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I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-te

I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.

louwrentius 4y ago
Guess I’m a Luddite as I only see blockchain tech as a solution in search of a problem. I think it’s worse than useless and crime isn’t a valid use case.
- nu11ptr 4y ago
  Separation of money and state is definitely a worthwhile goal in my opinion. Everything else is more questionable.
  - nwah1 4y ago
    The state has a monopoly on the use of force. It can tax, expropriate, conscript, regulate, and otherwise redirect resources however it wants, and it can demand payments in any currency it chooses. The wishful thinking involved in trying to "separate" money and states is absurd. Even under a gold standard, the government can acquire resources from the public at will. The entire goal is nonsense. The root desire there is the urge to not have a government, which is just yet more wishful thinking.
    - deebosong 4y ago
      Not the person you're responding to. But I concur. How will one separate money from state and then protect one's state-separated money without themselves becoming a "state" of sorts, that then is fused to their money? And then everyone becomes their own little island/state, that is fused to their money, and then you forge alliances and become allied island-states, and so on and so forth, until you become a nation of sorts? Like cmon now. Isn't that the inevitable progression? And if so, doesn't that mean these folks who insist upon separating state from money just want to become the ruling class? I dunno. That's just how it always comes across to me.
      - cellis 4y ago
        Centralization is inevitable. - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/centralization-is-inevitable https://subconscious.substack.com/p/centralization-is-inevit...
      - three_seagrass 4y ago
        Yep, power vacuums always have a way of being filled. The question is, do you want it to be controlled by rational actors seeking to exploit everyone else, or an organization that has potential for other (maybe even altruistic) motives?
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      Back in the beginning, bitcoin was intensely attractive to people who were in the intersection of extreme libertarian ethics and cosmopolitan financial capitalism ethos. It's a fundamentally contradictory world view, of course. You cannot have cosmopolitan financial capitalism without very strong states propping up an extremely unnatural global order. But you can understand how middle-wealthy tech people ended up there. They were self-made, annoyed with taxes, and primarily held wealth that was generated without geographic ties. This is opposed to traditional middle-wealthy folks, whose revenue streams were historically closely tied to place and/or community. Now that the End Of History is over, the contradiction is laid bare, and the reaction has been a sort of ideological immune response triggering fever dreams that are increasingly absurd and desperate (metaverse, web3, NFTs).
    - JamesianP 4y ago
      I would have assumed separating money and state simply means the state can no longer control money creation. So yes it would be similar to using gold as a currency. Just high tech. Though with all the hype I'm sure there was a lot of craziness imagining more beyond that.
      - yifanl 4y ago
        That seems like a non-feasible end-goal. If we assume there's any meaningful input involved with the creation of money (mining equipment or graphics cards), then centralization will happen around having the most of the input and securing that, which naturally implies a monopoly on force, which implies a state. If you allow for fiat money, then almost definitionally, there's a state that everybody agrees is empowered to create the money or else, why would they continue to ensure the value of money?
        JamesianP 4y ago
        Gold mining purportedly does cause inflation in gold-backed currency. I guess bitcoin mining is the same, not familiar with that other than the annoying effect on hardware prices. Perhaps the argument is that this gets increasingly harder, as opposed to fiat money creation, which appears to be exponential growth. Plus manipulation of the currency has never been all that consistent, they are constantly trying new things and pushing boundaries. so any claims of future stability comes down solely to predicting how far some president or fed chairman might choose to go next along with how other countries react to that.
    - pxmpxm 4y ago
      People pitching the state vs money argument are the same crypto nerds as per xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
      - louwrentius 4y ago
        Indeed, thank you.
    - birdyrooster 4y ago
      These are the same people that want free software to workaround abusive corporate policy instead of first regulating corporations. We might actually even be served by a free software movement if employees and people were actually free and unconstrained by corporations that that keep them from ever participating. People like Stallman think a license.txt is going to solve this?
    - killerstorm 4y ago
      People can move from one country to another. The majority of people on Earth live in countries which are considered corrupt & incompetent and have regular bank crashes. It would be a good thing if we remove control of money from corrupt governments.
      - louwrentius 4y ago
        As if that’s really working. Food is still paid in local currency and exchanges can be controlled by the government. It’s not worth boiling the oceans for. But even so, crypto was never really about the poor and unfortunate. Crypto is about pure greed. Money. Tax evasion. Don’t tell waffle stories about people in other countries please. It was never about them. Be at least honest.
        zeroclip 4y ago
        Crypto is about a lot of things. A new asset class appears and people will assign different stories to it. Totally possible that blockchain tech is used for payment infra in future. Ethereum and PoS is no longer energy intensive.
  - squokko 4y ago
    Then you have no state power to deal with misuse of money.
  - louwrentius 4y ago
    You mean tax evasion. I said legal use cases. Please pay your dues to society.
- nwah1 4y ago
  Calling out useless "tech" for being useless doesn't make you a luddite. If you call out a "free energy" machine for not actually making free energy, that just makes you honest and reasonable.
thwayunion 4y ago
> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database. Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough were exploring use cases for blockchain. AFAICT everyone in that space either left the space altogether, is still rambling about solving supply chain fraud (...), or pivoted to shovel salesmanship to support speculators (or speculate themselves).
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  It's been 10+ years of a costly solution desperately looking for a problem.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Definitely useful in Argentina: https://www.freethink.com/technology/crypto-argentina-black-market-cash https://www.freethink.com/technology/crypto-argentina-black-... - fabulous article
  - three_seagrass 4y ago
    Bitcoin was always this fun nerdy hobby money, right up until the speculators came in and exploited it. Now it's "investing" in the confidence of the future of a computing network that can only handle 7 transactions a second, but that still hasn't stopped it becoming the essential oils for tech bros either.
