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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

One theory I have on the hate towards Ethereum (and cryptocurrencies / blockchain in general) on HN is that it's a radically different way of solving problems, something that is alien to software engineers who have put decades of time becoming experts at solving problems a certain way. So rather than invest more than 15 minutes learning about it, they say "Blockchain is just a distributed database and it's useless!" or attack it from a variety of minimum-thought / minimum-effort angles.

There is genuine innovation in this space and it is going to impact a lot of areas. Decentralization, immutability, protocols monetized with market forces, fee-less payments that cannot be prevented, to name but a few interesting areas.

And of course there are numerous downsides. Difficulty of keeping keys safe, bugs that cost millions of dollars, issues with scaling.

But these are problems that people are solving right now. As a technologist, you should be looking at the possibilities! Now is the time to start a new company or project, not 5 or 10 years from now when the tech has matured.

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I think a lot of the hate is a reaction to the baseless hype from people just trying to get rich from cryptocurrency. There are tons of altcoins and ICOs being made and advertised constantly that are nothing but hot air. There are people making a lot of money (or thinking they can) from buying into altcoins (hyped up by nonsense marketing pages), which they then try to shill to others. People are often being incentivized by rising prices to act this way!

Outsiders start to learn that "blockchain" = "get-rich-quick nonsense", and miss the interesting technical discussions (which often come from the Bitcoin and Ethereum spaces).

Yes, this is definitely a big part of it. HN used to be super into cryptos, when it was more about the technology (pre-2017, or even pre-2013). That being said, the pendulum has pretty clearly swung too far the other way here.

The pretty obvious reality is that smart contracts and cryptocurrencies are truly interesting and novel technology. Does that mean they're good investments? No. Are they going to take over the world? Maybe, maybe not. But they're definitely 'cool', in the technological/hacker sense. They're cool in the way the internet was cool - they enable a fundamentally novel form of human interaction. It remains to be seen if that form of interaction will be economically meaningful. But the novelty and possibility of it is definitely interesting, and anyone who says otherwise either doesn't get it, or has been jaded by the scams. An understandable response to all the greed and general chicanery of course, but the reality is still that this stuff is actually pretty cool tech, even if you never use it to buy a latte.

>>I think a lot of the hate is a reaction to the baseless hype from people just trying to get rich from cryptocurrency.

This is it exactly. People are naturally suspicious of anything that is widely promoted for the profit of the promoters.

I don’t think you’re wrong or anything, but I do find it frustrating that HackerNews seems to be full of people dismissive of the technology and from what I’ve gathered relatively devoid of the baseless shilling. Other communities, not so much.

Well, baseless naysayers are just as bad as baseless hypers.

> Now is the time to start a new company or project, not 5 or 10 years from now when the tech has matured.

Actually, I'd rather start the new company 5 or 10 years from now when the tech has matured. It's the same reason the company I'm currently on relies primarily on boring PHP stuff and the more boring parts of Docker, not the newer tech that I'd rather be using. The time that could be spent chasing stuff that might be fads or might be an advantage is better spent directly working with customers to better understand their problems and exploring directly-business-relevant parts of the solution space.

That and the blockchain really is "just" a distributed database. It's potentially very useful, because of the way it tackles the trust problems, but if you're not sure whether you need it or not, then you probably don'.

As a technologist I look at vaporware and call it vaporware.

I look at get-rich-quick schemes and call them get-rich-quick schemes.

I look at how blockchain don't solve a single problem that hasn't already been solved more efficiently on much grander scales, and I call them out as such.

Your words, and images of grandeur, and promises of great things to come are just that: words, and images, and promises, and I call them as such.

Blockchain is not "the next Internet that haters cannot see", as the overused saying goes. So far it's nothing but the next Tomagotchi or Pets.com, and nothing that's happening in blockchain can prove it otherwise. And so, we call it as such.

> I look at how blockchain don't solve a single problem that hasn't already been solved more efficiently on much grander scales, and I call them out as such.

This position is the most confusing of all the blockchain FUD out there. It's easy to show that it's false: today, people are able to purchase proscribed plants and medicines in a way that completely subverts the efforts of state to prevent that.

Now, I'm not saying that's sufficient to prove the kind of meaning you're looking for, but doesn't it give you the slightest bit of pause? Doesn't it make you say, "Wow - that's something people have been trying to do since the garden of eden and nothing has ever done it so successfully. I wonder what else this thing can do?"

