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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

• bsenftner 5y ago
  As this series of blog posts detailing why the crypto/bitcoin/ntf/web3 ecosystem is bad and wrong, I am continually reminded of two quotes from people worth listening to: “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” ― Mark Twain "Don't believe the hype!" -Flavor Flav
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Those crypto hate articles are so trite. By this point, either people get it, or they don't. We could even agree it isn't for everyone. Some people suffer from or dislike centralization, others don't. Some even explicitly WANT centralization.
• streetcat1 5y ago
  interest rate at 2-4 % will do the trick. not so long.
  • babyshake 5y ago
    Apparently high levels of debt will really limit the amount rates can be increased. This is something I have heard from crypto investors, but also from people who dislike Bitcoin.
• rvz 5y ago
  So there is no progress in non Proof-of-Work coins today? Perhaps the author is saying that there are no blockchains that are being used as the basis of regulated stable-coins and CBDC projects that are being tested by central banks today? I mean, the author is arguing as if Bitcoin, and Ethereum are the only blockchains that exist today. Hence why this is another blog-post that associates all cryptocurrencies having the same characteristics as Bitcoin, and Ethereum, which that isn't true and the author knows it. This is all given that they 'claim' to have done 'research' even though they feel 'annoyed' by all of this. [0] If you are going to argue about cryptocurrencies and blockchains technologies in general, at least attack the current alleged 'state of the art' rather than using the same old arguments on the same old cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum) that everyone knows its faults already. [0] https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/
  • Jasper_ 5y ago
    I spent some time looking into Proof-of-Stake coins. Specifically, the Proof-of-Stake system advocated by Tezos. Give it a lookover, it's actually a fairly quick read. https://tezos.gitlab.io/active/proof_of_stake.html https://tezos.gitlab.io/active/proof_of_stake.html Unfortunately, it's also very flawed, and nulls most of the security properties we thought we would get by switching to "Blockchain Technology": if someone captures 50% of this chain, it is quite easy and trivial to turn that into a full chain attack, since all future seed data comes from past chain data. The RNG is seeded deterministically, meaning a motivated attacker can maintain influence forever by maintaining control over the seed. When you usually bring this up, people usually say "yeah, but it would be against the economics interests of the miners to crash their own coins". Aka, the technology isn't providing the security, we're back to the same "no banker would ever be evil enough to crash the economy for small economic gains" security that most cryptocurrency enthusiasts usually claim is evidence of corruption at work. So, no, I don't see what the blockchain is adding over a typical database. I've tried multiple times to read through the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake FAQ [1], but I have a sneaking suspicion it's intentionally obfuscated, just so people like me bounce off of it. [1] https://eth.wiki/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs https://eth.wiki/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs
    • baby 5y ago
      You should read into BFT protocols. Hotstuff is probably the reference today.
      • Jasper_ 5y ago
        Maybe I should! Feel free to suggest links and papers. Part of the challenge is that some of these concepts are super varied in their implementation, despite having similar names, and I can only come to understand the tradeoffs of a complete system. "Byzantine Fault Tolerance" is a huge umbrella term that covers a lot of different tactics and approaches, so I welcome recommendations for concrete systems to investigate. EDIT: The reference to Hotstuff was added after I posted this reply. I'll investigate it.
• jjtheblunt 5y ago
  the final paragraph seems to summarize the article : "The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down."
  • epinephrinios 5y ago
    Future will tell. But the author is either acting on bad faith or they are not informed on the innovations that happened since then and are currently happening in the crypto space. And I am not even focusing on NFTs but on hardcore crypto stuff such as multisig and zero-knowledge proof protocols.
• JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.
  • xmprt 5y ago
    I feel like even after zooming out and seeing the big picture, it's hard to imagine blockchain solving real world problems. Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. Anything that has the government in the loop (like buying houses or property) is a non starter and anything that runs on centralized servers (like game NFTs) also doesn't make sense.
    • anonporridge 5y ago
      You're right. And bitcoiners have been saying this from the very beginning of the crypto madness. A global, government agnostic money like bitcoin that no group of insiders and early adopters have unassailable control over, seems like the only likely candidate for something that needs a truly decentralized and trustless blockchain. The rest is hype.
      • ryandamm 5y ago
        I believe this characterization fails to engage with what money actually is and does. It sounds good in print but fails in practice. Except for bitcoin's current "monetary" uses, like money laundering and tax evasion.
        • anonporridge 5y ago
          I personally prefer a money that isn't explicitly designed to encourage hyper consumption and short term thinking. Better for the planet. But what do I know? I'm just a dumb ape.
• kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago
  To be fair, it took decades for e-commerce on the web to become mainstream. Remember what a joke Webvan used to be in 2001?
  • obstacle1 5y ago
    Didn't pg write Viacom (shopping cart software) in 1995, and sell it to Yahoo in 1997? http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
  • ajross 5y ago
    Uh, 2001 happens to be the year that Amazon became the biggest bookseller in the world, having been founded five years earlier. That's literally about as mainstream as you can get, and it was half a decade. Whether or not you agree with the arc of the linked article, the basic facts are correct: blockchains have been with us for a decade now and haven't done much or made anything that wasn't itself a speculation about blockchain.
    • mw888 5y ago
      You call it speculation and that’s convenient for your argument. Bitcoin as a store of value is not speculative. It has objective qualities that make it valuable and you dismissing those as speculation lets you be ignorant to the comparable short term success of Bitcoin.
      • ajross 5y ago
        FWIW: a thing that has value only on a balance sheet is pretty much the definition of "speculation". I was saying that crypto and web3 hadn't produced any new kinds of economic activity beyond buying more crypto. The only reason to get involved in crypto now is to own crypto, just like it was a decade ago.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• baby 5y ago
  I think the author hasn’t heard about DeFi. It’s pretty mind blowing what people are building on top of blockchains these days. But of course users who are not directly affected are oblivious to the advances and are just upset that they are not being served as users. If you think blockchain is useless: you are not the target user. The day it becomes useful to you, then you can choose to use it or not, but that day you’ll probably use it without knowing you’re using it. After all, do you have a clue what backbone your bank is using to perform wire transfers?
  • obstacle1 5y ago
    I'm not aware of any serious financial application running at scale and relying on blockchain under the hood. Are you? What is it? Specifically.
