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Comment by Sargos | Hacker News Reader

I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology to the point that we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come.

The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. That's something that future generations will take for granted but HN is largely ignoring right now. Even Google goes down (sometimes once or twice a month). Take a moment to imagine a few of the things you could do better if you had 100% reliable hosting that was safe and private. And basically free. (Either the user pays a penny or two when using your app or you pay a penny or two for each user).

You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages on Usenet which take a while to appear. The tech was being improved. Those short pieces of messages evolved into images and then later video and now we have the internet of today. This isn't going to happen overnight but it's going to happen faster than the improvement of the internet since Ethereum is just software and no hardware needs to be rolled out.

Go ahead and ignore it right now. It's still building time. But don't assume it's useless or beanie babies. In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful and I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.

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> we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come.

That quote is a product of its time, and only seems foolish or misguided with the benefit of hindsight. There is no shame in skepticism, even if it ultimately ends up being incorrect (likewise I'd have no misgivings about making a wrong decision rationally). There is also an element of survivorship bias: many such quotes about things which did fail were wagered on similar amounts of information, but have since fallen into obscurity. I don't think it's fair to call the author of that quote a Luddite.

Speaking as someone well acquainted with the technicalities of distributed systems and cryptography, I am deeply skeptical of blockchain technology. I think the vast majority (but not all) of it is "lame"[1], for lack of a better word. I would happily accept being quoted for a decade or two if I'm wrong.

___________________________

1. I'm skeptical for reasons I'm not going to try to defend, because they've been rehashed on Hacker News over and over. The justifications will likely not convince anyone who remains unconvinced.

> That quote is a product of its time, and only seems foolish or misguided with the benefit of hindsight.

"Only"? There were top-level comments in that very thread [1] that pointed out why it was misguided and foolish. Hindsight is not the requirement that some want it to be.

1. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

Yet wireless and large capacity proved, in the long run, to be exactly what the market wanted and Apple had to incorporate those features into later iPods.

I think that’s sort of OP’s point. The criticisms that come up may be valid, but that doesn’t mean the whole enterprise is doomed.

The other thing is, something can be both lame and popular. Its popularity doesn't somehow magically erase its shortcomings.

The reverse can also be true. Zune for life.

I still think the Zune is a superior product. Great build quality, software layout was great and I think most people that put them side by side would agree. But network effects are very strong.

Network affects? For a stand-alone, non-networked MP3 player?

Bandwagon effect would be a more apt description.

Also the success of the iPod want a product of only the iPod but also of iTunes (store)

Disclaimer: I've co-founded a company building cryptographic protocols for existing cryptocurrencies. I'm also a cryptocurrency security researcher.

I believe in Bitcoin and the recent developments in both cryptography and distributed systems which are underlying many cryptocurrency projects. I think the skepticism of Hn is rational, valuable to the community and often correct. The cryptocurrency space is a great space to work in, but it requires a constant investment in skepticism and critical thought. I hope Hn always remains skeptical of technology.

> The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted.

I disagree with this statement. Ethereum DApps can fail, Ethereum can be rendered unavailable via: scalability issues, forks, bugs or failures in the P2P network. Furthermore the additional infrastructure that many DApps rely on can fail as well. Ethereum is not a solution for achieving high-availability, high-availability is probably harder to achieve with a DApp. Ethereum is a solution for building and managing assets outside the control of a single party or company. This intentional loss of control comes with many costs and does not provide universal business benefits.

I cannot find a good analogy, but I am starting to look at Ethereum as a really good proof of concept, but one that probably won't survive. I cannot put my finger on exactly why, but I am starting to feel like nothing will survive that is not built on Bitcoin itself.

Some projects will die in this during this current crash. The most likely force to kill off projects will be:

1. lack of developers to adapt to cheap 51% attacks,

2. cheap 51% attacks will lead to those coins getting delisted from exchanges since attacks will cheat exchanges via 51% double spending attacks (something which has happened a few times already)

3. With no ability for people to safely buy or sell coins those coins will die.

I don't think this will happen to BTC or ETH. I think Ethereum will look very different in 5-10 years.

BTC may survive, but ETH is down more than 90% and it's not looking good.[1]

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/

It is counter-intuitive but 90% drops in the price of a cryptocurrency don't result in that cryptocurrency dying. What kills a cryptocurrency is exchanges delisting it and/or having no developers. Price decreases are unlikely to directly cause either of these to happen to Ethereum.

Isnt the price reduction what can lead to the 51% attack?

there's no pressing need for ethereum, it's a cool experiment but it's much less efficient than the centralized databases that power 99.9% of the worlds computing needs today. it will die from lack of use once the hype and funding runs out. bitcoin will survive because people actually use it to evade currency control laws and launder money. not to mention traders will keep it alive as an alternative asset and good source of volatility

Centralized databases power 99.9% because Ethereum like technologies aren’t ready for general use yet. My money is on Ethereum getting there first with sharding, proof of stake, and adoption but whichever one does will unlock many, many use cases.

Which use cases?

Bitcoin will just die. The problem wit pretending it's an asset is you're doing exactly that - pretending. When you hold stocks you hold actual ownership of a productive corporation, when you hold bonds you hold repayment promises from productive corporations or governments which can tax their citizens etc.

When you hold Bitcoin...you don't hold anything which can convert into something useful at the end of the day - you hold the useless result of expended computing power. A bitcoin isn't a password which unlocks anything, it doesn't convert back into computing power - it can't do anything into the future.

I don't hold any bitcoin or cryptocurrency and am a crypto skeptic in general but isn't this argument commonly rebutted with the comparison to gold, to which all of the same criticisms apply but which has nonetheless maintained value for millenia?