I think that for most open-minded observers, something like this thought process is what keeps our attention.

I think that undermining drug prohibition is a wonderful thing and an obvious net good for the world. But I also think that it's a sign that there are more mundane / lawful-good elements that will arise in time.

Porn has largely driven the internet forward at various critical junctures. But if we had stopped and said, "oh, is this thing just about porn? How useless," then we'd be in a much worse place.

Give it some time and an open mind.

>people are able to purchase proscribed plants and medicines in a way that completely subverts the efforts of state to prevent that.

No it doesn't. This is the kind of absurd nonsense that earns blockchain proponents this level of scorn.

People could buy drugs before. Sure they can use cryptocurrency instead of cash, but the old problems remain: getting the product from the buyer to the seller. The state can, and sometimes does, prevent that because until teleportation is invented getting the drugs you bought online into your hands opens you to risk. Buying drugs is certainly easier, but it doesn't help to talk in these ridiculous terms. I bought pot in college just fine. If I buy drugs and have it shipped to me I'm at the same risk whether I used cash or Bitcoin.

>"Wow - that's something people have been trying to do since the garden of eden and nothing has ever done it so successfully. I wonder what else this thing can do?"

You've got this backwards. It's been 10 years. People have been asking all that time "so what else can you do", and the answer so far is...nothing, really. This despite the relentless, utopian hype all during that time.

If proponents want people to keep an open mind and not be so cynical, maybe they shouldn't have spent years promising that blockchain technology is the digital coming of Jesus that will completely change everything in every way and usher in an endless golden age of peace and prosperity.

How do you send cash to your drug dealer on the internet, instantly?

I agree with you that you still have to get the product to the person, and blockchain doesn't solve this. But it doesn't claim to.

What cryptocurrencies do is solve the payment part of it, so that you can send money to someone without your bank finding out and freezing your account.

If I send money to coinbase, buy Bitcoin, and then convert that to Monero, the only thing my bank knows is that I sent money to coinbase. And coinbase only knows that I sent money to a different exchange.

> How do you send cash to your drug dealer on the internet, instantly?

By instantly you mean "up to 200 hours"? https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time (at the time of writing this comment the spoke on the chat was at 12000 minutes).

> the only thing my bank knows is that I sent money to coinbase. And coinbase only knows that I sent money to a different exchange.

Money laundering is as old an art as the banking services themselves. I guess blockchain made it easier then? True innovation.

By instantly I mean, on average around 10 minutes, if you pay an appropriate fee. This is miles ahead of credit cards, for example, as that takes days to clear. Yes they do, as the transaction isn't confirmed until days later.

Obviously, if you pay too low of a fee, it could take a long time.

> Money laundering is as old an art as the banking services themselves. I guess blockchain made it easier then? True innovation.

Indeed it does. The whole point of bitcoin was to enable censorship resistant financial transactions.

And it turns out, that the people who most want to have access to censorship resistant transactions, are the people who are CURRENTLY being censored by the existing financial system.

I have no idea how I'd be able to quickly send cash to someone on the other side of the world, in a way that is censorship resistant. Bitcoin enables this, though.

Obviously, though, if you don't care about fighting financial censorship, then you wouldn't see the usecase for a toll that helps you make censorship resistant transactions.

It is perfectly fine for you to not care about subverting financial censorship. But you should be aware that there are other people with different values, who care a whole lot about this cause.

Wow. I write: blockchain doesn't solve a single problem that hasn't been solved.

You: But you can buy drugs! Be open-minded!

So yes, ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

Oh, and yes, porn has advanced the internet. Please show me how blockchain "has driven the internet forward at critical junctures". No, buying drugs isn't it.

I really don't understand what you're talking about.

Firstly: yeah, can you squarely address the simple fact that blockchain tech has helped people acquire prohibited plants and compounds? People who previously didn't have access? That alone is enough to prove that the vehicle is not in neutral - it hasn't achieved literally nothing.

And second, you seem to have entirely whooshed over the point about porn and the internet - and to be clear, I didn't make this point up, but you seem not to have ever heard of it? Or something?

It's simple: porn pushed the internet forward. That doens't prove that the internet is worthless (or that it is worth only as much as the porn it can carry). Drug sales have pushed blockchain tech forward. That doesn't prove that blockchain tech is only as interesting as the drug commerce it can facilitate.

