5 ms·

Side note but I wish hacketnews wasn’t always so anti-crypto. Makes it a pretty depressing forum for those of us working in the space earnestly

by exdsq 5y ago

yob89 5y ago
edent 5y ago
Earnestly for what? What problem can it solve that a central database can't? Half the scams I've seen are stopped because a central 3rd party (like OpenSea) refuses to deal in the "stolen" property. At which point, there's no decentralisation. Look, I'm pro-decentralisation and pro-cryptography. But no one working in your space has built anything which has convinced me you're on to something brilliant. I hope I'm wrong though. Because if not - an awful lot of money, talent, and goodwill have been wasted.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  To be fair to OP, your mind appears to be made up, and you can probably admit that, if youre honest with yourself, you don't earnestly look into the field much, right?
  - edent 5y ago
    I'm cyrrently studying for a Certified Blockchain Professional exam - see https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/certified-blockchain-professional/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/certified-blockchain-profession... My mind isn't made up. But I'm struggling to find use cases which fit the Blockchain model.
    - exdsq 5y ago
      A third of GDP in Nepal is money sent by nationals working abroad and 1/4 of that is taken through high international banking fees. Use stable coins on a blockchain to get around those and you’ll see a 1/12 increase in GDP? Phone credit based economies still exist in Africa. They have internet but no banking infrastructure. Using a blockchain allows people to create accounts and build a credit history as opposed to phone credit balances. The Gates foundation mentioned a lot of pain points in direct giving was the fees taken along the way. Again, something that could be looked at with crypto. Digital licenses - they aren’t transferable because the resale market doesn’t give returns to the creators. With NFT licenses you could trade them with fixed royalties going back to the creator. Etc
      - edent 5y ago
        Are the "gas" fees and similar better or worse than international banking fees?
        exdsq 5y ago
        Use a proof-of-stake chain and they're a few dollars, so much cheaper. That's why Visa and JP Morgan are hiring to build a blockchain to run inter-bank transactions to get around them.
    - anon9001 5y ago
      Ok, I'll bite because you seem earnest. One killer feature that doesn't get nearly enough hype is uptime. Check out these stats: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ The last incident to cause downtime for bitcoin was in 2013. Ethereum has never had downtime. Another is speed. People like to talk about how slow web3 is, but even Ethereum is super fast compared to a traditional banking transfer. Traditional accounting isn't expected to be instant, so it has a lot of waiting periods and days-long SLAs. Also trust. Not everyone can trust their local bank or local government. And even if they can, why should the default preference be to have a company with a spreadsheet tell me how many assets they have marked to my name? I'd rather have a decentralized ledger that doesn't require me to place my trust in an individual company or government. You can't really build these features without some sort of "blockchain". You could try to put together a consortium of companies or individuals to run a shared database with consensus and vote about administration, having it backed by contracts that would be enforceable by world governments. That'd get you 95% of the way there, but it'd still be less good than a public blockchain run by volunteers that provides the same trustless features.
      - edent 5y ago
        Speed? In the UK I can send money for free to any other UK bank account instantly. Not everywhere is as slow and expensive as the USA. Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful. Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum? There are some amazing theoretical gains for Blockchain technology. I hope they become practical in the near future.
        anon9001 5y ago
        > Speed? In the UK I can send money for free to any other UK bank account instantly. Not everywhere is as slow and expensive as the USA. If you believe that all the world is really the divine right of the queen, I suppose sending payments instantly within the UK is more than sufficient. > Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful. Way more powerful, but practically useless, as 100% uptime globally is the requirement. > Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum? Blockchains completely prevent chargeback fraud by simply not allowing for reversal of transactions. You might not want this feature if you're buying a cup of coffee, but it's very important if you're dealing with large sums.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Some of us just like to work on distributed systems, formal methods, compilers, etc… I’m skeptical about the whole thing and so are many colleagues I’ve worked with but the technical challenges are interesting.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    You should work on actual problems, then not only will the technical challenges be interesting, but the result delivery and client satisfaction challenge will be too !! Don't you dream of doing work that people actually use ?
