20 ms·

On the dangers of cryptocurrencies and the uselessness of blockchain

182 points by mikece 4y ago

j0hnyl 4y ago
Blockchains offer democratized access to programmable money, and you think this is a BAD thing? Where's your creativity?
- pavlov 4y ago
  Getting too creative with money historically leads to ordinary people losing their savings and homes. 1980s penny stocks. 1995-2005 Enron creative accounting. 2008 subprime mortgages. 2017-21 crypto ICOs and DeFi. Maybe we don't need any more ultra-creative capitalism, but better regulation and shared financial digital commons where interoperability is guaranteed by government mandate. The EU has been quite successful in making Eurozone cross-country banking just work for the ordinary consumer and small business. After all money itself isn't the point, the business it enables is. Money should ideally get out of the way and not make you think about it, but crypto so far has taken the opposite approach where the money itself is everything and nothing is actually being traded.
  - jbaczuk 4y ago
    You can try to regulate Bitcoin but you can't stop it. It will become like the drug war or prohibition.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      It's sufficient to regulate the high-profile crypto on/off-ramps. Exchanges should follow the same rules as banks and brokers, and there probably should be an energy waste tax levied on PoW coin transactions which exchanges would enforce, similar to how brokers do dividend tax withholding today. If someone wants to trade Bitcoin peer-to-peer for cash 2010-style, that's fine by me, it won't create systemic risks.
      - jbaczuk 4y ago
        I agree, and exchanges already are heavily regulated. But taxing energy consumption? How can you tax energy waste? What if someone sets up their own power generation? Is it wasting energy to let sunlight hit a parking lot?
        kayodelycaon 4y ago
        > What if someone sets up their own power generation? I'd like to see how this is economically feasible for crypto.
        jbaczuk 4y ago
        Me too. It's another financial incentives to make clean power generation more accessible.
        pavlov 4y ago
        > ...exchanges already are heavily regulated. They are not, compared to banks and brokers. They do all kinds of things that would be absolute no-nos in regular finance, like trading against their customers.
        jbaczuk 4y ago
        Ah, that's a good point. Well, good thing is you don't need an exchange to use it, and there are decentralized exchanges.
    - cliffy 4y ago
      What is there to stop beyond the horrible energy consumption and scams? Bitcoin doesn't do anything useful at all. It's a net negative for the earth and the public at large.
      - jbaczuk 4y ago
        People will just keep using it. But you might be right that it is a net negative since it's mostly used for speculation... But, it's not completely useless (tell that to the criminals who use it regularly). Or people who own it because they don't want all their assets in a highly inflationary currency.
        hnthrow1010 4y ago
        You're playing a semantic game here. Yes, technically if criminals are using it, it's not "useless". To the rest of us, it's actually worse than useless because the criminal activity is a net negative on society. The idea that crypto is a hedge against inflation is laughable, look at any of the price activity in the last few months. Crypto tokens have no fundamentals or inherent value or anything. The price is completely random.
        jbaczuk 4y ago
        I'm not condoning all the illegal stuff that happens with Bitcoin, to be clear, but just because a government says something is illegal, doesn't mean it should be. For example we're happy in the U.S. (well most of us I think) to be freed from oppressive rulers who taxed without representation, and something like Bitcoin would have been quite useful in that situation. There are many countries who are in a similar situation.
        dghlsakjg 4y ago
        > Or people who own it because they don't want all their assets in a highly inflationary currency. When compared to world currencies BTC currently has an inflation rate that makes it the second most inflationary currency in the world after Venezuela. As a store of value crypto is not great.
  - mypastself 4y ago
    I submit to you that government-induced currency devaluation has caused orders of magnitude greater monetary losses for ordinary individuals than all of those events combined.
- Proven 4y ago
- elil17 4y ago
  First, programmable money is obviously a bad thing - you only need look at the large number of disasters in the DeFi space. Second, it's not really democratized if only the rich can afford the transaction fees. Third, what does "democratized access to money" even mean? Does it solve the problem of poor people being unable to access financial services? Not that I've heard. I don't know anyone who doesn't have access to a bank account but is able to store their money on the blockchain. Does it mean something else I'm not thinking of?
  - sowbug 4y ago
    if only the rich can afford the transaction fees For at least the past year, average fees have been below a dollar, and less than five cents if you're willing to wait an extra 30 minutes for a confirmation.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - j0hnyl 4y ago
    Democratized access to money means that I can move my life savings as a refugee from a war torn country by just remembering 24 words. Access to a bank account doesn't preclude this need. Think corrupt countries like Ukraine or even Cambodia, Laos. There are banks, but they go belly up every week and new ones come up. If you think outside of the narrow scope of the first world, there are many unbanked folks that can benefit. As for the rich affording tx fees, maybe a replacement for daily cash isn't everyone's use case? Maybe it doesn't have to be bitcoin? It can be one of many other cryptocurrencies that has low tx fees. There are places in the world where the volatility of crypto looks stable in comparison to the local geo-political and financial climate. Cryptocurrencies offer the world a "splinter economy". Having said all that, of course this stuff is not without issues that need addressing. Regulating this technology into oblivion isn't it though.
    - hnthrow1010 4y ago
      >Democratized access to money means that I can move my life savings as a refugee from a war torn country This has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, blockchains, or "democratized access" at all. What you're suggesting is simply for people to use foreign banks. If your local money is being destabilized by war, I can't see why you'd want to put your money into an extremely volatile offshore casino, which is what cryptocurrency is.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kabdib 4y ago
  If cryptocurrencies are "democratic", then so in the same sense are disease, starvation and violence. Available to anyone. Doesn't make them a good thing. All I see are scams, hype, and tricks to get marks to stuff more money into the pockets of bad actors, followed by thievery. Being creative is often fine. Being creative when you're ripping people off for billions of dollars is not fine. Our culture may respect and admire talented criminal underdogs like art forgers and counterfeiters, but we still put them in jail.
jbaczuk 4y ago
𝐁𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. No. Bad power generation is bad for the environment. Also, proof-of-stake does not offer the same level of security and accessibility. 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡. Only when the network is congested and people are transacting a lot. This is required in order to incentivize miners to include your transaction. When too high, layer 2 protocols like lightning or the Liquid Network. Also, fees are flat, so it doesn't matter how much or where you send.
- elil17 4y ago
  Good power generation is also bad for the environment. Every form of energy generation has an environmental cost (e.g. land use for solar, mining needed to make wind turbine components). If someone is shoveling food into a landfill, you don't say "Oh well, that would be fine if we just had more food. Not his fault." People are burning electricity for no reason when it's still a scarce resource. So it's only useful if no one uses it or if you're sending more money than the average person earns in a year?
  - jbaczuk 4y ago
    Energy is not generated, it's captured/converted, and energy is not a scarce resource. In this case, it's converted to financial security to prevent double spends and allow this currency to exist.
    - danuker 4y ago
      > and energy is not a scarce resource Explain to me the spikes in electricity prices?
      - jbaczuk 4y ago
        Have you heard of the sun? It's sending quite a bit of free energy. In fact too much, many would argue, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
    - 4y ago
iskander 4y ago
>Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. That is, a problem that could not have been solved without blockchain that can now be solved with it. I would like to fundraise with an international group that doesn't trust US based corporations with their personal data. Is there an existing way to do that? Also, more generally and away from things that start in the financial sphere, a decentralized web-scale database seems to have broad conceptual appeal but the only functioning large-scale instances all come bundled with cryptocurrencies. I think this is largely because we don't a way to pay for servers without the financial layer (and figuring out a way to dial down the financialization while keeping decentralization would be good).
- elliekelly 4y ago
  Cash?
  - iskander 4y ago
    Me and a few hundred pseudonymous individuals on Twitter will...what? Mail different currencies to a trusted central party?
    - engineer_22 4y ago
      What could go wrong? /s
    - elil17 4y ago
      Or mail the currencies to the international group directly?
    - 4oh9do 4y ago
      > on Twitter Don't go changing the goalposts now. You previously said: > an international group that doesn't trust US based corporations with their personal data So no Twitter for you.
  - glerk 4y ago
    As in sending cash by mail potentially across borders? Is that really a solution?
ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
- elil17 4y ago
  So why do you need bitcoin for that? Doesn't cash work fine? It's more stable, easier to use, and already more widely adopted than crypto.
  - mgamache 4y ago
    Cash is being phased out (censored) and can't be sent via the internet.
    - elil17 4y ago
      Is it? I have never had anyone “censor” me for using cash, I don’t even know how that would work. Yes if you’re trying to send money covertly over the internet you could use crypto for that - but you will have to interact with financial institutions to get the crypto and the recipient will have to interact with financial institutions to turn the crypto into real money, so why not just use the financial institutions to send the real money in the first place?
      - randomhodler84 4y ago
        In 2021, I used cash at a bar, and the girl behind me said “ew look! He is paying like a poor person!”. I was shocked. Censorship can be overt, covert, societal or authoritarian.
        elil17 4y ago
        I guarantee that if you asks a barkeeper to pay with crypto you will also get made fun of
        randomhodler84 4y ago
seibelj 4y ago
