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Comment by voz_ | Hacker News Reader

So, I'm just a guy, been a software engineer most of my life, from age 7 or so when dad first showed me how to punch some commands in DOS. Probably like many of you here. So, when you read what I am about to write, please don't attack me, please read it with an inquisitive, truth seeking perspective. I come in peace, if even you don't like what I am about to say.

When I first got into tech, the technology amazed me, not the problems it solved. The tech was enough, it was not a means to an end, it just was. As I got older, and started owning projects, managing teams, etc, I realized that technology should be in service of something, not just a thing to exist in and of itself.

So, how does that relate to this? One question I have constantly asked, and never gotten an answer to - What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve? What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer.

inb4 payments: Payments has been the closest answer, but then you realize that payments infra is bogged down by regulation, not by technology, and that any technology that goes to replace existing tech will get regulated down into the same place.

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I worked in the public sector for decades and we did so many proof of concepts on block chains, exactly because successful consultants and university researchers (the sort of people we trust) tried to sell us various ideas.

It never stuck in my country, I think it did for a while in Sweden for their land ownership systems, but never here. It never stuck because it’s just a terribly inefficient database.

There is a use case for decentralised landownership, maybe not in a low corrupt country like Sweden, but I’m sure you can think of places where total transparency in land ownership and the transfer of land ownership would matter.

The problem blockchain doesn’t solve is that even with perfect transparency, your claim of ownership means nothing to the people with guns. Which means it doesn’t actually help you in countries that aren’t big like Sweden.

The same is true for all its use cases, including money. Because even money relies more on the established system more than any crypto fan will ever care to admit to themselves.

What problem does blockchain solve there? Land is expensive and not exchanged often, it wouldn't be a problem to require every operation to be submitted to a government agency, right?

You only need to have any widely trusted entity. A government entity is not always widely trusted, nor trustworthy everywhere globally.

I think that comes back to “the people with guns don’t have to care what the blockchain says” - and places without a widely trusted entity are likely to have the people with the guns.

If you don't have a system that enforces private ownership then who cares what a blockchain says?

Screenshots NFT

What, exactly, is the enforcement mechanism of NFT? Do they come with a military or police force to do violence against those who disagree with your Internet Claim Check?

That was sort of my point. I’m not English so maybe it got a little lost in my wording, but decentralised trust doesn’t work, exactly because you need a centralised force to back its integrity up, and if you have that, what use is the decentralisation?

Maybe if it wasn’t hopelessly energy inefficient you could utilise it to cut back on your bureaucratic processes and make your organisation leaner. That’s just not going to happen in politically lead organisations, at least not here, where it would be political suicide to replace workers with a technology that can easily be painted as destroying the climate. Even the most fanatical liberal (this is our right-wing mind you) would realise how poor of a political platform that would be in the current political climate.

Where I live, the land registry is trusted.

You need the authorities (the "people with guns") to be able to override whatever the blockchain says.

If you install a virus and someone steals your land token on the blockchain, should you lose the land? Most people and courts will say no.

«What problem does Bitcoin solve»

Easy: it's censorship-resistant. You send a transaction and no middleman, no financial organization, no one can prevent you from sending it. You can transact with anyone, anywhere, 24/7/365, however much you want, $100 or $100 million. No other system does this.

On the other hand, with legacy systems, Paypal can freeze your account, Zelle limits your sends to $2500/month, a credit card company can deny your transaction, a bank chooses to not process your international wires on "weekends and holidays", etc. Limits everywhere.

> bogged down by regulation...

Except for this bit though. Eventually it too gets regulated and has been.

1) You're right, and perhaps its a position of privilege to say this, but this does not seem to be a real problem worth solving? I've transacted a lot of money, both ingress and egress, buying a modest home, a car or two, paying off student loans, etc. No one has ever tried to censor me.

2) Beyond censorship, one needs safety. It may not be censored, but its certainly traceable, so how useful is the lack of censorship without anonymity?

3) If we take it that it solves this (both 1 and 2), then moving on to the other part of the question, how does it solve it better than any other distributed infrastructure? You could build a censorship resistant payment system without the insanely excessive hoarding of base wealth (like the gold mining analogy in the payment article), and without the insane environmental impact.

4) Let's say it solves 1, and 2, but we can't do better and I am wrong in 3. Is this problem worth the massive environmental cost to solve?

As for '4', you have an implicit assumption that I see a lot on HN. No, BTC doesn't have a massive environmental cost. Please re-examine that premise.

https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

Bitcoin is perhaps a rounding number today (my guess is that it is more than that due to Chinese miners not reporting energy usage correctly but could very easily be wrong), but what it solves is even less of a rounding number.

Said in a different way to do all financial transactions on the blockchain would use a lot more energy then it currently does.

BTC does not require every single transaction to be processed on-chain in the way that you describe. Please refer to the Lightning Network.

But then you are moving the goal posts, blockchain is not really needed for lighting.

That's not how it works, energy usage does not scale with the number of transactions.

Uh, why not?

Sorry, but 0.1% of global energy consumption still adds up to a lot of coal power plants.

This appears to be a semantic deflection. Are you arguing that less than 0.1% of the world's energy consumption equates to a "massive environmental impact"?

If we want to put it this way, yes.

