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No, we didn't. There are tens of thousands of developers writing smart contracts. Some of these smart contracts, such as Uniswap (https://uniswap.org/ https://u

No, we didn't. There are tens of thousands of developers writing smart contracts. Some of these smart contracts, such as Uniswap (https://uniswap.org/ https://uniswap.org/), have traded more than $1.2 trillion in volume. Uniswap works 24/7 with 100% uptime. It's permissionless to create a liquidity pool or to trade on the platform. It's a novel architecture, called an Automated Market Maker, a real innovation in financial markets. Uniswap is fully auditable thanks to everything being on-chain. Source code is open. There's also on-chain lending markets (Aave: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/), decentralized stable coins (https://www.liquity.org/ https://www.liquity.org/), on-chain arbitration (https://kleros.io/ https://kleros.io/), on-chain DAO governance (https://compound.finance/governance https://compound.finance/governance), on-chain social media primitives which are extensible (https://www.lens.xyz/ https://www.lens.xyz/), multi-sig on-chain smart contract wallets that custody hundreds of millions to billions in assets (https://gnosis-safe.io/ https://gnosis-safe.io/), decentralized strategy games that use on-chain zero knowledge proofs to maintain a fog of war and player secrets while keeping everyone honest while allowing for full hackability (Dark Forest - https://zkga.me/ https://zkga.me/), etc. Can really go on and on, but the industry is not going anywhere.

dimgl 4y ago
- robcohen 4y ago
  Don’t hold your breath.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  If you are focusing on the bad side of a tech, AI could do way worse than crypto. I mean, the most evil thing you can do with crypto is merely taking away money from people.
  - jchw 4y ago
    You're thinking too small. If you really want to get cynical, you could think about the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact. Or more realistically, what happens today: facilitation of ransomware and the sale of illegal material. You could argue that most of these theoretical consequences have nothing to do with the technologies themselves, but that's true of almost all software technology. Even a potentially devastating piece of malware is, in a vacuum, just some bytes floating in space, with no inherent meaning until someone chooses to execute it. Most discussions about morals in programming and computer science either ignore or gloss over this part as if it is already answered, but it probably matters. There's some arbitrary dividing line where you decide when the blame lies with the operator(s) vs the technology itself. In practice, I think it's more useful to look at it in terms of who's executing the code instead of who's writing it, since in practice the existence of code that does something is basically an inevitability, in a world where you can only rely on impracticality for a limited amount of time and where it's basically impossible to hold a monopoly on some piece of knowledge or information forever. I think this also is rather helpful when you look at things like exploits: if someone makes a genuine mistake in their software, for which they expressly disclaimed any warranty, it would be weird for them to be culpable when it impacts an operator; but if someone were to be using said software to store user data, and that user data were leaked via an exploit in software, it's more reasonable to say the operator is responsible. Code itself doesn't usually have much intent encoded into it, so it's unreasonable to go in from a perspective that assumes that you can judge the morality of software itself. But then, taking this to its logical extreme, it might be a little too absolutist; even if software is inevitable, that doesn't mean that culpability for intentionally destructive behavior is necessarily a bad idea. Either way, from this viewpoint, I think you can easily argue that cryptocurrency and AI both have enormous potential to cause consequences in the world. It isn't necessarily that the technologies themselves are inherently bad, but from a practical standpoint it doesn't really matter.
    - cflynnus 4y ago
      > the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact. https://endthefud.org/energy https://endthefud.org/energy
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Can you name one practical product built on top of ChatGPT? I don't even want to knock the tech, I think they're both fantastic, but blockchain has far more product-market fit than chatbots do. Not only that, but in a world of ever increasing and convincing AI deep fakes, a ledger with built-in cryptographic identity primitives will become increasingly useful for identifying, timestamping, and hashing authentic content in a plausibly neutral way.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - csb6 4y ago
