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I think HN is skewing heavily against AI and blockchain claims. I pick those to make the point below. For what it's worth, I agree that blockchain itself is a

by EGreg 4y ago

I think HN is skewing heavily against AI and blockchain claims. I pick those to make the point below. For what it's worth, I agree that blockchain itself is a first-generation technology and sucks relative to other things, like giant vacuum tube computers did. However, the concepts it enables (smart contracts) have as much promise as the idea of software programs running on personal computers back when most people wondered why you need them, since they do very little but play pong. When I wrote the following article for CoinDesk in 2020, I didn't want to say "blockchain voting", I wanted to say "voting from your phone". Because there are far better decentralized byzantine-fault-tolerant systems, than blockchains. But that's what they ran with: https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting In it, I say: For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before. And that's really, the crux of the issue. It happens slowly, and then all at once. Yes we need to listen to guys like Moxie who are skeptical, but we need to also then go and have a discussion from different perspectives, not just one specific perspective. It has even become fashionable in many liberal circles to be against the type "tech bro" typified by HN, including VCs and Web 2.0 tech bros. So before you downvote, realize that most of you would be on the receiving end of it in other echo chambers, due to this phenomenon of thinking there's only one best narrative. People like Moxie are much more interesting and interested, because they say they' love to be proven wrong. And I am also open to substantive discussion: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... I imagine it's the same with AI claims about traditional fields. Where have we heard that before? "Yes it's cute and impressive but these guys don't really understand what the experts know about chess."

