Ask HN: How aware are you about building decentralised software on blockchain? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How aware are you about building decentralised software on blockchain?

41 pointssprafa130 comments

The HN attitude about blockchain is overwhelmingly negative.

Yet what I see with smart contracts on blockchain, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a huge potential for change and opportunity.

If you don't know what that is:

You can run code on the Ethereum blockchain. The user pays to run your code, instead of you paying to run the server that serves them the code. This is because everyone who's running an Ethereum node actually has a copy of your code in the blockchain.

This is called a "smart contract" but enough people have experimented with it that they've actually built decentralised applications - dApps for short.

There are now real world examples of decentralised applications in Finance - DeFi - which includes a Decentralised exchange - uniswap - and decentralised finance like Compound, Balancer and Yield Finance. So there are apps. You can get a loan from a DeFi app today.

This seems like it has huge disruptive potential. Mark Cuban has talked about how he could sell tickets as NFTs on the blockchain, and get a percentage of resell, forever.

You could in theory build something similar for Airbnb or Uber on the blockchain - just NFT a house/day and then sell it on the blockchain. Same thing with Uber - drivers could auction off their time in a blockchain dApp.

Because devs don't pay to keep their code in the ETH blockchain, you can just build software and it will "run" forever, at no cost to the developer. You can also set up the smart contract to give you a percentage every time it runs - see uniswap. Thus user - pays the dev + network on usage.

This is a radical change and imo a huge avenue for new innovation.

But this is hardly talked about here in HN.

Let's ignore, if possible, the whole "proof of work is bad for the environment" question (all I'll say about that is proof of stake is real and in production with DOT/ALGO and that's a 99% reduction in energy consumption). I know it's tempting to go in this direction but again - let's assume all crypto is proof of stake for the sake of argument.

View on HN

Generally I would say that for the average HN'er software is our life, it's not just a field in which exciting things happen (the internet, ML and blockchains etc) but also, indeed perhaps more so, a "boring", day-in day-out livelihood. Personally, I feel the trouble with the blockchain is that it has attracted a lot of "fair weather" supporters, people that have only become geeky due to the allure of money, not because of an inherent love of software.

Yes blockchains are indeed an exciting development and present a lot of potential, but "true" hackers are probably as excited by blockchains as they are by say Rust. The thing is that generally speaking we can have informed conversations about Rust, because those that understand the novelty of Rust have come to that understanding through a genuine interest in the technology, not because of how Rust can make them rich.

So yes, blockchains are indeed very interesting, but unfortunately the conversations around them are overwhelmingly distorted by the superficialities of what I would cynically describe as dilettantes. Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise :/

This is 100% true and the reason why made this post. I think people are missing the signal for the noise - the noise being all the absurd people and ideas the space has indeed attracted. The signal being - dApps are huge.

> Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise.

100%, seeing people who just learned the word blockchain explain to me how I can make 100x my money on crypto is pretty annoying.

My recommendation would be to stick to github, the technical parts of bitcointalk.org and whitepapers at most. Those tend to have better signal to noise ratios.

Decrypt is pretty good too.

Agreed. And I think that those of us who truly believe in cryptocurrency are not really interested in the USD/your-flavor-of-cryptocurrency exchange price. Yet that is exactly the main thing that almost everyone who cares about cryptocurrency seems to care about. And sure, making money would be nice so I can’t directly blame them. But if you are really really into cryptocurrency then you should be dreaming of a future where we can sell and buy services and products for cryptocurrency and where we can pay our taxes in cryptocurrency directly, and where we never have to exchange our cryptocurrency into fiat again. That is the real end goal of cryptocurrencies.

Because as of today cryptocurrency has not yet reached the point where it makes sense for most merchants to accept payment in cryptocurrency. Because we are still paying other people and entities and the government in fiat and the exchange rates are fluctuating wildly.

And also furthermore in agreement with what you are saying, a lot of the fairweather supporters will be like let’s put this and that on the blockchain, and yet those people have no real understanding of the trade-offs that come with choosing to do so.

Thirdly something that I find annoying is when someone describes proof-of-work as “solving difficult maths problems”. A cryptographic hash is computationally expensive to find a collision for unless it is flawed, true. But the mathematics behind for example SHA-256 are not really “difficult”. It’s just time-consuming. And it has the property of being fast to verify. But to me when someone describes it as solving difficult maths problems it seems probable that they don’t really know at all what is being done.

Most of the stuff people talk about in crypto space is really meaningless. Gotta focus on the signal!

But what can you actually do with blockchains, outside of cryptocurrencies? The "oracle problem" means they can only interact with themselves, so all these ideas about Airbnb or Uber or whatever on the blockchain will never be able to go anywhere without an off-blockchain element, at which point you have to ask - what value does the blockchain part of the solution add (apart from increasing the value of people's hodlings)?

Why do you need an off blockchain element? You can just have reputation tokens running on the blockchain.

And how does that reputation token change value? Human input, i.e. information which starts outside the blockchain but which has to be recorded onto the blockchain. In which case, what is the point of the blockchain? Maybe making it impossible to fix mistakes in human input, but most professional developers would call that a bug not a feature.

What about an AI controlled by contracts on a bockchain?

The point of the blockchain is that it’s a computing platform that would allow you to write decentralised software.

Having something on the blockchain doesn’t mean it can never be fixed. It’s just data and that data can never be deleted, but it can be amended and superseded.

> But what can you actually do with blockchains, outside of cryptocurrencies?

I have not explored this idea fully, but I think blockchain technology would be a good candidate for something like a community members ledger. Ie, a public list of people that belong to a group.

Based on this ledger then you can derive new ones for individual issues that the members can cast votes on.

This would form the basis for a type of electronic voting.

Until someone unambiguously shows real-world (not a proof-of-concept) value of blockchain beyond crypto currencies, I’d be happy to never hear the word blockchain ever again.

I don’t care what Mark Cuban thinks, I hardly know who he is beyond being wealthy and liking limelight.

He put Radio on the Internet, man! Rad.

For those who missed it, this is a reference to Russ Hanneman from Silicon Valley. There are some good best-of clips on Youtube, but the summary is he's flashy with no substance. He's at least partially based on Mark Cuban.

