Ask HN: Why does blockchain get so much hate here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does blockchain get so much hate here?

20 pointsarisAlexis40 comments

Sure there is a lot of discussion about how cryptocurrencies can fit in the existing economic system or regulations etc. What is surprising though is that there is a lot of genuine hate over blockchain and the whole sector.

You can see that from downvotes here that are vindictive to any comment in favor, you can see huge upvotes for articles saying blockchain is BS.

All in all, blockchain is firstly supposed to be a technology. As such, it makes no sense to trash talk it and ridicule it.

Secondly, this technology tries (at best without any guarantees) to bring a societal change meaning transparency for everybody, financial inclusion, censorship resistance etc.

How can these things be hated upon? Why? I understand the "i told you it was a bubble" effect but I can never imagine someone hating on new tech discoveries for reasons other than psychology.

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Most people on HN, myself included, do not hate blockchain, but are extremely skeptical of the discourse and community that has grown up around it for a few reasons:

- Blockchain is essentially a distributed database. It's an interesting implementation of the idea, but the universe of problems that this can solve is significantly smaller than blockchain proponents will ever acknowledge. That kind of intellectual dishonesty does not sit well with people who by professional habit think critically about the applications of any new technology. There are a lot of those people on HN.

- It is extremely profitable to over-hype blockchain. There are enormous amounts of money to be made by bilking the greater fool in the cryptocurrency market and the best way to do that is to create media buzz, including on this platform. That obviously rubs people the wrong way. No one likes sleaze-bags.

- The proportion of conversations about cryptocurrency that involve a massive misunderstanding of monetary economics, databases, and the word 'algorithm' approaches 1. If you ask someone what the differences are between fiat currency, gold, and bitcoin, you will generally get an answer that is complete nonsense. Most (many?) people have experienced the desperation of trying to escape a tedious conversation about the evils of fiat currency, or reading comments on HN/other platforms that sound like cult-speak. That shouldn't matter and every great idea has had proponents that are idiots, but people associate the things hear about something with the thing itself, and a lot of what is said about blockchain is pretty dumb.

I don't 'hate' blockchain. At various points, I've tried to use blockchain technology to solve various supply chain, ecommerce and even worked for a startup that wanted to apply blockchain technology to user authentication. So, I definitely don't hate blockchain, however, my experience with the technology has lead me to be extremely skeptical for these reasons:

1.) The technology feels too immature for its age. Whenever I work with a blockchain, I feel like I'm working with bleeding edge technology that was theorized months ago and released weeks ago. Yet, blockchain is about a decade old.

2.) For all the hype, blockchain is just a distributed database.

3.) There are more mature, cheaper ways to solve the vast majority of problems that distributed databases are useful for solving. This always killed off my blockchain dreams. Once I got past the (often self inflated) hype, I was always left with the actuality that I could solve each problem without a blockchain in less than half the time it would take me to solve it with a blockchain.

4.) I've been collecting data off cryptocurrency exchanges for long enough that I can make some conclusions about the market. My conclusion is that I'm significantly better at predicting results from hands of blackjack than I am from predicting results from crypto trading. Cryptocurrency is the one killer application I've found for blockchain, but it's too irrational for me to ever get involved.

Long story short, in my experience, blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. This could be solved by more mature tooling, since often, as an implementor, I'm struck by how much more efficient it would be to solve distributed problems with tools other than a bc. And, the one space where bc is a great solution makes too little sense for me to get involved in.

but cryptocurrency is not for making profit. It's a killer application because its censorship resistant peer to peer digital money without counterfeiting and fungible (some of the coins). That you can't predict the price is totally irrelevant of the application and societal changes this can bring.

This is a great example of what people here hate, while not hating the underlying technology. In the midst of a ludicrous series of ICO scams and proliferation of get-rich-quick coins, it’s very clearly false. For those of us who like our Libertarianism grounded in reality, the fantastical, counterfactual version peddled in cryptocurrency circles is almost offensive.

I completely agree with everything you say. In fact, those exact arguments propelled my initial interest in Bitcoin!

