the term as a stand-in for some degree of "censorship resistance". Which is reasonably true! They might not understand the social consequences of this, or they might not care; maybe having free (as in speech) transactions between disparate people is worth the social cost of somewhat increased ransomware. There are fair criticisms of people who talk about decentralization - I notice there are a lot of (facebook-hating, mostly) people who seem to think decentralization will bring privacy or control of your data - but overall I think most people use the word decentralization correctly.
ilaksh 5y ago
Critically fails to distinguish between decentralization technologies (a wider category) and cryptocurrency. Does not understand the term he is criticizing. There is another deeper primary failure here shared by much of the HN community. That is the inability, despite so much evidence, to comprehend that technology IS an ally to society. In fact, it has always been a core part of progress in human society. But the above, and the article, are just laying out worldviews, which is not constructive since beliefs are very broad and quite difficult to change. What IS possible to discuss are specific types of problems and technological or non-technological solutions to them. The article provides nothing specific to discuss. It is simply idealogical flamebait and should be removed.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Most of HN is aware and mature enough to comprehend that Ayn Rand is NOT an ally of society.
  - ilaksh 5y ago
    Do you have a browser extension that replaces the word "technology" with "Ayn Rand"? Have no idea what you are talking about. I was a fan of Ayn Rand when I read her as a kid. At this point I am close to the opposite of an Ayn Rand fan. Again, don't see how you possibly brought Ayn Rand into my comment.
meheleventyone 5y ago
Trustless is another word that gets the same rhetorical slight of hand and IMO is more dangerous in terms of individuals getting scammed. All these terms specific in context get sold as general in application when crypto is marketed. Same thing with other rallying cries like removing middlemen.
trwhite 5y ago
Some good points here. If the author is reading the comments, I spotted the following typos: 1) "that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either" should probably say "that tries to rationalize their existence by appealing to either" 2) "like that that quantum mechanics and consciousness" should probably say "like that quantum mechanics and consciousness"
avivo 5y ago
I've used "magical decentralization fallacy" to get at something similar[1], but I appreciate how much more concise this is! [1] https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy-69b426d16bdc https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy... "the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. What do I mean by governance problems? Things like misinformation and
voidmain0001 5y ago
The sentence in the second last paragraph reads "They all have their idea about how to “make the world a better place” and to do it they need you to tithe and purchase their ponzicoin today to buy a stake in a better tomorrow." and is the anthem of this video I saw posted on reddit.com/r/bitcoin called "Bitcoin is Generational Wealth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rnqst5qCgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rnqst5qCgA A lot of fluff and no details regarding the implementation of the ideal future except that one must get on the Bitcoin train now to be part of it.
zajio1am 5y ago
> If you see government overreach as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. I do not really get this. Decentralization in government just moves the power from one level of government to another (so overreach is the same), and usually the local government is less accountable, as most public scrutiny is focused on the central government.
martin_drapeau 5y ago
History replays itself every new invention or enlightment humans have. Over the past centuries many have been persecuted for studying chemistry, astronomy, physics and even biology. Think of Galileo who was persecuted for advaing the theory that the Earth was round. Crypto embodies a new paradigm whereby rules can be programmed and enforced by computers. Instead of relying on centralized human authorities to measure, control and enforce, the rule of "law" is coded into the protocol. No one can cheat. The only way to change the "law" is for every player to agree to change the protocol. Through concensus. For example Bitcoin with its fixed supply of 21M coins which prevents dillution and debasement. No human can change that unless, there is a concensus to change the protocol. You see humans still have control, but only if we all agree. We are living a unique human experiment with Crypto. I really wish people would stop bashing the industry and instead join in the experiment. Remember that evolution and innovation is innevitable. The financial system currently controlled by humans will get disrupted by technology. Crypto turns finance onto its head. Fascinating.
- iammisc 5y ago
  > We are living a unique human experiment with Crypto. I really wish people would stop bashing the industry and instead join in the experiment. This is the sort of pseudo-religious statement that makes people bristle when they hear about crypto. You frame it as an experiment, and then follow it up by your wish for everyone to join the experiment. Normal experiments have control groups. The only groups that have no control group and demand universal obedience are religions. This is why people view crypto-promoters as the modern day equivalent of televangelists.
- history_ghost 5y ago
  You guys started by comparing yourselves to the great people of history, before you'd done anything. You guys have been saying the same thing for a decade. This kind of mindset and argument sounds remarkably ignorant about how power works (you'll never, never divorce the monetary system from outside, get real), and is ignorant about the value of law being something that changes over time. This is the problem with building the world with 20 year old men. You don't know what you don't know.
- 5y ago
mistercheph 5y ago
>The Dirac equation has nothing to say about the phenomenon of mind except to describe the chemistry that gives rise to it. On the contrary, the question of mind is precisely what is at stake in our investigation of the particle-wave nature of the electron. "From the point of view of wave mechanics, the infinite array of possible point paths would be merely fictitious, none of them would have the prerogative over the others of being that really traveled in an individual case. I have, however, already mentioned that we have yet really observed such individual particle paths in some cases. The wave theory can represent this, either not at all or only very imperfectly. We find it confoundedly difficult to interpret the traces we see as nothing more than narrow bundles of equally possible paths between which the wave surfaces establish cross-connections. Yet, these cross-connections are necessary for an understanding of the diffraction and interference phenomena which can be demonstrated for the same particle with the same plausibility -- and that on a large scale, not just as a consequence of the theoretical ideas about the interior of the atom, which we mentioned earlier. Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make do in each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself." The Fundamental Idea of Wave Mechanics (Schrodinger 1923)
cslarson 5y ago
> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change to the status quo, or they choose not to educate themselves (try it) - neither is really valid response if you want to write coherently about something. > We have systems like BitTorrent and Tor which are decentralized networks and whose responsibility is to blindly distribute data according to a set of prescribed rules and algorithms. This is a great line because they clearly appreciate some decentralized tech. It is not such a cognitive leap to see that blockchain based smart contracts (Ethereum) are vehicles to build more legitimate decentralized protocols. Perhaps it's just too much. Because the landscape is now too large it is too difficult for the writer to point out specific valuable aspects, they get confused, and out of laziness paint a broad brush of "woo" all over it all.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  I've been a huge skeptic myself until a friend almost forced me into going down the rabbit hole. I have since been wondering why we tech people are so unbelievably critical. "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases. I have no answer. Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? "What's the value of having friends I see daily online?". I think it's very difficult to imagine value of technology that is not mainstream yet.
  - twic 5y ago
    > Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? No, it would have been obviously cool. Those of us who were online already had IRC and newsgroups, and later instant messaging, home pages on GeoCities, etc. A service which rolled all of that up together and made it easy to use would have been rad as hell.
timdaub 5y ago
I think there needs to be a new discipline in the cryptosphere similar to what a hacker is to technology. Maybe it's just that hackers need to gain more influence. Anyways, what's necessary is that the crypto space needs a stronger internal critical voice. It can't just all be about owning tokens and shilling them to others. We need due diligence too. I find this type of manifesto quite cool: https://criticalengineering.org/en https://criticalengineering.org/en
