17 ms·

It amazes me how polarizing blockchain and cryptocurrency is. It is to black/white, love/hate. I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a

by onebot 4y ago

It amazes me how polarizing blockchain and cryptocurrency is. It is to black/white, love/hate. I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people. I personally, believe there is a quite novel concept behind the trust-less consensus mechanisms. It amazes me that computers can come to an agreement in a hostile environment--fully decentralized. How that is put to use in practicality maybe debatable. But I think arguments like this tend to just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

mightyRodri 4y ago
There is no baby. The technology does not solve technical problems that havent been solved better. The only thing bchains does is give ppl with a lot of money to become stakeholders, the possibility to comodify even more parts of the internet. Thats the only upside of the technology, scam ppl for their money. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- mike_d 4y ago
  What technical solution do you have for multiple parties needing to transact where they do not trust each other and cannot depend on a third party or the court system for dispute resolution? I'll wait.
  - Ragnarokk 4y ago
    When you use bitcoin, you actually rely on a third party to validate your transaction. A banking organisation can also be a third party.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    Don't sell illegal drugs? Sure there are countries with no functioning legal systems and extreme levels of corruption but most people affected by that would probably have a hard time using blockchain technologies directly and would have to rely on 3rd parties anyway.
  - hurril 4y ago
    Why don't you give your answer to these questions first? I'll wait.
    - mike_d 4y ago
      Obviously given the context here, various blockchains meet these requirements.
  - pja 4y ago
    If you’re transacting with a bunch of people that you do not trust then the payment rails are the least of your problems. Your comment just feels like typical crypto-booster vague handwaving to me - can you give an actual example of such a situation where the existing third parties that alreayd exist to solve these kind of problems cannot be used? Be concrete.
    - mattdesl 4y ago
      I gave an example here[1]. The typical answer is "just trust a third-party service" which side-steps the constraints in the question. FWIW there is a variety of reasons you may not want to use a service like escrow.com — they take a cut of the exchange, operate as a for-profit business in a particular US-based jurisdictions, only operate on a limited set of currencies, request personal/private data sharing, and tend to settle the transaction in days, not seconds or minutes. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423
      - hiq 4y ago
        Your example only works because you're considering an asset that lives in the blockchain itself. So it doesn't apply to anything physical, as in this case, you need a trusted channel to transfer the asset anyway, and a blockchain doesn't solve that. Even considering only these digital assets, you have an implicit notion of trust. The xyz.eth representation on the Ethereum blockchain is considered valuable because most people think it does represent what people expect to find at xyz.eth. But the ICANN can change this at any moment by adding .eth to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... and this will all be gone. Humans don't live in a blockchain, and blockchain rules don't apply outside of it, so you can't solve this boundary problem. Or rather, you solve it by trusting whoever's in charge of this boundary.
        mattdesl 4y ago
        The whole point is peer to peer transfer of digital assets and digital state that is recorded on-chain. The goal is not “how to transfer a physical asset.” These assets do have market value (despite your own personal feeling on what they “should” be worth) and so users do wish to find ways of interacting with and trading them without an intermediary. The TLD/ICANN is irrelevant, as “.eth” is a construct for Ethereum clients, not HTTPS clients. And yes, we build trust of, say, an immutable contract address originated by a human, and continue to trust in it years later because (a) the ledger is incredibly expensive to dismantle and (b) we can cryptographically verify this on our own local node.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    When you rig the questionnaire to arrive at the exact answer you were looking for to begin with...
  - tirpen 4y ago
    My suggestion is: "grow up". All of human society is based on trust, and it works just fine and has for centuries. Who would even want to live in a trust less society? That sounds like hell.
    - drdeca 4y ago
      This is not a technical solution.
      - q3k 4y ago
        Growing up is also realizing that some problems require non-technical solutions :).
        drdeca 4y ago
        Sure, but it also makes it not an answer to the question which was asked. And just because the technical solution to a technical problem might not be (/isn’t) a good/practical solution to the practical problem that the technical problem is inspired by, doesn’t make interest in the technical solution illegitimate.
    - magicalhippo 4y ago
      I might trust someone enough to give them $20. I might not trust someone enough to enter my credit card details on their webpage.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        The technical solution to that is temporary CC numbers, not a giant crypto chain.
        magicalhippo 4y ago
        Sure, that's one technical solution, assuming you can get a card. I was just trying to point out that trust is not binary.
