Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

Well, the blockchain hype is easy to criticize. Tech people refer to its inefficiencies and how it is just a decentralized database. Political people point out that the real world is much more complex than what a blockchain can represent.

I would argue that its strength lies in another area: It gets people excited. It makes people start thousands of new projects and companies, millions read all the news articles and a huge crowd invests a lot of money into the space.

And, of course, it gets people excited because it hits a nerve. It promises a change of power structure in the world. Away from monolithic, opaque, political structures to democratic, transparent, border-less systems. Changing the role of everyone from a helpless observer to an actice participant.

Obviously the build-up is messy and over-promising but it may very well change the core infrastructures of how the whole world currently operates - economically, politically and socially.

The ratio of people who's nerves are hit because crypto can change the power structure, to those who're interested in it because it has the potential to turn a young person's $10k creditcard borrowings into $1m, is probably pretty close to 1:100.

I mean, name the 10 biggest use cases. Bitcoin is 10 years old, it is a household name, it's been in every newspaper, every developer in the world has heard of it, it captured orders of magnitude more angel and venture investment than say a google or facebook did. It should have some genuine users who are using it not because it's a volatile asset class with an average annual return of >10x.

It's virtually impossible to find any usergroup of significance anymore. Outside of course the asset class, which so far hasn't changed the power structure so much as it has made a few techies and rich people (paper) rich.

I thought that it gets people excited because there is a lot of dumb money to be made in it, regardless of whether or not your work will result in any added value to the world.

Bitcoin gets people as excited as tulip fanatics in 1636.

Blockchains aren't widely exciting. There are some interesting applications, yes... but there are not millions of people following blockchains, there are not "thousands" of new projects. It's a quiet back-end evolution, not a revolution in the public-facing world.

Exactly. If it was something conventional it would not get the attention of a full blog post saying why it is bad or the general mob-hatred at HN.

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