24 ms·

Is Crypto Dead?

elijahmoses 4y ago
Personally, I don't think Crypto is dead, since their are many applications for blockchain in our world going forward. Nevertheless, I feel the initial hype of making quick money from Crypto has definitely died, because many lost money in the Crypto bull market.
- hawthornio 4y ago
  What applications of blockchain do you envision? I have not yet encountered a use that is better served by blockchain than, for example, an append-only DB.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    When consortia of industries are trying to convince third parties that the information on their append-only DB is reliable. So basically marketing.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Name any append only DB with uptime equivalent to any crypto blockchain network.
    - xcvbjbhvfgx 4y ago
      for the same out of pocket price? every single one of them! heck even paying 5 lawyers to work in shifts around the clock taking calls and updating a local excell sheet is cheaper with better uptime
      - lrvick 4y ago
        They can handle 5 transactions a second while constantly providing proof to millions of users that the data has not and can not be tampered with, even if you bribe or threaten all 5 lawyers? Those are some superhuman lawyers.
        anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > while constantly providing proof to millions of users that the data has not and can not be tampered with The BNB Beacon Chain doesn't sync: https://datafinnovation.medium.com/bnb-beacon-chain-not-a-blockchain-3230dda7172c https://datafinnovation.medium.com/bnb-beacon-chain-not-a-bl...
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    It's preferable where there's a reason to distrust a custodian of the data. Of course, most of the use cases dreamed up don't fit that description, and much of the hype may have eroded confidence in the term.
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    There are lot of documents to proof document identity, for instance, notaries in Brazil: https://finbold.com/brazil-authenticates-156k-documents-via-blockchain-in-last-four-months/ https://finbold.com/brazil-authenticates-156k-documents-via-...
    - Oxidation 4y ago
      What does a blockchain bring to that process that signing a document with a normal public-private key pair does not?
      - latchkey 4y ago
        Who holds the private key, the end user or a centralized entity?
        Oxidation 4y ago
        Presumably the equivalent to the Brazilian notary blockchain would be a centralised entity (in this case, probably Growth Tech[1], or perhaps the central government or a key sharing scheme between the both of them), since that's a private permissioned blockchain. [1]: https://growthtech.com.br https://growthtech.com.br
        latchkey 4y ago
        IMHO, the whole private permission based blockchain thing is just a poor attempt at a very slow database. This concept really hasn't caught on, primarily because of the centralized aspects. While we are very far way from this concept in the real world, I'd prefer my proof of identity documents to live on something that isn't controlled by any single entity other than myself. Sure makes them a lot more difficult to revoke or modify without my consent.
        Oxidation 4y ago
        Even with a hypothetical maximally decentralised system, there's always a centralised chokepoint where a specific organisation (including and perhaps especially, a state) that you wish to prove your identity to chooses to unconditionally accept records from the system.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Remittance, anonymous payments, proof of authorship, decentralized DNS, international financial contract enforcement, provably fair gambling, immutable digital asset ownership, publicly accountable donations... just off the top of my head. It takes little imagination to see many use cases for a computing system that no single party can control. It is the difference in a dictatorship vs a democracy.
    - hesdeadjim 4y ago
      How do you reconcile these statements against a 51% attack that is already possible with Bitcoin? Decentralized? Hardly.
      - reedjosh 4y ago
        Possible does not mean likely or easy. Bitcoin is by far the most secure and decentralized crypto to date. If you have ideas on how to build an even more decentralized or secure money, then please do so. Regardless, there is definitely need for money outside of the control of centralized actors.
        hesdeadjim 4y ago
        I want crypto to die in a fire. It is 100% a Ponzi scheme with no real world use case. If there was a use, we would have seen something useful come out of the Etherium project by now — other than a demonstration that majority group consensus can rewrite an “immutable” ledger.
      - lrvick 4y ago
        If 51% of US politicians all decided the value of the US dollar should become 0, then it would be so... and yet it is still a representative democracy which is a decentralized form of governance. This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage. Even if they did most of the public would likely just ignore the decision. https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/ covers this question in regards to cryptoassets. It will cost something like $1m/hour to attack Bitcoin, but to even do that you would already need to actually convince 51% of miners to light their profits on fire for no reason. Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well.
  - philippz 4y ago
    Without giving you a monologue, I'll give you some food for thought in a very few statements. 1. The internet you know today allowed people to connect and share information globally. 2. Over the years, we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge. 3. We have no way to deal with digital assets, which has implications and inefficiencies. DRM was a symptom & soft way to deal with this problem. 4. While the internet connects globally, it is not made to reflect ownership on a global level. Real ownership either doesn't exist or is not transparent. And while privacy is important, ownership should at least be cryptographically provable. 5. Blockchains do not aim to replace the internet or your database; they are a layer on top of the internet, giving us a new foundation to rethink and rebuild how we deal with digital value creation. In some way, it will bring humanity closer on a global level. On top of that, there are many philosophic, societal, and idealistic ideas. A lot of them require or trigger a systemic change—many of them we might never see happening, at least not in our lifetime. If you want to learn more, you need to dig in.
    - phpnode 4y ago
      You wrote a lot of words but did not answer the question
      - philippz 4y ago
        Because the question needs to be revised. It is not about what you can do with an append only database vs. blockchain. That's not reflecting its purpose.
        phpnode 4y ago
        Ok, please could you list some tangible, practical and cost effective use cases for blockchain that are not better solved with other technologies?
