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> 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 skep

> 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.
  - nathias 5y ago
    as someone that was on IRC at the time, no it wasn't obviously cool, it was and remains worse in every aspect to irc. FB succeeded because it ignored the internet as it existed and conquered it for normies.
- foobarbecue 5y ago
  > wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? Nah. It was obvious to me from my first encounter with text-based internet that this was going to be a social phenomenon that would link the world together. BBS, forums, myspace were all incremental improvements. Facebook just caught the wave with the right timing and did friend recommendations effectively.
- kranke155 5y ago
  The media has been conducting a half decade hit job on crypto and people bought it. To quote someone smarter than me on Twitter - the world was FUDded out of the biggest investment opportunity in their lifetime.
- api 5y ago
  Not everyone got the web, chat, or social networks, but loads of people did and people from all backgrounds. Things like Geocities, AIM, MySpace, early Facebook, early search engines, etc. had millions of users very rapidly. They penetrated beyond the tech-savvy early adopters within years. Cryptocurrency is more than 10 years old and hasn't seen anything like this. The vast majority of what I see in cryptocurrency is just speculation. It all seems like a giant very complex over-engineered online casino app. Yes there are use cases outside of that but they seem much more niche. The people saying "there is no use case" are over-arguing their position, but I think the actual non-gambling use case is small.
  - throwaway6977 5y ago
    I strongly suggest doing a comparison of O(log n)-style adoption curves between Bitcoin, and say- cell phones, computer networking, or really any innovation that became ubiquitous and for which we have the data... I think you'd be surprised at the similarities.
    - manbart 5y ago
      Have any such graphs to share?
    - JackFr 5y ago
      Where we measure adoption by cups of coffee purchase with bitcoin. [1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1322925/is-there-proof-show-that-log-x-is-undefined-and-make-no-sense-at-x-0 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1322925/is-there-pr...
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      If I look at the adoption curves of cell phones or computer networking, I see a steady increase. If I look at the adoption curve of Bitcoin as means for payment, the peak was multiple years ago when many companies in my area experimented with accepting it as payment - I could order a pizza with Bitcoin, I could buy an airline ticket, etc; but now those companies have stopped accepting them. There are multiple niches of business which do accept Bitcoin, but overall there has been a significant decrease at least in practical use - there has been some upsurge in digital asset related transactions, but in any case the adoption is certainly not growing exponentially like for other growing technologies, if we look at transaction rates at e.g. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-second https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-secon... then we're at the same level as of 2017, and below the peak.
- simias 5y ago
  >What's the value of having friends I see daily online? None. The value is in having people want to watch ads in order to see what their friends are up to. The only monetization scheme for the blockchain so far seems to build pyramid schemes or making fees from running off-chain, centralized exchanges.
  - shoto_io 5y ago
    That’s exactly my point. Who would have thought about that?
- deweller 5y ago
  So true. Every technology revolution seems like a toy at first. Consider the personal computer, the spreadsheet, the internet, the smart phone. Only time will tell if cryptocurrencies will join this list.
  - brabel 5y ago
    All those things became mainstream in a matter of a few years from the time they became affordable and available to most people. Crypto currencies have existed for well over a decade now, have been available to anyone who wants in for a long time, but still, all we see them being used for is market speculation. I would've loved to use digital money to buy stuff, but it simply isn't a serious option today in most online shops as far as I can see... even if it was, I currently see zero reason to use that instead of my credit card (which has almost no interest, very low fees, and the guarantee of my bank that fraud will be reverted). Given that, why the hell people still believe it might eventually take over the world??? It just won't! It's pretty clear IMHO that it is, and will remain for probably a long time, a ponzi scheme of sorts, or to be a bit more generous, a gambling platform.
    - TomSwirly 5y ago
      > all we see them being used for is market speculation. And crime. Don't forget crime.
- Kalium 5y ago
  We tech people see a lot of ideas. Most of them are superficially exciting. For example, a way of detecting when counterfeit parts with substandard specs are used in farming equipment. Maybe a music-centered social network for users of a particular music player. Many of them go on to be either wastes of time or much, much worse. Suddenly detecting substandard parts is DRM for John Deere tractors and the social network is iTunes Ping. Most ideas fail. This doesn't make them bad ideas or the people creating them bad people. It just means we've collectively learned that most ideas will fail and there are some fairly common reasons for this.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  Part of the problem is that much of the cryptocurrency hype, some might even say most, actually is just a bunch of scams and pump and dump nonsense. The people who are in it for a get rich quick scheme are the enemy, and most of the people who expect to get rich quick will end up on the bottom of the pyramid. But that isn't to say that there's nothing there. It's like saying that the internet is worthless and should be destroyed because it has pornography and copyright infringement. It's not that it doesn't; it's that there are still things it's good for even though it does.
