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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

It's a very good point. A lot of smart people jumped into an area that if I'm feeling very generous I would call "unproven". And I'm all for startups trying new things, but we could have learned just as much about the possible utility of cryptocurrencies with 100x less resources.

My main worry now is that some of the people will have been damaged by this. Some of the interest we can write off as irrational exuberance; hopefully some will have gotten their fingers usefully burned and will be more careful choosing what they work on next time. But a lot of the field was somewhere between chasing a bubble and outright scammy.

It reminds me of people I've seen burned by MLM schemes. Some say, "never again!" But some really buy into the get-rich-quick thinking and will keep on making the same mistake in different forms. "This time it will be different!" But it never is.

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This is the financial version of natural selection. I don't feel bad for people losing their money over something that had little purchasing power and was very obviously unstable.

>I would call "unproven".

Why wouldn't you call it novel? It's only 10 year old technology at this stage.

Because the vast majority of crypto/blockchain things are either outright scams, obviously doomed to fail ("it's Yelp but crypto!") or misapplied ("we're using blockchain intternally").

I honestly can't think of a single crypto startup that's had a compelling product.

Edit: typos.

How does that make them less novel?

Your impression that the "vast majority of crypto/blockchain thing are either outright scams" is a personal opinion for which you can't find supporting evidence. The SEC has only issued a hand full of notifications and LOST the only court case I've seen so far.

"Scam" was only one of three categories I mentioned, but regardless here's a nice long list: https://www.scambitcoin.com/blacklist

Ten years into the Web we had Google, Amazon, Geocities, eBay, Flash games, and thousands of existing companies moving their operations online. What is a single blockchain-related success we can point to other than cryptocurrency exchanges?

Who manages that list? Why do you trust it?

edit: I looked through the site and most of the "scams" seemed more like basic phishing sites than actual blockchains or cryptocurrencies

Your anecdote is irrelevant. Scam sites usually give up their bitcoin related domains when they fail, which invariably get taken over by basic phishing sites. You should look on the Internet Archive to see what the scam sites were actually doing, before they went out of business and had their domains taken over by phishers.

Funny that you trust and parrot Bitcoin scammers, but you don't trust a list of Bitcoin scammers. Afraid some you've invested in, hyped and promoted yourself might show up?

What anecdote?

I've pointed out that most of the scams didn't actually involve a blockchain or tokens, as the SEC cases against a few of them show.

The question of who manages the list is important so we can tell what method was used and what's the motivation to keep it. One of the areas I'm most interested is cryptoeconomics and of course fairness and transparency matter to me which is why I wonder why would you defend this site as if you knew it to be true and accurate.

Your anecdote about looking through the site. How could you possibly not understand that?

Nothing I said in any way was a defense of the site. Where did you get that idea?

You're obviously not reading anything that I wrote, and just trying to be contrary to make it sound like you're making an argument. Please don't bother replying if you can't understand what I'm saying, and make stuff up that I didn't say.

We had these companies by '99, so assume the starting point for the ten year timeline is 1989. The 'internet' had already been opened up to certain universities/institutions in 1981 (and was in government R&D years before that). There were plenty of people in 1991 who said the internet wasn't going to be or do much of anything.

The most charitable reading of the crypto tech timeline is to say that the bubble popped at the protocol layer instead of the application layer. In that case, we're somewhere around 1989-1993/94. Maybe we're still waiting for a Tim Berners-Lee.

Who knows.

You might check out numer.ai, along with their coming data marketplace, Erasure. They've been running for awhile...

What other ten year old technologies, that went on to be successful, were as useless for their stated purpose as crypto?

If crypto is money, can I:

Spend it at Amazon? My grocery store? My corner deli? Pay my rent? Pay my employees?

If crypto is a store of value can I trust it will have any rational storage value over any time period?

> Spend it at Amazon? My grocery store? My corner deli? Pay my rent? Pay my employees?

YES on all accounts.

No, you can't spend Bitcoin at Amazon. They don't accept it.

The others depend on whether they choose to accept it or not. It's not the same as legal tender, where they must accept it.

You can use a service to pay Amazon shopping with bitcoin.

https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/how-to-buy-on-ama...

Sure, maybe there's a service that allows you to pay with live chickens for Amazon gift vouchers. By your definition that makes live chickens money, I guess.

Chickens could very well be money, at least bones have been used before.

edit:https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-18827269/a-brief-histor...

You're missing the point. Again. He countered your argument. You reply ignores that fact, and just tries to derail the conversation.

I don't think "legal tender" means what you think it means.