    - piyh 4y ago
      You're under selling the revolution that was buying LSD on the internet
      - three_seagrass 4y ago
        Yeah, I almost mentioned Silk Road, but BTC has since been used to back trace and arrest online drug dealers so I feel like it was never really that good at it to begin with.
monkmartinez 4y ago
what do you see as the "revolutionary potential" in blockchain? Genuinely curious.
- mkoryak 4y ago
  separating people from their money
sdiacom 4y ago
As someone with a similar-ish position to yours, I think by the time someone figures out how to build something useful with this technology, the terminology of cryptocurrencies (blockchain, "defi", NFTs and whatever a "web3" is) will be so tightly associated with scams, that this new useful thing will use completely different terms to describe itself.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  While true, there's an endless supply of new buzzwords to use to capture another round of rubes.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  These things already exist. Uniswap, Aave. Both pretty easy to use and can not just go insolvent on you.
  - sdiacom 4y ago
    The only currently existing purpose of those things is to trade scam tokens for other scam tokens, which makes them effectively meta-scams. What I mean is that, like Ethereum, they're not scams in itself, but their only real-world use-case is to provide a decentralised platform on which to run scams.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      Lazy and shallow take. But at least those using the “scam” DeFi protocols still have custody of their assets, which is not the case with FTX depositors.
vkou 4y ago
We already tried that, that was the wave 2 of Crypto, when people were trying to build tokens with utility. Things like Filecoin. Eventually everyone realized that the value-add of the utility those tokens bring is roughly ~$0, and the only reason tokens in general, and those tokens in particular have any value at all is because people buy them so they could sell them to a bigger fool. Token producers thus took the next logical step[1] - dispense with any promises of token utility, and go straight to minting NFTs and fartcoins. Why bother actually developing a product and ecosystem when the only thing people buying from you care about is the pump and dump? [1] I'm omitting the various ponzicoins, here, those are straight up, unabashed fraud, without even a fig leaf to cover themselves with. :)
chx 4y ago
> and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. I can not. It's been 13 years and there's still nothing. It was never anything else but a scam and can not be anything else but a scam for all crypto"currencies" with a transaction fee are negative sum games.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Fast, cheap money transfer (theoretically) not requiring trust in any middle man, cutting out bank's control, i.e. "digital cash". I don't know if it's revolutionary, but it has a lot of potential and is great when it works.
  - codegeek 4y ago
    "not requiring trust in any middle man" And yet, we have these middlemen like Coinbase and what not. IN theory, decentralized currency is awesome. In practice, almost impossible. Novel idea for sure but it is time we admit that it cannot be implemented without middlemen.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      You don't necessarily need Coinbase etc, but yes, they do make everything easier. I meant that you still need to trust the miners who have centralized and aren't guaranteed to be trustworthy.
  - chx 4y ago
    Here are the steps you need to take to move money with crypto"currency": 1. Establish a presence at an exchange (you need to do this only once) 2. The receiver needs to establish presence at their exchange (every receiver of yours need to do this) 3. Transfer money to the exchange 4. Buy coins and move them and the receiver exchanges back them to money 5. The receiver needs to move money from the exchange to their back account Reminder: you want to transfer money and crypto"currency" is merely a vehicle to do this. And so turns out the hard part is #3 and #5 -- integrating into existing banking systems and #4 is completely superflous. For example, wise.com (nee transferwise) solves the same problem except without the receiver needing to do this nightmarish rigmarole. Not trusting the middle man would require the entire world to switch to some crypto"currency" and this is completely unfeasible with the current ones.
Barrin92 4y ago
You don't need to preemptively apologize for criticizing or questioning a particular data structure. That certainly does not make anybody a luddite. Also luddites had some decent reasons for their activism given the mass unemployment as a result of factory work, which I don't think we're facing with the 'blockchain revolution' any time soon, unless you operate a casino maybe.
twblalock 4y ago
> But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Not without changing human nature. If there is a get-rich-quick scheme available, there will always be takers.
codegeek 4y ago
"> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth" Then there is nothing left to do. "I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain." Started in 2009. 13 years now. How much longer do we need to see the revolutionary potential ? Isn't it obvious that there is no real practical usage ?
JeremyNT 4y ago
> I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. What do you feel is the "revolutionary potential" here? Bitcoin has been around for a while, and I surely haven't seen it. I see this stuff only used for scams, speculation, and illicit transactions. None of this is "revolutionary" - scams, speculation, and illicit transactions have been around as long as money.
- wustangdan 4y ago
  The reason is because your government is reasonably well behaved. You can think of crypto as a hedge against bad government behavior. So in your case, you aren't a target customer. Try thinking about people in Turkey or Venezuala, where the yearly inflation is 100% - 5,000%. Bitcoin looks like a relatively stable safe heaven in comparison. https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/25/turkey-cryptocurrency-explained/ https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/25/turkey-cryptocurr... In the US it was illegal to send dollars to Wikileaks. Is it really your money if you aren't allowed to send it to whoever you want? Imagine instead of Wikileaks it was a political cause you truly believed in and wanted to support but your government didn't like. Surely you can see how they could label any money flowing to this cause as an "illicit transaction". Dn't you think that you should have the power to support whatever cause you believe is right? Or do you think that only your government should decide what are the approved political causes you are allowed to support?
  - GrinningFool 4y ago
    You haven't answered the OP's question though. From the article you posted, it seems like its primary value there has been as a proxy for other [more stable] currencies. USD did that something like that for a while when it was gold-backed. How is it now revolutionary when crypto does the same thing backed by fiat currencies instead of gold?
odiroot 4y ago
"There's a sucker born every minute". And so there's always an opportunity to sell new revolutionary investments.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

