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> 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

> 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.
      - w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
        I suspect BTC has always been an US government honey pot... Google dorian satoshi nakamoto newsweeks. The guy is probably behind btc. He worked previously as army contractor and in the finance sector... Just like TOR network was the work of 2 previously army contractors (I remember that quite well, even if wikipedia doesn't seem to remember as well). Beside, Belgian and other CB (not even ECB) never had a thing to say about crypto with public blockchain of any sort. But monero, which has a private blockchain, has been prohibited in nearly all EU juridiction soon after its launch.
nannal 4y ago
I don't trust you, you don't trust me, neither of us trust the guy who owns the git server but I need to give you something without anyone being able to stop us.
- fuckstick 4y ago
  > give you something Eh? You can’t like give me anything - you can give me a token - which can also effectively be money. The latter usually occurs due to some other trust relationship needing to be established - we are back at square one.
  - nannal 4y ago
    Luckily there's a fairly liquid market for the things we're handing around (usually)
    - fuckstick 4y ago
      I acknowledged “something you can exchange for money” - that was not the objection. It doesn’t solve the underlying difficulty of exchanging physical goods and services that are not tokens - you, know, the actual hard part. It also doesn’t solve the laundering aspect once you try to get those tokens liquidated to something not volatile as fuck.
- pama 4y ago
  Signed git commits, as per the parent.
  - nannal 4y ago
    Git guy took the server offline. You want to refer to the commit to give someone else the token but now you can't. You can't trust the git guy.
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      This isn't a coherent problem statement, and to the extent that it is, it's solved by TCP/IP (this isn't the early 1980s; why are you using some random third party's server if you explicitly don't trust them to keep the server running? Run it from your own box. This has been solved since the early 90s.)
kasey_junk 4y ago
A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships would be extremely valuable and could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages. But the blockchain space has an extreme bias against the existing finance world. Frequently products in the space want to tear it down as they view it as predatory. This leaves us with the current situation, the crypto industry speed running the history of finance and a technology in search of a problem.
- caycep 4y ago
  How is it currently run? From my layperson experience, every time I do a wire transfer, I feel like I'm inputting data into a mainframe or something...
  - belter 4y ago
    Well technically... [1] - "How Mainframes Keep The Financial Industry Up And Running" "...92 of the top 100 banks use the mainframe to provide banking services to customers, and other types of financial services companies depend on the mainframe, as well. Visa, for example, uses the mainframe to process billions of credit and debit card payments every year. According to some estimates, up to $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through mainframes..." [1] https://blog.share.org/Article/mainframe-matters-how-mainframes-keep-the-financial-industry-up-and-running https://blog.share.org/Article/mainframe-matters-how-mainfra...
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Technically technically, you're feeding data into a system whose purpose is the care and feeding of a mainframe. That veneer is pretty thin in places and so it tends to feel like you're talking to a mainframe even when you're talking to an arbitrator for the mainframe.
      - belter 4y ago
        Oh I see...you are here for an argument... https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ
deepspace 4y ago
... or they are off promoting "web 3", the definition of which changes as the weather does. For me, enthusiasm for "the blockchain" is a quick way to identify a) people who promote technologies without bothering to research the fundamentals and b) crooks/charlatans.
hinkley 4y ago
I worked on code that used a Merkle Tree before any of us had heard of a Merkle tree or this blockchain bullshit came around, so I never got starry eyed about any of this stuff. That project was in an environment where chain of custody is an established mechanism for ensuring public safety. Layering a web of trust over the top of that was something the users could mostly digest. Consumers can only use software signed by a particular department or person, only approved software is signed, and approval requires a chain of approvals before it going back to an original signature that says "these are the bits we gave you". That's a useful application of the Merkle Trees. But you'll note there's no distributed consensus, and there's no Proof of Work. Or rather, the proof inferred, backed by process and in this case legistlation. Blockchain admits it's only barely a Merkle Tree right in the name. Our graph looked a lot more like trunk in a git repo. Slightly more tree-like but people only care about the last node.
