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Nah, man. The stink is all over crypto/blockchain like dead fish at the corner of the beach. If your product has anything at all to do with cryptocurrencies or

Nah, man. The stink is all over crypto/blockchain like dead fish at the corner of the beach. If your product has anything at all to do with cryptocurrencies or blockchain, I'm closing that tab instantly and moving on with my life. I have zero interest in any product associated with a tech that is used solely by hucksters and criminals. They've had more than a decade to find a single usecase other than crime, and they haven't. We need to just ignore these last few stupid projects that are falling out of the pipeline generated by idiotic contracts signed during the 2020 blockchain fraud/hype bubble.

benreesman 3y ago
I appreciate that at an individual level it's reasonable to "close the tab" on a whole space when you're fed up with it, that's your prerogative. But in terms of trashing the work of everyone who has worked on a blockchain in a public forum: `git` is a blockchain by any reasonable "degenerate Merkle tree" definition. Barbara Liskov who is the first female Turing winner (and would have gotten her Turing a lot sooner if it weren't for sexism) has been running a research group at MIT on PBFT for like 10 years. IO-HK has more Turning/Able/Fields-type folks than fucking Google per capita and might be pushing RenTech per-capita. In 1995 the Internet had like three massive use cases: Usenet, penis pill spam, and porn, and by egress, mostly porn. Nothing wrong with porn, but but nothing wrong with some idiots trading Pokemon cards of monkeys for too much money either if this is a free country. Tulip-scam Level 1 blockchains with a clear incentive for the treasury holders to make transactions expensive because they want to pump the fuck out of some stupid token and skip town before the bill comes due? Yeah, I think we're over that now. But take it up with Linus and all the fucking Turing winners if you think the tech never has and never will have any legitimate application.
- coldpie 3y ago
  Neither [1] nor [2] contain the word "blockchain". I don't think you get to retroactively claim those projects & research as part of the blockchain movement. It was a nice try, though ;) IO-HK's products page is just a list of 2020-era buzzwordy wallet & smart contract junk I've never heard of that all smells like dead fish. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git [2] Well, except in the context of Bitcoin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault
  - benreesman 3y ago
    There's nothing retroactive about it: I've been in the distributed systems space since I met the former Akamai guys who founded Basho and built Riak in 2008. so cool it with the "nice try" stuff and read up: "Hash trees are used in hash-based cryptography. Hash trees are also used in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Btrfs and ZFS file systems[4] (to counter data degradation[5]); Dat protocol; Apache Wave protocol;[6] Git and Mercurial distributed revision control systems; the Tahoe-LAFS backup system; Zeronet; the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks;[7] the Certificate Transparency framework; the Nix package manager and descendants like GNU Guix;[8] and a number of NoSQL systems such as Apache Cassandra, Riak, and Dynamo.[9] Suggestions have been made to use hash trees in trusted computing systems.[10]" [1], and if you still have a difference of opinion, get Wikipedia edited if you can. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
    - coldpie 3y ago
      When people say "blockchain" this is what they're thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain > Uses >> Cryptocurrencies >> Smart contracts >> Financial services >> [Blockchain video] games You know, all those dead fish smelly things from the 2020/2021 hype bubble, just like this junk from Paypal, and whatever IO-HK is faffing around with. You don't get to claim all possible usages of a tree data structure as retroactively part of the blockchain movement.
      - benreesman 3y ago
        There's a limit to how deeply I'm going to nest a thread with someone who seems to have already made up their mind: after 15 years on this site, I'm starting to get it into my head that "winning" an HN fight might be fun in the moment, but as my grandma used to say: ain't no money in it. And I think we agree about the failure of what used to be called "Web 3": it was an experiment that became a hype cycle that got hijacked by the unscrupulous and my bet is that history will mark the spectacular collapse of FTX last fall as the "end of Web 3". But behind all the headlines and scandals and shit, a lot of serious distributed systems pros were doing real research and writing real code, and that stuff represents a bunch of tools in our toolbox as engineers that we didn't have 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I think it's foolish to throw the baby (tools) out with the bathwater (exit scam scandals). All you have to do is pick up a newspaper on either side of the blood/crip political knife fight and you'll see a bunch of problems that the Internet created directly or indirectly and haven't solved yet, and many if not most of them are related to "proving things". - We're having arguments about vote tallies, and who "double spent" their vote - We're having