    - exdsq 5y ago
      I donate a lot of money to charity (>10% a year) - that’s my way of having an impact. If I can make that money working on cool tech problems and without scamming people then I am very happy. If the tech also becomes useful then that’s awesome, that’s just added to the upside. If it doesn’t, well I’ve done a lot more good with my career than if I took a lower paying job to make some web app slightly more performant for people to buy sweaters.
      - xwolfi 5y ago
        Dude if you weren't busy scamming them, that'd be one less source of adversarial financial risk and you may not have to throw some crumbs at them. Charity is when the taxpayers failed :( And I'm glad at least you helped people buy clothes, that sounds more rewarding than selling them debt and misery :) And I've sold personal loans, I know :D
        exdsq 5y ago
        I don’t scam people and I don’t work for projects that scam people. No one I know scams people. Some projects and people might, sure, but I’m not part of that. If I knew of a scam I'd be very vocal about it.
        5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
consp 5y ago
I'm not anti-crypto per-se and my guess is most people like me aren't opposed to the ideas behind it but the reality is there is massive fraud(-adjacent) stuff happening and while some of the ideas might be ethically noble, most of them aren't. The result being (for me at least) that skepticism is best.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Scepticism is fine but is pointing out bugs in crypto really so interesting 10% of the top page is almost always related to that topic?
  - e1g 5y ago
    https://rekt.news https://rekt.news articles dive into most hacks to describes how the relevant contracts/crypto/logic works, what's the suspect code, and which parts in the architecture were abused. This is on-brand for "Hacker News" and intellectually stimulating. But this submission got nuked. It went to #4 in an hour, and then disappeared. Maybe we need decentralized HN!
xwolfi 5y ago
Sorry milord, continue working earnestly a little bit more before we have to bow and kiss your golden moonshaped shoes. What do you guys work on all day long ? How to convert a DOGE to USDT to BTC then to a bored ape NFT looking to the right ? Hope you dont work at SafeMoon or other such "project" you guys call "crypto" because there's 1 hash function somewhere and one key elsewhere :p
- exdsq 5y ago
  > Sorry milord, continue working earnestly a little bit more before we have to bow and kiss your golden moonshaped shoes. You see, this is the issue I have. This is just twattish behaviour. > What do you guys work on all day long? Pretty interesting problems. In the last year or two I've worked with some of the founding designers of Haskell on compiler profiling. I've heard from Leslie Lamport on using TLA+ to formally prove consensus algorithms. I profiled worst-case-performance of cloud infrastructure across the world. Stephen Wolfram and Vint Cerf gave internal talks to us at monthly learning sessions. I've written systems code in Rust, Haskell, Golang, F#, and multiple other 'cool' languages. I got to ask the guy who introduced monads to functional programming wtf is a monad? I spoke to SPJ about programming. Been taught property-based testing by the creator of QuickCheck. Etc... It's a really cool space if you like tech with some great minds in it.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Where do you work? seems exciting.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    > Pretty interesting problems. In the last year or two I've worked with some of the founding designers of Haskell on compiler profiling. I've heard from Leslie Lamport on using TLA+ to formally prove consensus algorithms. I profiled worst-case-performance of cloud infrastructure across the world. Stephen Wolfram and Vint Cerf gave internal talks to us at monthly learning sessions. I've written systems code in Rust, Haskell, Golang, F#, and multiple other 'cool' languages. I got to ask the guy who introduced monads to functional programming wtf is a monad? I spoke to SPJ about programming. Been taught property-based testing by the creator of QuickCheck. Etc... It's a really cool space if you like tech with some great minds in it. Sounds a lot like university, what do you guys produce as a result ? Do you work at BlockOne, I hear a lot of such dilettante feedback where work is more about learning fun things at random without any specific purpose. I mean from compiler profiling to property testing, do you have time to focus on a tight deadline ? How many systems do you focus on, if you have to touch 4+ languages just to apply a change ? I hope at least it's not each end to end feature that requires all those languages -_-. But at least, good you accept to work on all of them, problem where I work, where we do more classical Python/Java/C#/JS,is I have trouble to convince my colleagues just to touch a second one and de-specialize.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pontifier 5y ago
I wish I could still feel good about crypto. Perhaps you should look at why people become anti-crypto. Most of us have had bad experiences with it and have decided that the problems outweigh the benefits. I still think it's an interesting experiment, but I won't invest another cent in it.