How can I have a digital form of money protected from a politician that doesn't like me? That is what crypto provides - you cannot seize my money. You can compel me to give it up, but I will not wake up one day and have a court notice that I'm ("temporarily") bankrupt.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  You can have a court notice that says any transactions from wallet X will be considered contempt of court punishable by jail, which is close to the same thing for most people.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  If a powerful politician cared enough, they could take everything you own. BTC won't save you from tyranny.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  You can be arrested and held in contempt until you give up the money.
  - transcoderx 4y ago
    What money? I don't have any money.
    - randomhodler84 4y ago
      Yeah, sorry, I lost it all in a tragic boating incident.
engineer_22 4y ago
Not very courageous to release a piece like this AFTER the crash. Understood that nobody would listen while times were good, but because of the timing the conviction of the author is questioned. EDIT: Author has been releasing criticism of cryptocoins for some time now. I guess he's bona fide.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  Schneier has a pretty solid reputation and his articles appear regularly on HN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier Information from the first paragraph of the linked article: Previous post: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an... Post by Matthew Green he is replying to: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2022/06/09/in-defense-of-cryptocurrency/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2022/06/09/in-defen...
shuntress 4y ago
Block chains can be useful. Git is the most obvious example.
- engineer_22 4y ago
  Is Git on a block chain?
  - shuntress 4y ago
    Each commit is hashed as a block that includes the hash of the previous commit, so, yes. Though, to be more accurate, you would say thay each "repository" is a block chain rather than say that Git is "on" a block chain.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    It is a blockchain. It's different from Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. in that it doesn't use a trustless consensus method. And that's literally the only situations where cryptocurrencies make sense, situations where you need to be able to operate with zero trust of the other party/parties. Turns out those situations are a lot rarer than crypto advocates claim, and even when such situations exist crypto is actually pretty limited in how much it can do/solve.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    The underlying data structure for a blockchain and git is a merkle tree. So by some looser definitions, yes.
- elil17 4y ago
  Git is not what most people mean when they say blockchains (e.g. the decentralization of the blockchain and the use of the consensus algorithm is implied)
  - shuntress 4y ago
    Kind of like how "Crypto" now means gamblinging on speculative assets rather than the study of cryptography?
lvass 4y ago
>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology I generally agree but there definitely are exceptions. For example they can provide viable financial models for tech organizations like Brave and Protocol Labs (I'm not endorsing them) to actually care about privacy, which is an enormous social issue right now.
- engineer_22 4y ago
  Agreed - privacy of transaction is the #1 issue blockchain potentially solves.
  - ninkendo 4y ago
    I don't get it... aren't all transactions completely public on the blockchain? Isn't that the fundamental way it works? (Mixing services notwithstanding.) Sure, your wallet isn't necessarily traceable to your identity, but the whole transaction history of your wallet is there, and if you ever convert those bitcoins to real cash, you're going to need to divulge that identity to someone.
    - iskander 4y ago
      "Shielded" transactions on networks such as Zerocash are private. There's an increasing trend in this direction as "zero knowledge" layer 2 networks come online, since they have the same underlying mechanisms which makes private transfers easy to implement (or to even have as the default).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    And Monero is the only widely used coin that actually does this, the rest make things even less private because all transactions are publicly available on the blockchain.
haolez 4y ago
I have a contrarian view on cryptocurrencies: I don't think the blockchain is the biggest innovation. I think that Bitcoin is. And Bitcoin is more than just a blockchain. However, I think blockchains are only useful for a single purpose: digital money. Every other use seems misplaced for me.
- bhaak 4y ago
  I'm not sure a meme should be "worth" 400 Billion dollars. Or what else could you mean what the "more than just a blockchain" is?
  - haolez 4y ago
    The game theory behind it that makes the whole thing work.
    - bhaak 4y ago
      For questionable values of “work”. It doesn’t work as digital money (see the narrative of it being digital gold). And it’s not stable yet. The block rewards are decreasing and we don’t know for sure if it will still work when they are mostly gone (we will find out in a few years though).
- lawn 4y ago
  I certainly agree that digital money is the use-case, but I don't think Bitcoin is it. Transactions are far too expensive and has too poor privacy for that to be the case.
  - randomhodler84 4y ago
    It’s super cheap. I sent $30 to a friend last night via Lightning, it was <1c. They used it to buy drinks. There is no record of the tx on a blockchain - it is reasonably private. It is not as private as monero, zcash — sure, but there is no ongoing record of tx.
sirmoveon 4y ago
Boy, whoever's funding the negative press around cryptocurrencies, send some money my way... I'll find better arguments than void hate.
- imustbeevil 4y ago
  Yes, when I see articles I disagree with my first thought is that someone paid them to write it, and not that most people disagree with me and statistically most articles will be from that side.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Probably their thinking is that otherwise intelligent people are writing roughly the same complete nonsense all at roughly the same time. I'm a big believer in Hanlon's razor though.
  - throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
    and you don't find it rather peculiar that the concentration of anti-crypto rhetoric has suddenly spiked about a year ago, and now there's a relentless assault from all opinion outlets? especially here on HN, where a few years ago it was all blockchain this, blockchain that, and you could have intelligent conversation about cryptocurrency without someone immediately clawing at your throat. and now we have bi-hourly 5-minute hate instead totally organic, yes?
    - imustbeevil 4y ago
      > and you don't find it rather peculiar that the concentration of anti-crypto rhetoric has suddenly spiked about a year ago, and now there's a relentless assault from all opinion outlets? When the price goes up, people are happy and write happy articles. When the price goes down, people are sad and write sad articles. How that actually happens is that, the people writing the happy and sad articles are different groups of people who each wait for the price to do what they need it to justify their position. The price is down, so it justifies negative positions. When the price is up in ~3 years, there will be more people writing happy articles. When that happens I won't think they've all been paid to (even though it is obviously more likely that the group selling something has financial interest in promoting it).
photochemsyn 4y ago
The core thinking behind the argument in this article is perhaps this: This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology. And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems. It's the same issue with things like personal data protection and mass surveillance - everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, and it's eminently clear that only reform of government policies, i.e. legal policy changes like enforceable data privacy laws, offers any real solution.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  >everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, Can you expand on this? Outside of theoretical attacks only possible by the largest nation state actors and attacks that rely on something other than Tor (e.g. bad opsec, enabling JS, etc.), are you saying Tor has been broken? Is there a paper?
  - lvass 4y ago
    Not sure what OP meant, but Tor is mostly broken right now for anything on clearnet, it's either practically or outright unusable.
    - ziddoap 4y ago
      Not being practical is much different than what the OP seems to be claiming; that onion routing itself is broken in terms of security/privacy.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    I'd read "Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex", by Yasha Levine, for a discussion of why Tor/Onion has relatively little value for private communications, unless it's used in a highly specific manner - and even then, one end of the communication is inevitably going to be known to metadata trackers at the very least. It's also highly probable that most or all Tor nodes on the Internet are backdoored by one intelligence agency or another at this point, meaning they can reconstruct the hops pretty easily. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-valley https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-va...
gfodor 4y ago
There are many flaws in this perspective, but I'll pick one: the argument that there is no problem being solved with blockchain. This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions. Of course, from there, people often wince. But that wincing comes from an assumption: that a transaction is morally just if and only if it is legal. This is a fairly bad assumption (particularly with a brief skim of the history of the 20th century), but even if it were true, it is provably the case that blockchain technology is solving this problem in a way previous solutions have not been able to, given it is the chosen mechanism.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  > This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions. He literally makes this point in the article.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    I read the article and do not see this point being made. Can you point it out?
    - lolinder 4y ago
      > Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. That is, a problem that could not have been solved without blockchain that can now be solved with it. (And “ransomware couldn’t exist because criminals are blocked from using the conventional financial networks, and cash payments aren’t feasible” does not count.) He's specifically calling out ransomware criminals as not counting, but I think he'd extend the logic to crime in general.
      - gfodor 4y ago
        That's not refuting my argument. My argument is that the general problem of being able to transact freely across the globe with radically reduced risk of government interception is a legitimate problem for many individuals now and in the past, who live under governments with unjust laws. Plucking one very obvious form of immoral criminality out of that gigantic pool of use cases is misleading at best. I think many people in the West forget how lucky they are that, on average, the correlation between the morality and legality of economic transactions is fairly decent.
whatisweb3 4y ago
