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Standard blockchain apologist. Always jam tomorrow, never jam today. It's always "early" for some definition of the word "it". Any decade now we'll have PoS, o

Standard blockchain apologist. Always jam tomorrow, never jam today. It's always "early" for some definition of the word "it". Any decade now we'll have PoS, or an actual use case for smart contracts, or NFTs etc. But no, every year just seems to bring a new "invention" that is "still early" while implying that this, unlike every single other use of distributed blockchain, somehow is the first of all of them to not be pointless (outside of a way to find the bigger fool). Blockchains are just scam generators. Well, they are of great utility to ransomware, so i guess they have found one use case in over a decade. Edit: and of course this rebuttal found like one possible mistake in statistics and calls it a "lie". That should tell you all you need to know about the author's intellectual honesty.

eqmvii 5y ago
Hey now, ransomeware /and/ drugs!
- floatboth 5y ago
  And both are now eclipsed by the wild speculation. The vast majority of buttcoins' "usage" is all about "number go up".
  - srqwe 5y ago
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    How financial markets should be.
    - sobkas 5y ago
      > How financial markets should be. Until the bubble pops, then better not be one holding the bucket.
      - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        The winning move is to stay far away and focus on things with real value.
- outside1234 5y ago
  Don’t forget money laundering with NFTS and bribing politicians
kristofferR 5y ago
- knorker 5y ago
  > if you were intellectually honest you would agree that the decentralized web/crypto both have positives and negatives. If this were 2010 then I would agree that it's interesting technology with some possible use cases not yet clarified. But this is 2022, and it's now time to turn this around to focus on actual solution first, get-rich-quick as a possible incidental side effect. Because we've had over a decade now of get-rich-quick first, "maybe solve a real problem, not sure how because I've not talked to domain experts to find out what the real problems actually are" as incidental. Like, talk to any contract lawyer and ask them if "smart contract" is a solution to any of their hard problems. It's not. It just makes everything much worse. Or currencies. You can't just (at best) say you'll bolt on AML/KYC to your perfectly anonymous currency "later". And without AML/KYC it's not actually a solution that anybody wants (except very rare anarcho-libertarians and ransomware people). So does this whole space have positives? It's not impossible. Every single so-called solution in this space has made its intended space worse, and also created huge externalities (environment, e-waste (old mining rigs), resource shortages (GPU, SSD), etc...). But it's not impossible that any decade now something will actually be a solution. But because the "solutions" are also get-rich-quick schemes, the "inventors" don't want to wait for the solution to actually be... a solution. Launch now, get rich, problem (of not being rich) solved. Take PoS for example. Greta Thunberg is wrong to attack boomers. Looking at the age bracket of cryptocurrency supporters it seems that millennials are also pushing that whole "environment" thing to future generations. "Oh, it'll be fine with PoS eventually. But today we can burn the environment a bit because I gots to get paid". So no, it doesn't "have" positives. It's one of the infinitely many pools of ideas where positives could come from, but haven't yet.
  - kristofferR 5y ago
    Silk Road is the easiest example of a positive to mention. And you know very well that the Kintsugi testnet is public, to falsely pretend it's decades away is shitposting.
fleddr 5y ago
Well, the author at least makes an intellectual attempt, unlike you. Both the original article and the response are reasonable, which is rare in this discussion. There's actual substance, rather than lazy binary conclusions.
- knorker 5y ago
  I did call out the major flaw in the response (always jam tomorrow, never jam today) and elaborated on it, with examples or other technologies. At no point did I say "this is a lie". You can disagree with my factual rebuttal of the response, but you are also factually incorrect that I was doing some sort of shitposting.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    It's cute that you call your own response "factual" "Any decade now we will have PoS" Almost every blockchain already is. Ether will move to PoS within the coming 2 years. They must, as competition is fierce and may become irrelevant if they don't. Bitcoin will never move to PoS. So, "any decade"...what does it factually refer to? Your remark on use cases is equally primitive. There's a few hundred million people using crypto. You can say that the existing use cases aren't for you, but that's not factual. Facts are that user growth is exponential. Singling out ransomware is equally lazy. A recent study showed that the portion of criminal activity in the crypto space is lower compared to cash. Yet you'd never comment on cash being a criminal invention, would you? Yet you're the "intellectually honest" one.
    - knorker 5y ago
      > "Any decade now we will have PoS" Almost every blockchain already is. You know that's not relevant. Nobody cares about the number of blockchains having one or another attribute. I could create and launch a billion new ones, and it doesn't matter. > Ether will move to PoS within the coming 2 years. I truly hope so. I'll believe it when I see it. > There's a few hundred million people using crypto. Estimate I found is one, not a few. But that could be wrong. But yeah. I know of several people who tried, some successfully, to get paid in bitcoin. They didn't want to pay taxes. Everyone wants everyone else to pay their fair share. You can't point to someone saying "Well I don't want to pay my fair share" as a contradiction, because that's a completely different statement. Everyone wants only sober people on the street, but come on, it's me and I only had three beers and it's like a 10min drive. > Singling out ransomware is equally lazy. Lazy because it's not hard. "Pointing out murder is wrong, is