17 ms·

I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders. When reading up on it, there is no meani

I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders. When reading up on it, there is no meaning to find besides "yep, its a linked list allright".

lmarcos 4y ago
I thought the same at the beginning. Yet somehow I think I'm missing something a bit more complex (complicated?) than just "linked lists". I don't want to understand only the theory but also the "practice" (e.g., one could read all about distributed systems... But one really gets the gist of it until one has to deal with real world networks in the cloud or on prem, dealing with real systems)
- mightyRodri 4y ago
  Have you seen the "Line goes up" summary by Dan Olson? It puts the crypto sphere into context. From that many descisions and marketing practices start to make sense.
  - fastball 4y ago
    Crypto being full of grifters does not mean that the actual developers in the space are using "technobabble" in order to sound smarter without actually introducing new concepts. Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly applicable to computer science in general, e.g. with all the work being done on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. And those innovations require new words because they are new concepts. I think it should be somewhat obvious to anyone that has actually looked at the space that devs are not just re-naming existing ideas.
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      > Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly applicable to computer science in general Most of it is just companies putting blockchains everywhere because VCs give them money in that case. Nothing scientific about that.
      - fastball 4y ago
        Again, the two things are not mutually exclusive. Most people/orgs can be applying blockchain tech in ways that are not actually useful (or are actively harmful), but that doesn't mean there aren't people in that same space doing novel work that requires new terms in order to communicate with other experts/researchers/developers efficiently and effectively.
  - AgentME 4y ago
    In that video he searches for the griftiest projects and treats them as defining the whole technology. Suggesting it as an answer here is like responding to a question about how eBay is engineered and showing off the scammiest eBay auction pages you can find by searching for the lowest-rated users.
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago
      I actually thought Line Goes Up was pretty well informed and well-presented. It's definitely one-sided, but I think there were only a couple of statements that I found questionable. I work in the crypto industry, and definitely agree there's a ton of innovation in the space, but the innovations lie at an incredibly technical intersection of cryptography, game theory, and distributed networks. Get marketing, sales, and investment capital involved in the mix (which almost every project has), and you have a bundle of products being thrust in front of the public which they can't rigorously evaluate, and because everything is directly incentivized, tons of scammers, grifters, liars, and fraudsters. When my non-technical friends ask me about crypto, I'm happy to tell them some of the things I think are really cool about it. But I don't recommend buying anything based on my perspective; it's basically gambling (even if you're well-informed)
    - jekrb 4y ago
      Well yeah this is how he gets paid. It's not about being informative about a class of technology, its about generating clicks to get more patreon subscriptions and youtube ad payments.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Try to imagine you are building a new banking system, and you want it to be secure. How would you A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number and B) ensure that, even if those payments were secure, there was no other cheating, such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million? Generally speaking the way to handle those requirements is by employing cryptographic signatures and public blockchain(s), and the result is usually referred to as a cryptocurrency.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    There's also chaum's e-cash
    - AgentME 4y ago
      It relied on a central authority to work, and that's very related to why it no longer works.
      - wruza 4y ago
        David Chaum opined then “As the Web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash Not sure how this opinion relates to failure, but just in case, things only got worse since.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    > A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number We have a whole bunch of these systems, like Open Banking payments in the UK, Pix in Brazil, and to a lesser extent stuff like Apple/Amazon pay and other payment proxies which don't require you to expose account numbers to merchants. Physical credit-card transactions work this way too, as the chips have built-in cryptographic processors. > such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million? This is not a problem people really have. Having a limited quantity of your means of exchange is not a desirable quality in a currency.
ramraj07 4y ago
The mark of ignorance is to dismiss things you “think” are beneath you before any real consideration. In my opinion too, the crypto crowd is typically one I like to avoid. But to dismiss the tech behind it as babble is sad.