The million dollar application is accounting systems like SAP etc. Where you have shares issued, the books, all incoming and outgoing transactions. And then every one of your partners is using a compatible system. In construction, a new building being built would be its own project that each firm interacts with. AP/AR/Inventory/Labor/Progress/ChangeManagement all in sync between all parties.

Autodesk will probably get there first, and everyone will pay to use a centralized system instead and then have to export the data to their legacy accounting system.

But, a group of collaborating firms, that still dont quite trust each other, or want to hide certain amounts of profit, are a use case.

Accounting has already solved this problem. It’s based on double entries, separation of duties and audit. If there are still problems despite those controls, blockchain won’t solve them - those are human problems.

A blockchain is triple entry accounting, which has advantages over double.

http://www.warrenhenke.com/writing/essays/triple-entry-accou...

https://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html

I find it odd to say "thats a human problem" as if technical invention over centuries isnt specifically to abstract away human inefficiency.

A group of somewhat trusting firms doesnt need crazy PoW/PoS. The idea of companies sharing a collaborative ledger when working together shouldnt be dismissed so flippantly. Everyone keeping their own (unreconciled automatically with each others) book may be the status quo, but it doesnt make it optimal.

DeFi is real - you now have multiple protocols for decentralised finance, where you can “be your own bank”. So those applications exist.

Look into Compound, Balancer and MakerDAO.

My bank allows me to send money to my landlord, pay direct debits for my bills, receive my salary, and (via Mastercard) spend my money in shops.

How does "being your own bank" do these things? My understanding is that you would still need a "regular" banking layer for each of these activities, which seems like it defeats the point?

Autonomous software exchanging currencies without anybody being in control is cool. I find it hard to think otherwise.

You have a contract written in software, people pledging money to liquidity pools, and the rest is just magic. Sure you can go to a bank or someone and pay a currency exchange fee, but the fact that its possible P2P is quite neat.

It's basically Banks-as-software, collaboratively maintained like Wikipedia.

But that still doesn't solve any of those problems I mentioned?

Plus I can already do P2P currency exchange. I don't because it's inconvenient to find those to exchange with, so I happen to use a marketplace (TransferWise), and they take a cut because they're providing a useful service and now they're an exchange. Exactly the same will happen with DeFi currency exchange, so how is it better?

Not sure if you got what he said.

It’s better because instead of transfer wise controlling the money from point A to point B and taking a percentage as a fee (0.1% or whatever) you have 10 000 people who build a liquidity pool where the money gets transferred from point A to B. All those 10 000 people share the 0.1% fee. Maybe less, in an extremely competitive space.

Basically all the centralisation, the app takes a fee bullshit goes away, and instead you get 10 000 or 100k or 1mil people all sharing their money and receiving part of the fee.

The dev can also write into the smart contract that he gets paid a percentage as well. Boom, you have a transferwise competitor with 100 mil in liquidity within days with 0 server costs. You can do this right now with a few days/weeks work on a decentralised application. You don’t think that’s big? Any app that “takes a cut” in exchange for having written a few thousand lines of code and maintaining server infrastructure will be challenged by decentralised alternatives.

I think I understood it.

> you have 10 000 people who build a liquidity pool

> The dev can also write into the smart contract that he gets paid a percentage as well.

This is literally what TransferWise is. They convinced thousands of people to work together to build a liquidity pool – that's the hard part – and then they take a small cut.

Sure but - the hard part - transferwise had to build a pool of people - can be done in days in crypto now.

Getting a loan with a bank is hard. Takes days/weeks.

Getting a loan on DeFi takes minutes.

There are many loan providers who will pay out within a day, my bank will give me a loan via their app in 2 minutes and receive the money not long afterwards, and I don't need to understand what a wallet is or which ones are safe to use or how to use them safely, etc.

There's nothing about regular banking that prevents this, or anything about DeFi that is required to make it happen.

I think you're mistaking the fact that DeFi is a hub of great innovation for DeFi itself being the great innovation.

You are extrapolating your situation > global situation. Millions if not billions of people don't have access to the credit opportunities you describe. Certainly I don't, living in the country in europe I live in.

That is absolutely true, but the fact it is possible in some places does lead me to believe this is not a benefit of DeFi, but a benefit of well developed banking infrastructure.

DeFi might be able to provide this, but we don't need DeFi to get it.

Can you explain DeFi loans? I used a calculator, and to take out $500 worth in one coin, it costs $900usd in bitcoin collateral, I mean if I had $900 in bitcoin, why would I need $500 and not just use the bitcoin?

I honestly find the thing pretty confusing myself.

However the fact that it’s confusing doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Cuban has rightfully said UX in the space is beyond awful - some of it is virtually unusable without deep instruction.

My assumption there would be that you lock that bitcoin away. And you get 150% of the value of the BTC in another coin - DAI or whatever.

So you might have had 1000 usd in BTC but by the end you have 1500usd in DAI ? Dunno

Being your own bank cuts out costly middle men. You can directly receive your salary from your employer rather than employer -> employer's bank -> your bank -> you, directly spend your money to a merchant instead of you -> your bank -> your credit card company -> their bank -> them, directly send to your landlord, etc etc. No banking layer is needed for any of the use cases you're talking about.

Banks aren't costly. They earn money on their deposits by using them as the reserve store for creating new money, and generally pay their users, not the other way around.

Granted, they're costly if you're poor, but I've yet to see a blockchain application that seems likely to be useful for poor people who may not even have consistent network access.

Payment processors, on other hand, certainly charge vendors and result in some level of markup to the sale price of goods and services. But blockchains as payment processors add cost as well. This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything. Crypto values have to stabilize at some point to ever be usable for transactions, so this cannot continue forever, and users will eventually need to pay the cost of the transaction processing directly, just as they do with non-blockchain payment processors.

Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless. Some work is being done somewhere by some machine or person.

My jaw drops for you. Banks are indeed costly. They take your money, earn >5% interest on it and pay you 0.02% interest back. It doesn't even get close to beating inflation. They nickle and dime you on overdraft fees, minimum balance fees, other BS. You're paying them just as much as you're paying credit card companies, if not substantially more. You just don't know it.

> poor people who may not even have consistent network access.

