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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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