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Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto projects. Nothing that makes headlines is ever good, and it's clear that's where most of the op

Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto projects. Nothing that makes headlines is ever good, and it's clear that's where most of the opinions of it on here are sourced from. You're doing yourself a definite disservice by not investing a smidgeon of your time. You are looking at a garden and remarking about the rotten veggies on the soil floor.

pornel 4y ago
You should also spend a week getting into homeopathy and a week writing horoscopes.
- keeganpoppen 4y ago
  maybe you should-- i am an unrelentingly rational man, but i can't deny that of all the horoscope "archetypes", or whatever you want to call them (i'm by no means an expert or even an enthusiast), Virgo is by far the best description of my personality, and just so happens to be my astrological sign (I guess... like i said, i find the whole thing rather silly). as a crypto skeptic, i did go through the exercise of learning about the space in various respects (Solidity + mostly niche, more cool, less-crypto-bro-y things like zero-knowledge proofs), and i actually must confess that i had a lot of fun, and was left with the feeling that there are certain classes of thing that the crypto mindset actually is valuable, or, at the very least, interesting. for example: if you were to ask me "would you rather deal with the shitshow of oath, or use crypto-y / solidity-ish primitives for dealing with authentication/authorization?".... i have to admit that there are some blissful aspects to the crypto view of the world. which makes sense: it was literally built to "solve" some of these problems. [written as someone who remains a "crypto-skeptic", whatever that means at this point]
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Same with me and Capricorn, it's weird actually.
  - aiwv 4y ago
    Yeah, it's sort of funny how much scorn people heap on astrology. I am not trying to convince anyone to take astrology seriously, but I think it's foolish to condescend to those who take an interest in it. The archetypes that astrology describes are undeniably true if you bother to read them and think about how you, yourself, and others relate to them. As a tool for forecasting what's going to happen tomorrow, it's of very dubious value. But if one thinks across longer time scales, if you are manifesting certain types of archetypal energies, and we all are, there are certain types of events: conflicts, romance, etc. that are very likely to happen and others that are quite unlikely to happen. On a meta level, it's also interesting simply because so many people find that they strongly relate to their chart, even when they really do not want to believe that their time of birth has any meaning at all. You don't have to believe that there is actually some physical influence of the position of the stars to be curious about why it has that effect. Is it just one of the greatest magic tricks of all time? If so, it might be interesting to understand how that works from a human psychological perspective.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - bawolff 4y ago
    Did you do that test double blind? The skeptical position on astrology is typically that the archtypes are so vauge that they apply to everyone equally, and people tend to discard any parts that don't fit. Saying that the archetype applies to you isn't countering the skepticism. On the contrary that is precisely the outcome that someone who think astrology is bullshit would expect.
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  I kind of agree? Granted, many people have already done this over the decades and we have set answers on the validity of these methods.
ausbah 4y ago
why is it up to me to "learn the rea crypto"? the best things coming out the space should be enough to speak about the quality of the domain
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BenjiWiebe 4y ago
I've spent far more than a week studying crypto and I've actually went from thinking it's a great thing to realizing it has too many limitations to be web3, the future of finance, etc.
- momo_O 4y ago
  Could you list some limitations? And are you using the blockchain co-opted “web3” here, or the general “web3”?
davey48016 4y ago
Any suggestions on projects to look at?
- slickrick216 4y ago
  Chainlink. Ignore the community. Look at the work of those involved and the things they are building.
  - nl 4y ago
    Chainlink only makes sense in a blockchain-centric world. If you get rid of blockchain then you don't need chainlink....
- rvz 4y ago
  Skiff Drive and Skiff Mail [0] and their use of ENS [1] and other naming systems is interesting. Endaoment is also another useful web3 project. [2] [0] https://skiff.com/ https://skiff.com/ [1] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [2] https://endaoment.org/ https://endaoment.org/
  - omnimus 4y ago
    Skiff is exactly the type of service that uses crypto and chains for no reason. Its essentially gmail/docs alternative that e2e encrypts the content and saves them on their servers. Services like protonmail have been working like that forever. I am not saying its not a good product just that it doesnt require blockchain at all. They slap it on there to use it and get hype but thats all.
- ryan29 4y ago
