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Comment by craze3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised of the amount of blockchain hate in the comments from people who haven't even checked out the product...

There are some reasons to be skeptical of Blockstack in particular. They make a lot of claims, pump cash into apps without disclosing it's actual source (they claim it's from sales of a subtoken, but aside from a blog post, I can't actually find any evidence of that) and in general have built a JS heavy library that is setup for easy code injection.

None of these apps need a blockchain. None of these apps gain any benefit from a blockchain. Just, I dunno, don't use a giant universally observable blockchain that suffers from the majority issue in order to store private data? Seems easy enough.

Blockstack engineer here.

Regarding financials, I invite you to read our SEC offering circular for details on the source of the money: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1719379/000110465919...

> None of these apps need a blockchain. None of these apps gain any benefit from a blockchain.

The blockchain serves as a "shared source of truth" for everyone's name/public-key/storage-URL bindings. So as long as you trust that the blockchain doesn't get re-orged, you may assume that your Blockstack node will independently calculate the same such bindings as everyone else's node. All other application activity (rightfully) happens off-chain, via commodity Web infrastructure.

EDIT: typo

Thanks Jude for helping out ;)

Thanks! I was thinking the same, but it is reasonable to be defensive to new things. And it helps us to find out how we can provide better info for new users and welcome them more appropriately.

blockchain and silicon valley don't really play too nice together, which is why you see so much chain dev done outside of the valley in places like Seattle, NYC or Switzerland.

SV is stuck in its silo's, content to be spymasters of their peers for the five eyes.

Silicon Valley is one of the major hubs of blockchain development. And not everyone on HN is from SV.

No, its really not compared to other places. What projects are you thinking of?

There aren't as many SV people here as there used to be, but the community is still skewed that way.

Yes, it really is compared to other places. I don't have the time or energy to dig up a comprehensive list, but the tip of iceberg would be Berkeley & Stanford blockchain research groups, Blockstream (HQ in BA), Cosmos (engineering lead in SV), Dfinity (Palo Alto, SanFran, Zurich), Protocol Labs (IPFS, Filecoin, HQ in SV), O(1) Labs (HQ in SV). Just a small sample of some of the highest quality technical projects in the industry. And several of the largest cryptocurrency VC funds are based there - A16Z Crypto, Paradigm, Polychain, Metastable Capital, and a bunch of others.

SV's tech industry is far from dominated by blockchain as it may be in other places, which may make blockchain seem relatively small there. But it's a bigger and more robust scene than most other places.

https://cbr.stanford.edu/

https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/proofs2019-boot-camp (berkeley has several sites, not sure which best to link, but their speciality is in Zero Knowledge crypto applied to blockchain)

Huh, you make some really great points. I didn't realize some of those products were based out of there.

> SV's tech industry is far from dominated by blockchain as it may be in other places, which may make blockchain seem relatively small there.

That is also a great point! I didn't even think about that, thanks for the eye opener.

With that said, it does seem like this place is extremely skeptical of blockchain. I figure its the SV legacy types that probably lurk around here still.

I actually did a blockchain at Berkeley online class. It was great, I think it was through Coursera iirc.

Yeah there are a lot of skeptics here too, and rightfully so imho. Scams abound.

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