  - hiq 4y ago
    That only holds if you donate your BTC. In practice you want to buy something with it. How do you guarantee that you do receive the thing you're buying once you've given your BTC? You need to trust this other channel through which you're receiving it.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Are you implying that block chains solve this? So, I can buy a car from someone I don't trust by using a blockchain, with no need to rely on courts or other third parties?
    - swalsh 4y ago
      A digital car... yeah. The more i've tried to hack with smart contracts for physical stuff, the more I realize that's not what it's good for. But if you stop thinking of the physical world, and only think of the digital world, and you use a modern chain (I use avax). It works pretty good. I think there's a few missing pieces of infrastructure still, but the people who "are in it to build, and not for the money" (I include myself in this) stick around to build what I consider the first purely digital economy.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        Ok, then how can I buy a World of Warcraft mount from another player I don't trust by using my Final Fantasy 14 money and a block chain? Or, if that's too silly, how do I buy a .com domain name in exchange for some ETH, assuming neither I nor the seller of the domain name trust each other? These are all digital goods, so can avax help me do it?
        swalsh 4y ago
        The games needs to be built to allow this, however here's how it works for games that do implement it. This is using the C-Chain. Most games now would use a subnet (which is like a parallel blockchain integrated with the mainnet, but cheaper transactions) 1. Dev Create an ERC721 contract for WoW items 2. Dev Create an ERC20 contract for Final Fantasy 14 money 3. ANYONE can Create a liquidity pair for the Final Fantasy ERC20 with AVAX in one or more of the numerous dex's (since i'm using avax, probably using Trader Joe's) 4. Players Swap Final Fantasy money for AVAX, use AVAX to purchase WOW NFT at any of the numerous NFT marketplaces.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
  - ChrisLomont 4y ago
    So you're claiming this is a rare case for which Blockchain is useful, but outside this rare, niche case normal banking is better?
- mattdesl 4y ago
  > technology does not solve technical problems that havent been solved better Critics like Diehl repeat this often, but without ever referencing the solutions. What non-blockchain solution solves the double spend problem when transferring digital assets in a peer-to-peer network? Or, in the case of Ethereum, providing solutions to general-purpose decentralized computation and state (rather than only peer-to-peer payments) with such strong public consensus? I would love to see the following succinctly solved by a non-crypto and non-blockchain solution: - User A holds digital asset X (such as a valuable domain name "xyz.eth") and User B holds digital asset Y (such as a valuable sum of stablecoin tokens) and these users wish to exchange them in a single public + cryptographically verifiable transaction (i.e. atomic swap), without relying on the trust (and for-profit services) of a third-party escrow agent.
  - tkfu 4y ago
    You're being willfully obtuse here. > What non-blockchain solution solves the double spend problem when transferring digital assets in a peer-to-peer network? Literally any trusted central authority or database. > Or, in the case of Ethereum, providing solutions to general-purpose decentralized computation and state (rather than only peer-to-peer payments) with such strong public consensus? You haven't actually stated a problem here, you've described a solution in search of a problem. > User A holds digital asset X (such as a valuable domain name "xyz.eth") You're mentioning a .eth domain name being bought with cryptocurrency as an example, which is entirely circular. "Hurr durr, betcha can't swap one blockchain thing (.eth domain) for another blockchain thing (cryptocurrency tokens) without using a blockchain" isn't as strong an argument as you think it is. If we were talking about a .com domain name, no blockchain in the world will help you with that transaction.
    - mattdesl 4y ago
      As usual, “just trust Amazon or Google” which is centrally owned, and not peer-to-peer (distributed/decentralized), and not an answer to my question. > You're mentioning a .eth domain name being bought with cryptocurrency as an example, which is entirely circular. "Hurr durr, betcha can't swap one blockchain thing (.eth domain) for another blockchain thing (cryptocurrency tokens) without using a blockchain" isn't as strong an argument as you think it is. If we were talking about a .com domain name, no blockchain in the world will help you with that transaction. Your argument feels in bad faith, but I’ll bite: “.eth” and ENS is a valuable construct for those transacting in the network. These assets do have clear market value, even if you personally feel they shouldn’t.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  For me, bitcoin solves very real problems that I wouldn't be able to solve without it: getting paid circumventing Putin's banking system.
  - lakomen 4y ago
    What does the Russian president have to do with anything in that context?
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      He is a dictator who controls money flowing in and out of country, using the tax revenue to fund his regime and wage war. He can't tax or block bitcoin payments, or steal proceeds by forcing foreign currency sale at a very unfair exchange rate. Bitcoin helps live without paying taxes and fund opposition without repercussions. In fact, cryptocurrency payments are the only way for Russians to fund anti-Putin opposition. So anyone who says that cryptocurrencies are useless, please, kindly, stop saying this nonsense. If you are lucky to be born in a first world country you simply don't know how easily banking can be used to suffocate a person in a (lawless) cashless society. Bitcoin is a hedge against that, and a powerful one.