Gold at least has legitimate industrial uses that put a floor under its valuation.

What do you hold when you hold USD in a bank account? The best argument I've heard for the value of USD is:

1. is that you can pay your US federal and state taxes in USD

2. and many companies and individuals will accept USD in trade for goods and services.

Measuring BTC by that same rule you'll find:

1. You can pay your Ohio state taxes in Bitcoin [0],

2. and you can trade BTC (Bitcoin) for some goods and services (overstock for example).

Thus if USD has value by the measure above than BTC must share some of that value. The value of BTC might be significantly smaller than USD but it must be non-zero.

>When you hold stocks you hold actual ownership of a productive corporation

Not every company is productive. The stock is worth what someone is willing to pay for it now or at some future point. Companies have issued stock as cryptocurrency tokens.

>When you hold Bitcoin...you don't hold anything which can convert into something useful at the end of the day - you hold the useless result of expended computing power

You raise an interesting point here. Should currencies have a use other than being a medium of exchange? For example you can burn paper money to generate heat or melt down coinage into useful metals. Does having that property make paper money or physical coins better as a currency? Goldbugs would say yes, I'm less sure.

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pay-taxes-with-bitcoin-ohio-say...

>>1. is that you can pay your US federal and state taxes in USD

>>2. and many companies and individuals will accept USD in trade for goods and services.

First of all to have USD someone needed to borrow it first and they need to return it. The USD you hold is useful for someone else to pay their debt back. This is much more important than taxes.

>>Thus if USD has value by the measure above than BTC must share some of that value.

No, the reasoning is based on missing the point of fiat currency: someone else owns USD to the central authority with a lot of power.

>>For example you can burn paper money to generate heat or melt down coinage into useful metals. Does having that property make paper money or physical coins better as a currency? Goldbugs would say yes, I'm less sure.

The point is that USD represents someone's debt. They will need to come up with goods/services to pay that debt back if they don't currently own enough USD. BTC represents wasted power and its only value is a hope someone wants to accept it as payment even though no one really needs to (unlike USD).

> First of all to have USD someone needed to borrow it first and they need to return it.

This is a novel concept to me - could you please elaborate on that or provide suitable search keywords?

Look up "Credit theory of money".

Thanks!

You can’t actually pay your Ohio state taxes with BTC. They convert immediately to USD when you pay with BTC. If it didn’t convert, you can bet they would not accept BTC.

This is a tired argument, comparing Bitcoin to stock and using words like "actual" in the context of stock while using words like "pretending" in the context of Bitcoin.

Most stock today doesn't pay dividents and has no direct relationship to the company's assets. You own some tradeable tokens and you bet on them going up or down in value. Implying stock ownership gives you something that's tangible and non-speculative is the real pretending.

fewer than 20% of the stocks in the S&P500 do not pay dividends:

https://www.dividend.com/investor-resources/sp-500-companies...

Arguably the whole human civilisation is based on imaginary things - that is on 'pretending'.

There's nothing make believe about the trillion dollar US armed forces that backs the full faith and credit of the US dollar.

I put my finger on it being too expensive. It works when it is subsidized by all these speculators - but eventually this cost needs to be paid.

Replication of fixed infrastructure and computing costs come to mind.

Well said. Decentralization does not magically give you reliability or high availability. Sometimes it is quite the opposite. It is still just a bunch of software running on a bunch of miscellaneous computers over an unreliable network.

To me there are strong parallels between the cryptocurrency boom and the previous P2P boom. P2P technology was exciting and super interesting, but people assumed that it would magically be the solution to a million problems just because the tech was awesome and decentralized. But that didn't happen, instead Netflix happened. Netflix found a way to solve the actual problems that people were having and at the end of the day the underlying technology didn't matter.

I expect to see something similar happen with a lot of the current crypto use cases. More centralized solutions like Amazon QLDB[1] will provide the majority of the benefits that people really need: a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log, while also being performant and highly available.

Many people see decentralization as the solution to all problems because it will finally make things fair, a level playing field for all. I just don't see it happening. Not because of some sinister world order trying to retain control, but simply because that is not how human interactions and trust tend to work. I think we can continue to move towards more decentralization, but it shouldn't be the end goal in and of itself and we should always be skeptical when there is more focus on that than there is on solving the problem at hand.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/

>Netflix found a way to solve the actual problems that people were having and at the end of the day the underlying technology didn't matter.

This, one thousand times this, it is always this. People have problems and they want solutions, they don't care about particular technology architectures.

To be fair p2p was, and still is, a better technical solution, and had it not been illegal, would probably have won.

(p2p wasn’t illegal, but what people wanted out of it was)

There are services that incorporate P2P (e.g., Spotify, and you can find others if you do some research). If you're writing closed-source software that operates on content that belongs to you (or that you've legally licensed) there's nothing preventing you from using peer-to-peer technologies in your stuff.

I can't believe that Netflix didn't seriously consider P2P. I imagine they didn't do it because there are issues with consuming limited upload bandwidth that doesn't belong to NF, and having poor control over the resulting complicated network flows and the ultimate customer experience (think about what your first customer service action for a customer having video quality issues would be).

No doubt there are many managers and system engineers who shy away from P2P because it's associated with bad actors. But there are sound reliability engineering and customer-facing reasons not to use it, too.

Didn’t Netflix start providing ISP level caching vis boxes? In any case if they didn’t this method would make P2P pointless as consumer peers would still route traffic back to their ISP, and in worst cases another consumer could be at another ISP network.

