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Comment by bangboombang | Hacker News Reader

I've been on the internet for so long that I genuinely don't know whether this person is serious or trolling hard.

Also that person chiming in calling Jimmy anti-capitalist cracked me up.

Oh an OT: WTF is a cashtag? I'm not using Twitter, the linkified $BSV in the very first message was new to me, and on hover the URL reveals it's a cashtag. I'm feeling old.

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Based on the decade of cult-like blockchain advocacy I’ve seen, I’m going with “dead serious”. There are a few - maybe as high as 1-2% - people in that community who genuinely understand the technology and its relevance but it’s dominated by get-rich-quick types. Once you’ve “invested” the only way you make money is by convincing other people to buy in and that usually means turning into a marketing bot pushing it for every problem — basically the nerd equivalent of joining an MLM.

meanwhile professors in academia teaching students (who came there to learn from an authoritative source) that blockchain is the future and an important skill in the industry. IMO academia doesn't do enough and is very much complicit in peddling this horse manure.

Being involved in audit/security for quite a while, I do appreciate the benefits of blockchain. Would I tell a large corporation to drop their DBs and switch to BC? Not this decade. As Jimmy Wales wrote "It works well.", and if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

I can imagine a general ledger audit to be 'bullet proof'. Of course there are other issues in a DB's user access management. But we can achieve the same results right here, right now, without having to invest $m to change our software/infrastructure/SIEM, etc. in order to achieve in 5 years, what we are already doing now.

Change will come (as always), but in the right time. Where "right" in this case is benefit largely outweigh costs (build/maintain/support/train/etc.)

What kind of usecase do you imagine for blockchain in audit/security, given that sensitive information can't be put on a public blockchain and the security provided by proof-of-work consensus doesn't work in a smaller private blockchain?

I've been surprised by the number of blockchain articles in Communications of the ACM and the more practical publication ACM Queue. I expect blockchain is a flash-in-the-pan topic that will get a lot of papers for a few years working on increasingly esoteric details, and then everyone will forget all about it in 5 years.

Something that cryptocurrencies changed about the internet is that you can be talking to someone who has $2 invested and is now spending their time shilling a product in bad faith.

The Brave browser suffers from this as well since they went with their own cryptocurrency BAT crap. Every "use brave" you see in the wild had a good chance of the 14-year-old hoping to get rich from their $2 investment. Yet they have all the time in the world to argue with people on the internet. There's no difference between the posts of someone who is excited about the Brave platform vs someone who holds $5 of BAT on Coinbase and thinks it will one day buy them a lambo if they put in the e-time.

It instantly makes your product reek.

I think he is trolling but doesn't know it yet -- second order trolling if you will...

It's a tag for tickers, also works with stock market tickers, e.g. $GE

I assumed the anti-capitalist thing was a joke, and laughed. Now I'm dubious..

I thought so too. Then I viewed their other tweets :eek:

Personally I had guessed a warped and shallow idea of capitalism from the start - regardless of trolling or sincerity. A "everyone should be greedy as possible and running a free encyclopedia superpasser is anti-capitalist due to not trying to make money from it". Which is wrong / a poor approximation as part of the bloody point of capitalism is to have your spending in both money and effort advocate your views.

Anyway even before checking that sort of view in generic ironically fits both the anti-capitalist and the speculator "Gordon Gecko" types.

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