  - brabel 5y ago
    > the internet is worthless and should be destroyed because it has pornography and copyright infringement. Tangential to the topic, but pornography is not a crime like copyright infrigement, or even something intrinsically bad as you seem to imply, for whatever reason! There's a lot of good taste porn out there. It has a high value of entertainment to a lot of people... I would compare it to something like gaming or sports rather than copyright infrigement.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- megameter 5y ago
  I think the analogy of cryptocurrency's position to the 90's internet is the wrong one to pick, because it describes an environment with some maturity and acceptance in its base technologies, primed for waves of consumer commerce to take hold. The proper example to pick is personal computing circa 1982. When you look at the envisioned uses of personal computing, the advertisements really reach: it helps your child learn. You can store recipes on it. Balance your checkbook. Write documents. And (whispers) play games. As well, one can occasionally find reassurances in the literature that the computer is your friend, not the back-office monster that billed you incorrectly last month. Would you feel convinced? Many people saw no use for computers in their lives. And the reality of personal computing at that point was that it was mostly a nerd hobby, with a few niches where it could have immediate, direct impact(white collar information work). Professional graphic design functions, audio and video were all still years away, far out of reach on the consumer platforms. It all cost too much - the computers, accessories, the networking options. But it's also a representative inflection point: microprocessors as a product category had only been available for a little over a decade, and it only took about a decade from there for the embrace of all things digital to kick into high gear with the onset of commodity PC clones, the Wintel monopoly, and then the Internet. Cryptocurrency is seeing a trajectory like that - we're nearing 12 years in and, like early personal computing, it's understood by few, often advertised deceptively, and seeing massive amounts of growth and capital investment. The applications are gradually appearing, and industry incumbents are hopping onto the bandwagon, but it's sneered at by experienced code jockeys: they work with much bigger and fancier hardware than these toys. Nobody is sure of the business model to use. Prices are all over the map.
  - allturtles 5y ago
    > The proper example to pick is personal computing circa 1982. When you look at the envisioned uses of personal computing, the advertisements really reach: it helps your child learn. You can store recipes on it. Balance your checkbook. Write documents. And (whispers) play games. Okay so what is the "play games" of crypto today? It seems like the only equivalent is "criminal activity." Unless you count speculation on crypto itself, but that isn't a "use." Computer users in 1982 were not buying IBM PCs, leaving them boxed in their closet, and then re-selling them for 10 or 100x the price in a year or two.
- serverholic 5y ago
  Wow this is exactly the example I use. Explaining crypto use-cases is like explaining the use-cases for the internet in the 90s. "But I can just write a check or hand someone cash, why would I need to send money over the internet?" "Amazon? But I can go buy what I need down the street. Seems like a lot of work just to save a few minutes."
  - brabel 5y ago
    > "But I can just write a check or hand someone cash, why would I need to send money over the internet?" But today, I can just use my credit card to pay for anything instantly, anywhere in the world... who the fuck still uses checks?? Why would I want to use crypto and lose all the protections I have from my card company, while having to wait minutes for transactions to be confirmed instead of milli-seconds?? And with the risk of my "wallet" being hacked in an instant and losing everything, without a chance for appealing to anyone for the funds to be returned?? Do you seriously consider that an attractive option to anyone, in the way that the Internet or Amazon (actually, online shops in general!) were?? Seems completely delusional to me.
    - serverholic 5y ago