  You could look at Chia. I don't think the base project with the typical token scheme is worth anything, but the way it uses disk space for mining is kind of neat. The general idea is that you precompute a bunch of proofs and store them on disk. Challenges are issued and if you have a matching proof, you can claim the token for that challenge. The part that I find interesting isn't the tokens. It's the concept that an algorithm can prove you've committed some disk space to the network. The reason I find it interesting is because, for small amounts of disk space, the incremental cost of participation is $0. If I plot proofs on unused disk space and only try to match proofs when my computer is on anyway, it basically costs me nothing. Compare that to someone trying to farm (aka mine) on an industrial scale and they have a real, non-zero cost starting with the first byte of storage they buy. I find it interesting because it's different than normal economies of scale where a large operator eventually outperforms all the small operators (economically). Unmatched, but valid proofs, are a byproduct of mining the tokens and those are what proves you have some idle capacity. Since normal PC owners pretty much have to buy excess capacity for something like a hard disk, participating in a system like that doesn't have much downside. It's that byproduct that I think is interesting. I'm not sure if there are any pragmatic use cases, since the 500GB of free space a normal user has might not exceed the value of pretending to be a real person, but being able to say "I have $50 of idle capacity and I can prove it" could be a novel way to combat large scale networks of bots and bad actors.
School-Cotton 4y ago
This comment has the same energy as “research flat earth”.
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  Reddit-tier comment. Ad hominem. Ignoring.
acdha 4y ago
> Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto projects. Most of us have looked at this space extensively over the last decade plus. Can you offer pointers to the things you think are delivering real benefits to anyone whose primary goal isn't finding buyers for random hashes? I add that last qualifier because literally every time this question comes up the only things people seem to come up with which aren't outright scams are projects which only make sense if you've already decided that everything you work with should be on a blockchain and you need to deal with the ensuing problems. I'm looking for things where someone who works at a normal non-crypto business — say a coffee shop or a company which makes toasters — could go to their boss and say “If we spend money setting up X we'd save $Y over what we're doing now or gain $Z from new sales”. The closest people come are things like supply chain verification, which is certainly useful but nobody can explain why that idea only works if you pay the extra blockchain overhead relative to just using basic digital signatures from the human you're already trusting to do a particular task. Also as a starting premise, remember that most of us are quite familiar with things which aren't great now. The idea of getting rid of PayPal or not having people login using Facebook/Google sounds great to a lot of us, but that needs to be predicated on system which would actually get normal people to switch by being cheaper, safer, etc. Appeals to ideological purity don't tend to get traction when the “Login with Facebook” button is right there.
- pie_flavor 4y ago
  The Internet Computer[0] hosts whatever kind of service you can cram in a smart contract form-factor. In exchange for having to deal with things like oracles to retrieve information from the outside world, it costs absolute peanuts[1]. I tend to use it whenever I want to PoC a web app because it's usually lower-friction than a VM. Unfortunately there aren't that many things to show as an example that aren't just NFT silliness, but one big one is OpenChat[2], which also shows off the basically zero-friction single-sign-on[3] that can't be tracked across services. Will it pan out? I have no earthly idea. But it's cool enough to try. [0]: https://internetcomputer.org https://internetcomputer.org [1]: https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/deploy/computation-and-storage-costs https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/dep... [2]: https://oc.app https://oc.app [3]: https://identity.ic0.app https://identity.ic0.app (unfortunately obligatory: I am not a bot. please do not downvote singularly because of linking to a blockchain service, in response to a question about them.)
bawolff 4y ago
People always say things like this, but i never see the interesting projects. Yes some are not as batshit insane as the ones that make the news for being crazy, but none of them seem "good" either. It feels a bit like an unfalsifiable premise. You should do your own research until you find one that is good. If you haven't found a good one yet, you just haven't researched hard enough, so keep going.
- tornato7 4y ago
  What do you think of Uniswap?
  - bawolff 4y ago
    My understanding is that its basically a decentralized crypto exchange. I'm not sure what's to really get excited about. It does solve a problem which makes it miles better than most crypto things. Nonetheless its basically solving a problem that only exists due to crypto currency stuff in the first place. So it doesn't really get me excited about the promise of "web3".
mcluck 4y ago
I cannot tell you how many people have said the exact same thing as you and when pressed to show what is exciting to them, all that comes out is yet another financial motivated, inward looking solution searching for a problem. I've done some serious searching. There is absolutely nothing exciting in this space for people who aren't already bought in to it. It's like a cult

pornel 4y ago

You should also spend a week getting into homeopathy and a week writing horoscopes.