    • Dwolb 5y ago
      Curve Finance with $14B locked to its platform. Serves up low slippage stablecoin swaps. Some background on Curve (and Convex): https://medium.com/coinmonks/convex-curve-curve-d7e28cd6c1d9 https://medium.com/coinmonks/convex-curve-curve-d7e28cd6c1d9
      • mikeg8 5y ago
        “Low slippage stable coin swap” is one of the most jargony things I’ve read on here in a while. Can you please ELI5 because I have no clue what this is or how it could be useful.
        • baby 5y ago
          Have you heard of leverages, margin calls, derivatives, put options, etc.? DeFi is pretty much the same level of complexity but implemented on top of cryptocurrencies.
          • mikeg8 5y ago
            Ok cool, so basically just fancy ways for traders/investors to gamble and “create value” that doesn’t really benefit anyone besides themselves and others tied to the platforms. Got it.
• bpodgursky 5y ago
  I'm not long on anything blockchain related. But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure. Maybe it is, and it'll all die. That's fine. Why do people spend so much time insisting that it's the inevitable outcome. Let it do its thing, find something better to do.
  • obstacle1 5y ago
    > But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure. Can't speak for everyone. But from my perspective, it's because certain "applications" are being marketed very heavily to non-technical people who aren't able to reasonably assess the viability of the technology. I'm thinking of NFTs in particular. The only other popularized non-NFT applications are cryptocurrencies, which are pure speculation (i.e., gambling). In short, that's a moral issue. People were outraged by the Madoff scandal (and others), and this doesn't look a lot different to people who understand the underlying technology. Nobody wants their mom going broke because they bought some hyped-up blockchain thing on the advice of some super-hustler internet marketing influencer out looking to make a buck.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    Many of us believe all this stuff is incredibly harmful right now. Just standing back and ignoring it, rather than attempting to direct people away from it, will likely cause more harm.
  • Liron 5y ago
    Imagine all your friends were really into MLM schemes and even quitting their job to join Amway and Herbalife. Sure you can just ignore it, but you can understand it’s tempting to ask them what the hell.
  • dorkwood 5y ago
    I was of the same mindset until this year when the pro-crypto crowd invaded the online art scene. Now I unfortunately can't avoid it, as much as I try, not matter how many keywords I mute. I'd like to go back to ignoring it. But it looks like it's here to stay, and it's taken away one of the few things enjoyed about the internet. I guess I'm still moving through the anger and grief stages and am yet to reach acceptance. Why couldn't they have just left art alone?
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  > All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009. A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a distributed consensus workaround that enables artificial scarcity of fungible digital items. Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it. It is absolutely still early days. Because these are decentralized consensus networks, there's inertia. Bitcoin is never going to be cutting edge. Because there's a lot of money to be made, there will be scams. Most of the "cutting edge" isn't cutting edge at all. But there are some real developments happening, allowing novel use cases, enabling very interesting things to be done. I'm not a fan of the whole web3 concept. I think 99% of the selling points that the charlatans hype every market cycle are nonsense. But a little digging beyond an animated JS bloat landing page (a red flag all it's own) and you can quickly figure out what projects potentially have something and what's bullshit. Or you can do what I do and assume a project is a scam until proven otherwise.
  • chx 5y ago
    > Today, you have snip weird things no one gives one hoot about outside of the crypto shill word. All of this is just buttering the cat. https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1476873668605186050 https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1476873668605186050
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      Well then what's the point of this discussion? The thread is "how has it advanced? How long can you call it early days?" If you just stop reading rebuttals as soon as they're mentioned you're better off talking to a wall, and you'd waste less people's time that way too.
• gcampos 5y ago
  Following the same logic, the late 90s were not the web “early days” because the web started in the early 90s
  • mikeg8 5y ago
    Not really. The innovations in 90s web technologies solved more “real” problems and gained mass adoption. much different than the blockchain/crypto innovations of the past decade which are still used by a relatively small number of people.
  • rvz 5y ago
    Only due to the internet existing in the first place, which by the author's own logic, 'that wasn't new either'. The World Wide Web was the 'killer app' for the internet (which that has been there for years before) in the early 1990s; perhaps even fuelling the dot-com boom. A decade after that, the whole market crashed. The critics were celebrating, did the utility of the web stop? Nope. Only the scams and useless, overvalued websites died. The same thing applies to just blockchain technology even beyond 'Bitcoin or Ethereum' where when the concept of that is not new. The regulations will come and eliminate the coins that do not comply and the useless cryptocurrencies or meme coins will be extinguished - probably will cause another crash again and eliminating more useless unregulated cryptocurrencies. That is even before the regulatory framework has been even properly implemented. A few of these cryptocurrencies will survive all of that.
• hubraumhugo 5y ago
  I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)
  • echopurity 5y ago
    [dead]
  • systemvoltage 5y ago
    This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this. Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probably the opposite. We ought to try new tech and keep an open mind. Before people go off on Boston Dynamics - there are thousands of spin-offs, pick some other charitable example. The point isn’t about BD.
    • 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
      Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.
      • systemvoltage 5y ago
        I don’t understand your point. So if University research makes it out to the world - but the world decides to create scams from it, is it University’s fault? I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.
• larsiusprime 5y ago
  Kelsey Hightower said it best: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1477871890723078146 https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/14778718907230781... "If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize."
  • bb88 5y ago
    Not if you have a heavy investment and depend upon other investors (or greater fools) to buy your shares.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    But it’s not too early to be a cult
  • mritchie712 5y ago
    Any sane web3 proponent would agree with this statement. Only the scammers wouldn't. Sane people interested in web3 don't evangelize and are totally aware of and agree with most of the criticisms. If you criticized Ethereum as being expensive and inefficient, you'd get head nods from people that understand the space and pointed to projects that are trying to fix those issues.
    • lolinder 5y ago
      The problem is that when a space becomes dominated by the insane people, it's the insane people who drive its future. Any hope for a sane web3 depended on the hype starting after there was an actual use case. As it stands, web3's Eternal September began before the foundations were even laid, and it's going to be very difficult to retrofit them.
      • mw888 5y ago
        That’s absolute nonsense. Scammers and grifters making vaporware projects have no significant influence on the projects who spend their budget on development rather than marketing. What you just said is “all these novice basketball players training the wrong techniques is a dire problem for those training effectively.” No it’s not, if anything investments in actual projects during relative, senseless mania is cheaper and easier than it ever was.
• stupidworld 5y ago
  In the same time, India & China got mobile payment revolution. 4b+ transcations per month are done in India. Well which means 3B people dont ever need crypto.