      That quote was from the perspective of someone learning about the internet in the 90s. My point is it's hard for people to imagine the implications of a technology. > Why would I want to use crypto and lose all the protections I have from my card company The current system is kinda crazy if you think about it. We give out our credit card numbers all the time and don't think twice about it. These protections you speak of are mostly a bandaid on a flawed system. Additionally, we give all the power to a central authority which is ok until it isn't. My buddy does freelance work and has gotten screwed because these "protections" were used by shitty clients to get their money back after he handed over the project. Finally, crypto has other protections like smart wallets that implement a sort of password recovery feature. The difference is you have control over how you want to use it. > while having to wait minutes for transactions to be confirmed instead of milli-seconds Crypto transactions appear almost instantly. Do you really need to wait minutes to fully confirm a taco bell transaction? Besides, Ethereum Layer 2 will help out with this quite a bit by boosting performance. Blockchain scaling is still in its infancy. > And with the risk of my "wallet" being hacked in an instant and losing everything Then use a savings wallet and a checking wallet. Or have 100 wallets. It's up to you how you want to structure it. Also people get hacked all the time due to poor passwords. How is this any different than, say, someone finding your bank account password? Or a phishing email? I imagine over time services will crop up from trusted providers that will smooth over the UX here. For example, walking you through setting up your wallet. Also smart wallets like I mentioned above. > without a chance for appealing to anyone for the funds to be returned If that really worries you then there will be centralized services for you to use with systems in place to prevent this. Wallets are just a lego brick that you can use to build many different kinds of services and systems. > Do you seriously consider that an attractive option to anyone, in the way that the Internet or Amazon Yes. We are just starting to see the implications of the technology and it's inspiring IMO.
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  Smart contracts are really really really cool! I was able to write a contract to take out a loan, distribute funds to various pools and pull the funds out. Having that sort of atomic control over financial transactions or data is simply amazing. Anyone with the knowledge can do it. Just understand the vulnerabilities and caveats with the languages/apis that interact with the various blockchains.
  - skulk 5y ago
    After you pass a certain threshold, it makes zero sense to trust your assets to code that _you, personally_ haven't 100% authoritatively verified to be bug-free. Traditional financial institutions don't work like this; if there's an obvious "bug" in bank logic that lets someone take all of your assets, it gets rolled back. Doing away with this protection is fine, but the big bucks will stay away.
    - unemphysbro 5y ago
      Of course not, the dao hack is a case in point. I am happy the ecosystem is spurring growth in formal verification. It's still the wild west and I encourage anyone interested to swing a lasso.
- quantified 5y ago
  Facebook is less a technology than an application. Blockchain and stuff is technology, maybe there are good applications.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  > 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?". It's probably easy to say with hindsight, but I honestly don't think so. The stereotype of teenagers (especially girls) spending too much time on the phone is older than personal computers, let alone Facebook. AIM and ICQ were quite successful in the 90s, and LiveJournal launched in 1999.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I think for me the problem is splitting people into binary camps of skeptic or supporter. Personally, I have my strongest reactions of skepticism when people seem to declare blockchains as a god, an inevitable coming of blissful revolution. I have a similar, altho less extreme reaction, when people tell me there is absolutely no value or future and that the whole space is pure bs and fraud. I wish we didn't see the world as so us/them, for/against, good/bad. I think I mostly fight against those perspectives and this space seems to have a lot of 100% yes and 100% no attitudes.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases. > I have no answer. The answer is: ten years into it, there isn't a use case except crime. And I was working in the field writing code, code that's still in use in XRP, in 2014. I'm not ignorant. Doesn't it make you stop and think that you weren't able to come up with a use case? ---- > Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? Oh, I can answer this question because I've been using computers since the 1970s! The first time I saw email I was so blown away I couldn't believe it. Sending messages to people anywhere in the world, in an instant, for free? The web, same thing. YouTube, same thing. Friendster, MySpace - same thing. I can hang with my friends, and maybe get laid! Skype - free video conferencing? I was blown awawy! ---- But if you had told me in 2001 that in 2021, I could buy one of 7400 different currencies, issued by anonymous individuals, with absolutely no legal guarantees or safeguards, relying on computer code that even experts have trouble validating, with no market makers, no assets, no cash flows, no liquidation value, I would have asked, "Why would anyone do this?" Crime. The only application for cryptocurrency is crime - tax evasion, money laundering, drugs, weapons, bribery.
billjings 5y ago
> 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. The claim you are referring to here doesn't say that the technology is valueless. It says that the individual assets - the NFTs, the Bitcoins - are valueless. This is a meaningful distinction, because the premise that a global decentralized unit of exchange is valuable doesn't connect at all with what value the individual coins in that exchange system should have.
- jw1224 5y ago
  Fiat currency, in essence, is equally valueless. It only has inherent value because enough people agree that it does. Bitcoin is no different (and in fact has several advantages over fiat, giving it further value).