louwrentius 4y ago

Guess I’m a Luddite as I only see blockchain tech as a solution in search of a problem. I think it’s worse than useless and crime isn’t a valid use case.

nu11ptr 4y ago
Separation of money and state is definitely a worthwhile goal in my opinion. Everything else is more questionable.
- nwah1 4y ago
  The state has a monopoly on the use of force. It can tax, expropriate, conscript, regulate, and otherwise redirect resources however it wants, and it can demand payments in any currency it chooses. The wishful thinking involved in trying to "separate" money and states is absurd. Even under a gold standard, the government can acquire resources from the public at will. The entire goal is nonsense. The root desire there is the urge to not have a government, which is just yet more wishful thinking.
  - deebosong 4y ago
    Not the person you're responding to. But I concur. How will one separate money from state and then protect one's state-separated money without themselves becoming a "state" of sorts, that then is fused to their money? And then everyone becomes their own little island/state, that is fused to their money, and then you forge alliances and become allied island-states, and so on and so forth, until you become a nation of sorts? Like cmon now. Isn't that the inevitable progression? And if so, doesn't that mean these folks who insist upon separating state from money just want to become the ruling class? I dunno. That's just how it always comes across to me.
    - cellis 4y ago
      Centralization is inevitable. - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/centralization-is-inevitable https://subconscious.substack.com/p/centralization-is-inevit...
    - three_seagrass 4y ago
      Yep, power vacuums always have a way of being filled. The question is, do you want it to be controlled by rational actors seeking to exploit everyone else, or an organization that has potential for other (maybe even altruistic) motives?
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    Back in the beginning, bitcoin was intensely attractive to people who were in the intersection of extreme libertarian ethics and cosmopolitan financial capitalism ethos. It's a fundamentally contradictory world view, of course. You cannot have cosmopolitan financial capitalism without very strong states propping up an extremely unnatural global order. But you can understand how middle-wealthy tech people ended up there. They were self-made, annoyed with taxes, and primarily held wealth that was generated without geographic ties. This is opposed to traditional middle-wealthy folks, whose revenue streams were historically closely tied to place and/or community. Now that the End Of History is over, the contradiction is laid bare, and the reaction has been a sort of ideological immune response triggering fever dreams that are increasingly absurd and desperate (metaverse, web3, NFTs).
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    I would have assumed separating money and state simply means the state can no longer control money creation. So yes it would be similar to using gold as a currency. Just high tech. Though with all the hype I'm sure there was a lot of craziness imagining more beyond that.
    - yifanl 4y ago
      That seems like a non-feasible end-goal. If we assume there's any meaningful input involved with the creation of money (mining equipment or graphics cards), then centralization will happen around having the most of the input and securing that, which naturally implies a monopoly on force, which implies a state. If you allow for fiat money, then almost definitionally, there's a state that everybody agrees is empowered to create the money or else, why would they continue to ensure the value of money?
      - JamesianP 4y ago
        Gold mining purportedly does cause inflation in gold-backed currency. I guess bitcoin mining is the same, not familiar with that other than the annoying effect on hardware prices. Perhaps the argument is that this gets increasingly harder, as opposed to fiat money creation, which appears to be exponential growth. Plus manipulation of the currency has never been all that consistent, they are constantly trying new things and pushing boundaries. so any claims of future stability comes down solely to predicting how far some president or fed chairman might choose to go next along with how other countries react to that.