There are plenty of poor unbanked people whoe have enough network access to use bitcoin, especially with the lightning network. You only need network access when paying (or receiving). You don't need consistent network access.

>This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything

That's not true man. Miners are not empowered to charge anything. Miners can only accept transaction fees that users place on their own transactions. Its a market and miners choose the highest fee transactions. That's how it works. You're implying that coinbase rewards subsidize low fees, but you're very wrong about that. When the coinbase rewards go away, fees don't consequently go up - rather miner revenue goes down in such a case.

> Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless

But it can make it orders of magnitude cheaper. Paying someone on the bitcoin lightning network costs less than a tenth of a cent. Tell me that isn't cheaper than any other traditional payment mechanism.

> You can directly receive your salary from your employer... directly spend your money to a merchant... directly send to your landlord, etc etc

My point is that none of this is actually possible. My employer doesn't pay me in Bitcoin/etc, has no facility to right now, and would get into a lot of legal trouble if they didn't pay payroll taxes. I don't frequent any shops or online services that accept payment with cryptocurrencies. My landlord wants to be paid in GBP because that's what he's paying his mortgage in and he doesn't want the hassle and cost of conversion.

I get that these things are all possible when everyone has moved over to cryptocurrencies, but that's a huge chicken-and-egg problem, and I've yet to see a path from where we are now to this future world that is at all credible/accessible/legal/compliant/safe/cheap.

> My point is that none of this is actually possible

Except it is possible.. What you mean is that the people who pay you don't want to pay you in bitcoin, and the places you buy from aren't taking bitcoin. But they could if they wanted to. It is in fact possible today.

You asked "how does being your own bank do these things". I think its pretty clear how they do those things and how banks are not necessary for you to pay someone else (in bitcoin) today.

> would get into a lot of legal trouble if they didn't pay payroll taxes

Paying employees in bitcoin does not prevent them from paying payroll taxes...

> huge chicken-and-egg problem

Its really not tho. Individual merchants can (and do) accept bitcoin without all their customers willing or able to pay in bitcoin. Its just another option. Individual employers can offer the option of paying employees in bitcion (especially easy if they're a merchant that accepts bitcoin). Individual employees can opt into such an option. There is no chicken and egg problem, it can happen gradually one person at a time and one company at a time.

I didn’t say “real”, I said “real world value”

Just because DeFI exists, doesn’t mean it solves a problem that anyone actually has in a way that is measurably better than our existing systems.

I get that you’re passionate about this, but you’re simply not selling it. The least appealing thing in the world to me is to “be my own bank”. I hardly want to interact with a bank, let alone be one.

Real economic use cases appear to be suppressed in favor of frivolous tokens. I don't know why this is the case.

If you're genuinely interested, you can check out my project which tokenizes real estate rental income: http://leasehold.io/

I wrote a detailed article which explains how it works: https://jonathangrosdubois.medium.com/how-leasehold-achieves...

The idea is to use blockchain tokens instead of shares but later we will also allow people to use LSH tokens to pay for rent when staying in one of the properties in our network.

We essentially invented a new concept called 'Proof of Profit' - Imagine if you could have irrefutable proof that a company earned a certain amount of profit in a specific month. Typically you need to trust company financiers and accountants. Not so with Leasehold. If you just launch a node to sync with the blockchain, you can verify the profits yourself with absolute certainty; just by looking at on-chain buybacks for that month. Tell me this isn't innovative and useful.

The fact is you’re being downvoted.

HN is going to miss the boat. Build more cool stuff. You will become insanely rich, since so many people seem set to let this opportunity go to waste.

I saw a reference to this site elsewhere on HN, so I thought I'd respond:

The focus on where to buy your token, how much your token is selling for, etc is a major turn off for me. It might not be fair, but my first thought after landing on your website is that it's another ICO that isn't going to go anywhere.

And looking at your token model, users can "see" that Leasehold the company is reinvesting in itself by buying property or buying back shares. This seems very easy to game - what keeps you from just burning some of the "significant" shares that you own to prop up the price / prove that you are receiving income?

Shipment tracking, Stocks delivery and settlement, the government official gazette. These are three I'm thinking of. Sure, you can do it with a centralized server, but a decentralized alternative can offer some kind of "Open World API".

Now for a true defi, you can't depend on the physical world (some authority out-there). Only cryptocurrencies are possible in this case, and maybe, if the blockchain becomes advanced enough: Dynamic value derivatives denominated in crypto.

It might sound as limited but money (and the transfer of it) is kinda a huge thing. Crypto's downside is volatility. Being able to hold crypto as crypto while preserving stability (or better: value) will be a game changer. It'll also mean KYC and regulation will be harder to implement.

KYC/regulation/blacklisting are huge tools for governments. Government can have control over centralized entities (ie: an exchange, a bank, etc...) but they can't control everyone's wallet. They might be able to mess with a couple guys or figure out if a certain gang used such and such, but it'll be impossible to track everyone transactions that are happening in the blockchain (worse, the "whole world" is out there). And even worse: Current events have showed that governments are way behind when it comes to blockchain technologies. Some governments are not even aware of its existence or meaning.

In my opinion, this is huge. Most societies/civilizations collapsed when they failed to collect taxes. Peasants (your lovely citizens) are unlikely to pay when given the opportunity. Less taxes means less control, it's a slippery slope. Bad news for many governments around the world.

How about a decentralized, open source cloud?

https://akash.network/

They claim to be "lower cost", yet the page is curiously devoid of pricing info (except on how much their token is worth and what its market cap is).

They definitely could do a better job of marketing their pricing compared to the big three.

https://akashlytics.com/price-compare

Am I correct that they are saying you get 0.1 of a CPU for $1.34/hr, but then AWS gives you 1.0 of a CPU for $4.25/hr.

That would mean that for 1.0 CPU on Akashlytics, I would need to pay $13.40/hr versus $4.25/hr on AWS. The cost savings claims on their pricing is deceptive at best since it is not comparing apples to apples.

I don't see how this makes sense unless you are looking for < 1 CPU, but then there are places like Digital Ocean which is likely more cost competitive there as well.

I am totally open to being wrong though as Blockchain seems like something so many smart minds are working on, but the solutions where it makes sense over not using Blockchain have so far not been apparent to me.