In this case it is a little stranger though. It seems that the problem is that the economic system is rigged against them, and their payment systems are spying on them. When the “solution” to this becomes evident it has been flowing to the participants in that economy. They then realize that Bitcoin was solving their monetary problem all along and the awakening happens - only when they rush to the solution it appears to be a mirage as the very act of them rushing on their realization turns into instant debt liberation for the long term participants. Then it all crumbles and they say it’s a scam and was never a solution. In reality, nothing really changed, and the slow crawl will continue for the long term participants.

I am genuinely interested what are those problems that decentralized apps and cryptocurrency solve? Anonymity of payments? Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything and I want convenience first and most of the time I do not care about anonymity at all. Smart contracts? After 2008 there was talk about including Python code into contracts to codify distribution of gains in MBS’s. Pretty low tech and workable. Did not happen, because finance is still largely a business of relationships and trust.

>Anonymity of payments? Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything and I want convenience first and most of the time I do not care about anonymity at all.

Unfortunately Bitcoin provides much less anonymity than cash or credit card payments. Bitcoin provides excellent censorship resistance, in that Bitcoin lets anyone who has Bitcoin send Bitcoin to anyone that wants Bitcoin (assuming of course internet access and fairly technical users). Additionally Bitcoin lets people custody Bitcoins like cash or gold and also lets those same users send Bitcoins digitally. This is a new development and something people couldn't do before. We are still in the early stages of seeing how people use this new capability. Check back in 20-100 years.

Smart contracts, especially legally enforceable smart contracts, have existed well before cryptocurrencies, however cryptocurrencies provide a fairly natural setting for them.

>Did not happen, because finance is still largely a business of relationships and trust.

Relationships and trust mean a high cost of doing business, both because trust is expensive and because relationships are not able to be automated. Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts offer a technical substitute for trust. This substitute is not good in all cases and has some serious tradeoffs. However there are some areas in which it is a clear improvement.

I agree that cash is better for anonymous transactions ... Sometimes. But I don't follow that credit cards are more anonymous that Bitcoin.

You generally have to give up your ssn and lots of private data to get a credit card. Your name is tied to it.

Cash is great, but does require you or someone to physically deliver it.

But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.

>But I don't follow that credit cards are more anonymous that Bitcoin.

Credit card transactions are private between you, the merchant, the processor and your bank and anyone those parties sell your data to. Whereas Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public immutable ledger.

>But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.

You can certainly obfuscate Bitcoin transactions. I even wrote a tumbling protocol for Bitcoin[0] and have been involved with other cryptocurrency privacy projects. I believe that cryptocurrencies can achieve a high degree of privacy, but we aren't there yet.

Note you can do similar things to make credit card payments more privacy. For instance by buying and trading gift cards or store credits.

At the end of the day if you buy physical goods online you have to have them delivered to your house, drop site or PO box. That means giving out a physical address which greatly reduces your anonymity.

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf

> Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything and I want convenience first and most of the time I do not care about anonymity at all.

As a side comment, just two hours ago I paid an IPTV service with BTC using coinpayments.net and it was easy (scan QR code and click send) and quite fast (at first I was going to pay for BCH because usually it is faster, but I only had BTC in my wallet).

Really cool as payments technology if you tell me.

> Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything

I think following the reasoning of many BTC optimists, your quote is equivalent to saying "PPP (the one in OSI layer 2) is a shitty way to have globally distributed, secured real-time chats"

> I am genuinely interested what are those problems that decentralized apps and cryptocurrency solve?

Censorship resistant, electronic, financial transactions.

You can make an electronic payment to anyone, and nobody is going to stop you. No transactions are currently being censored on most of the big crypto platforms, so we have provable evidence that it works for this usecase right now.

Thank you. So, electronic financial transactions is a problem already solved by other means (and much better at that). Censorship - I totally recognize my first world privilege - what are the contexts in which this is relevant? Even if payment censorship problem is somehow solved, the delivery of goods and services can still be blocked, be it by customs or firewalls.

If people end up really wanting something like asset management that's not in the hands of a middleman, of course your Netflix and Amazon examples don't apply.

People want fast, cheap, easy ways to move money. Most don't particularly care whether or not a middleman is involved. They just want the job to get done and they want it to be simple.

> Ethereum [...] apps [...] are fully trusted

Haha you're funny.

On a more serious note, I don't think the current generation of blockchains is "The Future". They offer basically nothing more than what you can achieve with a publicly hosted git repository with post-commit hooks that enforce signatures. Actually, Ethereum is far worse, because all computations are repeated by every node (as far as I know), which is a huge waste of energy. If you want reliable distributed computation, you need to make sure there's some way of smart distribution of work... e.g. offer exponentially diminishing returns for each "duplicated" evaluation of the same piece of code beyond the 2nd.

The replication is for secure non-censorable trusted code execution.

For high-throughput computations, Golem is being developed, where there is (generally) no computation replication. www.golem.network. The repository is here: https://github.com/golemfactory

Even better:

> Ethereum [...] apps [...] never fail

Just...

wow.

Listen, distributed ledgers are useful.

Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful.

These people just can't seem to see the difference.

> Listen, distributed ledgers are useful.

> Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful.

> These people just can't seem to see the difference.

To be clear, are you claiming the GGP (Sargos) can't see the difference between these two things?

They didn’t say such apps exist, they said Ethereum provides the protocol for such apps.

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted.

Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems. Blockchains solve only one problem, which is consensus formation on ontrusted networks. They do not solve politics, governance, downtime, and certainly not application failure.. these things all exist on blockchains.

Essentially none of the application ported from centralized systems to Ethereum or even Bitcoin actually face Byzantine consensus issues when deployed as centralized systems. Bitcoin can be used as a 24x7x365 global collateral and value transfer instrument - such a system would face consensus problems if implemented on top of traditional banking infrastructure. That's hugely valuable, but pretty much the only problem-solving application to date.