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    People pitching the state vs money argument are the same crypto nerds as per xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    - louwrentius 4y ago
      Indeed, thank you.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    These are the same people that want free software to workaround abusive corporate policy instead of first regulating corporations. We might actually even be served by a free software movement if employees and people were actually free and unconstrained by corporations that that keep them from ever participating. People like Stallman think a license.txt is going to solve this?
  - killerstorm 4y ago
    People can move from one country to another. The majority of people on Earth live in countries which are considered corrupt & incompetent and have regular bank crashes. It would be a good thing if we remove control of money from corrupt governments.
    - louwrentius 4y ago
      As if that’s really working. Food is still paid in local currency and exchanges can be controlled by the government. It’s not worth boiling the oceans for. But even so, crypto was never really about the poor and unfortunate. Crypto is about pure greed. Money. Tax evasion. Don’t tell waffle stories about people in other countries please. It was never about them. Be at least honest.
      - zeroclip 4y ago
        Crypto is about a lot of things. A new asset class appears and people will assign different stories to it. Totally possible that blockchain tech is used for payment infra in future. Ethereum and PoS is no longer energy intensive.
- squokko 4y ago
  Then you have no state power to deal with misuse of money.
- louwrentius 4y ago
  You mean tax evasion. I said legal use cases. Please pay your dues to society.
nwah1 4y ago
Calling out useless "tech" for being useless doesn't make you a luddite. If you call out a "free energy" machine for not actually making free energy, that just makes you honest and reasonable.

thwayunion 4y ago

> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database. Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough were exploring use cases for blockchain. AFAICT everyone in that space either left the space altogether, is still rambling about solving supply chain fraud (...), or pivoted to shovel salesmanship to support speculators (or speculate themselves).

jonny_eh 4y ago
It's been 10+ years of a costly solution desperately looking for a problem.
- robocat 4y ago
  Definitely useful in Argentina: https://www.freethink.com/technology/crypto-argentina-black-market-cash https://www.freethink.com/technology/crypto-argentina-black-... - fabulous article
- three_seagrass 4y ago
  Bitcoin was always this fun nerdy hobby money, right up until the speculators came in and exploited it. Now it's "investing" in the confidence of the future of a computing network that can only handle 7 transactions a second, but that still hasn't stopped it becoming the essential oils for tech bros either.
  - piyh 4y ago
    You're under selling the revolution that was buying LSD on the internet
    - three_seagrass 4y ago
      Yeah, I almost mentioned Silk Road, but BTC has since been used to back trace and arrest online drug dealers so I feel like it was never really that good at it to begin with.

monkmartinez 4y ago

what do you see as the "revolutionary potential" in blockchain? Genuinely curious.

mkoryak 4y ago
separating people from their money

sdiacom 4y ago

As someone with a similar-ish position to yours, I think by the time someone figures out how to build something useful with this technology, the terminology of cryptocurrencies (blockchain, "defi", NFTs and whatever a "web3" is) will be so tightly associated with scams, that this new useful thing will use completely different terms to describe itself.

nkozyra 4y ago
While true, there's an endless supply of new buzzwords to use to capture another round of rubes.
zeroclip 4y ago
These things already exist. Uniswap, Aave. Both pretty easy to use and can not just go insolvent on you.
- sdiacom 4y ago
  The only currently existing purpose of those things is to trade scam tokens for other scam tokens, which makes them effectively meta-scams. What I mean is that, like Ethereum, they're not scams in itself, but their only real-world use-case is to provide a decentralised platform on which to run scams.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    Lazy and shallow take. But at least those using the “scam” DeFi protocols still have custody of their assets, which is not the case with FTX depositors.

