Hacker News Reader

Comment by jf- | Hacker News Reader

The problem with your argument is that blockchain isn’t comparable to the internet. It’s an energy inefficient immutable public ledger. There just aren’t many, if any, applications that require an immutable public ledger, or that derive any benefit from using one.

Some blockchains allow smart contracts. Smart contracts sound like a nice idea, but when you think about potential use cases, you quickly realise they actually have no utility. Any application for a smart contract requires information from outside the blockchain which must be supplied by a trusted authority. This being the case, why bother with blockchain at all?

View on HN

The only application for smart contracts I can think of involves trusted public data sources. For instance government published satellite imagery, public stock market indicators, government published socio-economic data.

For instance you might have a company that's looking to reforest an area and you can have a smart contract that takes donations and sends them to the company if some image recognition software scans satellite images and sees the area being reforested(lots of technical complications there).

Or you might have a company that's looking to reduce some poverty indicators in a given city and the smart contract is controlled by statistics published by the local city(though it's not clear government statistics are released frequently enough for this to work, at least they are reasonably trustworthy in developed nations).

Now, why do these types of contracts need to live on the blockchain? Ehhhh. But there's certainly a case to be made for smart contracts, in general as more and more real world information is digitally published in real time.

Yes, but as you point out, those applications don’t need a blockchain to be involved. You’re just running an app somewhere that takes in data and transfers funds held in escrow.

I agree that there may be uses for that kind of automation, but probably you’re going to want human oversight and ability to intervene, and blockchain actually hinders that.

The blockchain = internet is a grand claim but so is the assumption of little utility. People forget how horribly inefficient and unethical current economic tools are. Crypto-plebs seem to completely undervalue blockchains ethical potential. Both the pro- and anti- proponents are moving sideways throwing the same memes back and forth at each other. Maybe engineers will eventually focus on the stateless ethical proposition again someday, maybe they never will and stagnation will become the constant.

> People forget how horribly inefficient and unethical current economic tools are. Crypto-plebs seem to completely undervalue blockchains ethical potential.

> Both the pro- and anti- proponents are moving sideways throwing the same memes back and forth at each other.

Oh the irony.

Btw it's funny how you have written this back to back without flinching.

“Ledger” was just the first app we worked out how to do as a blockchain.

There will be more, but the design process is hard. The reason Ledger was cracked first is because ledgers are pretty simple.

Saying blockchain is “just a ledger” is like saying the web is “just a bunch of nerds uploading documents about their hobbies”. That’s where it started but after many years we learned to solve other problems with the same ideas.

Anything that can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Claim:

Many games can be implemented as a blockchain

Evidence:

Ledgers have been implemented as a blockchain

There you go. Now the burden is on you to provide evidence that it’s impossible for any game other than a ledger to be implemented as a blockchain.

Wow.

I'm sorry to be snarky but if this level of reasoning is representative of the cryptocurrency community then there's a reason it's failing.

That’s pretty mean. I tried to engage your criticism in good faith, and you’re treating me like I’m too dumb to even talk to.

Feels bad.

Sorry, but I don’t think I can engage meaningfully if you expect me to prove a negative for the claim that you are making. That’s either a logical error or an attempt to make me do all the work, and the ‘claim’ ‘evidence’ part of your post doesn’t make sense.

Your argument doesn't even make sense. The blockchain is just a ledger. A really inefficient one, at that. It has to be inefficient because otherwise it loses all the attributes that make it desirable to certain markets. Take that inefficiency and you lose all that "trustless" "byzantine generals whatever" crap and you are left with git or hell, a real database.

Face it. Blockchain is going nowhere. It was stillborn the day it was created. It's had 10 years and nothing about it has fundamentally changed (as many bitcoin advocates love to point out as if it was a positive thing).

Normal people who say "yeah, blockchain might have a use" are just being polite. They don't want to state the obvious. Beyond its current use case as a magnet for scams, fraud, pump & dumps and get rich quick schemes there is no use for the blockchain at all.

> It's had 10 years and nothing about it has fundamentally changed

The usecase is censorship resistant financial transactions.

It is working right now, for people in Venezuela, for example. It is working for people who are attempting to make financial transactions, across the world, quickly and cheaply.

Tell me a better way to make censorship resistant financial transactions, over the internet, if you think this is useless.

A blockchain, by definition, is a chain of blocks cryptographically proven to be in a certain order, and only appended to or over-written by a majority vote.

A ledger is all it is, not an "app".

With due respect mate but you say that blockchain isn't comparable to the internet because you say so, and I say it is because that's what I work on.... How are we to move forward?

Should we have a discussion on what the internet is and what blockchain is? I mean, you define a blockchain by its ledger component while I believe that's only a small part of it...

You could have started by putting forward an argument in support of your position, rather than an appeal to your personal authority.

I see your point about argument to personal authority, my bad, but what I am saying is that I see your argument as being too far off my experience, and it would be very hard to reconcile our views.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com