> you can just build software and it will "run" forever, at no cost to the developer.

We already have software that runs at no cost to the developer. It's called software.

That's the main problem with many of the "blockchain" solutions - is that they're just reimplementations of already-existing solutions to problems.

You can run someone else's software and pay for the actual running thereof, it's called installing it on a virtual machine (and things like the AWS Marketplace exist for turn-key solutions). Maybe something "microtransactiony" could happen here - but why would you need a blockchain when AWS can just make "Marketplace for normal people"?

And many of the other solutions provided end up having a central authority, in which case why not just have ... a database? Amusingly enough most crypto exchanges are internally run not on a blockchain but on a database, even though in theory one entirely on a blockchain might be a workable use case.

Huh? Are you not familiar with uniswap? That’s a fully decentralised exchange running on blockchain.

Interesting - I expected there to be one, but I've never heard of it compared to the big-names.

Uniswap is relatively new - started really working last year. There are large numbers of decentralised exchanges now.

You might not have heard of it but it does significant volume. For example, if you look at the USDC markets and sort by 24-hour volume, you'll see that Uniswap is at the top.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin#markets

> they're just reimplementations of already-existing solutions to problems

They're also federated, but at the cost of being exponentially more expensive to run.

Because we tried the whole centralized database thing and it just leads to trillion dollar monopolies built on value extraction of users and open source developers.

Yep

How do you run an Uber replacement app at no cost to the developer ?

There's a significant amount of software that is ran by the developer (hosting) at a cost to the developer. The idea here is that the user pays for the hosting directly instead.

You don't need a blockchain to charge your users a fee.

If it's just software running locally, you don't have common data with global consensus on updates.

If you have the common data, it's on a central database and the developer is paying for it.

Blockchains give you the common data without the developer paying.

This doesn't remove cost. It just imposes it on the owners of blockchain nodes, which presently don't charge anything because crypto coins shooting through the roof means they can pay for running the node by just holding coins. This can't stay the case forever. Pushing cost somewhere else doesn't remove it.

I don't think anyone here argued that blockchains are totally free to run, just that developers don't have to pay. Mainly the costs are paid by users, who pay fees to miners for running their transactions.

You don't have to run a node to hold coins. A piece of paper can do it.

HN is a highly concentrated community of future-focused computing experts. You're right that it is also bearish about blockchain.

Which is more likely?

A) That thousands of progress-minded professional technologists are all wrong and ignorant, as you've suggested above...

Or...

B) That you are wrong, and there are people with huge financial incentives to pump up crypto platforms by misleading people about their capabilities

I'll ask you the same question I've been asking for 5 years without getting a good response:

What is a real pain that a dApp can solve better today than non-blockchain software?

Uber drivers auctioning their time is not one of them, because Uber drivers do want a benefit that's only possible with centralization: vetting/banning of passengers.

>HN is a highly concentrated community of future-focused computing experts.

Cryptocurrency is a perfect example of how computing experts can also have little to no understanding of finance and economics :). HN has been bearish on cryptocurrency for years, meanwhile the industry is continuously expanding into the territory of trillions of dollars.

Pretty much. It's amazing to me that so many developers are en masse choosing to not get rich in the biggest opportunity for startups in the last decade or more.

HN has had many bad consensus calls on a lot of successful ideas. One of the most famous examples is Dropbox, when the original founder posted his idea here 13 years ago or so and people just didn't get it or get what value add there was there. And he was heavily criticized. Ultimately, you gotta take the peanut gallery with a grain of salt. And use the criticism as fuel for innovation.

HN's take on crypto will be one of the most comical examples in a few years. Decentralized finance alone is already a 100 billion plus dollar industry and growing at 5-10x a year.

yep pretty much. I'm saddened by this, and I wonder how many people are accepting of HN take and not DYOR enough to realise there's real opportunity there. I mean there are kids becoming mil/billionaires on blockchain dApps overnight, building real value. But HN is dead set on ignoring them.

> I mean there are kids becoming mil/billionaires on blockchain dApps overnight

Which dApps? How many users are there? And why can't that dApp be built on traditional stacks?

> building real value

Haven't seen any of this yet. I've seen speculation on coins, and then there are many layers of financial products built on top.

The application space is essentially non-existent as a use-case.

Getting a loan on DeFi is a real use case.

https://defipulse.com/

This site shows the top DeFi protocols and their locked value in their smart contracts. It's hardly exhaustive but just visiting and researching the top 10 or 15 will be instructive for you.

Axie Infinity the game has hundreds of thousands of users and growing like crazy. Tens of millions at least own some cryptocurrency. Ethereum has more than 1 million active wallet addresses and it's growing on an exponential curve.

https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/07/218240...

You probably haven't seen it because you are following HN and mainstream news and expect to be informed on it through their filter.

The main success stories I would point out are Uniswap, Sushi, Aave, Compound, Maker, Synthetix, Liquity, OpenSea, Rarible, Sandbox, Decentraland, Aavegotchi, Audius, Matcha, Zapper, and more than I can list to be honest. It's a bit like trying to explain all the interesting use cases of the internet to an early dot com skeptic.

Thank you. Thank you.

The Hn filter is brutal. It might be costing people the opportunity of their lifetime.

> Ultimately, you gotta take the peanut gallery with a grain of salt.

The difference is that Dropbox was a prediction about a business model, while the anti-blockchain comments are assessments of a technology.

A lot of the bullish claims about crypto are based on badly misunderstanding the underlying technology. HN is not predicting anything in that case, just debunking misinformation.

> Decentralized finance alone is already a 100 billion plus dollar industry and growing at 5-10x a year.

You're changing the topic. This thread was about decentralized, blockchain-based apps, not about decentralized finance.

Decentralised finance is a blockchain based app. He’s talking about Compound, Balancer. They are that.

https://defipulse.com/ take a look, that's just Ethereum and not an exhaustive list at that.

Any intelligent person must be forced to admit that a person is often wrong, and groups of people are often spectacularly wrong.

You missed option C, that thousands of smart but loud technology professionals speaking outside their area of expertise are wrong, thousands more are right, and it's not as obvious as you're making it out to be.

> Uber drivers auctioning their time is not one of them, because Uber drivers do want a benefit that's only possible with centralization: vetting/banning of passengers.