tinalumfoil 5y ago
> Or similarly they suggest misguided equivalences, like that that quantum mechanics and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivelent [sic] without a reference to a mechanism. Similarly this article connects bad article about quantum mechanics to bad articles about cryptocurrencies without reference to a mechanism that might explain why these would be the same effect. > it's simply a proxy meme of the more dangerous idea that technology can fix social problems Technology literally has fixed social problems. Look at the printing press, for instance in its effects on the protestant reformation. Printing, and printing "dangerous ideas" no less, has been an essential part of social change.
defgeneric 5y ago
Stephen Diehl has been colossally wrong for YEARS on crypto.
- lekevicius 5y ago
  If you look at ALL of his articles, they are ALL about one topic only, how crypto is a scam. I'm for one very glad he exists. He'll either end up being able to say "told you!", or, more likely, as a great quote in some article in 2032, when people will write about early response to crypto.
klntsky 5y ago
> The essence of decentralized woo, and why it’s such a pernicious form of sophistry, is that it’s simply a proxy meme of the more dangerous idea that technology can fix social problems. That's a strong wording. Technology can actually "fix" some social problems. The problem is that we don't know, which of them. Also, we know very little about the tradeoffs.
shawnz 5y ago
I think it's wrong to say that technology can't affect societal problems. Isn't all encryption technology a workaround for the societal problem of maintaining privacy? As another specific (but admittedly contentious) example, consider how Uber supplanted the taxi monopoly with a technological workaround.
somenewaccount1 5y ago
With El Salvadors requirement that businesses accept Bitcoin, I have come to believe that just about every 3rd world nation without significant military will eventually do the same. Why? Because having your countries currency pegged to the bitcoin is better than being pegged to the dollar. Pegged to the dollar allows the US and allies to devalue your currency to nothing almost immediately. Bitcoin is more risilient than this. Disclaimer: I hate bitcoin and own none of it, having "missed the boat". But once I have visited a developing nation who's currency is constantly beat up by the dollar, and witnessing the people work 4x harder for 1/10 the standard of living, it really does make sense.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  > having "missed the boat" The boat is still going, likely to hit $100K in the next few months.
- floe 5y ago
  Then why have all countries abandoned the gold standard? What makes bitcoin more suitable than gold for this purpose?
danans 5y ago
> Advocates of these assets claim crypto platforms will make things trustless, transparent, open, immutable, secure and decentralized. Perhaps those who have disproportionately consumed libertarian ideology, but those who've studied the longer arc of history know that power abhors a vaccum, and understand destruction and decentralization of institutions as a step on the path to setting different centralized institutions that prioritize a different vision of the world, whether that is ethno-nationalist, theocratic, communist, whatever. The pure crypto enthusiasts are just helping them along, greasing the skids if you will. Once the increased social entropy weakens institutions enough to reveal a takeover opportunity, all ideas of decentralization will be cast aside because centralized power is too effective. This attack on existing institutions in order to pave the way for replacement institutions one prefers is omnipresent in history, including the American Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution, both of which fought against the centralized monarchical authority. The current one is instead fighting against globalist institutions and the multiculturalism and economic leveling they have brought on, which have had very distinct sets of winners and losers.
raintrees 5y ago
Maybe decentralized needs to be valued against the (possibly negative) value of centralized authority? Similar to how air quality, other natural resources are frequently not taken into account during the manufacturing of goods or services, so we may end up with a Tragedy of the Commons situation; If proportional effective causes and their constituent values are not taken into account, then the value cannot be correctly ascertained.
koonsolo 5y ago
> We have systems like BitTorrent and Tor which are decentralized networks and whose responsibility is to blindly distribute data according to a set of prescribed rules and algorithms. Imagine you could sell and buy things on these distributed networks, that would be a game changer! Only problem is that you need some kind of central payment processor :(. ...oh wait...
quantified 5y ago
Value is in whatever two parties agree is valuable, in lots of cases requiring the expectation of being valuable to someone else too. A tulip was enormously valuable at one place and time. Who’s to say where it goes, people are funny.
alexashka 5y ago
To me, crypto is just another miracle diet, except it's not weight loss you're after, but 'fixing the finance industry', or getting rich, or whatever. It's all the same and it's all rather boring. I don't know what Stephen's motivation is for harping on this topic for so long. Does he expect people to abandon their love for lottery tickets, or their tendency to want to be part of a cult to give their life meaning? It's just what humans do, among other stupidities such as open offices and having clueless people managing people who know how to do the work. It's stupidity all the way down. Maybe it hasn't hit home yet - most things are stupid, including a whole lot of what you do, including spending all this time worrying about crypto-pocalypse :)
cromwellian 5y ago
In the 90s I was part of the cypherpunks movement and a total devotee of the idea that decentralized currency, unbreakable cryptography, mix-nets, etc was going to make it impossible for state power to govern cyberspace, and John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace would be made real. But this turned out to be the high naïveté of a young person. First of all, the physical world is the ultimate gatekeeper, and so unless you are uploaded into the matrix, you're going to need access to stuff in the real world, and those off ramps and real world requirements can still easily come under the control of governments. Secondly, a lot of "decentralized" stuff becomes centralized rapidly because it turns out there are still efficiency gains from centralization, and a lot of people don't want to include costs to upkeep these systems. As you saw with miners, eventually the folks who had cheap access to energy, and capital resources to buy large farms of equipment, could tend to monopolize a significant amount of hashing power. And when you look at technologies like IPFS, again, people are much more interesting in consuming files than letting their computer resources be used to provide part of the network. I suppose BitTorrent is a counter example since enough people seem to be seeders, but I'm not convinced it'll scale to replace the entire Web. Look at SMTP/IMAP. Decentralized and federated, one of the oldest protocols on the net. Yet, almost all of humanity gets their email from a few big providers handling billions of addresses. Hardly anyone runs an SMTP server at home. A decentralized protocol today becomes a centralized protocol tomorrow if there is any net economic/efficiency benefit to centralizing. That means eventually there will be a power asymmetry and all of the vaunt claims of a flat, non-hierarchal, or democratic system go out the window. Eventually, a few entities will end up in control in a way that gives them significant power that individuals do not. But unlike the real world systems we have today, where governments can intervene when the distortions become too onerous, the current crop of defi stuff has no regulatory system to restore a kind of homeostasis when it becomes unbalanced. There is also nothing to be done if a critical security flaw is found (e.g. SHA found to be 'broken'). Thus the idea of basing a significant part of the world finance and information systems on top of blockchain to me seems both hideously wasteful and potentially catastrophic for society.
robertlagrant 5y ago
> If you see tech monopolies as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. If you see income inequality as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. If you see government overreach as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. If you see monetary policy as a fundamental societal problem, you’ll find an answer in decentralization. There is no meme that you won’t find an answer for because how someone sees decentralization is like a Rorschach for their fears and tragic flaws. This is sort of true, but also there are lots of problems that on their face don't make sense with decentralisation (e.g. the problem of how hard it is to disseminate expert information, which is enabled in part by decentralisation). This is just a list of problems that decentralisation could actually help with.
pepoluan 5y ago
"WooHoo" ... I thought it was about The Sims...