    ChatGPT was released less than a week ago, so I would be very surprised if a practical product was already built on it.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Fine, how about GPT3 or Stable Diffusion? Does the world really need deep fakes? Doesn't it cause more harm than good? The debate is really still out on that one, especially with regards to AI. I find AI amusing as well, I wouldn't want to knock it, but it would be very easy for me to craft cynical arguments against it. I might even enlist ChatGPT to help me make the case.
      - bratbag 4y ago
        Stable diffusion has been used to create artwork for shoestring budget projects. I've used it to generate prototype images before hiring an artist to get precisely what we want and a designer friend of mine uses it as a starting point for manual modification, drastically increasing his output. Direct, practical, real tangible work enhancers that we could not do before. Unlike crypto
- lamp987 4y ago
  youre gonna wait a loooong time then
andrewflnr 4y ago
Ok, I'll grant the game sounds cool.
Gigachad 4y ago
What value did any of this provide to the world? Just reads like a buzzword soup where finance bros find more and more obscure ways to leach money.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Don't you guys get tired of rehashing the same baseless arguments over and over again? The value of decentralized platforms is that it gets rid of the tech bros and financial scams. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can make transactions independently, without having to blindly trust that the funds are actually there. If people transacted using DeFI, there would be no FTX, no Coinbase, no VC trying to leech off the masses.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > The value of decentralized platforms is that it gets rid of the tech bros and financial scams. Ah yes. No scams or tech bros. Except the implicit blind trust in programs written in esoteric programming languages on esoteric VMs that are rife with financial scams. > If people transacted using DeFI, there would be no FTX, no Coinbase, no VC trying to leech off the masses. Except that Uniswap is currently almost 100% automated bots "swapping" fictional tokens. And for anything useful you depend on centralized oracles. And for anything related to actual real world you must go through centralized entities.
    - lamp987 4y ago
      "And for anything useful you depend on centralized oracles." chainlink etc
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        > chainlink etc Which are entirely dependent on centralised oracles etc. Hint: if there are only 2/5/10 centralised oracles providing you with data, no amount of fluffy "decentralised tamper-proof inputs" statements make them such.
    - 4y ago
isodev 4y ago
This is a list of things people have created, none of which offers any kind of improvement or transformative change. The fact that someone's money had been sucked into this black hole also doesn't justify the technology or its intentions. As every good old pyramid scheme, the crypto ecosystem needs you to believe that investing time and money has merits. That's how the few at the top benefit from the whole scheme.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  I replied elsewhere in the tree on this thread. But exchanges, lending markets, human coordination over the internet, capital allocation, novel on-chain governance structures for organizations, smart contract multisig wallets, zero knowledge proof gaming, zk privacy, hell, even programmable, accessible, liquid, token-denominated assets have incredible value for the world. Value is being created despite your inability to distinguish the wheat from the chaffe.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    I can also write lists of things and pretend that long lists === list of value.
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    How does any of this help a typical financial products consumer? Can you explain where I can do $0.00 transactions to my friends? Can you point me to where I can get a better deal on a refinance or HELOC loan with my house as collateral? Because I love financial products that help me retain my earned money, and am avid about getting the best deals. Right now I have 0$ transactions, 3.75% actual guaranteed returns on cash (not a 50% chance of being worth $0 by next year a la FTX, genesis, blockfi, etc.), 3% cash back on transactions that cost a business 2.5%, and would love a cheaper HELOC than traditional banks. However, none of anything you mentioned actually does any of this better, the things that 99.8% people actually want, rather than speculative "investments" they're hoping to sell for more later. What's that YC slogan again? "Make something people want."
    - 4y ago