  • baby 5y ago
    Ah they can send money abroad easily?
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      How often they need to? How often average person actual does that? Maybe there just isn't that big of an market there outside things like web payments. Or a market that doesn't involve complexities of dealing with money...
      • baby 5y ago
        Depends on the people I’d say. There’s definitely a market.
      • fragmede 5y ago
        Just because you ~never do, doesn't mean there's no market. In this case, there's a huge market for remittances, on the order of hundreds of billion (USD) in 2020 for the industry globally. Every immigrant with family back home is saving local currency and sending as much as they can back home because of the difference in exchange rate. The incumbent players aren't very good, having been created before the Internet. Western Union is still a choice in this area, though it's worth noting that they did close down their telegram service in 2006. Whether cryptocurrencies are competitive in this area depends on if theres a way locally to get local cash for crypto. In countries where this illegal, it's a bit harder to do so, and the old ways are still the best, depending on how high the service fees are.
    • ir123 5y ago
      I send money abroad using Wise though I'd be happier with a publicish API. Why would I in my right mind use crypto? Im not doing anything illegal and I'm not ideologically opposed to paying my taxes.
• magicjosh 5y ago
  The article suggests that using the phrase "it's early days" is incorrect in blockchain technology because Bitcoin and Ethereum have been around for 13 and 6 years respectively. The author goes on to give examples like smartphones, Uber, and Tesla, all of which have had serious developments in terms of impact and usability in around the same time period. Then given that Bitcoin and Ethereum have not made similar progress in that time period suggests it is not "early days". Users continue to get scammed and lose funds. So what is it instead? Middle days? End of life? Pre-early days? Open to ideas here. The author seems to suggest that what we're seeing in blockchains is the best we're going to get out of it. If Bitcoin were middle aged, would users put up with all the warts knowing they won't go away? (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
  • cuteboy19 5y ago
    It will always be "early days". Crypto requires a constant influx of marks who genuinely believe that they are early, as a ponzi scheme only ever benefits early entrants. No crypto enthusiast is ever going to tell that you are late.
    • magicjosh 5y ago
      For a pyramid scheme that certainly holds up. Whoever joins last seems most incentivized to bring others in. Has anyone modeled pyramid scheme dynamics to Bitcoin perhaps at an academic level? (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
      • smokey_circles 5y ago
        I don't understand how bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. There's no pyramid shape, which is kind of crucial. "Just look at the whales" uh huh, you mean like the dollar? It's just a value store. Debating the efficacy of the value store is fine, labeling it a ponzi scheme seems reductive to absurdity. The real problem (unsurprisingly) is with fiat currencies. These are heavily regulated, nearly made up values. That crash, often. We put handbrakes on the systems (see gamestop, mortgage debt crisis etc) because of how unsafe they can be. If we trade goods for fiat currency, we put handbrakes and regulations there too. The bitcoin/fiat exchange is merely proof why we need these regulations. Until it (the crypto/fiat intersection) is regulated, it's not gonna look and feel like what we're used to. There are good criticisms to be made of bitcoin (like how centralized most mining operations are, the community's constant in-fighting and many more). It's drowned out by daft arguments like pollution (that's a whole other economic sectors fault) and ponzi schemes. Maybe other coins could be construed that way (again, regulations required) but not bitcoin.
• TekMol 5y ago
  Depends on how you define early. When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public. The usability of crypto solutions also reminds me of 1997. It is still so bad that it makes them almost unusable. Reminds me of acoustic couplers where you had to manually plug your cable bound phone into some device and dial a number to connect to a bulletin box. Just that today the bad usablity looks very different. It has to do with complicated, privacy violating KYC processes, no standardized secure way to make a socially recoverable secret key, lightning network only used in very few places etc. TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). So over 20 years before the first internet company went public. So the adoption of the internet evolved more slowly than the adoption of crypto it seems. As the Coinbase IPO came already 13 years after the Bitcoin whitepaper.
  • joosters 5y ago
    TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public. Is that really your belief about how to define when a technology became useful?
    • TekMol 5y ago
      The IPO of a company makes a nice reference point for several reasons: - It is a specific point in time which is easy to look up - To go public, a company needs a big amount of traction already - A lot of data is published for the IPO "Useful" is in the eye of the beholder. But how much the company is "used" can be approximated by its revenue. Yahoo had $1.4 million in yearly revenue the year before it IPOed. Coinbase had $1.14 billion. So about a thousand times more. Even when adjusted for inflation, this should be one or two orders of magnitude more.
  • inter_netuser 5y ago
    >1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public. >TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public. 1996 - 1972 = 24.
• Dwolb 5y ago
  IMO L1 (Ethereum, Solana, Fantom, etc.) development is closer to building out a communications or telco network. From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace. So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on par with today’s app performance.
  • magicjosh 5y ago
    Good stuff, so you would suggest to the author that their examples are too narrow. Perhaps that smartphones, Uber, and Facebook all represented somewhat minor "time has come" type innovations, whereas you see Bitcoin as a development more like the internet itself, and that instead we are in the Arpanet days. (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
    • Dwolb 5y ago
      Yeah narrow or just on a different layer/level of abstraction. Yup my mental model is we’re either in Arpanet days or multiple-competing-DOS days.
      • magicjosh 5y ago
        Are there any other examples of recent + long cycle developments? Solar? Electric vehicles? Part of me has come to expect such fast development (Facebook, Uber, Yelp!), but other modern industries must have longer cycles I just am not paying attention.
        • Dwolb 5y ago
          1G was delivered late 1970s, 5G… 2018ish? https://www.techadvisor.com/feature/small-business/timeline-of-5g-development-3788816/ https://www.techadvisor.com/feature/small-business/timeline-... JWST was conceived in 1996: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_James_Webb_Space_Telescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_James_Webb_S...
• rsanheim 5y ago
  I'm increasingly seeing "web 3.0" as basically a two headed beast: 1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out 2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?
  • freemanon 5y ago
    i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more
    • ryandamm 5y ago
      I've yet to see a "pro" for blockchain or NFTs that doesn't conform to the characterization you're trying to dispute. Care to offer one? I'm eager to learn.
