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Comment by mihaifm | Hacker News Reader

Tron is just an overhyped marketing machine and a massive cash grab. Now they're using the money to buy some real world assets to consolidate their image in the distributed/decentralized world. Their strategy works, what can I say. As far as the product itself, just take a look at their website (https://tron.network/index?lng=en) under the DApps section, they just list some mockups with dead urls or no additional info...a joke really for a project worth several billions in market cap. Taking a look at their repository (https://github.com/tronprotocol/java-tron) there is no sign of a virtual machine that's supposed to run smart contracts, however they do attempt to create some kind of documentation for it (http://wiki.tron.network/en/latest/TRON_Virtual_Machine.html)

Seriosly, it's frightening how this project managed to raise so much money from thin air.

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The dot-com boom was like that but didn't deter good companies emerge with life changing technologies.

Key difference: dot-com bubble followed successes like Yahoo, Amazon, Hotmail. What are the crypto equivalent of the Yahoos that have a material product and user-base?

Bitcoin and ethereum are such successes! On a smaller scale but growing, 0x is doing an amazing job.

What’s their end product to date besides speculation?

It is in heavy use in black markets and for illegal enterprise such as ransom. So the product is successful transactions outside many laws.

The same can be said of cash. Can we agree that this has been played to death by now?

Cash can be used at tens of thousands of locations for non-shady uses. Same can’t be said of crypto.

Same can be said for the Internet, cars, cell phones, hell a paper and pen.

I'm thrilled to participate in building something that won't be government controlled. It's the same excitement I had when the web wasn't Facebook and Google.

I really believe that Bitcoin has a material product and user-base but I suspect you will disagree with me. Just a hunch :)

Believing is good, proving is better. Every time I hear this kind of comment I've never once found a person that could give me concrete proof or simple explanations of how any of this is being "successful". I'm not trying to be a skeptic, it's just the easiest position given the situation.

I also think “will crypto ever be successful?” and “isn’t it just like the dot-com bubble?” are worth answering separately.

I’m pretty sure blockchain applications will emerge eventually and have wide usage.

But I also think crypto is more so where the Internet was in the late 70s than 90s. Except for the hype (the Internet wasn’t as hyped in 70s and 80s.)

Hotmail success, yes.

Amazon success, yes.

Yahoo, had alot of money and continuously pissed it away on poor choices (Mark Cuban, just to name one. 5MB limit on email).

Ripple and XRP have actual Banking software actually used by money transfer firms and banks

AFAIK Ripple-the-software has very little to do with crypto. It’s a centralized system to move fiat and only the super tiny fee it charges banks are paid using XRP — and that too is optional.

Chuckecheese tokens have more widespread usage than XRP.

What part of "Distributed Ledger" seems centralized to you?

Distributed doesn’t necessarily mean “decentralized”. I can have a distributed database stored across 5 servers. It wouldn’t mean my database is “decentralized.”

Fair enough. But why do you say Ripple is centralized?

Ripple (the protocol) has been tested and presumably is still tested by money transfer firms and banks for evaluation purposes but not used in production.

And Ripple the protocol != XRP which is kind of funny with the ridiculous valuation of XRP. XRP is a pregen (shit)coin which banks would be loathe to use.

I never said Ripple == XRP. In fact, I meant Ripple the company.

I am not going to make a comment about coin valuations - that is a different discussion.

You were looking for an example where something useful that creates real value for customers was created. I simply gave you an example of something that does.

Well you did write Ripple and XRP so you can see how one could be confused. :)

When/if financial institutions start using Ripple the protocol for real then I will agree that it creates a real value for customers.

If I order an eval kit for the latest RPi clone and I do not use it after a week of evaluation it is debatable whether the kit created a real value for me.

Tron VM has a beta release out, but it's not a priority currently.

They're working on building and stabilizing the blockchain first. Dapp partnerships are coming but you cant have people commit to building on a nonexistant blockchain ;)

dapps are a dud. just look at all the dapps eth has

I havent tried using them, but what makes them stink?

Expensive/Slow?

Ensuring the integrity of your distributed application by running the same code on every node in the network is a fundamentally bad idea. It only makes sense in zero trust, monetary applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum itself - or speculative tokens built on top of them.

> It only makes sense in zero trust, monetary applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum itself - or speculative tokens built on top of them.

Which only make sense in a very narrow "technically correct" kind of way. From a larger perspective they still don't make sense. Pissing away small countries worth of electricity to validate an incredibly small number of transactions is a horrible idea.

...And that is just one of the deep, fundamental flaws in blockchain-based currency.

The duplicated code can be as simple as a few cryptographic operations for each broadcasted transaction. This can easily scale to tens of thousands of nodes and transactions per hour without requiring significant computing resources over the baseline of running a high bandwidth internet node.

When the consistency algorithm is proof of work chains, or when the proof of work is used to control the scarcity and disbursement of the valuable token, only then you have the whole "world turning into fucking Mordor" problem.

No connection to the actual world outside of the blockchain.

So mostly they are gambling apps (with source of randomness the blockchain itself), exchanges, or artificially scarce "collectibles" (like cryptokitties).

I’ve been at BEF the last couple of days and http://www.dapp.com is exhibiting. They are launching a service to help promote these kinds of decentralized apps.

Might be a bit too early. Don’t know if the market is even close to ready.

yeah the issue isn't promotion. there's just no compelling services

Seriously, do take a look at it: https://dappradar.com/

The most used dapp had just over 4000 users in the last 24 hours, while CryptoKitties, arguably the most famous dapp, didn't even have 400.

All the most used dapps are games and distributed exchanges for coins. Distributed exchanges do not justify the existence of these coins (which are meant to power distributed apps not just be tokens for speculation). The games don't need to be dapps they are just novelties.

Find me a dapp that isn't one of those two things with appreciable usage and I'll be impressed.

You can start looking into Dai which serves as a stable coin using collateral or more generally into Security Tokens (here an explanation on STO https://medium.com/crypto-oracle/prepare-yourself-the-securi...) Those are going to be big very soon!

I'm well informed already about these things. Note that neither of them have significant adoption.

Security tokens are a Bad idea.

Dai is basically only useful for speculating on cryptocurrencies and so I dismiss it like I dismiss exchange dapps. This whole industry can't be built on speculating on the value of nonces.

Could you elaborate on why you believe security tokens to be a bad idea?

To quote some random other person here:

> It's awesome until your private key gets stolen and suddenly a hacker in Russia owns your house.

I like the legal system. The transactions I'm involved with are already cheap and the non-cheap transactions aren't made cheaper with the blockchain.

Why could not you have both ? No one said that you need Securities transactions to be irreversible. STO can bring more liquidity to property assets and simplify dramatically otherwise complex financial operation (title emission, splitting of subsidiaries and so on). I do hate the point that talks about adoption when we are talking of a technology that has less than 5 years of age (Ethereum for that matter). I hear it a lot and I cannot stop myself to think that this is the same kind of reasoning could have been use again Amazon in 1996 (Bookstore are a small business and Internet has no adoption)

bitcoin is closer to 10 years old really

Stable coins are a terrible idea that one day people will realize as such. The economics of a stable coin make no sense. All it takes for it to be totally useless is just enough people to refuse to accept it or the market crashing to the point where trade volume is so low you can never cash out. Just because there is 1 for 1 fiat backing, doesn’t mean you can actually claim your money.

turn that dapp into a dab

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