Unfortunately though, all those good things about cryptocurrency depend on it being as easy to trade as fiat currency. That wasn't true five or six years ago, but then that could be excused because it was a new technology. But, it's still not true and that's why I'm getting more skeptical as time goes by.

It isn't true for several reasons. The biggest is that value fluctuates too wildly and is highly unpredictable, so it works best as a currency if suppliers constantly change their prices and you convert your cryptocurrency to fiat as quickly as possible. But if you do quick crypto-fiat conversions, you often run into either slow transaction times or transaction fees many times higher than the most expensive payment processors.

(I genuinely hope that I'm wrong and feel like a Luddite when I read this in five years.)

That may have been the initial motivation and intent. But it's not true of the reality, and hasn't been for several years.

> That you can't predict the price is totally irrelevant...

For something that aspires to be "money", that is highly relevant.

not if the base currency is Bitcoin (I know...)

I don’t think I’d characterise the discussions around the technology as hate. Maybe with the exception of the environmental cost of Proof of Work.

Where most of the heat comes from, in my opinion, is the religion that’s grown around it. Fundamentally, it is just a technology; clever in parts, flawed in others.

Some people have ascribed almost messianic qualities to it. And like many religions, the adherents often just ignore evidence that doesn’t align with their worldview.

Personally, I find the religion bit irritating but I don’t hate it. I do find it frustrating because it taints the technology which, in my opinion, does have merit.

The technical reasons why blockchain is overhyped are well-described by others, including this succinct presentation the other day: https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/980485587827224577?s=21 .

But I suspect what really annoys people about blockchain is that it’s making lucky, foolish, or crooked people very rich. For now, anyway.

The lucky and the fools - who either got in super early, or spent a lot of their net worth on a speculative asset - now consider themselves geniuses and proselytize how blockchain is going to change the world. Worst example: crypto bro disaster capitalists in Puerto Rico. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurre...

The crooked - do I even need to explain?

PS: I’m not saying everyone who is into blockchain is lucky, foolish, or crooked. Just the vast majority at this time. Notable exceptions: some of the original Bitcoin developers, Vitalik Buterin, apparently the whole nation of Argentina (https://twitter.com/santisiri/status/980483903633977344?s=21), and some interesting projects like Filecoin.

PPS: I forgot the most annoying bitcoin supporters: anarchocapitalists. For them, it’s all about making money laundering go mainstream. These people cheer for the defunding of public institutions and the disenfranchisement of everyone who isn’t already in the 1%.

The core source of things "bad" on the world is the dehumanization of humans by other humans.

Some original reasons being race and gender. Religion also became a big one.

In American culture it's revolves around hard work. Those who work less hard are less human or less deserving.

In tech this also happens and it revolves around intelligence. It is opposed to hard work in a way as well.

Blockchain puts front and center fools getting rich and fools getting scammed. I suspect the bristling is at the former and the latter is used subconsciously as a socially acceptable justification.

Ironically truly empowerment technology created both good and bad and the creators did not become mega rich. Tcp/up and BitTorrent come to mind. It's only recently that tech has mixed with the narratives of high salaries and founders becoming rich. It used to be a Mish mosh of people just doing what they thought was cool. (without moral consideration I might add in a cats are assholes type of way)

Lucky is also visionary or risky same as some that bought Apple shares in the 80s but that doesn't piss people off because it wasn't as fast. Psychology is very interesting.

People who bought Apple shares got rich because Apple made something good (arguably changed the world).

People who got rich on Bitcoin got rich while really nothing of value has been produced (although crypto prophets indeed try hard to tell us how the world has changed).

And yes, there are real-world usages of the cryptocurrencies but they haven't changed while the market valuations did.

can you wait a bit on that?

Valid point about crooked, but why the hate for lucky/foolish people? A lot of people owe their success in life (at least partially) to luck, being at the correct place at the correct time. Not just financially, but in relationships/politics etc.

A lot of deserving/smart/hard working people don't get what they deserve, but a lot of dumb/lazy people get more than what they worked for. That's how life works, isn't it?

exactly. it's funny that the same people that don't like communism where these things don't happen get very mad about how capitalism works and how some people become rich without skills/effort (although it's just random variance I am not saying that skills are not rewarded).

