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Comment by dteiml | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Peter Thiel doing that with the Thiel Grants? Pretty successful so far (projects Ethereum, Aragorn... founded by grantees).

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I once regarded Ethereum as the the only successful project out of it. But is it? Did it create anything meaningfully better? Not really. Anyway, yes. And Peter Thiel’s fellowship is great. It’s just that he doesn’t have $30B a year to spare on that

Decentralized scripting that large numbers of developers know how to use is powerful. Entire parts of the internet could shift to that in the long term. Obviously, it's a long way away... but that's a given. Even if you choose another crypto and say it has a better approach because of x, y and z mining or other infra, you can't argue with the fact that Ethereum has increased the competition in the space.

It’s nice as I said, but it didn’t impact anything, and most likely never will. Even if the whole internet switched to that, there’s no x10 improvement in anything interesting. Unless you think airplanes are as good as owning your data and not having a few big entities owning the major services (which btw, you’d still have, because the oracle problem is basically impossible to efficiently solve).

>there’s no x10 improvement in anything interesting

Don't you think trusting code to transmit and trade assets is a x10 improvement over trusting people? I'd rather trust code I can audit than people.

Even if you don't call it an x10, I would definitely call it a success.

You can't choose between tech and people. You have to trust both.

Not with crypto. It's trustless. That statement is a blanket statement that might seem correct at first but technically is completely wrong when it comes to crypto and well implemented smart contracts. See "The Byzantine Generals Problem": https://decryptionary.com/dictionary/byzantine-generals-prob....

This model ignores the areas where you need trust and focuses instead on making an impenetrable black box for communications. That might be useful, but you can still be backstabbed by the other generals, or your soldiers or the programmer who put something fun in the implementation.

Bitconnect, mtgox and every other imploded bitcoin service illustrates the point to the tune of billions.

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