- Hbruz0 4y ago
  double spending problem, anyone ?
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    Every banking system ever? At vastly lower energy waste, at higher transaction rates, and with all the legal protection of centuries of well developed needs.
    - lustforleif 4y ago
      > trust-less Trusting a central authority (bank) is not a solution to trust-less prevention of double spending.
      - nicbou 4y ago
        Why does it need to be trustless? And why is it worth paying such a premium for it?
      - SideQuark 4y ago
        >Trusting a central authority (bank) Strawman? A bank is not a central authority any more than large mining pools are central authorities. Or China (when it controlled enough BTC to double spend at will). The banking system is vastly distributed. Trust is a giant network of accountants, central banks, regulators, investors, and lots more that help ensure there is no double spending. There are checks all throughout the system, ledgers, reports, audit trails, and, unlike BTC, when something is actually stolen, lots of protections and methods to claw back stolen money. BTC can be double spent via majority control, so double spend protection is at best a statistical claim, just like real banking. A large problem with Bitcoin is developers were unaware of modern (or even ancient) banking and money systems and have tried to reinvent simple money with all the same problems that mankind moved from millennia ago. Then people unaware of the why of modern money systems think crypto solves an important problem that modern economies and users don't care about, while ignoring all the problems modern systems solved as if they don't exist. And honestly, in all my life, I have never heard of anyone in the normal banking system double spend. So chalk one more up to the Bitcoin make believe event crowd. How many double spend events have you performed in your entire life via normal banking?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dr_dshiv 4y ago
I think it is the concept of “trust-less” itself. You replace trust in people and institutions with trust in technology. I think that rubs some people the wrong way.
cloutchaser 4y ago
Many of the people controlling the narrative have realised recently what a threat decentralisation is. They are pushing extremely hard to make everyone think this is some evil useless force that is only used for scamming people. It's the same way protecting the children is used by people in power to take away your privacy. Blockchains and cryptos are innovative tools. They can be used for good and bad, but they are an interesting development. It's really sad how many on HN have fallen for this black and white thinking.
- smt88 4y ago
  I am a huge proponent of decentralization. You could distill my philosophy down to this: the concentration of power into a single person is always dangerous. This is why I support democracies and breaking up monopolistic companies, among other things. I have also spent years trying to figure out a use-case for blockchain that is not solved by some other technology with less risk, and I can't figure one out.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Decentralization does not require bitcoin. There are trust-based decentralized payment networks much older than the transistor. These could be digitized as well, but computing circles have relatively little interest in decentralization+trust.
traveler01 4y ago
That's the world we live in. Nobody can stay in the middle, people either hate it or love it, it's either black or white. Nobody can do pros/cons on everything, specially giving valid criticism to improve an idea.
- smt88 4y ago
  > That's the world we live in. Nobody can stay in the middle, people either hate it or love it, it's either black or white. This is an illusion created by spending time online. The loudest people are polarized, but the majority of people are still in the middle somewhere, sometimes in a very ambivalent state. A great example of this is Elon Musk. Online (Twitter, reddit, etc.) people worship him or loathe him. But the average person rarely thinks about him at all and doesn't care that much about him. They certainly don't have a strong opinion. If you look at research (I read a lot of Pew surveys), this is true for most topics. There are 5-25% of people on the extremes, and everyone else can be said to be "not extreme" about the topic in some way (either ambivalent or just not knowledgeable enough to give a response).
  - traveler01 4y ago
    Yeah that makes sense. We're listening too much to the extremes, they're louder after all. Sadly I don't see this changing in the near future...
dijit 4y ago