How can Filecoin compete with Amazon? Amazon has economies of scale.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13420777

yes I know but there is a time factor, these days is even more pronnounced

The problem is that, as a technology, blockchain does almost nothing new. It's a much slower and less-efficient version of technology that already works correctly (i.e. the distributed database).

The only thing that proof-of-work (or proof-of-whatever) accomplishes is that it addresses the "double-spend" problem whereby the same person signs two mutually incompatible transactions and tries to get different nodes to respond to both of those transactions as if they were valid.

Proof-of-work addresses this issue by using a voting system whereby everybody gets votes based on how much electricity they waste. There are other, better, ways to address this issue.

Anyway, I could talk about blockchain and what's wrong with it all day, but I don't want to bore you. I could also talk about specifically what's wrong with Bitcoin and what would still be wrong with Bitcoin even if it were implemented using a sane distributed database, but again, I don't want to bore you.

The important thing to remember out of all of this is that you have a fundamentally silly technology. So it's only ever going to be used by people who don't understand it, or people who are trying to trick other people.

It is therefore not an coincidence that there are so many blockchain-based scams. And it's also not a coincidence that it's so hard to tell the difference between what's a scam and what's not. These are fundamental consequences to the nature of blockchain as a technology.

And if you think I don't know what I'm talking about, you should probably know that, for a time I was considering using blockchain as the underlying technology for my digital currency project. But the more I learned about blockchain, the more I came to realize that there's essentially nothing there.

If you think I'm wrong, prove me wrong.

how and why (incentive) would you run a node of a distributed database checking that all the country's assets and budget spending is transparent and not tampered with if not with this technology? truly curious about the just a distributed argument

Hmm. I'm not sure I fully understand the question. Anyone who wants a country's assets and budget spending to be transparent would be free to run a node. And there's nothing about a traditional distributed database that prevents it from using hash pointers to ensure that the history cannot be tampered with. That's not a special feature of blockchain.

The question is: how do you get a country to record all its transactions in a public ledger? Once you've figured that out, the technology to use for it probably isn't blockchain.

Most of the work that goes into running a Bitcoin node is actually just for burning electricity to find the next block. No real work is being done in proof-of-work.

The point is that this would work if we lived in Utopia. Since we don't then running nodes needs some incentive because electricity costs money and that's where the difference lies and why cryptocurrencies exist.

A lot of skepticism is warranted. But there is also a lot of bias and unwarranted skepticism. Or more specifically, lack of faith.

Blockchain's is like a precocious child and everyone is saying this genius will revolutionize the world. It is still a child though.

Faith is the opposite of technical measurement so for many people anything that requires faith deserves a heaping ton of skepticism. The biggest negative example in many people's minds is religion.

Blockchain involves not only technology but psychology, economics, politics, etc... It mixed in a lot of soft things that tech people may not appreciate.

Many people get involved in tech or other hard fields BECAUSE they don't see the value of soft things. Combined with the recent validation of tech (tech hasn't always had such high relative salaries) that "idiots" or "wee-woo" people are making bank is very distressing.

The validation of tech via money has in some ways poisoned the original mindset of technology as empowerment for all. That people can make money doing things they don't understand is anathema in tech circles.

Especially as tech workers (I am one btw) often consider themselves having cutting edge ideas and more foresight but somehow missed the boat. Either they have to admit they were shortsighted and over-conservatism or that other people are fools.

It's not hate it's normie and charlatan fatigue.

I think because from a technology perspective it's only a 6-7. "Tech people" only find it mildly interesting at best. and let's face it devalues code and the skills of people that make it.

"tech money people"(VCs/Angels) find it interesting because it allows you to monetize something you couldn't before a protocol. Also, it's interesting because it lets you capture value from an economy as opposed to just a marketplace. (I'm calling an economy something where the rules aren't as rigid and controlled as much by a central authority versus an ebay or uber). ie Why some VCs are investing in it.

The open question is just because you monetize V1 or V2 of a protocol does it allow you to profit or does V1.2A split and you lose your shirt.