- killerstorm 4y ago
  A Block header includes a root hash of a Merkle tree of transactions. So yes, it is a tree, if you also consider the useful payload, not just block headers. Then e.g. in Ethereum there's also a Merkle tree of the entire state as well. > there's no distributed consensus Distributed consensus is necessary if you want high availability and replication for your Merkle tree. If data in your tree is important, you want to replicate it, right? You want to be sure it's stored on multiple nodes. So this distributed consensus thing, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, it basically gives you a receipt that at least N nodes have this data stored. You didn't implement it because it takes considerable effort. But if you implemented Merkle tree with high availability, you'd get something very similar to blockchain.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > If data in your tree is important, you want to replicate it, right? Yes! > You didn't implement it because it takes considerable effort. I'd wager it's because he was smart enough to read the man page for rsync and didn't over-engineer a non-solution to a non-problem in his particular use-case.
JSavageOne 4y ago
- three_seagrass 4y ago
  Perhaps you can share some of the many advantages?
  - JSavageOne 4y ago
    Being able to self-custody and send money anonymously and internationally in seconds without an intermediary. Decentralization, composibility, programmable money. Come on this is literally crypto 101 I don't understand how anyone can be on HN talking about crypto without knowing any of crypto's use cases. I mean you don't see people here in Rust threads commenting "I can't think of a single use case of Rust".
    - generalpf 4y ago
      Rust has use cases.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      > Being able to self-custody Also possible with cash, but extremely risky for most people. Not an advantage of crypto, not an advantage in general. > send money anonymously Only relevant for crime. Disadvantage or irrelevant for most legitimate businesses (you anyway need to provide address for shipment). > send money [] internationally in seconds without an intermediary Also possible with many banks, VISA, Western Union. The fact that you're using an intermediary is irrelevant - since either way you're paying transaction fees, and trying to avoid sanctions is too dangerous for most people. > Decentralization In practice, it's far more centralized (far fewer exchanges in the world than banks, and the majority of people using crypto hold it with an exchange) > composibility, programmable money Doesn't really mean anything. Money is money, it can only change hands with a legal contract, and "smart contracts" are not legal contracts.
      - 4y ago
RetpolineDrama 4y ago
>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. I've heard a lot of people used it to buy drugs on the internet.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  That works for a while - when it's an obscure new thing that the government doesn't know to look for. Afterwards, it becomes a public unchangeable ledger of the entire network of illegal trading.
  - everfree 4y ago
    The IRS currently has a $600k bounty on the ability to de-anonymize Monero transactions, which has so far gone unclaimed. Most crypto drug sales are transacted in Monero nowadays. Not every crypto has public and traceable transactions.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      You're still betting your future on this privacy holding. If they do find a way to attack it, they will likely still be able to reconstruct the whole history, unlike with cash. Also, the bounty was awarded to a company who is theoretically developing a solution. I'm not holding my breath, and anyway I hope for the sake of everyone guilty of harmless "crimes" (buying recreational drugs) that the anonymity holds.
      - everfree 4y ago
        I actually don't believe it's possible to retroactively reconstruct Monero history, in an information-theoretic sense. The data just isn't there, because it gets thrown out along the way after each ring-signature is completed. It's on a similar playing field as cash in that regard. To track cash, you need to surveil each point at which the cash changes hands, otherwise that information is lost forever. To track XMR, you likewise need to surveil each point at which XMR changes hands. In some ways, the process is similar to reconstructing TOR traffic - you can't passively observe and deanonymize the entire network, you have to actively target a specific actor. I believe that's what the IRS is talking about when they offer their bounty.
miracle2k 4y ago
> 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. The value is in a permissionless and censorship resistant financial network. You may not find that valuable, but that's ok.
mumbisChungo 4y ago