- desindol 4y ago
  It’s 12 year old tech that gets propped up as innovative every 2 months. I can understand his sentiment.
  - fastball 4y ago
    A. 12 years old is relatively new for tech / computer science. There aren't that many novel / widely adopted computer science ideas introduced each year. B. This "merge" in particular utilizes innovations in computer science that were non-existent 12 years ago when the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published. C. There continues to be loads of cutting edge CS research that is broadly applicable to the entire industry but is being spear-headed by blockchain development, for example work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
    - retcore 4y ago
      Proof of stake is a application not computer science. What fundamental new knowledge into computing are you thinking about attributing?
      - fastball 4y ago
        PoS is an application of what?
        sterlind 4y ago
        to be really pedantic, I'd say PoS is an economic breakthrough rather than heavy-duty computer science, strictly speaking. the actual math of the consensus algorithms seems relatively simple, the challenge is aligning all the incentives so that adversaries in a group of anonymous people have nothing to gain by subverting the rules. I will gladly give a Turing award to whoever formally proves the safety and liveness of Gasper like Lamport did for Paxos.
capableweb 4y ago
I could say the same thing about reading fields I don't generally understand, and it can seem like "technobabble" because I don't understand the meaning of words they are using, since some things are written with a certain audience in mind that possesses the knowledge to understand the content, like many academic papers. However, I don't regularly dismiss fields like that, but rather I understand that not everything is meant for me to understand without a deeper meaning. Not sure why anyone would treat the (technical) ecosystem of cryptocurrencies differently. Seems like a non-curious way of acting. Just like I realize the problems pornography introduces to the world, but reading and speaking with engineers working at those companies are still a fruitful endeavour for me.
- retcore 4y ago
  Genuine research states claims for the methods and discovery, making it often quite easy to work backwards from the conclusions to the theory. No such logic seems to exist in the crypto culture.
  - 0xrips 4y ago
    - paulgb 4y ago
      Here’s an example of a well-hyped, well-funded crypto startup being loose with words that have well-understood technical meaning outside of crypto. > The "Helium 5G" network is instead a 4G LTE CBRS network, which right now has significant advantages over 5G but doesn't have the "5G" moniker Helium and its partners wanted for marketing. So it's just calling it 5G because, apparently, anyone can use any word to mean anything. https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-hot-air https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-ho... Helium was, until recently, one of the companies bound to come up if you asked around for real-world use cases of crypto.
      - ForHackernews 4y ago
pbak 4y ago
Yeah, Fully distributed consistency algorithms running on N nodes on linked list in which each node is a Turing-machine program run concurrently on N nodes, whose consistency shall also be insured, and which can write on said linked-list. Everything has absolutely tons of edge-cases related to the distributed nature of the thing to take care of. Of course, I haven't even begun anything about the whole "crypto" part, and minimizing power usage. Absolutely no meaning besides "linked lists", riiiight...
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
bonk
spaceman_2020 4y ago
smart contracts offer legitimate efficiency gains over some traditional models Even something like a Dex can be far superior to traditional order book exchange models in some cases
bowsamic 4y ago
It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges
- LtWorf 4y ago
  The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic value". There is no computer science innovation there. Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it made no sense. And it all went downhill from there.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    No, the goal wasn't to create economic value. The goal was to make it prohibitively expensive to recreate the chain and thus fool someone else. Satoshi did not say that the purpose of PoW was to "create economic value".
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      And a digital signature couldn't be used because?
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        A digital signature alone cannot prevent double spending
        LtWorf 4y ago
        No, going back in the list of transactions can.
        bowsamic 4y ago
somenameforme 4y ago
The internet is fundamentally little more than the ability to send 1s and 0s from point A to point B. So you mean like me calling you and saying 0 1 0? Well, yeah kind of, but faster! And we can even have conference calls! It's going to change the entire world! Yeah, ok... Well, I'm going to leave now. Wait, sorry... I mean I'm going to '0 1 1 0' now. Wow, I can feel the world shifting already. The applications of a technology often are far greater than the most simplified fundamental upon which it is built.