I’ll bite. My friends and I were into bitcoin in mid-2009. We mined some coins on our 8800 GT. At the time, I read the papers and the wiki and understood that the technology will not scale so greatly, in a way it wasn’t even designed to; it felt like an interesting proof of concept, the ability to actually buy things with bitcoins felt largely like a novelty, I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something. I was ambivalent on the technology, but understood that fundamentally it was quite wasteful (computationally). But something changed, suddenly people were using it to launder money, then once it started earning value (due to it being finite and so many people having already mined the majority of coins and probably losing the wallets) scammers crept in. Now I see reels on Instagram glorifying “trader” life, so many of the old tired schemes from 100 years ago that used to plague the markets are new again. Just like how our bodies have no tolerance to thousand year old virus’ that have long since gone extinct; our brains are not easily capable of understanding these schemes anymore: because they’ve been illegal and regulated for more than our lifetimes, we have no “natural immunity” to them. When alls said and done, the initial promise isn’t even kept, there’s very few “super miners” who if they worked together would be able to control the entire bitcoin economy, which is the situation with central banks. So what were left with is a scam ridden, fundamentally wasteful technology that doesn’t scale properly and does not solve the problem it was meant to; and the main reason that this is the case is because scammers adopted it so readily. You can see exactly what I mean when you look at Monero. Objectively Monero solves the problems with bitcoin, but because it’s very difficult to trade with (due to it being privacy focused and no exchange willing to trade it) the price is very stable, since it can’t easily be used for money laundering or scams due to it’s higher barrier to entry. That said, I’m still fairly ambivalent but leaning towards negative. I will not work for a “crypto” company or with “NFTs” for example.
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  > I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something. Was that a coffee shop in the Holesovice area? I remember a café where you could only pay in Bitcoin, which I thought was a rather dumb idea.
- ooaa 4y ago
rvz 4y ago
> How that is put to use in practicality maybe debatable. But I think arguments like this tend to just throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe is that why companies like Stripe are still using it then for crypto payouts? [0] What is nonsense is totally thinking that it is going to go away 100% due to the scam projects, fraud, etc like what the author has said AND totally thinking ever project is going to survive or go for mass adoption. This is where you get complete nonsense [0] from HN users who reply back and have admitted they have not read the article and scream 'CrYPtO IS SCaM' and either cannot answer basic questions or reply back with another question without given a concrete answer to the first. Perhaps there is a reason why in particular Stripe ignored everyone and looked at a select few cryptocurrencies / blockchain technologies again despite all the other scams going on. [0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132996
- rvz 4y ago
  Obviously with the nonsense replies being here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133074 of course.
delegate 4y ago
It is the people, not the technology. It is about money and getting rich. Whichever problem a certain blockchain is supposed the solve, the main reason for its existence is that the people who create it want to get rich, fabulously rich and fast. Besides getting rich, majority of these projects are solutions to non-existent or solved problems, which use a very complicated distributed immutable database that very few investors actually understand. If it's complicated and convoluted, then it must be the future. Fabulously rich is hypnotising and it can easily become the most important thing in someone's life. They're betting a lot on being right. Others, who see the side effects of these people's mission in life, try to wake them up from this hypnosis, but that's impossible. And so far, they have been right and many got rich. But I have yet to see a project that solved a real problem (besides dark markets and the ones that enable crypto) The side effects are not negligible though, they really affect others - scams, ransomware, energy use, etc .. So it's going to stay polarized.
smt88 4y ago
> I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people. I don't remember a technology that has attracted such an incredibly irritating fanbase. Twitter is unusable because of crypto shills. Even someone genuinely curious about crypto is probably going to assume that it's all a dumpster fire because of the absolute scum on Twitter that spam every thread with crypto nonsense. If it weren't for those people, I can guarantee the technology itself would not have broken through to mainstream consciousness. In and of itself, it's not a particularly polarizing thing. Of course, the outrage of the original cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) essentially being "proof of burning fossil fuels" isn't helping either.
corobo 4y ago
It seems more rich/poor from where I'm sitting haha. I'd love to have cashed in on the crypto too, I just couldn't afford to get in An internet with a door fee is a failed internet, I hope the web3 bubble bursts before we lose anything
FabHK 4y ago
Bitcoin has two innovations in my view: 1. Technological innovation: distributed ledger with trust-less consensus. However, that innovation is largely unnecessary for almost all practical purposes, and it leads to resource use that is about a billion times higher than without that innovation (due to duplicated work and Proof of Waste). 2. Legal/process/social innovation: circumvention of rules and regulations, like Uber. Some people love that innovation, some people think it is rather harmful. Personally, I think encrypted and uncensorable flow of information is a net positive, and should be retained. Encrypted and uncensorable flow of money, not so sure.
maxerickson 4y ago
It's not just the computers coming to agreement, a majority of participants in a network (by control weight) can decide to ignore the conclusion the computers came to and do something else. And of course it has happened.

