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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 li

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.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      BLS signature aggregation was finalized as an IETF standard in 2019. It's the reason Ethereum can support over a million staking nodes. BLS was invented back in 2001, but was expensive to verify. A paper published in 2018 showed how to verify n aggregated signatures on the same message m with just 2 pairings instead of n+1. https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-bls/2105 https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-...
- nwiswell 4y ago
  You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts; proof of stake is not 12 years old (Sunny King and Scott Nadal, 2012), and certainly there have been a lot of other hard problems solved since then. There's a lot of other stuff beyond Ethereum, too. Privacy coins in particular look very little like what was envisioned in Satoshi's paper. Whether that's all worth anything from an economic perspective, I'm not sure (and even less sure whether it's worth what it's valued), but crypto is legitimately a bunch of very clever technological solutions to hard problems, invented by actual hackers, so I'm a little sad to see people minimizing it on Hacker News. Especially since this particular innovation is ameliorating the whole global warming problem, which is the prime criticism leveled at crypto. Take that away, and isn't it just open source software that we're talking about here?
  - josh2600 4y ago
    This is the thing I don't get about HN. Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch. Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent. Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives. Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.
    - desindol 4y ago
      It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of people on this planet. I was as excited as everyone was in 2012 but that plateu is just going on and on.
      - birracerveza 4y ago
        Since 2012 the situation has changed quite a bit. Adoption has increased massively. It's just doing it so slowly you aren't noticing it's happening. Not to mention the adoption possibly going on behind the scenes.
- TimJRobinson 4y ago
  Maybe if you turned your mind off 12 years ago. Fast Zero knowledge proofs only left the research labs a handful of years ago and are now being used to power layer 2s that deliver 10 - 1000x scalability improvements. DeFi is barely 2 years old. The consensus and scaling mechanisms being rolled out were only just created in the last few years (that's why Ethereum PoS took so long, thery were still making changes to the design as new research came out).
llanowarelves 4y ago
There's a lot of slang and jargon (metaphors, some good, some silly), to the point where most crypto projects are scams, hiding what's going on (many DeFi projects built on Ethereum). And this is my opinion as someone who loves the value proposition of what cryptocurrency was supposed to be (see first line of Satoshi whitepaper), and care more about seeing the technology gain mindshare than hype cycles and price movement.
- Tenoke 4y ago
  What technical projects have no impenetrable to outsiders terms at first glance? Try to read information on React, Django, Tensorflow or whatever software project you like from the PoV of an outsider and tell me you won't find plenty of jargon, metaphors etc.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    You're not wrong. But those also aren't ponzi schemes offering 1000's of % APY based on convoluted multi-token staking schemes, minting, etc. that directly interact with money (as tokens) you send it, potentially breaking SEC rules because of what it means to be a money transmitter (low bar). (Overall I'm talking about a bunch of tokens/dapps on Ethereum, not Ethereum itself, BTW.).
    - mratsim 4y ago
      You also have MLM and Ponzis with cash, stocks (pump and dumps), diamonds, art, fine wine, gold and jewellery. Anything of values get its share of fakes, even dev shops.
- AgentME 4y ago
  A randomly chosen crypto project (including ones that use Ethereum) will probably be mostly nonsense, but Ethereum itself is a serious project with interesting deep engineering.
preseinger 4y ago
I can assert with absolute authority that the tech behind crypto is inarguably "babble". There is no "there" there.
- jdileo 4y ago
  Are you referencing the myriad of scam projects/tokens or ecosystem as a whole, including blockchain?
  - preseinger 4y ago
    The latter. Or both: there isn't really a distinction between blockchain and scams. On the merits, blockchains are inarguably a regression on the status quo; philosophically, they solve problems that don't exist in reality. (Censorship is a non-issue.) They exist for one reason only: to provide a faster vehicle for money seeking return. Prior to blockchains, a 100M fund would have to wait ca. 10 years for a ROI; now, due to lack of regulation and etc. etc., you can get a return in 12 to 18 months. That's it. That's all there is.