arguments about who created a piece of IP that got vacuumed up by a big AI model - We're having arguments about who should be able to post their views on the Internet (i.e. at all) and how to prevent political grand mal seizures from censoring dissenting opinion - The story on international remittances is still a nightmare, and wildly impacts some of the most vulnerable members of our global community - USDC or something is still the only way I know about to get paid by an overseas employer in any kind of timely way without a nightmare set of bank interactions and also be totally above-board regarding e.g. taxes and stuff The list goes on, and while I don't think this is totally demonstrated yet, as a long-time distributed systems guy, I think it's at least plausible demonstrably (and in my opinion even pretty likely) that some of the tools that went in the toolbox in the last 10 years (and got inadvertently funded by token scam assholes: win) are pretty friggin adjacent to any solution I can think of to any of these.
spir 3y ago
If you end up being wrong, and crypto becomes a globally ubiquitous economic backbone, how will you rationalize having been incorrect in your present view? You're a long-term hacker news community member. Like all of us, you pride yourself on the rational exploration of technology. Does "They've had more than a decade to find a single usecase other than crime, and they haven't" strike you as a particularly rigorous argument? Why would a decade be the magic number? Might there be more objective or intrinsic metrics of realization of potential than a set number of years? For example, Ethereum invented the crypto app layer and launched eight years ago, so perhaps ten years is both arbitrary and incorrect? You seem to be somebody who is certain that crypto is- paraphrasing- useless for anything but crime. Given your conviction in this view, what up-to-date evidence do you have? For example, how would you contrast the capabilities of modern non-blockchain payment systems, like FedNow or India's UPI, versus the emerging network of public blockchains? If you can't answer the question, maybe your strong conviction is unjustified? It seems that many technologists in the HN community have been whipped into an anti-crypto frenzy by crypto's many scams and now, blinded by rage and disgust, are unable to pursue any semblance of the kind of rational inquiry that otherwise is a fixture in their intellectual lives.
- coldpie 3y ago
  I'll rationalize it by being wrong. It's happened before, it'll happen again. But given that all the blockchain/crypto community has to show so far is "a really crummy database" and "a way for criminals to more easily avoid repercussions," I'm feeling pretty good about this one.
  - trompetenaccoun 3y ago
    There is an example use case right in the article we're commenting on.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    I say this as one strident HN loudmouth to another, not as a guy in a glass house with a rock in his hand. If you have a substantive argument about how PayPal, or Paxos, or the regulators have blown this, or why it's a net-negative, or why this case is so exceptional that you aren't "closing the tab" this time: I will listen with avid interest, and I imagine everyone else on the site will do the same. But as someone who takes too many cheap shots at groups of people too large and too diverse to generalize about too often myself: chip in on all of us being better. If you think it's a bad thing, explain why. My read is that it's a net improvement in a flawed world, and if I've got that wrong, I'd like to get un-wrong. But it's pretty much an unwritten rule of HN that "shitty X technology" and cavalier uses of the word "criminal" are party fouls (which I still make, I'm also working on this). My read is that the consensus view of the community is that prohibition of e.g. drugs or prostitution or selling sex toys or whatever is stupid and ways around those things are necessary, and I'm basically sure that it's a consensus view that there are regimes in the world where being a criminal is the only ethical move. So even if "Bitcoin is for Drugs", I still think an argument with some meat on it's bones is merited here.
aftbit 3y ago
That's simple prejudice. It's a very effective strategy for protecting yourself in the world, but it is also manifestly unfair to the technology that you are maligning (and more importantly, its proponents and practitioners).
- listenallyall 3y ago
  How can an intangible "technology" be a victim of prejudice?
  - benreesman 3y ago
    Pretty sure GP meant that maligning a bunch of serious engineers because a 1-bit generalization lumped them in with a bunch of scam artists is prejudice.
    - listenallyall 3y ago
      Oil companies employ large numbers of serious engineers. If I make a 1-bit generalization that I don't want fracking or drilling or refining in my neighborhood, or anywhere in the world for that matter, I'm now guilty of "prejudice" because I'm maligning those serious engineers and their work?
      - benreesman 3y ago
        If you call Barbara Liskov's work bad or stupid or irrelevant or anything like that, bring your fucking Turing award to the debate.
        listenallyall 3y ago
        I honestly have no idea what the point of your comment is, other than deflection, I guess. What does Barbara Liskov have to do with either of my comments?
        3y ago