        philippz 4y ago
        * Insurances (e.g. your travel insurance) are contracts. They should be digital, standardized, on a public ledger, so that I can travel anywhere and prove that I have one instead of having to bring, a fakeable piece of paper. * If I resell my phone, transfering the remaining guarantee and/or insurance should be nothing else then a transaction. On the blockchain that's 10x more efficient than the status quo. * If an artist sells his art the first time for $10, and the person resells it for 10000$, then the artist should be compensated too. Royalty mechanisms can solve for that and avoid secondary markets or at least create a more beneficial secondary. There are an endless amount of examples which will make a lot of things more efficient, transparent and enforce standardization on a global level. Long way to go, but absolutely worth it.
  - elijahmoses 4y ago
    [dead]
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > What applications of blockchain do you envision? "digital store of value" which is: not controlled by any centralized entity and thus immune to corruption of the said entity, easily transferable, fungible, easy to divide into sub-units. I have compiled various usage examples of such a technology here[1], but primarily it boils down to "shitty governments", which covers a vast portion of humanity. Traditionally, this was Gold but BTC is better at transfers than Gold. Maintenance burden is lighter for BTC on the one hand because you just have to memorize 12 words, but it is also susceptible to hacks on the other hand compared to Gold. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
    - D13Fd 4y ago
      Except gold has intrinsic value, and cryptocurrency has none.
      - RestlessMind 4y ago
        > gold has intrinsic value Gold market cap is >12T$, which is nowhere close to its actual intrinsic value. A lot of that market cap is due to the collective myth we have bought into that Gold is a store of value. If you don't see that, then probably you also won't be able to see the usecase of BTC. Moreover, if you do not see a need for a store of value in general (which is totally based on collective myths and less so on actual intrinsic values), then you are probably in a cute bubble somewhere.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  For better or worse, the period of hype tends to come back (typically in the months after Bitcoin's 4 year halving cycle)
- yokoprime 4y ago
  I have yet to see an application of crypto where it’s not just solving a solved problem in a more convoluted manner. We have had digital certificates for decades which works efficiently to establish validation through digital signatures. Most use cases presented by blockchain enthusiasts competes with solutions based off of simple digital signatures.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    I have compiled a list of BTC usecases here[1]. Can you please provide me an already available alternative for those examples, which is clearly superior to BTC? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
- himinlomax 4y ago
  By "going forward," do you mean that no one has come up with one just yet?
- Yoric 4y ago
  So maybe we're going to see actually useful applications? Until now, it's unclear if there were any because anything that wasn't a ponzi scheme was drowned under the lure of free money.
Terretta 4y ago
> Is Crypto Dead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- Yuioup 4y ago
  Except that the answer should be yes
lrvick 4y ago
Another entry for: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-is-dead/ https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-is-dead/ edit: apparently I cannot read and this article is a rare exception.
- reedjosh 4y ago
  The first line of the article says it's not dead. I like your link, but the author of the article is actually saying it's not dead
mountainriver 4y ago
I still don’t think we’ve seen many good use cases. If people were being honest they would know that crypto was propped up initially by the drug trade and largely continues to be. There might be a killer application down the road but investing in AI is so much more useful to humanity
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  Drug trade and ransomware. Crypto has huge externalities, even apart from people being scammed.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Drug trade and ransoms... we should clearly ban cash and visa gift cards and any form of anonymous payment then, right?
  - dist1ll 4y ago
    The good ol' "criminals use it" Might as well ban e2e encryption. Or any security-enhancing measure that can protect individuals.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      The difference is my mom uses e2e encryption to check her emails and sell jewelry on etsy. She's never used BTC to buy anything. Outside of a few tech bros in SF or Austin no one is buying houses in BTC. I don't know a single person on either coast or in any city that has used BTC to directly buy groceries; pretty much everyone I know has used e2e encryption to buy something off of Amazon.
- devd00d 4y ago
  Evidence?
- LMYahooTFY 4y ago
  This claim was made often early on, without any supporting evidence. Because the network and userbase was smaller it was more plausible. Now it's substantially larger, and industry has developed within it. So what's honest about claiming that it was or continues to be without any data? Even if you decided to go out and attempt to gather this data (good luck), why does this matter? How much impact to the USD do you think there would be if all illegal drug trade stopped tomorrow?
louwrentius 4y ago
I’ve scrolled through all the graphs but this question is never answered. I’m not knowledgeable enough to interpret the data. So I can only express my sincere hope that it is true. I think crypto is a blight on our societies and has caused tremendous damage and suffering for those who were too trusting, desperate (or both) and lost. I was somewhat surprised to see that bitcoin’s value has risen quite a bit recently. But then again, this is a space in which people do all that is normally forbidden (like wash trading) to try and get the number go up. I personally believe crypto was never even alive to begin with in a legal/moral sense, but maybe that’s just me.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  The graphs show that, with the possible exception of the Centralized exchanges, there's more revenue out than in. On the protocol level (though I didn't see the Centralized exchange protocols in the graphs), on the Decentralized exchange level, etcetera. Basically all of crypto except the goldpan and pickaxe sellers, and some rare gold miners and gold traders, are as deeply in the red as Charlie Javice's startups. Not mentioned in the article of graphs is that if this ever isn't the case it becomes more and more likely that a Sybil attack would become worthwhile. To protect against a Sybil attack you need to keep the value of the coins needed for a Sybil attack at greater than the total value of each protocol. I guess this is also the case for regular companies, with P/E greater than 1, and a marketcap greater than the liquidation value of the company. But it also means that people can't all cash out at once, only at a trickle. For publicly held companies a larger company, or a billionaire, can buy out all shareholders at the current share price. But for crypto most of the value of the coins or tokens are that other people are willing to buy them at the current price. If someone buys out all of the tokens for a protocol it automatically loses its value. If crypto ever is used primarily as a currency maybe you don't need to cash out, but that's a big IF. These charts showed me that publicly held crypto really is a ponzi-like scheme.