lmarcos 4y ago

I thought the same at the beginning. Yet somehow I think I'm missing something a bit more complex (complicated?) than just "linked lists". I don't want to understand only the theory but also the "practice" (e.g., one could read all about distributed systems... But one really gets the gist of it until one has to deal with real world networks in the cloud or on prem, dealing with real systems)

mightyRodri 4y ago
Have you seen the "Line goes up" summary by Dan Olson? It puts the crypto sphere into context. From that many descisions and marketing practices start to make sense.
- fastball 4y ago
  Crypto being full of grifters does not mean that the actual developers in the space are using "technobabble" in order to sound smarter without actually introducing new concepts. Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly applicable to computer science in general, e.g. with all the work being done on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. And those innovations require new words because they are new concepts. I think it should be somewhat obvious to anyone that has actually looked at the space that devs are not just re-naming existing ideas.
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    > Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly applicable to computer science in general Most of it is just companies putting blockchains everywhere because VCs give them money in that case. Nothing scientific about that.
    - fastball 4y ago
      Again, the two things are not mutually exclusive. Most people/orgs can be applying blockchain tech in ways that are not actually useful (or are actively harmful), but that doesn't mean there aren't people in that same space doing novel work that requires new terms in order to communicate with other experts/researchers/developers efficiently and effectively.
- AgentME 4y ago
  In that video he searches for the griftiest projects and treats them as defining the whole technology. Suggesting it as an answer here is like responding to a question about how eBay is engineered and showing off the scammiest eBay auction pages you can find by searching for the lowest-rated users.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I actually thought Line Goes Up was pretty well informed and well-presented. It's definitely one-sided, but I think there were only a couple of statements that I found questionable. I work in the crypto industry, and definitely agree there's a ton of innovation in the space, but the innovations lie at an incredibly technical intersection of cryptography, game theory, and distributed networks. Get marketing, sales, and investment capital involved in the mix (which almost every project has), and you have a bundle of products being thrust in front of the public which they can't rigorously evaluate, and because everything is directly incentivized, tons of scammers, grifters, liars, and fraudsters. When my non-technical friends ask me about crypto, I'm happy to tell them some of the things I think are really cool about it. But I don't recommend buying anything based on my perspective; it's basically gambling (even if you're well-informed)
  - jekrb 4y ago
    Well yeah this is how he gets paid. It's not about being informative about a class of technology, its about generating clicks to get more patreon subscriptions and youtube ad payments.
ilaksh 4y ago
Try to imagine you are building a new banking system, and you want it to be secure. How would you A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number and B) ensure that, even if those payments were secure, there was no other cheating, such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million? Generally speaking the way to handle those requirements is by employing cryptographic signatures and public blockchain(s), and the result is usually referred to as a cryptocurrency.
- cowtools 4y ago
  There's also chaum's e-cash
  - AgentME 4y ago
    It relied on a central authority to work, and that's very related to why it no longer works.
    - wruza 4y ago
      David Chaum opined then “As the Web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash Not sure how this opinion relates to failure, but just in case, things only got worse since.
- Nursie 4y ago
  > A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number We have a whole bunch of these systems, like Open Banking payments in the UK, Pix in Brazil, and to a lesser extent stuff like Apple/Amazon pay and other payment proxies which don't require you to expose account numbers to merchants. Physical credit-card transactions work this way too, as the chips have built-in cryptographic processors. > such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million? This is not a problem people really have. Having a limited quantity of your means of exchange is not a desirable quality in a currency.

ramraj07 4y ago

The mark of ignorance is to dismiss things you “think” are beneath you before any real consideration. In my opinion too, the crypto crowd is typically one I like to avoid. But to dismiss the tech behind it as babble is sad.

