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>it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history. No, please stop with this fal

>it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history. No, please stop with this fallacy. I don't know where people get this idea besides from marketing hype. There is no innovation in cryptocurrency. It's perfectly fair to also disregard any claims of innovation, because they're not true. I'll go into the specifics here. >1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run The innovation you're taking about here is a database server, blockchains not necessary. AWS and Azure are also an "inexpensive programmable and public" server except you can put anything you want on it, it doesn't have to take the form of an immutable ledger. Blockchains are just strictly worse than everything else. >2) zero-knowledge proofs. Also has nothing to do with blockchains, zero knowledge proofs are useful for other purposes besides cryptocurrency, and were invented long before it. >By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity, where you can send money digitally, similar to handing a $20 bill to a friend. No, you don't. By combining those things you might get some structure that would theoretically allow you to do that, but that's only a small portion of building a scalable financial platform. There are still a ton of other services you have to build, which have to exist anyway for any form of online finance regardless of whether you use a blockchain or not. Blockchains are also not "p2p" in any way, by definition they require middlemen to run the chain. I'm growing tired of reading these comments about cryptocurrency where basically everything is wrong, it's exhausting to deal with the torrent of misleading statements. That should tip any technologist off that something is seriously wrong there. I can't even blame you for making them, the marketing hype is just out of control and is confusing everybody.

robot9000 5y ago
>There is no innovation in cryptocurrency What other technology makes use of an immutable ledger, like you said?
- davidgerard 5y ago
  Merkle trees were invented in 1979.
rmbyrro 5y ago
What you're missing is that someone has to manage the AWS servers running the database. And everyone else has to trust them. With Bitcoin, you are user and "manager" of the server at the same time. You don't need to trust anyone. And no one needs to trust you. No single party needs to keep track of transactions and be the source of truth. That was not possible before and it is the innovation behind blockchain and bitcoin.
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  >What you're missing is that someone has to manage the AWS servers running the database. I didn't miss that. Someone also has to manage the servers running the blockchain. >With Bitcoin, you are user and "manager" of the server at the same time. I'm sorry what, no you aren't. At minimum, an external group of miners are managing the servers. You're paying them transaction fees to run the network, and you have to trust them not to attack the network, through a 51% attack or through something else. That doesn't even get into all the other parties you have to interact with and trust to do any kind of real business on a blockchain. >No single party needs to keep track of transactions and be the source of truth. Except there is a single party, that party is the miners. You could tell me that your point is how this party is loosely connected, but so are a lot of cloud businesses. >That was not possible before and it is the innovation behind blockchain and bitcoin. No, it was possible to create distributed systems and consensus algorithms long before blockchains. That isn't an innovation at all.

robot9000 5y ago

>There is no innovation in cryptocurrency What other technology makes use of an immutable ledger, like you said?

davidgerard 5y ago
Merkle trees were invented in 1979.

rmbyrro 5y ago

What you're missing is that someone has to manage the AWS servers running the database. And everyone else has to trust them. With Bitcoin, you are user and "manager" of the server at the same time. You don't need to trust anyone. And no one needs to trust you. No single party needs to keep track of transactions and be the source of truth. That was not possible before and it is the innovation behind blockchain and bitcoin.

throwaway82652 5y ago
>What you're missing is that someone has to manage the AWS servers running the database. I didn't miss that. Someone also has to manage the servers running the blockchain. >With Bitcoin, you are user and "manager" of the server at the same time. I'm sorry what, no you aren't. At minimum, an external group of miners are managing the servers. You're paying them transaction fees to run the network, and you have to trust them not to attack the network, through a 51% attack or through something else. That doesn't even get into all the other parties you have to interact with and trust to do any kind of real business on a blockchain. >No single party needs to keep track of transactions and be the source of truth. Except there is a single party, that party is the miners. You could tell me that your point is how this party is loosely connected, but so are a lot of cloud businesses. >That was not possible before and it is the innovation behind blockchain and bitcoin. No, it was possible to create distributed systems and consensus algorithms long before blockchains. That isn't an innovation at all.