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    You know, I wish that there were a requirement for people to read just one book on economics before blathering about cryptocurrencies. The idea that the US government's power to tax all of American commerce is "valueless" shows that you simply haven't thought for even a few seconds about anything in the field.
    - jw1224 5y ago
      > You know, I wish that there were a requirement for people to read just one book on economics before blathering about cryptocurrencies Well you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve read plenty of books on economics, and hey — I even hold a qualification in it! Just like the “value” inherent in fiat currencies, we grant “power” to the government because enough people agree to do so. This is real value, but nonetheless arbitrarily granted. Hence why I qualified my statement by saying “in essence” — just a bit of vital nuance you happened to miss. Thanks for the chuckle though, I did laugh at the notion that after 9 years in crypto, I “haven’t thought for even a few seconds” about it :)
cslarson 5y ago
in the last 24hrs i, - funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account. - joined a dao to bid on the last privately held copy of the US Constitution. - claimed an airdrop representing some control of a protocol i had used - borrowed stables against volatile collateral - repaid loans, shored up collateral (market went down) - many token swaps (stable <-> stable, volatile <-> stable) the hn crowd should be leading discussion on the ethical implications of the technology but it is stuck where it was like 10 years ago. it is very strange. but i guess this happened to slashdot too.
- kranke155 5y ago
  HN has decided to completely fail at crypto collectively. They are missing out on the entirety of the Next Big Thing .
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    If it is your intention to convince people on HN that you're not running a scam, refraining from FOMO-based tactics would be a good start.
    - kranke155 5y ago
      I wasn’t using FOMO at all, just saying that when you get deep into decentralised applications, it’s hard to understand why folks don’t see the huge opportunity. I’m also “not running” crypto since that’s impossible ?
- hhmc 5y ago
  - funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account. If they have no bank account, how do they convert ETH into something actually useful to them (presumably Turkish Lira)?
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Sell it to a neighbor for cash?
skybrian 5y ago
It's not that there's no value, it's that the intrinsic value is unknown and can't be derived from investor speculation. When investors get over-enthusiastic it usually ends when the fundamentals don't turn out the way they hoped. Nothing like that seems to be going on here. Prices seem to be essentially indeterminate and disconnected from non-financial use cases. (When people do talk about use cases they are typically "inside the casino," essentially another game for investors to play.) Casinos and gaming are big businesses so clearly there is some value. But normally there's a way to calculate the value of a gaming business that's independent of the quirks of the in-game economy. Not so here.
groby_b 5y ago
So your answer to the statement that most blockchain technology is exploitation of verbal ambiguity and appeal to emotion is... verbal ambiguity and appeal to emotion? The claim is that there is no traditional valuation model that assigns any value to cryptocurrencies. The only way to refute it is to show that yes, such a valuation model exists. Until then, it's Goop but for tech.
- cslarson 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency (dumb term) just means token - it is a very broad concept. Tokens can have stable value pegged to a fiat, or represent share of a company, or a non-fungible item like a house, or a fungible share of a house, or claim on profits from a financial protocol, or memecoin, or a way to pay for transactions. Of course traditional valuation models can be assigned - it just depends on the characteristics of the token in question.
  - jw1224 5y ago
    Exactly this. I see so many people conflating NFTs with “expensive JPEGs”… No, an NFT is a cryptographically-secured representation of ownership of an economic asset. Yes… It also happens that there’s a ton of money being ploughed into weird, niche, expensive digital art. But this has now created an economic market in a space where previously one was not possible, by virtue of the fact you could never prove something was original, unique, or “yours”.
    - groby_b 5y ago
      Except most digital art lacks provenance in the first place, so you paid for a cryptographically-secured link to a bunch of bits somebody claims are original. (It turns out an https link on a domain you own does the same work) The lack of provable provenance means that a good chunk of NFT "art" is actually stolen from the artists who do the work. Bored Ape demonstrated that the theft of NFT art is easy, and the supposed ironclad ownership can easily be changed by the sites listing the art work - because they can just decide that those ironclad bits you hold aren't really yours. At which point you have a central authority arbitrating ownership, which is even worse than what the art world has right now. It's certainly a lovely place for all sorts of cons, but as economic asset or cryptographic representation of ownership it is an utter and complete failure. You still can't prove something's original, unique, or yours. It just has a thin veneer of technobabble to hide that fact.
TomSwirly 5y ago
> It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Translation: "I have no argument for why my Dunning-Krugerands should be worth anything, so instead I'll just be insulting and superior."

