9 ms·

As a programmer, I'm very impressed by the cleverness of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a tech demo, much the same way I'm impressed by 64k intros from the

by m12k 4y ago

As a programmer, I'm very impressed by the cleverness of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a tech demo, much the same way I'm impressed by 64k intros from the demo scene. And at the same time I'm as horrified by the notion that people have seriously invested billions in turning the former into the basis of a new real-world economy, as I would be if the same were done with the latter. It just blows my mind that so many highly intelligent people can so thoroughly believe in something so misguided.

can16358p 4y ago
Maybe if so many intelligent people believe in it... There's really something worth it, perhaps?
- WJW 4y ago
  In this case there are intelligent people on both sides though. Who can say which side is correct?
  - duped 4y ago
    I think the same of intelligent people in the blockchain space the same that I think of intelligent people that have joined cults. Either they're in on the scam or a victim of their own naïveté and/or ignorance. Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.
  - thebean11 4y ago
    Like most things, it's pretty obviously not black and white.
- halestock 4y ago
  I think the real lesson to be learned here is that it's extremely possible for a bunch of really smart people to completely miss the mark.
  - m12k 4y ago
    If there's one thing Dungeons and Dragons has taught me, it's that intelligence and wisdom are two completely different stats.
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      And INT is basically irrelevant outside of niche wizardy whereas nobody should be dumping wisdom.
- lostgame 4y ago
  There were and are a surprising number of people such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who studied and practiced an actual thing called ‘Magick’. I have yet to see any honest-to-God evidence of such a thing. Just because whom you believe may be credible people might back something up doesn’t give it value. It’s value does.
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  Intelligent, pro-blockchain people should be relatively easily able to explain the value and utility provided by it though. It shouldn't be necessary to say "I'm intelligent and I think this is good".
  - jacobsenscott 4y ago
    Blockchain is a super simple data structure. So any bc product with a incomprehensible buzzwordy description is fraud.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Even I can name a few: uncensorable payments (especially important as I'm from an extremely corrupted country where we can't use PayPal), also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs), moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards), smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger). While some of those can also be implemented non-blockchain too, decentralization and having everything public and distributed is the key here. I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc. And as a bonus everyone can come and say "hey if you have this card you can play this other game I made" which empowers creative freedom. Eventhough I consider myself above average, I'm sure there are smarter and more creative people that can come up with more use cases by time. Just like the Internet evolved to what it is over decades, crypto space also will. We're in the "animated gifs, visitor counts, and unskippable huge flash intros" era of the crypto space.
    - kareemsabri 4y ago
      With your last sentence, I think you're conflating the utility of blockchains as implemented today with the potential of the technology that has yet to be realized. I'm not asking for someone to point me to an incredible crypto project that exists today, but rather to explain why they think a decentralized, low-trust consensus protocol will change the world as we know it. Like, what are the killer use cases. If what you're saying is (like the early internet) we don't know what they are yet but expect it will be transformational in the long term, that's fine, but that's not really what people are saying. Regarding your use cases. > uncensorable payments would your corrupt country not eventually catch up by regulating the ability to convert your BTC into fiat to buy things, or do you anticipate doing all your payments on the blockchain and never converting to fiat? > also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs) a global payment system does seem very useful, assuming the currency is stable; not justified to the current hype though > moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards) I have failed to understand this one. If you own NFT 1 on Blockchain X, how do you enforce your ownership rights in the real world if someone else chooses not to acknowledge the authority of this decentralized system? If it's a real world asset, and I steal it from you, who do you appeal to? If it's a digital asset, and I copy and use it, who do you appeal to? Or is the utility here people who all buy into and respect the authority of this chain's ownership ledger being able to trade these things within that ecosystem? > smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger) I haven't found this one that compelling, but maybe I'm missing something. Code isn't immutable, so what's to stop my "smart contract" from changing? I may be unaware of some guarantees that the blockchain provides that the code itself is also immutable.
- kristianc 4y ago
  The more intelligent people are, the easier they find it to rationalise their own decisions.
- honkler 4y ago
  midwits belive in blockchain
pstuart 4y ago
I worked for a blockchain startup and let me tell you, it was a ride. It was small operation not doing cryptocurrency (it had tried, failed, and pivoted). There was still a financial angle to it and the pitch enamored me enough to join them. It turned out that the only value proposition they had was that they "used blockchain" but literally only in the sense that at some point a blockchain would have some data on it. They were true believers too, but simultaneously didn't care that it was fakery. I have lingering PTSD from that gig. The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner. Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them. I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".
  - pstuart 4y ago
    I had an opportunity to get something going on Amazon once they started hosting Hyperledger Fabric (the stack that I used). I could not come up with a commercially viable service to launch on there. I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.
  - jacobsenscott 4y ago
    git is a fantastic usage of blockchain, no?
threeseed 4y ago
For me blockchain is peer to peer 2.0. Lot of hype back in the day that this technology e.g. torrent was going to revolutionise the internet and society would never be the same. And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  >And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative. This comment reminds me of the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo Saverin taunts Sean Parker about Napster losing to the record companies, and Parker says "you wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?" By which I mean: just because peer-to-peer didn't win as a technology, does not mean it wasn't transformative. We live in a world where the iPod could launch and we have access to $10/mo unlimited (centralized) streaming. This world exists because the mere existence of p2p technology places limits on the way that the content industry can operate.

by m12k 4y ago

can16358p 4y ago

Maybe if so many intelligent people believe in it... There's really something worth it, perhaps?

