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To the surprise of literally no one with a brain. I'm in awe of how much collective brain power has going to waste on crypto. Will we ever get these years back

by skc 4y ago

To the surprise of literally no one with a brain. I'm in awe of how much collective brain power has going to waste on crypto. Will we ever get these years back?

devoutsalsa 4y ago
I'd rather waste my brainpower on crypto than advertising or in-app purchases.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  If you spend your brainpower on crypto, cheer up! You're likely one of the contributors to the allocation of brainpower on advertising in-app purchases of crypto as well!
- puranjay 4y ago
  if every single crypto dApp was erased from the world overnight, absolutely nothing about how you live your life would change. That's how much impact crypto has had on the world in 15 years.
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    If the iPhone was never released in 2007, Android would have picked up the smartphone slack.
    - puranjay 4y ago
      if the iPhone was released in 2007 but in 2022, you couldn't use it to make calls, browse the web, and chat with friends. Instead, it could only run a bunch of Candy Crush clones, but with real money. Would you call that a successful product?
    - heretogetout 4y ago
      And given how bad Android is with its plurality or majority market share, how much worse would it be without iPhone competition? I wonder how few years Android devices would be supported if iPhones didn't set the bar so high.
  - asenna 4y ago
    Bitcoin is 13 years old. The "crypto" that you're most likely referring to is Smart contracts based dApps, 7 years old. The Internet in early 1990s was still over a decade old but had it disappeared overnight then, absolutely nothing about anyone's life would've changed back then.
    - puranjay 4y ago
      Crypto usage is entirely tied to the market. If the market is doing well, dApp usage collapses. Google search volume doesn't collapse if the stock market isn't doing well. You still send emails even in a recession. No one uses crypto outside of speculation. Even the dApp with the most "mainstream" use case, OpenSea, has collapses in usage as soon as the market turns bearish. Why? Because no one wants to buy "digital art" when there is no bigger fool to sell it to. I haven't even logged into my Metamask for weeks now.
      - asenna 4y ago
        My point above is still relevant to your response as well - the Internet in the 1990s was in a similar state. No one was buying things online and it was too slow to replace TV shows. > No one uses crypto outside of speculation. Same old argument while closing your eyes to actual use cases. You have this technology where - leaving aside free cross-border trustless payments to anyone, you can have an immutable record of data to store, unhackable, solves spam and you actually still think this is all about speculation? You're on Hacker News, really recommend putting on your hacker hat and re-evaluating it. --- On a slightly different note, Opensea is not a true dApp and it's a little centralized in places. But yes of course NFTs right now are extremely speculative. Look elsewhere, ENS domains usage is at an all time high and rapidly growing (even after the recent price correction), Uniswap recently crossed a trillion $ in total transaction volume in its lifetime. Blockchain tech is an extremely powerful tool, it's a shame most hackers on HN are hostile to it which makes them miss real use-cases happening under the surface.
        puranjay 4y ago
        Man, I've been in the crypto hole for two years straight. There's not a protocol that I haven't tried yet. And there's not a protocol that I now use outside of speculation. Even ENS domain usage has been going up because of the speculative frenzy around valuable domain names (look up the race to register all 3-letter ENS names). You can start off by naming three projects that you actually use regularly outside of speculative investments. Because for the life of me, I can't.
jeffrallen 4y ago
At least those people stopped working on targeted advertising. The best minds of a generation. Pfft.
- 09bjb 4y ago
  I'm open to proposals for an ethical basis for technological work that's better than "well it's not nearly as societally destructive as what I was building before!"
- _moof 4y ago
  I swear, programming being worth real money might be the worst thing that ever happened to the field.
mistrial9 4y ago
09bjb 4y ago
No, but imagine a world in which brain power was distributed by consensus via a decentralized ledger, rather than a bio-authoritarian central party! The crowdsourced, democratic nature of DeBi(o) would sense this problem early and avoid it in the first place. There are other solutions as well, but they all have one thing in common...you guessed it, blockchain technology!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cecida 4y ago
  Brain power on a ledger? I've heard it all now. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien: “Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
- sytelus 4y ago
  It is not about brain power but the computing power. The biggest fallacy with crypto is that combined computing power owned by general public is more than few powerful entities. This has never hold true in the history of humanity. The 1% of people owns 80% of the computing resources. So there is no "decetralized" or "distributed" authority. For instance, US or Chises government can put togather more GPUs than the rest of the public combined any day perform 51% attack on any crypto. The reason for this lies in tax arrangement in physical world. No matter what people earn, government is taking away a big chunk from them and thus always can have majority resources than rest of the public combined.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    your history of humanity is sorely out of date - see graeber and wengrow's works for instance
- frozenlettuce 4y ago
  after all, our reality is just some random quantum fluctuation generated in some alien's graphics card that is mining alien crypto
medion 4y ago
Same could be said about the collective brain power going to the likes of Facebook, TikTok, etc etc etc.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Even the most execrable world-torching view of Facebook, TikTok, &c. does not entail the kind of global waste and fraud that transpires in decentralized finance.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    More engineering hours were probably wasted by defi but more hours wasted period and more lives were ruined by social media.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I can't argue with that. Then again, I don't feel compelled to defend social media either.
throwaway290 4y ago
Couple months back a seemingly talented promising colleague quit for croinspace. He had some arguments like "I don't want to pay taxes so gov blocked my accounts, it's an unfair system" and "it's a scammy field now, but we can solve that by simply automating scam assessment". When I talked to his superior turned out he shown himself not nearly as good a dev as my impression was, they were strapped for resources yet not sad to see him go. Makes me think it's not usually the best brain power that goes there.
whack 4y ago
Let's be honest, the vast majority of things we spend money on is a complete waste, focused solely on producing short-term feel-good chemicals in our brain. Tasty food? Waste. Fine wine? Waste. Any car that costs more than $20k? Waste. Blockbuster hollywood movies? Waste. Housing that goes beyond our basic need for shelter? Waste. The resources we've spent on crypto are, at the very least, pushing technological frontiers. And experimenting with new systems of finance that could improve on the foundations of our entire economy. Compared to all the other crap we spend money on, this is far less wasteful.
- stusmall 4y ago
  > The resources we've spent on crypto are, at the very least, pushing technological frontiers. What are some projects or technologies that have been driven forward by crypto companies that are usable outside the crypto-space?
  - iskander 4y ago
    If you peel back the feverish financialization, there are a few different areas of actual research which might be usable outside crypto, such as consensus methods for distributed computation. The one I have started following is the development of ZK proofs from a theoretical construct into a programming substrate. Traditional complexity texts focus on interactive ZK protocols, but non-interactive ZK proofs have been developed significantly in the crypto world. They have recently become usable for general purpose computing with interesting privacy guarantees: you can prove f(x) = y for a known f and y but without revealing x. This feels very powerful and related to other research fields like differential privacy. Examples: - Circom: https://iden3.io/circom https://iden3.io/circom - Cairo: https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/ https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/ - zkREPL: https://0xparc.org/blog/zkrepl https://0xparc.org/blog/zkrepl
    - stusmall 4y ago
      That's a great example. Thank you
zamalek 4y ago
We are going to waste many more years and many more watts.
exdsq 4y ago
Look at ads...
dqpb 4y ago
You could make this same argument every time someone gets phished on the internet.