benreesman 3y ago

I appreciate that at an individual level it's reasonable to "close the tab" on a whole space when you're fed up with it, that's your prerogative. But in terms of trashing the work of everyone who has worked on a blockchain in a public forum: `git` is a blockchain by any reasonable "degenerate Merkle tree" definition. Barbara Liskov who is the first female Turing winner (and would have gotten her Turing a lot sooner if it weren't for sexism) has been running a research group at MIT on PBFT for like 10 years. IO-HK has more Turning/Able/Fields-type folks than fucking Google per capita and might be pushing RenTech per-capita. In 1995 the Internet had like three massive use cases: Usenet, penis pill spam, and porn, and by egress, mostly porn. Nothing wrong with porn, but but nothing wrong with some idiots trading Pokemon cards of monkeys for too much money either if this is a free country. Tulip-scam Level 1 blockchains with a clear incentive for the treasury holders to make transactions expensive because they want to pump the fuck out of some stupid token and skip town before the bill comes due? Yeah, I think we're over that now. But take it up with Linus and all the fucking Turing winners if you think the tech never has and never will have any legitimate application.

coldpie 3y ago
Neither [1] nor [2] contain the word "blockchain". I don't think you get to retroactively claim those projects & research as part of the blockchain movement. It was a nice try, though ;) IO-HK's products page is just a list of 2020-era buzzwordy wallet & smart contract junk I've never heard of that all smells like dead fish. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git [2] Well, except in the context of Bitcoin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault
- benreesman 3y ago
  There's nothing retroactive about it: I've been in the distributed systems space since I met the former Akamai guys who founded Basho and built Riak in 2008. so cool it with the "nice try" stuff and read up: "Hash trees are used in hash-based cryptography. Hash trees are also used in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Btrfs and ZFS file systems[4] (to counter data degradation[5]); Dat protocol; Apache Wave protocol;[6] Git and Mercurial distributed revision control systems; the Tahoe-LAFS backup system; Zeronet; the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks;[7] the Certificate Transparency framework; the Nix package manager and descendants like GNU Guix;[8] and a number of NoSQL systems such as Apache Cassandra, Riak, and Dynamo.[9] Suggestions have been made to use hash trees in trusted computing systems.[10]" [1], and if you still have a difference of opinion, get Wikipedia edited if you can. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
  - coldpie 3y ago
    When people say "blockchain" this is what they're thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain > Uses >> Cryptocurrencies >> Smart contracts >> Financial services >> [Blockchain video] games You know, all those dead fish smelly things from the 2020/2021 hype bubble, just like this junk from Paypal, and whatever IO-HK is faffing around with. You don't get to claim all possible usages of a tree data structure as retroactively part of the blockchain movement.
    - benreesman 3y ago
      There's a limit to how deeply I'm going to nest a thread with someone who seems to have already made up their mind: after 15 years on this site, I'm starting to get it into my head that "winning" an HN fight might be fun in the moment, but as my grandma used to say: ain't no money in it. And I think we agree about the failure of what used to be called "Web 3": it was an experiment that became a hype cycle that got hijacked by the unscrupulous and my bet is that history will mark the spectacular collapse of FTX last fall as the "end of Web 3". But behind all the headlines and scandals and shit, a lot of serious distributed systems pros were doing real research and writing real code, and that stuff represents a bunch of tools in our toolbox as engineers that we didn't have 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I think it's foolish to throw the baby (tools) out with the bathwater (exit scam scandals). All you have to do is pick up a newspaper on either side of the blood/crip political knife fight and you'll see a bunch of problems that the Internet created directly or indirectly and haven't solved yet, and many if not most of them are related to "proving things". - We're having arguments about vote tallies, and who "double spent" their vote - We're having arguments about who created a piece of IP that got vacuumed up by a big AI model - We're having arguments about who should be able to post their views on the Internet (i.e. at all) and how to prevent political grand mal seizures from censoring dissenting opinion - The story on international remittances is still a nightmare, and wildly impacts some of the most vulnerable members of our global community - USDC or something is still the only way I know about to get paid by an overseas employer in any kind of timely way without a nightmare set of bank interactions and also be totally above-board regarding e.g. taxes and stuff The list goes on, and while I don't think this is totally demonstrated yet, as a long-time distributed systems guy, I think it's at least plausible demonstrably (and in my opinion even pretty likely) that some of the tools that went in the toolbox in the last 10 years (and got inadvertently funded by token scam assholes: win) are pretty friggin adjacent to any solution I can think of to any of these.