dimgl 4y ago

robcohen 4y ago
Don’t hold your breath.
charlieyu1 4y ago
If you are focusing on the bad side of a tech, AI could do way worse than crypto. I mean, the most evil thing you can do with crypto is merely taking away money from people.
- jchw 4y ago
  You're thinking too small. If you really want to get cynical, you could think about the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact. Or more realistically, what happens today: facilitation of ransomware and the sale of illegal material. You could argue that most of these theoretical consequences have nothing to do with the technologies themselves, but that's true of almost all software technology. Even a potentially devastating piece of malware is, in a vacuum, just some bytes floating in space, with no inherent meaning until someone chooses to execute it. Most discussions about morals in programming and computer science either ignore or gloss over this part as if it is already answered, but it probably matters. There's some arbitrary dividing line where you decide when the blame lies with the operator(s) vs the technology itself. In practice, I think it's more useful to look at it in terms of who's executing the code instead of who's writing it, since in practice the existence of code that does something is basically an inevitability, in a world where you can only rely on impracticality for a limited amount of time and where it's basically impossible to hold a monopoly on some piece of knowledge or information forever. I think this also is rather helpful when you look at things like exploits: if someone makes a genuine mistake in their software, for which they expressly disclaimed any warranty, it would be weird for them to be culpable when it impacts an operator; but if someone were to be using said software to store user data, and that user data were leaked via an exploit in software, it's more reasonable to say the operator is responsible. Code itself doesn't usually have much intent encoded into it, so it's unreasonable to go in from a perspective that assumes that you can judge the morality of software itself. But then, taking this to its logical extreme, it might be a little too absolutist; even if software is inevitable, that doesn't mean that culpability for intentionally destructive behavior is necessarily a bad idea. Either way, from this viewpoint, I think you can easily argue that cryptocurrency and AI both have enormous potential to cause consequences in the world. It isn't necessarily that the technologies themselves are inherently bad, but from a practical standpoint it doesn't really matter.
  - cflynnus 4y ago
    > the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact. https://endthefud.org/energy https://endthefud.org/energy
chrisco255 4y ago
Can you name one practical product built on top of ChatGPT? I don't even want to knock the tech, I think they're both fantastic, but blockchain has far more product-market fit than chatbots do. Not only that, but in a world of ever increasing and convincing AI deep fakes, a ledger with built-in cryptographic identity primitives will become increasingly useful for identifying, timestamping, and hashing authentic content in a plausibly neutral way.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- csb6 4y ago
  ChatGPT was released less than a week ago, so I would be very surprised if a practical product was already built on it.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Fine, how about GPT3 or Stable Diffusion? Does the world really need deep fakes? Doesn't it cause more harm than good? The debate is really still out on that one, especially with regards to AI. I find AI amusing as well, I wouldn't want to knock it, but it would be very easy for me to craft cynical arguments against it. I might even enlist ChatGPT to help me make the case.
    - bratbag 4y ago
      Stable diffusion has been used to create artwork for shoestring budget projects. I've used it to generate prototype images before hiring an artist to get precisely what we want and a designer friend of mine uses it as a starting point for manual modification, drastically increasing his output. Direct, practical, real tangible work enhancers that we could not do before. Unlike crypto
lamp987 4y ago
youre gonna wait a loooong time then

andrewflnr 4y ago

Ok, I'll grant the game sounds cool.

Gigachad 4y ago

What value did any of this provide to the world? Just reads like a buzzword soup where finance bros find more and more obscure ways to leach money.

rglullis 4y ago
Don't you guys get tired of rehashing the same baseless arguments over and over again? The value of decentralized platforms is that it gets rid of the tech bros and financial scams. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can make transactions independently, without having to blindly trust that the funds are actually there. If people transacted using DeFI, there would be no FTX, no Coinbase, no VC trying to leech off the masses.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > The value of decentralized platforms is that it gets rid of the tech bros and financial scams. Ah yes. No scams or tech bros. Except the implicit blind trust in programs written in esoteric programming languages on esoteric VMs that are rife with financial scams. > If people transacted using DeFI, there would be no FTX, no Coinbase, no VC trying to leech off the masses. Except that Uniswap is currently almost 100% automated bots "swapping" fictional tokens. And for anything useful you depend on centralized oracles. And for anything related to actual real world you must go through centralized entities.
  - lamp987 4y ago
    "And for anything useful you depend on centralized oracles." chainlink etc
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > chainlink etc Which are entirely dependent on centralised oracles etc. Hint: if there are only 2/5/10 centralised oracles providing you with data, no amount of fluffy "decentralised tamper-proof inputs" statements make them such.
  - 4y ago

isodev 4y ago

This is a list of things people have created, none of which offers any kind of improvement or transformative change. The fact that someone's money had been sucked into this black hole also doesn't justify the technology or its intentions. As every good old pyramid scheme, the crypto ecosystem needs you to believe that investing time and money has merits. That's how the few at the top benefit from the whole scheme.

chrisco255 4y ago
I replied elsewhere in the tree on this thread. But exchanges, lending markets, human coordination over the internet, capital allocation, novel on-chain governance structures for organizations, smart contract multisig wallets, zero knowledge proof gaming, zk privacy, hell, even programmable, accessible, liquid, token-denominated assets have incredible value for the world. Value is being created despite your inability to distinguish the wheat from the chaffe.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  I can also write lists of things and pretend that long lists === list of value.
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  How does any of this help a typical financial products consumer? Can you explain where I can do $0.00 transactions to my friends? Can you point me to where I can get a better deal on a refinance or HELOC loan with my house as collateral? Because I love financial products that help me retain my earned money, and am avid about getting the best deals. Right now I have 0$ transactions, 3.75% actual guaranteed returns on cash (not a 50% chance of being worth $0 by next year a la FTX, genesis, blockfi, etc.), 3% cash back on transactions that cost a business 2.5%, and would love a cheaper HELOC than traditional banks. However, none of anything you mentioned actually does any of this better, the things that 99.8% people actually want, rather than speculative "investments" they're hoping to sell for more later. What's that YC slogan again? "Make something people want."
  - 4y ago