  - louwrentius 4y ago
    Thank you for clarifying and providing context.
pfdietz 4y ago
[flagged]
smoldesu 4y ago
They're conveniently zoomed all the way out on their graphs. Scrolling down to the DAUs, developer count and overall revenue (at the bottom btw), it's pretty obvious that things have shifted downward since September. I get that this is supposed to be one of those 'draw your own conclusions' articles, but it doesn't really work when there's such a sharp short-term loss at the end of the bubble.
jrm4 4y ago
Look. I don't love it or hate it; not an evangelist or anything. 99% of what you see calling it a scam is accurate. But once that all shakes out -- I still think it's just getting started. The use cases aren't what a lot of people thought they would be -- but the ones that are actually useful are doing fine, and the world of "all the other money" is in such a bad state that I can't help but see some form of widespread adoption as completely inevitable.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Having felt this for a while (and then jumping off the bandwagon in ~2017), I feel like Crypto's dream of a 'money protocol' has been perverted too far to touch. Go figure, introducing money into a democratic system incentivizes the wrong things. Maybe things will shake out differently in the future, but there's not a chance in hell that a money API gets made without some form of regulation or profiteering. Goodwill alone is not enough to drive a bartering system, as proven by the disaster that is crypto's overall price instability and corresponding 'stablecoin' corruption.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    "API" is a funny term to use here, considering that APIs are always "permission based," borderline political. Crypto is designed to be somewhat of the opposite of that idea. Anyway, I think the real use case isn't "day to day transactions," it's better "money in a mattress." along with a staking/savings instrument.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  No, I don't think so. I think it's not dead yet, but it's definitely stalling. On the tech side, it seems to be stagnating. Bitcoin is still the most popular one, and it's stopped improving. The capacity is fixed, the use for normal people is not really there, adoption has gone backwards. Things like NFTs have been a temporary boon, but then didn't quite work. For the big players, there seem to be daily scandals and bankruptcies. It's becoming clear that many of them were barely hanging by a thread, and many have complete morons in charge. They're also being targeted by law enforcement. On the public side, I think it's peaked. Crypto got advertised more or less everywhere and nobody really cared. By now pretty much who was going to get into it already has, and there's not much more room to expand into.
est 4y ago
The asian crypto hype was surely dead. It was largely driven by rich people trying to smuggle money out of China.
dadoge 4y ago
Bitcoin “crashed” to a market cap of 440 billion USD. It is valued more than the vast majority of publicly traded companies. From that measure alone, why should anyone think “it’s dead”? Bitcoin ain’t tulips, ain’t the pets.com, etc, to think something that is 14 years old and valued at 440 billion is going to die anytime soon seems…so wrong Especially when in the past 2 weeks, BlackRock (biggest asset manager) is continuing to dabble more in bitcoin https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-investment-to-15b-fund/ https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-in...
- quonn 4y ago
  pets.com at least provided _some_ value.
  - dadoge 4y ago
    How could something be worth 440 billion in market cap after a major correction not be valuable? This is after having a 14 year history of people learning about it, not some scam coin like LUNA that went from zero to 40 billion and to zero in less than 1 year
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      For the simple reason that market corrections are not absolutes: the only thing that a correction down to 440B tells us is that it hasn’t been corrected down to 0 yet. It may never be, but that’s just to say that “it’s still valued” is not a good argument for “it’s correctly valued.”
    - quonn 4y ago
      If I take 80 Dollars from you and promise to return you 50, is this operation also worth 50 Dollars? If so, what‘s the meaning of „worth“? If I open a bank account and someone else deposits 1 billion there and I have a contract that obliges me to return the money in a year and I am not allowed to move it or use it as a security, is my bank account or the bank creating it „worth“ 1 billion? Whether bitcoin is worth something as a tool/currency cannot be measured well by the amount of money stored in it.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
It may revive. If it becomes regulated and inspected and secure, you know, like real currencies.
latchkey 4y ago
The ETH token issuance changed significantly with the change from PoW to PoS. There is no more issuance to miners, it all goes to stakers now and is tiny compared with what was going to miners. The sudden graph change under #3 (Sept 15th), is actually a good thing. A better visual of this is https://ultrasound.money/ https://ultrasound.money/
- verdverm 4y ago
  > is actually a good thing If you believe that those who have the most should get more going forward. The new system concentrates the wealth more than the old system
  - 56friends 4y ago
    I have several friends who stake ETH. Never met a single miner in person.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      I was a miner and you only have 56 friends... so would you like 57? =)
      - 56friends 4y ago
        Haha we would need to meet in person for that to invalidate my previous statement!
    - verdverm 4y ago
      Staking pool or outright staking? Lots of people mined before the hardware got sophisticated enough to price out the smaller miners. Even so, there were still people mining on GPUs. Do you remember when gamers and ML researchers were priced out of GPUs?
  - latchkey 4y ago
    I am of the view that in general, lowering inflation is a good thing. Given the success of PoS so far (1), ETH was over paying for security when there was another alternative way to do things... and this is coming from an ex-large scale miner. (1) We likely won't know for decades if the switch to PoS was indeed successful, but I do feel it is an interesting experiment