In many jurisdictions (including the US and the Eurozone, as far as I know), almost no business is required to accept legal tender as payment. Legal tender is only required to be accepted when settling a debt, and even then there can be restrictions (such as a maximum denomination or number of banknotes or coins, a maximum amount that can be settled in cash, or contract obligations).

I think it does mean exactly what I think it means :)

It's not about debt, it's about payments. If there is no agreement to the contrary, then you must accept legal tender. You also don't have to accept anything else.

Amazon have chosen not to accept Bitcoin, and instead to accept payment via certain credit cards. Saying that they accept Bitcoin is false.

Trying to pay people unexpectedly in Bitcoin or chickens or something else will not go well. They can demand legal tender, unless there are other agreements in place.

I still don't understand why you are mentioning legal tender in this discussion. Legal tender is cash, credit cards are not legal tender.

Therefore Amazon does not accept legal tender.

Yes, businesses like Amazon could demand payment in legal tender (or credit cards, or Bitcoin) but they are under no obligation to accept any of those forms of payment.

Bitcoin is no different than credit cards with respect to legal tender.

Ah yeah, the OP is arguing elsewhere that Bitcoin is legal tender in some European countries, and here he is trying to say you can use it to pay your employees and Amazon etc. I can see how I am confusing things, sorry.

If that is true for you, I'm impressed. Could I see the properly redacted receipt from any of these listed places showing you paying in crypto? Maybe a pack of gum would be easiest. It'll be like 0.0000000001 BTC.

Could also show 1 mBTC but that's a UX question imho.

I agree if such a receipt from a corner store could be shown, it could have many ways of displaying the amount of BTC paid for the pack of gum. I would love to see such a receipt.

Again, you're missing the point, and trying to derail the conversation. He called you on your outrageous claim, asking for proof. You dodged and tried to derail, instead of providing the proof he requested. But that certainly proves his point, that you're not sincere about your extraordinary claim "YES on all accounts" that you can't even provide any ordinary evidence to support when asked to, instead you suddenly try to change the subject to UX.

Digital cameras, when invented back in the 70s. It took decades until they were usable, and still another decade until they started to approach the quality of nondigital.

Great example!

And the industry leader (Kodak) at the time didn't think digital would be useful and delayed R&D. But don't worry they came up with Kodakcoin!

To convert Kodakcoin to cash, you have to send rolls of 12 Kodakcoins at a time off for a week to the lab to be developed. But just wait until some day there will finally be a Coinomat booth in every shopping center parking lot that can develop your Kodakcoins into cash in only 24 hours!

Yes, but the real world advantages of digital cameras were apparent from the very start.

Currently there are zero real world practical use cases for cryptocurrency that aren't associated with illegal activity. If anyone knows of legal applications of cryptocurrency, feel free to respond. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Digital cameras were useful since day 1. Nobody was confused about what to do with them. What you're talking about as "usable" is just technological refinement that happens to all things.

It's not a very good example, in that the barrier there was physical development of hardware. This is purely a software problem.

Another obvious difference is that from the first moment they were on the market, they had some practical use, and the amount of use grew quickly. If we count from the Kodak DCS 100 introduced in 1991 at a price of $20,000, then ten years later we see that they were being bought at the rate of 18 million units a year and rapidly rising. [1]

Bitcoin, in contrast, has very little practical use 10 years after introduction. Its merchant adoption peaked years ago. That's far short of what an actually useful digital payments product can do. Look at M-Pesa [2] for contrast. It was introduced only a year early than Bitcoin. It has tens of millions of active users, and processes up to 900 transactions per second, with an average of 160 per second. [3] A huge success compared with Bitcoin's average of 3-4 transactions per second, most of which are speculative rather than practical. [4]

[1] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/5474101424/pmaresearch2003...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

[3] https://www.nation.co.ke/news/MPesa-transactions-rise-to-Sh1...

[4] https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/transactions-per-second

> If we count from the Kodak DCS 100 introduced in 1991

Kodak invented digital cameras in 1975.

>> If we count from the Kodak DCS 100 introduced in 1991

> Kodak invented digital cameras in 1975.

DigiCash was founded in 1990 based on a paper from 1983.

Exactly. I think the fair place to start counting with both Bitcoin and digital cameras is first consumer launch.

And with M-Pesa versus Bitcoin, they're both digital cash, so I think it's even easier to see how badly Bitcoin has done.

>If crypto is a store of value can I trust it will have any rational storage value over any time period?

There are different types of cryptocurrencies and the one you are looking for is known as a "stable-coin". I suggest looking into Bancor and Maker DAI to get a better view of how these currencies keep their value over time.

Why not both?

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