I think you have to want or need decentralization in order to buy into most of the use-cases of the technology, either because you don't trust institutions or because you're in a part of the world where either the institutions aren't safe or the currency isn't. Assuming you do believe that decentralization is nice to have, applications like decentralized banking (ie. lending, borrowing, exchange of assets) become valuable. There are also emergent culture sources of "value" in the industry, such as medium native artforms in on-chain generative artworks, distributed multiplayer "runtime" systems artworks, on-chain gaming and metagaming, etc. I understand that for many people, even if you grant that _some_ people might find the above legitimately valuable or useful you may still believe that it doesn't justify the energy costs. To that my response would be that all of the above are serviced by networks like ethereum and its various layer two solutions, none of which utilize proof of work, and the sum of which have a fairly modest carbon footprint, as with other computationally inexpensive digital technologies. If you take issue with Bitcoin specifically I can't really offer an argument with conviction. BTC is what got me into the industry, and I think the BTC whitepaper is a brilliant example of human ingenuity, but more recent advancements in the technology leave me skeptical about the societal ROI on large scale PoW operations.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  I do not see any need in my life for the combination of high finance and decentralization. Centralized and highly regulated high finance is bad enough, and already something I try to avoid except when absolutely necessary. My economic life is highly decentralized, but with extremely high trust and very little financialization, so no need for what crypto people mean when they say "decentralization". DeFi, in my life, means the neighbor down the street leaves a you-owe-me note when she drops off eggs, a debt instrument that I can settle using any number of currencies recognized by the local economy; I most often opt to pay in HomeBrewCoin. > I think the BTC whitepaper is a brilliant example of human ingenuity I largely have the same problem as hinkley (sibling comment): I had seen most or all of these ideas prior to the emergence of BTC. I first countered Merkle trees... gosh, forever ago. Got really into cryptography in the 90s. Etc. The idea of creating a currency backed by PoW didn't seem ingenious; it seemed like a particularly silly application of otherwise quite useful technologies. AFAICT it still is mostly useless, except that it made some people very wealthy. Anyways, I'll go back to yelling at kids to stop picking my tulips.
afarrell 4y ago
I have found one: Sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the olympics. I highly doubt that this could have been done based on Postgres. Postgres is too boring and stable to attract the necessary attention. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/265060754/wow-dogecoin-other-donors-send-jamaican-bobsled-team-to-sochi https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/265060754...
- qeternity 4y ago
  TFA: Dogecoin was sent for 30k of the 184k raised So no this effort was not enabled by crypto
- thunky 4y ago
  Yes because we all know the only way to raise money is via shitcoins. I learned that by watching Cool Runnings.
  - afarrell 4y ago
    As noted elsewhere, most of the money wasn't transferred via dogecoin. But reasonable financial transaction systems don't attract the advertising attention that this was able to. Does that make it a good financial system? To the degree that a clown car is a good public transport system.
nazgulnarsil 4y ago
>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. You have always --always-- lived in a high trust society with trustworthy institutions
- thwayunion 4y ago
  I live in the USA. I will concede your point if it means you'll agree that at the very least cryptocurrency is useless to people in the USA. (Even as a hedge. My resiliency to societal collapse comes from the social relationships I maintain in my local community and the collection of skills and knowledge we collectively have, not my ability to flee to New Zealand and hope my digital tokens still have perceived value.)
ssnistfajen 4y ago
The promise was a trustless system that can operate on its own without central authorities. The problem is this proposed solution has yet to justify itself in terms of both efficiency and cost over existing alternatives which is relying on self-declared central authorities whose trust has been earned via either regulatory guarantees or well-established reputation.
sfifs 4y ago
For those of us living on the right side of a relatively stable rules based society where we have reasonable expectation of personal property rights, it is not useful. For those either on the wrong side of the society (eg. Source of income is what the society defines as crime etc) or living in a society where your wealth (possibly acquired through corruption) can be seized without recourse, it is potentially a useful way to store and transfer wealth in a way that is difficult and expensive to interfere with or detect. This is a real use case though possibly not a morally defensible one to most of us. The other theoriticical use case of having a form of liquidish currency that is not devaluable at whim by governments has not come to pass due to speculation and volatility. The rest are either speculating OR selling shovels to the gold diggers.