ww520 4y ago
Crypto has one application - soak up excessive speculative capital. And annihilate them in the process.
jmyeet 4y ago
This [1] is worth watching in full. Crypto, to me, has shown three things: 1. Its only use case is bypassing laws; 2. Crypto thrives on desperation and hopelessness. I think more and more people are realizing that their circumstances (or "material conditions" if you prefer) are awful. So many people are bordering on food and housing insecurity. So many people feel like they'll never "get ahead". Everyone saw Bitcoin's meteoric rise and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin; and 3. Despite crypto having no use cases and being a giant Ponzi scheme, it's amazing how long something can persist when people want it to be true. So is it dead? Not yet. It may never die. But it should. It's worth noting Weaver's Iron Law of Blockchain [2] > When somebody says you can solve X with blockchain, they don’t understand X, and you can ignore them. I'll also note that apparently the Bitcoin network used 200TWh in 2022. It came up in another thread the other day that Google in 2020 used 15TWh. Now compare the utility. Think about that. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORdWE_ffirg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORdWE_ffirg [2]: https://twitter.com/Kellblog/status/1532756678596124673 https://twitter.com/Kellblog/status/1532756678596124673
- hiq 4y ago
  > 1. Its only use case is bypassing laws; > 3. Despite crypto having no use cases You're contradicting yourself here.
- hossbeast 4y ago
  If you think 200TWh is too much to operate the Bitcoin network, is there a smaller number you would find reasonable?
  - jmyeet 4y ago
    Let's compare to Visa [1]: > According to VISA corporate responsibility and sustainability report in 2017, the company consumed a total amount of 680,560 GigaJoules of energy globally for all its operations (1). We also know VISA processed 111.2 billion transactions in 2017 (2). Rely on these numbers, VISA ECPT is 0.0017 kilowatt-hours and for simplification 100,000 VISA transactions consume 170 kWh. 680,000 GJ is roughly 190GWh (0.1%). But it gets worse. In 2017 Visa executed ~111B transactions. Bitcoin peaks at about ~90M. So 1000x the energy for 1/1000 of the transaction volume. So each Bitcoin transaction uses ~1,000,000 times the energy of a Visa transaction. [1]: https://medium.com/@a.abbaszadeh.s/measuring-iota-pow-s-energy-consumption-and-comparing-with-other-payment-systems-413f4de50274 https://medium.com/@a.abbaszadeh.s/measuring-iota-pow-s-ener...
kris-nova 4y ago
Yes. If you have to ask then you know the answer.
- dist1ll 4y ago
  Betteridge disagrees with you
  - kris-nova 4y ago
    Excellent. Most people and resources sited on this Machiavellian capitalist mega-bro site often disagree with me. I take it as a compliment. It’s a positive sign I’m on to something sustainable and worth investing my time into. Thanks for helping me smile today.
    - dist1ll 4y ago
      To avoid some misunderstanding, I was referring to Betteridge's law of headlines [0]. Just an attempt at humor from my side, nothing else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
paulpauper 4y ago
These metrics do not mean anything in the context of investing. The protocol is not going anywhere, but so what. This does not mean it's a good investment. Developer counts, push requests, etc...these metrics are easily inflated, such as due to churn volume or making tiny or trivial modifications to code.
ThomPete 4y ago
AI is the use case blockchain didn't know it was looking for. The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that. With regards to crypto specifically microscopic payments will be needed to allow for adding cost to a lot of the things that are currently "free" now that AI content creation is going to overwhelm all of us.
- quotemstr 4y ago
  > The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that. No it isn't. Blockchains have no solution to the oracle problem. A blockchain is useless for distinguishing AI-generated content from other content for the same reason a blockchain is useless for managing mortgages on real property.
  - ThomPete 4y ago
    There is no solution to the oracle problem. But there is a solution to the trusted protocol problem by only trusting content created through transformers as you will be able to see the intent it was created with.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > "The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that." I don't see how this is the case. Any blockchain verification is one off, and limited to the chain it is on. I, and many other people, would probably more trust a variety of centralized claims to truth or trust, than a decentralized claim. You trust when multiple parties state how they verified, you don't trust when one party writes "this is true" to a decentralized service, without all of the evidence they used to verify as true. Crypto, except transactions on centralized exchanges, is hideous for microscopic payments. It costs too much to verify even minimal transactions on chain (even more for contracts). It's a lot, lot cheaper to use a centralized service for minimal transactions.
pawelduda 4y ago
"Is Crypto Dead?", the very king of clickbaity article titles, brought to you by a crypto website.
nforgerit 4y ago
Thing is, I'm rather neutral to it, though for years I'm getting bombarded with ponzi-like BS in Feeds, Meetups, articles and other public occasions. That's a shame because it contaminates everything around it. I'm pretty sure it would make sense for a tax authority to infrequently poll the head of a hash-chain of a businesses' bookkeeping process to avoid the (at least in Germany) stupid manual process that it is now. But the whole crypto bro smell around that makes me very reluctant even exploring this direction.
- detaro 4y ago
  That doesn't really need the multiparty aspects of a blockchain though, you can solve that with just cryptography. (Indeed in Germany digital cashier machines etc already need to store such logs and print the transaction checksum etc on receipts - just storing that online instead of on the device is currently not common)
  - nforgerit 4y ago
    I was deliberately talking about a hash-chain and not about blockchain. Point is, if they infrequently collect the head's hash, the tax audit consists of just a recalculation. That could be a first step. If they then would somehow (like you mentioned) provide a service for providing authenticity of receipts, they'd have a system that works better than what they have now with much less work. Am I missing sth?
    - detaro 4y ago
      That it's not really relevant to discussion of "crypto" in the sense used here, and that this logging already exists and is the law? The checking obviously still needs to be done, and since people generally dont get receipts digitally requires some manual work.

