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It’s extremely disingenuous to say we have “nothing”. The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciat

It’s extremely disingenuous to say we have “nothing”. The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate, even if they don’t see a practical application.

adam_arthur 5y ago
I think OP was implying something of real world value. I can see the hypothetical value in decentralized computing/public database. Certain types of data could in theory be stored publicly, and anybody could build APIs around them. In particular, it would be cool if there was some common protocol and storage format for something like tweets, such that anybody could build Twitter client. Common protocol would especially benefit social media IMO. We've long collaborated on open source code, but this would be more akin to open source data. But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet? The decentralized experience is worse, and there are privacy concerns around storing certain data publicly, I would guess. Can those problems be solved?
- atweiden 5y ago
  > But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet? Because Ethereum was founded by early Bitcoiners to raise bitcoin for themselves, and the technology always came second to the pursuit of self-enrichment. Software projects can never lose their soul. If the soul was rotten from the very beginning, as the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out”. I sincerely doubt if any of the inventors of the marketing phrase “web 3” ever thought it would come to this: where their investors are so desperate for yield that they begin taking the term seriously. Not that it matters to the founders of Ethereum, many of whom have long since become secretive Bitcoin billionaires. The Ethereum project is best described as a series of cynical courtship displays designed purely to bootstrap the “network effect” for their newly created confidence game called ETH, which in 2014 they sold to — to borrow their own legal terminology — “philanthropists” in exchange for “donations”. A process they swore up and down bore no similarity at all to a securities offering. People not privy to the way cryptocurrency works are shocked to find the various buzzwords hatched by the Ethereum people for their own self-enrichment in the described legacy era of ICOs turn out to be a whole lot of nothing. They shouldn’t be shocked, they should be embarassed for lowering themselves to investing in such a system, or angry if they did so in ignorance.
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Well, I fully expect cryptos to implode akin to 2018 in the near future. There's no tie to real world value... Everything is self referential and only implies value within world of crypto. I do think there's potential behind the concept of standard protocols for "open source data", but blockchains have not delivered on the premise very well. It's just one pyramid/ponzi scheme after the other, designed with self enrichment in mind first, as you say.
kllrnohj 5y ago
> The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology Are they, though? What's amazing about them? The amount of overhead per unit of useful work is mind boggling. So much so that a single raspberry pi 4 is 5,000x more powerful than the entire EVM network. And the initial smart contract language Solidity is notoriously poorly designed for the job. Truly honestly what is the technology here that we're supposed to be appreciating?
preseinger 5y ago
They are inefficient solutions to problems that nobody actually has (shrug)
astrange 5y ago
There is nothing amazing about being able to run a computer program. That's what computers do. EVM is also not a distributed computing service since every node has to run the same thing. It is slightly interesting watching people try to reinvent high-assurance computing from scratch without doing any research first, but it's not technically interesting. Actually, the more "interesting" crypto projects are the more likely they are to be a scam using a "courtier's reply" defense.
dmitriid 5y ago
> The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate I'm a technical person. Virtual machines and languages are a dime a dozen, and EVM is no different. Moreover, Solidity was such a laughable attempt at a programming language that even first version of Javascript was better.

adam_arthur 5y ago

I think OP was implying something of real world value. I can see the hypothetical value in decentralized computing/public database. Certain types of data could in theory be stored publicly, and anybody could build APIs around them. In particular, it would be cool if there was some common protocol and storage format for something like tweets, such that anybody could build Twitter client. Common protocol would especially benefit social media IMO. We've long collaborated on open source code, but this would be more akin to open source data. But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet? The decentralized experience is worse, and there are privacy concerns around storing certain data publicly, I would guess. Can those problems be solved?

atweiden 5y ago
> But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet? Because Ethereum was founded by early Bitcoiners to raise bitcoin for themselves, and the technology always came second to the pursuit of self-enrichment. Software projects can never lose their soul. If the soul was rotten from the very beginning, as the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out”. I sincerely doubt if any of the inventors of the marketing phrase “web 3” ever thought it would come to this: where their investors are so desperate for yield that they begin taking the term seriously. Not that it matters to the founders of Ethereum, many of whom have long since become secretive Bitcoin billionaires. The Ethereum project is best described as a series of cynical courtship displays designed purely to bootstrap the “network effect” for their newly created confidence game called ETH, which in 2014 they sold to — to borrow their own legal terminology — “philanthropists” in exchange for “donations”. A process they swore up and down bore no similarity at all to a securities offering. People not privy to the way cryptocurrency works are shocked to find the various buzzwords hatched by the Ethereum people for their own self-enrichment in the described legacy era of ICOs turn out to be a whole lot of nothing. They shouldn’t be shocked, they should be embarassed for lowering themselves to investing in such a system, or angry if they did so in ignorance.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Well, I fully expect cryptos to implode akin to 2018 in the near future. There's no tie to real world value... Everything is self referential and only implies value within world of crypto. I do think there's potential behind the concept of standard protocols for "open source data", but blockchains have not delivered on the premise very well. It's just one pyramid/ponzi scheme after the other, designed with self enrichment in mind first, as you say.

kllrnohj 5y ago

> The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology Are they, though? What's amazing about them? The amount of overhead per unit of useful work is mind boggling. So much so that a single raspberry pi 4 is 5,000x more powerful than the entire EVM network. And the initial smart contract language Solidity is notoriously poorly designed for the job. Truly honestly what is the technology here that we're supposed to be appreciating?

preseinger 5y ago

They are inefficient solutions to problems that nobody actually has (shrug)

astrange 5y ago

There is nothing amazing about being able to run a computer program. That's what computers do. EVM is also not a distributed computing service since every node has to run the same thing. It is slightly interesting watching people try to reinvent high-assurance computing from scratch without doing any research first, but it's not technically interesting. Actually, the more "interesting" crypto projects are the more likely they are to be a scam using a "courtier's reply" defense.

dmitriid 5y ago

> The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate I'm a technical person. Virtual machines and languages are a dime a dozen, and EVM is no different. Moreover, Solidity was such a laughable attempt at a programming language that even first version of Javascript was better.