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.
    - w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
      I suspect BTC has always been an US government honey pot... Google dorian satoshi nakamoto newsweeks. The guy is probably behind btc. He worked previously as army contractor and in the finance sector... Just like TOR network was the work of 2 previously army contractors (I remember that quite well, even if wikipedia doesn't seem to remember as well). Beside, Belgian and other CB (not even ECB) never had a thing to say about crypto with public blockchain of any sort. But monero, which has a private blockchain, has been prohibited in nearly all EU juridiction soon after its launch.

nannal 4y ago

I don't trust you, you don't trust me, neither of us trust the guy who owns the git server but I need to give you something without anyone being able to stop us.

fuckstick 4y ago
> give you something Eh? You can’t like give me anything - you can give me a token - which can also effectively be money. The latter usually occurs due to some other trust relationship needing to be established - we are back at square one.
- nannal 4y ago
  Luckily there's a fairly liquid market for the things we're handing around (usually)
  - fuckstick 4y ago
    I acknowledged “something you can exchange for money” - that was not the objection. It doesn’t solve the underlying difficulty of exchanging physical goods and services that are not tokens - you, know, the actual hard part. It also doesn’t solve the laundering aspect once you try to get those tokens liquidated to something not volatile as fuck.
pama 4y ago
Signed git commits, as per the parent.
- nannal 4y ago
  Git guy took the server offline. You want to refer to the commit to give someone else the token but now you can't. You can't trust the git guy.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    This isn't a coherent problem statement, and to the extent that it is, it's solved by TCP/IP (this isn't the early 1980s; why are you using some random third party's server if you explicitly don't trust them to keep the server running? Run it from your own box. This has been solved since the early 90s.)

kasey_junk 4y ago

A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships would be extremely valuable and could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages. But the blockchain space has an extreme bias against the existing finance world. Frequently products in the space want to tear it down as they view it as predatory. This leaves us with the current situation, the crypto industry speed running the history of finance and a technology in search of a problem.

caycep 4y ago
How is it currently run? From my layperson experience, every time I do a wire transfer, I feel like I'm inputting data into a mainframe or something...
- belter 4y ago
  Well technically... [1] - "How Mainframes Keep The Financial Industry Up And Running" "...92 of the top 100 banks use the mainframe to provide banking services to customers, and other types of financial services companies depend on the mainframe, as well. Visa, for example, uses the mainframe to process billions of credit and debit card payments every year. According to some estimates, up to $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through mainframes..." [1] https://blog.share.org/Article/mainframe-matters-how-mainframes-keep-the-financial-industry-up-and-running https://blog.share.org/Article/mainframe-matters-how-mainfra...
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Technically technically, you're feeding data into a system whose purpose is the care and feeding of a mainframe. That veneer is pretty thin in places and so it tends to feel like you're talking to a mainframe even when you're talking to an arbitrator for the mainframe.
    - belter 4y ago
      Oh I see...you are here for an argument... https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ

deepspace 4y ago

... or they are off promoting "web 3", the definition of which changes as the weather does. For me, enthusiasm for "the blockchain" is a quick way to identify a) people who promote technologies without bothering to research the fundamentals and b) crooks/charlatans.

hinkley 4y ago

I worked on code that used a Merkle Tree before any of us had heard of a Merkle tree or this blockchain bullshit came around, so I never got starry eyed about any of this stuff. That project was in an environment where chain of custody is an established mechanism for ensuring public safety. Layering a web of trust over the top of that was something the users could mostly digest. Consumers can only use software signed by a particular department or person, only approved software is signed, and approval requires a chain of approvals before it going back to an original signature that says "these are the bits we gave you". That's a useful application of the Merkle Trees. But you'll note there's no distributed consensus, and there's no Proof of Work. Or rather, the proof inferred, backed by process and in this case legistlation. Blockchain admits it's only barely a Merkle Tree right in the name. Our graph looked a lot more like trunk in a git repo. Slightly more tree-like but people only care about the last node.