various issues in this post, but to examine the central question: > Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. That is, a problem that could not have been solved without blockchain that can now be solved with it. Application: User Alice and Bob want to swap domain names they own, but using an escrow to facilitate the trade safely and mitigate counterparty risk - and they want this exchange to settle in mere seconds or minutes, without the need to share private data with a third party, and without the need to pay a % commission to a rent-extracting centralized corporate entity*. This application can and already is being achieved by recording these domain name properties and their records of ownership on a public distributed ledger - a blockchain. The application of blockchain is as it always has been: creating a decentralized and permissionless ledger. * most blockchains use transaction fee markets to mitigate spam. In this blockchain app, a small fixed transaction fee must be directed to all users upholding the protocol - which, importantly, may include Alice and Bob themselves as token holders, block producers, and/or delegators within the network. Edit: lol at downvotes. author literally asked for an application - the downvotes end up hiding my comment and help to maintain the HN echo chamber.
danuker 4y ago
One purpose I use Bitcoin for is as a store of value. I can't know what the government will do with its currency in the future. But I know what the Bitcoin protocol dictates. Sadly, the supply not being responsive to the demand also means I'll see crashes. But I also see crashes with gold, stocks, and real estate.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Completely normal "store of value" behavior. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BTC-USD?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjO0pruqcb4AhXpJkQIHUuqCQ4Q-fUHegQIDhAX&window=1Y https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BTC-USD?sa=X&ved=2ahUKE...
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    classic fallacy, you've chose a window of time where the arrow points down. there are many other windows of time where the arrow points up. besides value, the operative word is "store", as in, store it another 5 years and see which way the arrow points then.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Ah yea, the store of value routinely moves 10% in an hour, and I’m the one being fallacious.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  You may know what the Bitcoin protocol dictates, but Bitcoin protocol has little to do with its value. It is worth what people will pay for it. You don't know how much or how little people will be willing to pay for it tomorrow, and that number varies rapidly. That's not a property I'd want in a "store of value."
  - danuker 4y ago
    Indeed, demand is the biggest risk in owning crypto assets. Here are what I believe the largest factors that influence demand: - liquidity (depends on, say, GDP and national currency supply) - network effects (it's easier to use Bitcoin if more people are using Bitcoin, because more services and trading partners pop up etc.) - amount of "speculators" - people buying because the price went up recently. They are betting on momentum. - amount of "true believers" - people seeing the value of the protocol, and sticking through crashes or betting on mean reversion.
blurbleblurble 4y ago
Blockchains are useful for maintaining chronologically ordered global state in an adversarial environment. And that's pretty much it.
mareko 4y ago
This reads to me like an argument against the internet because everything can still be done on intranets or other permissioned networks. After all, the internet can be used by criminals so we should absolutely stay away from it! The author fails to see that people want to build products and companies on open networks, and so the closed ones will struggle to compete.
- rvz 4y ago
  > After all, the internet can be used by criminals so we should absolutely stay away from it! The dotcom tech bros must have been trying to persuade typewriters, post offices, etc in 1990s at the time at the near height of the dotcom speculative mania. The skeptics at the time called it a fad at the time and would be no better than using fax machines. So again the internet is being used by money launderers, scammers, criminals, etc. Does that mean we need to go back to using fax machines? I think everyone knows the obvious answer to that question.
  - yodon 4y ago
    The historical strawman you're presenting is a wildly inaccurate portrayal of the period you're describing. If you're actually interested in what Internet skeptics were actually focused on in the early days, read Cliff Stoll's books[0]. His second book is where he established himself as the leading thinker on Internet skepticism in the early days, and his first book is where he established himself as one of the most important protectors of the Internet, with his first book work leading directly to many of the digital security and privacy laws and principles we take for granted today. Early Internet skepticism wasn't driven by clueless Luddite thinking, nor was it focused on nonsensical issues. Most of the problems he pointed out in 1995 have only become more serious and more apparent in the intervening years. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll
sktrdie 4y ago
This article talks about everything except what I think is the value proposition of Bitcoin/blockchain: A gambling system one can speculate about entirely anonymously. It’s anonymous Las Vegas and people love it. It’s a programmable Wall Street stock market where new kind of invisible wolves can Ponzi scheme the hell out of others in a new kind of scary unstoppable way. You can argue this is bad for the world (in fact I think it is), but in my opinion this is why blockchain still exist. Not because it’s a value storage system, or programmable money. The scary part is that it’s built to be unstoppable so people will continue to gamble and get rich/poor over it. A new more interesting discussion could be: is it inherent within humans to be able to gamble in this unhealthy way and what can we do to raise awareness about its real nature? (Similar to having facilities where people can get help on gambling or drug addiction)
asah 4y ago
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." - CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, leading computer maker, in 1977. Microsoft was founded in 1975. https://www.google.com/search?q=ken+olson+quote+personal+computers https://www.google.com/search?q=ken+olson+quote+personal+com...
- compiler-guy 4y ago
  The quote doesn't end with "and there never will be." Quoting him like this is a little bit like quoting someone in 1900 saying that we don't need gas stations. The Apple II was probably the first reasonable, non-pure-hobbyist home computer, and it didn't appear until 1977. And even then it took another year or two years for useful software to appear.
jmyeet 4y ago
There's a lot talk about what blockchains could be but most of the time this is just people lying to themselves or others about getting rich. It's the FOMO from Bitcoin. It's somehow picking the next Bitcoin from the 30,000 shitcoins. Algorithmic stablecoins have shown their obvious weaknesses in recent times and is another application that doesn't deliver. But here's the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to blockchains: the government could shut down any blockchain, including Bitcoin, tomorrow if it chose to. The US could make mining Bitcoin illegal and make it illegal for any financial institution who wants access to the US financial system to transact with cryptocurrencies. Will that shut down the network? Not technically, no. But it will make any such network basically useless. The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system. China shut down crypto mining and it basically disappeared the next day (mostly moving to Kazakhstan it seems). With rising energy costs in the developed world (including the disruption to natural gas supply in Europe thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine), at some point hte fact tha Bitcoin uses more power than Sweden is going to be an political issue. The US dollar is maintained by the long dick of the US government. A currency is a projection of government power. And no crypto network is a match for the projection of power of nation states.
- RichEO 4y ago
  I think we need a word to replace FOMO for these purposes. Perhaps one already exists? It strikes me that it’s not so much the fear of a potential new missed opportunity driving the tulip mania, but the retroactive regret of having missed the (10,000x) opportunity that bitcoin specifically represented. I suspect labelling it might have some persuasive/deflating power. Bitcoin regret? ROMO?
- whatisweb3 4y ago
  I like how your comment points out cannabis. > The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system. The US tried to ban the use of cannabis. The result was not that cannabis stopped being used or that it significantly reduced the levels of cannabis use - instead, recreational cannabis users and those with legitimate reasons for using it were forced into more dangerous black market activity, and often criminalized and put behind bars. Millions of dollars of state funding was spent exercising this drug war, which most people now see as a colossal failure, and finally some states are decriminalizing and legalizing cannabis use so long as it falls within government regulations. No single country can do much to take the network offline by banning mining. If all countries in unison decided to criminalize mining and enact a PoW-war, and were successful the blanket removal of PoW mining, then maybe the network would suffer to remain online, and users would be forced to migrate to more resilient consensus mechanisms like Proof of Stake.
charonn0 4y ago
Cryptocurrencies have also resulted in the invention of an entirely new crime: stealing CPU time.
- randomhodler84 4y ago
  I think you will find incidences of CPU theft going back to the first multi-user mainframe computing systems. You can’t even argue ransomware is a new crime from cryptocurrency, as this existed via payment card networks back in the day, see Reverton malware.
  - charonn0 4y ago
    To clarify: I'm referring to the ability to convert CPU cycles directly into money.
    - randomhodler84 4y ago
      Yeah, revolutionary technology! Money from computation! Sign me up!
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - charonn0 4y ago
        There's no need to be a dick about it.
        randomhodler84 4y ago
        I mean no offense to you personally, it’s just one of my quests in life to dispel misunderstandings of this revolutionary technology. It’s easy to find flaws in any tech. It’s how we adapt that is important.
        charonn0 4y ago
glennvtx 4y ago
"The future is now, old man".
syzygyhack 4y ago
The way it has supported the development of practical zero-knowledge proof-based applications alone is worth the weight of the blockchain industry in full, and then some. Not sure it has made it worth wading through the 2017 hot takes that HN continues to insist on upvoting though.
- JofArnold 4y ago
  While I get your point, zkSNARKS preceded blockchain by two decades.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - whatisweb3 4y ago
    No - zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) was first outlined in 2012[1] and the first real production implementation of it in the wild was Zcash (development of which started in 2013). The ZK proof protocols being used today in blockchains are very different than those envisioned in the 80s. Specifically they are "non interactive" and "succinct" (proof is very short and easy to verify). Most of the massive leaps in development of ZK proof technology recently has been led by crypto currency space. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2090236.2090263 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2090236.2090263