I'm just saying: be patient. Ten years isn't a very long time in this context. Well-intentioned, thoughtful people are working on it. The fact that it can seemingly overcome a long-time and entrenched evil in the world says that there's something there. Let's work out what it is.

Why so quick to judge?

First. Any other use cases than buying illegal drugs?

Second. What whooshed is your understanding of what I wrote. I know that porn had advanced the internet. What I asked is for you to provide examples how blockchain has advanced the internet the same way porn has.

Ten years is eternity in IT.

For a much better overview I refer you to the aforementioned article, https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... and its second part, "Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future", https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

The second part talks about drugs as well.

I have already read both of those. Here is my long-form response, posted on HN after the second link was posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788447

You are seriously dodging the conversation here, but I'll try one more time, just to make this clear:

* First: Imagine my answer, for the moment, is "no." So what? Disrupting drug prohibition is already not nothing.

* Second: Yeah, you whoosed. I didn't say that blockchain tech had advanced the internet (like porn has), but that drug commerce has advanced blockchain tech. See? In both cases, the resulting boost isn't limited to porn or drugs.

> What I asked is for you to provide examples how blockchain has advanced the internet the same way porn has.

I didn't make that claim. I don't think that it's clear that blockchain tech is even cognizable as part of what we today call "the internet." So I'm not making the statement you're asking me to defend.

What I am saying is that it's not reasonable to conclude "Well, it doesn't do anything but facilitate drug commerce" any more than you can sensibly conclude, about the early days of the internet, "It doesn't do anything other than facilitate porn."

Get it?

> So far it's nothing but the next Tomagotchi or Pets.com

At least with Pets.com you could order a 40 pound bag of dog food and get it delivered to your door. It may have been a bad business model but it still tried to solve a real problem.

Blockchain doesn't even solve real problems. It is just a technology in search of a problem. So far, the only "problem" it solves is providing a world-class platform for fraudsters and scammers to conduct business on top of.

Ethereum, in particular, is an excellent platform to spin up an ICO, take a bunch of suckers money, exit scam, and then go move to a country with no extradition treaty with the US...

Problem: Want to part many fools from many millions of dollars.

Solution: Blockchain!

I think that’s the frame rails this whole messy thing is built on, loveingly maintained by scammers and some True Believers.

Thanks, you said it way better than I could.

Blockchain is a world class way to solve the problem of how to part fools and their money.

> I look at how blockchain don't solve a single problem that hasn't already been solved more efficiently on much grander scales, and I call them out as such.

What about the problem of running an immutable log using compute power around the world without paying for the costs? That's what santoshi accomplished. He stopped mining many years ago and it's been committing logs every 10 minutes for years.

You are proving the OPs point and attacking a strawman.

People said that about motor cars, about touchscreen phones, and personal computers, the internet itself... any new technology will bring with it controversy, naysayers, early adopters, opportunities and pain.

Will Blockchain technology as we know it eventually go on and become something we all use / interact with? Nobody knows... but a technologist doesn't write off new technology just because it's not in use by everyone on the planet after less than a decade.

A lot of the hate from me and others is precisely the opposite - it doesn't solve problems. It doesn't bring novel solutions to the table. In fact anything at all blockchain related seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Every time, people start from blockchain and look for somewhere to crobar it in.

In the end it's just another data structure. It may have its niche, but as yet it seems to be hype over substance.

I see a lot of this as-well, and it goes with the atmosphere of our industry. Remember "cloud" was a solution looking for a problem also: server colocation had been around for 30 years prior...

We are in the adoption chasm of blockchain architecture right now; if we make it to the other side we'll have a new wave of innovation in the distributed software space.

> Remember "cloud" was a solution looking for a problem also: server colocation had been around for 30 years prior

True, although "you get root on it", "it takes 2 minutes to set up", and "it costs $10/mo" were properties that never really lived together before "the cloud". The value prop for cloud VMs was immediately obvious for a lot of people. And, at least in the crowd I roll with, managed systems like Google App Engine had very obvious utility out of the gate too (I can just push Python code to it and it'll manage all the servers for me? Woah!)

My "hate" for cryptos is not because it is a different way to solve a problem. It is because cryptos are trying to disrupt financial industry by adding technology to medieval monetary policies that we have long history showing that they are bad policies. Putting lipstock to a pig won't make the pig fly...