Personally, I don't think Crypto is dead, since their are many applications for blockchain in our world going forward. Nevertheless, I feel the initial hype of making quick money from Crypto has definitely died, because many lost money in the Crypto bull market.

hawthornio 4y ago
What applications of blockchain do you envision? I have not yet encountered a use that is better served by blockchain than, for example, an append-only DB.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  When consortia of industries are trying to convince third parties that the information on their append-only DB is reliable. So basically marketing.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Name any append only DB with uptime equivalent to any crypto blockchain network.
  - xcvbjbhvfgx 4y ago
    for the same out of pocket price? every single one of them! heck even paying 5 lawyers to work in shifts around the clock taking calls and updating a local excell sheet is cheaper with better uptime
    - lrvick 4y ago
      They can handle 5 transactions a second while constantly providing proof to millions of users that the data has not and can not be tampered with, even if you bribe or threaten all 5 lawyers? Those are some superhuman lawyers.
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > while constantly providing proof to millions of users that the data has not and can not be tampered with The BNB Beacon Chain doesn't sync: https://datafinnovation.medium.com/bnb-beacon-chain-not-a-blockchain-3230dda7172c https://datafinnovation.medium.com/bnb-beacon-chain-not-a-bl...
- bdcravens 4y ago
  It's preferable where there's a reason to distrust a custodian of the data. Of course, most of the use cases dreamed up don't fit that description, and much of the hype may have eroded confidence in the term.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  There are lot of documents to proof document identity, for instance, notaries in Brazil: https://finbold.com/brazil-authenticates-156k-documents-via-blockchain-in-last-four-months/ https://finbold.com/brazil-authenticates-156k-documents-via-...
  - Oxidation 4y ago
    What does a blockchain bring to that process that signing a document with a normal public-private key pair does not?
    - latchkey 4y ago
      Who holds the private key, the end user or a centralized entity?
      - Oxidation 4y ago
        Presumably the equivalent to the Brazilian notary blockchain would be a centralised entity (in this case, probably Growth Tech[1], or perhaps the central government or a key sharing scheme between the both of them), since that's a private permissioned blockchain. [1]: https://growthtech.com.br https://growthtech.com.br
        latchkey 4y ago
        IMHO, the whole private permission based blockchain thing is just a poor attempt at a very slow database. This concept really hasn't caught on, primarily because of the centralized aspects. While we are very far way from this concept in the real world, I'd prefer my proof of identity documents to live on something that isn't controlled by any single entity other than myself. Sure makes them a lot more difficult to revoke or modify without my consent.
        Oxidation 4y ago
        Even with a hypothetical maximally decentralised system, there's always a centralised chokepoint where a specific organisation (including and perhaps especially, a state) that you wish to prove your identity to chooses to unconditionally accept records from the system.
- lrvick 4y ago
  Remittance, anonymous payments, proof of authorship, decentralized DNS, international financial contract enforcement, provably fair gambling, immutable digital asset ownership, publicly accountable donations... just off the top of my head. It takes little imagination to see many use cases for a computing system that no single party can control. It is the difference in a dictatorship vs a democracy.
  - hesdeadjim 4y ago
    How do you reconcile these statements against a 51% attack that is already possible with Bitcoin? Decentralized? Hardly.
    - reedjosh 4y ago
      Possible does not mean likely or easy. Bitcoin is by far the most secure and decentralized crypto to date. If you have ideas on how to build an even more decentralized or secure money, then please do so. Regardless, there is definitely need for money outside of the control of centralized actors.
      - hesdeadjim 4y ago
        I want crypto to die in a fire. It is 100% a Ponzi scheme with no real world use case. If there was a use, we would have seen something useful come out of the Etherium project by now — other than a demonstration that majority group consensus can rewrite an “immutable” ledger.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      If 51% of US politicians all decided the value of the US dollar should become 0, then it would be so... and yet it is still a representative democracy which is a decentralized form of governance. This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage. Even if they did most of the public would likely just ignore the decision. https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/ covers this question in regards to cryptoassets. It will cost something like $1m/hour to attack Bitcoin, but to even do that you would already need to actually convince 51% of miners to light their profits on fire for no reason. Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well.
- philippz 4y ago
  Without giving you a monologue, I'll give you some food for thought in a very few statements. 1. The internet you know today allowed people to connect and share information globally. 2. Over the years, we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge. 3. We have no way to deal with digital assets, which has implications and inefficiencies. DRM was a symptom & soft way to deal with this problem. 4. While the internet connects globally, it is not made to reflect ownership on a global level. Real ownership either doesn't exist or is not transparent. And while privacy is important, ownership should at least be cryptographically provable. 5. Blockchains do not aim to replace the internet or your database; they are a layer on top of the internet, giving us a new foundation to rethink and rebuild how we deal with digital value creation. In some way, it will bring humanity closer on a global level. On top of that, there are many philosophic, societal, and idealistic ideas. A lot of them require or trigger a systemic change—many of them we might never see happening, at least not in our lifetime. If you want to learn more, you need to dig in.
  - phpnode 4y ago
    You wrote a lot of words but did not answer the question
    - philippz 4y ago
      Because the question needs to be revised. It is not about what you can do with an append only database vs. blockchain. That's not reflecting its purpose.
      - phpnode 4y ago
        Ok, please could you list some tangible, practical and cost effective use cases for blockchain that are not better solved with other technologies?
        philippz 4y ago
        * Insurances (e.g. your travel insurance) are contracts. They should be digital, standardized, on a public ledger, so that I can travel anywhere and prove that I have one instead of having to bring, a fakeable piece of paper. * If I resell my phone, transfering the remaining guarantee and/or insurance should be nothing else then a transaction. On the blockchain that's 10x more efficient than the status quo. * If an artist sells his art the first time for $10, and the person resells it for 10000$, then the artist should be compensated too. Royalty mechanisms can solve for that and avoid secondary markets or at least create a more beneficial secondary. There are an endless amount of examples which will make a lot of things more efficient, transparent and enforce standardization on a global level. Long way to go, but absolutely worth it.
- elijahmoses 4y ago
  [dead]
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  > What applications of blockchain do you envision? "digital store of value" which is: not controlled by any centralized entity and thus immune to corruption of the said entity, easily transferable, fungible, easy to divide into sub-units. I have compiled various usage examples of such a technology here[1], but primarily it boils down to "shitty governments", which covers a vast portion of humanity. Traditionally, this was Gold but BTC is better at transfers than Gold. Maintenance burden is lighter for BTC on the one hand because you just have to memorize 12 words, but it is also susceptible to hacks on the other hand compared to Gold. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    Except gold has intrinsic value, and cryptocurrency has none.
    - RestlessMind 4y ago
      > gold has intrinsic value Gold market cap is >12T$, which is nowhere close to its actual intrinsic value. A lot of that market cap is due to the collective myth we have bought into that Gold is a store of value. If you don't see that, then probably you also won't be able to see the usecase of BTC. Moreover, if you do not see a need for a store of value in general (which is totally based on collective myths and less so on actual intrinsic values), then you are probably in a cute bubble somewhere.
bdcravens 4y ago
For better or worse, the period of hype tends to come back (typically in the months after Bitcoin's 4 year halving cycle)
yokoprime 4y ago
I have yet to see an application of crypto where it’s not just solving a solved problem in a more convoluted manner. We have had digital certificates for decades which works efficiently to establish validation through digital signatures. Most use cases presented by blockchain enthusiasts competes with solutions based off of simple digital signatures.
- latchkey 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  I have compiled a list of BTC usecases here[1]. Can you please provide me an already available alternative for those examples, which is clearly superior to BTC? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
himinlomax 4y ago
By "going forward," do you mean that no one has come up with one just yet?
Yoric 4y ago
So maybe we're going to see actually useful applications? Until now, it's unclear if there were any because anything that wasn't a ponzi scheme was drowned under the lure of free money.