    - randomhodler84 4y ago
      Ironically the zksnark paper had a glaring, crypto system breaking error and the implementers of zcash went out of their way to hide the parameters until sapling, where they could correct the problem. That being said, zcash is a quite useful construction.
automatic6131 4y ago
>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology. >And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems This is such an important sentence that is bear repeating ad infinitum. For completeness: if you do have a technological solution to an economic and politcal problem, you have created a new political problem (for yourself): getting everyone to use and understand your solution.
- tim333 4y ago
  >technology can’t solve economic ... problems It certainly can. Maybe not blockchain but the old problems of lacking food etc in the west have largely been fixed by technology like tractors and fertilizers and we have obesity now.
- Synaesthesia 4y ago
  Yanis Varoufakis elucidated it pretty well recently: Crypto won't form a revolution because we haven't changed our own institutions, our relationships and so on. That is what changes in a revolution. In other words we still have the boss-employee wage relationship, the role within a corporation and so on, completely unchanged.
  - PretzelPirate 4y ago
    There’s an important discussion to be had around this: revolutions take inspiration, which only comes after people see that things can be better. You can argue that crypto won’t form a revolution because we still support and value trusted third parties, but using decentralized assets on a blockchain may be what inspires people to change those institutions and relationships. Sadly, many of the “get rich quick” scams we see getting deployed on blockchains won’t help build the public’s confidence in changing our current system, but there’s still time.
    - hnthrow1010 4y ago
      Using a blockchain is literally trusting a third party. Blockchains require third party miners/validators to run the chain. The idea that blockchains will change anything about this is a pipe dream. The design of them simply makes it impossible for everyone to "be their own trusted third party", whatever that is supposed to look like. Ironically, the most feasible way to really go "off the grid" is still probably to hide large amounts of valuable commodities (i.e. gold, platinum, etc) inside your home. In the words of that grug brain developer from yesterday, you go back to collecting shiny rocks. But I really doubt cryptocurrency is going to encourage people to do that, it's bad for many obvious reasons.
dqpb 4y ago
I recently had to move a lot of money between my own accounts. It took days. On algorand, transactions of any amount take 4 seconds and cost .00035 cents.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  On Solana they take 0.03 seconds and cost a fraction of that as well. That might sound unnecessary, but it actually enables novel and compelling use cases for monetary transactions. Programmatic value transfer solves problems we didn't even know we had, whether its Bitcoin, Algorand, Ethereum, or Solana.
jacknews 4y ago
laser
whitepaint 4y ago
> Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. There seriously should be a requirement for anyone writing an article or a comment about how crypto is useless to install MetaMask and go play with Defi protocols for a few days: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ (You can use all of this if you have an internet connection, no arbitrary restrictions by governments or companies imposed can stop you - how on earth does it not blow your mind?!?! Not only that, countries that will have digital stablecoins (like USDC) will gain tremendous benefits; to the similar extent as Petrodollar has). I honestly can't get the short-sightedness of tech people in this area. This is a revolution. Obviously.
- soco 4y ago
  So your answer is that defi is essential to blow minds. I can agree to that. The rest is only "will be" while the question was about "what is".
motohagiography 4y ago
On Green's challenge of "I postulate that no one has ever said “Here is a problem that I have. Oh look, blockchain is a good solution.” in 2015 I worked in digital identity and showed how identity itself in its very definition was the emergent artifact of relationships, and the only way to establish idenitity in a consistent and scalable way was to federate the consenus of which your identity was the artifact. The company abruptly pivoted from its federation protocols based ID to an identity blockchain, and it is being adopted by governments and financial institutions today. The next problem was "how do you do cryptographic key management in autonomous swarms of devices that connect via a mesh protocol that cannot connect to a central base station?" again, this is the same identity problem, where the integrity and quality of "legitimacy" of a node's identity is an artifact of the consensus of the mesh it connects to. Now, these cases don't need proof of work, but they absolutely rely on consensus, and not a database. Their criticisms of blockchains imply a misunderstanding of a core aspect of security, which is that a proof in a closed loop system cannot be shown to be externally consistent with another instance of itself without some encompassing closed loop system both instances are a part of. A generic consensus protocol (like a blockchain) enables the federation of these consistency proofs. This particular blockchain may not be the best possbile one - but I'd argue back that a cryptographic substrate that facilitates consensus and federation for distributed computing is as significant an invention as the internet. There is another piece where it's finally clicking that "security" isn't so much an engineering problem as it is a critical theory of technology based on different ideologies that favour autonomy or governmance respectively, and like a critical theory, it can be used to both befog and obfuscate - or prove - whatever you like in it. On currencies, to borrow an adage, if you don't know what problem cryptocurrencies are solving, the problem may be you. That's unnecessarily provocative, but the real problems it solves are those around peer-to-peer transactions and dynamic federation - all the stuff the internet used to promise until it succumbed to the very criticisms Schneier is making of blockchains, particularly emergent centralization and scams. I have tremendous respect for both of them, but Schneier and Green are both making appeals for governance to people who don't want it, and I think they are lending their engineering cred to a general global governance narrative that I'm not sure they appreciate the motives of.
anonymoushermit 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mrkramer 4y ago
Blockchain solves the problem of trust; you don't have to trust centralized entity with your transactions because with the Bitcoin's blockchain implementation there is consensus among nodes on the chronology and the nature of transactions plus all transactions are open to public aka transparent.
baby 4y ago
> To me, the problem isn’t that internet can be made slightly less awful than it is today. The problem is that it doesn’t do anything its proponents claim it does. In some very important ways, the internet is not secure. It doesn’t replace the post office with ethernet cables; in fact, in many ways it is far less trustworthy than the postal service. It's not decentralized, and its inevitable centralization is harmful because it’s largely emergent and ill-defined. It still has trusted intermediaries, often with more power and less oversight than the post office. Internet still requires governance. It still requires regulation. (These things are what I wrote about here.) The problem with internet is that it’s not an improvement to any system—and often makes things worse. > In our letter, we write: “By its very design, the internet is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as e-commerce and information-at-your-fingertips to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use. Despite more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated services and are not an improvement on the existing mailing system.”
baby 4y ago
I really don't understand these arguments. "Blockchain" is a collection of technology but at its heart it's about byzantine-fault tolerant consensus and distributed protocols. I explain this here (https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me-what-the-heck-is-blockchain-its-simple-really/ https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me...) but if you're looking at it from the outside, you should see blockchain as 1) a distributed database: it is here to emulate a centralized system, like a central bank! and 2) a distributed database that works even in the presence of malicious actors, so like an international central bank that wants to operate across borders There's nothing more than that, if you want to understand the technology in a financial scenario. If you want to understand how this kind of technology can be useful outside of a financial scenario, think about the web PKI (which I wrote about here https://cryptologie.net/article/561/the-web-pki-20/ https://cryptologie.net/article/561/the-web-pki-20/) or protocols like certificate transparency and binary transparency, and how they could provide resistance against attacks (instead of detection of attacks) if they used a BFT consensus protocol.
status200 4y ago
I wouldn't really count on Bruce to have the complete picture, he is obviously biased. He has some valid points but completely misses the mark because he doesn't understand the technology or its purpose. Having an immutable ledger would be very useful for things that should be public and transparent (e.g. where tax dollars are actually being spent, eliminating middlemen, etc.), but the structure right now is in its infancy and has its doors open to the same bad actors that have ruined the traditional financial systems. At least blockchains are working to prevent collusion, whereas Bruce would rather whine to Congress and throw the baby out with the bathwater, either from ignorance, bitterness, or some combination of the two. Instead of fighting against the technology, he should advocate for public servants to be incorporated into a system that actually lets any casual citizen audit their input to the system as a whole, with confidence that all of the data is accurate and cannot be manipulated.
dqpb 4y ago
> I and others wrote a letter to Congress, basically saying that cryptocurrencies are an complete and total disaster, and urging them to regulate the space. This guy wants the US government to regulate what data structures, algorithms, and protocols you’re allowed to use in your software. Sorry, but I don’t think anyone really wants the US congress and a baby boomer with a blog to be the ceiling of technology progress.
dee8717 4y ago
Blockchains are useful when two parties needs a third party to trust. Blockchain eliminate the third party. yes, there might not be a robust solutions today but its pretty robust problem to solve.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
One often overlooked application of crypto is that it may be attracting a large proportion of scammers and those easily scammed, thereby pulling a whole bunch of scam activity out of the regular financial system and into the crypto space. If we can get all the fraud onto the blockchain, I'd call that a win.