vkou 4y ago

We already tried that, that was the wave 2 of Crypto, when people were trying to build tokens with utility. Things like Filecoin. Eventually everyone realized that the value-add of the utility those tokens bring is roughly ~$0, and the only reason tokens in general, and those tokens in particular have any value at all is because people buy them so they could sell them to a bigger fool. Token producers thus took the next logical step[1] - dispense with any promises of token utility, and go straight to minting NFTs and fartcoins. Why bother actually developing a product and ecosystem when the only thing people buying from you care about is the pump and dump? [1] I'm omitting the various ponzicoins, here, those are straight up, unabashed fraud, without even a fig leaf to cover themselves with. :)

chx 4y ago

> and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. I can not. It's been 13 years and there's still nothing. It was never anything else but a scam and can not be anything else but a scam for all crypto"currencies" with a transaction fee are negative sum games.

luckylion 4y ago
Fast, cheap money transfer (theoretically) not requiring trust in any middle man, cutting out bank's control, i.e. "digital cash". I don't know if it's revolutionary, but it has a lot of potential and is great when it works.
- codegeek 4y ago
  "not requiring trust in any middle man" And yet, we have these middlemen like Coinbase and what not. IN theory, decentralized currency is awesome. In practice, almost impossible. Novel idea for sure but it is time we admit that it cannot be implemented without middlemen.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    You don't necessarily need Coinbase etc, but yes, they do make everything easier. I meant that you still need to trust the miners who have centralized and aren't guaranteed to be trustworthy.
- chx 4y ago
  Here are the steps you need to take to move money with crypto"currency": 1. Establish a presence at an exchange (you need to do this only once) 2. The receiver needs to establish presence at their exchange (every receiver of yours need to do this) 3. Transfer money to the exchange 4. Buy coins and move them and the receiver exchanges back them to money 5. The receiver needs to move money from the exchange to their back account Reminder: you want to transfer money and crypto"currency" is merely a vehicle to do this. And so turns out the hard part is #3 and #5 -- integrating into existing banking systems and #4 is completely superflous. For example, wise.com (nee transferwise) solves the same problem except without the receiver needing to do this nightmarish rigmarole. Not trusting the middle man would require the entire world to switch to some crypto"currency" and this is completely unfeasible with the current ones.

Barrin92 4y ago

You don't need to preemptively apologize for criticizing or questioning a particular data structure. That certainly does not make anybody a luddite. Also luddites had some decent reasons for their activism given the mass unemployment as a result of factory work, which I don't think we're facing with the 'blockchain revolution' any time soon, unless you operate a casino maybe.

twblalock 4y ago

> But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Not without changing human nature. If there is a get-rich-quick scheme available, there will always be takers.

codegeek 4y ago

"> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth" Then there is nothing left to do. "I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain." Started in 2009. 13 years now. How much longer do we need to see the revolutionary potential ? Isn't it obvious that there is no real practical usage ?

JeremyNT 4y ago

> I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. What do you feel is the "revolutionary potential" here? Bitcoin has been around for a while, and I surely haven't seen it. I see this stuff only used for scams, speculation, and illicit transactions. None of this is "revolutionary" - scams, speculation, and illicit transactions have been around as long as money.

wustangdan 4y ago
The reason is because your government is reasonably well behaved. You can think of crypto as a hedge against bad government behavior. So in your case, you aren't a target customer. Try thinking about people in Turkey or Venezuala, where the yearly inflation is 100% - 5,000%. Bitcoin looks like a relatively stable safe heaven in comparison. https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/25/turkey-cryptocurrency-explained/ https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/25/turkey-cryptocurr... In the US it was illegal to send dollars to Wikileaks. Is it really your money if you aren't allowed to send it to whoever you want? Imagine instead of Wikileaks it was a political cause you truly believed in and wanted to support but your government didn't like. Surely you can see how they could label any money flowing to this cause as an "illicit transaction". Dn't you think that you should have the power to support whatever cause you believe is right? Or do you think that only your government should decide what are the approved political causes you are allowed to support?
- GrinningFool 4y ago
  You haven't answered the OP's question though. From the article you posted, it seems like its primary value there has been as a proxy for other [more stable] currencies. USD did that something like that for a while when it was gold-backed. How is it now revolutionary when crypto does the same thing backed by fiat currencies instead of gold?

odiroot 4y ago

"There's a sucker born every minute". And so there's always an opportunity to sell new revolutionary investments.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]