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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely think HN is subject to what Clay Christensen put as "disruptive innovation" when it comes to Blockchain and friends (strange to say that for a community as opposed to a company).

I understand that many on HN think of the many ICOs as Ponzi schemes, and other tech (like identity, DBs, VPNs, apps, or even alternate WWW) built on top as smokes and mirrors; but the industry being built around it is very real even if niche. There's a lot going on (including research) and it seems to me like, one fine day, like how ARM sneaked up on x86, Blockchain is going to take HN by surprise. And then, the disruption would have truly arrived.

It isn't like the best sounding tech wins anyways.

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>but the industry being built around it is very real even if niche. There's a lot going on (including research)

What are some concrete examples?

I think most of us who are critical are still interested, because we do see things that are going on, and we ask ourselves, are we missing something?

But we seem to run into the same road blocks again and again.

“Solutions” seem to come from people subtly or transparently “talking their book,” that is, they have an undisclosed vested interest in you not thinking too much about those roadblocks.

What is some fruitful research being done in the areas of well known roadblocks? What are some application areas with a genuine pathway to viability and no better non-blockchain alternative?

I think smart contracts are actually extremely novel in the form they take in Ethereum EVM, Tezos, Cardano, DAML and Pact (I'm author of the latter). TBH I'm a little frustrated with the evolution of smart contract langs post-2017, as I think Ethereum's dominance has made most engs/projects uninterested in innovating.

If you look around, it's actually very hard to find a genuinely small language you can embed in your runtime, and offer to users. Lua is a common suggestion, but Lua doesn't let you lock down IO, or code loading (that is, without writing your own interpreter and changing semantics -- what's the point?). A truly pure smart contract language gives the containing app full control over the entire runtime.

Smart contracts to me are a modern stored-procedure language that you embed directly into your app, and give you a 100% deterministic way to store long-term state, including code. "Application DBs" like sqlite don't scratch this itch (for instance sqlite doesn't have SPs). Plus, smart contracts are metered (usually), which allows for a cost-model and prevents against DOS. This plus the turing-incomplete angle makes them reasonable to open up to the world.

Erlang and lambdas come to mind, and I can argue why they're different too. But this is already too long :)

>But this is already too long :)

Not at all, I appreciate the info.

Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort.

What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model?

What sort of applications most excite you? Are there places the distributed model works better than the traditional? Are there applications the distributed model enables that the traditional does not?

And vice versa, what are the limitations of the distributed model? What things just aren't feasible? Could you build Twitter or YouTube like systems?

> Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort.

Yes, but smart contract languages (Plutus in Cardano's case) generally are unrelated to the specific consensus algorithm of the blockchain platform.

> What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model?

In general, public blockchain platforms run by incentivizing the operators within the system itself. PoS and PoW are different versions of this (staking v mining).

> Are there applications the distributed model enables that the traditional does not?

Crypto, and DeFi (decentralized finance), is conducting a huge "live beta" in decentralized corporate governance and finance. There is a crapton of innovation happening with financial engineering and exchanges, completely new models like Uniswap (constant product DEXs) or new versions of existing things, like on-chain options.

Is it world-changing? No, or not yet certainly. But by construction, DeFi can only happen on a decentralized smart-contract blockchain, so it's genuinely new.

> What sort of applications most excite you?

Outside of crypto, there are many areas within industries which require the sharing and use of data across multiple organizations, markets, and even intra-industry. Think of Healthcare and the multitude of data sources, processes, and interaction between parties. In areas like this, where multiple parties have many different roles and responsibilities in a shared business process, I think the opportunity for private blockchains is promising. I admit that these are niche use cases and the use of these type of applications has not taken off yet.

Do note that these types of applications are very different from the decentralized implementations seen in the crypto sphere. These are the private, permissioned models that people speak of.

In that case they don't need a blockchain, they just need a database.

Daml is a nice functional smart contract platform, with the ambition of smart contracts being really contracts. This is a few years old video about the original idea: https://vimeo.com/219723741, and this is their web site: https://daml.com. Today Daml is integrated with the Canton synch platform, and can connect several kinds of blockchains and databases: https://www.canton.io.

>What are some concrete examples?

I like how you can use a PoS blockchain to earn interest on your coins. Cardano can do this without moving your coins to another wallet, xlm can do it but you need to trust the other party. Currently there are enough people in the world without banking access that this could make a huge difference to them.

That is speculation at the moment, a lovely fantasy to imagine to come to fruition for any technology; a market cap that has reached $1 trillion including price manipulation, I'm unsure it warrants that valuation - and arguably it's not simply that high due to price manipulation.

I do believe blockchain could help us solve some fundamental problems - but only if it's tied to real trust and democratic processes.

Bitcoin is a blockchain that's been structured to inherently be an MLM, and if you think through to the conclusion - say once 50% of the population has bought into Bitcoin, and now a growing majority require the remaining society to adopt Bitcoin to realize their gains - to unnecessarily, unreasonably transfer wealth from later adopters weighted towards earlier adopters - then you can how conflict will occur when the remaining 50% of society don't want to be left holding the bag, with no one else to then buy more Bitcoin for the last adopters to get wealth transferred to them; and this is why it also mimics a Ponzi scheme - it's just that there isn't a single controller liker Madoff, but instead it's controlled via a global, decentralized system that anyone can participate in.

It’s not a Ponzi scheme any more than any other investment is a Ponzi scheme. Once 50% of society buys gold, who’s going to realize their gains? Except for gold speculators, the point isn’t necessarily to just realize gains, the point is to own an asset whose value is guaranteed not to disappear, even if it fluctuates.

Granted, gold has a stronger guarantee than Bitcoin as of now. But that doesn’t make Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme.

Would be nice to have a decentralized HN . I m sure it exists

An ICO is a framework for a criminal conspiracy to defraud. As outlined in the evidence gathered by the SEC on Ripple.

Make some outrageous sales pitch that experts in technology would describe as vaporware

Sell your utility tokens. A worthless type of token

Buy some fake articles and pump the price. Dump on the suckers that bought your tokens

Pay for a exchange listing on a junk exchange. Pump the token and dump on the suckers that bought it

Exits, rinse and repeat

By your logic the stock market a scam because of penny stocks.

Penny stock is a utility token redeemable for an unproduced good?

Penny stock is a utility token representing governance in a company as well as the privilege of taking its profits — much like crypto governance tokens are.

The ICO scammer often markets the tokens as equity or money but they are gift cards to use the network

Wrong. Utility token gives you no equity. It's a gift card voucher to use a network

Ah, my bad. I didn't realize those were different from governance tokens, which are more directly analogous to stock.

That being said, just because something is commonly used for fraud doesn't make it illegitimate. There are fraudulent companies in real life, though usually there's more legal recourse to go after them.

Governance tokens I haven't seen so much. Don't believe they are sold as or the same as equity in a company. How they are different from equity could be very important to their value as an investment

All are fraudulent from the 20 or so I've looked into or talked to the founders and realised they were criminals

Sounds like you either have a horrible method of finding projects to approach or, given your comments here, no matter how legit a project was you'd still think it's a scam due to cognitive dissonance.

Some tokens distribute usage fees to token owners.

Penny stocks are companies building perpetual motion machines and magic derivative technology with no trade-offs?

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