by onebot 4y ago

mightyRodri 4y ago

There is no baby. The technology does not solve technical problems that havent been solved better. The only thing bchains does is give ppl with a lot of money to become stakeholders, the possibility to comodify even more parts of the internet. Thats the only upside of the technology, scam ppl for their money. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

mike_d 4y ago
What technical solution do you have for multiple parties needing to transact where they do not trust each other and cannot depend on a third party or the court system for dispute resolution? I'll wait.
- Ragnarokk 4y ago
  When you use bitcoin, you actually rely on a third party to validate your transaction. A banking organisation can also be a third party.
- qwytw 4y ago
  Don't sell illegal drugs? Sure there are countries with no functioning legal systems and extreme levels of corruption but most people affected by that would probably have a hard time using blockchain technologies directly and would have to rely on 3rd parties anyway.
- hurril 4y ago
  Why don't you give your answer to these questions first? I'll wait.
  - mike_d 4y ago
    Obviously given the context here, various blockchains meet these requirements.
- pja 4y ago
  If you’re transacting with a bunch of people that you do not trust then the payment rails are the least of your problems. Your comment just feels like typical crypto-booster vague handwaving to me - can you give an actual example of such a situation where the existing third parties that alreayd exist to solve these kind of problems cannot be used? Be concrete.
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    I gave an example here[1]. The typical answer is "just trust a third-party service" which side-steps the constraints in the question. FWIW there is a variety of reasons you may not want to use a service like escrow.com — they take a cut of the exchange, operate as a for-profit business in a particular US-based jurisdictions, only operate on a limited set of currencies, request personal/private data sharing, and tend to settle the transaction in days, not seconds or minutes. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423
    - hiq 4y ago
      Your example only works because you're considering an asset that lives in the blockchain itself. So it doesn't apply to anything physical, as in this case, you need a trusted channel to transfer the asset anyway, and a blockchain doesn't solve that. Even considering only these digital assets, you have an implicit notion of trust. The xyz.eth representation on the Ethereum blockchain is considered valuable because most people think it does represent what people expect to find at xyz.eth. But the ICANN can change this at any moment by adding .eth to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... and this will all be gone. Humans don't live in a blockchain, and blockchain rules don't apply outside of it, so you can't solve this boundary problem. Or rather, you solve it by trusting whoever's in charge of this boundary.
      - mattdesl 4y ago
        The whole point is peer to peer transfer of digital assets and digital state that is recorded on-chain. The goal is not “how to transfer a physical asset.” These assets do have market value (despite your own personal feeling on what they “should” be worth) and so users do wish to find ways of interacting with and trading them without an intermediary. The TLD/ICANN is irrelevant, as “.eth” is a construct for Ethereum clients, not HTTPS clients. And yes, we build trust of, say, an immutable contract address originated by a human, and continue to trust in it years later because (a) the ledger is incredibly expensive to dismantle and (b) we can cryptographically verify this on our own local node.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  When you rig the questionnaire to arrive at the exact answer you were looking for to begin with...
- tirpen 4y ago
  My suggestion is: "grow up". All of human society is based on trust, and it works just fine and has for centuries. Who would even want to live in a trust less society? That sounds like hell.
  - drdeca 4y ago
    This is not a technical solution.
    - q3k 4y ago
      Growing up is also realizing that some problems require non-technical solutions :).
      - drdeca 4y ago
        Sure, but it also makes it not an answer to the question which was asked. And just because the technical solution to a technical problem might not be (/isn’t) a good/practical solution to the practical problem that the technical problem is inspired by, doesn’t make interest in the technical solution illegitimate.
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    I might trust someone enough to give them $20. I might not trust someone enough to enter my credit card details on their webpage.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      The technical solution to that is temporary CC numbers, not a giant crypto chain.
      - magicalhippo 4y ago
        Sure, that's one technical solution, assuming you can get a card. I was just trying to point out that trust is not binary.
- hiq 4y ago
  That only holds if you donate your BTC. In practice you want to buy something with it. How do you guarantee that you do receive the thing you're buying once you've given your BTC? You need to trust this other channel through which you're receiving it.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Are you implying that block chains solve this? So, I can buy a car from someone I don't trust by using a blockchain, with no need to rely on courts or other third parties?
  - swalsh 4y ago
    A digital car... yeah. The more i've tried to hack with smart contracts for physical stuff, the more I realize that's not what it's good for. But if you stop thinking of the physical world, and only think of the digital world, and you use a modern chain (I use avax). It works pretty good. I think there's a few missing pieces of infrastructure still, but the people who "are in it to build, and not for the money" (I include myself in this) stick around to build what I consider the first purely digital economy.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Ok, then how can I buy a World of Warcraft mount from another player I don't trust by using my Final Fantasy 14 money and a block chain? Or, if that's too silly, how do I buy a .com domain name in exchange for some ETH, assuming neither I nor the seller of the domain name trust each other? These are all digital goods, so can avax help me do it?
      - swalsh 4y ago