spir 3y ago

If you end up being wrong, and crypto becomes a globally ubiquitous economic backbone, how will you rationalize having been incorrect in your present view? You're a long-term hacker news community member. Like all of us, you pride yourself on the rational exploration of technology. Does "They've had more than a decade to find a single usecase other than crime, and they haven't" strike you as a particularly rigorous argument? Why would a decade be the magic number? Might there be more objective or intrinsic metrics of realization of potential than a set number of years? For example, Ethereum invented the crypto app layer and launched eight years ago, so perhaps ten years is both arbitrary and incorrect? You seem to be somebody who is certain that crypto is- paraphrasing- useless for anything but crime. Given your conviction in this view, what up-to-date evidence do you have? For example, how would you contrast the capabilities of modern non-blockchain payment systems, like FedNow or India's UPI, versus the emerging network of public blockchains? If you can't answer the question, maybe your strong conviction is unjustified? It seems that many technologists in the HN community have been whipped into an anti-crypto frenzy by crypto's many scams and now, blinded by rage and disgust, are unable to pursue any semblance of the kind of rational inquiry that otherwise is a fixture in their intellectual lives.

coldpie 3y ago
I'll rationalize it by being wrong. It's happened before, it'll happen again. But given that all the blockchain/crypto community has to show so far is "a really crummy database" and "a way for criminals to more easily avoid repercussions," I'm feeling pretty good about this one.
- trompetenaccoun 3y ago
  There is an example use case right in the article we're commenting on.
- benreesman 3y ago
  I say this as one strident HN loudmouth to another, not as a guy in a glass house with a rock in his hand. If you have a substantive argument about how PayPal, or Paxos, or the regulators have blown this, or why it's a net-negative, or why this case is so exceptional that you aren't "closing the tab" this time: I will listen with avid interest, and I imagine everyone else on the site will do the same. But as someone who takes too many cheap shots at groups of people too large and too diverse to generalize about too often myself: chip in on all of us being better. If you think it's a bad thing, explain why. My read is that it's a net improvement in a flawed world, and if I've got that wrong, I'd like to get un-wrong. But it's pretty much an unwritten rule of HN that "shitty X technology" and cavalier uses of the word "criminal" are party fouls (which I still make, I'm also working on this). My read is that the consensus view of the community is that prohibition of e.g. drugs or prostitution or selling sex toys or whatever is stupid and ways around those things are necessary, and I'm basically sure that it's a consensus view that there are regimes in the world where being a criminal is the only ethical move. So even if "Bitcoin is for Drugs", I still think an argument with some meat on it's bones is merited here.

aftbit 3y ago

That's simple prejudice. It's a very effective strategy for protecting yourself in the world, but it is also manifestly unfair to the technology that you are maligning (and more importantly, its proponents and practitioners).

listenallyall 3y ago
How can an intangible "technology" be a victim of prejudice?
- benreesman 3y ago
  Pretty sure GP meant that maligning a bunch of serious engineers because a 1-bit generalization lumped them in with a bunch of scam artists is prejudice.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    Oil companies employ large numbers of serious engineers. If I make a 1-bit generalization that I don't want fracking or drilling or refining in my neighborhood, or anywhere in the world for that matter, I'm now guilty of "prejudice" because I'm maligning those serious engineers and their work?
    - benreesman 3y ago
      If you call Barbara Liskov's work bad or stupid or irrelevant or anything like that, bring your fucking Turing award to the debate.
      - listenallyall 3y ago
        I honestly have no idea what the point of your comment is, other than deflection, I guess. What does Barbara Liskov have to do with either of my comments?
        3y ago