I'm nearly certain that there are quite a lot of drivers out there who would be willing to forgo this if it meant taking home the huge share of their revenue that's currently going to Uber.

Is Uber extracting revenue right now? I thought their business model to this point largely relied on stock appreciation with value extraction from that happening in the form of lower costs to users compared to normal taxis, not more revenue per ride to Uber.

The bigger issue is it's not clear drivers going on the blockchain is even legal. Uber and Lyft provide some minimal vetting and certification. Prior to them, drivers directly owned their own taxi businesses, but needed medallions, which also involved regulatory compliance. Uber and Lyft could get away with operating in legal gray areas because of huge legal departments funded by VCs and stock holders. Can individual drivers do that or will cities just hammer them?

Yes, Uber takes a cut of rides, and that is where most of their revenue comes from. They do lose money on some rides (primarily short ones) and it's not a flat percentage per ride or a rate that hasn't shifted over time, but they are definitely taking a solid chunk on average. I may be misremembering, but I think I heard The Rideshare Guy say it's been around 28% as of late. It used to be a flat 20% years ago but the model has gotten a lot more complex.

> Can individual drivers do that or will cities just hammer them?

This is a good question. Personally, I think it's a risk that many drivers would be willing to take and that enforcing this sort of law on a per driver basis would prove extremely difficult.

> I'm nearly certain that there are quite a lot of drivers out there who would be willing to forgo this if it meant taking home the huge share of their revenue that's currently going to Uber.

I wholeheartedly disagree. It's not even easy to get a female driver in certain places because they're afraid of riders. And most women would never use a service where the drivers aren't identified, background-checked, and banned upon their first incidence of assault.

But if you're right, where is decentralized Uber? Or decentralized Twitter? Or literally decentralized anything?

All we have right now is tokens.

why couldn't a blockchain have built in identity (through verifiers) to ensure 1 account per identity, and a voting system? Is there something about voting that wouldn't allow vote records to be public? System could automatically just ban anyone who gets below a 2 from 3 separate drivers, or something else ... there's ways... it's not a hard problem to solve...

I believe in cryptocurrency/blockchain, but your examples illuminate why speculation is far ahead of application. Why would an Uber driver want to auction their time on a blockchain? How would making Airbnb houses NFTs have any advantage to a consumer versus a centralized approach? Needlessly complicated, less quality control, less safety. Centralized is truly better for these in every way.

The fact is that 99% of the perceived uses are simply riding the hype train for investment. The 1% is really changing things, despite all the haters, but it’s typically finance, currency, settlement, etc.

Because Uber and Lyft extract much of the value from each ride. If Uber or Lyft were a blockchain-based peer-to-peer protocol with its own utility token, the users and the drivers could easily benefit from the value capture. For what it's worth I think the decentralized Uber example is a bit contrived and that these applications are more complex than people realize. However, ultimately that's what I see in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps: I see loans being made via a smart contract that automates away much of the middle man infrastructure of the banking system. And therefore I as a depositor can get a higher yield than I can at a regular bank because the only thing between me and the borrower is code.

I'm not convinced that centralized is better in every way for the more complex examples, however. I just think the tooling and distribution aren't quite there yet. And sometimes it will take a rethink of the existing application. For example, Uniswap is a great decentralized exchange, but the constant product architecture it used to achieve its result is much different than the standard order book architecture that centralized exchanges use.

Yep I think it's tooling, tech. Ubercoin and Airbnbcoin type apps are inevitable I think. There's no reason for all drivers to give away their time at a fixed cost for Uber, and auctions would allow 5 star drivers to gain a lot more than 4 star drivers, even 4.8 star drivers. Uber doesn't allow for this, but that's the thing with permission-less innovation - you will be allowed to do stuff people can't even imagine right now.

Like every engineering project, it boils down to pros and cons, it doesn't make sense to shoehorn blockchain into everything.

Do you need a decentralized, trustless, transparent and uncensorable system with adversarial participants and you can boil down your logic to a bunch of if/else conditions and some for-loops? Then blockchain probably makes sense and finance is the best use case so far.

But decentralization comes at a great cost, both in efficiency and actual costs. So do I want to train a ML model in a decentralized way? Probably not. Do I want to put my game on the blockchain where I relinquish any control? Probably not.

The hype means that people are trying to put blockchain into everything which in turn turns off a bunch of people because it doesn't make sense.

There are tons of things blockchain doesn't make any sense. However dApps are real and there are real-world use cases being used right now by millions of users. HN seems to be ignorant of that, weirdly.

Are these users doing anything more than essentially just shuffling more crypto around? No.

It's honestly so strange to hear person after person replying in comments here "why would i want to cut out costly middleman x or y?" Presumably all smart developers. Do people just not realize that credit cards extract like 5% from purchases? That all these middlemen extract that much or more from every interaction you do with them? That some middle men (ahem, robinhood) are straight up fraudulent and will cheat you when they can get away with it? Have they not gotten BS charges from their bank they had to call in to complain about or just eat and bite their tongue? So many reasons to cut out these middlemen where possible. It's now possible where it wasn't before because of cryptocurrencies

Basically. There's quite a bit of cargo cult behavior.

This doesn't get rid of middlemen, though. Blockchain is not truly peer to peer. It relies on blockchain nodes, which you can run yourself, but mostly people don't do that, and it isn't free to do. The reason users of the blockchain don't currently have to pay anything to use it is that owners of blockchain nodes earn money by holding coins that appreciate relative to their local legal currency at a sufficiently fast rate that they don't need to charge their users.

That doesn't seem like a permanently sustainable business model. Coin values can't keep shooting up forever, and at some point blockchain node owners are going to need to either shut down or directly charge blockchain users, and then you're back to the same situation as normal payment processors.

> Blockchain is not truly peer to peer.

"Blockchain" isnt a single thing. Bitcoin is definitely peer to peer. Most cryptocurrencies are operated in a peer to peer way.

> It relies on blockchain nodes, which you can run yourself, but mostly people don't do that

Most people not doing it is irrelevant. They can if they want. They can get rid of more middle men if they want. Even using custodial cryptocurrency services get rid of some layers of middlemen and so is still a win.