by skc 4y ago

To the surprise of literally no one with a brain. I'm in awe of how much collective brain power has going to waste on crypto. Will we ever get these years back?

devoutsalsa 4y ago

I'd rather waste my brainpower on crypto than advertising or in-app purchases.

bilbo0s 4y ago
If you spend your brainpower on crypto, cheer up! You're likely one of the contributors to the allocation of brainpower on advertising in-app purchases of crypto as well!
puranjay 4y ago
if every single crypto dApp was erased from the world overnight, absolutely nothing about how you live your life would change. That's how much impact crypto has had on the world in 15 years.
- netr0ute 4y ago
  If the iPhone was never released in 2007, Android would have picked up the smartphone slack.
  - puranjay 4y ago
    if the iPhone was released in 2007 but in 2022, you couldn't use it to make calls, browse the web, and chat with friends. Instead, it could only run a bunch of Candy Crush clones, but with real money. Would you call that a successful product?
  - heretogetout 4y ago
    And given how bad Android is with its plurality or majority market share, how much worse would it be without iPhone competition? I wonder how few years Android devices would be supported if iPhones didn't set the bar so high.
- asenna 4y ago
  Bitcoin is 13 years old. The "crypto" that you're most likely referring to is Smart contracts based dApps, 7 years old. The Internet in early 1990s was still over a decade old but had it disappeared overnight then, absolutely nothing about anyone's life would've changed back then.
  - puranjay 4y ago
    Crypto usage is entirely tied to the market. If the market is doing well, dApp usage collapses. Google search volume doesn't collapse if the stock market isn't doing well. You still send emails even in a recession. No one uses crypto outside of speculation. Even the dApp with the most "mainstream" use case, OpenSea, has collapses in usage as soon as the market turns bearish. Why? Because no one wants to buy "digital art" when there is no bigger fool to sell it to. I haven't even logged into my Metamask for weeks now.
    - asenna 4y ago
      My point above is still relevant to your response as well - the Internet in the 1990s was in a similar state. No one was buying things online and it was too slow to replace TV shows. > No one uses crypto outside of speculation. Same old argument while closing your eyes to actual use cases. You have this technology where - leaving aside free cross-border trustless payments to anyone, you can have an immutable record of data to store, unhackable, solves spam and you actually still think this is all about speculation? You're on Hacker News, really recommend putting on your hacker hat and re-evaluating it. --- On a slightly different note, Opensea is not a true dApp and it's a little centralized in places. But yes of course NFTs right now are extremely speculative. Look elsewhere, ENS domains usage is at an all time high and rapidly growing (even after the recent price correction), Uniswap recently crossed a trillion $ in total transaction volume in its lifetime. Blockchain tech is an extremely powerful tool, it's a shame most hackers on HN are hostile to it which makes them miss real use-cases happening under the surface.
      - puranjay 4y ago
        Man, I've been in the crypto hole for two years straight. There's not a protocol that I haven't tried yet. And there's not a protocol that I now use outside of speculation. Even ENS domain usage has been going up because of the speculative frenzy around valuable domain names (look up the race to register all 3-letter ENS names). You can start off by naming three projects that you actually use regularly outside of speculative investments. Because for the life of me, I can't.