        The games needs to be built to allow this, however here's how it works for games that do implement it. This is using the C-Chain. Most games now would use a subnet (which is like a parallel blockchain integrated with the mainnet, but cheaper transactions) 1. Dev Create an ERC721 contract for WoW items 2. Dev Create an ERC20 contract for Final Fantasy 14 money 3. ANYONE can Create a liquidity pair for the Final Fantasy ERC20 with AVAX in one or more of the numerous dex's (since i'm using avax, probably using Trader Joe's) 4. Players Swap Final Fantasy money for AVAX, use AVAX to purchase WOW NFT at any of the numerous NFT marketplaces.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
- ChrisLomont 4y ago
  So you're claiming this is a rare case for which Blockchain is useful, but outside this rare, niche case normal banking is better?
mattdesl 4y ago
> technology does not solve technical problems that havent been solved better Critics like Diehl repeat this often, but without ever referencing the solutions. What non-blockchain solution solves the double spend problem when transferring digital assets in a peer-to-peer network? Or, in the case of Ethereum, providing solutions to general-purpose decentralized computation and state (rather than only peer-to-peer payments) with such strong public consensus? I would love to see the following succinctly solved by a non-crypto and non-blockchain solution: - User A holds digital asset X (such as a valuable domain name "xyz.eth") and User B holds digital asset Y (such as a valuable sum of stablecoin tokens) and these users wish to exchange them in a single public + cryptographically verifiable transaction (i.e. atomic swap), without relying on the trust (and for-profit services) of a third-party escrow agent.
- tkfu 4y ago
  You're being willfully obtuse here. > What non-blockchain solution solves the double spend problem when transferring digital assets in a peer-to-peer network? Literally any trusted central authority or database. > Or, in the case of Ethereum, providing solutions to general-purpose decentralized computation and state (rather than only peer-to-peer payments) with such strong public consensus? You haven't actually stated a problem here, you've described a solution in search of a problem. > User A holds digital asset X (such as a valuable domain name "xyz.eth") You're mentioning a .eth domain name being bought with cryptocurrency as an example, which is entirely circular. "Hurr durr, betcha can't swap one blockchain thing (.eth domain) for another blockchain thing (cryptocurrency tokens) without using a blockchain" isn't as strong an argument as you think it is. If we were talking about a .com domain name, no blockchain in the world will help you with that transaction.
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    As usual, “just trust Amazon or Google” which is centrally owned, and not peer-to-peer (distributed/decentralized), and not an answer to my question. > You're mentioning a .eth domain name being bought with cryptocurrency as an example, which is entirely circular. "Hurr durr, betcha can't swap one blockchain thing (.eth domain) for another blockchain thing (cryptocurrency tokens) without using a blockchain" isn't as strong an argument as you think it is. If we were talking about a .com domain name, no blockchain in the world will help you with that transaction. Your argument feels in bad faith, but I’ll bite: “.eth” and ENS is a valuable construct for those transacting in the network. These assets do have clear market value, even if you personally feel they shouldn’t.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
For me, bitcoin solves very real problems that I wouldn't be able to solve without it: getting paid circumventing Putin's banking system.
- lakomen 4y ago
  What does the Russian president have to do with anything in that context?
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    He is a dictator who controls money flowing in and out of country, using the tax revenue to fund his regime and wage war. He can't tax or block bitcoin payments, or steal proceeds by forcing foreign currency sale at a very unfair exchange rate. Bitcoin helps live without paying taxes and fund opposition without repercussions. In fact, cryptocurrency payments are the only way for Russians to fund anti-Putin opposition. So anyone who says that cryptocurrencies are useless, please, kindly, stop saying this nonsense. If you are lucky to be born in a first world country you simply don't know how easily banking can be used to suffocate a person in a (lawless) cashless society. Bitcoin is a hedge against that, and a powerful one.
Hbruz0 4y ago
double spending problem, anyone ?
- SideQuark 4y ago
  Every banking system ever? At vastly lower energy waste, at higher transaction rates, and with all the legal protection of centuries of well developed needs.
  - lustforleif 4y ago
    > trust-less Trusting a central authority (bank) is not a solution to trust-less prevention of double spending.
    - nicbou 4y ago
      Why does it need to be trustless? And why is it worth paying such a premium for it?
    - SideQuark 4y ago
      >Trusting a central authority (bank) Strawman? A bank is not a central authority any more than large mining pools are central authorities. Or China (when it controlled enough BTC to double spend at will). The banking system is vastly distributed. Trust is a giant network of accountants, central banks, regulators, investors, and lots more that help ensure there is no double spending. There are checks all throughout the system, ledgers, reports, audit trails, and, unlike BTC, when something is actually stolen, lots of protections and methods to claw back stolen money. BTC can be double spent via majority control, so double spend protection is at best a statistical claim, just like real banking. A large problem with Bitcoin is developers were unaware of modern (or even ancient) banking and money systems and have tried to reinvent simple money with all the same problems that mankind moved from millennia ago. Then people unaware of the why of modern money systems think crypto solves an important problem that modern economies and users don't care about, while ignoring all the problems modern systems solved as if they don't exist. And honestly, in all my life, I have never heard of anyone in the normal banking system double spend. So chalk one more up to the Bitcoin make believe event crowd. How many double spend events have you performed in your entire life via normal banking?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dr_dshiv 4y ago