killerstorm 4y ago
A Block header includes a root hash of a Merkle tree of transactions. So yes, it is a tree, if you also consider the useful payload, not just block headers. Then e.g. in Ethereum there's also a Merkle tree of the entire state as well. > there's no distributed consensus Distributed consensus is necessary if you want high availability and replication for your Merkle tree. If data in your tree is important, you want to replicate it, right? You want to be sure it's stored on multiple nodes. So this distributed consensus thing, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, it basically gives you a receipt that at least N nodes have this data stored. You didn't implement it because it takes considerable effort. But if you implemented Merkle tree with high availability, you'd get something very similar to blockchain.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > If data in your tree is important, you want to replicate it, right? Yes! > You didn't implement it because it takes considerable effort. I'd wager it's because he was smart enough to read the man page for rsync and didn't over-engineer a non-solution to a non-problem in his particular use-case.

JSavageOne 4y ago

three_seagrass 4y ago
Perhaps you can share some of the many advantages?
- JSavageOne 4y ago
  Being able to self-custody and send money anonymously and internationally in seconds without an intermediary. Decentralization, composibility, programmable money. Come on this is literally crypto 101 I don't understand how anyone can be on HN talking about crypto without knowing any of crypto's use cases. I mean you don't see people here in Rust threads commenting "I can't think of a single use case of Rust".
  - generalpf 4y ago
    Rust has use cases.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    > Being able to self-custody Also possible with cash, but extremely risky for most people. Not an advantage of crypto, not an advantage in general. > send money anonymously Only relevant for crime. Disadvantage or irrelevant for most legitimate businesses (you anyway need to provide address for shipment). > send money [] internationally in seconds without an intermediary Also possible with many banks, VISA, Western Union. The fact that you're using an intermediary is irrelevant - since either way you're paying transaction fees, and trying to avoid sanctions is too dangerous for most people. > Decentralization In practice, it's far more centralized (far fewer exchanges in the world than banks, and the majority of people using crypto hold it with an exchange) > composibility, programmable money Doesn't really mean anything. Money is money, it can only change hands with a legal contract, and "smart contracts" are not legal contracts.
    - 4y ago

RetpolineDrama 4y ago

>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. I've heard a lot of people used it to buy drugs on the internet.

tsimionescu 4y ago
That works for a while - when it's an obscure new thing that the government doesn't know to look for. Afterwards, it becomes a public unchangeable ledger of the entire network of illegal trading.
- everfree 4y ago
  The IRS currently has a $600k bounty on the ability to de-anonymize Monero transactions, which has so far gone unclaimed. Most crypto drug sales are transacted in Monero nowadays. Not every crypto has public and traceable transactions.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    You're still betting your future on this privacy holding. If they do find a way to attack it, they will likely still be able to reconstruct the whole history, unlike with cash. Also, the bounty was awarded to a company who is theoretically developing a solution. I'm not holding my breath, and anyway I hope for the sake of everyone guilty of harmless "crimes" (buying recreational drugs) that the anonymity holds.
    - everfree 4y ago
      I actually don't believe it's possible to retroactively reconstruct Monero history, in an information-theoretic sense. The data just isn't there, because it gets thrown out along the way after each ring-signature is completed. It's on a similar playing field as cash in that regard. To track cash, you need to surveil each point at which the cash changes hands, otherwise that information is lost forever. To track XMR, you likewise need to surveil each point at which XMR changes hands. In some ways, the process is similar to reconstructing TOR traffic - you can't passively observe and deanonymize the entire network, you have to actively target a specific actor. I believe that's what the IRS is talking about when they offer their bounty.

miracle2k 4y ago

> 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. The value is in a permissionless and censorship resistant financial network. You may not find that valuable, but that's ok.