lazy". Uh… so what? > A recent study showed that the portion of criminal activity in the crypto space is lower compared to cash. Speculation is by far the biggest, yes. Studies have shown that much or most of that speculation is market manipulation, too. > Yet you'd never comment on cash being a criminal invention, would you? I didn't say that about blockchain either. I said it's a scam generator. Cryptocurrencies are more like the scam of being paid in company credits in the company store, if you want to make comparisons to cash. It's not a great comparison, of course, because your whole question assumes that "cryptocurrencies are just like cash" which they are very much not. Partly because what I already said. But partly... well I don't think you're interested in hearing anything anything, so what's the point? If you've gotten this far, and are this invested, then you'd need to get over the cognitive dissonance of that, and a HN comment won't help. > you're the "intellectually honest" one. Yup.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
serverholic 5y ago
You could say similar things about nuclear fusion. It’s easy to say this when you don’t actually follow the technology and the people actually building it.
- xigoi 5y ago
  Nuclear fusion is meant to solve our energy problems, not to make them as bad as possible.
  - knorker 5y ago
    Then you've not heard what blockchain apologists say on the issue: That they are stimulating demand, and speeding up the development of renewals. Which is like keeping your tap water running into the sewers at full blast 24/7 and saying you're stimulating the desalination industry. Also sounds like Zorn in Fifth Element, when he's talking about the benefits of destruction. When your argument sounds like one made by a fictional over the top Hitler-inspired absolute evil character, then maybe you should reassess your life choices.
    - AlexCoventry 5y ago
      > Which is like keeping your tap water running into the sewers at full blast 24/7 and saying you're stimulating the desalination industry. It's a bit more sophisticated than that, no? I thought the argument was that renewable energy sources could use crypto mining to monetize power which would otherwise go to waste during periods of low demand.
      - knorker 5y ago
        Meh. It's just the same with extra steps. During periods of low demand we can shut down coal plans (instead they spin up new ones to mine). And even solar is not without guilt as equipment goes end of life. Even if we were to live in a world powered entirely by even production base load such as nuclear we'll still have hydro that can be saved, and even pump storage hydro if there's still left over. There's no getting around it: this argument is still spinning destruction to be construction. And it's clearly a spin that's being done for very direct financial gain. But remember too that when you say "low demand", what you mean is that it sets a price floor on energy. The equilibrium for miners is to continue mining always when the price is lower than their ROI. This means that fluctuations in a cryptocurrency can mean that demand is unmet, if such demand is not able or willing to pay the same as this rentseeking mining is. Concretely: If we were at equilibrium, and we suddenly invent an energy source that would drop energy price by 10x, real prices would still not go down, because economic incentives such that mining would eat up ALL of that potential lowering of price, and we'd be back to the price we started at. All price of energy would be bounded at the lower end by cryptocurrency mining incentives. We'd have rolling blackouts when the currency goes up. Or when gas fees/attestation fees go up, depending on the details. We'd have doubling-to-quadrupling of energy prices like we've had this winter, except triggered by even more causes. So no, I'd say it's the same as what I've said, or worse.
gooseus 5y ago
This is a grift as old as time, promise salvation tomorrow to all those that worship today. Tomorrow is only ever a day away, and really isn't the worship and community great anyways? The doomsday cult and spiritual guru model of community-building fits right into the Silicon Valley culture of techno-optimism alongside the "if you believe it, you can achieve it" New Age mantras and "fake it till you make it, it's not fraud if you believe it" naivete. The only thing more upsetting that watching it happen is knowing how it will likely unravel, with everyone pointing fingers and rushing to find a conspiracy theory to explain why "the powers that be" targeted them for destruction because they were so threatened and were afraid of the power they were losing to the Bored Ape movement, or whatever it is.
dlubarov 5y ago
Why are critics so focused on timing though? Does it really matter whether the Eth2 merge happens in 6 months or 12 months, as long as steady progress is being made? Granted, early timelines from Vitalik and others were way off base initially. The planning fallacy is a thing, and we shouldn't expect a 21 year old to accurately predict the timing of a very complex network migration. Hanlon's razor suggests that bad estimates are usually just bad estimates, not some kind of scam.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Because in the meantime the Ethereum network has less computing power than a Raspberry Pi while consuming several orders of magnitude more electricity. So it's shitty, expensive, and horribly polluting.
  - dlubarov 5y ago
    Yes, that's why we're working to make it better with proof of stake, sharding, validity proofs and so forth. It won't happen overnight but we're getting there. Why not help improve things instead of critiquing the current state?
jbump 5y ago
Also, I want to note my favorite part of current blockchain apologists. Instead of presenting counter-arguments, they list projects working on that problem or working on an alternate solution to that problem. You say X is a problem, and it would be if XChain didn't exist, duh. XChain is removing the entire need for X. Are there lists of blockchain projects that the apologists memorize, or is being "into crypto" all about being familiar with a never ending list of projects? How many of these projects last a year? Ugh.
- knorker 5y ago
  They don't last enough to even understand the problem they claim to solve.