vaidhy 4y ago
> For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before. That is just success bias. How many times did people try out perpetual motion machines? The rest of the article tries to make the converse that if something is inadequate today, it will be the replacement in the future. When do you consider something to be not worth spending time on?
- lesuorac 4y ago
  > How many times did people try out perpetual motion machines? Or even turning lead into gold! A ton of famous scientist (i.e. Newton) were very busy with that idea but we end up only knowing them for other side projects/discoveries.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    > A ton of famous scientist (i.e. Newton) The abbreviation "i.e." stands for "id est" and means "that is". So what you have written means "A ton of famous scientist (that is, Newton)"... Now while I'm sure Newton had gravitas (hah!), I doubt it amounted to a ton. You want to use the abbreviation for "exempli gratia" which is "e.g." and means "for example". It's a common mistake but easy to remember with eg-xample. :-)
- jsiva 4y ago
  I think its more a comment of how we should be open to people contributing to these efforts (while still being mindful of wild claims). While the concept of perpetual motion machines is flawed, the effort put into reducing kinetic energy loss is very useful. Flywheels are being actively studied as a method to store excess energy storage. In the long-term view I don't think you can consider anything not worth spending time on, the result just might not be applicable to the original goal.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  I think perpetual motion is the wrong way to go. Mark Twain lost all of his money on a wide variety of speculative investments, most of which I would call fairly reasonable. Getting in on the ground floor does you no good if it's the wrong kind of ground floor, or if it's the right kind of ground floor but the one next door ends up going to the moon while yours falters, or even if it's the right exact ground floor but you go bankrupt investing too early and the person who buys it from you rides it to the moon.
kspacewalk2 4y ago
My skepticism about e.g. AI and blockchain is not definitive or final, and the goal is not to end the conversation. To the contrary, for me this is a (possibly very deficient) style of reasoning about the world. You are excited about technology X, can I express my skepticism in a sufficiently annoying way to prod you into helping me understand some insight about technology X which disproves my hypothesis that technology X is a technology in search of a problem? For example, I don't see an important problem which is solved by blockchain in a way that's superior to other solutions, when taking into account their respective advantages and drawbacks. Just don't see it. For example, I want to have a centralized authority which can override fraud or a mistake in a financial transaction. I want laws to apply, I want them to be written by elected humans. I'm not even sold on the value of any kind of electronic voting in general elections, since trust in the process is so vital here that in my mind the horrible inefficiencies of pen and paper and a bunch of humans manually tallying up votes in a thousand school gyms until 11 pm is actually quite okay. I'll pay for that with my taxes, no problem. Now you add blockchain into the mix, and I don't know what problem it solves that does not have superior alternative solutions. And so on. But I'm gonna stay open minded. Technology X might one day find the perfect problem to solve, or I might realize I was stupidly wrong about technology X for some time.
- EGreg 4y ago
  For now, I would simply ask that you go through the many applications here and tell me if you see smart contracts being very useful for collectively managaing high-value decisions and capital after reading: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    Can you instead point out the one (strongest, best) application for which the case of using blockchain solves a big problem in a way that's better than existing alternatives, given all their respective advantages and drawbacks? I'm lazy, you see. Conveniently forgot to mention that.
    - 4y ago
gjulianm 4y ago
I think the framing of your argument is a little bit misguided. Looking at history and possibilities doesn't really get you anywhere. Sometimes people get a tech massively wrong, sometimes they don't. In order to have an actually good discussion, we need to look at the thing and go past the "well someone criticized the Internet too and now look at it". So taking the idea of the blockchain. What makes the blockchain a "different thing"? The differential aspect is that it allows untrusted nodes to join in a distributed architecture. It's not the only database that exists and it's not the only distributed one either. So any claims of new features brought by blockchain should justify why they need the "untrusted distributed nodes" part. If they don't, we can assume that those new features don't really need the blockchain: either it's already been done, it's not an use case people are too interested in or it's not viable due to other reasons (economical, technical apart from storage, political...). In the case of blockchain claims, most don't actually justify the need for the untrusted distribution. For example, smart contracts: it's just a fancy word for "computer program" only that it runs on a distributed trustless architecture. But is that really needed? My bank already runs computer programs that execute loan payments, for an example of things people try to implement with smart contracts. Compare that with personal computers or even AI. PCs allowed data manipulation, storage and calculations at a capacity that was not previously available. Of course the first computers wouldn't have enough power to do things that a wide array of people would find useful, but "low power" isn't a fundamental aspect of personal computers in the same way that "low bandwidth" isn't a fundamental aspect of blockchains.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Suppose I start a Web2 company, and end up building the next big social network. Or maybe I deploy Mastodon or Qbix and make a large community. Now elections, roles, permissions and credit balances may hold significant total value. Various jurisdictions now start to require you to hold surety bonds, get audits etc. Suppose you manage payments volume of $20 million a month for a teacher marketplace. One of your developers can just go into the database and change all the balances, salami-slicing money to themselves. Or someone can go and change all the votes. How can the users trust elections, or that you won’t abscond with the money one day, or get hacked, like FTX and MtGox? Web3 solves this with smart contracts. For the first time in history, we can guarantee (given enough nodes) that it is infeasible to take actions you are not authorized to do. The blockchain is readable by everyone - but more importantly, only authorized accounts can take individual actions that do a limited amount. It’s truly decentralized. The alternative is to build elaborate schemes where watchers watch the watchers — and the more value is controlled by the database (in terms of votes or balances) the more risk and liability everyone has. Why have it? Have teachers be paid by students using web3 smart contracts and tokens. Your site becomes merely an interface which contains far more low-value things. As for data, you can store it on IPFS with similar considerations. Read this: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-and-other-digital-content-in-2022/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-... As you can see, my company and I have been giving it a LOT of thought, and not distracted by ponzi schemes. I am able to articulate exactly when you need Web3 and IPFS.
breuleux 4y ago
I feel like there is a tendency for technology to overpromise by offering solutions to the wrong problems. To take your example, what is the fundamental issue with elections? I would say that it is that the optimal number of people for deliberative decision making is probably around Dunbar's number, certainly not millions. When you have millions of people, it is purely a media game, so decision quality falls off a cliff. So I doubt general elections can ever yield better results than they currently do, regardless of the voting system and regardless of technology. So my general skepticism regarding blockchain is that it presents technological solutions to social problems (so it won't work). AI is different since it's a bit all over the place. In principle, it aims to solve problems that are obviously worth solving, but as long as it will fall short of its promises, the partial solutions we do get are kind of a mixed bag: if we need to keep a human in the loop or at the wheel, it's suddenly a lot less attractive. And the path to the AI being good enough to be trusted is nebulous at best. But we'll see. As for PCs, their utility has always been obvious and the roadmap clear.
- EGreg 4y ago
  The fundamental issue is that elections are too expensive so we don’t do collective decision making that often, and usually only for our state or national governments. People tend to elect representatives for long terms instead and then complain about them, rather than delegating their vote to experts or trying other systems like Ranked Choice Voting. Many people complain about having to travel far to a polling booth, and disenfranchisement, whereas they could vote for their phone. Elderly and minorities in rural areas often have bad access. If elections were cheap, people could easily engage in collective decision making of various types and choose various ways yo tally votes. None of that is possible today, we are like the people before computers, or before the industrial revolution - having a limited number of options, newspapers, etv. We would also have more confidence in the results as we’d check using the Merkle tree that our vote was counted. It would be user friendly to do so. And we could also implement many of the results on-chain, such as how much UBI to give out in our own community’s currency, or how much to tax transactions. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Just see https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications
  - 4y ago