233 points by amin 5y ago

this guy automatically associates for me with crypto-fudster and of course the very next post of his i see is more "criticism" of crypto. not that there's nothing to criticize crypto projects for, but this particular argument is very meh. projects that advertise as being decentralized but aren't will eventually collapse. projects that advertise as decentralized and do attempt to be decentralized - are solving some truly hard problems, both technically and socially. something to learn from, not dismiss hand-wavingly.

DerekBickerton 5y ago

Seen many people conclude the low hanging fruit of technology has all been obtained, and there's little left to build. But with web3 we're only getting started. There's so much you can do with it. PS: Is it not `woo woo` instead of `woo hoo`? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woo-woo https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woo-woo

Fckd 5y ago

The big two, India and China account for 3B people would never need Crypto at all. Their own mobile payment systems are thriving. India's system which was launched in 2016 clocks in 4B+ transcations per month, grows 100% YOY. A lot of developing countries have their mobile systems which are far better than Crypto.

spiralx 5y ago
Another half billion or more in Africa have been happily using mobile payment systems such as M-Pesa for years now as well, sending more money than the Bitcoin "market cap" each year.

jollybean 5y ago

There's a lot less woo around decentralization than around crypto. The cryto woo I can't stand, but I don't mind at least a bit of decentralization woo. Within reason.

deleted 5y ago
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nathias 5y ago

Why does hn love this fud so much? I haven't read anything that wasn't completely intellectually dishonest from him.

kethinov 5y ago

This is on point. I've been saying for years that while decentralization is good in many contexts, it's not necessarily good in every context. This is why I'm bullish on Matrix and Mastodon but remain skeptical of cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc. The former seems like real power transfer to the people from centralized platform owners. The latter seems more like a speed run to teach Libertarians why we got all our financial regulations.

seibelj 5y ago
The libertarians have been going full speed ahead, and their system has not crashed yet. You can regulate the margins and the connections to tradfi but many teams and projects are anonymous, and cannot be stopped easily. The experiment is happening right now.

whitepaint 5y ago

OP seems to have no idea about DeFI. You can lend and borrow on compound.finance, aave. You can play no-loss lotteries like PoolTogether. You can bet on your beliefs and hedge your investments on markets platforms like Polymarket. You can gamble. More on: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/. All of this without any arbitrary restrictions imposed by governments or companies, you just need an internet connection. How can you look at it and not be in awe? Especially if you're into technology.

amin 5y ago
In DeFi, most of the yield comes from speculators who are using your money as leverage to bet which cryptocurrencies will go up. It's not like a regular loan, whereby a company uses your money to expand, innovate, hire and train new employees, to build and sell something people want.
- whitepaint 5y ago
  So? You still earn way way more than what banks offer and you can withdraw at any point. It's been working very well for quite some time now.
  - amin 5y ago
    1. If you think about it, there is no reason why banks should always offer free money to cash hoarders in the form of interest. During a recession, central banks lower interest rates to incentivize spending and productive investment, which benefits the rest of society. 2. DeFi yield relies on Greater Fools essentially gambling their money on cryptocurrency pairs. It might not last forever. I'd rather have 5% yield in corporate bonds, denominated in a currency that I can pay rent and groceries with, than 20% in a shitcoin which might be worthless tomorrow.
    - whitepaint 5y ago
      You can lend stablecoins such as USDC and have 3-10% APR returns.