WJW 4y ago
In this case there are intelligent people on both sides though. Who can say which side is correct?
- duped 4y ago
  I think the same of intelligent people in the blockchain space the same that I think of intelligent people that have joined cults. Either they're in on the scam or a victim of their own naïveté and/or ignorance. Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.
- thebean11 4y ago
  Like most things, it's pretty obviously not black and white.
halestock 4y ago
I think the real lesson to be learned here is that it's extremely possible for a bunch of really smart people to completely miss the mark.
- m12k 4y ago
  If there's one thing Dungeons and Dragons has taught me, it's that intelligence and wisdom are two completely different stats.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    And INT is basically irrelevant outside of niche wizardy whereas nobody should be dumping wisdom.
lostgame 4y ago
There were and are a surprising number of people such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who studied and practiced an actual thing called ‘Magick’. I have yet to see any honest-to-God evidence of such a thing. Just because whom you believe may be credible people might back something up doesn’t give it value. It’s value does.
kareemsabri 4y ago
Intelligent, pro-blockchain people should be relatively easily able to explain the value and utility provided by it though. It shouldn't be necessary to say "I'm intelligent and I think this is good".
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  Blockchain is a super simple data structure. So any bc product with a incomprehensible buzzwordy description is fraud.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Even I can name a few: uncensorable payments (especially important as I'm from an extremely corrupted country where we can't use PayPal), also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs), moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards), smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger). While some of those can also be implemented non-blockchain too, decentralization and having everything public and distributed is the key here. I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc. And as a bonus everyone can come and say "hey if you have this card you can play this other game I made" which empowers creative freedom. Eventhough I consider myself above average, I'm sure there are smarter and more creative people that can come up with more use cases by time. Just like the Internet evolved to what it is over decades, crypto space also will. We're in the "animated gifs, visitor counts, and unskippable huge flash intros" era of the crypto space.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    With your last sentence, I think you're conflating the utility of blockchains as implemented today with the potential of the technology that has yet to be realized. I'm not asking for someone to point me to an incredible crypto project that exists today, but rather to explain why they think a decentralized, low-trust consensus protocol will change the world as we know it. Like, what are the killer use cases. If what you're saying is (like the early internet) we don't know what they are yet but expect it will be transformational in the long term, that's fine, but that's not really what people are saying. Regarding your use cases. > uncensorable payments would your corrupt country not eventually catch up by regulating the ability to convert your BTC into fiat to buy things, or do you anticipate doing all your payments on the blockchain and never converting to fiat? > also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs) a global payment system does seem very useful, assuming the currency is stable; not justified to the current hype though > moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards) I have failed to understand this one. If you own NFT 1 on Blockchain X, how do you enforce your ownership rights in the real world if someone else chooses not to acknowledge the authority of this decentralized system? If it's a real world asset, and I steal it from you, who do you appeal to? If it's a digital asset, and I copy and use it, who do you appeal to? Or is the utility here people who all buy into and respect the authority of this chain's ownership ledger being able to trade these things within that ecosystem? > smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger) I haven't found this one that compelling, but maybe I'm missing something. Code isn't immutable, so what's to stop my "smart contract" from changing? I may be unaware of some guarantees that the blockchain provides that the code itself is also immutable.
kristianc 4y ago
The more intelligent people are, the easier they find it to rationalise their own decisions.
honkler 4y ago
midwits belive in blockchain

pstuart 4y ago

I worked for a blockchain startup and let me tell you, it was a ride. It was small operation not doing cryptocurrency (it had tried, failed, and pivoted). There was still a financial angle to it and the pitch enamored me enough to join them. It turned out that the only value proposition they had was that they "used blockchain" but literally only in the sense that at some point a blockchain would have some data on it. They were true believers too, but simultaneously didn't care that it was fakery. I have lingering PTSD from that gig. The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
> I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner. Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them. I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".
- pstuart 4y ago
  I had an opportunity to get something going on Amazon once they started hosting Hyperledger Fabric (the stack that I used). I could not come up with a commercially viable service to launch on there. I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  git is a fantastic usage of blockchain, no?

threeseed 4y ago

For me blockchain is peer to peer 2.0. Lot of hype back in the day that this technology e.g. torrent was going to revolutionise the internet and society would never be the same. And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
>And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative. This comment reminds me of the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo Saverin taunts Sean Parker about Napster losing to the record companies, and Parker says "you wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?" By which I mean: just because peer-to-peer didn't win as a technology, does not mean it wasn't transformative. We live in a world where the iPod could launch and we have access to $10/mo unlimited (centralized) streaming. This world exists because the mere existence of p2p technology places limits on the way that the content industry can operate.