Terretta 4y ago

> Is Crypto Dead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Yuioup 4y ago
Except that the answer should be yes

lrvick 4y ago

Another entry for: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-is-dead/ https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-is-dead/ edit: apparently I cannot read and this article is a rare exception.

reedjosh 4y ago
The first line of the article says it's not dead. I like your link, but the author of the article is actually saying it's not dead

mountainriver 4y ago

I still don’t think we’ve seen many good use cases. If people were being honest they would know that crypto was propped up initially by the drug trade and largely continues to be. There might be a killer application down the road but investing in AI is so much more useful to humanity

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Drug trade and ransomware. Crypto has huge externalities, even apart from people being scammed.
- lrvick 4y ago
  Drug trade and ransoms... we should clearly ban cash and visa gift cards and any form of anonymous payment then, right?
- dist1ll 4y ago
  The good ol' "criminals use it" Might as well ban e2e encryption. Or any security-enhancing measure that can protect individuals.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    The difference is my mom uses e2e encryption to check her emails and sell jewelry on etsy. She's never used BTC to buy anything. Outside of a few tech bros in SF or Austin no one is buying houses in BTC. I don't know a single person on either coast or in any city that has used BTC to directly buy groceries; pretty much everyone I know has used e2e encryption to buy something off of Amazon.
devd00d 4y ago
Evidence?
LMYahooTFY 4y ago
This claim was made often early on, without any supporting evidence. Because the network and userbase was smaller it was more plausible. Now it's substantially larger, and industry has developed within it. So what's honest about claiming that it was or continues to be without any data? Even if you decided to go out and attempt to gather this data (good luck), why does this matter? How much impact to the USD do you think there would be if all illegal drug trade stopped tomorrow?

louwrentius 4y ago

I’ve scrolled through all the graphs but this question is never answered. I’m not knowledgeable enough to interpret the data. So I can only express my sincere hope that it is true. I think crypto is a blight on our societies and has caused tremendous damage and suffering for those who were too trusting, desperate (or both) and lost. I was somewhat surprised to see that bitcoin’s value has risen quite a bit recently. But then again, this is a space in which people do all that is normally forbidden (like wash trading) to try and get the number go up. I personally believe crypto was never even alive to begin with in a legal/moral sense, but maybe that’s just me.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
The graphs show that, with the possible exception of the Centralized exchanges, there's more revenue out than in. On the protocol level (though I didn't see the Centralized exchange protocols in the graphs), on the Decentralized exchange level, etcetera. Basically all of crypto except the goldpan and pickaxe sellers, and some rare gold miners and gold traders, are as deeply in the red as Charlie Javice's startups. Not mentioned in the article of graphs is that if this ever isn't the case it becomes more and more likely that a Sybil attack would become worthwhile. To protect against a Sybil attack you need to keep the value of the coins needed for a Sybil attack at greater than the total value of each protocol. I guess this is also the case for regular companies, with P/E greater than 1, and a marketcap greater than the liquidation value of the company. But it also means that people can't all cash out at once, only at a trickle. For publicly held companies a larger company, or a billionaire, can buy out all shareholders at the current share price. But for crypto most of the value of the coins or tokens are that other people are willing to buy them at the current price. If someone buys out all of the tokens for a protocol it automatically loses its value. If crypto ever is used primarily as a currency maybe you don't need to cash out, but that's a big IF. These charts showed me that publicly held crypto really is a ponzi-like scheme.
- louwrentius 4y ago
  Thank you for clarifying and providing context.