I think it is the concept of “trust-less” itself. You replace trust in people and institutions with trust in technology. I think that rubs some people the wrong way.

cloutchaser 4y ago

Many of the people controlling the narrative have realised recently what a threat decentralisation is. They are pushing extremely hard to make everyone think this is some evil useless force that is only used for scamming people. It's the same way protecting the children is used by people in power to take away your privacy. Blockchains and cryptos are innovative tools. They can be used for good and bad, but they are an interesting development. It's really sad how many on HN have fallen for this black and white thinking.

smt88 4y ago
I am a huge proponent of decentralization. You could distill my philosophy down to this: the concentration of power into a single person is always dangerous. This is why I support democracies and breaking up monopolistic companies, among other things. I have also spent years trying to figure out a use-case for blockchain that is not solved by some other technology with less risk, and I can't figure one out.
tsimionescu 4y ago
Decentralization does not require bitcoin. There are trust-based decentralized payment networks much older than the transistor. These could be digitized as well, but computing circles have relatively little interest in decentralization+trust.

traveler01 4y ago

That's the world we live in. Nobody can stay in the middle, people either hate it or love it, it's either black or white. Nobody can do pros/cons on everything, specially giving valid criticism to improve an idea.

smt88 4y ago
> That's the world we live in. Nobody can stay in the middle, people either hate it or love it, it's either black or white. This is an illusion created by spending time online. The loudest people are polarized, but the majority of people are still in the middle somewhere, sometimes in a very ambivalent state. A great example of this is Elon Musk. Online (Twitter, reddit, etc.) people worship him or loathe him. But the average person rarely thinks about him at all and doesn't care that much about him. They certainly don't have a strong opinion. If you look at research (I read a lot of Pew surveys), this is true for most topics. There are 5-25% of people on the extremes, and everyone else can be said to be "not extreme" about the topic in some way (either ambivalent or just not knowledgeable enough to give a response).
- traveler01 4y ago
  Yeah that makes sense. We're listening too much to the extremes, they're louder after all. Sadly I don't see this changing in the near future...