182 points by mikece 4y ago

Blockchains offer democratized access to programmable money, and you think this is a BAD thing? Where's your creativity?

pavlov 4y ago
Getting too creative with money historically leads to ordinary people losing their savings and homes. 1980s penny stocks. 1995-2005 Enron creative accounting. 2008 subprime mortgages. 2017-21 crypto ICOs and DeFi. Maybe we don't need any more ultra-creative capitalism, but better regulation and shared financial digital commons where interoperability is guaranteed by government mandate. The EU has been quite successful in making Eurozone cross-country banking just work for the ordinary consumer and small business. After all money itself isn't the point, the business it enables is. Money should ideally get out of the way and not make you think about it, but crypto so far has taken the opposite approach where the money itself is everything and nothing is actually being traded.
- jbaczuk 4y ago
  You can try to regulate Bitcoin but you can't stop it. It will become like the drug war or prohibition.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    It's sufficient to regulate the high-profile crypto on/off-ramps. Exchanges should follow the same rules as banks and brokers, and there probably should be an energy waste tax levied on PoW coin transactions which exchanges would enforce, similar to how brokers do dividend tax withholding today. If someone wants to trade Bitcoin peer-to-peer for cash 2010-style, that's fine by me, it won't create systemic risks.
    - jbaczuk 4y ago
      I agree, and exchanges already are heavily regulated. But taxing energy consumption? How can you tax energy waste? What if someone sets up their own power generation? Is it wasting energy to let sunlight hit a parking lot?
      - kayodelycaon 4y ago
        > What if someone sets up their own power generation? I'd like to see how this is economically feasible for crypto.
        jbaczuk 4y ago
        Me too. It's another financial incentives to make clean power generation more accessible.
      - pavlov 4y ago
        > ...exchanges already are heavily regulated. They are not, compared to banks and brokers. They do all kinds of things that would be absolute no-nos in regular finance, like trading against their customers.
        jbaczuk 4y ago
        Ah, that's a good point. Well, good thing is you don't need an exchange to use it, and there are decentralized exchanges.
  - cliffy 4y ago
    What is there to stop beyond the horrible energy consumption and scams? Bitcoin doesn't do anything useful at all. It's a net negative for the earth and the public at large.
    - jbaczuk 4y ago
      People will just keep using it. But you might be right that it is a net negative since it's mostly used for speculation... But, it's not completely useless (tell that to the criminals who use it regularly). Or people who own it because they don't want all their assets in a highly inflationary currency.
      - hnthrow1010 4y ago
        You're playing a semantic game here. Yes, technically if criminals are using it, it's not "useless". To the rest of us, it's actually worse than useless because the criminal activity is a net negative on society. The idea that crypto is a hedge against inflation is laughable, look at any of the price activity in the last few months. Crypto tokens have no fundamentals or inherent value or anything. The price is completely random.
        jbaczuk 4y ago
        I'm not condoning all the illegal stuff that happens with Bitcoin, to be clear, but just because a government says something is illegal, doesn't mean it should be. For example we're happy in the U.S. (well most of us I think) to be freed from oppressive rulers who taxed without representation, and something like Bitcoin would have been quite useful in that situation. There are many countries who are in a similar situation.
      - dghlsakjg 4y ago
        > Or people who own it because they don't want all their assets in a highly inflationary currency. When compared to world currencies BTC currently has an inflation rate that makes it the second most inflationary currency in the world after Venezuela. As a store of value crypto is not great.
- mypastself 4y ago
  I submit to you that government-induced currency devaluation has caused orders of magnitude greater monetary losses for ordinary individuals than all of those events combined.
Proven 4y ago
elil17 4y ago
First, programmable money is obviously a bad thing - you only need look at the large number of disasters in the DeFi space. Second, it's not really democratized if only the rich can afford the transaction fees. Third, what does "democratized access to money" even mean? Does it solve the problem of poor people being unable to access financial services? Not that I've heard. I don't know anyone who doesn't have access to a bank account but is able to store their money on the blockchain. Does it mean something else I'm not thinking of?
- sowbug 4y ago
  if only the rich can afford the transaction fees For at least the past year, average fees have been below a dollar, and less than five cents if you're willing to wait an extra 30 minutes for a confirmation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  Democratized access to money means that I can move my life savings as a refugee from a war torn country by just remembering 24 words. Access to a bank account doesn't preclude this need. Think corrupt countries like Ukraine or even Cambodia, Laos. There are banks, but they go belly up every week and new ones come up. If you think outside of the narrow scope of the first world, there are many unbanked folks that can benefit. As for the rich affording tx fees, maybe a replacement for daily cash isn't everyone's use case? Maybe it doesn't have to be bitcoin? It can be one of many other cryptocurrencies that has low tx fees. There are places in the world where the volatility of crypto looks stable in comparison to the local geo-political and financial climate. Cryptocurrencies offer the world a "splinter economy". Having said all that, of course this stuff is not without issues that need addressing. Regulating this technology into oblivion isn't it though.
  - hnthrow1010 4y ago
    >Democratized access to money means that I can move my life savings as a refugee from a war torn country This has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, blockchains, or "democratized access" at all. What you're suggesting is simply for people to use foreign banks. If your local money is being destabilized by war, I can't see why you'd want to put your money into an extremely volatile offshore casino, which is what cryptocurrency is.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kabdib 4y ago
If cryptocurrencies are "democratic", then so in the same sense are disease, starvation and violence. Available to anyone. Doesn't make them a good thing. All I see are scams, hype, and tricks to get marks to stuff more money into the pockets of bad actors, followed by thievery. Being creative is often fine. Being creative when you're ripping people off for billions of dollars is not fine. Our culture may respect and admire talented criminal underdogs like art forgers and counterfeiters, but we still put them in jail.

jbaczuk 4y ago

𝐁𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. No. Bad power generation is bad for the environment. Also, proof-of-stake does not offer the same level of security and accessibility. 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡. Only when the network is congested and people are transacting a lot. This is required in order to incentivize miners to include your transaction. When too high, layer 2 protocols like lightning or the Liquid Network. Also, fees are flat, so it doesn't matter how much or where you send.

elil17 4y ago
Good power generation is also bad for the environment. Every form of energy generation has an environmental cost (e.g. land use for solar, mining needed to make wind turbine components). If someone is shoveling food into a landfill, you don't say "Oh well, that would be fine if we just had more food. Not his fault." People are burning electricity for no reason when it's still a scarce resource. So it's only useful if no one uses it or if you're sending more money than the average person earns in a year?
- jbaczuk 4y ago
  Energy is not generated, it's captured/converted, and energy is not a scarce resource. In this case, it's converted to financial security to prevent double spends and allow this currency to exist.
  - danuker 4y ago
    > and energy is not a scarce resource Explain to me the spikes in electricity prices?
    - jbaczuk 4y ago
      Have you heard of the sun? It's sending quite a bit of free energy. In fact too much, many would argue, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
  - 4y ago

iskander 4y ago

>Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. That is, a problem that could not have been solved without blockchain that can now be solved with it. I would like to fundraise with an international group that doesn't trust US based corporations with their personal data. Is there an existing way to do that? Also, more generally and away from things that start in the financial sphere, a decentralized web-scale database seems to have broad conceptual appeal but the only functioning large-scale instances all come bundled with cryptocurrencies. I think this is largely because we don't a way to pay for servers without the financial layer (and figuring out a way to dial down the financialization while keeping decentralization would be good).

elliekelly 4y ago
Cash?
- iskander 4y ago
  Me and a few hundred pseudonymous individuals on Twitter will...what? Mail different currencies to a trusted central party?
  - engineer_22 4y ago
    What could go wrong? /s
  - elil17 4y ago
    Or mail the currencies to the international group directly?
  - 4oh9do 4y ago
    > on Twitter Don't go changing the goalposts now. You previously said: > an international group that doesn't trust US based corporations with their personal data So no Twitter for you.
- glerk 4y ago
  As in sending cash by mail potentially across borders? Is that really a solution?

ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago

elil17 4y ago
So why do you need bitcoin for that? Doesn't cash work fine? It's more stable, easier to use, and already more widely adopted than crypto.
- mgamache 4y ago
  Cash is being phased out (censored) and can't be sent via the internet.
  - elil17 4y ago
    Is it? I have never had anyone “censor” me for using cash, I don’t even know how that would work. Yes if you’re trying to send money covertly over the internet you could use crypto for that - but you will have to interact with financial institutions to get the crypto and the recipient will have to interact with financial institutions to turn the crypto into real money, so why not just use the financial institutions to send the real money in the first place?
    - randomhodler84 4y ago
      In 2021, I used cash at a bar, and the girl behind me said “ew look! He is paying like a poor person!”. I was shocked. Censorship can be overt, covert, societal or authoritarian.
      - elil17 4y ago
        I guarantee that if you asks a barkeeper to pay with crypto you will also get made fun of
        randomhodler84 4y ago

seibelj 4y ago

How can I have a digital form of money protected from a politician that doesn't like me? That is what crypto provides - you cannot seize my money. You can compel me to give it up, but I will not wake up one day and have a court notice that I'm ("temporarily") bankrupt.

alasdair_ 4y ago
You can have a court notice that says any transactions from wallet X will be considered contempt of court punishable by jail, which is close to the same thing for most people.
randomsearch 4y ago
If a powerful politician cared enough, they could take everything you own. BTC won't save you from tyranny.
kayodelycaon 4y ago
You can be arrested and held in contempt until you give up the money.
- transcoderx 4y ago
  What money? I don't have any money.
  - randomhodler84 4y ago
    Yeah, sorry, I lost it all in a tragic boating incident.

engineer_22 4y ago

Not very courageous to release a piece like this AFTER the crash. Understood that nobody would listen while times were good, but because of the timing the conviction of the author is questioned. EDIT: Author has been releasing criticism of cryptocoins for some time now. I guess he's bona fide.

kayodelycaon 4y ago
Schneier has a pretty solid reputation and his articles appear regularly on HN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier Information from the first paragraph of the linked article: Previous post: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an... Post by Matthew Green he is replying to: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2022/06/09/in-defense-of-cryptocurrency/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2022/06/09/in-defen...

shuntress 4y ago

Block chains can be useful. Git is the most obvious example.

engineer_22 4y ago
Is Git on a block chain?
- shuntress 4y ago
  Each commit is hashed as a block that includes the hash of the previous commit, so, yes. Though, to be more accurate, you would say thay each "repository" is a block chain rather than say that Git is "on" a block chain.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  It is a blockchain. It's different from Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. in that it doesn't use a trustless consensus method. And that's literally the only situations where cryptocurrencies make sense, situations where you need to be able to operate with zero trust of the other party/parties. Turns out those situations are a lot rarer than crypto advocates claim, and even when such situations exist crypto is actually pretty limited in how much it can do/solve.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  The underlying data structure for a blockchain and git is a merkle tree. So by some looser definitions, yes.
elil17 4y ago
Git is not what most people mean when they say blockchains (e.g. the decentralization of the blockchain and the use of the consensus algorithm is implied)
- shuntress 4y ago
  Kind of like how "Crypto" now means gamblinging on speculative assets rather than the study of cryptography?

lvass 4y ago

>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology I generally agree but there definitely are exceptions. For example they can provide viable financial models for tech organizations like Brave and Protocol Labs (I'm not endorsing them) to actually care about privacy, which is an enormous social issue right now.

engineer_22 4y ago
Agreed - privacy of transaction is the #1 issue blockchain potentially solves.
- ninkendo 4y ago
  I don't get it... aren't all transactions completely public on the blockchain? Isn't that the fundamental way it works? (Mixing services notwithstanding.) Sure, your wallet isn't necessarily traceable to your identity, but the whole transaction history of your wallet is there, and if you ever convert those bitcoins to real cash, you're going to need to divulge that identity to someone.
  - iskander 4y ago
    "Shielded" transactions on networks such as Zerocash are private. There's an increasing trend in this direction as "zero knowledge" layer 2 networks come online, since they have the same underlying mechanisms which makes private transfers easy to implement (or to even have as the default).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  And Monero is the only widely used coin that actually does this, the rest make things even less private because all transactions are publicly available on the blockchain.

haolez 4y ago

I have a contrarian view on cryptocurrencies: I don't think the blockchain is the biggest innovation. I think that Bitcoin is. And Bitcoin is more than just a blockchain. However, I think blockchains are only useful for a single purpose: digital money. Every other use seems misplaced for me.

bhaak 4y ago
I'm not sure a meme should be "worth" 400 Billion dollars. Or what else could you mean what the "more than just a blockchain" is?
- haolez 4y ago
  The game theory behind it that makes the whole thing work.
  - bhaak 4y ago
    For questionable values of “work”. It doesn’t work as digital money (see the narrative of it being digital gold). And it’s not stable yet. The block rewards are decreasing and we don’t know for sure if it will still work when they are mostly gone (we will find out in a few years though).
lawn 4y ago
I certainly agree that digital money is the use-case, but I don't think Bitcoin is it. Transactions are far too expensive and has too poor privacy for that to be the case.
- randomhodler84 4y ago
  It’s super cheap. I sent $30 to a friend last night via Lightning, it was <1c. They used it to buy drinks. There is no record of the tx on a blockchain - it is reasonably private. It is not as private as monero, zcash — sure, but there is no ongoing record of tx.

sirmoveon 4y ago

Boy, whoever's funding the negative press around cryptocurrencies, send some money my way... I'll find better arguments than void hate.

imustbeevil 4y ago
Yes, when I see articles I disagree with my first thought is that someone paid them to write it, and not that most people disagree with me and statistically most articles will be from that side.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Probably their thinking is that otherwise intelligent people are writing roughly the same complete nonsense all at roughly the same time. I'm a big believer in Hanlon's razor though.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  and you don't find it rather peculiar that the concentration of anti-crypto rhetoric has suddenly spiked about a year ago, and now there's a relentless assault from all opinion outlets? especially here on HN, where a few years ago it was all blockchain this, blockchain that, and you could have intelligent conversation about cryptocurrency without someone immediately clawing at your throat. and now we have bi-hourly 5-minute hate instead totally organic, yes?
  - imustbeevil 4y ago
    > and you don't find it rather peculiar that the concentration of anti-crypto rhetoric has suddenly spiked about a year ago, and now there's a relentless assault from all opinion outlets? When the price goes up, people are happy and write happy articles. When the price goes down, people are sad and write sad articles. How that actually happens is that, the people writing the happy and sad articles are different groups of people who each wait for the price to do what they need it to justify their position. The price is down, so it justifies negative positions. When the price is up in ~3 years, there will be more people writing happy articles. When that happens I won't think they've all been paid to (even though it is obviously more likely that the group selling something has financial interest in promoting it).

photochemsyn 4y ago

The core thinking behind the argument in this article is perhaps this: This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology. And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems. It's the same issue with things like personal data protection and mass surveillance - everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, and it's eminently clear that only reform of government policies, i.e. legal policy changes like enforceable data privacy laws, offers any real solution.

ziddoap 4y ago
>everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, Can you expand on this? Outside of theoretical attacks only possible by the largest nation state actors and attacks that rely on something other than Tor (e.g. bad opsec, enabling JS, etc.), are you saying Tor has been broken? Is there a paper?
- lvass 4y ago
  Not sure what OP meant, but Tor is mostly broken right now for anything on clearnet, it's either practically or outright unusable.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    Not being practical is much different than what the OP seems to be claiming; that onion routing itself is broken in terms of security/privacy.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I'd read "Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex", by Yasha Levine, for a discussion of why Tor/Onion has relatively little value for private communications, unless it's used in a highly specific manner - and even then, one end of the communication is inevitably going to be known to metadata trackers at the very least. It's also highly probable that most or all Tor nodes on the Internet are backdoored by one intelligence agency or another at this point, meaning they can reconstruct the hops pretty easily. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-valley https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-va...

gfodor 4y ago

There are many flaws in this perspective, but I'll pick one: the argument that there is no problem being solved with blockchain. This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions. Of course, from there, people often wince. But that wincing comes from an assumption: that a transaction is morally just if and only if it is legal. This is a fairly bad assumption (particularly with a brief skim of the history of the 20th century), but even if it were true, it is provably the case that blockchain technology is solving this problem in a way previous solutions have not been able to, given it is the chosen mechanism.

randomsearch 4y ago
> This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions. He literally makes this point in the article.
- gfodor 4y ago
  I read the article and do not see this point being made. Can you point it out?
  - lolinder 4y ago
    > Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. That is, a problem that could not have been solved without blockchain that can now be solved with it. (And “ransomware couldn’t exist because criminals are blocked from using the conventional financial networks, and cash payments aren’t feasible” does not count.) He's specifically calling out ransomware criminals as not counting, but I think he'd extend the logic to crime in general.
    - gfodor 4y ago
      That's not refuting my argument. My argument is that the general problem of being able to transact freely across the globe with radically reduced risk of government interception is a legitimate problem for many individuals now and in the past, who live under governments with unjust laws. Plucking one very obvious form of immoral criminality out of that gigantic pool of use cases is misleading at best. I think many people in the West forget how lucky they are that, on average, the correlation between the morality and legality of economic transactions is fairly decent.