eqmvii 5y ago

Hey now, ransomeware /and/ drugs!

floatboth 5y ago
And both are now eclipsed by the wild speculation. The vast majority of buttcoins' "usage" is all about "number go up".
- srqwe 5y ago
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  How financial markets should be.
  - sobkas 5y ago
    > How financial markets should be. Until the bubble pops, then better not be one holding the bucket.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      The winning move is to stay far away and focus on things with real value.
outside1234 5y ago
Don’t forget money laundering with NFTS and bribing politicians

kristofferR 5y ago

knorker 5y ago
> if you were intellectually honest you would agree that the decentralized web/crypto both have positives and negatives. If this were 2010 then I would agree that it's interesting technology with some possible use cases not yet clarified. But this is 2022, and it's now time to turn this around to focus on actual solution first, get-rich-quick as a possible incidental side effect. Because we've had over a decade now of get-rich-quick first, "maybe solve a real problem, not sure how because I've not talked to domain experts to find out what the real problems actually are" as incidental. Like, talk to any contract lawyer and ask them if "smart contract" is a solution to any of their hard problems. It's not. It just makes everything much worse. Or currencies. You can't just (at best) say you'll bolt on AML/KYC to your perfectly anonymous currency "later". And without AML/KYC it's not actually a solution that anybody wants (except very rare anarcho-libertarians and ransomware people). So does this whole space have positives? It's not impossible. Every single so-called solution in this space has made its intended space worse, and also created huge externalities (environment, e-waste (old mining rigs), resource shortages (GPU, SSD), etc...). But it's not impossible that any decade now something will actually be a solution. But because the "solutions" are also get-rich-quick schemes, the "inventors" don't want to wait for the solution to actually be... a solution. Launch now, get rich, problem (of not being rich) solved. Take PoS for example. Greta Thunberg is wrong to attack boomers. Looking at the age bracket of cryptocurrency supporters it seems that millennials are also pushing that whole "environment" thing to future generations. "Oh, it'll be fine with PoS eventually. But today we can burn the environment a bit because I gots to get paid". So no, it doesn't "have" positives. It's one of the infinitely many pools of ideas where positives could come from, but haven't yet.
- kristofferR 5y ago
  Silk Road is the easiest example of a positive to mention. And you know very well that the Kintsugi testnet is public, to falsely pretend it's decades away is shitposting.