krisrm 5y ago

Mirrors my feelings on the crypto-craze. As "decentralized" as some may want crypto currency to be, there are some inherently "central" activities (exchanges being one of them) that tend to be skirted around by proponents. Also, Decentralized Woo Hoo sounds like a great band name. Or something naughty from The Sims.

capableweb 5y ago
That centralized exchanges exists doesn't somehow make decentralized cryptocurrencies less decentralized. Just like how centralized social media doesn't make decentralized social media less decentralized.
- Xorlev 5y ago
  Crytocurrencies are effectively useless without centralized exchanges. Change my mind. Social media doesn't need to interop between centralized and decentralized, but currencies do if they want to be useable. At the end of the day, someone will want to actually _buy_ something, and unfortunately I can't go to Petco and use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.
  - emerongi 5y ago
    I will add my own: cryptocurrencies are useless without a legal framework, which requires a central entity with power ensuring that there is fairness, i.e. the government. Change my mind. P.S. Banking will also still be needed. In any case, these are social issues and Decentralized Woo Hoo is a great name for it, as decentralization does not solve any of these issues. There is value to "digital cash", but not in the capacity that all these projects claim.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - k__ 5y ago
    Right now that is obviously true. If I want to pay for something, I need Euros here in Germany. But if I can pay with crypto that could change. DAI and MIM are some examples of decentralized stable coins that could be used for payment.

capableweb 5y ago

Maybe the title should be updated. It doesn't have anything to do with decentralization per se, but about cryptocurrencies, which is just a technology that happens to use decentralization as a technology. I actually thought the article was gonna be about decentralization (as in P2P technology, like BitTorrent), but instead it's about the authors distaste for cryptocurrencies. Edit: Maybe it's just me, but the article feels less and less honest the more I look into it. "Stephen Diehl" (the author) apparently founded a company that has the following tagline on GitHub "Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates." (https://github.com/adjoint-io https://github.com/adjoint-io) but I didn't find this disclosed in the post. There is a clear conflict of interest, but it's not highlighted for some reason.

kethinov 5y ago
The article is about how the term decentralization has become a generic buzzword for good and in fact could describe a range of technologies that are either good or bad, hence we should be immediately skeptical whenever we see the term decentralized used to describe something as good and innovative and look more closely at the details.
tantalor 5y ago
> clear conflict of interest That's not a conflict of interest.
- capableweb 5y ago
  The company (Adjoint, Inc) is described as "digitises cash and settlement processes", something that cryptocurrencies aim to do as well. His company clearly doesn't use decentralization (since why would he make a post against it?), which cryptocurrencies do. How is that not a conflict of interest in this specific blogpost? Reading the post it seems like he has no stake in the outcome of what people think about cryptocurrencies and decentralization, but that's not true, as a founder he has a huge stake in the outcome.
  - gipp 5y ago

foobarbecue 5y ago

The argument that "observer" as used in physics is misunderstood by laypeople makes sense. He then argues the same is happening with the word "decentralized" which makes no sense because laypeople don't know that word. I guess he's arguing that people see "decentralized" and read "democratized," but he fails to make that argument.

lysecret 5y ago
He makes more an analogy of quantum woo and decentralization woo, and i kind of agree with that. Honestly, this idea that you can pinpoint 1 similarity in a very humanly important thing and a technincal complicated, precise and solvable problem (like the consciousness and quantum or like social issues and decentralization (as he writes here) also, human intelligence and AI comes to mind) and then blow that similarity way out of proportion is a very interesting thing to think about and a thought this article presents quite well.
- foobarbecue 5y ago
  Yes, I certainly agree that there's woo going on in both, and enthusiastic misunderstanding of technical things is a powerful and problematic phenomenon. I watched a video by a surf instructor the other day who kept talking about the Bernoulli Principle breathlessly and it was clear that the instructor had no idea what it was (he was actually talking about cohesion / adhesion of water)... and I'm sure most of his audience just ate it up and will be repeating it.

xipho 5y ago

Read the first paragraph, thought, interesting, I hear this type of thing in conversations with fellow scientists but instead it's "blockchain woo". Then read on...

jrm4 5y ago

Criticisms here are correct: Look, decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest. I think for - not just the people he's critcizing, but ALSO FOR HIM, "decentralized" really means "centralized differently." True "decentralization" means letting go of (at least some) exclusivity and ownership; and the current flavor of the crypto craze can't even conceive of it. Ironic, since a lot of it is built on free/open source (which is true decentralization). (Which is to say, cryptocurrency isn't valueless, bills gotta get paid and I think fungible crypto can help. But trying to leverage to create new forms of ownership, which is centralization, is exactly backward.)

fragmede 5y ago
> decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest. That's a bit much. There is a bunch of weird crypto hype surrounding web3, but when I can use a website without having to create a login, and my data that its showing doesn't exist on their servers, that's fundamentally a different Internet than the one we've come to know.
- jrm4 5y ago
  But not fundamentally different from the one we had 20 years ago! Maybe that's my issue here. So many of these Web3 clowns are promising slightly worse versions of the web we already had a while ago (which, fair, might be necessary) -- but while pretending it's something new and, perhaps this is the worst part, apparently aggressively ignoring the extent to which "Information wants to be free"/ GNU Manifesto/etc" type ideas are at least PARTLY true.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Same thing happened when VPS hosting started being branded as this brand new thing called the cloud and now look at where we are with that. Go figure out how and where smart contracts get executed, and how web3 does decentralize things via a wallet, and tell me there isn't something there, hidden behind all of the marketing fluff of crypto conmen.
5y ago

peter_retief 5y ago

He has some good points, I am also very suspicious of crypto but also a fan of IPFS, I guess I am conflicted.

yokem55 5y ago
The solution crypto assets propose is creating incentives for collaboration. Items on IPFS only remain lively as long as someone is willing to pin a particular bit of content and is ultimately doing so on a charitable basis. That's not nothing, but you can't scale to the whole internet that way. If you can create incentives to collaborate and participate in the storing and caching of those bits, now you've got a mechanism to scale far beyond what you could achieve on benevolence alone.