      • magicjosh 5y ago
        I also want a writeup covering some examples of Bitcoin or Ethereum use that are relatable. This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actually-buy-with-bitcoin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual... (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
        • freemanon 5y ago
          Blockchain and crypto are related yet distinct concepts. I was lining up for a PCR test in Thailand the other day, and it was a huge mess. The lack of streamlined systems between invoicing, identity verification, etc means very long queues, people running back and forth to get their documents printed. The testing scheme is private run but I assume it needs to interface with governmental departments (i.e. Immigration and the police) to initiate quarantine in case i'm positive, and change my eligibility status for travel outside the sandbox area if i'm negative, or to arrest me if i fail to take the test within the specified time. I thought about why so many centralizsed systems failed, or failed to be built, for streamlining processes in the real world. I think that it's because typically such systems would be built on SQL databases and backend servers that are prone to hacks and downtimes, and the APIs built by different developers often cannot integrate with one another. What if, instead of databases and custom APIs, a blockchain with smart contracts is used? What if we can also sign documents such as receipts with hashes that can be verified off-chain and off-line? We'd have a fault-tolerant, always-available systems, and also a "unified" protocol in which other systems can interface to. Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to. The PCR test system would be something along the line of: - Booking through a smart contract, paying the PCR test fee, and obtaining a receipt signed by the contract in the form of a hash - Upon arrival in the test center, they check the validity of this signature offline by using a public key to verify your payment. - An identification service can keep a hashed version of your personal data on-chain. You can provide your name, DOB, place of birth etc, and this can be checked against the identification service by decoding the hashed data with a one-time key you generated There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd. There are of course questions to be answered. But I see many use cases in my everyday life.
• mizzao 5y ago
  How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment". https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-adoption.png https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado... This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applications of machine learning became industrial tools. I'm personally in agreement with the author that crypto is probably a waste of energy and a way to scam people, but I can look at the 30,000 foot view and admit there might be some applications in the future as we climb the "slope of enlightenment". My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.
  • somebodythere 5y ago
    A cryptographically signed diploma could be sufficient for this use case, no specific need to commit it to a ledger. Certainly the transferability property of NFTs is not desired in this case.
    • foepys 5y ago
      Yes, a machine readable section on the diploma, like a QR code, would suffice here. Covid vaccination certificates in the EU use this method. No blockchain required, just some good old public/private key cryptography.
  • magicjosh 5y ago
    Did Moore ever talk about the time length of such cycles? I imagine it differs from industry to industry. Is blockchain on a 10 year cycle like Uber/Facebook, or a longer cycle? (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
    • ryandamm 5y ago
      The hype cycle isn't Moore, it's Gartner -- the research firm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
• freemanon 5y ago
  people have the tendency to quickly categorise things into "good" or "bad". as scammy as the crypto world is, there are a lot of potential uses for the blockchain. think fault-resistant backends, think open and transparent data flow and storage. "the early days" is subjective but in my opinion there are still so many things that'd run better if it were run on a blockchain instead of a traditional centralised server
• qaq 5y ago
  If there would be a legal framework in place that can tie a DAO to basically be legally binding bylaws of an actual org. and the smart contract lang. is expressive enough for this to work this would be extremely valuable. Outside of this most of web3 looks like hype.
  • cuteboy19 5y ago
    so if we are depending on a centralized legal framework, why would we need the blockchain (decentralized store)? Wasn't Code supposed to be Law?
    • qaq 5y ago
      so we do not have to go through legal process to resolve anything
      • bbddg 5y ago
        Law is not like code. It requires interpretation. You're nuts if you don't think most of these "smart contacts" wouldn't just end up in court anyways.
        • qaq 5y ago
          thats the legal framework in place bit.
          • bbddg 5y ago
            A legal framework. You mean laws? We have those for all sorts of things but we still have courts to interpret How the laws apply for specific situations.
      • lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
        That's literally how things work now. ~99.99999999% of contractual agreements are not litigated. The legal process is there as a slow debugger when it all goes wrong. But most of the time, things don't go wrong and people work out their disputes without involving courts and judges.
• poof131 5y ago
  A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a transparency in the open-source code of smart contracts that will disrupt the current gatekeepers like the internet did. Certainly, there are problems, but some things will live beyond the crash that is coming and change things in ways no one can be sure of. The internet started in the 1960s and was opened up commercially in 1989.[3] It feels like we are somewhere between 1995 and 2000. The energy feels similar with people trying to shove old paradigms into a new world, vaporware companies, and insane investments. I don’t think we’ve seen the top and it will likely make the crash of 2001 look small by comparison. I may be wrong, but if I’m not, it still is early. [1] https://bitfinexed.medium.com/tether-is-setting-a-new-standard-for-transparency-that-is-untethered-from-facts-deec42c473bb https://bitfinexed.medium.com/tether-is-setting-a-new-standa... [2] https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1457749433844568066 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1457749433844568066 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
  • somebodythere 5y ago
    Every time a nascent technology bubble crashes (dot com, AI winter, crypto...) speculation gets reset, scams and projects with no future get wiped out, and the space gets healthier.
  • benreesman 5y ago
    I have wondered for awhile why the crypto mega-whales in my vicinity are trading USDT at par or better over the last year or two. My conspiracy theory is that when insiders trade a distressed asset at par or better it’s often a bailout expectation that’s really being traded. Who has unimaginable access to financing, a “stablecoin” going so/so, and a primary line of business critically dependent on Tether, like, I don’t know, a massive exchange with the highest volume pairs all sharing USDT as quote?
    • 5y ago
• mNovak 5y ago
  The author's description of 2015 doesn't sound like some ancient era to me.. Have things moved on and changed so dramatically from ML hype, Microsoft Edge, Apple Watch, and ES6? I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusable rocketry, mm-wave communications, or quantum tech, because all those things were being developed decades before some guy named Satoshi wrote a very popular blog post.
  • Uehreka 5y ago
    Regarding ES6: Definitely. It used to be that there’d be a new JS framework every week, and the language was rapidly evolving to catch up with over 10 years of programming language innovation. No change to the language as big as ES6 has happened since, and the Cambrian Explosion of frameworks has largely subsided. Nowadays things are way more stable. I’m sure someone will pop in and mention how their workplace just changed from Webpack to Vite, or how hard it is to keep track of Angular, React and Vue. To which I’d chuckle and note that when I got started in 2014 we had AngularJS, Ember, React, Backbone, Knockout, Google FOAM, Polymer, OJ.js and Aurelia (which emerged as Google announced that AngularJS 1.x would be deep-sixed and Angular 2 would essentially be a totally different framework). To build/bundle your app you would use one or more of Grunt, Gulp, Brunch, Webpack, Browserify, 6to5, Traceur Google Closure Compiler and/or RequireJS (so far we’re assuming you’re not using CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, or one of their downstream variants like IcedCoffeeScript).
