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> Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros. the issue is that w

> Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros. the issue is that we show the things being made and hn calls them all scams and ponzis and fraud. we show the rates adoption, and the growth in use and hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal. we point out that crypto is in many ways doing better than other industries to represent marginalized communities and we all get labelled cryptobros and any of us who arent that get erased from the picture. if we post anything positive linking to a twitter account that account starts getting endless abuse. there are very few people who bother coming to hn anymore, pretty much everyone working in the space has given up on it. We have automated stable currencies, permission-less loans and lending, streaming payments, UBI experiments, co-ops governing land use, automated taxation and public goods funding experiments, sybil resistance mechanisms for 1p1v governance, resilient p2p infrastructure that people are using every day to pay each other and run their businesses. Composability for all of these things to quickly build your own business logic on top of it. Standards for tokenising royalties/payments/tickets... All running on p2p infrastructure anyone can participate in. Thats pretty amazing imo. At what point will what we've been building be considered useful? If you took any of these things and wrap it in a saas startup connected to stripe hn would eat it up and claim its the greatest startup of the decade. but because its built on crypto it can only ever be world destroying disaster capitalist alt-right incubating cartoon villain fraudulent vc led scammers right? its just so tiring.

ctvo 5y ago
> At what point will what we've been building be considered useful? Can you share some of the numbers you're citing? Who is using what to run their businesses daily? What's the number of transactions relative to current financial systems? How many actual users do you have for these things? The problem is anyone digging deeper sees it's all marketing and bullshit. It starts being useful when it's not motivated by VCs and others with a financial stake trying to get higher exists hyping up products with no utility and no users.
aww_dang 5y ago
>... hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal. This is the part that confuses me. What is the theory of value here? If you don't like it don't buy it. If you're not interested, don't buy it. If you don't see the benefits, don't develop cryptocurrency applications. Nobody is compelling developers or users to use this technology. Meanwhile state run currencies are forced upon us. Walled gardens and browsers force tech choices on developers. Isn't it enough to dislike something and avoid it entirely? Why advocate for limiting the choices of others? How is this not authoritarian paternalism?
- oblio 5y ago
  > Nobody is compelling developers or users to use this technology. Ummm.. have you seen the mountains of hype and cash poured from the cryptocurrency community onto regular folks? > Isn't it enough to dislike something and avoid it entirely? I would, but the cryptocurrency community isn't letting me do that.
kkielhofner 5y ago
Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Visa has 1B transactions per day and virtually every single one of them is someone purchasing a good or service. Credit cards were "invented" in 1951. By 1970 51% of US households had at least one. All happening well before the internet. Even with all of the hype an estimated 13% of American households even traded crypto last year. Want to guess how many households used it to purchase a good or service? Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading. Regarding the abuse here on HN - tweet something negative about blockchain and I think your perspective on the "abuse" coming from the HN community will change. By nature "cryptobros" and other people pumping these things are doing so for their own financial gain. People that are negative about crypto typically don't have any skin in the game and even if they do (somehow) their ferocity pales in comparison to the portions of the population that are expecting to retire with it.
- Quindecillion 5y ago
  > Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Source for this? Also, all of these transaction numbers are for on-chain transactions. They don't include layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. Given that the Lightning Network is built for micro-transactions, where sats can literally be streamed to a creator, while someone listens to a podcast for example, it's possible (though impossible to definitively confirm?) that on-chain AND off-chain transactions already exceed credit card services. You have to understand that Bitcoin (the blockchain network) isn't trying to be a credit card network. It's a settlement layer/clearing house. Traditionally for a transaction to occur with finality would take days, perhaps weeks to occur. When you make a purchase with a credit card that payment isn't occurring with finality in the banking system. It takes days to "lock in". On Bitcoin it takes 10 minutes and is completely automated and trustless. The Lightning Network (enabled by the SegWit upgrade) allows for payments to occur instantly, with low fees, and can be used for micro-transactions. The tradeoff to that convenience is it's less secure. This is why you would have a Lightning wallet for your day to day usage, and your "savings account" in cold storage on-chain. You would only use on-chain transactions for big purchases, or to open a Lightning channel. > Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading. It literally is, you're just not paying attention. As already mentioned it is being used to stream payments in podcasts as your listen, it is being used in competitive video games, there are gift card services like Bitrefill, The Lightning Labs blog does a good job of summarizing the state of the Lightning Network. https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-flywheel-is-starting-to-spin https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-flywheel-is-startin... https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-lightning-reaching https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-lightning...
oblio 5y ago
I've worked for a crypto startup. They were frank enough to tell me that their business could have done the same thing in a centralized fashion, but they wouldn't have gotten funding. Cryptocurrencies don't have a "killer app". Something for the common person. I suspect that even when they do, it will be incidental. Something that could have been developed as part of a centralized architecture, but built with cryptocurrencies because the financial support was there. > permission-less loans and lending What does this mean?