scyclow 5y ago

I think the best examples of Decentralized Woo Hoo is the phrase "ownership over your data". When most people hear this they think of facebook selling their data to third parties, using it for targeted advertising, etc. But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source. I have sole discretion to send you an NFT, but facebook is still free to use that sale data to sell me things. This distinction appears to be lost on a lot of people who are new to the space, and leads to a lot of marketing fluff around projects that make no sense.

kertoip_1 5y ago
> From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source Unless you encrypt things you put on blockchain. Or use clever ways to hide information from others. There are cryptocurrencies like Monero.
- scyclow 5y ago
  This is true! But it's also hard to think of a situation in which you would need to store that encrypted data on chain. Why not store it on a central server? Or, encrypted on a p2p network? And if order of events is important, you could just store a hash of the data on chain.
timdaub 5y ago
> But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. I disagree in parts. In e.g. an app on Ethereum you own your and the app's data more than e.g. you do on Facebook. It's because there are no gatekeepers that'd stop you from creating an interoperable app using the original data or straight up downloading the data. There's sufficient historical precedence of FAANG platform risk. But then also "just owning the right to writes" may sell the concept cheap considering that in the realm of "owning data," there isn't many concepts besides "reading", "writing" and "accessing". "Owning the write" may be as good as it gets? We tend to look at data from a materialistic view and represent it in our heads as .zip files or csvs. But data really isn't that. Data is continuous and owning "the right to write" is pretty cool IMO.

typon 5y ago

Can't wait for the day when crypto becomes a footnote in history and the Deepak Chopras of this world are resigned to obscurity where they belong.

21eleven 5y ago

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals is not the same as "decentralization" but more about a concept where you start from a decentralized and open base (blockchain) and build structures atop that base that are appropriately balanced between centralized and decentralized. This is all very ambitious and may fail utterly and completely. But if it does succeed there will be a period where people have wild ambitious visions about what could be while the technology progresses to actualize those visions at what appears to be a slow pace. To provide a specific ambitious vision: you could have a world where appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract and everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status. Actually creating a system that allows for this and doesn't have tons of other problems will take time.

CJefferson 5y ago
Your last point (everything in smart contracts) I just can't understand. I personally wouldn't want to live in a world where the "computer says no", and even if a court and Jury disagrees, it's impossible to change. Similarly (and it's already happened several times), what happens when someone finds a loophole and drains the entire GDP of a country into their account? Do we say "Oh, well that's what the smart contract said, so bye bye country?"
- deweller 5y ago
  The smart contracts you are seeing now are relatively simple programs and are woefully insufficient for nation-state level use. Imagine a future with multiple levels of smart contracts that allow for court intervention and arbitration. It starts to resemble the checks and balances we have in place now, but the rules are public and codified.

Zababa 5y ago

I liked the Haskell content on his blog, I'm not sure about his new political line against crypto. This started a bit more than a year ago with this post https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/crypto.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/crypto.html, which ends on a bizarre claim about a link between crypto and right-wing extremism: > David Golumbia’s excellent book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism outlines the rabbit-hole effect that this ecosystem is having on software engineers onboarding them into deeper forms of right-wing extremism. This is not crypto-specific, I'd rather read software blogs than political blogs in general. In the spirit of Drew DeVault (https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...), I'll disclose my stake in cryptocurrency: I currently own ~1000€ in Bitcoin, that I bought for something like 800€ earlier in the year. Those ~200€ are the only profit I made on crypto. I use Monero from time to time for stuff where Monero is useful.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

When honest articles draw ire, it is a tell-tale sign. Like Walter from The Big Lebowski, crypto fans claim "Calmer than you" while internally seething at The Dude's honest callout of their inconsistencies. Maybe rather than coming at the author from every possible angle to somehow discredit his observations, stop and consider he's making an extremely valid analogy: all of us have encountered at least one "quantium woo" acolyte in our lifetime, and realizing that you might be that person but with a different woo is upsetting, but important. The most potent statement of the article: "There is no meme that you won’t find an answer for because how someone sees decentralization is like a Rorschach for their fears and tragic flaws."

pezzana 5y ago

> ... But crypto assets come with an attached narrative economics that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either libertarian politics or technology. If we venture down the technology arguments, at this point the discussion of intrinsic value of crypto assets reduces down to a rhetorical word salad of decentralized woo making all manner of appeals to alleged ideals of decentralization and networks, yet like with quantum woo, without a reference to a mechanism. Decentralization by itself has no value. In fact, it has negative value because decentralized systems by their nature tend to be less efficient and more complicated than their centralized counterparts. Bitcoin's value proposition rests not on decentralization, but on censorship resistance. Censorship resistance means that in Bitcoin, it's difficult to impose rules designed to prevent specific groups or individuals from transacting. This approach is the polar opposite of the one taken by most of the world's governments. This is the point that zooms over the heads of just about every Bitcoin critic. They either don't grasp the value of censorship resistance or reject it because they've lived a life of financial and/or political privilege. Their world view tells them that censorship only happens to those who deserve it. By definition, only criminals and evil-doers seek censorship resistance. Financial repression and censorship are on the rise. The worlds governments now have not only the motive but the means for large-scale control by selectively shutting off access to financial services. Those who don't subscribe to this view are some of the harshest critics of Bitcoin.