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.
- nathias 5y ago
  as someone that was on IRC at the time, no it wasn't obviously cool, it was and remains worse in every aspect to irc. FB succeeded because it ignored the internet as it existed and conquered it for normies.
foobarbecue 5y ago
> wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? Nah. It was obvious to me from my first encounter with text-based internet that this was going to be a social phenomenon that would link the world together. BBS, forums, myspace were all incremental improvements. Facebook just caught the wave with the right timing and did friend recommendations effectively.
kranke155 5y ago
The media has been conducting a half decade hit job on crypto and people bought it. To quote someone smarter than me on Twitter - the world was FUDded out of the biggest investment opportunity in their lifetime.
api 5y ago
Not everyone got the web, chat, or social networks, but loads of people did and people from all backgrounds. Things like Geocities, AIM, MySpace, early Facebook, early search engines, etc. had millions of users very rapidly. They penetrated beyond the tech-savvy early adopters within years. Cryptocurrency is more than 10 years old and hasn't seen anything like this. The vast majority of what I see in cryptocurrency is just speculation. It all seems like a giant very complex over-engineered online casino app. Yes there are use cases outside of that but they seem much more niche. The people saying "there is no use case" are over-arguing their position, but I think the actual non-gambling use case is small.
- throwaway6977 5y ago
  I strongly suggest doing a comparison of O(log n)-style adoption curves between Bitcoin, and say- cell phones, computer networking, or really any innovation that became ubiquitous and for which we have the data... I think you'd be surprised at the similarities.
  - manbart 5y ago
    Have any such graphs to share?
  - JackFr 5y ago
    Where we measure adoption by cups of coffee purchase with bitcoin. [1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1322925/is-there-proof-show-that-log-x-is-undefined-and-make-no-sense-at-x-0 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1322925/is-there-pr...
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    If I look at the adoption curves of cell phones or computer networking, I see a steady increase. If I look at the adoption curve of Bitcoin as means for payment, the peak was multiple years ago when many companies in my area experimented with accepting it as payment - I could order a pizza with Bitcoin, I could buy an airline ticket, etc; but now those companies have stopped accepting them. There are multiple niches of business which do accept Bitcoin, but overall there has been a significant decrease at least in practical use - there has been some upsurge in digital asset related transactions, but in any case the adoption is certainly not growing exponentially like for other growing technologies, if we look at transaction rates at e.g. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-second https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-secon... then we're at the same level as of 2017, and below the peak.
simias 5y ago
>What's the value of having friends I see daily online? None. The value is in having people want to watch ads in order to see what their friends are up to. The only monetization scheme for the blockchain so far seems to build pyramid schemes or making fees from running off-chain, centralized exchanges.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  That’s exactly my point. Who would have thought about that?
deweller 5y ago
So true. Every technology revolution seems like a toy at first. Consider the personal computer, the spreadsheet, the internet, the smart phone. Only time will tell if cryptocurrencies will join this list.
- brabel 5y ago
  All those things became mainstream in a matter of a few years from the time they became affordable and available to most people. Crypto currencies have existed for well over a decade now, have been available to anyone who wants in for a long time, but still, all we see them being used for is market speculation. I would've loved to use digital money to buy stuff, but it simply isn't a serious option today in most online shops as far as I can see... even if it was, I currently see zero reason to use that instead of my credit card (which has almost no interest, very low fees, and the guarantee of my bank that fraud will be reverted). Given that, why the hell people still believe it might eventually take over the world??? It just won't! It's pretty clear IMHO that it is, and will remain for probably a long time, a ponzi scheme of sorts, or to be a bit more generous, a gambling platform.
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    > all we see them being used for is market speculation. And crime. Don't forget crime.
Kalium 5y ago
We tech people see a lot of ideas. Most of them are superficially exciting. For example, a way of detecting when counterfeit parts with substandard specs are used in farming equipment. Maybe a music-centered social network for users of a particular music player. Many of them go on to be either wastes of time or much, much worse. Suddenly detecting substandard parts is DRM for John Deere tractors and the social network is iTunes Ping. Most ideas fail. This doesn't make them bad ideas or the people creating them bad people. It just means we've collectively learned that most ideas will fail and there are some fairly common reasons for this.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