For things like asset ownership and transfer, any kind of voting, real estate, IPOs, etc, most people still have to deal with incredibly bad centralized systems, that would be amazing if rebuilt as centralized node.js apps that talk to a MySQL database. This stuff is low hanging fruit that's a huge pain for massive swathes of humanity. And despite the fact that no Palo Alto real estate broker is talking to the city's land deed system over unreliable networks, where enemy messengers might swoop in and assign your deed to the wrong buyer, there's this myth that we need distributed consensus for this and other problems best solved by... databases.

>>Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems

Nobody denies its slow, its a waste of resources, its buggy, its hyped. its a lot of things many early systems was. Its all challenges that people try to solve. What is interresting is if those things can be solved. And i dont understand Why so many dont see a benefit if we could one day build true decentralized systems... its not the distributed or avalibility thats important. Its not like goverments or companies always have the peoples best interrest when they make decissions.

Even on decentralized networks like ethereum/bitcoin, it's possible for governments and companies to have a major impact on network direction. True economic decentralization is more likely to come from products like Stripe Atlas that give small players scaling and distribution tools that previously, only big corporations or well-resourced founding teams had access to.

Sure goverments can affect etherum and bitcoin but they cant stop it globally and Im talking about the next generations build from the learnings of bitcoin and the likes. Its not just about money but information any kind that could benefit. Stripe is cool but just one area and its centralized and itself relies on payment networks like visa and mastercard, banks and other psp networks all the way to the POS.

> Nobody denies its slow, its a waste of resources, its buggy, its hyped

A lot of people deny all of that, actually.

> slow

They say "there is no faster way to achieve distributed consensus".

> waste

They say "it's not wasteful because its securing the network".

> buggy

They say "unlike all other software systems, it's never been hacked!".

> hyped

They say "it's literally the greatest innovation since the internet"

> And i dont understand Why so many dont see a benefit if we could one day build true decentralized systems

I have no idea, I guess most engineers are just too jealous of early adopters getting rich to be willing to give cryptocurrency a chance. There are so many problems that can be solved right now with cryptocurrency if the community would just give cryptocurrency a fair shot instead of always trying to say that it doesn't solve any real problems.

Note: the previous paragraph is a satirical portrayal of a cryptocurrency enthusiast attempting to explain why the entire software community isn't hyped about cryptocurrency.

Perhaps Im just a dreamer... but i believe in an open-source, decentralized, free information, patentless World... Where one day nobody can rewrite history, can force a monopoly down our throath, lock us in, be unaccoubtable for their actions, censor us or run us around like sheep. One day we stop shooting ourselves in the foot and pee our pants and stop being blind to the tech giants like they have our best interrest. A true decentralized system might be nesssary one day to avoid us being enslaved in democrazy

> Perhaps Im just a dreamer... but i believe in an open-source, decentralized, free information, patentless World... Where one day nobody can rewrite history, can force a monopoly down our throath, lock us in, be unaccoubtable for their actions, censor us or run us around like sheep

> open-source

Blockchain software is an amazing example of open-source software, but blockchain is ultimately unimportant with respect to the entire open-source movement as whole.

> decentralized

Blockchains are decentralized, but they can't "decentralize the world" because they don't exist in the world so they necessarily require outsourcing any real world effects to untrustworthy humans who do not have to respect the state of the blockchain in the material world.

> free information

Not sure what this even means, but whatever market incentives exist that might keep information from "being free" will always exist, regardless of blockchains.

> patentless

The patent system is a political institution that will exist regardless of blockchains.

> nobody can rewrite history

As has been demonstrated many times, blockchain history can be trivially rewritten given the appropriate political influence of those who control the nodes. The DAO is a classic example of that.

> force a monopoly down our throath

Blockchains do absolutely nothing to stop this.

> be unaccoubtable for their actions

Blockchains do absolutely nothing to stop this.

> censor us or run us around like sheep.

A government can effortlessly censor you and doesn't really care if are able to flip some bits in an arbitrary digital ledger.

> One day we stop shooting ourselves in the foot and pee our pants and stop being blind to the tech giants like they have our best interrest

The cryptocurrency community does not have our best interest at heart.

> A true decentralized system might be nesssary one day to avoid us being enslaved in democrazy

This is the height of cryptocurrency delusion. I regret that I have to sound so dismissive but I think the monumental assertions you're putting forward are fundamentally disconnected from history and our current reality.

What you Seem to ignore is that my aspiration is to fix the flaws and come up with a Better system and you Seem to focus on the past and currency Which is just a small part of the picture. Control of nodes is just a reference to some current implementation details. DAO was also just bugs exploited. Being able to alter the current State of the Ledger doesnt make it invisible that you did it, or prevents others from not agreeing with you.

Im thinking about civilations destroyed or Winners of war rewriting history, or powerfull companies and poltiticians covering up information that was already out there... eg recently we found out its easy to delete from waybackmachine. If you cannot Imagine we Can build true decentralized tamperproof systems or could ever have a neeed for one i suggest you study human history.

> What you Seem to ignore is that my aspiration is to fix the flaws and come up with a Better system

Admirable goals but lots of us have aspirations. You need to demonstrate how your suggestions can actually help, and at this point, explaining it is not enough, you and your community need to stop talking about it and actually do something. No other software requires so much vocal defense.

Yes because pow is all there is and Will ever be. Research have stagnated. The time is up and if we don’t show results now we never will.

> "Im thinking about civilations destroyed or Winners of war rewriting history, or powerfull companies and poltiticians covering up information that was already out there... "

None of these are engineering or technical problems. They are all extremely complex meatspace-based problems that get solved (if they are even solvable at all, or even actual problems) well outside of the realm of computer code.