fleddr 5y ago

Well, the author at least makes an intellectual attempt, unlike you. Both the original article and the response are reasonable, which is rare in this discussion. There's actual substance, rather than lazy binary conclusions.

knorker 5y ago
I did call out the major flaw in the response (always jam tomorrow, never jam today) and elaborated on it, with examples or other technologies. At no point did I say "this is a lie". You can disagree with my factual rebuttal of the response, but you are also factually incorrect that I was doing some sort of shitposting.
- fleddr 5y ago
  It's cute that you call your own response "factual" "Any decade now we will have PoS" Almost every blockchain already is. Ether will move to PoS within the coming 2 years. They must, as competition is fierce and may become irrelevant if they don't. Bitcoin will never move to PoS. So, "any decade"...what does it factually refer to? Your remark on use cases is equally primitive. There's a few hundred million people using crypto. You can say that the existing use cases aren't for you, but that's not factual. Facts are that user growth is exponential. Singling out ransomware is equally lazy. A recent study showed that the portion of criminal activity in the crypto space is lower compared to cash. Yet you'd never comment on cash being a criminal invention, would you? Yet you're the "intellectually honest" one.
  - knorker 5y ago
    > "Any decade now we will have PoS" Almost every blockchain already is. You know that's not relevant. Nobody cares about the number of blockchains having one or another attribute. I could create and launch a billion new ones, and it doesn't matter. > Ether will move to PoS within the coming 2 years. I truly hope so. I'll believe it when I see it. > There's a few hundred million people using crypto. Estimate I found is one, not a few. But that could be wrong. But yeah. I know of several people who tried, some successfully, to get paid in bitcoin. They didn't want to pay taxes. Everyone wants everyone else to pay their fair share. You can't point to someone saying "Well I don't want to pay my fair share" as a contradiction, because that's a completely different statement. Everyone wants only sober people on the street, but come on, it's me and I only had three beers and it's like a 10min drive. > Singling out ransomware is equally lazy. Lazy because it's not hard. "Pointing out murder is wrong, is lazy". Uh… so what? > A recent study showed that the portion of criminal activity in the crypto space is lower compared to cash. Speculation is by far the biggest, yes. Studies have shown that much or most of that speculation is market manipulation, too. > Yet you'd never comment on cash being a criminal invention, would you? I didn't say that about blockchain either. I said it's a scam generator. Cryptocurrencies are more like the scam of being paid in company credits in the company store, if you want to make comparisons to cash. It's not a great comparison, of course, because your whole question assumes that "cryptocurrencies are just like cash" which they are very much not. Partly because what I already said. But partly... well I don't think you're interested in hearing anything anything, so what's the point? If you've gotten this far, and are this invested, then you'd need to get over the cognitive dissonance of that, and a HN comment won't help. > you're the "intellectually honest" one. Yup.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

serverholic 5y ago

You could say similar things about nuclear fusion. It’s easy to say this when you don’t actually follow the technology and the people actually building it.