by EGreg 4y ago

vaidhy 4y ago

> For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before. That is just success bias. How many times did people try out perpetual motion machines? The rest of the article tries to make the converse that if something is inadequate today, it will be the replacement in the future. When do you consider something to be not worth spending time on?

lesuorac 4y ago
> How many times did people try out perpetual motion machines? Or even turning lead into gold! A ton of famous scientist (i.e. Newton) were very busy with that idea but we end up only knowing them for other side projects/discoveries.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  > A ton of famous scientist (i.e. Newton) The abbreviation "i.e." stands for "id est" and means "that is". So what you have written means "A ton of famous scientist (that is, Newton)"... Now while I'm sure Newton had gravitas (hah!), I doubt it amounted to a ton. You want to use the abbreviation for "exempli gratia" which is "e.g." and means "for example". It's a common mistake but easy to remember with eg-xample. :-)
jsiva 4y ago
I think its more a comment of how we should be open to people contributing to these efforts (while still being mindful of wild claims). While the concept of perpetual motion machines is flawed, the effort put into reducing kinetic energy loss is very useful. Flywheels are being actively studied as a method to store excess energy storage. In the long-term view I don't think you can consider anything not worth spending time on, the result just might not be applicable to the original goal.
saalweachter 4y ago
I think perpetual motion is the wrong way to go. Mark Twain lost all of his money on a wide variety of speculative investments, most of which I would call fairly reasonable. Getting in on the ground floor does you no good if it's the wrong kind of ground floor, or if it's the right kind of ground floor but the one next door ends up going to the moon while yours falters, or even if it's the right exact ground floor but you go bankrupt investing too early and the person who buys it from you rides it to the moon.

kspacewalk2 4y ago

My skepticism about e.g. AI and blockchain is not definitive or final, and the goal is not to end the conversation. To the contrary, for me this is a (possibly very deficient) style of reasoning about the world. You are excited about technology X, can I express my skepticism in a sufficiently annoying way to prod you into helping me understand some insight about technology X which disproves my hypothesis that technology X is a technology in search of a problem? For example, I don't see an important problem which is solved by blockchain in a way that's superior to other solutions, when taking into account their respective advantages and drawbacks. Just don't see it. For example, I want to have a centralized authority which can override fraud or a mistake in a financial transaction. I want laws to apply, I want them to be written by elected humans. I'm not even sold on the value of any kind of electronic voting in general elections, since trust in the process is so vital here that in my mind the horrible inefficiencies of pen and paper and a bunch of humans manually tallying up votes in a thousand school gyms until 11 pm is actually quite okay. I'll pay for that with my taxes, no problem. Now you add blockchain into the mix, and I don't know what problem it solves that does not have superior alternative solutions. And so on. But I'm gonna stay open minded. Technology X might one day find the perfect problem to solve, or I might realize I was stupidly wrong about technology X for some time.

EGreg 4y ago
For now, I would simply ask that you go through the many applications here and tell me if you see smart contracts being very useful for collectively managaing high-value decisions and capital after reading: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  Can you instead point out the one (strongest, best) application for which the case of using blockchain solves a big problem in a way that's better than existing alternatives, given all their respective advantages and drawbacks? I'm lazy, you see. Conveniently forgot to mention that.
  - 4y ago

