Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Lightning doesn't work because it either leads to a chaos of routing that doesn't scale or it ends up centralized and you lose the point of bitcoin in the first step.

And don't bother coming up with hand wavy explanations of how it could work, some day. People have been talking about Lightning for years, literally billions of dollars have been poured into the "tech", the fact that even bitcoin enthusiasts barely ever use it is all the proof I need.

I wonder how many more years of empty promises we'll have to suffer through before people accept that cryptocurrencies are a very good pyramid scheme with a thick layer of technobabble around it.

View on HN

Weird Lightning works perfect for me, every time I use it. Low fees instant transactions. Maybe the trouble is in your trolling?

Your entire premise is based on nonsense. People use lightning all the time and it works great.

lightning works, at least you are having fun tho

Daily reminder that cryptocurrencies are not == bitcoin

All the problems with bitcoin are long long solved just not with bitcoin because its not possible to fix something when the majority (of hashpower) thinks its not broken or rather profit form its brokenness.

FBA coins exists since 2013 or so.

Would you include environmental impact as a solved problem? My understanding is that Proof of Stake is the best serious option and that it's very controversial if it'll work.

Solves as in it does not use more energy than what the hardware needs to process the data + it doubles every time you double the number of nodes (obviously since they all have to do the same work too) Its not wasting energy for a PoW lottery it just uses energy like a comparable instant messenger with global server farm would. The more people who use it the more energy it will use there is no way around that.

FBA is completely different form PoS. It does not work on incentives and penalties it works with a global final state, global rules and (federated) byzantine agreement (FBA) for progress (adding the next "block"). No way to re-org, no block/staking reward, no censorship. If someone doesn't act in everyone's interest other nodes simply wont listen to them anymore. Not following the rules its publicly visible for anyone. And since there is no reward anyway there is no financial reason why anyone would participate who does not simply want to help the system.

Proof of stake lacks the security properties of proof of work, e.g. via grinding attacks.

Grinding attacks aren't a problem if you include secure verifiable randomness in the protocol. E.g., Algorand's VRF-based sortition, or Ethereum 2.0's verifiable delay function.

FBA is centralized. Period. There’s a reason ripple hasn’t dominated the secure payments industry.

faceplam FBA is a technology its not a thing or a running system. It can not be centralized its just bunch of math that BTW is mathematically proven to work. There are many FBA based "blockchains" out there some centralized some not. Ripple is a company that uses such a FBA system.

> Daily reminder that cryptocurrencies are not == bitcoin

This is an interesting feature of cryptocurrencies. Someone levels a fair criticism of a particular implementation but it can be handwaved away because an entirely separate cryptocurrency solved this particular problem (nevermind that whatever replacement you’ve chosen has its own host of separate problems because those can be handwaved away the same way).

Handwaved away? You mean improved?

I did not hand wave anything away, maybe read the thread. There was a wrong generalization (cryptocurrencies == bitcoin) about cryptocurrencies that is very common but not accurate at all. Fair criticism on the Ford Model T does not apply to cars.

Well, the "pyramid scheme" + "technobabble" is not totally worthless, if it enables the investment of "literally billions of dollars" in otherwise totally unproven technology paths, doesn't it? Finally there is one area where people are really investing money into computer science! A cause to celebrate in my book.

cough dotcom bubble.

Seriously, investing money in a bubble is nothing to celebrate. That’s why it is called a bubble. It pops and many people loose their money.

Except this bubble is a bit more insidious because you have actors like Tether that are most likely creating a lot of artificial liquidity/demand. If there is a sudden loss of faith and enough actors start rushing for the exits, it will look something more like a musical game of chairs of who is left holding the bag of worthless Mickey Mouse dollars, by my estimation.

Absolutely, that is my biggest worry. And it has no true backing, apart from these pump and dumps.

The single question people in favor of crypto can’t answer is the value creation. Now crypto is a natural evolution of certain monetary services and techniques, but at the core it literally does nothing of value. In fact, one might argue that that is its prime feature in its current state.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com