Hacker News Reader

Cool tech doesn't become the next "big thing" just because it's cool.

Decentralised tech doesn't win just because it's decentralised (centralisation has a lot of advantage when it comes to easy of use and implementation)

What real business or personal problems does blockchain solve that alternatives don't? Few

a tech wins when the tech developers are enthusiastic about it. We have seen this before.

what are the examples? Aside from Linux?

Would early App Store iOS be an example?

JavaScript, bitcoin and many more :)

bitcoin development is basically dead.

javascript is universally hated, yet everyone uses it. I don't understand why.

No-ones got a choice, you have to use it in the browser.

I have never seen a "heavyweight" non-speculative application of crypto.

It seems almost tautological, if you need a strong system of guarantees in the real world, you usually have some central agency involved, and that agency needs to be trustable. Blockchain is still subject to garbage in garbage out after all.

What public chains can offer is an undisputed reputation rating. If I’m an oracle promising to provide information to Ethereum contracts you can check my history for mistakes. Although using oracles requires trust the level of scrutiny can be higher than off chain.

You also seperate concerns (Chinese wall) of data provider and settlement entity, with the latter being trustless.

We just need much lower fees and environmental impact.

I got lost by the end of this comment... but that tends to happen when I hear people talk about crypto's value (the value always seems to be a very niche application which doesn't help). I never see it framed in straight forward widely beneficial terms. (And I'm not saying that to be flippant mind you, just an observation)

The first paragraph, I can kind of follow it, you're saying you can check someone's track record for providing information? But that's the least important part of reputation systems isn't it?

Being able to vet the reputation hasn't been artificially inflated is really the meat of that. After all, what's stopping someone from making up a history? It requires the same central authority current systems do right?

The second paragraph is where I totally get lost. I have a vague understanding of each term, but how they come together doesn't seem to add up for me

I’ll try to explain better with an example.

Say you want to buy crop futures on Ethereum using smart contracts. The contract is “trustless” it will execute according to the Ethereum rules. Once set in motion no one can interfere.

The problem is that the contract needs to know something about the outside world.

That’s where an oracle comes in: a provider of information to the smart contract.

The oracle could lie about the crop price as a scam to manipulate the market.

We must trust it so there are 2 things “who” runs it and also have they been providing reliable data in the past.

With this in place anyone can now write up futures contract or options contract or weirder stuff based on the price of the crop.

And other people can participate independently of both the oracle and the contract writer.

This is like taking apart the commodities market and turning into Lego to build anything.

The advantage over normal finance is probably akin to the advantage of Linux over Windows. You can hack Linux. You can compile everything. It is yours.

It’s hard to say what this will lead to but I can see a lot of cool ideas coming from it.

NFTs as they are called, Which are tokens for things instead of money could add more. You could resell your games not at GameStop but on an automated marketplace on Ethereum. Just say “I want to resell this one for $40” and forget about it. One day $40 rolls into your account and the game stops loading up from steam. And that’s a simple example.

I could hack an IFTTT to say sell 3 games but only if I won’t make the rent. Of course this is in a future where you can pay your rent from crypto - but if they get the fees down you could have PayPal like transmitters between transferring money for small fee or even free.

I'm not trying to stonewall here but it feels like every time this gets close to something concrete I'm thrown for a curve

> crop futures on Ethereum using smart contracts

Why would I do this? You mention:

> The advantage over normal finance is probably akin to the advantage of Linux over Windows. You can hack Linux. You can compile everything. It is yours.

What does this actually mean? Like this combination of words? I don't get it, especially "It is yours.". The best I can picture is maybe you're saying this is like owning your access vs being beholden to a brokerage, but you still need to trust some coordinating body for these futures right?

Futures are covering an underlying asset, the part where you buy it is the tip of the iceberg to their functionality and the players that facilitate it still need to exist, so what's a concrete example of something new I can do by using crop futures on Ethereum that isn't self-referential to crypto?

The closest I saw to that was your IFTTT example, but how does any of that rely on Ethereum? Isn't the automated marketplace the enabler here? Like what changes about your example

> You could resell your games not at GameStop but on an automated marketplace on Ethereum. Just say “I want to resell this one for $40” and forget about it. One day $40 rolls into your account and the game stops loading up from steam. And that’s a simple example.

if the automated marketplace is based on fiat currency vs smart contracts? You still need to trust some sort of central entity to transact these games after all

Again, I know it might sound like I'm just not trying to picture this, but I really am, and it's just so ethereal to me. Every part of this I grasp ostensibly leads back to "ok but what is crypto adding here?". And the answer to that always seems to involve more crypto, which doesn't help move forward over that all important question

Thanks for the reply.