> and it isn't free to do

Yes it is. There is no substantial cost in running a bitcoin node for example.

> The reason users of the blockchain

There is no such thing as "the blockchain"

> the reason.. users .. don't currently have to pay anything to use ["the blockchain"] is that owners of blockchain nodes earn money by holding coins that appreciate relative to their local legal currency at a sufficiently fast rate that they don't need to charge their users.

You're wrong on many many levels, as I told you in my other comment to you. Please stop trying to explain things that you clearly don't understand.

> just NFT a house/day and then sell it on the blockchain.

And there's nobody there to enforce any rules or regulations.

So you fly down to Mexico and your Airbnb simply doesn't exist, meanwhile your money is irreversibly transferred.

If you try to prevent that by holding the funds in escrow until after the stay then the reverse scam and nonpayment of funds can happen by staying in the house and then claiming fraud.

Shifting the window around just shifts the window from favoring the renter or the client.

There's flaws with having a company acting as the dispute resolver, but the centralized reputational authority means that people have an incentive to not trash the place or fail to pay and cannot list houses that don't exist, and don't rape or rob the clients, etc. It also helps to have dispute resolution via credit cards, and to have court systems. Those centralized third parties also should have taken some time to validate the information of the parties on both sides (Airbnb made me scan my passport to validate my identity, which raises the bar somewhat over creating a thousand different random identities on the blockchain).

Making it all decentralized with no trusted third parties has very significant downsides.

(And that is before we start to consider the fact that contracts as code is limited by our ability to write bug free code, which as it currently stands is incredibly poor)

AirbnbCoin is potentially one of the hardest of these to implement.

Some of this would be fixed by something like hypersign which will tokenise ID/reputation.

Some other parts of this could be fixed, let’s speculate - with a token that rewards people for verifying that houses around the world that are up for rent are real and match the photos.

The point is - having a centralised company doing something can be replaced with 10 000 individuals doing the same thing with the right crypto token that rewards the right kind of activity.

Hard ? Yes. Impossible? No way. Get a lot of smart people on the problem and they will figure out the Best incentive structure. Figure out enough incentives and you abstract away a layer of the software stack - customer support, verification ID, verification of real-world items.

That’s what we’re seeing now - layer by layer of applications will become tokenised until the application layer becomes obvious.

I'm aware enough to know that it's not the computing platform that I want. Some reasons that come to mind include:

- UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter.

- Unsolved side-effects/data input. While "blockchains" are good at reducing the amount of trust needed in a system, for smart contracts to interact with the real world, they still need trust for data input/output. This all seems like it's in very early development.

- Inflexibility of contracts. "Paper" contracts, T&Cs, etc, have an advantage that they work 99% of the time, but that when you hit an edge case that no one has figured out before you can email someone and come to a resolution, or at worst, go to court to have a (hopefully unbiased) third party decide. This is often better for both parties, but is not an option with smart contracts.

- Development risks. Last time I checked smart contracts were written in a language that seemed to be inspired by a combination of C and Javascript. I'm not sure there's a worse way to write code that is so critical. Software engineering is decades ahead of this, safety-critical software engineering is many more decades ahead of that, and contract law is centuries ahead.

> - UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter.

I don't know which projects you've used, but in my experience, the DeFi projects I've used have much better UX than any bank I've ever had.

Most of them just have a simple "Connect wallet" button you click and you're in, no need for a password, whatsoever [1]. There are some easy to use wallets like MetaMask, just have to set it up once.

1: For example, https://oasis.app/borrow.

So I click "connect a wallet", and I'm given a list of 7 options, none of which a typical user will have heard of, let alone understand what a wallet is.

Compared to going to my bank's website and clicking "get a quote for a loan", filling in some personal details, and getting an email?

I understand why this feels exciting to tech-minded people but this essentially proves my point.

Maker already has thousands of vaults, so clearly people do know what it is.

I've never had an online loan application work, always had to go to their branch or call them which is a lot more work than installing one browser extension called MetaMask.

A lot of these complaints remind me of the time when all the newspapers were writing about how internet is never gonna succeed because x, y, z[1].

There was a time where email was a "complex" thing, you can find out videos of news anchors trying to understand the "@" [2].

1: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

This is a good point. In the early days of the web these things were only accessible to the few people who really understood them, like where DeFi is at right now.

Over time we got companies like AOL, Yahoo, eventually Facebook and Twitter. This is how most people use the web, what these companies offer(ed) is safety, accessibility, consistency, centralisation.

On the early web people knew it was unsafe to just hand over your card details, it took us developments like HTTPS and 3D Secure to make that safe. Right now DeFi is in a similar place, it's a wild-west of technology that has been fraught with hacks and scandals where many have lost a lot of money.

To truly take off it needs to develop that trust, and to develop it in a way that is safe and accessible to all.

I know you can do it safely now, but you need to know what things like hardware wallets are (which are a terrible UX), and even then we've seen hardware wallets being used as an attack vector recently.

I think this "Connect wallet" or "sign in with Ethereum" feature is a killer use case. It's a solution for SSO with public/private cryptography without giving your identity away to Facebook or Google or Paypal. I love it and can't wait for more websites to start using that as an identity/auth solution.

I have two issues with blockchain.

First, whenever I work with blockchain, I reach a point where I realize all my technical issues are because I chose that data structure.

The second is that outside of hype, your examples are remarkably poor uses for blockchain. Each can be solved more efficiently and effectively through better technology choices.

Blockchain's best use case is selling blockchain.

Part of the problem is that they're slow and expensive to use. Although Cryptokitties had (in web terms) a miniscule number of users performing tiny transactions, that was enough to essentially break Ethereum in 2017[0]. There are other blockchains now that try to resolve these issues though.

The other fundamental problem is connecting the blockchains to the outside world. There are various libraries to help with this, e.g. web3.js for Ethereum, but this typically means most DApps are inward-looking (exchanges, DeFi, token-based games etc.) rather than providing any non-crypto-related functionality. That of course makes it look to many people (rightly or wrongly) that DApps, DeFi, etc. all just serve two functions: (i) "plausible deniability" (look, my cryptocurrency does all this, so it can't just be a pyramid scheme), and (ii) sustain the pyramid schemes (i.e. keep them going for longer, draw more people in etc.).