xigoi 5y ago
Nuclear fusion is meant to solve our energy problems, not to make them as bad as possible.
- knorker 5y ago
  Then you've not heard what blockchain apologists say on the issue: That they are stimulating demand, and speeding up the development of renewals. Which is like keeping your tap water running into the sewers at full blast 24/7 and saying you're stimulating the desalination industry. Also sounds like Zorn in Fifth Element, when he's talking about the benefits of destruction. When your argument sounds like one made by a fictional over the top Hitler-inspired absolute evil character, then maybe you should reassess your life choices.
  - AlexCoventry 5y ago
    > Which is like keeping your tap water running into the sewers at full blast 24/7 and saying you're stimulating the desalination industry. It's a bit more sophisticated than that, no? I thought the argument was that renewable energy sources could use crypto mining to monetize power which would otherwise go to waste during periods of low demand.
    - knorker 5y ago
      Meh. It's just the same with extra steps. During periods of low demand we can shut down coal plans (instead they spin up new ones to mine). And even solar is not without guilt as equipment goes end of life. Even if we were to live in a world powered entirely by even production base load such as nuclear we'll still have hydro that can be saved, and even pump storage hydro if there's still left over. There's no getting around it: this argument is still spinning destruction to be construction. And it's clearly a spin that's being done for very direct financial gain. But remember too that when you say "low demand", what you mean is that it sets a price floor on energy. The equilibrium for miners is to continue mining always when the price is lower than their ROI. This means that fluctuations in a cryptocurrency can mean that demand is unmet, if such demand is not able or willing to pay the same as this rentseeking mining is. Concretely: If we were at equilibrium, and we suddenly invent an energy source that would drop energy price by 10x, real prices would still not go down, because economic incentives such that mining would eat up ALL of that potential lowering of price, and we'd be back to the price we started at. All price of energy would be bounded at the lower end by cryptocurrency mining incentives. We'd have rolling blackouts when the currency goes up. Or when gas fees/attestation fees go up, depending on the details. We'd have doubling-to-quadrupling of energy prices like we've had this winter, except triggered by even more causes. So no, I'd say it's the same as what I've said, or worse.

gooseus 5y ago

This is a grift as old as time, promise salvation tomorrow to all those that worship today. Tomorrow is only ever a day away, and really isn't the worship and community great anyways? The doomsday cult and spiritual guru model of community-building fits right into the Silicon Valley culture of techno-optimism alongside the "if you believe it, you can achieve it" New Age mantras and "fake it till you make it, it's not fraud if you believe it" naivete. The only thing more upsetting that watching it happen is knowing how it will likely unravel, with everyone pointing fingers and rushing to find a conspiracy theory to explain why "the powers that be" targeted them for destruction because they were so threatened and were afraid of the power they were losing to the Bored Ape movement, or whatever it is.

dlubarov 5y ago

Why are critics so focused on timing though? Does it really matter whether the Eth2 merge happens in 6 months or 12 months, as long as steady progress is being made? Granted, early timelines from Vitalik and others were way off base initially. The planning fallacy is a thing, and we shouldn't expect a 21 year old to accurately predict the timing of a very complex network migration. Hanlon's razor suggests that bad estimates are usually just bad estimates, not some kind of scam.

giantrobot 5y ago
Because in the meantime the Ethereum network has less computing power than a Raspberry Pi while consuming several orders of magnitude more electricity. So it's shitty, expensive, and horribly polluting.
- dlubarov 5y ago
  Yes, that's why we're working to make it better with proof of stake, sharding, validity proofs and so forth. It won't happen overnight but we're getting there. Why not help improve things instead of critiquing the current state?

jbump 5y ago

Also, I want to note my favorite part of current blockchain apologists. Instead of presenting counter-arguments, they list projects working on that problem or working on an alternate solution to that problem. You say X is a problem, and it would be if XChain didn't exist, duh. XChain is removing the entire need for X. Are there lists of blockchain projects that the apologists memorize, or is being "into crypto" all about being familiar with a never ending list of projects? How many of these projects last a year? Ugh.

knorker 5y ago
They don't last enough to even understand the problem they claim to solve.