Inflationary vs deflationary only really matters when you are talking about world wide level scales for things.

But even so, there are lots of modern assets in the world that are deflationary. Stocks is a great example of a "deflationary" good. Or commodities.

so if you can’t fix the problem then you shouldn’t even try to make it better? should we roll back internet banking, eftpos, etc?

If you can't fix the problem you should not try to make it worse. Internet banking etc. are making things better. I do not know how bitcoin is supposed to make anything better for a non-criminal person.

I think the parent meant deflationary economics vs inflationary of today

That would be an irrational reason to hate cryptocurrencies, because they can be either inflationary or deflationary.

It's not about inflationary vs deflationary, but adjustable monetary supply based on need vs. predefined monetary supply.

So what is your solution? Marxism? Communism? Anarchy?

Well, first issue in current monetary policy that would need fixing is removing zero lower bound from interest rates to allow heavily negative rates when needed to manage aggregate demand more efficiently. (I understand that most people do not agree to this statement, but yes, to me it looks like aggregate demand needs to be managed in economy. And I do not know that many other tools than interest rate for that.)

Can we please stop labelling doubt and maybe cynicism as hate? It is nonsensical and doesn't add to the discussion. It rather makes people even more defensive and argue their position even harder.

I would say these are the solutions people are producing right now and the problems they are solving are still unknown.

I personally have animosity toward a lot of them because they've spiked the price of graphics cards to crazy levels.

This is a typical condescending blockchain enthusiast line. Stop implying that the critics don't understand how things work, it's insulting, intellectually lazy and false. When the blockchain is actually useful enthusiasts won't have to beg everyone to give it a chance.

I've been actively researching use cases and properties of cryptocurrencies (more than 15 minutes) and have come to the opposite conclusion: none of the hype is based in fact. For instance, let's go through your claims one by one.

> Decentralization,

There is surmounting evidence that this is not true and that Bitcoin and Ethereum are actually quite centralized and would benefit from being more centralized [0][1][2][3][4].

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03998

[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

[2] https://arewedecentralizedyet.com

[3] https://fc18.ifca.ai/bitcoin/papers/bitcoin18-final13.pdf

[4] https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...

> immutability,

I'm not sure if you've heard of theDAO fork [5], but basically transactions on Ethereum are not final. They can be reversed if a select group of powerful individuals decide to do so. Maybe it's "immutable" in the sense that the history can't be changed, but it's not "immutable" in the sense that the history can't be reverted arbitrarily by someone other than yourself.

[5] https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...

> protocols monetized with market forces,

What do you mean by this? Older protocols like TCP weren't made operational for free, they were funded by many institutions, both public and private. Are you sure this is something new?

> fee-less payments that cannot be prevented

Cryptocurrencies aren't fee-less. There are transaction fees, exchange fees and volatility/liquidity risk. If you're in the US and want to send money (real money) to your friend in Japan, you must buy crypto (exchange fee), send it (transaction fee), and sell it (exchange fee and volatility or liquidity risk).

Finally, as you've seen with theDAO fork, crypto payments can be reversed, which prevents the transaction from being final. I'd love to see any research on how crypto payments can't be censored, though, if you have any.

This comment is just wishful thinking and stems from a false fact. There are HNers who were using "blockchain" even before Vitalik knew about bitcoin.

There is no innovation happening. Distributed is not decentralized. Ethereum's blockchain is a mathematical proof of it being mutable (and thus not a blockchain?). Tell me any "dapp" and I will tell you the point of centralization. (Before you even mention it's probably 'the origin of money' )

Well, it's already 10 years down the line with blockchain technology. Still waiting.

And, despite your silly claims of jealousy, the real reason blockchain technology now receives such scorn is precisely because for years after its inception it received absurd hype. What you're seeing now is the backlash against the utopian, almost religious praise of the technology when it first came out.

It's precisely because it's been 10 years and the reality hasn't nearly matched the early hype that people have cooled on the technology, and now want solid results instead of more empty talk. It's long past the point where telling everyone big things are coming is enough, it's time to show those big things.

> Well, it's already 10 years down the line with blockchain technology. Still waiting.

To be fair -- it's 10 years since Bitcoin. People didn't start innovating (widely) on blockchains until Ethereum came along and paved the way for generalized blockchains.

