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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

Services are bad and libraries are good. (Extra proof: the latter can be turned into the former if you really want, but not vice versa).

Cryptocurrency doesn't factor into any of this.

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As a programmer I agree, but for a business a service might have a nice mote and offer the right incentives to develop and sell a service.

A crypto service is the worst of both worlds, in this case the income just goes to the miners.

And the enegy companies that sell the power for mining, and the chip makers that sell chips for mining.

But chips and power-plants are harder to create then just copying software.

From my understanding, mining is generally pretty difficult to do profitably.

And the African children mining the metals!

Following it that way is like following the glass maker in the standard broken window fallacy.

And in the parable of the broken window fallacy, the glassmaker does benefit from the broken window, but the broken window is bad for the economy overall. It's a similar situation here, at least in the short term GPU makers are profitting from increased demand, as well as scalpers and people selling secondhand GPUs, but for the economy (and in this case the environment) as a whole it is probably unhealthy.

So, the broken window fallacy is definitely relevant but doesn't really refute my claim that someone is benefitting from it

True. I had interpreted your comment as implying that the existence of beneficiaries beyond the transaction validators themselves makes the system as a whole be beneficial.

Well, I think "crypto" here means "universally viewable and add-only modifiable" database which feels like there might be a use for?

ed: "consensus-driven publicly-auditable append-only database" is actually a pretty decent generalization of "crypto", thanks.

Is "consensus-driven" that necessary? I'm thinking how one might argue that it's fundamentally an implementation detail of "append-only," meaning that you don't really have to say it out loud, like "electricity-driven" or "cryptography-powered."

A centralized database operating off a write-once-read-many drive would be append-only and not consensus-driven, and also not really what anyone means by crypto.

A whole lot more efficient though.

Basically Git(hub)

Other people have to agree on what you put in there. There are rules. It's not an append-only buffer of arbitrary bytes that everyone is forced to replicate for no reason.

We have open source. Crypto allows for open state. Blockchains are databases where everyone is a root user.

Nobody is a root user. Try rm -rf / on a distributed blockchain.

Fair. I'm trying to think if "Blockchains are 'no-delete' databases where everyone is root" makes sense?

You need to account for consensus among many

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