Bitcoin and Satoshi's Glorious Blockchain is, was, and always will be a solution in search of a problem.

Sorry i dont believe that. Its the only place it can ever get solved if at all. Putting trust in people has so far proved to be flawed. Again had you made eg waybackmachine immutable then we hadent seen recent discussions about who Said What. Again look at eg bittorrent... how succesfull have copyright holders Been at preventing filesharing...

In regard to bitcoin it works pretty well for a lot of things and not so much for others. Just as everything. Personally it served me well.

And Having background in lottery abd payment industries i Can tell you we are already using it.. current systems are a terrible mess Which Anyone who ever had to implement against visa mastercard banks etc can tell you All about. Private blockchain ledgers like in the mentioned corporations is already in use and even more in the future.

> HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology

HN dislikes the never ending and unsubstantiated breathless hype surrounding cryptocurrency, this is painfully obvious if you actually engage genuinely instead of pretending that everyone is an idiot because they don't fawn over what has amounted to a novel and interesting but mostly useless technology.

> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Using hindsight to cherry-pick historical examples of when naysayers were wrong is obviously terribly flawed logic yet it is a routinely common defense among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It should be obvious to any engineer that this proves nothing and I personally take this reasoning as a sign that you might be arguing in bad faith.

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted.

A base layer for apps that nobody cares about. Give one example of a useful Ethereum app. I define "useful" as a product or service that has demonstrated market success but is cheaper or somehow improved through cryptocurrency. I don't count it as useful if its a niche use-case that is impractical or has no market demand (e.g. avoiding taxes). Also, the idea that these systems never fail is laughably absurd as they have failed to the tune of multiple millions of dollars at this point (i.e. badly written code that failed to do what it claimed, resulting in funds being stolen).

> You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages

This absurd comparison of cryptocurrency to the early internet has been so thoroughly debunked that it barely merits a response. Please stop saying this.

> In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful

Only in cryptocurrency software land is "in a few more years it might be useful" a defensible explanation of why cryptocurrency is the greatest innovation since the internet. Why can't you wait till its actually useful before broadcasting your condescendingly cliche cryptocurrency judgements regarding how HN is full of Luddites who are incapable of understanding technology? I'm sure cryptocurrency is just so complex and so new that todays engineers are just too dumb to understand it, it takes a special breed of elite hacker to fully grok the amazing potential of this new technology, Luddite software engineers be damned.

Hacker News' own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment was when Dropbox was introduced:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Same with Slack/Discord vs. IRC. I think geeks tend to underestimate the power of polish, ease of use and integration of populist new social media features(auto expand/play gifs).

The flip side is handing over control over everything to Silicon Valley which is slowly coming to roost. Wonder what'll happen if the Discord store doesn't make enough money to pay for servers and investors demand RoI?

IRC is irrelevant in today's world. No serious, innovative community is still on IRC.

IRC is niche these days but I'd be interested to hear your methodology to reach the conclusion that "No serious, innovative community is still on IRC".

I've heard Amazon uses IRC internally?

Amazon uses Chime (https://aws.amazon.com/chime/) internally.

Some teams on Amazon still stubbornly remain with IRC.

Source: worked on one such team at Amazon in 2017.

Every big open source project has a dedicated IRC channel on Freenode, still alive and kicking.

Slack is not an alternative.

> Every big open source project has a dedicated IRC channel on Freenode, still alive and kicking. > Slack is not an alternative.

A lot of large open-source projects have Slack communities, often alongside IRC ones. Take Clojure for example, with its 14k-members “Clojurians” Slack project.

Do Slack give free access to open source communities like that? Otherwise the price to have search of over 10k messages would be over £70k/mo which I'm guessing they're not paying. Slack's pricing model seems horrific for communities like that.

> Do Slack give free access to open source communities like that?

Yes. It’s free for non-profit orgs.

Not at all. Clojurians Slack does not keeps history for more than a few days because the community does not pay, and it's the major PITA. Slack does not offer any special treatment to large open source communities, other than tolerating their existence.

> Not at all. (…) Slack does not offer any special treatment to large open source communities, other than tolerating their existence.

I wasn’t clear. It’s free for non-profit orgs. Open-source communities that aren’t registered organizations are by definition not non-profit orgs.

Really it is a matter of relative costs to everything. They already have the skillset to be thoroughly unimpressed. It would be like if someone tried to sell you a magnifying glass that would read words held under it out loud. You can already see fine and read it - why on earth would you want that? Well it would be a useful tool for the illiterate and blind.

The first assessment isn't wrong but limited in its scope to people like them. The blind and illiterate might 'overvalue' it as a priority. Getting the actual value is hard to tell prior to knowing the whole state of the market with a lot of work. It might become a best selling memetic "gag item" like the horse head mask or be useless even in the target market practically.

It's useful to look at why the comments were wrong though. In the Dropbox case it was because the user forgot the size of the market of people that didn't use Linux on their desktop or wish to periodically upload folders using FTP clients encompassed most of the computer-using world. With crypto it looks much more like the evangelists who've erred on the side of discounting the level of inconvenience of their solution to non-niche adopters (including bits which are integral, like transactions being irreversible, secure private keys being the only way of retrieving one's funds or contracts being code)

We only remember those who ended up working. Remember color.com? Remember Theranos? There are probably hundreds of others in old HN posts we have long forgotten. Sometimes skepticism is warranted.

Instead of playing on our heartstrings to convince us that cryptocurrencies are useful, how about actually making something useful? We've been told for years that it was about to pay off, that "it's still building time". You've had billions poured in ICOs and pre-mined coins and you have nothing to show for it besides glorified pyramid schemes and currencies that are useless as currencies.

Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early internet is frankly absurd. Maybe people didn't imagine how huge is was going to become but the practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA (and then the world) is obvious. Besides the Internet grew fast and was useful almost from day 1, even though it involved a complex and expensive hardware infrastructure. By the 90's the Internet wasn't mainstream but it was definitely very useful. Sci-fi writers had expected something like the Internet long before ARPA, it's just immediately obvious that being able to connect to the entire world in real time would be greatly valuable.

Furthermore what prevented a more mainstream adoption were mainly hardware limitations. Internet on dial-up wasn't fun at all. Remember having to wait for a full minute to have a progressive JPEG load up? I do. It was clunky but there was nothing else like it. Once technology improved and got faster and cheaper adoption exploded. What's slowing down progress in CryptoCurrency? The infrastructure is there, yet hardly anybody wants to use it. And unlike the Internet, there are plenty of alternatives for the vast majority of the services offered through a blockchain.

>I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.

That's faith, not reason.

> practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA

Replace "data" with "money", and "USA" with "anywhere in the world"... do you see any value in that?

Funny. I have been able to send money cross-border relatively cheaply and relatively fast for quite some time. So yes, obviously I see value in that. But actually it has never been any kind of issue that would have even crossed my mind that it would need some fancy new solutions to enable me to do that. Would you be willing to share some more details on which kind of money transactions this is an actual unsolved problem? Where from/to are you trying to transfer the money and what are you buying/selling with that money?

This is the most obvious use-case. Try to send any amount of money outside of business hours from an account in one country to any account in another. You can't do it! You can't even send funds from an account in one bank, to an account in the SAME bank, if it's across a border.

I had this problem one time over a long-weekend, and the only solution I had was to use Western Union. Because I didn't warn my bank that I wanted to use my own money, they disabled my account until they were open again (3 days).

> relatively fast

Maybe 5 days is relatively fast to you, but it's not to me. 1 horsepower was relatively fast to people before cars were common also.

There's a big problem though, we already have many ways to do that. They have flaws but they are mature and generally pretty easy to use. Cryptocurrencies are not breaking new ground, they're trying to offer an alternative. That's a very different proposition. It's not enough for cryptocurrencies to work, they have to work better than "fiat". So far I'm unimpressed.

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted.

dapps nobody uses? ICO pump and dumps? you lost the crowd there Sir.

We are not luddites, I don't think you fully comprehend what that word means.

You are assuming blockchain right now, in it's current shape and form, a ReallSlowDatabase(tm), with no real Fortune 500 or the military using it to power their major operations, the so called ledger already exists in Datomic and now AWS, the alleged decentralized PoW tx verification process is bullshit, mining pools have centralized, every fucking meetup I go to I get people like you getting in my fucking face telling me why im a fucking idiot for not buying to their pump and dump schemes that SEC is looking into, it's litearlly the ultimate hyperereality-using social media accounts to shill and attack unbelievers for not HODL, blindly calling any piece of fact or reality as FUD or FakeNews(tm)

Shut the fuck up.

Seriously. We are not luddites, HN users range from NASA engineers to lawyers, who all exercise common sense and have seen this type of pump and dump of technological hype probably far far longer than most blockchain thumpers.

God. I don't care if dang bans me for this post, I just had to get this off my chest. A fucking cult has hijacked the internet.

> dapps nobody uses? ICO pump and dumps? you lost the crowd there Sir.

That's human behavior, not technology. Fiat cash could easily (and has) replace cryptocurrency for this purpose. The argument is irrelevant either way: it doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies are bad and doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies have use.

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. That's something that future generations will take for granted but HN is largely ignoring right now.

The iPod was released at that point and you could hold it in your hands and see for yourself.

Can you give me some examples of real world applications of Ethereum's protocol that you think are being undercounted?

I recently looked for some using smart contracts but all I see is hype and a lot of VC/bitcoin money thrown at things that haven't been able to deliver and don't even need blockchain. I saw Dubai putting property records into a blockchain but not sure it has smart contracts. Perhaps something will come up in the future, but what does it have to do with excessive crypto-profit and hype money being put into startups that lack fundamentals? I am not saying experimentation is bad, but I felt like we were/are reaching dotcom pets.com levels of hype and mania.

If you ask me, HN mostly seems to be saying that the hype has been out of control over blockchain. I don't see people saying blockchain technology is lame or unreliable, do you? I have seen comparisons of bitcoin to tulip mania and ponzis, but that's not the same as discounting blockchain technologies.

https://medium.com/cryptolinks/maker-for-dummies-a-plain-eng...

A stablecoin run in a contract is pretty amazing and becoming more and more popular.

DAI, like other stablecoins, isn't really all that stable - right now it costs about $1.02 to buy $1 worth. And, it's frequently been over 5% away from $1: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/#charts

Most "stable" coins are trading at over $1 right now, presumably as people try to flee sinking cryptocurrencies and have no practical and/or legal means to turn them into real money.

It doesn't have to always be exactly $1. You obviously can't control markets and what people sell things for...but DAI has mechanisms in it's protocol so that the price trends to $1. It's incredibly fascinating, it's decentralized, permissionless, loans with an economic system backing it. It's very novel tech and a huge achievement.

More succinctly than most of the replies:

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan

Offtopic, but people actually had a good reason to laugh at Columbus: he made a simple error in his calculations that lead him to believe Earth is much smaller that it really is.

Most of the nobles he asked for money were actually better educated than him, so the error was obvious to them. And since noone could know about America's existence it was reasonable to assume that Columbus will simply run out of supplies and starve to death in the middle of the ocean. Which almost happened, they've found the land at the very last moment.