ctvo 5y ago

> At what point will what we've been building be considered useful? Can you share some of the numbers you're citing? Who is using what to run their businesses daily? What's the number of transactions relative to current financial systems? How many actual users do you have for these things? The problem is anyone digging deeper sees it's all marketing and bullshit. It starts being useful when it's not motivated by VCs and others with a financial stake trying to get higher exists hyping up products with no utility and no users.

aww_dang 5y ago

>... hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal. This is the part that confuses me. What is the theory of value here? If you don't like it don't buy it. If you're not interested, don't buy it. If you don't see the benefits, don't develop cryptocurrency applications. Nobody is compelling developers or users to use this technology. Meanwhile state run currencies are forced upon us. Walled gardens and browsers force tech choices on developers. Isn't it enough to dislike something and avoid it entirely? Why advocate for limiting the choices of others? How is this not authoritarian paternalism?

oblio 5y ago
> Nobody is compelling developers or users to use this technology. Ummm.. have you seen the mountains of hype and cash poured from the cryptocurrency community onto regular folks? > Isn't it enough to dislike something and avoid it entirely? I would, but the cryptocurrency community isn't letting me do that.

kkielhofner 5y ago

Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Visa has 1B transactions per day and virtually every single one of them is someone purchasing a good or service. Credit cards were "invented" in 1951. By 1970 51% of US households had at least one. All happening well before the internet. Even with all of the hype an estimated 13% of American households even traded crypto last year. Want to guess how many households used it to purchase a good or service? Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading. Regarding the abuse here on HN - tweet something negative about blockchain and I think your perspective on the "abuse" coming from the HN community will change. By nature "cryptobros" and other people pumping these things are doing so for their own financial gain. People that are negative about crypto typically don't have any skin in the game and even if they do (somehow) their ferocity pales in comparison to the portions of the population that are expecting to retire with it.

Quindecillion 5y ago
> Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Source for this? Also, all of these transaction numbers are for on-chain transactions. They don't include layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. Given that the Lightning Network is built for micro-transactions, where sats can literally be streamed to a creator, while someone listens to a podcast for example, it's possible (though impossible to definitively confirm?) that on-chain AND off-chain transactions already exceed credit card services. You have to understand that Bitcoin (the blockchain network) isn't trying to be a credit card network. It's a settlement layer/clearing house. Traditionally for a transaction to occur with finality would take days, perhaps weeks to occur. When you make a purchase with a credit card that payment isn't occurring with finality in the banking system. It takes days to "lock in". On Bitcoin it takes 10 minutes and is completely automated and trustless. The Lightning Network (enabled by the SegWit upgrade) allows for payments to occur instantly, with low fees, and can be used for micro-transactions. The tradeoff to that convenience is it's less secure. This is why you would have a Lightning wallet for your day to day usage, and your "savings account" in cold storage on-chain. You would only use on-chain transactions for big purchases, or to open a Lightning channel. > Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading. It literally is, you're just not paying attention. As already mentioned it is being used to stream payments in podcasts as your listen, it is being used in competitive video games, there are gift card services like Bitrefill, The Lightning Labs blog does a good job of summarizing the state of the Lightning Network. https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-flywheel-is-starting-to-spin https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-flywheel-is-startin... https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-lightning-reaching https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-lightning...

oblio 5y ago

I've worked for a crypto startup. They were frank enough to tell me that their business could have done the same thing in a centralized fashion, but they wouldn't have gotten funding. Cryptocurrencies don't have a "killer app". Something for the common person. I suspect that even when they do, it will be incidental. Something that could have been developed as part of a centralized architecture, but built with cryptocurrencies because the financial support was there. > permission-less loans and lending What does this mean?