pfdietz 4y ago

[flagged]

smoldesu 4y ago

They're conveniently zoomed all the way out on their graphs. Scrolling down to the DAUs, developer count and overall revenue (at the bottom btw), it's pretty obvious that things have shifted downward since September. I get that this is supposed to be one of those 'draw your own conclusions' articles, but it doesn't really work when there's such a sharp short-term loss at the end of the bubble.

jrm4 4y ago

Look. I don't love it or hate it; not an evangelist or anything. 99% of what you see calling it a scam is accurate. But once that all shakes out -- I still think it's just getting started. The use cases aren't what a lot of people thought they would be -- but the ones that are actually useful are doing fine, and the world of "all the other money" is in such a bad state that I can't help but see some form of widespread adoption as completely inevitable.

smoldesu 4y ago
Having felt this for a while (and then jumping off the bandwagon in ~2017), I feel like Crypto's dream of a 'money protocol' has been perverted too far to touch. Go figure, introducing money into a democratic system incentivizes the wrong things. Maybe things will shake out differently in the future, but there's not a chance in hell that a money API gets made without some form of regulation or profiteering. Goodwill alone is not enough to drive a bartering system, as proven by the disaster that is crypto's overall price instability and corresponding 'stablecoin' corruption.
- jrm4 4y ago
  "API" is a funny term to use here, considering that APIs are always "permission based," borderline political. Crypto is designed to be somewhat of the opposite of that idea. Anyway, I think the real use case isn't "day to day transactions," it's better "money in a mattress." along with a staking/savings instrument.
dale_glass 4y ago
No, I don't think so. I think it's not dead yet, but it's definitely stalling. On the tech side, it seems to be stagnating. Bitcoin is still the most popular one, and it's stopped improving. The capacity is fixed, the use for normal people is not really there, adoption has gone backwards. Things like NFTs have been a temporary boon, but then didn't quite work. For the big players, there seem to be daily scandals and bankruptcies. It's becoming clear that many of them were barely hanging by a thread, and many have complete morons in charge. They're also being targeted by law enforcement. On the public side, I think it's peaked. Crypto got advertised more or less everywhere and nobody really cared. By now pretty much who was going to get into it already has, and there's not much more room to expand into.

est 4y ago

The asian crypto hype was surely dead. It was largely driven by rich people trying to smuggle money out of China.

dadoge 4y ago

Bitcoin “crashed” to a market cap of 440 billion USD. It is valued more than the vast majority of publicly traded companies. From that measure alone, why should anyone think “it’s dead”? Bitcoin ain’t tulips, ain’t the pets.com, etc, to think something that is 14 years old and valued at 440 billion is going to die anytime soon seems…so wrong Especially when in the past 2 weeks, BlackRock (biggest asset manager) is continuing to dabble more in bitcoin https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-investment-to-15b-fund/ https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-in...

quonn 4y ago
pets.com at least provided _some_ value.
- dadoge 4y ago
  How could something be worth 440 billion in market cap after a major correction not be valuable? This is after having a 14 year history of people learning about it, not some scam coin like LUNA that went from zero to 40 billion and to zero in less than 1 year
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    For the simple reason that market corrections are not absolutes: the only thing that a correction down to 440B tells us is that it hasn’t been corrected down to 0 yet. It may never be, but that’s just to say that “it’s still valued” is not a good argument for “it’s correctly valued.”
  - quonn 4y ago
    If I take 80 Dollars from you and promise to return you 50, is this operation also worth 50 Dollars? If so, what‘s the meaning of „worth“? If I open a bank account and someone else deposits 1 billion there and I have a contract that obliges me to return the money in a year and I am not allowed to move it or use it as a security, is my bank account or the bank creating it „worth“ 1 billion? Whether bitcoin is worth something as a tool/currency cannot be measured well by the amount of money stored in it.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

It may revive. If it becomes regulated and inspected and secure, you know, like real currencies.

latchkey 4y ago

The ETH token issuance changed significantly with the change from PoW to PoS. There is no more issuance to miners, it all goes to stakers now and is tiny compared with what was going to miners. The sudden graph change under #3 (Sept 15th), is actually a good thing. A better visual of this is https://ultrasound.money/ https://ultrasound.money/

verdverm 4y ago
> is actually a good thing If you believe that those who have the most should get more going forward. The new system concentrates the wealth more than the old system
- 56friends 4y ago
  I have several friends who stake ETH. Never met a single miner in person.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    I was a miner and you only have 56 friends... so would you like 57? =)
    - 56friends 4y ago
      Haha we would need to meet in person for that to invalidate my previous statement!
  - verdverm 4y ago
    Staking pool or outright staking? Lots of people mined before the hardware got sophisticated enough to price out the smaller miners. Even so, there were still people mining on GPUs. Do you remember when gamers and ML researchers were priced out of GPUs?
- latchkey 4y ago
  I am of the view that in general, lowering inflation is a good thing. Given the success of PoS so far (1), ETH was over paying for security when there was another alternative way to do things... and this is coming from an ex-large scale miner. (1) We likely won't know for decades if the switch to PoS was indeed successful, but I do feel it is an interesting experiment

ww520 4y ago

Crypto has one application - soak up excessive speculative capital. And annihilate them in the process.