• aiisahik 5y ago
  The blog post conflates several issues together: (1) why is the blockchain still so inefficient? (2) why is the blockchain still so lacking in practical use cases with widespread adoption? I think she is totally fair in complaining about (1). Either it is impossible to have decentralization and efficiency or it's just a technical problem that will be solved given more time. I don't have the answer here - only time will tell. For problem (2), I think it's mostly an over-exaggeration of the use case(s) where web3 that beats web2. As far as I can tell there is one and only one use case: web3 can do things while having a middle finger pointed at major governments. Web2 cannot. In that bitcoin and eth can offer people of Argentina a some reliable store of value (against their own currency which depreciates at 50% per year) it has generally achieved that. You can't even buy a Tesla in Argentina so the adoption of that wonderful technology there is zero. To claim that it's the next web2 or mobile tech is both an exaggeration and an underestimate. Web3 will not be much of a challenge to web2 or mobile. Instead it will be a huge challenge to existing political, monetary and taxation systems. It will be the tool of the rich to evade taxes, for libertarians to evade control and for those living in high inflation countries to build wealth. Those who complain that this is hardly revolutionary are both right and wrong.
• ryandamm 5y ago
  The central problem in this entire debate is two groups talking past each other. The skeptics say "what is it for?" expecting a detailed answer, and the response from crypto enthusiasts is vague and high level; most of what I hear is heavy on words like "revolutionize" and "decentralize" but very, very short on specifics. Or I get argument by analogy to other technologies. If I heard a single use case where blockchain technology actually created real value in the world, and was better than other alternatives, I'd listen. But it has to create real value, based on the real world and not some fantastical notion of what money is or governments are for. I think we skeptics want a grounded narrative, and we're stuck hearing a thesis statement and nothing to back it up.
  • rednerrus 5y ago
    Crypto was good for blackmarket transactions.
    • ryandamm 5y ago
      Still probably is!
      • pclmulqdq 5y ago
        Not now that companies like chainalysis exist: the transactions are on a public ledger. Monero was designed for private payments, and its value hasn't exploded like Bitcoin or Eth...
      • mw888 5y ago
        People this uninformed are somehow the vocal majority of blockchain talk on HackerNews. What a seriously embarrassing misconception which demonstrates ignorance on a fundamental level.
        • RobertRies 5y ago
          Wait, what misconception? That crypto is good for black market transactions? You assert that it isn't?
• SCAQTony 5y ago
  Very precise criticisms. I wish she would have mention her thoughts on proof-of-stake blockchains.
  • usrbinbash 5y ago
    PoS blorkchains do not solve the first problem completely (they still require an obscene amount of power to do something that can be done way more efficient) but implement an entirely new kind of problem: The more tokens someone already had, the higher his chances in the "stake-lottery". Essentially, PoS makes sure that "he who has the gold makes the rules" becomes hardwired in the system, instead of only being a side effect of it.
    • baby 5y ago
      No they don’t. They’re pretty green.
      • usrbinbash 5y ago
        "pretty green" is not a unit of measurement. How "green" something is, is determined by how much resources one unit of what it does uses, compared to how much resources doing the same unit of work on an alternative system uses. eg. a petroleum lantern produces light more efficiently than a campfire. However, neither of them is "pretty green" compared to a LED. Compare the amount of energy per transaction required with a PoS system to the amount of energy required to do it with, say, a credit card.
        • miracle2k 5y ago
          > "pretty green" is not a unit of measurement. PoS is just a bunch of computers largely idling. Whether it's 1k or 10k, it doesn't matter - there is no energy use to speak of, at least none that society has a legitimately interest in regulating. The Tezos Foundation, who's interest is in advertising how green they are, claims in a year they consume as much electricity as 17 individuals (https://tezos.com/carbon/ https://tezos.com/carbon/). It is up to critics to provide evidence of PoS energy use being a concern; no one has done so, because the outcome is essentially is predetermined.
• friedman23 5y ago
  Not related to blockchain but just an interesting difference in perspective. Using 2010 to refer to "ages ago" is almost comical. The internet was created in the 60s and I'd say 2000-2010 was still early days for the internet. So saying something is old because it was created 10 years ago is just ridiculous.
  • jopsen 5y ago
    2000-2010 internet companies had to actually have revenue, or have users or some value. Before the dot-com bubble there was hype about anything involving the internet. Just like today, any business plan involve blockchain is awesome.
• tomputer 5y ago
  Comparing Bitcoin with companies and software products is not a good comparison. Replacing software or products is not the same as exchanging government-issued fiat money to a new decentralized non-governmental form of money. The transition between different forms of money depends on trust which takes time[1]. E-mail and internet (web) took of faster but these inventions did not require people to exchange their money into an alternative system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
• smokey_circles 5y ago
  I just can't take the power and pollution argument seriously. There's just nothing salient about it. I might have otherwise agreed with the author on their other points but if you can't see the issue with this argument it disqualifies your opinion (which js just my opinion). "Bitcoin requires lots of electricity". No, nowhere near the scale human activity sans blockchain does and to provide it we burn coal. Like we've done for a looong time before bitcoin. Removing bitcoin doesn't remove the coal we burn. Genuinely daft argument. And that's before we get into looking at the numbers from areas like the mining sector. Aluminum smelting isn't cheap from a power perspective, yet I don't see this argument leveled against coke. The answer is renewable energy. Obviously.
  • igorkraw 5y ago
    The difference is that from then perspective of the critics, cryptos burn the energy needs of multiple small country for Ponzi schemes. Purely to represent the opinion of the critics now, aluminum smelting might be and, but at least aluminum out of it, so they don't criticize the base activity, just the energy type. From the perspective of the critics, we don't need to struggle and transition crypto to RE, we can just stop doing it. I personally agree, but people with your perspective (presumably) don't and place Crypto in "expensive but inherently valuable activity" or at least in "entertainment" both of which also use a lot of coal power but aren't negotiable, hence people focus on the energy sources not so much the activity. Hence talking past each other
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    > I just can't take the power and pollution argument seriously. There's just nothing salient about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26097332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26097332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26335888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26335888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351959 TL;DR: Bullshit. > The answer is renewable energy. You're talking as if the crowding out effect didn't exist: Even if we had a lot more renewable energy than we do, every kWh used for crypto-"currencies" is a kWh that can't be used for something else
• chrischen 5y ago
  My purely anecdotal experience so far has been that crypto bulls have tended to be more business-y/finance type people and, even among technical people, the technical people who don’t actually know how a blockchain works. Not a good sign for the technology and its applications but I don’t think all crypto is useless… but a lot of the hype is definitely by people trying to get rich quick with a hand-wavy understanding of the technology. A lot of people missed out on Bitcoin early days… best way to cash in is to fork it and voila, the crypto Cambrian explosion where most of the forks will eventually die off.