I think the same arguments can be said about P2P during the file sharing era. File sharing was often used for sketchy purposes most of the time, like cryptocurrencies, and people argued the underlying technology (P2P) was the key breakthrough especially for legal applications. While there are some minor cases of using P2P these days, it really hasn't made the impact that was expected. I don't see why the same won't happen for blockchain and technology underlying cryptocurrencies.

Torrents and other P2P networks literally redefined how people consume music and movies. And people used p2p a lot for quite a time. Is there anyone that uses blockchain for anything, other than speculation? Any dapp used by more than 100 people?

Electronic communication services have a linear path of development any idiot can see: more bits per second, more information, more possibilities.

Blockchains don’t have that simple path of development. They fundamentally don’t make practical sense compared to centralized services. There’s a reason that everyone gets their power from a small number of centralized power plants instead of everyone throwing a few solar panels on their roof and trading their power on the marketplace to create a decentralized power grid. It sounds really cool but it’s just wildly illogical in the real world. That’s blockchain.

Actually solar panels and distributed grids make a lot of sense and what was holding them back was the state of the technology. Unlike the blockchain, which is fundamentally broken for 99.999% of all use cases, distributed power grids could actually work with the right engineering.

I know they sound really cool. I’m saying that it’s illogical to do so in the real world. Centralization is almost always cheaper, faster, and stronger.

They still have a place as a 'competitor of last resort' to force reasonability on centralized powers. They would essentially do to power what satellite dishes did to cable - and that was just another centralized power!

Sure satellite dishes are worse in latency and cost than running a cable but if the cable gets too unreasonable in comparison you can tell them to get bent and switch to satellite.

Didn't CryptoKitties bring the Etherium network to its knees? Not saying the issues aren't solvable, but can't we agree that nothing "never goes down," especially complex distributed systems.

Also: “Proof if Weak Hands” was successful in making a game out of spamming the network to the point of DoS.

When ETH was hundreds of dollars, the cost of running code on the blockchain (gas price) could get up to $50 during these attacks.

Imagine adding a column in a database table cost $50. Forget about it.

I created and run a cryptocurrency trading game called Cache (https://www.cachethegame.com) that uses ERC20 tokens in the “coin-op” sense. The solution when transaction fees go wild is to simply enable free play. Nobody wants to play $1+ in fees for something that costs a few cents.

It did become more expensive to use (on the order of 10x), but it didn't go down.

No thats not what happend. Nothing ever went down but if you wanted a tx to go through fast you had to pay more.

I was thinking of this story: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162 (Which, I understand, is for a general audience and might not be very accurate.)

I recall the founder of CryptoKitties saying that the transaction cost was significantly higher than the kitty cost. Isn't that a failure state for the network?

> Isn't that a failure state for the network?

it depends on what you define as a failure state. Technically, the network is still working - but business-case wise, it failed.

> I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology

Or we were just chalking it up to "Irrational Exuberance." Instead of addressing initial concerns economists had about it, most proponents were arrogant in their belief that old school economics wouldn't apply to cryptocurrency.

And that gets me to the second point. The people arguing for cryptocurrency weren't transparent in their holdings of it. And that seems to be what created the bubble. Now people are questioning where the basement price is on bitcoin, and it seems like there's nothing but arguments like "It's the money of the future".

There are also matters that it is operating fundamentally at cross purpose with itself. It tried to be both the next thing for the gold-bugs who are angry with the very concept of inflationary currency despite the fact relative value really does go down compared with sustained production and being a medium of exchange outside the arbitrary control and rent-seeking of banking systems. Well being a medium for exchange is what gives bitcoins value. Rising in value makes it not worth it as a medium of exchange because everybody is holding onto their pogs instead of trading them making them useless.

That is the exact thing that everybody warns about for deflationary currencies so of course they were skeptical about it. Combine the gratuitous use of processing and power for speculation you can see why they would be less than sanguine about it even before money laundering got involved.

I too began to detect a hatred of US monetary policy from the most hardcore cryptocurrency supporters.

> Well being a medium for exchange is what gives bitcoins value.

I do want to separate out the concepts of "utility" vs "market value".

Probably a good example for this is a hammer. It has a great amount of utility for pounding in nails, securing lumber, etc. It's just not valued on the market though. $5 bucks maybe? You will save a bunch of time using one. However, being able to pound in nails doesn't justify a high cost in and of itself, since the market is flooded with them.

If, however, the utility of bitcoin(medium of exchange) is the only thing that is lifting bitcoin's market value (price), then its price depends upon it outperforming other cryptocurrencies and instruments of money. And the marginal cost of creating another cryptocurrency is maybe a weeks worth of time?

Because there appears to be an unlimited supply of numbers and algorithms, the market value of any cryptocurrency should approach zero over time even if it has great utility.

You seem to be argiing from the position of "previous skepticism of new technologies was proved false, so we should assume this skepticism will prove false too" That doesn't seem reasonable. Some skepticism has been proven accurate. There's enough enthusiasm for crypto blockchain to carry it forward if there's a future in it. We don't all need to back that vision when plenty of valid criticisms exist for the skeptical viewpoint as well.

> Go ahead and ignore it right now. It's still building time.

I've been hearing this argument for years, but you that doesn't take away that global broadcast doesn't scale to any kind of useful TPS rate unless you're willing to decrease the network diameter, which implies centralization.

All the wishful thinking in the world can't change the laws of mathematics and physics.

The underlying tech is potentially powerful and useful. The current popular implementations are slow, have very wonky hyperdeflationary economics (which makes them Ponzis whether intended or not), and are surrounded by a toxic ecosystem that is shockingly riddled with scams and fraud.

