Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

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This "blockchain" space is getting so complicated that I can't see anymore what it is about. Is it a database? Is it a p2p network? Is it a currency?

Most of the "blockchains" listed on aggregators such as coinmarketcap.com are essentially clients communicating to a few nodes which, for all we know, sync up in a coordinated way to provide the illusion of a decentralized consensus system.

Like maybe we need to take a step back and ask "what problem are we actually trying to solve?".

Is an uncontrollable & anonymous currency truly the next big thing we need? Did we even stop to think of the potential issues of a system like that?

To me the future should be more audacious. Maybe we don't need some kind of unalterable decentralized database where capitalism can thrive from. Maybe we need to rethink society where money is not as crucial as it is today.

Hoping that the "next" cryptopunks can think of these ideas to really change the world for the better rather than ways to scale an unalterable database which, for all I can tell, just provides a distributed way to track who owes what to whom.

Money is much older than agriculture. Recognizable money-like grave goods, in the form of shells of a consistent size with holes for stringing, date back 80,000 years.

That's about is Lindy as it gets. I'm dubious of anyone who supposes we can "rethink society" to make money less crucial. It seems simpler to assure that anyone who doesn't have enough money gets some.

It's a dangerous experiment we're running, to have all currencies in the modern world be government-issued paper. Such currencies have a known and spectacular failure mode, which continues to happen right now, and "it can't happen to us" is just a bet, not a law of nature.

I'm glad that cybercoins exist, as a hedge against that occurring. Gold is the old standard, but difficult to transfer other than hand-to-hand.

Maybe it won't happen, perhaps Modern Monetary Theory is perfectly correct and the Fed and ECB will keep on trucking indefinitely with a manageable and smooth inflation curve. I'd prefer that, of course, a currency collapse tends to be a regime-ending event as often as not, and it's bad for commerce, which I need in order to eat, clothe myself, and travel more than about ten miles in a day.

But I'm grateful that there exists at-least-one distributed and uncensorable way to "track who owes what to whom". We might all be grateful for it one day. Or we might not.

It’s a network supporting both a decentralized data-store with a consistent view into valuable data and an a distributed computer with consistent results. What is so hard about this?

Yes but what problem is it trying to solve? It's a solution to a non existent problem.

Okay, decentralized currency is one idea. This can be used to implement some money with a monetary policy that is transparent and modified through consensus: eg bitcoin - deflationary via finite supply. Multi-party wallet is another. With this, cryptographic signatures from a majority of the owners is required to transfer currency/digital assets. Non-fungible tokens is another. This can be used to — as an example — publish land deeds and property deeds online and make them easily transferred as opposed to the current systems which are not fool-proof and are not as user friendly (look at selling a house and how expensive it is for no good reason). Or what about decentralized finance? A user can literally borrow money against Bitcoin without the need of an authority which can discriminate against him for no good reason. How nice is it that we can now operate such systems that are robust to censorship.

But you will just dismiss all these ideas. Same way people dismissed all the ideas people were imagining when the internet is young.

If you want to broaden your mind— just detach the idea of blockchain from the price of Bitcoin. Yes, it’s insane to the point of being obscene.

What stops the authority from blocking internet access they can't spy on..

That is a very different discussion altogether.

Its a major problem to all the hype around crypto - it relies on a centralized internet infrastructure.

If needed TOR is always available. Besides, internet may be vulnerable to ISP censorship for something like DNS but I would love to hear your approach for censoring something like the BTC network.

DPI can detect TOR for example. In the end your are still running on a centrally run network.

Some examples that are being worked on right now:

Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.

Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.

Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.

Hard? Nothing. Useful? Nope.

It's not hard, it's just an easy brain-free dunk.

That's why you should stick to Bitcoin, not Ethereum. While I find the problems and musings of the Ethereum crew fascinating, I have started to wonder if it is the crypto equivalent to a planning economy: they'll just add patch after patch to fix thing that are not fixable, making the system more and more complicated.

I understand Bitcoin (in principle), it is not that hard to understand. I don't understand most of Ethereum.

Bitcoin is a stagnant ecosystem. It’s not useful for everyday monetary transactions, and the developer community is too conservative to introduce features that would allow scaling up meaningfully (lightning is insufficiently decentralized)

I see it as a global, decentralized market anyone can participate in without restrictions.

For instance, if I feel my country's currency is heading towards hyperinflation, I can buy up tokenized USD as a hedge. There is no limit to how much I can buy nor do I ever need to visit a bank and comply with an oppressive regime - think Venezuela.

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