mumbisChungo 4y ago

I think you have to want or need decentralization in order to buy into most of the use-cases of the technology, either because you don't trust institutions or because you're in a part of the world where either the institutions aren't safe or the currency isn't. Assuming you do believe that decentralization is nice to have, applications like decentralized banking (ie. lending, borrowing, exchange of assets) become valuable. There are also emergent culture sources of "value" in the industry, such as medium native artforms in on-chain generative artworks, distributed multiplayer "runtime" systems artworks, on-chain gaming and metagaming, etc. I understand that for many people, even if you grant that _some_ people might find the above legitimately valuable or useful you may still believe that it doesn't justify the energy costs. To that my response would be that all of the above are serviced by networks like ethereum and its various layer two solutions, none of which utilize proof of work, and the sum of which have a fairly modest carbon footprint, as with other computationally inexpensive digital technologies. If you take issue with Bitcoin specifically I can't really offer an argument with conviction. BTC is what got me into the industry, and I think the BTC whitepaper is a brilliant example of human ingenuity, but more recent advancements in the technology leave me skeptical about the societal ROI on large scale PoW operations.

thwayunion 4y ago
I do not see any need in my life for the combination of high finance and decentralization. Centralized and highly regulated high finance is bad enough, and already something I try to avoid except when absolutely necessary. My economic life is highly decentralized, but with extremely high trust and very little financialization, so no need for what crypto people mean when they say "decentralization". DeFi, in my life, means the neighbor down the street leaves a you-owe-me note when she drops off eggs, a debt instrument that I can settle using any number of currencies recognized by the local economy; I most often opt to pay in HomeBrewCoin. > I think the BTC whitepaper is a brilliant example of human ingenuity I largely have the same problem as hinkley (sibling comment): I had seen most or all of these ideas prior to the emergence of BTC. I first countered Merkle trees... gosh, forever ago. Got really into cryptography in the 90s. Etc. The idea of creating a currency backed by PoW didn't seem ingenious; it seemed like a particularly silly application of otherwise quite useful technologies. AFAICT it still is mostly useless, except that it made some people very wealthy. Anyways, I'll go back to yelling at kids to stop picking my tulips.

afarrell 4y ago

I have found one: Sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the olympics. I highly doubt that this could have been done based on Postgres. Postgres is too boring and stable to attract the necessary attention. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/265060754/wow-dogecoin-other-donors-send-jamaican-bobsled-team-to-sochi https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/265060754...

qeternity 4y ago
TFA: Dogecoin was sent for 30k of the 184k raised So no this effort was not enabled by crypto
thunky 4y ago
Yes because we all know the only way to raise money is via shitcoins. I learned that by watching Cool Runnings.
- afarrell 4y ago
  As noted elsewhere, most of the money wasn't transferred via dogecoin. But reasonable financial transaction systems don't attract the advertising attention that this was able to. Does that make it a good financial system? To the degree that a clown car is a good public transport system.

nazgulnarsil 4y ago

>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. You have always --always-- lived in a high trust society with trustworthy institutions

thwayunion 4y ago
I live in the USA. I will concede your point if it means you'll agree that at the very least cryptocurrency is useless to people in the USA. (Even as a hedge. My resiliency to societal collapse comes from the social relationships I maintain in my local community and the collection of skills and knowledge we collectively have, not my ability to flee to New Zealand and hope my digital tokens still have perceived value.)

ssnistfajen 4y ago

The promise was a trustless system that can operate on its own without central authorities. The problem is this proposed solution has yet to justify itself in terms of both efficiency and cost over existing alternatives which is relying on self-declared central authorities whose trust has been earned via either regulatory guarantees or well-established reputation.

sfifs 4y ago

For those of us living on the right side of a relatively stable rules based society where we have reasonable expectation of personal property rights, it is not useful. For those either on the wrong side of the society (eg. Source of income is what the society defines as crime etc) or living in a society where your wealth (possibly acquired through corruption) can be seized without recourse, it is potentially a useful way to store and transfer wealth in a way that is difficult and expensive to interfere with or detect. This is a real use case though possibly not a morally defensible one to most of us. The other theoriticical use case of having a form of liquidish currency that is not devaluable at whim by governments has not come to pass due to speculation and volatility. The rest are either speculating OR selling shovels to the gold diggers.