Part of the problem is that much of the cryptocurrency hype, some might even say most, actually is just a bunch of scams and pump and dump nonsense. The people who are in it for a get rich quick scheme are the enemy, and most of the people who expect to get rich quick will end up on the bottom of the pyramid. But that isn't to say that there's nothing there. It's like saying that the internet is worthless and should be destroyed because it has pornography and copyright infringement. It's not that it doesn't; it's that there are still things it's good for even though it does.
- brabel 5y ago
  > the internet is worthless and should be destroyed because it has pornography and copyright infringement. Tangential to the topic, but pornography is not a crime like copyright infrigement, or even something intrinsically bad as you seem to imply, for whatever reason! There's a lot of good taste porn out there. It has a high value of entertainment to a lot of people... I would compare it to something like gaming or sports rather than copyright infrigement.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
megameter 5y ago
I think the analogy of cryptocurrency's position to the 90's internet is the wrong one to pick, because it describes an environment with some maturity and acceptance in its base technologies, primed for waves of consumer commerce to take hold. The proper example to pick is personal computing circa 1982. When you look at the envisioned uses of personal computing, the advertisements really reach: it helps your child learn. You can store recipes on it. Balance your checkbook. Write documents. And (whispers) play games. As well, one can occasionally find reassurances in the literature that the computer is your friend, not the back-office monster that billed you incorrectly last month. Would you feel convinced? Many people saw no use for computers in their lives. And the reality of personal computing at that point was that it was mostly a nerd hobby, with a few niches where it could have immediate, direct impact(white collar information work). Professional graphic design functions, audio and video were all still years away, far out of reach on the consumer platforms. It all cost too much - the computers, accessories, the networking options. But it's also a representative inflection point: microprocessors as a product category had only been available for a little over a decade, and it only took about a decade from there for the embrace of all things digital to kick into high gear with the onset of commodity PC clones, the Wintel monopoly, and then the Internet. Cryptocurrency is seeing a trajectory like that - we're nearing 12 years in and, like early personal computing, it's understood by few, often advertised deceptively, and seeing massive amounts of growth and capital investment. The applications are gradually appearing, and industry incumbents are hopping onto the bandwagon, but it's sneered at by experienced code jockeys: they work with much bigger and fancier hardware than these toys. Nobody is sure of the business model to use. Prices are all over the map.
- allturtles 5y ago
  > The proper example to pick is personal computing circa 1982. When you look at the envisioned uses of personal computing, the advertisements really reach: it helps your child learn. You can store recipes on it. Balance your checkbook. Write documents. And (whispers) play games. Okay so what is the "play games" of crypto today? It seems like the only equivalent is "criminal activity." Unless you count speculation on crypto itself, but that isn't a "use." Computer users in 1982 were not buying IBM PCs, leaving them boxed in their closet, and then re-selling them for 10 or 100x the price in a year or two.
serverholic 5y ago
Wow this is exactly the example I use. Explaining crypto use-cases is like explaining the use-cases for the internet in the 90s. "But I can just write a check or hand someone cash, why would I need to send money over the internet?" "Amazon? But I can go buy what I need down the street. Seems like a lot of work just to save a few minutes."
- brabel 5y ago
  > "But I can just write a check or hand someone cash, why would I need to send money over the internet?" But today, I can just use my credit card to pay for anything instantly, anywhere in the world... who the fuck still uses checks?? Why would I want to use crypto and lose all the protections I have from my card company, while having to wait minutes for transactions to be confirmed instead of milli-seconds?? And with the risk of my "wallet" being hacked in an instant and losing everything, without a chance for appealing to anyone for the funds to be returned?? Do you seriously consider that an attractive option to anyone, in the way that the Internet or Amazon (actually, online shops in general!) were?? Seems completely delusional to me.