Spivak 5y ago
I don't think critics don't "get it", it's just that money exists in meatspace and if you're goal is to stop people with guns then you're gonna have a rough time unless you also have guns. All that would be needed to completely destroy Bitcoin's censorship resistance is, say the US for example, creating and mandating the use of a blacklist of addresses (that updates on xfers). So if you found yourself on it no above-board business would legally be able to transact with you and no individual would dare touch you because their wallet would get poisoned, and your coins would be stuck in limbo. You couldn't send your coins to another wallet because that would be immediately blacklisted as well. Money you can't spend anywhere except black markets is basically the same as having your assets frozen for basically everyone. Edit: You could destroy it even more with KYC requirements.

jamespitts 5y ago

I have been participating in the Ethereum community for many years and I agree that there is a widespread belief that decentralized tech and economies run on smart contracts can substantively address social problems. Additionally, in the wider crypto community there is a widespread belief that these networks are a way to restore fair money. In most cases I don't think that these beliefs are post-hoc rationalization. Rather, it is simply motivating to think this way. "woo" is a longstanding feature of any new human endeavor because most of us are psychologically wired to think that what we work on is going to be helpful, and we build a little religion with each other in order to cohere and quickly get the work done. Regarding the question whether decentralized tech will make the world "better": it can and will in some cases -- for very specific reasons -- but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems. As is the case for every major technology unleashed on our world. Focusing on the over-positive views of enthusiasts won't stop them, and certainly won't stop the progression of the tech. People will keep building on something new when it can be built, when it is wildly interesting, and when the endeavor is sustainable. What we need to put more attention on is what to do with the outcomes. It is our responsibility to do so! How to replace the services the tech will disrupt with options that have qualities we desire: more fair, less expensive, more secure, less arbitrarily alterable, etc. And we need to put more attention on the ways it could all go wrong and bring widespread harm.

cslarson 5y ago
> but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems So glad you said this - I've also been in the Ethereum community for a while and have significant trepidation about the impact of this technology. But also I see it as unstoppable so we have a duty to participate and try to ensure the positive outweighs the negative.
elwell 5y ago
> but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems I suspect this as well. Would be curious to see your list of possible issues.

hamburga 5y ago

I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third.[1] A blockchain tends to require centralized logic/code/data structures so that agents can communicate with the same protocol. Architectural means servers. As the OP mentions, this is really the only way in which blockchains are currently decentralized. Governance is about how the rules and decisions are made. I guess fairly linked to the logical/code layer. Also heavily centralized in the blockchain world. [1] https://youtu.be/LKbOPYnUlXs?t=369 https://youtu.be/LKbOPYnUlXs?t=369

jrm4 5y ago
And they never will the third. Never. Once again, this is thinking you can make humans act like robot computer code. You can't. So-called "smart contracts" (which are neither) will never helpfully substitute for humans doing dispute resolution by talking to each other.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third. This is even worse than it sounds. Crypto projects like DAOs actually make hidden centralization a breeze for well-funded adversaries. If someone has enough money, they can simply take over a DAO by buying enough tokens to swing the votes in the direction they want. Thanks to the way most blockchain solutions are implemented, they can even accumulate all of these tokens in ways that appear decentralized across many unique wallets that are nevertheless controlled by a central party. Big players can acquire centralized control of decentralized projects in ways that consumers and regulators wouldn't even be able to detect. Decentralized, tokenized ownership structures are definitely not "power to the people" structures. They are "power to the money" structures, where whoever can spend the most money is guaranteed to win and all of the participants have given up their ability to ever even know when it's happening.
- crypto_is_king 5y ago

stickfigure 5y ago

The exposition on quantum woo was lovely, but the analogy to decentralization falls flat. The difference is that when lay people talk about decentralization, they seem to have a pretty decent - though often imperfect - idea what they're talking about. I think most folks who throw around the word "decentralized" use the term as a stand-in for some degree of "censorship resistance". Which is reasonably true! They might not understand the social consequences of this, or they might not care; maybe having free (as in speech) transactions between disparate people is worth the social cost of somewhat increased ransomware. There are fair criticisms of people who talk about decentralization - I notice there are a lot of (facebook-hating, mostly) people who seem to think decentralization will bring privacy or control of your data - but overall I think most people use the word decentralization correctly.

ilaksh 5y ago

Critically fails to distinguish between decentralization technologies (a wider category) and cryptocurrency. Does not understand the term he is criticizing. There is another deeper primary failure here shared by much of the HN community. That is the inability, despite so much evidence, to comprehend that technology IS an ally to society. In fact, it has always been a core part of progress in human society. But the above, and the article, are just laying out worldviews, which is not constructive since beliefs are very broad and quite difficult to change. What IS possible to discuss are specific types of problems and technological or non-technological solutions to them. The article provides nothing specific to discuss. It is simply idealogical flamebait and should be removed.

DonHopkins 5y ago
Most of HN is aware and mature enough to comprehend that Ayn Rand is NOT an ally of society.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  Do you have a browser extension that replaces the word "technology" with "Ayn Rand"? Have no idea what you are talking about. I was a fan of Ayn Rand when I read her as a kid. At this point I am close to the opposite of an Ayn Rand fan. Again, don't see how you possibly brought Ayn Rand into my comment.

meheleventyone 5y ago

Trustless is another word that gets the same rhetorical slight of hand and IMO is more dangerous in terms of individuals getting scammed. All these terms specific in context get sold as general in application when crypto is marketed. Same thing with other rallying cries like removing middlemen.

trwhite 5y ago

Some good points here. If the author is reading the comments, I spotted the following typos: 1) "that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either" should probably say "that tries to rationalize their existence by appealing to either" 2) "like that that quantum mechanics and consciousness" should probably say "like that quantum mechanics and consciousness"

avivo 5y ago

I've used "magical decentralization fallacy" to get at something similar[1], but I appreciate how much more concise this is! [1] https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy-69b426d16bdc https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy... "the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. What do I mean by governance problems? Things like misinformation and

voidmain0001 5y ago

The sentence in the second last paragraph reads "They all have their idea about how to “make the world a better place” and to do it they need you to tithe and purchase their ponzicoin today to buy a stake in a better tomorrow." and is the anthem of this video I saw posted on reddit.com/r/bitcoin called "Bitcoin is Generational Wealth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rnqst5qCgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rnqst5qCgA A lot of fluff and no details regarding the implementation of the ideal future except that one must get on the Bitcoin train now to be part of it.

