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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

It mentions the blockchain hype mania as well. I happen to currently be the clearinghouse for lots of people's silly blockchain ideas right now. I mostly have no issue with the ones that are basic "chain of hashed blocks" git style ideas, intended to show some simple sequence of integrity, while still requiring trust. I don't get many of those.

But there are so many that try to shoehorn the full trustless model onto an idea that obviously still has a central authority. Argh.

Is there a good resource I can hand to non-technical people that explains why "full blockchain" only makes sense for a handful of use cases?

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From where I am standing it seems as if any resource to explain anything to non-technical people will fall on deaf ears. The reason for this is money. People aren't looking for the best technical solution for their problem. They don't even have a problem. They are looking for the best way to get their hands on money quickly. If people will hand over cash they will do it. This goes for AI too. Many investors are stupid (naively optimistic if I'm being kind) and people are out to get their money.

Ahh, yes, the motivation is somewhat similar here. It's internal projects at a big company. The people proposing wouldn't get money per se, but they want the reputational thing of doing something cool and newsworthy. I'm the first person they have to get past with their (usually) bad idea.

Repeating my other comment in this thread:

> This is a tired trope, that “business people” are brainless and gullible. Almost as tired as the “VCs are so dumb they’ll throw money at anything-AI” idea repeated in the article.

> Maybe, just maybe, the people running multi-billion-dollar companies, and multi-billion-dollar investment funds, are not stupid?

> It would be much more interesting and productive to discuss what they see in AI and why they feel so much urgency, rather than dismissing them as fools falling for magic.

VCs only need one big winner out of every ten investments. You are looking at their nine failures and calling them stupid and naive.

Experienced VCs are not the only business people who give out money.

My problem is with the generalization. The article and some comments in this thread paint all VCs and business people as dummies falling for shiny objects.

I don’t think anybody would argue with an article that said some percentage of any population makes stupid decisions for stupid reasons. But then again, nobody would read that article, either.

I agree that saying all VC's are dumb, all the time, is silly. On the other hand, things like Theranos and Ubeam do prove that some investments that some VC's make are spectacularly dumb. One out of every ten still requires basic due diligence, or at least questioning business plans that require setting physics or other basic knowns aside.

I'm only saying what I saw during the hype bubble. People were looking for a reason to use blockchain (or just be able to say blockchain in relation to their company) rather than letting the problem drive the technology choice. This behaviour suddenly disappeared when the bubble burst. There is lots of smart money in VC and the dumb money follows it. Mostly it seems to be from laziness and herd mentality rather than actually being stupid. If you invest a little in everything you're bound to pick a winner. The ratio is skewed way out past 1 in 10 in this scenario.

> It would be much more interesting and productive to discuss what they see in AI and why they feel so much urgency, rather than dismissing them as fools falling for magic.

I can answer that question without asking. People can see the potential to do more work with less people and make truckloads of cash. Everyone is scared of being the stupid one and be left holding their dick whilst everyone else gets rich. When you have cash to spend it's a small risk to take.

You may want to pick one of the following flow charts:

https://medium.com/@sbmeunier/when-do-you-need-blockchain-de...

The "Birch-Brown-Parulava" and Lewis models look very promising. I may try to combine them. Thanks!

http://doyouneedablockchain.com/

Bitcoin for laypeople is pretty good. https://gist.github.com/mafintosh/bd9e6d350ebf02441c9707c5f7...

My Open Source project focuses on educating mainstream users about blockchain and cryptocurrency with simple videos and content https://www.trycrypto.com

Bruce Schneier has a talk which is probably online and I think has written a blog on how there’s always some of trust in the system needed. Kevin Werbach has written a book on blockchain and probably has shorter pieces.

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