dijit 4y ago

I’ll bite. My friends and I were into bitcoin in mid-2009. We mined some coins on our 8800 GT. At the time, I read the papers and the wiki and understood that the technology will not scale so greatly, in a way it wasn’t even designed to; it felt like an interesting proof of concept, the ability to actually buy things with bitcoins felt largely like a novelty, I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something. I was ambivalent on the technology, but understood that fundamentally it was quite wasteful (computationally). But something changed, suddenly people were using it to launder money, then once it started earning value (due to it being finite and so many people having already mined the majority of coins and probably losing the wallets) scammers crept in. Now I see reels on Instagram glorifying “trader” life, so many of the old tired schemes from 100 years ago that used to plague the markets are new again. Just like how our bodies have no tolerance to thousand year old virus’ that have long since gone extinct; our brains are not easily capable of understanding these schemes anymore: because they’ve been illegal and regulated for more than our lifetimes, we have no “natural immunity” to them. When alls said and done, the initial promise isn’t even kept, there’s very few “super miners” who if they worked together would be able to control the entire bitcoin economy, which is the situation with central banks. So what were left with is a scam ridden, fundamentally wasteful technology that doesn’t scale properly and does not solve the problem it was meant to; and the main reason that this is the case is because scammers adopted it so readily. You can see exactly what I mean when you look at Monero. Objectively Monero solves the problems with bitcoin, but because it’s very difficult to trade with (due to it being privacy focused and no exchange willing to trade it) the price is very stable, since it can’t easily be used for money laundering or scams due to it’s higher barrier to entry. That said, I’m still fairly ambivalent but leaning towards negative. I will not work for a “crypto” company or with “NFTs” for example.

CaptainZapp 4y ago
> I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something. Was that a coffee shop in the Holesovice area? I remember a café where you could only pay in Bitcoin, which I thought was a rather dumb idea.
ooaa 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

> How that is put to use in practicality maybe debatable. But I think arguments like this tend to just throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe is that why companies like Stripe are still using it then for crypto payouts? [0] What is nonsense is totally thinking that it is going to go away 100% due to the scam projects, fraud, etc like what the author has said AND totally thinking ever project is going to survive or go for mass adoption. This is where you get complete nonsense [0] from HN users who reply back and have admitted they have not read the article and scream 'CrYPtO IS SCaM' and either cannot answer basic questions or reply back with another question without given a concrete answer to the first. Perhaps there is a reason why in particular Stripe ignored everyone and looked at a select few cryptocurrencies / blockchain technologies again despite all the other scams going on. [0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132996

rvz 4y ago
Obviously with the nonsense replies being here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133074 of course.

delegate 4y ago

It is the people, not the technology. It is about money and getting rich. Whichever problem a certain blockchain is supposed the solve, the main reason for its existence is that the people who create it want to get rich, fabulously rich and fast. Besides getting rich, majority of these projects are solutions to non-existent or solved problems, which use a very complicated distributed immutable database that very few investors actually understand. If it's complicated and convoluted, then it must be the future. Fabulously rich is hypnotising and it can easily become the most important thing in someone's life. They're betting a lot on being right. Others, who see the side effects of these people's mission in life, try to wake them up from this hypnosis, but that's impossible. And so far, they have been right and many got rich. But I have yet to see a project that solved a real problem (besides dark markets and the ones that enable crypto) The side effects are not negligible though, they really affect others - scams, ransomware, energy use, etc .. So it's going to stay polarized.

smt88 4y ago

> I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people. I don't remember a technology that has attracted such an incredibly irritating fanbase. Twitter is unusable because of crypto shills. Even someone genuinely curious about crypto is probably going to assume that it's all a dumpster fire because of the absolute scum on Twitter that spam every thread with crypto nonsense. If it weren't for those people, I can guarantee the technology itself would not have broken through to mainstream consciousness. In and of itself, it's not a particularly polarizing thing. Of course, the outrage of the original cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) essentially being "proof of burning fossil fuels" isn't helping either.

corobo 4y ago

It seems more rich/poor from where I'm sitting haha. I'd love to have cashed in on the crypto too, I just couldn't afford to get in An internet with a door fee is a failed internet, I hope the web3 bubble bursts before we lose anything

FabHK 4y ago

Bitcoin has two innovations in my view: 1. Technological innovation: distributed ledger with trust-less consensus. However, that innovation is largely unnecessary for almost all practical purposes, and it leads to resource use that is about a billion times higher than without that innovation (due to duplicated work and Proof of Waste). 2. Legal/process/social innovation: circumvention of rules and regulations, like Uber. Some people love that innovation, some people think it is rather harmful. Personally, I think encrypted and uncensorable flow of information is a net positive, and should be retained. Encrypted and uncensorable flow of money, not so sure.

maxerickson 4y ago

It's not just the computers coming to agreement, a majority of participants in a network (by control weight) can decide to ignore the conclusion the computers came to and do something else. And of course it has happened.