Plus, as with any new "tech" it's over hyped at best and a lot of fraud at worst.

And it's current best Use Cases "secret economies" aren't exactly something that's going to benefit society in general.

The problem, for me (and I'm hardly an expert) is that you need a considerable amount of double speak to work through it.

Anonymous? No, this isn't going to help with censorship.

Crypto that's world changing? How we all forget history.

My problems with crypto run deep, but it's really a high-level poker game. I know I'm a sucker that doesn't know the rules, but 99% who's diving in aren't aware of this fact.

Distributed / decentralized internet? Ugh... Let's talk when our cell phones have 100tb of storage.

I've had the misfortune of working on crypto contracts. I'll never do it again. If you honestly believe your information is safe or if you believe the developers working on this stuff are l33t, I'm sorry, but I have to burst your bubble.

In my opinion, the tech is interesting in it's own right for research, but real-world uses has shown it to be dangerous, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

> Anonymous

Bitcoin is almost the opposite however ZCash and Monero do offer anonymity.

> World Changing

The world has changed because of cryptocoins. It's empowered criminals but it's also become a way to get around price controls (e.g. The adoption in Cyprus). Not always for the better but certainly it has caused change.

There are a lot of people who don't know what they are doing in this space but that is to be expected from any new technology with mass adoption. Very few people even in established industries have the whole picture - yet they are able to operate in their niche.

actually the amount of criminals using cryptocurrency is very minimal there are reports from EU official bodies. This is a myth. Also capital controls are in Greece but very few people use it. A much better example is Venezuela where many people do.

> A much better example is Venezuela where many people do.

I've yet to see any evidence of this being true, it appears to be a claim backed by endless "news" articles that have sourced other such articles in some giant stack of crypto-turtles.

I may not have been clear on that. There are maybe 1/1000 people who knows the rules of the game. Everyone else is getting pokered to death. It's a fish-vs-shark game, and I'm rather confused that so few people don't see it.

I don't think there is any future for cryptocurrency.

I'm just reacting against the use of "blockchain" as a mass noun. It's absurd to talk about a data structure as though it were a substance, like toothpaste or motor oil, and I have a hard time taking anyone seriously if they think this is normal.

blockchain is a term for a technology that is much more than a data structure. if you object to the term that's fine, come up with a new one?

„The blockchain“. Problem solved.

Really, skipping the article sounds infantile.

There's a lot of hype surrounding blockchain. It's cool technology but IMO a lot of the talk in business (in my own sphere) sounds like, "How can we sell this expensive, flashy tech for a lot of money and cash in on the gravy train?".

Most of the hate for it is spite and envy combined with a little bit of groupthink.

I think there is a question of terminology here, Blockchain is a concept, Cryptocurrency is an application of that concept.

I imagine there are few people on HN who hate blockchain, it is a useful concept and forms the basis for some very useful technologies i.e. Git version control.

I imagine there are a whole range of reasons for negativity toward Cryptocurrency/Cryptoassets on HN. Personally I think the enormous number of new ICO and currencies being made available is purely driven by greed and fraud. While I see bitcoin and other major coins representing a great new application of the technology, I think it's been over-hyped to the point where I just tune it out.

TL;DR: Crypto != Blockchain. People hate Crypto for many reasons.

One more thing.

Shoehorning new applications of Blockchain concepts into every new conceivable application, especially where the key advantages, i.e. decentralised trust, distributed consensus are not needed also causes a great deal of hate. But so it should.

wait, what? Blockchain doesn't form the basis of git version control! What are you smoking?

> All in all, blockchain is firstly supposed to be a technology. As such, it makes no sense to trash talk it and ridicule it.

Bullshit. Who says we can't hate a technology? I hate XML.

The widely touted notion that technical people are open-minded is laughably absurd.

The opposite is true.

Never has a collective so violently assailed change more than ours, whose identity and livelihood swing on the strictest adherence to dubious 'norms' and unconsidered methods. Pattern-think is everywhere.

We are not innovators, we are craven perpetuators who fear any form of change that may lay bare our vulnerability.

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