> It's precisely because it's been 10 years and the reality hasn't nearly matched the early hype that people have cooled on the technology, and now want solid results instead of more empty talk. It's long past the point where telling everyone big things are coming is enough, it's time to show those big things.

Excessive hype is normal and expected for any disruptive technology. AI took decades to become fruitful, the Internet took a few decades to become mainstream. We're seeing hype with cloud computing, VR, IoT, synthetic foods, and all of these have very vocal nay-sayers.

IMO, blockchains are revolutionary but also very primitive -- there's a ton of innovation in this space, and its spawned a variety of new areas for very interesting research (in trustless consensus, decentralized economies, stable currencies, algorithmic governance, and cryptographic applications.)

Of course, all of this is my opinion, and only time will tell.

(/me spent a decade working on distributed consensus infrasatructure at Google.)

This is that "utopian, almost religious praise of the technology" that's being talked about. What is actually disruptive about blockchain?

It's funny, all these technologies you listed are all ones that are hyped for hyped sake before having an actual use case. What actual, useful purpose does Blockchain provide? Like really. Apart from "a computationally burdensome way to hate the government."[1] Because all I ever see things like "blockchain-backed sex contracts" or "mangocoin - how IBM helped Walmart and farmers". I thought the most promising use case was when the Australian securities regulator announced they were going to put all the shares in the blockchain, but then I just realised that there's no actual concrete benefit from it - nothing they're doing can't be achieved by a simple, centralised database.

[1]: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/951163739562061824?lan...

I think this might be because you live in a relatively trustful world of the west. Trust and privacy online will only become harder and harder to come by with how our current systems are set up.

> Excessive hype is normal and expected for any disruptive technology.

Plenty of hype for things that didn't make it though. Excessive hype isn't an indicator of success....

IMO, blockchains are worthless energy sucking devices whose only purpose is to take money from rubes and transfer it into the pockets of scammers. It's the worlds greatest platform for financial fraud and that is about it.

There were plenty of naysayers back then too.

Engineers love to play devil's advocate. Now that the posts/articles about cryptocurrency are becoming more frequent, those dissenting opinions are also becoming more frequent.

I have two problems with all existing crypto currencies.

1. Are they fundamentally safe or are the scams? 2. Will they get shut down by governments?

Both of those questions leave me feeling very open to risk. People willing to assume that risk before either issue has been resolved may reap whatever reward early adoption gives them. But if you build a business on the wrong tech you could get bankrupt or worse.

Most of the big dotcom 1.0 companies disappeared (or are dying before our eyes, RIP Yahoo). Maybe it is better to be a crypto 2.0 business.

Don't mix up crypto currencies with blockchain

Think pets.com vs the internet

I'm thinking more like SOAP vs. REST, except with the penalty possibly being outstanding debts in a currency that has been made illegal.

It’s more SOAP vs TCP/IP, the latter being Blockchain.

Cryptocurrency is the economic layer of a decentralized blockchain.

I'm open to change as well as skeptical of far-reaching claims. We're going on a decade of claims about what blockchain was going to enable. I'm still waiting, hopeful that something will come of it, but I'm also aware (as all techies should be) that hype and money can get you very far.

There is genuine innovation in this space and it is going to impact a lot of areas.

For example, these are claims with no evidence. You've taken it on faith, but it's just as possible there's nothing there. I'd say it's coin flip as to which will end up being true, but I don't at all accept that it's a given, nor do I believe anyone being honest would.

We simply don't know and anyone telling you otherwise is a true believer. Would you like some of my kool aid? Don't kid yourself about how wrong people can be about, well, anything.

My "hate" has nothing to do with what you described but more on how the project is run.

It's no longer what it claims to be, and increasingly moving away from decentralization while at the same time the high priests creating propaganda that it's OK to be a "little bit centralized" for the "greater vision". Looks like most uneducated people genuinely believe this because they have no idea how Ethereum works underneath, and even many entrepreneurs who DO understand how Ethereum works are so invested in the ecosystem as to be blinded by their own interest, so "choose" to believe in it, but if they all stepped back for a minute and look at what has happened they will all realize this is not the platform they were excited about in the first place.

I generally hope the idea itself will work out, but doubt the current team and the entourage (also known as "ecosystem") around them will get there.

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