keeganpoppen 4y ago
maybe you should-- i am an unrelentingly rational man, but i can't deny that of all the horoscope "archetypes", or whatever you want to call them (i'm by no means an expert or even an enthusiast), Virgo is by far the best description of my personality, and just so happens to be my astrological sign (I guess... like i said, i find the whole thing rather silly). as a crypto skeptic, i did go through the exercise of learning about the space in various respects (Solidity + mostly niche, more cool, less-crypto-bro-y things like zero-knowledge proofs), and i actually must confess that i had a lot of fun, and was left with the feeling that there are certain classes of thing that the crypto mindset actually is valuable, or, at the very least, interesting. for example: if you were to ask me "would you rather deal with the shitshow of oath, or use crypto-y / solidity-ish primitives for dealing with authentication/authorization?".... i have to admit that there are some blissful aspects to the crypto view of the world. which makes sense: it was literally built to "solve" some of these problems. [written as someone who remains a "crypto-skeptic", whatever that means at this point]
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Same with me and Capricorn, it's weird actually.
- aiwv 4y ago
  Yeah, it's sort of funny how much scorn people heap on astrology. I am not trying to convince anyone to take astrology seriously, but I think it's foolish to condescend to those who take an interest in it. The archetypes that astrology describes are undeniably true if you bother to read them and think about how you, yourself, and others relate to them. As a tool for forecasting what's going to happen tomorrow, it's of very dubious value. But if one thinks across longer time scales, if you are manifesting certain types of archetypal energies, and we all are, there are certain types of events: conflicts, romance, etc. that are very likely to happen and others that are quite unlikely to happen. On a meta level, it's also interesting simply because so many people find that they strongly relate to their chart, even when they really do not want to believe that their time of birth has any meaning at all. You don't have to believe that there is actually some physical influence of the position of the stars to be curious about why it has that effect. Is it just one of the greatest magic tricks of all time? If so, it might be interesting to understand how that works from a human psychological perspective.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bawolff 4y ago
  Did you do that test double blind? The skeptical position on astrology is typically that the archtypes are so vauge that they apply to everyone equally, and people tend to discard any parts that don't fit. Saying that the archetype applies to you isn't countering the skepticism. On the contrary that is precisely the outcome that someone who think astrology is bullshit would expect.
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
I kind of agree? Granted, many people have already done this over the decades and we have set answers on the validity of these methods.

ausbah 4y ago

why is it up to me to "learn the rea crypto"? the best things coming out the space should be enough to speak about the quality of the domain

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

BenjiWiebe 4y ago

I've spent far more than a week studying crypto and I've actually went from thinking it's a great thing to realizing it has too many limitations to be web3, the future of finance, etc.

momo_O 4y ago
Could you list some limitations? And are you using the blockchain co-opted “web3” here, or the general “web3”?

davey48016 4y ago

Any suggestions on projects to look at?

slickrick216 4y ago
Chainlink. Ignore the community. Look at the work of those involved and the things they are building.
- nl 4y ago
  Chainlink only makes sense in a blockchain-centric world. If you get rid of blockchain then you don't need chainlink....
rvz 4y ago
Skiff Drive and Skiff Mail [0] and their use of ENS [1] and other naming systems is interesting. Endaoment is also another useful web3 project. [2] [0] https://skiff.com/ https://skiff.com/ [1] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [2] https://endaoment.org/ https://endaoment.org/
- omnimus 4y ago
  Skiff is exactly the type of service that uses crypto and chains for no reason. Its essentially gmail/docs alternative that e2e encrypts the content and saves them on their servers. Services like protonmail have been working like that forever. I am not saying its not a good product just that it doesnt require blockchain at all. They slap it on there to use it and get hype but thats all.
ryan29 4y ago
You could look at Chia. I don't think the base project with the typical token scheme is worth anything, but the way it uses disk space for mining is kind of neat. The general idea is that you precompute a bunch of proofs and store them on disk. Challenges are issued and if you have a matching proof, you can claim the token for that challenge. The part that I find interesting isn't the tokens. It's the concept that an algorithm can prove you've committed some disk space to the network. The reason I find it interesting is because, for small amounts of disk space, the incremental cost of participation is $0. If I plot proofs on unused disk space and only try to match proofs when my computer is on anyway, it basically costs me nothing. Compare that to someone trying to farm (aka mine) on an industrial scale and they have a real, non-zero cost starting with the first byte of storage they buy. I find it interesting because it's different than normal economies of scale where a large operator eventually outperforms all the small operators (economically). Unmatched, but valid proofs, are a byproduct of mining the tokens and those are what proves you have some idle capacity. Since normal PC owners pretty much have to buy excess capacity for something like a hard disk, participating in a system like that doesn't have much downside. It's that byproduct that I think is interesting. I'm not sure if there are any pragmatic use cases, since the 500GB of free space a normal user has might not exceed the value of pretending to be a real person, but being able to say "I have $50 of idle capacity and I can prove it" could be a novel way to combat large scale networks of bots and bad actors.