gjulianm 4y ago

I think the framing of your argument is a little bit misguided. Looking at history and possibilities doesn't really get you anywhere. Sometimes people get a tech massively wrong, sometimes they don't. In order to have an actually good discussion, we need to look at the thing and go past the "well someone criticized the Internet too and now look at it". So taking the idea of the blockchain. What makes the blockchain a "different thing"? The differential aspect is that it allows untrusted nodes to join in a distributed architecture. It's not the only database that exists and it's not the only distributed one either. So any claims of new features brought by blockchain should justify why they need the "untrusted distributed nodes" part. If they don't, we can assume that those new features don't really need the blockchain: either it's already been done, it's not an use case people are too interested in or it's not viable due to other reasons (economical, technical apart from storage, political...). In the case of blockchain claims, most don't actually justify the need for the untrusted distribution. For example, smart contracts: it's just a fancy word for "computer program" only that it runs on a distributed trustless architecture. But is that really needed? My bank already runs computer programs that execute loan payments, for an example of things people try to implement with smart contracts. Compare that with personal computers or even AI. PCs allowed data manipulation, storage and calculations at a capacity that was not previously available. Of course the first computers wouldn't have enough power to do things that a wide array of people would find useful, but "low power" isn't a fundamental aspect of personal computers in the same way that "low bandwidth" isn't a fundamental aspect of blockchains.

EGreg 4y ago
Suppose I start a Web2 company, and end up building the next big social network. Or maybe I deploy Mastodon or Qbix and make a large community. Now elections, roles, permissions and credit balances may hold significant total value. Various jurisdictions now start to require you to hold surety bonds, get audits etc. Suppose you manage payments volume of $20 million a month for a teacher marketplace. One of your developers can just go into the database and change all the balances, salami-slicing money to themselves. Or someone can go and change all the votes. How can the users trust elections, or that you won’t abscond with the money one day, or get hacked, like FTX and MtGox? Web3 solves this with smart contracts. For the first time in history, we can guarantee (given enough nodes) that it is infeasible to take actions you are not authorized to do. The blockchain is readable by everyone - but more importantly, only authorized accounts can take individual actions that do a limited amount. It’s truly decentralized. The alternative is to build elaborate schemes where watchers watch the watchers — and the more value is controlled by the database (in terms of votes or balances) the more risk and liability everyone has. Why have it? Have teachers be paid by students using web3 smart contracts and tokens. Your site becomes merely an interface which contains far more low-value things. As for data, you can store it on IPFS with similar considerations. Read this: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-and-other-digital-content-in-2022/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-... As you can see, my company and I have been giving it a LOT of thought, and not distracted by ponzi schemes. I am able to articulate exactly when you need Web3 and IPFS.

breuleux 4y ago

I feel like there is a tendency for technology to overpromise by offering solutions to the wrong problems. To take your example, what is the fundamental issue with elections? I would say that it is that the optimal number of people for deliberative decision making is probably around Dunbar's number, certainly not millions. When you have millions of people, it is purely a media game, so decision quality falls off a cliff. So I doubt general elections can ever yield better results than they currently do, regardless of the voting system and regardless of technology. So my general skepticism regarding blockchain is that it presents technological solutions to social problems (so it won't work). AI is different since it's a bit all over the place. In principle, it aims to solve problems that are obviously worth solving, but as long as it will fall short of its promises, the partial solutions we do get are kind of a mixed bag: if we need to keep a human in the loop or at the wheel, it's suddenly a lot less attractive. And the path to the AI being good enough to be trusted is nebulous at best. But we'll see. As for PCs, their utility has always been obvious and the roadmap clear.

EGreg 4y ago
The fundamental issue is that elections are too expensive so we don’t do collective decision making that often, and usually only for our state or national governments. People tend to elect representatives for long terms instead and then complain about them, rather than delegating their vote to experts or trying other systems like Ranked Choice Voting. Many people complain about having to travel far to a polling booth, and disenfranchisement, whereas they could vote for their phone. Elderly and minorities in rural areas often have bad access. If elections were cheap, people could easily engage in collective decision making of various types and choose various ways yo tally votes. None of that is possible today, we are like the people before computers, or before the industrial revolution - having a limited number of options, newspapers, etv. We would also have more confidence in the results as we’d check using the Merkle tree that our vote was counted. It would be user friendly to do so. And we could also implement many of the results on-chain, such as how much UBI to give out in our own community’s currency, or how much to tax transactions. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Just see https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications
- 4y ago