desindol 4y ago
It’s 12 year old tech that gets propped up as innovative every 2 months. I can understand his sentiment.
- fastball 4y ago
  A. 12 years old is relatively new for tech / computer science. There aren't that many novel / widely adopted computer science ideas introduced each year. B. This "merge" in particular utilizes innovations in computer science that were non-existent 12 years ago when the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published. C. There continues to be loads of cutting edge CS research that is broadly applicable to the entire industry but is being spear-headed by blockchain development, for example work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
  - retcore 4y ago
    Proof of stake is a application not computer science. What fundamental new knowledge into computing are you thinking about attributing?
    - fastball 4y ago
      PoS is an application of what?
      - sterlind 4y ago
        to be really pedantic, I'd say PoS is an economic breakthrough rather than heavy-duty computer science, strictly speaking. the actual math of the consensus algorithms seems relatively simple, the challenge is aligning all the incentives so that adversaries in a group of anonymous people have nothing to gain by subverting the rules. I will gladly give a Turing award to whoever formally proves the safety and liveness of Gasper like Lamport did for Paxos.

capableweb 4y ago

I could say the same thing about reading fields I don't generally understand, and it can seem like "technobabble" because I don't understand the meaning of words they are using, since some things are written with a certain audience in mind that possesses the knowledge to understand the content, like many academic papers. However, I don't regularly dismiss fields like that, but rather I understand that not everything is meant for me to understand without a deeper meaning. Not sure why anyone would treat the (technical) ecosystem of cryptocurrencies differently. Seems like a non-curious way of acting. Just like I realize the problems pornography introduces to the world, but reading and speaking with engineers working at those companies are still a fruitful endeavour for me.

retcore 4y ago
Genuine research states claims for the methods and discovery, making it often quite easy to work backwards from the conclusions to the theory. No such logic seems to exist in the crypto culture.
- 0xrips 4y ago
  - paulgb 4y ago
    Here’s an example of a well-hyped, well-funded crypto startup being loose with words that have well-understood technical meaning outside of crypto. > The "Helium 5G" network is instead a 4G LTE CBRS network, which right now has significant advantages over 5G but doesn't have the "5G" moniker Helium and its partners wanted for marketing. So it's just calling it 5G because, apparently, anyone can use any word to mean anything. https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-hot-air https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-ho... Helium was, until recently, one of the companies bound to come up if you asked around for real-world use cases of crypto.
    - ForHackernews 4y ago

pbak 4y ago

Yeah, Fully distributed consistency algorithms running on N nodes on linked list in which each node is a Turing-machine program run concurrently on N nodes, whose consistency shall also be insured, and which can write on said linked-list. Everything has absolutely tons of edge-cases related to the distributed nature of the thing to take care of. Of course, I haven't even begun anything about the whole "crypto" part, and minimizing power usage. Absolutely no meaning besides "linked lists", riiiight...

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

bonk

spaceman_2020 4y ago

smart contracts offer legitimate efficiency gains over some traditional models Even something like a Dex can be far superior to traditional order book exchange models in some cases

bowsamic 4y ago

It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges

LtWorf 4y ago
The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic value". There is no computer science innovation there. Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it made no sense. And it all went downhill from there.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  No, the goal wasn't to create economic value. The goal was to make it prohibitively expensive to recreate the chain and thus fool someone else. Satoshi did not say that the purpose of PoW was to "create economic value".
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    And a digital signature couldn't be used because?
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      A digital signature alone cannot prevent double spending
      - LtWorf 4y ago
        No, going back in the list of transactions can.
        bowsamic 4y ago

somenameforme 4y ago

The internet is fundamentally little more than the ability to send 1s and 0s from point A to point B. So you mean like me calling you and saying 0 1 0? Well, yeah kind of, but faster! And we can even have conference calls! It's going to change the entire world! Yeah, ok... Well, I'm going to leave now. Wait, sorry... I mean I'm going to '0 1 1 0' now. Wow, I can feel the world shifting already. The applications of a technology often are far greater than the most simplified fundamental upon which it is built.