School-Cotton 4y ago

This comment has the same energy as “research flat earth”.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago
Reddit-tier comment. Ad hominem. Ignoring.

acdha 4y ago

> Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto projects. Most of us have looked at this space extensively over the last decade plus. Can you offer pointers to the things you think are delivering real benefits to anyone whose primary goal isn't finding buyers for random hashes? I add that last qualifier because literally every time this question comes up the only things people seem to come up with which aren't outright scams are projects which only make sense if you've already decided that everything you work with should be on a blockchain and you need to deal with the ensuing problems. I'm looking for things where someone who works at a normal non-crypto business — say a coffee shop or a company which makes toasters — could go to their boss and say “If we spend money setting up X we'd save $Y over what we're doing now or gain $Z from new sales”. The closest people come are things like supply chain verification, which is certainly useful but nobody can explain why that idea only works if you pay the extra blockchain overhead relative to just using basic digital signatures from the human you're already trusting to do a particular task. Also as a starting premise, remember that most of us are quite familiar with things which aren't great now. The idea of getting rid of PayPal or not having people login using Facebook/Google sounds great to a lot of us, but that needs to be predicated on system which would actually get normal people to switch by being cheaper, safer, etc. Appeals to ideological purity don't tend to get traction when the “Login with Facebook” button is right there.

pie_flavor 4y ago
The Internet Computer[0] hosts whatever kind of service you can cram in a smart contract form-factor. In exchange for having to deal with things like oracles to retrieve information from the outside world, it costs absolute peanuts[1]. I tend to use it whenever I want to PoC a web app because it's usually lower-friction than a VM. Unfortunately there aren't that many things to show as an example that aren't just NFT silliness, but one big one is OpenChat[2], which also shows off the basically zero-friction single-sign-on[3] that can't be tracked across services. Will it pan out? I have no earthly idea. But it's cool enough to try. [0]: https://internetcomputer.org https://internetcomputer.org [1]: https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/deploy/computation-and-storage-costs https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/dep... [2]: https://oc.app https://oc.app [3]: https://identity.ic0.app https://identity.ic0.app (unfortunately obligatory: I am not a bot. please do not downvote singularly because of linking to a blockchain service, in response to a question about them.)

bawolff 4y ago

People always say things like this, but i never see the interesting projects. Yes some are not as batshit insane as the ones that make the news for being crazy, but none of them seem "good" either. It feels a bit like an unfalsifiable premise. You should do your own research until you find one that is good. If you haven't found a good one yet, you just haven't researched hard enough, so keep going.

tornato7 4y ago
What do you think of Uniswap?
- bawolff 4y ago
  My understanding is that its basically a decentralized crypto exchange. I'm not sure what's to really get excited about. It does solve a problem which makes it miles better than most crypto things. Nonetheless its basically solving a problem that only exists due to crypto currency stuff in the first place. So it doesn't really get me excited about the promise of "web3".

mcluck 4y ago

I cannot tell you how many people have said the exact same thing as you and when pressed to show what is exciting to them, all that comes out is yet another financial motivated, inward looking solution searching for a problem. I've done some serious searching. There is absolutely nothing exciting in this space for people who aren't already bought in to it. It's like a cult