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It would be nice if people could just talk about technical blockchain stuff without the most upvotes comment every time being a wholly unrelated tangent about h

It would be nice if people could just talk about technical blockchain stuff without the most upvotes comment every time being a wholly unrelated tangent about how cryptocurrencies are useless. I agree they’re useless, I just also find the tech interesting and find the copypaste comments in every thread pretty tiresome. Currently 2/3 top-level comments have nothing to do with TFA

rapsey 5y ago
> I just also find the tech interesting and find the copypaste comments in every thread pretty tiresome. Most people do not find useless tech to be interesting.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Then why do esoteric conlangs reach front page? I hope most people on HN find tech interesting regardless of practicality
  - mminer237 5y ago
    Because they are funny and tongue-in-cheek. If people were always seriously advocating that programming in PowerPoint was the future, they would probably be less popular.
    - exdsq 5y ago
      I hope the future definition of ‘hacker’ is not making slightly more performant line-of-business applications. New languages that run over decentralized systems are cool regardless of utility, and I hope can be appreciated as such rather than having bear vs bull comments
      - gizmo385 5y ago
        People aren't talking about crypto currencies in the same way they talk about esoteric languages - those are consistently framed as practically useless for-fun side projects. Crypto, on the other hand, is instead framed as a large scale revolution of our existing systems and pushed as something that should be used be people worldwide while having significant problems they many believe are very damaging on a societal level.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    TBH a (few) hundred votes are very far from "most users are interested in this". The more popular posts have upwards of 4k votes. https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
- neither_color 5y ago
  A lot of us got into tech as teens just fiddling around taking things apart and writing "useless" scripts.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  A large number of techs on the front page here every day are useless by any reasonable standard, so you're not really speaking for this community as a whole.
  - rapsey 5y ago
    And if any one of them would have gone on for 13 years people would be sick of the damn thing.
ur-whale 5y ago
> It would be nice if people could just talk about technical blockchain stuff without the most upvotes comment every time being a wholly unrelated tangent Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I haven't heard a single original crypto-contrarian argument in close to a year on HN. It's all "tulips, ponzi, useless, no real use case, only used by criminals, won't you think of the children" instead of actually trying to understand why an entire industry is being built from the ground up. Some folks here seem to believe that repeating things enough time will somehow make them real.
camgunz 5y ago
With a technology that is extremely damaging to the entire planet for no reason, when its advocates come into your community and try selling it, it's perfectly reasonable to shout them down. Like it or not, HN is an important forum. People with a fair amount of influence come here. Personally I'd like anyone perusing a cryptocurrency thread here to come away with the opinion that it's junk tech that roasts the planet, both because it's true and because climate change is a very serious problem. If the end result is that cryptocurrency discourse is effectively run out of HN, similar to phrenology or eugenics, that would delight me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Feel free to keep making this criticism of bitcoin, which has no path toward using anything but more and more energy over time. But ethereum's aggregate energy usage is not yet enormous enough to accuse it of roasting the planet, and it is in the final stages of switching to a consensus technology that is not energy inefficient. (And all the newer blockchains have already switched.)
  - camgunz 5y ago
    If Ethereum had as much use as Bitcoin it would use as much energy--probably more because of the extra processing power required by smart contracts. So this argument reduces to "Ethereum isn't popular so leave it alone", which doesn't make sense because you all are trying to make it popular. None of the PoS networks are popular outside of the crypto space, and almost certainly never will be. Most institutions are busy working on their own, highly centralized coins (e.g. Libra, whatever the PRC's coin is, etc) and aren't gonna adopt one of these anyway, so they're irrelevant. But if they were, they would have the same problems that any PoS network has: rich people control them. How exactly does that improve on the existing system?
    - pa7x1 5y ago
      Have you looked at the data before making the claims? Ethereum far surpasses in use Bitcoin by pretty much any metric you look. For example, in the last 24h Ethereum processed 1.24M of transactions and netted a revenue of $ 60M in transaction fees. Bitcoin processed 0.24M transactions in the same time period and netted a revenue of $ 0.88M. Source: messari.io The transition to PoS cuts the energy consumption by 99.95%, btw.
sanderjd 5y ago
I'm honestly pretty ambivalent about this. My initial interest in this was of this purely technical sort you're advocating for. But that was almost a decade ago in '12/'13. So yeah, I'm now much more interested in seeing what people are doing with this that is useful. I'm actually not in this boat of thinking nobody has done anything useful with blockchains yet, but I do think their usefulness seems to severely lag their hype, and I am more interested in the discussion of use cases than pure technology at this point. But I also agree that it's tiresome that this same discussion is had on every article related to it.

