Hacker News Reader

Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

It's a hash tree with a vape cloud around it, not quantum chromodynamics. I think most people on this technical forum understand it just fine.

View on HN

The hard part is not the data structure behind it (Merkle tree) but the economics. An entirely new branch of economics has spun of it and it's far from trivial.

I think the hard part is convincing people that it’s a new branch of economics and therefore the old rules need not apply.

"People had to invent entirely new ways to explain it because our existing models didn't work" isn't a very good argument for it being real.

Why not? We made something and it takes time to understand its implications.

I mean, it's not even 'entirely new ways' to describe it. Bitcoin has been reinventing the finance industry one mistake at a time.

Tragedy of the commons is fully evident in the bitcoin block size debacle.

Cryptocurrency is wasting modern technology to recreate the economic system of the 1800s.

I would even venture to say the tangibility of precious metal-backed currencies in the 1800's made them still a step above cryptocurrencies currently.

I can understand mapping out a new branch of a field is nontrivial. But I’d also hope that domain experts could explain it well enough to bring others to a basic level of understanding without saying, “it’s too hard.”

> entirely new branch of economics

More like, everything old is new again. Nicholas Weaver called it "speedrunning 500 years of bad economic history".

Reductionism can be applied to anything. I am confident that very few understand it just fine. Because it cannot be understood without taking a very serious deep dive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com