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    That quote was from the perspective of someone learning about the internet in the 90s. My point is it's hard for people to imagine the implications of a technology. > Why would I want to use crypto and lose all the protections I have from my card company The current system is kinda crazy if you think about it. We give out our credit card numbers all the time and don't think twice about it. These protections you speak of are mostly a bandaid on a flawed system. Additionally, we give all the power to a central authority which is ok until it isn't. My buddy does freelance work and has gotten screwed because these "protections" were used by shitty clients to get their money back after he handed over the project. Finally, crypto has other protections like smart wallets that implement a sort of password recovery feature. The difference is you have control over how you want to use it. > while having to wait minutes for transactions to be confirmed instead of milli-seconds Crypto transactions appear almost instantly. Do you really need to wait minutes to fully confirm a taco bell transaction? Besides, Ethereum Layer 2 will help out with this quite a bit by boosting performance. Blockchain scaling is still in its infancy. > And with the risk of my "wallet" being hacked in an instant and losing everything Then use a savings wallet and a checking wallet. Or have 100 wallets. It's up to you how you want to structure it. Also people get hacked all the time due to poor passwords. How is this any different than, say, someone finding your bank account password? Or a phishing email? I imagine over time services will crop up from trusted providers that will smooth over the UX here. For example, walking you through setting up your wallet. Also smart wallets like I mentioned above. > without a chance for appealing to anyone for the funds to be returned If that really worries you then there will be centralized services for you to use with systems in place to prevent this. Wallets are just a lego brick that you can use to build many different kinds of services and systems. > Do you seriously consider that an attractive option to anyone, in the way that the Internet or Amazon Yes. We are just starting to see the implications of the technology and it's inspiring IMO.
unemphysbro 5y ago
Smart contracts are really really really cool! I was able to write a contract to take out a loan, distribute funds to various pools and pull the funds out. Having that sort of atomic control over financial transactions or data is simply amazing. Anyone with the knowledge can do it. Just understand the vulnerabilities and caveats with the languages/apis that interact with the various blockchains.
- skulk 5y ago
  After you pass a certain threshold, it makes zero sense to trust your assets to code that _you, personally_ haven't 100% authoritatively verified to be bug-free. Traditional financial institutions don't work like this; if there's an obvious "bug" in bank logic that lets someone take all of your assets, it gets rolled back. Doing away with this protection is fine, but the big bucks will stay away.
  - unemphysbro 5y ago
    Of course not, the dao hack is a case in point. I am happy the ecosystem is spurring growth in formal verification. It's still the wild west and I encourage anyone interested to swing a lasso.
quantified 5y ago
Facebook is less a technology than an application. Blockchain and stuff is technology, maybe there are good applications.
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
> 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?". It's probably easy to say with hindsight, but I honestly don't think so. The stereotype of teenagers (especially girls) spending too much time on the phone is older than personal computers, let alone Facebook. AIM and ICQ were quite successful in the 90s, and LiveJournal launched in 1999.
jimkleiber 5y ago
I think for me the problem is splitting people into binary camps of skeptic or supporter. Personally, I have my strongest reactions of skepticism when people seem to declare blockchains as a god, an inevitable coming of blissful revolution. I have a similar, altho less extreme reaction, when people tell me there is absolutely no value or future and that the whole space is pure bs and fraud. I wish we didn't see the world as so us/them, for/against, good/bad. I think I mostly fight against those perspectives and this space seems to have a lot of 100% yes and 100% no attitudes.
TomSwirly 5y ago
> "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases. > I have no answer. The answer is: ten years into it, there isn't a use case except crime. And I was working in the field writing code, code that's still in use in XRP, in 2014. I'm not ignorant. Doesn't it make you stop and think that you weren't able to come up with a use case? ---- > Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? Oh, I can answer this question because I've been using computers since the 1970s! The first time I saw email I was so blown away I couldn't believe it. Sending messages to people anywhere in the world, in an instant, for free? The web, same thing. YouTube, same thing. Friendster, MySpace - same thing. I can hang with my friends, and maybe get laid! Skype - free video conferencing? I was blown awawy! ---- But if you had told me in 2001 that in 2021, I could buy one of 7400 different currencies, issued by anonymous individuals, with absolutely no legal guarantees or safeguards, relying on computer code that even experts have trouble validating, with no market makers, no assets, no cash flows, no liquidation value, I would have asked, "Why would anyone do this?" Crime. The only application for cryptocurrency is crime - tax evasion, money laundering, drugs, weapons, bribery.