  • mw888 5y ago
    Exposure bias. Who are you going to see more? The thoughtful coder and innovator who spends their time working on problems, or the excited businessman telling everyone about that work? Even the more outgoing founders are overshadowed by influencer types, and that’s not surprising at all. One dichotomy I have noticed in crypto is that non-involved “tech” people seem to understand crypto and the big picture much more slowly than economically minded people (no, not just speculators). People don’t usually understand that crypto currencies are an economic innovation using cryptographic primitives, though more recently the space has started driving cryptographic innovation as well.
    • chrischen 5y ago
      Well the excited businessman telling everyone about the work is the one hyping it to everyone. My point exactly is if it was just the hard working coder in a dark room everybody and their grandma wouldn't be buying into crypto right now. I'm also bullish on the utility of Bitcoin, as it allows for an almost cash-equivalent that's digital. Silk road took it as currency, and cybercriminals. These may be illegitimate businesses but they are businesses nonetheless.
• scotty79 5y ago
  I guess I'm old bacause all the he things listed as exapmle how far away was 2009 and especially 2015 feel new or at least newish to me.
• mirzap 5y ago
  Well, 10y ago is not ages ago. Email existed for 30 years before it was ready for consumers. Same is with the internet. Certain types of technologies require decades research and development. I would argue that in 20 years it will still be "early days" of blockchain. And only in mid 40 we will figure out apps and who nows what to fully utilize underlining technology. Right now we are just coping what we have outside of blockchain and put it on the blockchain. Same as people couldn't imagine how internet could possibly transform their business and life, we now can't imagine how Bitcoin and blockchain will transform our business and life in the future. It's too early.
  • unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Email required everyone to have a computer, plus infrastructure to connect them. Blockchain has been waiting on a useful implementation since inception.
    • mirzap 5y ago
      No. Email didn't have useful implementation (UI) until 30y after it was invented. Only geeks and tech savy people were able to use it because it was not so easy to use. Sending messages was really hard, sending would often fail. So you would say, 25y after email inception there was no useful implementation and no usage by consumers, so technology is worthless. And there were people who were saying that, I'm sure. Same was with the internet.
      • Uehreka 5y ago
        Until 1998, my middle class American family didn’t have internet. I was a rather tech-curious kid, but until we actually had a second phone line run to our house and a new Gateway computer and a modem, there was this huge barrier to what I could learn about on our airgapped Windows 3.1 machine. My Dad was able to navigate the command line because he’d needed to on our previous DOS computer, so I feel like he could’ve handled email if we’d had a connection back then. I’d argue that infrastructure was a pretty big barrier to email catching on, not just the UI.
• teh_infallible 5y ago
  Substitute “NASA” for “blockchain” in this article, and I agree:)
• harwoodleon 5y ago
  Platforms develop quickly. Protocols develop slowly.
• personjerry 5y ago
  This article feels like it's just riding the crypto bandwagon for clicks. The "early days" of something is relative to the lifespan of the thing. If crypto lasts for the next 1000 years then yes we are very much in the early days. Moreover, a label like "early days" is entirely irrelevant, because really the question that needs to be asked is "Is it still changing, evolving, growing?" Based on what I've seen (I'm not a crypto enthusiast) the answer seems to be yes.
• vorhemus 5y ago
  To me, the most promising use cases for a blockchain would be activities that are today carried out by government agencies, states or lawyers. Anyone who has ever bought a property in central Europe knows how much money has to be spent on trustees and notaries. If such transactions can be carried out in a secure way between buyer and seller without an intermediary, that would be a huge win. However, the lobby of lawyers and notaries is big, the connections to politicians are tight and they will not give up this business easily. Additionally the public sector is not known for its fast technology adoption.
  • usrbinbash 5y ago
    Until the first person gets tricked into signing over his property for free...then suddenly, all these lawyers, agencies and notaries are back on the track again, because it turns out they were there for a good reason the entire time: To make sure its really really really hard to get someone to hand over his home via something like a typo or a misclick.
    • yashg 5y ago
      Code is law, until someone writs code to steal your monkey jpg or worse, a real house. Then you realize the law and lawyers were there for a reason.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    > activities that are today carried out by government agencies, states or lawyers. Anyone who has ever bought a property in central Europe knows how much money has to be spent on trustees and notaries. If such transactions can be carried out in a secure way between buyer and seller without an intermediary So if the system in those countries could be thoroughly reformed to work totally differently than it does today... Then why couldn't it just be thoroughly reformed to work more like it does in Western or Northern Europe today, where it works with a lot less hassle even without blockchain?
• antoniuschan99 5y ago
  Why is it that in 2021 if I accidentally transfer btc to an eth wallet I lose it all (into the actual ether)?
  • yashg 5y ago
    Because when the genius Satoshi Nakamoto thought up about digital funny money in the aftermath of 2008 financial crisis, he didn't think hard enough about all the possible scenarios.
• ramoq 5y ago
  I wonder if this will be one of the “Show HN: Dropbox” type threads in a few years…
• democracy 5y ago
  "Crypto" shat itself in the area of payments (noone really needs or wants it and it provides 0 value), so now they are trying other angles - NFT, DeFi. The problem is the crypto influencers are losing touch with reality. You could at least bullshit someone clueless about cryptocurrency and payments, but it's really hard to sell the idea of collecting JPEGs or investing into DeFi (which aggressively described in the terms of a classic ponzi scheme for some reason) to the general public.
  • baby 5y ago
    That’s not how it happened. Crypto is seeing a lot of technical advances. At the same time, people find different ways to build on top of it.
    • democracy 5y ago
      One man's advance is another man's dead end.
      • baby 5y ago
        One man observes while the other keeps moving
  • jakupovic 5y ago
    So the people buying houses with crypto have dirty pants? Or in El Salvador, where BTC is on par with USD, they all have dirty pants? Please re-read your comment before publicly posting, as this is not advancing conversation, nor adding anything, but only exposes your narrowly held (wrong) beliefs.