rapsey 5y ago

> I just also find the tech interesting and find the copypaste comments in every thread pretty tiresome. Most people do not find useless tech to be interesting.

exdsq 5y ago
Then why do esoteric conlangs reach front page? I hope most people on HN find tech interesting regardless of practicality
- mminer237 5y ago
  Because they are funny and tongue-in-cheek. If people were always seriously advocating that programming in PowerPoint was the future, they would probably be less popular.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    I hope the future definition of ‘hacker’ is not making slightly more performant line-of-business applications. New languages that run over decentralized systems are cool regardless of utility, and I hope can be appreciated as such rather than having bear vs bull comments
    - gizmo385 5y ago
      People aren't talking about crypto currencies in the same way they talk about esoteric languages - those are consistently framed as practically useless for-fun side projects. Crypto, on the other hand, is instead framed as a large scale revolution of our existing systems and pushed as something that should be used be people worldwide while having significant problems they many believe are very damaging on a societal level.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  TBH a (few) hundred votes are very far from "most users are interested in this". The more popular posts have upwards of 4k votes. https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
neither_color 5y ago
A lot of us got into tech as teens just fiddling around taking things apart and writing "useless" scripts.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
A large number of techs on the front page here every day are useless by any reasonable standard, so you're not really speaking for this community as a whole.
- rapsey 5y ago
  And if any one of them would have gone on for 13 years people would be sick of the damn thing.

ur-whale 5y ago

> It would be nice if people could just talk about technical blockchain stuff without the most upvotes comment every time being a wholly unrelated tangent Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I haven't heard a single original crypto-contrarian argument in close to a year on HN. It's all "tulips, ponzi, useless, no real use case, only used by criminals, won't you think of the children" instead of actually trying to understand why an entire industry is being built from the ground up. Some folks here seem to believe that repeating things enough time will somehow make them real.

camgunz 5y ago

With a technology that is extremely damaging to the entire planet for no reason, when its advocates come into your community and try selling it, it's perfectly reasonable to shout them down. Like it or not, HN is an important forum. People with a fair amount of influence come here. Personally I'd like anyone perusing a cryptocurrency thread here to come away with the opinion that it's junk tech that roasts the planet, both because it's true and because climate change is a very serious problem. If the end result is that cryptocurrency discourse is effectively run out of HN, similar to phrenology or eugenics, that would delight me.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sanderjd 5y ago
Feel free to keep making this criticism of bitcoin, which has no path toward using anything but more and more energy over time. But ethereum's aggregate energy usage is not yet enormous enough to accuse it of roasting the planet, and it is in the final stages of switching to a consensus technology that is not energy inefficient. (And all the newer blockchains have already switched.)
- camgunz 5y ago
  If Ethereum had as much use as Bitcoin it would use as much energy--probably more because of the extra processing power required by smart contracts. So this argument reduces to "Ethereum isn't popular so leave it alone", which doesn't make sense because you all are trying to make it popular. None of the PoS networks are popular outside of the crypto space, and almost certainly never will be. Most institutions are busy working on their own, highly centralized coins (e.g. Libra, whatever the PRC's coin is, etc) and aren't gonna adopt one of these anyway, so they're irrelevant. But if they were, they would have the same problems that any PoS network has: rich people control them. How exactly does that improve on the existing system?
  - pa7x1 5y ago
    Have you looked at the data before making the claims? Ethereum far surpasses in use Bitcoin by pretty much any metric you look. For example, in the last 24h Ethereum processed 1.24M of transactions and netted a revenue of $ 60M in transaction fees. Bitcoin processed 0.24M transactions in the same time period and netted a revenue of $ 0.88M. Source: messari.io The transition to PoS cuts the energy consumption by 99.95%, btw.

sanderjd 5y ago

I'm honestly pretty ambivalent about this. My initial interest in this was of this purely technical sort you're advocating for. But that was almost a decade ago in '12/'13. So yeah, I'm now much more interested in seeing what people are doing with this that is useful. I'm actually not in this boat of thinking nobody has done anything useful with blockchains yet, but I do think their usefulness seems to severely lag their hype, and I am more interested in the discussion of use cases than pure technology at this point. But I also agree that it's tiresome that this same discussion is had on every article related to it.