Relating this to your example of selling a house as an NFT, there was an attempt to do so earlier in the year[1], but the key point is "Whoever purchases the NFT will be able to contact the seller and organize the sale of the house through standard legal means." So if you buy the NFT, you are not buying the house, but buying a brochure with the particulars you'd need to try to actually buy the house. That is the fundamental issue: to do anything useful you still need to interact with the real world. And personally, when it comes to something like buying a house, I'd much rather deal with real people, than hope I don't irreversably lose all my money due to an unfixable bug in the immutable smart contract or someone typing in the wrong address or something.

Anyway, take a look at https://dappradar.com/ for DApp listings.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42237162

[1] https://decrypt.co/66173/a-house-in-germany-is-being-sold-as...

Ethereum has long since moved past Crypto kitties and now regularly transacts tens of billions of dollars a day in volume on-chain in DeFi apps like Aave, Compound, Sushi and Uniswap. And there is a whole ecosystem of gaming cropping up including Axie Infinity (which is more popular now than Kitties ever was), Aavegotchi, Gods Unchained, Dark Forest, Illuvium and more.

And with rollups it can do that at several thousand transactions per second. Some rollup implementations are in production today, and apps are gradually migrating to them.

For those interested, Chia has a really awesome functional on-chain language called Chialisp. It's secure, auditable (meaning large organizations would be more interested), and the recursive nature allows colored coins released on the chain to have the same functionality as Chia.

They have a $500k hackathon coming up this month:

https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/sirius-labs-launche...

It's not talked about because it's a dumb idea?

TBF, I'm bullish on Defi and crypto in general. A good argument against eth and dapps comes from "The Bitcoin Standard".

> As will become apparent from this exposition, the notion that a “blockchain technology” exists and can be deployed to solve any specific problems is highly dubious.

> It is unworkable for third‐party intermediaries to imagine they could improve their performance by employing a technology that sacrifices efficiency and speed precisely to remove third‐party intermediaries.

> Ethereum can be rolled back means that all blockchains smaller than Bitcoin's are effectively centralized databases under the control of their operators. It turns out code is not really law, because the operators of these contracts can override what the contract executes. Smart contracts have not replaced courts with code, but they have replaced courts with software developers with little experience, knowledge, or accountability in arbitrating.

Going with your proposal for a decentralized Airbnb/Uber -- how would you handle dispute resolution and trust mediation without a centralized authority in an IRL setting, off-chain? If you have a bad actor in the system, how would you screen/remove them and conversely, how would you prevent abuse of the screening mechanism you propose? Relying on the blockchain as a decentralized database/audit record is one thing, but I think IRL enforcement and mediation of off-chain matters are critical prerequisite matters that need to be addressed before these types of marketplace businesses can even be considered feasible as dApps

All of this will be tokenised piece by piece, until the application will just be blockchain running top of blockchain. Look at something like Hypersign which is trying to solve identity and reputation for crypto.

There are already hints of how this will happen in DeFi. Protocols interact with protocols, smart contracts with smart contracts, until suddenly you get a full stack and the application layer becomes inevitable.

Most of those situations you listed can be solved, and solved better, in a normal centralized way with often the same experience to the end user. And they don’t really care if you’re using block chain or AI or magic as long as it’s solving their problem so why would you choose Blockchain for the heck of it?

I see blockchain being useful in two areas, finance and transport/delivery logistics. Environments where no one trusts each other outside of financial contracts and you need to share information publicly to address faults and concerns without other parties being able to change anything.

For anyone who’s saying - where’s real world - real world exists in Decentralised Finance applications. You can now get a loan through DeFi - look into Compound, Balancer and Yield Finance.

Are you telling me I can get a loan - say for a car - using DeFi right now?

not for anything specific, but you can get a loan of X amount of money for Y amount of collateral, yes.

You can do this using cryptocurrency that's being loaned out to you under the protocols of a decentralised application. No centralised control, everything is automatic, and there are no central servers - you can do all this just by running code as smart contracts on a blockchain.

Man... you have to be taking the p%$s for sure!?

And you mean "I can get a loan of X amount of money for X amount of collateral, yes."

What use is that to me!? Total horsesh*%t.

This whole thing is the biggest financial joke of our generation.

> ...sell tickets as NFTs on the blockchain

You need to host an app or a website that facilitates that. Same for the Airbnb scenario. You'll quickly find that how that transaction works is a relatively small part of operating the platform. You need search, customer support, reviews, recommendations, marketing, analytics. Paying Visa and friends 3% to process payments isn't where your costs or complexity are.

You can tokenise most of those pieces of the app as separate blockchains. This is what’s happening right now - stuff like - customer support - can just be externalised from the application onto a separate crypto platform that rewards people for providing good support.

That’s a radical example. But piece by piece blockchains can abstract layers out of the application until you only have your own part of the smart contract.

sure, smart contracts are interesting but the entire field of blockchains has been poisoned by grifters, criminals and the social and environmental disaster that is proof of work cryptocurrencies.

fundamentally in such an environment there's just very little practical use for "decentralised finance" - we have spent millenia creating regulation and trusted (of varying degrees) parties to manage all this stuff and it works well enough compared to any of the "defi" stuff, where almost the entire ecosystem is fraud and pump and dump. and normal people fundamentally seem to like the system where they can't just be frauded without recourse.

if you can provide a way to do the smart contract bit without the toxic hangers-on then I'm sure there's niche uses for it all, but no one ever proposes any compelling argument other than, fundamentally, the proposer will make more money out of it that way.

For the life of me I can't understand the full negativity on HN. Crypto is the wild west. It may even be the last frontier of the internet. It's a corner of the web that hasn't been fully co-opted and dominated by centralized trillion-dollar monopolies hell bent on quantifying your ad preferences while beating all divergent thinking out of you. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Unlike the Web2 revolution, retail users get to participate and benefit from the value creation. Between social tokens, NFTs, decentralized finance protocols, and DAOs (decentralized organizations), there is now a burgeoning ecosystem of tooling for organizing human capital around a cause or a goal. This goes beyond centralized tooling. It's all open source, it's all forkable, it's creative, it is fresh and reminds me of the early promising days of the internet. It's a chance to get a redo on the promise of the web.

