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Still waiting to hear one of these valid and good uses cases for a publicly distributed ledger. One of these days I’ll hear one, but I haven’t yet. Circumventin

Still waiting to hear one of these valid and good uses cases for a publicly distributed ledger. One of these days I’ll hear one, but I haven’t yet. Circumventing oppressive regimes seems to be the only thing I’ve heard of that vaguely sounds like a value proposition.

emptysongglass 4y ago
That you don't see one just means that you don't see one and by shouting down anyone else who disagrees, as the HN hivemind has in every crypto thread I've seen to date, doesn't mean one exists, it just means that in this community a valid and good use case may as well not exist. People, including me, have tried to explain, many times, the valid use cases but HN at large disagrees and has made that distaste clear. That's fine but you'll forgive us for giving up. Those you disagree with aren't idiots, they just have a different perspective and don't see it as useless.
- taormina 4y ago
  I'd love to have a meaningful conversation. I'd love to hear a novel idea. You have to forgive me for being a little jaded though when I continually ask to hear a use case and I continually don't get use cases. "Some places are so terrible that the only external financial systems unregulated enough to allow them to participate are these specific unregulated financial markets" is some net good being produced in end for the citizens of those regimes, and circumstantially the "block chain did that" I guess, but that still doesn't tell me why you needed a block chain to be involved to begin with.
  - emptysongglass 4y ago
    At risk of sounding like I'm patronizing you, which I'm not, that ship has sailed. If you'd like to view arguments by people with a more balanced view of crypto, there are a ton of threads you can find on the topic with the help of Algolia. Maybe when the HN majority finds a way to interact with us that isn't awful, people like me will be willing to engage in discussion again.
RestlessMind 4y ago
This has come up so often that I have listed some interesting real world examples of Bitcoin usage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
- Fuzzwah 4y ago
  These all appear to be the same use case of "to transfer money, outside the control of governments". The problem with that is, these transactions are now on an immutable ledger (which is the actual use case of block chains). These transactions could have been made with any "thing" that enough people agree has some value.
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > could have been made with any "thing" "any" is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Apart from people agreeing on value, that thing also has to be: 1. out of their governments' control (all the examples had governments gone bad), 2. easy to transfer/carry, 3. durable. Can you please name a few alternatives if you think that's a simple problem? Bitcoin fits the bill for those aspects. Can you name a few other "things"?
    - Fuzzwah 4y ago
      Gold. Shells. Anything that people have used as money over the years. I do not disagree that blockchain tech has a good use case. It's just that it does one thing: a distributed ledger. That's it.
      - RestlessMind 4y ago
        "That's it" fails to capture the fact that said tech still has a collective market cap of $984B[1], after it has had precipitous drop in value over the last 12 months. Maybe, a distributed ledger for digital goods is a massively valuable tool for humanity? [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/
- 4y ago

emptysongglass 4y ago

That you don't see one just means that you don't see one and by shouting down anyone else who disagrees, as the HN hivemind has in every crypto thread I've seen to date, doesn't mean one exists, it just means that in this community a valid and good use case may as well not exist. People, including me, have tried to explain, many times, the valid use cases but HN at large disagrees and has made that distaste clear. That's fine but you'll forgive us for giving up. Those you disagree with aren't idiots, they just have a different perspective and don't see it as useless.

taormina 4y ago
I'd love to have a meaningful conversation. I'd love to hear a novel idea. You have to forgive me for being a little jaded though when I continually ask to hear a use case and I continually don't get use cases. "Some places are so terrible that the only external financial systems unregulated enough to allow them to participate are these specific unregulated financial markets" is some net good being produced in end for the citizens of those regimes, and circumstantially the "block chain did that" I guess, but that still doesn't tell me why you needed a block chain to be involved to begin with.
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  At risk of sounding like I'm patronizing you, which I'm not, that ship has sailed. If you'd like to view arguments by people with a more balanced view of crypto, there are a ton of threads you can find on the topic with the help of Algolia. Maybe when the HN majority finds a way to interact with us that isn't awful, people like me will be willing to engage in discussion again.

RestlessMind 4y ago

This has come up so often that I have listed some interesting real world examples of Bitcoin usage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

Fuzzwah 4y ago
These all appear to be the same use case of "to transfer money, outside the control of governments". The problem with that is, these transactions are now on an immutable ledger (which is the actual use case of block chains). These transactions could have been made with any "thing" that enough people agree has some value.
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  > could have been made with any "thing" "any" is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Apart from people agreeing on value, that thing also has to be: 1. out of their governments' control (all the examples had governments gone bad), 2. easy to transfer/carry, 3. durable. Can you please name a few alternatives if you think that's a simple problem? Bitcoin fits the bill for those aspects. Can you name a few other "things"?
  - Fuzzwah 4y ago
    Gold. Shells. Anything that people have used as money over the years. I do not disagree that blockchain tech has a good use case. It's just that it does one thing: a distributed ledger. That's it.
    - RestlessMind 4y ago
      "That's it" fails to capture the fact that said tech still has a collective market cap of $984B[1], after it has had precipitous drop in value over the last 12 months. Maybe, a distributed ledger for digital goods is a massively valuable tool for humanity? [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/
4y ago