jmyeet 4y ago

This [1] is worth watching in full. Crypto, to me, has shown three things: 1. Its only use case is bypassing laws; 2. Crypto thrives on desperation and hopelessness. I think more and more people are realizing that their circumstances (or "material conditions" if you prefer) are awful. So many people are bordering on food and housing insecurity. So many people feel like they'll never "get ahead". Everyone saw Bitcoin's meteoric rise and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin; and 3. Despite crypto having no use cases and being a giant Ponzi scheme, it's amazing how long something can persist when people want it to be true. So is it dead? Not yet. It may never die. But it should. It's worth noting Weaver's Iron Law of Blockchain [2] > When somebody says you can solve X with blockchain, they don’t understand X, and you can ignore them. I'll also note that apparently the Bitcoin network used 200TWh in 2022. It came up in another thread the other day that Google in 2020 used 15TWh. Now compare the utility. Think about that. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORdWE_ffirg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORdWE_ffirg [2]: https://twitter.com/Kellblog/status/1532756678596124673 https://twitter.com/Kellblog/status/1532756678596124673

hiq 4y ago
> 1. Its only use case is bypassing laws; > 3. Despite crypto having no use cases You're contradicting yourself here.
hossbeast 4y ago
If you think 200TWh is too much to operate the Bitcoin network, is there a smaller number you would find reasonable?
- jmyeet 4y ago
  Let's compare to Visa [1]: > According to VISA corporate responsibility and sustainability report in 2017, the company consumed a total amount of 680,560 GigaJoules of energy globally for all its operations (1). We also know VISA processed 111.2 billion transactions in 2017 (2). Rely on these numbers, VISA ECPT is 0.0017 kilowatt-hours and for simplification 100,000 VISA transactions consume 170 kWh. 680,000 GJ is roughly 190GWh (0.1%). But it gets worse. In 2017 Visa executed ~111B transactions. Bitcoin peaks at about ~90M. So 1000x the energy for 1/1000 of the transaction volume. So each Bitcoin transaction uses ~1,000,000 times the energy of a Visa transaction. [1]: https://medium.com/@a.abbaszadeh.s/measuring-iota-pow-s-energy-consumption-and-comparing-with-other-payment-systems-413f4de50274 https://medium.com/@a.abbaszadeh.s/measuring-iota-pow-s-ener...

kris-nova 4y ago

Yes. If you have to ask then you know the answer.

dist1ll 4y ago
Betteridge disagrees with you
- kris-nova 4y ago
  Excellent. Most people and resources sited on this Machiavellian capitalist mega-bro site often disagree with me. I take it as a compliment. It’s a positive sign I’m on to something sustainable and worth investing my time into. Thanks for helping me smile today.
  - dist1ll 4y ago
    To avoid some misunderstanding, I was referring to Betteridge's law of headlines [0]. Just an attempt at humor from my side, nothing else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

paulpauper 4y ago

These metrics do not mean anything in the context of investing. The protocol is not going anywhere, but so what. This does not mean it's a good investment. Developer counts, push requests, etc...these metrics are easily inflated, such as due to churn volume or making tiny or trivial modifications to code.

ThomPete 4y ago

AI is the use case blockchain didn't know it was looking for. The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that. With regards to crypto specifically microscopic payments will be needed to allow for adding cost to a lot of the things that are currently "free" now that AI content creation is going to overwhelm all of us.

quotemstr 4y ago
> The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that. No it isn't. Blockchains have no solution to the oracle problem. A blockchain is useless for distinguishing AI-generated content from other content for the same reason a blockchain is useless for managing mortgages on real property.
- ThomPete 4y ago
  There is no solution to the oracle problem. But there is a solution to the trusted protocol problem by only trusting content created through transformers as you will be able to see the intent it was created with.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> "The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that." I don't see how this is the case. Any blockchain verification is one off, and limited to the chain it is on. I, and many other people, would probably more trust a variety of centralized claims to truth or trust, than a decentralized claim. You trust when multiple parties state how they verified, you don't trust when one party writes "this is true" to a decentralized service, without all of the evidence they used to verify as true. Crypto, except transactions on centralized exchanges, is hideous for microscopic payments. It costs too much to verify even minimal transactions on chain (even more for contracts). It's a lot, lot cheaper to use a centralized service for minimal transactions.

pawelduda 4y ago

"Is Crypto Dead?", the very king of clickbaity article titles, brought to you by a crypto website.

nforgerit 4y ago

Thing is, I'm rather neutral to it, though for years I'm getting bombarded with ponzi-like BS in Feeds, Meetups, articles and other public occasions. That's a shame because it contaminates everything around it. I'm pretty sure it would make sense for a tax authority to infrequently poll the head of a hash-chain of a businesses' bookkeeping process to avoid the (at least in Germany) stupid manual process that it is now. But the whole crypto bro smell around that makes me very reluctant even exploring this direction.

detaro 4y ago
That doesn't really need the multiparty aspects of a blockchain though, you can solve that with just cryptography. (Indeed in Germany digital cashier machines etc already need to store such logs and print the transaction checksum etc on receipts - just storing that online instead of on the device is currently not common)
- nforgerit 4y ago
  I was deliberately talking about a hash-chain and not about blockchain. Point is, if they infrequently collect the head's hash, the tax audit consists of just a recalculation. That could be a first step. If they then would somehow (like you mentioned) provide a service for providing authenticity of receipts, they'd have a system that works better than what they have now with much less work. Am I missing sth?
  - detaro 4y ago
    That it's not really relevant to discussion of "crypto" in the sense used here, and that this logging already exists and is the law? The checking obviously still needs to be done, and since people generally dont get receipts digitally requires some manual work.