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Comment by iSnow | Hacker News Reader

It's a sentiment that gets expressed under most every blockchain-related submission on HN, and I wonder why.

Maybe it's something about blockchain tech, but I have the nagging feeling that HN is just getting old and complacent. If this community had existed, in 1995, on a BBS, it probably would have found nothing but fault with the emerging web.

I can't understand why a tech-minded person would find blockchain repulsive. It's (in the case of Ethereum) the biggest and most powerful distributed computing environment. BTC has a history of no major losses or exploits in 10y of existing in the most adversarial environment I could think of.

HN meanwhile: let's get totally over-excited by a new ePaper reader with drawing functionality.

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Because blockchain keeps promising things and never delivering anything of actual value.

The community appears full of -as another commenter put it: “Blockchain culture is full of Ferengi-style near-religious greed”. Crypto-anarchists with an axe to grind about inflation and monetary policy/government spending.

I find the technology fascinating, if woefully inefficient. It’s a novel idea whose use case doesn’t seem to markedly improve things for the average user, but introduces a number of downsides.

> the biggest and most powerful distributed computing environment

That does what exactly? Wasting energy to determine if I can transfer $0.3 to my friend to demo it? Suppose you wired them and ran scientific studies/simulations. You’d probably get more useful results out of the energy you just spent.

The value proposition in my head is you can pseudo-anonymously transfer any amount of value for almost no fee across any border to anyone else in the network within minutes. The implementation details aren’t great (energy wastage) but it is a working MVP of that imo.

>Because blockchain keeps promising things and never delivering anything of actual value.

Which is true for every early field. I was around in the 2001 dot-com bubble, and it wasn't different. AI has a 70-year history of broken promises, but lately seems to come into it's own. Quantum computing is another hyped tech that may or may not change the world. Video-telephony was hashed out in the 1970's and only after roughly 2010 has become reality.

>That does what exactly? Wasting energy to determine if I can transfer $0.3 to my friend to demo it? Suppose you wired them and ran scientific studies/simulations. You’d probably get more useful results out of the energy you just spent.

All snark aside, it's much more than sending money around. You have a fully digital system of distributed apps that can interact and very strong assurances to authenticity of the results. Finance is only one area where that sounds interesting, logistics, provenance, data recording in regulated fields like health-care or polluting industries, notary services, cadastral land registers, IoT are all fields that could profit from machine-to-machine interactions that are free from human interaction.

> Because blockchain keeps promising things and never delivering anything of actual value

My friends in Argentina would disagree

Blockchains (Ethereum specifically), cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance have allowed them to exit their broken financial system and survive hyperinflation.

They all get paid in stablecoins across borders, self-secure their funds using smart wallets like Argent or Gnosis, and earn good interest rates using lending protocols.

I think many of us forget how broken the financial system are outside of western developed countries.

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