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.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    BLS signature aggregation was finalized as an IETF standard in 2019. It's the reason Ethereum can support over a million staking nodes. BLS was invented back in 2001, but was expensive to verify. A paper published in 2018 showed how to verify n aggregated signatures on the same message m with just 2 pairings instead of n+1. https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-bls/2105 https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-...
nwiswell 4y ago
You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts; proof of stake is not 12 years old (Sunny King and Scott Nadal, 2012), and certainly there have been a lot of other hard problems solved since then. There's a lot of other stuff beyond Ethereum, too. Privacy coins in particular look very little like what was envisioned in Satoshi's paper. Whether that's all worth anything from an economic perspective, I'm not sure (and even less sure whether it's worth what it's valued), but crypto is legitimately a bunch of very clever technological solutions to hard problems, invented by actual hackers, so I'm a little sad to see people minimizing it on Hacker News. Especially since this particular innovation is ameliorating the whole global warming problem, which is the prime criticism leveled at crypto. Take that away, and isn't it just open source software that we're talking about here?
- josh2600 4y ago
  This is the thing I don't get about HN. Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch. Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent. Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives. Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.
  - desindol 4y ago
    It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of people on this planet. I was as excited as everyone was in 2012 but that plateu is just going on and on.
    - birracerveza 4y ago
      Since 2012 the situation has changed quite a bit. Adoption has increased massively. It's just doing it so slowly you aren't noticing it's happening. Not to mention the adoption possibly going on behind the scenes.
TimJRobinson 4y ago
Maybe if you turned your mind off 12 years ago. Fast Zero knowledge proofs only left the research labs a handful of years ago and are now being used to power layer 2s that deliver 10 - 1000x scalability improvements. DeFi is barely 2 years old. The consensus and scaling mechanisms being rolled out were only just created in the last few years (that's why Ethereum PoS took so long, thery were still making changes to the design as new research came out).

llanowarelves 4y ago

There's a lot of slang and jargon (metaphors, some good, some silly), to the point where most crypto projects are scams, hiding what's going on (many DeFi projects built on Ethereum). And this is my opinion as someone who loves the value proposition of what cryptocurrency was supposed to be (see first line of Satoshi whitepaper), and care more about seeing the technology gain mindshare than hype cycles and price movement.

Tenoke 4y ago
What technical projects have no impenetrable to outsiders terms at first glance? Try to read information on React, Django, Tensorflow or whatever software project you like from the PoV of an outsider and tell me you won't find plenty of jargon, metaphors etc.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  You're not wrong. But those also aren't ponzi schemes offering 1000's of % APY based on convoluted multi-token staking schemes, minting, etc. that directly interact with money (as tokens) you send it, potentially breaking SEC rules because of what it means to be a money transmitter (low bar). (Overall I'm talking about a bunch of tokens/dapps on Ethereum, not Ethereum itself, BTW.).
  - mratsim 4y ago
    You also have MLM and Ponzis with cash, stocks (pump and dumps), diamonds, art, fine wine, gold and jewellery. Anything of values get its share of fakes, even dev shops.
AgentME 4y ago
A randomly chosen crypto project (including ones that use Ethereum) will probably be mostly nonsense, but Ethereum itself is a serious project with interesting deep engineering.

preseinger 4y ago

I can assert with absolute authority that the tech behind crypto is inarguably "babble". There is no "there" there.

jdileo 4y ago
Are you referencing the myriad of scam projects/tokens or ecosystem as a whole, including blockchain?
- preseinger 4y ago
  The latter. Or both: there isn't really a distinction between blockchain and scams. On the merits, blockchains are inarguably a regression on the status quo; philosophically, they solve problems that don't exist in reality. (Censorship is a non-issue.) They exist for one reason only: to provide a faster vehicle for money seeking return. Prior to blockchains, a 100M fund would have to wait ca. 10 years for a ROI; now, due to lack of regulation and etc. etc., you can get a return in 12 to 18 months. That's it. That's all there is.