jeffrallen 4y ago

At least those people stopped working on targeted advertising. The best minds of a generation. Pfft.

09bjb 4y ago
I'm open to proposals for an ethical basis for technological work that's better than "well it's not nearly as societally destructive as what I was building before!"
_moof 4y ago
I swear, programming being worth real money might be the worst thing that ever happened to the field.

mistrial9 4y ago

09bjb 4y ago

No, but imagine a world in which brain power was distributed by consensus via a decentralized ledger, rather than a bio-authoritarian central party! The crowdsourced, democratic nature of DeBi(o) would sense this problem early and avoid it in the first place. There are other solutions as well, but they all have one thing in common...you guessed it, blockchain technology!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cecida 4y ago
Brain power on a ledger? I've heard it all now. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien: “Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
sytelus 4y ago
It is not about brain power but the computing power. The biggest fallacy with crypto is that combined computing power owned by general public is more than few powerful entities. This has never hold true in the history of humanity. The 1% of people owns 80% of the computing resources. So there is no "decetralized" or "distributed" authority. For instance, US or Chises government can put togather more GPUs than the rest of the public combined any day perform 51% attack on any crypto. The reason for this lies in tax arrangement in physical world. No matter what people earn, government is taking away a big chunk from them and thus always can have majority resources than rest of the public combined.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  your history of humanity is sorely out of date - see graeber and wengrow's works for instance
frozenlettuce 4y ago
after all, our reality is just some random quantum fluctuation generated in some alien's graphics card that is mining alien crypto

medion 4y ago

Same could be said about the collective brain power going to the likes of Facebook, TikTok, etc etc etc.

woodruffw 4y ago
Even the most execrable world-torching view of Facebook, TikTok, &c. does not entail the kind of global waste and fraud that transpires in decentralized finance.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  More engineering hours were probably wasted by defi but more hours wasted period and more lives were ruined by social media.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I can't argue with that. Then again, I don't feel compelled to defend social media either.

throwaway290 4y ago

Couple months back a seemingly talented promising colleague quit for croinspace. He had some arguments like "I don't want to pay taxes so gov blocked my accounts, it's an unfair system" and "it's a scammy field now, but we can solve that by simply automating scam assessment". When I talked to his superior turned out he shown himself not nearly as good a dev as my impression was, they were strapped for resources yet not sad to see him go. Makes me think it's not usually the best brain power that goes there.

whack 4y ago

Let's be honest, the vast majority of things we spend money on is a complete waste, focused solely on producing short-term feel-good chemicals in our brain. Tasty food? Waste. Fine wine? Waste. Any car that costs more than $20k? Waste. Blockbuster hollywood movies? Waste. Housing that goes beyond our basic need for shelter? Waste. The resources we've spent on crypto are, at the very least, pushing technological frontiers. And experimenting with new systems of finance that could improve on the foundations of our entire economy. Compared to all the other crap we spend money on, this is far less wasteful.

stusmall 4y ago
> The resources we've spent on crypto are, at the very least, pushing technological frontiers. What are some projects or technologies that have been driven forward by crypto companies that are usable outside the crypto-space?
- iskander 4y ago
  If you peel back the feverish financialization, there are a few different areas of actual research which might be usable outside crypto, such as consensus methods for distributed computation. The one I have started following is the development of ZK proofs from a theoretical construct into a programming substrate. Traditional complexity texts focus on interactive ZK protocols, but non-interactive ZK proofs have been developed significantly in the crypto world. They have recently become usable for general purpose computing with interesting privacy guarantees: you can prove f(x) = y for a known f and y but without revealing x. This feels very powerful and related to other research fields like differential privacy. Examples: - Circom: https://iden3.io/circom https://iden3.io/circom - Cairo: https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/ https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/ - zkREPL: https://0xparc.org/blog/zkrepl https://0xparc.org/blog/zkrepl
  - stusmall 4y ago
    That's a great example. Thank you

zamalek 4y ago

We are going to waste many more years and many more watts.

exdsq 4y ago

Look at ads...

dqpb 4y ago

You could make this same argument every time someone gets phished on the internet.