Side note but I wish hacketnews wasn’t always so anti-crypto. Makes it a pretty depressing forum for those of us working in the space earnestly

by exdsq 5y ago

Side note but I wish hacketnews wasn’t always so anti-crypto. Makes it a pretty depressing forum for those of us working in the space earnestly

yob89 5y ago

edent 5y ago

Earnestly for what? What problem can it solve that a central database can't? Half the scams I've seen are stopped because a central 3rd party (like OpenSea) refuses to deal in the "stolen" property. At which point, there's no decentralisation. Look, I'm pro-decentralisation and pro-cryptography. But no one working in your space has built anything which has convinced me you're on to something brilliant. I hope I'm wrong though. Because if not - an awful lot of money, talent, and goodwill have been wasted.

fartcannon 5y ago
To be fair to OP, your mind appears to be made up, and you can probably admit that, if youre honest with yourself, you don't earnestly look into the field much, right?
- edent 5y ago
  I'm cyrrently studying for a Certified Blockchain Professional exam - see https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/certified-blockchain-professional/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/certified-blockchain-profession... My mind isn't made up. But I'm struggling to find use cases which fit the Blockchain model.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    A third of GDP in Nepal is money sent by nationals working abroad and 1/4 of that is taken through high international banking fees. Use stable coins on a blockchain to get around those and you’ll see a 1/12 increase in GDP? Phone credit based economies still exist in Africa. They have internet but no banking infrastructure. Using a blockchain allows people to create accounts and build a credit history as opposed to phone credit balances. The Gates foundation mentioned a lot of pain points in direct giving was the fees taken along the way. Again, something that could be looked at with crypto. Digital licenses - they aren’t transferable because the resale market doesn’t give returns to the creators. With NFT licenses you could trade them with fixed royalties going back to the creator. Etc
    - edent 5y ago
      Are the "gas" fees and similar better or worse than international banking fees?
      - exdsq 5y ago
        Use a proof-of-stake chain and they're a few dollars, so much cheaper. That's why Visa and JP Morgan are hiring to build a blockchain to run inter-bank transactions to get around them.
  - anon9001 5y ago
    Ok, I'll bite because you seem earnest. One killer feature that doesn't get nearly enough hype is uptime. Check out these stats: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ The last incident to cause downtime for bitcoin was in 2013. Ethereum has never had downtime. Another is speed. People like to talk about how slow web3 is, but even Ethereum is super fast compared to a traditional banking transfer. Traditional accounting isn't expected to be instant, so it has a lot of waiting periods and days-long SLAs. Also trust. Not everyone can trust their local bank or local government. And even if they can, why should the default preference be to have a company with a spreadsheet tell me how many assets they have marked to my name? I'd rather have a decentralized ledger that doesn't require me to place my trust in an individual company or government. You can't really build these features without some sort of "blockchain". You could try to put together a consortium of companies or individuals to run a shared database with consensus and vote about administration, having it backed by contracts that would be enforceable by world governments. That'd get you 95% of the way there, but it'd still be less good than a public blockchain run by volunteers that provides the same trustless features.
    - edent 5y ago
      Speed? In the UK I can send money for free to any other UK bank account instantly. Not everywhere is as slow and expensive as the USA. Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful. Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum? There are some amazing theoretical gains for Blockchain technology. I hope they become practical in the near future.
      - anon9001 5y ago
        > Speed? In the UK I can send money for free to any other UK bank account instantly. Not everywhere is as slow and expensive as the USA. If you believe that all the world is really the divine right of the queen, I suppose sending payments instantly within the UK is more than sufficient. > Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful. Way more powerful, but practically useless, as 100% uptime globally is the requirement. > Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum? Blockchains completely prevent chargeback fraud by simply not allowing for reversal of transactions. You might not want this feature if you're buying a cup of coffee, but it's very important if you're dealing with large sums.
exdsq 5y ago
Some of us just like to work on distributed systems, formal methods, compilers, etc… I’m skeptical about the whole thing and so are many colleagues I’ve worked with but the technical challenges are interesting.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  You should work on actual problems, then not only will the technical challenges be interesting, but the result delivery and client satisfaction challenge will be too !! Don't you dream of doing work that people actually use ?
  - exdsq 5y ago
    I donate a lot of money to charity (>10% a year) - that’s my way of having an impact. If I can make that money working on cool tech problems and without scamming people then I am very happy. If the tech also becomes useful then that’s awesome, that’s just added to the upside. If it doesn’t, well I’ve done a lot more good with my career than if I took a lower paying job to make some web app slightly more performant for people to buy sweaters.
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      Dude if you weren't busy scamming them, that'd be one less source of adversarial financial risk and you may not have to throw some crumbs at them. Charity is when the taxpayers failed :( And I'm glad at least you helped people buy clothes, that sounds more rewarding than selling them debt and misery :) And I've sold personal loans, I know :D
      - exdsq 5y ago
        I don’t scam people and I don’t work for projects that scam people. No one I know scams people. Some projects and people might, sure, but I’m not part of that. If I knew of a scam I'd be very vocal about it.
        5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