zajio1am 5y ago

> If you see government overreach as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. I do not really get this. Decentralization in government just moves the power from one level of government to another (so overreach is the same), and usually the local government is less accountable, as most public scrutiny is focused on the central government.

martin_drapeau 5y ago

History replays itself every new invention or enlightment humans have. Over the past centuries many have been persecuted for studying chemistry, astronomy, physics and even biology. Think of Galileo who was persecuted for advaing the theory that the Earth was round. Crypto embodies a new paradigm whereby rules can be programmed and enforced by computers. Instead of relying on centralized human authorities to measure, control and enforce, the rule of "law" is coded into the protocol. No one can cheat. The only way to change the "law" is for every player to agree to change the protocol. Through concensus. For example Bitcoin with its fixed supply of 21M coins which prevents dillution and debasement. No human can change that unless, there is a concensus to change the protocol. You see humans still have control, but only if we all agree. We are living a unique human experiment with Crypto. I really wish people would stop bashing the industry and instead join in the experiment. Remember that evolution and innovation is innevitable. The financial system currently controlled by humans will get disrupted by technology. Crypto turns finance onto its head. Fascinating.

iammisc 5y ago
> We are living a unique human experiment with Crypto. I really wish people would stop bashing the industry and instead join in the experiment. This is the sort of pseudo-religious statement that makes people bristle when they hear about crypto. You frame it as an experiment, and then follow it up by your wish for everyone to join the experiment. Normal experiments have control groups. The only groups that have no control group and demand universal obedience are religions. This is why people view crypto-promoters as the modern day equivalent of televangelists.
history_ghost 5y ago
You guys started by comparing yourselves to the great people of history, before you'd done anything. You guys have been saying the same thing for a decade. This kind of mindset and argument sounds remarkably ignorant about how power works (you'll never, never divorce the monetary system from outside, get real), and is ignorant about the value of law being something that changes over time. This is the problem with building the world with 20 year old men. You don't know what you don't know.
5y ago

mistercheph 5y ago

>The Dirac equation has nothing to say about the phenomenon of mind except to describe the chemistry that gives rise to it. On the contrary, the question of mind is precisely what is at stake in our investigation of the particle-wave nature of the electron. "From the point of view of wave mechanics, the infinite array of possible point paths would be merely fictitious, none of them would have the prerogative over the others of being that really traveled in an individual case. I have, however, already mentioned that we have yet really observed such individual particle paths in some cases. The wave theory can represent this, either not at all or only very imperfectly. We find it confoundedly difficult to interpret the traces we see as nothing more than narrow bundles of equally possible paths between which the wave surfaces establish cross-connections. Yet, these cross-connections are necessary for an understanding of the diffraction and interference phenomena which can be demonstrated for the same particle with the same plausibility -- and that on a large scale, not just as a consequence of the theoretical ideas about the interior of the atom, which we mentioned earlier. Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make do in each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself." The Fundamental Idea of Wave Mechanics (Schrodinger 1923)

cslarson 5y ago

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change to the status quo, or they choose not to educate themselves (try it) - neither is really valid response if you want to write coherently about something. > We have systems like BitTorrent and Tor which are decentralized networks and whose responsibility is to blindly distribute data according to a set of prescribed rules and algorithms. This is a great line because they clearly appreciate some decentralized tech. It is not such a cognitive leap to see that blockchain based smart contracts (Ethereum) are vehicles to build more legitimate decentralized protocols. Perhaps it's just too much. Because the landscape is now too large it is too difficult for the writer to point out specific valuable aspects, they get confused, and out of laziness paint a broad brush of "woo" all over it all.

shoto_io 5y ago
I've been a huge skeptic myself until a friend almost forced me into going down the rabbit hole. I have since been wondering why we tech people are so unbelievably critical. "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases. I have no answer. Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? "What's the value of having friends I see daily online?". I think it's very difficult to imagine value of technology that is not mainstream yet.
- twic 5y ago
  > Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? No, it would have been obviously cool. Those of us who were online already had IRC and newsgroups, and later instant messaging, home pages on GeoCities, etc. A service which rolled all of that up together and made it easy to use would have been rad as hell.

timdaub 5y ago

I think there needs to be a new discipline in the cryptosphere similar to what a hacker is to technology. Maybe it's just that hackers need to gain more influence. Anyways, what's necessary is that the crypto space needs a stronger internal critical voice. It can't just all be about owning tokens and shilling them to others. We need due diligence too. I find this type of manifesto quite cool: https://criticalengineering.org/en https://criticalengineering.org/en

tinalumfoil 5y ago

> Or similarly they suggest misguided equivalences, like that that quantum mechanics and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivelent [sic] without a reference to a mechanism. Similarly this article connects bad article about quantum mechanics to bad articles about cryptocurrencies without reference to a mechanism that might explain why these would be the same effect. > it's simply a proxy meme of the more dangerous idea that technology can fix social problems Technology literally has fixed social problems. Look at the printing press, for instance in its effects on the protestant reformation. Printing, and printing "dangerous ideas" no less, has been an essential part of social change.

defgeneric 5y ago

Stephen Diehl has been colossally wrong for YEARS on crypto.

lekevicius 5y ago
If you look at ALL of his articles, they are ALL about one topic only, how crypto is a scam. I'm for one very glad he exists. He'll either end up being able to say "told you!", or, more likely, as a great quote in some article in 2032, when people will write about early response to crypto.

klntsky 5y ago

> The essence of decentralized woo, and why it’s such a pernicious form of sophistry, is that it’s simply a proxy meme of the more dangerous idea that technology can fix social problems. That's a strong wording. Technology can actually "fix" some social problems. The problem is that we don't know, which of them. Also, we know very little about the tradeoffs.

shawnz 5y ago

I think it's wrong to say that technology can't affect societal problems. Isn't all encryption technology a workaround for the societal problem of maintaining privacy? As another specific (but admittedly contentious) example, consider how Uber supplanted the taxi monopoly with a technological workaround.