billjings 5y ago

> 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. The claim you are referring to here doesn't say that the technology is valueless. It says that the individual assets - the NFTs, the Bitcoins - are valueless. This is a meaningful distinction, because the premise that a global decentralized unit of exchange is valuable doesn't connect at all with what value the individual coins in that exchange system should have.

jw1224 5y ago
Fiat currency, in essence, is equally valueless. It only has inherent value because enough people agree that it does. Bitcoin is no different (and in fact has several advantages over fiat, giving it further value).
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  You know, I wish that there were a requirement for people to read just one book on economics before blathering about cryptocurrencies. The idea that the US government's power to tax all of American commerce is "valueless" shows that you simply haven't thought for even a few seconds about anything in the field.
  - jw1224 5y ago
    > You know, I wish that there were a requirement for people to read just one book on economics before blathering about cryptocurrencies Well you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve read plenty of books on economics, and hey — I even hold a qualification in it! Just like the “value” inherent in fiat currencies, we grant “power” to the government because enough people agree to do so. This is real value, but nonetheless arbitrarily granted. Hence why I qualified my statement by saying “in essence” — just a bit of vital nuance you happened to miss. Thanks for the chuckle though, I did laugh at the notion that after 9 years in crypto, I “haven’t thought for even a few seconds” about it :)

cslarson 5y ago

in the last 24hrs i, - funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account. - joined a dao to bid on the last privately held copy of the US Constitution. - claimed an airdrop representing some control of a protocol i had used - borrowed stables against volatile collateral - repaid loans, shored up collateral (market went down) - many token swaps (stable <-> stable, volatile <-> stable) the hn crowd should be leading discussion on the ethical implications of the technology but it is stuck where it was like 10 years ago. it is very strange. but i guess this happened to slashdot too.

kranke155 5y ago
HN has decided to completely fail at crypto collectively. They are missing out on the entirety of the Next Big Thing .
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  If it is your intention to convince people on HN that you're not running a scam, refraining from FOMO-based tactics would be a good start.
  - kranke155 5y ago
    I wasn’t using FOMO at all, just saying that when you get deep into decentralised applications, it’s hard to understand why folks don’t see the huge opportunity. I’m also “not running” crypto since that’s impossible ?
hhmc 5y ago
- funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account. If they have no bank account, how do they convert ETH into something actually useful to them (presumably Turkish Lira)?
- fsflover 5y ago
  Sell it to a neighbor for cash?

skybrian 5y ago

It's not that there's no value, it's that the intrinsic value is unknown and can't be derived from investor speculation. When investors get over-enthusiastic it usually ends when the fundamentals don't turn out the way they hoped. Nothing like that seems to be going on here. Prices seem to be essentially indeterminate and disconnected from non-financial use cases. (When people do talk about use cases they are typically "inside the casino," essentially another game for investors to play.) Casinos and gaming are big businesses so clearly there is some value. But normally there's a way to calculate the value of a gaming business that's independent of the quirks of the in-game economy. Not so here.

groby_b 5y ago

So your answer to the statement that most blockchain technology is exploitation of verbal ambiguity and appeal to emotion is... verbal ambiguity and appeal to emotion? The claim is that there is no traditional valuation model that assigns any value to cryptocurrencies. The only way to refute it is to show that yes, such a valuation model exists. Until then, it's Goop but for tech.

cslarson 5y ago
Cryptocurrency (dumb term) just means token - it is a very broad concept. Tokens can have stable value pegged to a fiat, or represent share of a company, or a non-fungible item like a house, or a fungible share of a house, or claim on profits from a financial protocol, or memecoin, or a way to pay for transactions. Of course traditional valuation models can be assigned - it just depends on the characteristics of the token in question.
- jw1224 5y ago
  Exactly this. I see so many people conflating NFTs with “expensive JPEGs”… No, an NFT is a cryptographically-secured representation of ownership of an economic asset. Yes… It also happens that there’s a ton of money being ploughed into weird, niche, expensive digital art. But this has now created an economic market in a space where previously one was not possible, by virtue of the fact you could never prove something was original, unique, or “yours”.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    Except most digital art lacks provenance in the first place, so you paid for a cryptographically-secured link to a bunch of bits somebody claims are original. (It turns out an https link on a domain you own does the same work) The lack of provable provenance means that a good chunk of NFT "art" is actually stolen from the artists who do the work. Bored Ape demonstrated that the theft of NFT art is easy, and the supposed ironclad ownership can easily be changed by the sites listing the art work - because they can just decide that those ironclad bits you hold aren't really yours. At which point you have a central authority arbitrating ownership, which is even worse than what the art world has right now. It's certainly a lovely place for all sorts of cons, but as economic asset or cryptographic representation of ownership it is an utter and complete failure. You still can't prove something's original, unique, or yours. It just has a thin veneer of technobabble to hide that fact.

TomSwirly 5y ago

> It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Translation: "I have no argument for why my Dunning-Krugerands should be worth anything, so instead I'll just be insulting and superior."