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I disagree. Although I have extreme cynicism so far, I am far from making a long term conclusion. I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short t

I disagree. Although I have extreme cynicism so far, I am far from making a long term conclusion. I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth. Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild. I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow. It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.

epgui 3y ago
> I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable. These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
- rektide 3y ago
  It is an append only database. But being the world's universally-accessible infinitely-resilient append only database is a very notable difference from what came before. The post bitcoin technologies have a lot of interesting other ideas too, about distributing computing, about roll-up transactions (where you can prove your writes without them necessarily be readable).
  - lxgr 3y ago
    > infinitely-resilient This is complete hyberbole. The security of most blockchains can be quite explicitly expressed as a number (of hashes per second, coins of staking, or whatever the consensus mechanism of the day uses as its scarce resource for allowing appends to the database), and it's very finite. Another very real danger is a lack of interest and/or economic incentives to keep it going. I wouldn't be surprised if we've already lost many terabytes of data on "infinite append-only ledgers", since disk space still isn't free, and massively replicated disk space even less so.
lxgr 3y ago
> I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, Maybe, but why should humanity throw significant resources (mindshare, money, energy) at a technology that purports to solve a large number of important problems, yet doesn't have any track record of actually achieving any of it? > has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on That burden is always on the proponents of a new technology.
forgetfreeman 3y ago
Ok, let me put this another way: we're approaching the life expectancy of a programming language, and something like 3x the life expectancy of a framework, and so far all this tech has to show is a knack for separating dumb from money and driving up grid electricity rates globally. A sizeable percentage of the "best minds" in fintech have made serious attempts (backed by huge stacks of cash) to make something out of this to no obvious benefit. You'll get no argument from me about the bullshit tech hype mill and the churn that results from it.
- rektide 3y ago
  I think the problems is essentially that we had most of our worst minds working on crypto for a long time. Folks though there were incentives to do X, so almost everyone went out & got busy making cryptocoins. We saw people put their bitshovel in the bitground and mine up bitgold. And suddenly unsurprisingly everyone wants to go bitmining. Now that the bad incentive are much ameliorated, we can begin to see what real enduring uses might be. The bad systems aren't stealing all the oxygen. I'd also say that I think platform evolves at a slower timebase than languages. Posix has been around for omg long now. We were almost a on SysV or very alike until very recent mass migrations off. Http3 is fancy as heck but it does very very nearly what http 0.9 did. Programming languages come and go much faster than these sort of things change. And the next jumps we keep looking to make, most involve pretty significant increases in scope (one counter example might be the Zircon microkernel, https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel, but it has a sizable platform atop it again).

epgui 3y ago

> I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable. These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.

rektide 3y ago
It is an append only database. But being the world's universally-accessible infinitely-resilient append only database is a very notable difference from what came before. The post bitcoin technologies have a lot of interesting other ideas too, about distributing computing, about roll-up transactions (where you can prove your writes without them necessarily be readable).
- lxgr 3y ago
  > infinitely-resilient This is complete hyberbole. The security of most blockchains can be quite explicitly expressed as a number (of hashes per second, coins of staking, or whatever the consensus mechanism of the day uses as its scarce resource for allowing appends to the database), and it's very finite. Another very real danger is a lack of interest and/or economic incentives to keep it going. I wouldn't be surprised if we've already lost many terabytes of data on "infinite append-only ledgers", since disk space still isn't free, and massively replicated disk space even less so.

lxgr 3y ago

> I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, Maybe, but why should humanity throw significant resources (mindshare, money, energy) at a technology that purports to solve a large number of important problems, yet doesn't have any track record of actually achieving any of it? > has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on That burden is always on the proponents of a new technology.

forgetfreeman 3y ago

Ok, let me put this another way: we're approaching the life expectancy of a programming language, and something like 3x the life expectancy of a framework, and so far all this tech has to show is a knack for separating dumb from money and driving up grid electricity rates globally. A sizeable percentage of the "best minds" in fintech have made serious attempts (backed by huge stacks of cash) to make something out of this to no obvious benefit. You'll get no argument from me about the bullshit tech hype mill and the churn that results from it.

rektide 3y ago
I think the problems is essentially that we had most of our worst minds working on crypto for a long time. Folks though there were incentives to do X, so almost everyone went out & got busy making cryptocoins. We saw people put their bitshovel in the bitground and mine up bitgold. And suddenly unsurprisingly everyone wants to go bitmining. Now that the bad incentive are much ameliorated, we can begin to see what real enduring uses might be. The bad systems aren't stealing all the oxygen. I'd also say that I think platform evolves at a slower timebase than languages. Posix has been around for omg long now. We were almost a on SysV or very alike until very recent mass migrations off. Http3 is fancy as heck but it does very very nearly what http 0.9 did. Programming languages come and go much faster than these sort of things change. And the next jumps we keep looking to make, most involve pretty significant increases in scope (one counter example might be the Zircon microkernel, https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel, but it has a sizable platform atop it again).