somenewaccount1 5y ago

With El Salvadors requirement that businesses accept Bitcoin, I have come to believe that just about every 3rd world nation without significant military will eventually do the same. Why? Because having your countries currency pegged to the bitcoin is better than being pegged to the dollar. Pegged to the dollar allows the US and allies to devalue your currency to nothing almost immediately. Bitcoin is more risilient than this. Disclaimer: I hate bitcoin and own none of it, having "missed the boat". But once I have visited a developing nation who's currency is constantly beat up by the dollar, and witnessing the people work 4x harder for 1/10 the standard of living, it really does make sense.

koonsolo 5y ago
> having "missed the boat" The boat is still going, likely to hit $100K in the next few months.
floe 5y ago
Then why have all countries abandoned the gold standard? What makes bitcoin more suitable than gold for this purpose?

danans 5y ago

> Advocates of these assets claim crypto platforms will make things trustless, transparent, open, immutable, secure and decentralized. Perhaps those who have disproportionately consumed libertarian ideology, but those who've studied the longer arc of history know that power abhors a vaccum, and understand destruction and decentralization of institutions as a step on the path to setting different centralized institutions that prioritize a different vision of the world, whether that is ethno-nationalist, theocratic, communist, whatever. The pure crypto enthusiasts are just helping them along, greasing the skids if you will. Once the increased social entropy weakens institutions enough to reveal a takeover opportunity, all ideas of decentralization will be cast aside because centralized power is too effective. This attack on existing institutions in order to pave the way for replacement institutions one prefers is omnipresent in history, including the American Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution, both of which fought against the centralized monarchical authority. The current one is instead fighting against globalist institutions and the multiculturalism and economic leveling they have brought on, which have had very distinct sets of winners and losers.

raintrees 5y ago

Maybe decentralized needs to be valued against the (possibly negative) value of centralized authority? Similar to how air quality, other natural resources are frequently not taken into account during the manufacturing of goods or services, so we may end up with a Tragedy of the Commons situation; If proportional effective causes and their constituent values are not taken into account, then the value cannot be correctly ascertained.

koonsolo 5y ago

> We have systems like BitTorrent and Tor which are decentralized networks and whose responsibility is to blindly distribute data according to a set of prescribed rules and algorithms. Imagine you could sell and buy things on these distributed networks, that would be a game changer! Only problem is that you need some kind of central payment processor :(. ...oh wait...

quantified 5y ago

Value is in whatever two parties agree is valuable, in lots of cases requiring the expectation of being valuable to someone else too. A tulip was enormously valuable at one place and time. Who’s to say where it goes, people are funny.

alexashka 5y ago

To me, crypto is just another miracle diet, except it's not weight loss you're after, but 'fixing the finance industry', or getting rich, or whatever. It's all the same and it's all rather boring. I don't know what Stephen's motivation is for harping on this topic for so long. Does he expect people to abandon their love for lottery tickets, or their tendency to want to be part of a cult to give their life meaning? It's just what humans do, among other stupidities such as open offices and having clueless people managing people who know how to do the work. It's stupidity all the way down. Maybe it hasn't hit home yet - most things are stupid, including a whole lot of what you do, including spending all this time worrying about crypto-pocalypse :)

cromwellian 5y ago

In the 90s I was part of the cypherpunks movement and a total devotee of the idea that decentralized currency, unbreakable cryptography, mix-nets, etc was going to make it impossible for state power to govern cyberspace, and John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace would be made real. But this turned out to be the high naïveté of a young person. First of all, the physical world is the ultimate gatekeeper, and so unless you are uploaded into the matrix, you're going to need access to stuff in the real world, and those off ramps and real world requirements can still easily come under the control of governments. Secondly, a lot of "decentralized" stuff becomes centralized rapidly because it turns out there are still efficiency gains from centralization, and a lot of people don't want to include costs to upkeep these systems. As you saw with miners, eventually the folks who had cheap access to energy, and capital resources to buy large farms of equipment, could tend to monopolize a significant amount of hashing power. And when you look at technologies like IPFS, again, people are much more interesting in consuming files than letting their computer resources be used to provide part of the network. I suppose BitTorrent is a counter example since enough people seem to be seeders, but I'm not convinced it'll scale to replace the entire Web. Look at SMTP/IMAP. Decentralized and federated, one of the oldest protocols on the net. Yet, almost all of humanity gets their email from a few big providers handling billions of addresses. Hardly anyone runs an SMTP server at home. A decentralized protocol today becomes a centralized protocol tomorrow if there is any net economic/efficiency benefit to centralizing. That means eventually there will be a power asymmetry and all of the vaunt claims of a flat, non-hierarchal, or democratic system go out the window. Eventually, a few entities will end up in control in a way that gives them significant power that individuals do not. But unlike the real world systems we have today, where governments can intervene when the distortions become too onerous, the current crop of defi stuff has no regulatory system to restore a kind of homeostasis when it becomes unbalanced. There is also nothing to be done if a critical security flaw is found (e.g. SHA found to be 'broken'). Thus the idea of basing a significant part of the world finance and information systems on top of blockchain to me seems both hideously wasteful and potentially catastrophic for society.

robertlagrant 5y ago

> If you see tech monopolies as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. If you see income inequality as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. If you see government overreach as a fundamental societal problem … you’ll find an answer in decentralization. If you see monetary policy as a fundamental societal problem, you’ll find an answer in decentralization. There is no meme that you won’t find an answer for because how someone sees decentralization is like a Rorschach for their fears and tragic flaws. This is sort of true, but also there are lots of problems that on their face don't make sense with decentralisation (e.g. the problem of how hard it is to disseminate expert information, which is enabled in part by decentralisation). This is just a list of problems that decentralisation could actually help with.

pepoluan 5y ago

"WooHoo" ... I thought it was about The Sims...