I'm spending my time learning several things in the Ethereum ecosystem. One is using Ethereum for authentication, by using the wallet as a public key login and ENS domains as a user-friendly user name service (effectively acting as a decentralized auth/identity solution).

I'm also learning about IPFS and decentralized data storage through solutions like Filecoin and Arweave. I'm exploring a peer to peer database called ThreadDB.

And I'm studying Solidity and all the tooling for creating and interacting with EVM based smart contracts.

It's a very fascinating space and HN is doing a disservice to itself and its users by not featuring the positive side of it more.

> It's a corner of the web that hasn't been fully co-opted and dominated by centralized trillion-dollar monopolies hell bent on quantifying your ad preferences while beating all divergent thinking out of you.

Yes, but in the view of an outsider who at least has some knowledge of what it's trying to accomplish it seems mostly dominated by people running pump and dump schemes, scams, and other activities of ill repute. As such it is hard to see it in a positive light, and in the solution spaces of most businesses blockchain doesn't really fit and is the worst kind of vapourware instead. Worse, a lot of the applications seem to assume a perpetuity of things where there's no clear path of stewardship (decentralized or otherwise) of what happens when people get bored of it or the network stops being able to meet it's intended goals. Most applications of blockchain require people to not be bad actors and exploit the system, unfortunately it seems to have attracted a lot of bad actors.

The only use I've seen that makes any sense is CT (certificate transparency), where it actually fits the model provided by the blockchain concept well. It's my only example of a relatively 'clean' blockchain tied to something useful and practical and helps even people that don't understand it.

People excited around blockchain seem to be excited with the community they created and I don't think that's wrong. However, it is hard for me to see that community worth personally joining when a lot of what you see discussed around blockchain ends up being bots, salespeople, scammers, astroturfers, or the misinformed. It's not inducing the same medium of creativity as lot of other web inventions like forums, flash, mobile apps, etc. It just ends up being about itself which is fine but nets limited interest which makes the negative actors stand out that much more. I'm sure there's pockets of genuine good here and there, but it's hard to see past the dark vile ichor that surrounds everything.

Crypto will get regulated.

Everything that you’re saying about crypto is (almost) true of the early internet. 99% of the companies then were BS. Crypto is a weird space right now as it’s so void of regulation things that should be illegal are not.

As someone else said, this is the noise. The signal is Ethereum Virtual Machine, dApps and DeFi are real.

Thanks! Seems like I’m not the only person to get it.

Interestingly this post appears to have been removed from HN. Not sure if I did something incorrectly.

> The user pays to run your code, instead of you paying to run the server that serves them the code. This is because everyone who's running an Ethereum node actually has a copy of your code in the blockchain.

So if the user runs an Ethereum node, they have your code too, and then they can run it for free.

What am I missing?

You can get a percentage every time the user runs your code. That’s part of the smart contract. So a. You have no server costs and b. You get paid.

But how do you prevent the user from obtaining the code?

E.g. (1) a bad actor runs an Ethereum node, (2) you ask them to run your code, and (3) instead of running your code, they sell it.

i dont even understand the question you're making tbh.

The problem is that efficient systems are built to remove middle men or processes from transactions -- this 'get paid whenever someone sells / uses / blah' is just rent seeking. everyone wants a passive wealth generation system without work, but the universe shuns this idea.

the emergent, more efficient systems will remove the rent seeking behavior, and allow capital to flow more easily. Everything significant in this space is open and infinitely clone-able in many contexts. The only thing that isn't clone-able is value -- we have digital scarcity now in a world of efficiency maximizing code and systems. something about passive rentseeking as damage and routing around it.

Good software starts and ends with the people who are using it.

Concrete technologies, software architecture and design, algorithms, cryptography etc. are all means to an end. Start with what you want to achieve, what real world problem you want to solve and the people you want to solve it for.

And then work backwards from there.

I would think HN is smart enough to see through the BS. Mark Cuban has vested interest in feeding that BS.

All the use-cases you listed can be done without a Blockchain and in much much more efficient way, even if decentralized.

Can I use other people's computation to mine Bitcoins?!

context: bitcoiner. it is the hardest money and every other attempt to build a digital store of value pales in comparison to it.

Smart contracts! Its all absolutely revolutionary -- but also kinda sketchy. I have been playing with various defi protocols on various EVM based chains, and while it makes money (ideally, you are gaining more value by locking up funds in farms, vaults and pools.)

The reality is you are probably either holding a decreasing in value position in a liquidity pool (impermanent loss -- your apples and oranges are worth less in a month, but you end up with more apples and oranges with you withdraw), being issued inflation reward points from a vault (they are printed out of nothing as a reward for locking up funds) or being screwed on deposit, withdraw or 'performance' fees in a pool/farm. Dont get me wrong, there is actual value being created, the trade fees on the Automated Market Making contracts is actually good (eg: ~0.2% per trade * many trades!) It can be much higher than centralized finance can provide at a much highest risk.

While the savvy can use this system to buy more bitcoin (which is happily tokenized on EVM chains and convertible back to good ol' [bitcoin] UTXOs), most will probably just lose fiat value equivalency while increasing their holdings in shittokens, all the while thinking they are growing value.

The most promising value extract routine at the moment looks to be:

* Borrow fiat at low interest rates from cefi (banks)

* Convert fiat into stablecoins

* Deposit stablecoins into lending platforms

* Use stablecoin collateral to borrow at a slightly higher rate (but lower than the bank in step 1)

* Deposit borrowed funds as collateral in more lending platforms

* Repeat borrow until all collateral is consumed (to your own leverage/risk level).

* Deposit in pool/vault and collect 'interest', ideally higher than you are borrowing at.

* Last step probably earns the most of all, and will pay for the rest of the steps

* Profit!

My take on this is that this is just more Wall street fiat money shenanigans, reinvented on public blockchains. Or we could just have hard money -- 21 million coins. No yield, No interest, No inflation of the monetary base, No bs.

My biggest concern is security - that smart contract lives forever on the blockchain, secure or not. It's a pretty huge downside for very minimal gain.

This is clearly satire guys. Stop responding earnestly.

It’s a trillion dollar piece of satire.

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