consp 5y ago

I'm not anti-crypto per-se and my guess is most people like me aren't opposed to the ideas behind it but the reality is there is massive fraud(-adjacent) stuff happening and while some of the ideas might be ethically noble, most of them aren't. The result being (for me at least) that skepticism is best.

exdsq 5y ago
Scepticism is fine but is pointing out bugs in crypto really so interesting 10% of the top page is almost always related to that topic?
- e1g 5y ago
  https://rekt.news https://rekt.news articles dive into most hacks to describes how the relevant contracts/crypto/logic works, what's the suspect code, and which parts in the architecture were abused. This is on-brand for "Hacker News" and intellectually stimulating. But this submission got nuked. It went to #4 in an hour, and then disappeared. Maybe we need decentralized HN!

xwolfi 5y ago

Sorry milord, continue working earnestly a little bit more before we have to bow and kiss your golden moonshaped shoes. What do you guys work on all day long ? How to convert a DOGE to USDT to BTC then to a bored ape NFT looking to the right ? Hope you dont work at SafeMoon or other such "project" you guys call "crypto" because there's 1 hash function somewhere and one key elsewhere :p

exdsq 5y ago
> Sorry milord, continue working earnestly a little bit more before we have to bow and kiss your golden moonshaped shoes. You see, this is the issue I have. This is just twattish behaviour. > What do you guys work on all day long? Pretty interesting problems. In the last year or two I've worked with some of the founding designers of Haskell on compiler profiling. I've heard from Leslie Lamport on using TLA+ to formally prove consensus algorithms. I profiled worst-case-performance of cloud infrastructure across the world. Stephen Wolfram and Vint Cerf gave internal talks to us at monthly learning sessions. I've written systems code in Rust, Haskell, Golang, F#, and multiple other 'cool' languages. I got to ask the guy who introduced monads to functional programming wtf is a monad? I spoke to SPJ about programming. Been taught property-based testing by the creator of QuickCheck. Etc... It's a really cool space if you like tech with some great minds in it.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Where do you work? seems exciting.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  > Pretty interesting problems. In the last year or two I've worked with some of the founding designers of Haskell on compiler profiling. I've heard from Leslie Lamport on using TLA+ to formally prove consensus algorithms. I profiled worst-case-performance of cloud infrastructure across the world. Stephen Wolfram and Vint Cerf gave internal talks to us at monthly learning sessions. I've written systems code in Rust, Haskell, Golang, F#, and multiple other 'cool' languages. I got to ask the guy who introduced monads to functional programming wtf is a monad? I spoke to SPJ about programming. Been taught property-based testing by the creator of QuickCheck. Etc... It's a really cool space if you like tech with some great minds in it. Sounds a lot like university, what do you guys produce as a result ? Do you work at BlockOne, I hear a lot of such dilettante feedback where work is more about learning fun things at random without any specific purpose. I mean from compiler profiling to property testing, do you have time to focus on a tight deadline ? How many systems do you focus on, if you have to touch 4+ languages just to apply a change ? I hope at least it's not each end to end feature that requires all those languages -_-. But at least, good you accept to work on all of them, problem where I work, where we do more classical Python/Java/C#/JS,is I have trouble to convince my colleagues just to touch a second one and de-specialize.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pontifier 5y ago

I wish I could still feel good about crypto. Perhaps you should look at why people become anti-crypto. Most of us have had bad experiences with it and have decided that the problems outweigh the benefits. I still think it's an interesting experiment, but I won't invest another cent in it.