whatisweb3 4y ago

various issues in this post, but to examine the central question: > Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. That is, a problem that could not have been solved without blockchain that can now be solved with it. Application: User Alice and Bob want to swap domain names they own, but using an escrow to facilitate the trade safely and mitigate counterparty risk - and they want this exchange to settle in mere seconds or minutes, without the need to share private data with a third party, and without the need to pay a % commission to a rent-extracting centralized corporate entity*. This application can and already is being achieved by recording these domain name properties and their records of ownership on a public distributed ledger - a blockchain. The application of blockchain is as it always has been: creating a decentralized and permissionless ledger. * most blockchains use transaction fee markets to mitigate spam. In this blockchain app, a small fixed transaction fee must be directed to all users upholding the protocol - which, importantly, may include Alice and Bob themselves as token holders, block producers, and/or delegators within the network. Edit: lol at downvotes. author literally asked for an application - the downvotes end up hiding my comment and help to maintain the HN echo chamber.

danuker 4y ago

One purpose I use Bitcoin for is as a store of value. I can't know what the government will do with its currency in the future. But I know what the Bitcoin protocol dictates. Sadly, the supply not being responsive to the demand also means I'll see crashes. But I also see crashes with gold, stocks, and real estate.

jeffbee 4y ago
Completely normal "store of value" behavior. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BTC-USD?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjO0pruqcb4AhXpJkQIHUuqCQ4Q-fUHegQIDhAX&window=1Y https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BTC-USD?sa=X&ved=2ahUKE...
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  classic fallacy, you've chose a window of time where the arrow points down. there are many other windows of time where the arrow points up. besides value, the operative word is "store", as in, store it another 5 years and see which way the arrow points then.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Ah yea, the store of value routinely moves 10% in an hour, and I’m the one being fallacious.
D13Fd 4y ago
You may know what the Bitcoin protocol dictates, but Bitcoin protocol has little to do with its value. It is worth what people will pay for it. You don't know how much or how little people will be willing to pay for it tomorrow, and that number varies rapidly. That's not a property I'd want in a "store of value."
- danuker 4y ago
  Indeed, demand is the biggest risk in owning crypto assets. Here are what I believe the largest factors that influence demand: - liquidity (depends on, say, GDP and national currency supply) - network effects (it's easier to use Bitcoin if more people are using Bitcoin, because more services and trading partners pop up etc.) - amount of "speculators" - people buying because the price went up recently. They are betting on momentum. - amount of "true believers" - people seeing the value of the protocol, and sticking through crashes or betting on mean reversion.

blurbleblurble 4y ago

Blockchains are useful for maintaining chronologically ordered global state in an adversarial environment. And that's pretty much it.

mareko 4y ago

This reads to me like an argument against the internet because everything can still be done on intranets or other permissioned networks. After all, the internet can be used by criminals so we should absolutely stay away from it! The author fails to see that people want to build products and companies on open networks, and so the closed ones will struggle to compete.

rvz 4y ago
> After all, the internet can be used by criminals so we should absolutely stay away from it! The dotcom tech bros must have been trying to persuade typewriters, post offices, etc in 1990s at the time at the near height of the dotcom speculative mania. The skeptics at the time called it a fad at the time and would be no better than using fax machines. So again the internet is being used by money launderers, scammers, criminals, etc. Does that mean we need to go back to using fax machines? I think everyone knows the obvious answer to that question.
- yodon 4y ago
  The historical strawman you're presenting is a wildly inaccurate portrayal of the period you're describing. If you're actually interested in what Internet skeptics were actually focused on in the early days, read Cliff Stoll's books[0]. His second book is where he established himself as the leading thinker on Internet skepticism in the early days, and his first book is where he established himself as one of the most important protectors of the Internet, with his first book work leading directly to many of the digital security and privacy laws and principles we take for granted today. Early Internet skepticism wasn't driven by clueless Luddite thinking, nor was it focused on nonsensical issues. Most of the problems he pointed out in 1995 have only become more serious and more apparent in the intervening years. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll

sktrdie 4y ago

This article talks about everything except what I think is the value proposition of Bitcoin/blockchain: A gambling system one can speculate about entirely anonymously. It’s anonymous Las Vegas and people love it. It’s a programmable Wall Street stock market where new kind of invisible wolves can Ponzi scheme the hell out of others in a new kind of scary unstoppable way. You can argue this is bad for the world (in fact I think it is), but in my opinion this is why blockchain still exist. Not because it’s a value storage system, or programmable money. The scary part is that it’s built to be unstoppable so people will continue to gamble and get rich/poor over it. A new more interesting discussion could be: is it inherent within humans to be able to gamble in this unhealthy way and what can we do to raise awareness about its real nature? (Similar to having facilities where people can get help on gambling or drug addiction)

asah 4y ago

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." - CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, leading computer maker, in 1977. Microsoft was founded in 1975. https://www.google.com/search?q=ken+olson+quote+personal+computers https://www.google.com/search?q=ken+olson+quote+personal+com...

compiler-guy 4y ago
The quote doesn't end with "and there never will be." Quoting him like this is a little bit like quoting someone in 1900 saying that we don't need gas stations. The Apple II was probably the first reasonable, non-pure-hobbyist home computer, and it didn't appear until 1977. And even then it took another year or two years for useful software to appear.

jmyeet 4y ago

There's a lot talk about what blockchains could be but most of the time this is just people lying to themselves or others about getting rich. It's the FOMO from Bitcoin. It's somehow picking the next Bitcoin from the 30,000 shitcoins. Algorithmic stablecoins have shown their obvious weaknesses in recent times and is another application that doesn't deliver. But here's the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to blockchains: the government could shut down any blockchain, including Bitcoin, tomorrow if it chose to. The US could make mining Bitcoin illegal and make it illegal for any financial institution who wants access to the US financial system to transact with cryptocurrencies. Will that shut down the network? Not technically, no. But it will make any such network basically useless. The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system. China shut down crypto mining and it basically disappeared the next day (mostly moving to Kazakhstan it seems). With rising energy costs in the developed world (including the disruption to natural gas supply in Europe thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine), at some point hte fact tha Bitcoin uses more power than Sweden is going to be an political issue. The US dollar is maintained by the long dick of the US government. A currency is a projection of government power. And no crypto network is a match for the projection of power of nation states.

RichEO 4y ago
I think we need a word to replace FOMO for these purposes. Perhaps one already exists? It strikes me that it’s not so much the fear of a potential new missed opportunity driving the tulip mania, but the retroactive regret of having missed the (10,000x) opportunity that bitcoin specifically represented. I suspect labelling it might have some persuasive/deflating power. Bitcoin regret? ROMO?
whatisweb3 4y ago
I like how your comment points out cannabis. > The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system. The US tried to ban the use of cannabis. The result was not that cannabis stopped being used or that it significantly reduced the levels of cannabis use - instead, recreational cannabis users and those with legitimate reasons for using it were forced into more dangerous black market activity, and often criminalized and put behind bars. Millions of dollars of state funding was spent exercising this drug war, which most people now see as a colossal failure, and finally some states are decriminalizing and legalizing cannabis use so long as it falls within government regulations. No single country can do much to take the network offline by banning mining. If all countries in unison decided to criminalize mining and enact a PoW-war, and were successful the blanket removal of PoW mining, then maybe the network would suffer to remain online, and users would be forced to migrate to more resilient consensus mechanisms like Proof of Stake.

charonn0 4y ago

Cryptocurrencies have also resulted in the invention of an entirely new crime: stealing CPU time.

randomhodler84 4y ago
I think you will find incidences of CPU theft going back to the first multi-user mainframe computing systems. You can’t even argue ransomware is a new crime from cryptocurrency, as this existed via payment card networks back in the day, see Reverton malware.
- charonn0 4y ago
  To clarify: I'm referring to the ability to convert CPU cycles directly into money.
  - randomhodler84 4y ago
    Yeah, revolutionary technology! Money from computation! Sign me up!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - charonn0 4y ago
      There's no need to be a dick about it.
      - randomhodler84 4y ago
        I mean no offense to you personally, it’s just one of my quests in life to dispel misunderstandings of this revolutionary technology. It’s easy to find flaws in any tech. It’s how we adapt that is important.
        charonn0 4y ago

glennvtx 4y ago

"The future is now, old man".

syzygyhack 4y ago

The way it has supported the development of practical zero-knowledge proof-based applications alone is worth the weight of the blockchain industry in full, and then some. Not sure it has made it worth wading through the 2017 hot takes that HN continues to insist on upvoting though.