    • democracy 5y ago
      El Salvador doesn't have its own national currency at all. And yes, imaginary people paying for houses in bitcoin is another example of a crazy meaningless argument. Maybe there is one or two, who knows. I think more people pay for properties in camels or Vodka bottles if we really search.
• low_tech_love 5y ago
  The problem is that we’re still in the phase of “it’s good because it’s blockchain” so people are trying to get in early to make some free bucks. It will only work when someone comes up with a decentralized product backed by blockchain that simply works, and users don’t even need to know it’s a blockchain. It needs to be a blockchain use case instead of attempts to retrofit the blockchain into current problems.
• neillyons 5y ago
  Reminds me of something Elon Musk said. A lot of the content on the internet is a "projection of our limbic system". (Elon saying this https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI?t=1074 https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI?t=1074) I see the craze around crypto the same way. It is a representation of something in our limbic system. Perhaps greed?
  • mw888 5y ago
    Why limit your theory to blockchain? “Craze” in general seems to be limbic in nature, but that’s common knowledge, isn’t it?
• yob22 5y ago
• throwawaybobby 5y ago
  The author exemplifies people in the digital field who are making it their life mission to criticize blockchain/crypto all day. I invested a significant amount in bitcoin very early and am now retired thanks to that decision. My hunch was that it was the combination of interesting innovative tech and a vector for greed that would be unstoppable. I never talked about this publicly, very few people know. Crypto is not my identity. I honestly don’t care about whether it gets banned, disappears, or ends up replacing parts of our digital experience. I recognized from the beginning that it would be unstoppable, whether it was to be a net negative or positive contributor to humanity being completely irrelevant. You can’t stop an idea. But since I’ve been watching this space from day 1, literally installing the bitcoin client the day Satoshi posted it here, I’ve noticed that people who criticize blockchain tech tend to be folks who could have made the same bet I did and didn’t. At the time I invested I worked in a tech company and some people were already going on and on all day about how bitcoin is a scam, etc. These folks were aware of the tech very early, considered it a scam. And now they’re making this crypto bashing their identity. I think a lot of that drive comes from the frustration that despite the space having so many negative aspects, they missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They personally know people like me. And now the only way to make peace with that decision is to publicly bash it constantly, to revolt against it. This becomes who they are, as much as crypto bros make it their identity too. I don’t see people from the general public criticizing blockchain/crypto with as much passion as them. It’s only people from the tech field who go on personal vendettas against that space. People who had the tools and the information to transform their lives and even leave that space since… and didn’t. As much as people who promote blockchain constantly probably have a vested interest in it due to the money they’ve put in it, making their opinion less interesting, the same is true for people who bash blockchain constantly because their vested interest is to make peace with the fact that they didn’t put money in it when it was really early.
• disruptalot 5y ago
  It's truly incredible that people still confidently proclaim that there is "no use case" today. Because of the technical nature of the underlying tech, it's hard for the average individual to recognise how and why it's different. However, it's not possible to explain away the particular applications and their properties. Here are 2 use cases which are live and working today: -Taking a collaterised USD loan without permission or interference from a third party. - Creating a public digital object which lives forever and can be exchangeable and extendable without a third party involved. The immediate response from critics then is to question the validity of the use case. But that requires to admit that the use case is there.
  • bratwurst3000 5y ago
    Thirst one…link? And still less efficient then Cryptofree technologie. Second thats how crypto works … thats not a use case cryptobro ;)
  • gizmo 5y ago
    Presumably you’re talking about a loan against an NFT or other crypto asset. But taking a loan against a financial asset is already really easy. Does loaning against a house, car or stock portfolio get any easier with crypto? I don’t see how. The digital object in your second example is just a hyperlink or a hash, because the digital object itself won’t fit on the blockchain. And there is no link between digital and meat space identity, which means it’s exchangeable but not between people.
    • jakupovic 5y ago
      >>The immediate response from critics then is to question the validity of the use case. But that requires to admit that the use case is there.
    • disruptalot 5y ago
      This is the perfect example of a critic response and exactly the phenomenon I'm describing. On 1, you're somehow conveniently ignoring the "without permission or interference from a third party.". I never mentioned against a car, stock, or house. Nonetheless the functionality still exists. Using ETH or other crypto assets. It gets so much easier. Have you tried it? No talking to advisors, no documents, no discriminatory requirements. Pretty much 1 click and 30 seconds. Fully expect the next question of validity "aha! Well that's against a useless asset!". 2nd example. Yes it can be a hyper link or a hash, is there something particularly wrong with that? The use case I described has still been achieved, it's a digital object. Are you really questioning that people exchange assets using a digital identity? I'm not sure how that invalidates the use case. By the way you're incorrect that digital objects don't fit on the Blockchain. First it depends which Blockchain. Second, there are some objects that do fit. Look at ENS. A domain name, address mapping fits on the chain. That is an NFT. That exists today.
• jakupovic 5y ago
  First video call was made in the 60s. It took 50+ years before it was ubitiquous.
  • marcellus23 5y ago
    Yeah but the advantages of video calling are obvious to anyone immediately. Same with the internet.
• janandonly 5y ago
  I never understand critiques like these. > "somehow no one appears to have managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn’t be better served by blockchainless technologies" There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022. Replacing central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing, is the whole reason why bitcoin and it's blockchain exist. And it is working wonderfully well. People in countries where the central bankers and politicians are letting them down are flocking to bitcoin and other later inventions (such as stable coins). Just check these countries: - Lebanon: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/2/25/distrust-in-lebanese-banks-spurs-bitcoin-boom https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/2/25/distrust-in-leba... - Turkey: https://etfdb.com/crypto-channel/as-turkey-lira-falls-bitcoin-could-be-a-rescuer/ https://etfdb.com/crypto-channel/as-turkey-lira-falls-bitcoi... > "Rampant inflation is once again plaguing Turkey’s local currency, the lira, but one saving grace could be its citizens using bitcoin to supplant the plunging fiat currency." - Also Turkey: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-example-of-why-we-need-bitcoin https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-exam... - El Salvador: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/09/el-salvador-bitcoin-legal-tender-congress https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/09/el-salvador-bi... - And El Salvador again: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-el-salvador-geopolitics https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-el-salvador-geop...
  • WesternWind 5y ago
    I mean a significant portion of the world's money is created by fractional reserve banking.