HN has, like many other circles, gotten sick of the breathless vaporware hype and scams.

>Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted.

Are you suggesting that Ethereum apps can have 100% uptime (never go down, never fail), and are completely secure (fully trusted)?

Because if so I've got some shares of a bridge to sell you.

What's the vesting schedule of these shares?

I'm not saying I agree, but I'd be interested in hearing your argument

You really need me to argue that achieving 100% uptime and trust (not 99.99%! 100% was the claim) just by virtue of building on top of Ethereum is implausible?

Yes, explain yourself please.

As long as there is one node on the network that you have a route over the internet to, the network is up. This is why bitcoin has also never gone down thus far.

I believe he was interested in hearing the details of the bridge deal.

You can trust it in the sense that the network will execute the code you run on it, for the most part, but most of the contract code out there is full of bugs and they keep forking the chain when people fuck up if they know the right people.

Immutable webapps + blockchain backend = immortal applications.

It's great for evergreen software. Imagine a backpage that can't be shut down, for instance.

I don't even understand the benefit of 100.00% uptime, over 99.99% anyway? I mean, I probably spend more time in a parking garage with no internet available to me at all, than google spends being down in any given month.

I mean, I understand the idea that Google wants to increase their uptime because every lost query is lost revenue, but OP seemed to imply there's some intrinsic benefit that's more than just the incremental benefit...

Moving the goal posts.

Regardless of the marginal benefits of 100% uptime vs 99.99...the entire point of ETH is that once the contract is posted to the block chain, it continues to operate in perpetuity...and no centralized service provider or government can take it down. That's powerful, and in our age of creeping power consolidation by big tech cos and overreaching governments, I applaud the development of censorship-resistant tech.

BridgeCoin?

> I think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology to the point that we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come.

Well, as long as the underlying monetary policy of the cryptocurrencies is well tried and failed directly from the medieval times, I would personally:

1. Be quite careful who I blame being luddites. 2. Not holding my breath waiting for any kind of success as a currency.

And yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18572482

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_fi...

How many decades do we need to wait for it to be useful? The iPod took markets by storm that very year. Blockchain has had a decade.

I’ve typically ignored crypto related posts, just like you said HN does. Thus I don’t know anything about ethereum other than it involves contracts and blockchains. However I somehow ended up in this thread and your comment about ethereum as an app host is interesting. So know that you made at least one person google ethereum and read about it.

> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that [...] are fully trusted.

Wait, wait, I thought the hype peak is far behind us. Ever heard about 51% Attack?

> Even Google goes down (sometimes once or twice a month)

I have been using Google since 1999 and I've never seen it down once in more than 19 years.

YouTube including YouTube TV recently went down for hours.

Wasn't referring to their many other acquired services, only the titular domain.

Similar things were said about neural networks in the 90's, funnily enough. I also believe the underlying blockchain technology is important. It's just that many tech-savvy fraudsters are using the cryptocurrency hype for scamming the general population.

> In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful and I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.

Care to make an actual wager? longbets.org

Exactly this. HN bitched about platform risk for years. All of a sudden something comes along and solves the issue (and happens to be open source) and they get all mad.

> "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

And yet the iPod has been totally supplanted by products that came afterward.

Are you talking about Etherium, or blockchain tech? Because one is likely headed nowhere and one is here to stay.

I think it's Luddite (specifically sheep mentality) to believe their claims without skepticism when their results are worse than the things they say we need to replace. My model, which predates Bitcoin in various projects/products, is to generate signed, hashed logs that can be checked in a decentralized fashion all using high-performance databases and fast checkers. Check the results more often than computational steps to reduce unnecessary re-computation. If format and protocols are open, using common tech can allow for diverse implementations to reduce one-attack-to-rob-them-all setups. Also, where possible, do hashes of hashes like one, checkable report per day per bank to reduce overall size of chains over time.

This model can work with existing tech producing just some logs that can be hosted on CDN's, checked with hardware acceleration on commodity hardware, and even hosted on $5 VPS's if you want. That's a total cost of $5 per suspicious party running checks if minimizing costs and energy use. Current payment methods work at POS with 16-bit MCU's and such. The signed checks can themselves be sent in as just extra database transactions. The organizations should be non-profits or public-benefit companies whose charter, licensing agreements, and contracts make specific behaviors either mandatory if good or prohibited if bad. Possible sign auditing agreements with organizations that defend consumers with severe penalties for anything shady. Start with credit unions, though, combined with non-profit, payment processors with lean operations.

If you're wondering, the common pattern of my methods is to use the simplest, fastest, most-proven components, whether technical or legal, to build the improved version of current tech that solves the specific problems most people worry about. Nine times out of ten, it's just a shady, for-profit company being assholes due to their incentives. Just changing the model over to a public-benefit Paypal or Venmo with multinational implementation cross-checking each other by itself gets past most of that. Plus, using existing databases, crypto acceleration, and tamper-resistant smartcards keeps performance high with checking cost, hardware and energy, very low.

As I read cyptocurrency and blockchain stuff, it's like they never thought about any of this before going onto solve problems 99% of people with checking accounts and credit cards don't have. Volatile currencies, exchanges getting robbed, and no chargebacks allowed are good examples where most people wouldn't trade their bank and plastic. The folks working on these things should start with user requirements, look at existing solutions, enumerate problems, find simplest changes that fix those problems, deploy solutions, and iterate from there. Strangely, the exact advice YC gave to the startup founders that made it big.

>> Take a moment to imagine a few of the things you could do better if you had 100% reliable hosting that was safe and private.

Literally nothing more.. its why it doesnt work financially. The idea is cool though indeed

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