JofArnold 4y ago
While I get your point, zkSNARKS preceded blockchain by two decades.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- whatisweb3 4y ago
  No - zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) was first outlined in 2012[1] and the first real production implementation of it in the wild was Zcash (development of which started in 2013). The ZK proof protocols being used today in blockchains are very different than those envisioned in the 80s. Specifically they are "non interactive" and "succinct" (proof is very short and easy to verify). Most of the massive leaps in development of ZK proof technology recently has been led by crypto currency space. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2090236.2090263 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2090236.2090263
  - randomhodler84 4y ago
    Ironically the zksnark paper had a glaring, crypto system breaking error and the implementers of zcash went out of their way to hide the parameters until sapling, where they could correct the problem. That being said, zcash is a quite useful construction.

automatic6131 4y ago

>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology. >And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems This is such an important sentence that is bear repeating ad infinitum. For completeness: if you do have a technological solution to an economic and politcal problem, you have created a new political problem (for yourself): getting everyone to use and understand your solution.

tim333 4y ago
>technology can’t solve economic ... problems It certainly can. Maybe not blockchain but the old problems of lacking food etc in the west have largely been fixed by technology like tractors and fertilizers and we have obesity now.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
Yanis Varoufakis elucidated it pretty well recently: Crypto won't form a revolution because we haven't changed our own institutions, our relationships and so on. That is what changes in a revolution. In other words we still have the boss-employee wage relationship, the role within a corporation and so on, completely unchanged.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago
  There’s an important discussion to be had around this: revolutions take inspiration, which only comes after people see that things can be better. You can argue that crypto won’t form a revolution because we still support and value trusted third parties, but using decentralized assets on a blockchain may be what inspires people to change those institutions and relationships. Sadly, many of the “get rich quick” scams we see getting deployed on blockchains won’t help build the public’s confidence in changing our current system, but there’s still time.
  - hnthrow1010 4y ago
    Using a blockchain is literally trusting a third party. Blockchains require third party miners/validators to run the chain. The idea that blockchains will change anything about this is a pipe dream. The design of them simply makes it impossible for everyone to "be their own trusted third party", whatever that is supposed to look like. Ironically, the most feasible way to really go "off the grid" is still probably to hide large amounts of valuable commodities (i.e. gold, platinum, etc) inside your home. In the words of that grug brain developer from yesterday, you go back to collecting shiny rocks. But I really doubt cryptocurrency is going to encourage people to do that, it's bad for many obvious reasons.

dqpb 4y ago

I recently had to move a lot of money between my own accounts. It took days. On algorand, transactions of any amount take 4 seconds and cost .00035 cents.

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
On Solana they take 0.03 seconds and cost a fraction of that as well. That might sound unnecessary, but it actually enables novel and compelling use cases for monetary transactions. Programmatic value transfer solves problems we didn't even know we had, whether its Bitcoin, Algorand, Ethereum, or Solana.

jacknews 4y ago

laser

whitepaint 4y ago

> Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential. There seriously should be a requirement for anyone writing an article or a comment about how crypto is useless to install MetaMask and go play with Defi protocols for a few days: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ (You can use all of this if you have an internet connection, no arbitrary restrictions by governments or companies imposed can stop you - how on earth does it not blow your mind?!?! Not only that, countries that will have digital stablecoins (like USDC) will gain tremendous benefits; to the similar extent as Petrodollar has). I honestly can't get the short-sightedness of tech people in this area. This is a revolution. Obviously.

soco 4y ago
So your answer is that defi is essential to blow minds. I can agree to that. The rest is only "will be" while the question was about "what is".

motohagiography 4y ago

On Green's challenge of "I postulate that no one has ever said “Here is a problem that I have. Oh look, blockchain is a good solution.” in 2015 I worked in digital identity and showed how identity itself in its very definition was the emergent artifact of relationships, and the only way to establish idenitity in a consistent and scalable way was to federate the consenus of which your identity was the artifact. The company abruptly pivoted from its federation protocols based ID to an identity blockchain, and it is being adopted by governments and financial institutions today. The next problem was "how do you do cryptographic key management in autonomous swarms of devices that connect via a mesh protocol that cannot connect to a central base station?" again, this is the same identity problem, where the integrity and quality of "legitimacy" of a node's identity is an artifact of the consensus of the mesh it connects to. Now, these cases don't need proof of work, but they absolutely rely on consensus, and not a database. Their criticisms of blockchains imply a misunderstanding of a core aspect of security, which is that a proof in a closed loop system cannot be shown to be externally consistent with another instance of itself without some encompassing closed loop system both instances are a part of. A generic consensus protocol (like a blockchain) enables the federation of these consistency proofs. This particular blockchain may not be the best possbile one - but I'd argue back that a cryptographic substrate that facilitates consensus and federation for distributed computing is as significant an invention as the internet. There is another piece where it's finally clicking that "security" isn't so much an engineering problem as it is a critical theory of technology based on different ideologies that favour autonomy or governmance respectively, and like a critical theory, it can be used to both befog and obfuscate - or prove - whatever you like in it. On currencies, to borrow an adage, if you don't know what problem cryptocurrencies are solving, the problem may be you. That's unnecessarily provocative, but the real problems it solves are those around peer-to-peer transactions and dynamic federation - all the stuff the internet used to promise until it succumbed to the very criticisms Schneier is making of blockchains, particularly emergent centralization and scams. I have tremendous respect for both of them, but Schneier and Green are both making appeals for governance to people who don't want it, and I think they are lending their engineering cred to a general global governance narrative that I'm not sure they appreciate the motives of.

anonymoushermit 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mrkramer 4y ago

Blockchain solves the problem of trust; you don't have to trust centralized entity with your transactions because with the Bitcoin's blockchain implementation there is consensus among nodes on the chronology and the nature of transactions plus all transactions are open to public aka transparent.

baby 4y ago

> To me, the problem isn’t that internet can be made slightly less awful than it is today. The problem is that it doesn’t do anything its proponents claim it does. In some very important ways, the internet is not secure. It doesn’t replace the post office with ethernet cables; in fact, in many ways it is far less trustworthy than the postal service. It's not decentralized, and its inevitable centralization is harmful because it’s largely emergent and ill-defined. It still has trusted intermediaries, often with more power and less oversight than the post office. Internet still requires governance. It still requires regulation. (These things are what I wrote about here.) The problem with internet is that it’s not an improvement to any system—and often makes things worse. > In our letter, we write: “By its very design, the internet is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as e-commerce and information-at-your-fingertips to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use. Despite more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated services and are not an improvement on the existing mailing system.”

baby 4y ago

I really don't understand these arguments. "Blockchain" is a collection of technology but at its heart it's about byzantine-fault tolerant consensus and distributed protocols. I explain this here (https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me-what-the-heck-is-blockchain-its-simple-really/ https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me...) but if you're looking at it from the outside, you should see blockchain as 1) a distributed database: it is here to emulate a centralized system, like a central bank! and 2) a distributed database that works even in the presence of malicious actors, so like an international central bank that wants to operate across borders There's nothing more than that, if you want to understand the technology in a financial scenario. If you want to understand how this kind of technology can be useful outside of a financial scenario, think about the web PKI (which I wrote about here https://cryptologie.net/article/561/the-web-pki-20/ https://cryptologie.net/article/561/the-web-pki-20/) or protocols like certificate transparency and binary transparency, and how they could provide resistance against attacks (instead of detection of attacks) if they used a BFT consensus protocol.

status200 4y ago

I wouldn't really count on Bruce to have the complete picture, he is obviously biased. He has some valid points but completely misses the mark because he doesn't understand the technology or its purpose. Having an immutable ledger would be very useful for things that should be public and transparent (e.g. where tax dollars are actually being spent, eliminating middlemen, etc.), but the structure right now is in its infancy and has its doors open to the same bad actors that have ruined the traditional financial systems. At least blockchains are working to prevent collusion, whereas Bruce would rather whine to Congress and throw the baby out with the bathwater, either from ignorance, bitterness, or some combination of the two. Instead of fighting against the technology, he should advocate for public servants to be incorporated into a system that actually lets any casual citizen audit their input to the system as a whole, with confidence that all of the data is accurate and cannot be manipulated.

dqpb 4y ago

> I and others wrote a letter to Congress, basically saying that cryptocurrencies are an complete and total disaster, and urging them to regulate the space. This guy wants the US government to regulate what data structures, algorithms, and protocols you’re allowed to use in your software. Sorry, but I don’t think anyone really wants the US congress and a baby boomer with a blog to be the ceiling of technology progress.

dee8717 4y ago

Blockchains are useful when two parties needs a third party to trust. Blockchain eliminate the third party. yes, there might not be a robust solutions today but its pretty robust problem to solve.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

One often overlooked application of crypto is that it may be attracting a large proportion of scammers and those easily scammed, thereby pulling a whole bunch of scam activity out of the regular financial system and into the crypto space. If we can get all the fraud onto the blockchain, I'd call that a win.