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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

This article reminds me of Clifford Stolls 1995 article http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... In which he says how the promises of the internet have been inflated.

Progress is generally on the exponential (or sigmoid) curve, so it’s slow at first, but explosive later.

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> This article reminds me of Clifford Stolls 1995 article

You should remember this then, from 1994:

"It's not only going to revolutionize the Net, it will change the global economy."

https://www.wired.com/1994/12/emoney/

And this, from 1999:

"The next internet revolution will put central bankers out of business."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/1999/nov/04/onlinesup...

Similarly, during the late 1990s, people tried to make an internet version of EVERYTHING, even when it made zero sense. That’s where we are with blockchain today.

Right. That’s how technology works.

But internet right now is undeniable. Block chain will be the same.

The internet was undeniable back then, too, which is a huge difference. Millions of people used it for a ton of different purposes, so even though a bunch of businesses were pricing below cost the customer demand was clear. In contrast, nobody has come up for a legal use for bitcoin which many people need and is better than the alternatives. Some of the other blockchain ideas are more useful but again struggle to beat traditional PKI.

The hype reminds me more of Second Life. People put everything on Second Life, but no-one could ever say quite what it was for. It never "crashed" as such, it just gradually faded away.

Talking of PKI, Blockchains are actually a great use case to render PKI more secure [1]. It can help secure CAs' and Keybase is using it as well as a second factor [2].

All that stuff still need some more development obviously. We're still in the early days.

[1] https://www.cryptomathic.com/news-events/blog/how-digital-si... [2] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...

"Blockchain tech" is not the Internet, though. It's like a different kind of Internet, one that is slower, more expensive and has less capacity, which was invented after the real thing has already been created. And then people would ask why you would need this if the real Internet can already do almost all of what this worse version does.

You listed only the cons but none of the pros.

I'm having a hard time seeing the pros. What can a "blockchain" do that we cannot do with existing technology? The only application so far is crypto currencies where it solves a very specific problem.

Moreover, what even is a "blockchain"? The most basic definition would be an inversely linked list with an added hash in each node. That's not much of an innovation. On the other end of the spectrum we have something like Bitcoin with a distributed network of "miners" who compete against each other by wasting energy, because the participants do not trust one another. This is not something most people would want or need. In most use cases we probably have trusted agents, but then we don't even need a mechanism like PoW/PoS to facilitate trust. This means we're really just left with a distributed database.

Internet connected the world, and changed how we interact fundamentally. Blockchain uses the internet to create politically resistant money as a primary use case. Just not seeing how blockchain fits into any ongoing revolution, in part because it only can exist because of government/corporate controlled pipes on which it relies.

Right, block chain will do the same. The ongoing revolution is the fight against ruling classes, same as over the last 5000 years.

Not really true that it depends on the government. And even if it is, you only need like one government supporting it for it to be valuable.

Why couldn’t your argument be used to say the internet won’t work?

You can’t have a blockchain without a Bitcoin. The two are inseparable. Every blockchain needs a token reward which has monetary value to secure it.

That doesn't seem to me like a fundamental law. Certainly with "internal blockchains" or other cases where at least a majority of the operators are trusted, mining and tokens are completely unnecessary.

A blockchain is a decentralized trustless ledger. If the operators are trusted, you can just use a database. It’s much more efficient. It’s pretty clear from the comment that you don’t understand Bitcoin or why, when people say “we like blockchain but not bitcoin”, that they’re talking nonsense.

> If the operators are trusted, you can just use a database. It’s much more efficient.

This is true! But databases don't have that magic "blockchain" tech.

David Gerard's book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain touches on the ridiculousness of this idea, actually. And, yes, it's ridiculousness, but it's what some people are trying to sell.

So should I take it that you're one of the people who thinks blockchains have little applications outside of currency?

No, I think blockchains provide many useful functions. However, providing a token with value is a necessary feature. I’m very excited about things like Rootstock which add smart contract functionality to the bitcoin blockchain.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of tokens is to provide an incentive for running the ledger client and processing transactions: mining for uptake and transaction fees to maintain scale long-term. You need as many people to run the client as possible.

If you can find some other reason for processing transactions and can guarantee that the population is big enough then the coin becomes unnecessary.

Distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchain) are based on security by game theory. It's financially rewarding to agree with each other, and financially very costly to disagree or attack it. You can't have game theory in the protocol without intrinsic rewards, as far as I know.

I assume you mean extrinsic reward. Yeah, it's unrealistic to expect people to burn CPU cycles processing the ledger client just for the fun of seeing the dials on their power meter spin faster.

An extrinsic reward doesn't have to be financial though, it's anything that you want to get out of an activity that isn't part of the activity itself.

If the blockchain ledger was a part of a greater whole and the client software of which it forms a part was somehow intrinsically fun, useful or needed, the token itself wouldn't be necessary.

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