At a basic level there isn’t anything you can “do” in crypto (outside of gambling / tax evasion / other crime ) that you can’t do in the banking system.

If you are looking for the “wow it can do that!”, it doesn’t really exist.

Crypto offers a way for more companies to provide the services banks and exchanges provide. I wouldn’t say anyone could do it due to the technical knowledge required.

Crop futures - this was an example. More useful stuff will come along.

My Linux analogy is that anyone who I spoke to in the 90s “I might install Linux” would laugh. Why not just use Windows. What can Linux do that Windows can’t? It’s for geeks etc. It then found a use case in powering most of the web by being the OS of choice for web servers.

I think this is a good analogy because Linux still requires you to be technical and Ethereum will require this, but companies will build services to make it easier for ordinary people to get use of the system.

Business is all about trust so a completely trustless and still useful outcome is probably not possible.

I probably am not explaining this well enough and that’s my fault. It might be a tacit thing where if you use cryptos a little bit (in a playful way, small amounts of money) and keep an open mind you start to understand. Once you’ve done an exchange of one token to another with no central party, no company involved in that exchange with the price figured out by a contract no one can manipulate, to me that’s when you feel the potential of the tech.

That said there are so many problems with crypto it has some way to go. Number one is carbon emissions, number two is scams and number three is technical difficulty. I think these could be solved longer term.

Any starting points for some of us who still don't "get it"? Having done an introductory course on Bitcoin (coursera) I found it interesting especially for somebody with a bit of crypto/security background, however it didn't really deliver that long lasting wow effect.

Bitcoin may have its place, but it's not (at least not in practice) programmable. Most of the exciting stuff these days is happening on Ethereum and other chains that try to solve Ethereum's scalability problems. So I'd start looking at that.

I don't think there was a single moment in time it clicked for me. It was a combination of using some of the DeFi services, listening to to other people in the space, and trying to build stuff. I recommend learning by doing and trying to build something on Ethereum, ideally something that connects to existing services. Just using the developer tools will give you a sense of how early the space is.

I think it clicked for me when I understood the combination of:

- All data and code is freely available to everyone. Imagine you can literally copy Google, including all their code and user data, because you believe their user experience or ad model sucks. If you make a better version of it that attracts users you will get rewarded.

- You don't need business models such as subscriptions, ads, etc, because payments are natively built into everything.

- Everything is composable. That's huge. Imagine every service and website on the internet exposes everything as a global well-defined API that you can integrate into your own applications without restrictions or permission. These lego blocks may enable completely new applications.

- You don't need to manage infrastructure for storing data, or servers.

- Value, in all kinds of forms, is freely tradeable and transferable

A lot of things we use today can be built with drastically better business models, no intermediaries that extract money from you, and correct user incentives.

You're a Dfinity fan too?

i don't know if Balaji is popular here but he s a big advocate : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jPYk7ucrjo&t=9s

The problem Isee is that Ethereum is too expensive to do anything practical. So the “successes” have all been greater fool things.

Decentralized is really useful for many uses, but the monetary aspects are making it less useful, I think.

I’ve read some plans and thought they would be cool if it wasn’t going to devolve to people just getting money.

I think things like BitTorrent are successful because there’s not someone rentseeking over the operation extracting value as cash.

Ethereum’s issue, I think, is that the cost of transactions is much higher than the true cost. If it just focused on incentivizing distributed compute then there would be more benefit.

I’d rather have manual trust like seti/boinc did decades ago and greater functionality.

Can I connect with you somehow? I resonate with what you wrote, starting my development journey with eth and would like to have a small chat.

For your time, I can also donate some amount to a charity of your preference.

Honest question out of curiosity - why you aren't holding ETH if you think it's the next big thing?

A few reasons:

- I don't think that ETH specifically is the next big thing, just blockchain technology like ETH in general. There is lots of competition, both on top of ETH as well as different approaches.

- The price itself isn't strongly correlated with usage or value. Sure it's used for gas, but the price is mostly driven by speculation for now. So you never know what's "already priced in"

- Timing is hard. The space is still extremely nascent. There may very well be a few more crashes and cycles before it all settles down and becomes more mainstream. The timeframe here could be years. I think it's totally possible that crypto prices crash 90% tomorrow - but it's already too big to go away completely.

So I don't really have an opinion on the current ETH price, I'd just be gambling.

What's the best competition to ETH today?

Do you know of any good resources for learning ETH development? I've got the O'Reilly book Programming Bitcoin, but that obviously has nothing about Smart Contracts.

My fear is that it will become re-centralized when it becomes mainstream, using the same arguments as they did the first time.

This is basically PiperNet right? You get paid a digital coin to host content and apps for people -- distributed.