    • lottin 5y ago
      Not just a significant portion, the vast majority of money in circulation is money created by commercial banks, not central banks. For example, in 2007, Euros issued by the ECB accounted for less than 15% of the supply of Euros (M1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#/media/File:Euro_money_supply_Sept_1998_-_Oct_2007.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#/me...
  • 5y ago
• insaider 5y ago
  I've been against the whole blockchain space for some time but I only just realised the one big positive to come from it - a new market. I think that's why it's become so popular, you can actually invest in ideas just as they're being born now. The stock market is a marvel but the barrier to entry for companies is insane. It's also why there's so much money flowing through VC channels these days. I'm just hoping the resolution to these issues that sticks, a proper market for investing in early stage startups, is created outside of the blockchain.
• aaccount 5y ago
  A rare article on the realities of blockchain
• SanJacobs 5y ago
  > How long can it possibly be “early days”? 70-ish years. I'd say we just recently came out of the early days of computing around the 1990s or 2010s. >How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? Currency is inefficient? It's sure better than trading cows. Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient. "Bitcoin was the beginning of the end for the state" – geohot. And I can't imagine much more of an inefficient system than the state and central banking. > How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains? Energy production problem, not a blockchain problem. > How many people must be scammed for all they’re worth while technologists talk about just beginning to think about building safeguards into their platforms? God, devs, please don't put restrictions on your platforms under the guise of "safety". Same goes for governments. Stay out. If you have no clue how something works, it's partly on you if you gamble all your savings on it. But also, who is excusing scams? We all think scams are bad. Nobody is seeing someone who fell for BitConnect and saying "Well, it's the early days, so it's fine that you got scammed." It seems to me that this lady really wants to dislike. In general. She enjoys disliking things.
  • MoSattler 5y ago
    > Currency is inefficient? It's sure better than trading cows. > Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient. If crypto is doing these things really more efficiently than current solutions, then why neither use case has any significant adoption of blockchain solutions?
    • DaltonCoffee 5y ago
      Some of our current financial systems are deeply embedded and difficult to replace. We're in a situation where we need bankers to finance lawyers to work on issues that would negate some of the need for bankers and lawyers.
• magpi3 5y ago
  The hype around the blockchain reminds me of the hype around XML around 2000. People were blown away by the potential... but no one could quite demonstrate it with a product. Now the blockchain can point to cryptocurrencies as a success story, and XML can kind of point to HTML, but it is a reminder that real change in tech happens when someone comes out with a product where the rubber meets the road. When everyone is talking potential potential potential, I am very skeptical.
• unemphysbro 5y ago
  this article misses the forest for the trees. it's the early days for smart contracts and applications like defi once the barrier of entry drops in contract creation i suspect there will be exponential growth in exotic securities/financial-arbitration
• temp12913231 5y ago
  Automation has not delivered his full potential but only side effects which favored the few sociopath over the many. Internet has delivered as much as possible in the early days, not its full potential, and has been regulated so that the orwellian side effects will be prevalent. Bitcoin put a dent in the banking system, and it is being normalized. But the ideas behind blockchain and trustless consensus have a great potential. They will probably fail like the rest but why not give it a chance. I do NOT mean invest money. I mean invest time in understanding how those principles can be applied so technology can fight soulless technocracy.
• FledNanders 5y ago
  It's all about consensus and enforcement. The courts hold power because we all agree (actively or passively) that the decisions made by the courts are legitimate. We choose to keep our citizenships and pay taxes to enforce these decisions with coercive/violent means (police). If people lose faith in this arrangement and start disregarding the legal systems - e.g. if the police refuse to do their job - you could very well end up with blockchain officers taking their place and kicking down doors with the approval of the masses. For now, though, it doesn't really matter what you own on the blockchain because you have no shotgun to back it up (no legitimacy nor means of enforcement).
• echopurity 5y ago
• bernardv 5y ago
  Spot on.
• cam0 5y ago
  I think it's still early days in terms of what's been built and what valuable applications have been created, i.e. nothing of note. But it's definitely not early days for investing in tokens - almost all of the top tokens seem completely overvalued. I think the token prices will crash and rise continually over the next 5-10 years as developers and entrepreneurs take the ridiculous amounts of VC money that has been raised to invest in crypto, and ultimately (perhaps) build a handful of useful and popular applications.
• nudpiedo 5y ago
  I don’t think the “early days” will be over until we can in fact see a few of the big projects crash and fail AND THEN some new projects survive and take over with killer products as we saw with the dot com bubble. At the moment there are already some successful private blockchains, some of those the end user interacts without knowing about them.
• bawolff 5y ago
  While i agree, ultimately i don't think it would matter if it was. Either you have a product that does something interesting or you don't. I don't think it matters at what stage you have the interesting thing at. (Fwiw, i don't find recent blockchain interesting)
• xtat 5y ago
  Blockchain denialism is the new remote work denialism
• dreamcompiler 5y ago
  I've started telling my tech-following friends and relatives: Whenever you hear somebody say "Web 3.0" you should think "YABS" (Yet Another Blockchain Scam). History will not be kind to @pmarca for promoting this shite.
• chx 5y ago
  Memorable moments from interacting with the Internet -- and web3 It's 1993. We are given a tour of the university I just got admitted to. I peel off the group at the physics building where the university VAX is. Something, something Internet. What is that. I get an account. I begin to use Usenet and IRC where I can talk to people so far away. Usability of these are on par with any other application (say, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS) at the time. My mind is immediately blown. No one needs to give a pitch how useful or how fundamentally different this is to anything we had prior. It's 2006. I began travelling the world, settling in Canada in 2008. I can chat with family for free. Later, even do video calls. I remember the weekends when we wrote a letter to my uncle who moved to the United States in the 80s. It took months to get a reply. Phone calls were rare and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011, my uncle was talking to him daily for a long time for free -- thanks to the 'Net. It's 2007. I am wintering out in Israel. Moving around is very challenging, as I don't read Hebrew and I don't drive. It's 2015. I am again in Israel. For a week, every night I sleep in a different apartment, booked online. Moving around is trivial, my phone tells me where and when to get on and off buses. It's 2022. This a quote from someone touting the advances in the so called crypto"currency" space: > Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it. Excuse me for being skeptical about web3.
• JBSay 5y ago
  The author admitted in her opening that she doesn't understand the point of decentralization. Reading anything beyond that point is a waste of time.