140TWh out of 170000TWh is about 0.8%. relative impact is bigger than 0.08%. Coal is 36% of the power mix. Under the assumption that most bitcoin mining happens connected to the grid (seems reasonable) and that these grids contain coal powerplants (also reasonable with the exception of Iceland), that 0.08% translates to 0.22% of global coal based emissions. On a global scale, being responsible for 1/500th is a lot (for me at least)

the numbers are more relatable when looking at absolute impact. Assuming a average coal power plant of 600MW (you can find bigger, but this is a representative plant near me[1]). That’s 5TWh/yr per plant. Bitcoin then represents 28 of such coal powerplants running at 100% capacity 24/7. That - to me - seems like a massive amount of CO2 for a niche application.

And if I read your source correctly, that’s just bitcoin

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amercentrale

Coal is about 36%

The reason why the argument that it is only using 0.1% of the worlds energy consumption so it doesn't matter is a stupid argument is because it can be used about absolutely everything. This particular coal plant only emits a 0.01% of all greenhouse gas emissions, so it doesn't matter. That is true about that coal plant too, and that one. So just leave them all because no single coal plant matters in the whole.

Btc still uses far less energy than the banking industry. The relevant comparisons are important to consider.

The banking industry does 10000 times more things for billions more people.

I wonder how much energy is consumed via social networking on Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc?

You could build a censorship resistant payment system without the insanely excessive hoarding of base wealth

A key tenet of crypto is that you cannot, in fact, do that. To make the system secure it needs to make the people running it rich or they wouldn't bother. This is debated, of course, but so far blockchains that don't have "number go up" have been stillborn.

>it needs to make the people running it rich or they wouldn't bother. This is debated

I don't think this is even debatable anymore. We were promised decentralization and transaction costs at a fraction of traditional payments. Instead we have astronomical transaction/gas fees and effective centralization around a different cast of characters.

Of course there are positives. For instance, if you are sending large sums, it can be cost-effective. But, this is far from the world of micropayments and fractional penny transaction costs, and that money is going somewhere.

Seems pretty clear that we've just dislocated some percentage of the financial incumbents to create new ones. And, even the old incumbents are buying back in. Reminds me of the early promise of the Internet itself giving way to corporate overlords and capital.

I'm not anti-crypto, but it is kind of silly to keep pretending it's close to or even on track to realizing its early promise.

> Seems pretty clear that we've just dislocated some percentage of the financial incumbents to create new ones. And, even the old incumbents are buying back in. Reminds me of the early promise of the Internet itself giving way to corporate overlords and capital.

And yet again a bunch of tech-enthusiasts are forced to face that fact that their breakthrough technology does not infact lead to the techno-utopia they imagined, and instead is heavily directed by human factors, and leveraged/exploited by the same types of systems and entities that had the most power/influence prior to it.

Can't wait till we start again on this cycle with widely deployed machine learning systems in about 15 years. The same exact arguments of "it's just a technology." "It doesn't matter how it will be used in society." "By nature it's more [democratic/egalatarian/...]" "It will help to remove people problems by being tech".

Which will yet again change to: "Wait what?" "Not like that." "It's not supposed to be used like that". "It's been corrupted and taken over by X. Who could've foreseen this??"

If you're designing tech without designing how it will interact with society, you're just designing foot-guns. Hopefully at somepoint as an industry we'll get past this stage from teenage "look what I can do isn't this cool" to resonsible adult "Yes I have the freedome/ability to do this, and here's how I'll do it responsibly."

How is nano (a zero fee blockchain that has no impact on the environment that's based on ethereum) centralised?

https://hub.nano.org/i/merchants/4

> 52 Results

As GP said, "stillborn"

it's amazing for sending currency overseas with minimal fees, merchants aren't necessary for this

Are you saying Nano is based on Ethereum? Because it's not. Or if you mean the environmental impact claims are based on Ethereum... that's sort of true (Bitcoin is still the biggest offender here, but Ethereum currently also has a significant impact).

However, Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake, so this won't be relevant once that transition is complete.

sorry yeah, i duno why i thought nano was an erc20

«No one has ever tried to censor me»

No offense, but that's a very egocentric view. You may be (probably) a middle/upper-class westerner who has never encountered censorship, but I assure you there are billions (literally) of people on the planet for whom censorship is an issue.

So another spin on what you're saying is that middle/upper-class westerners have no use for blockchain, which certainly is in line with my experience that the only people who really need to rely on cryptocurrencies are ransomware people.

Yeah. And anyone unlucky enough to live in a place where the govt fucked the local fiat currency with hyperinflation. Zimbabwe, Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela, etc.

The problem still remains of how do you get crypto if all you have is near-worthless paper. Who would trade it to you? How much crypto is actually "produced" internally? International traders wouldn't want your shitty fiat.

Wouldn't it make more sense to use fiat from elsewhere like EUR or USD? There's probably already a decent stream of it into the country (from exporters and remote workers) so exchange could be done internally, lessening the above problem. Its value is far more stable than any crypto, it can actually be used in foreign trade without lossy conversions, it's just as easy to use, you can get bank accounts, etc.

No, in these places banks will steal your money.

> International traders wouldn't want your shitty fiat.

I'm sure there are local traders savvy enough to get a +30% premium in local cash which they then immediately exchange for more durable assets.

So international traders wouldn't but national ones that know the country, they would.

If I could sell my crypto for +30% and then immediately use that money to buy gift cards at a store (just brainstorming here) and could put those online and redeem them and cash out with a 10% slippage, allowing me to keep +20%. Why wouldn't I do it?

I don't know such a method since I'm Western-European. But if I'd be from Venezuela, then I'd know to what extent a plan like this is feasible among: friends, family and perhaps even certain strangers.

These places have wealth, in the form of foreign currencies like the USD, real property, businesses, commodities, etc. Their national currencies rapidly depreciates though, so it can only be used for short-term liqudity purposes.

>>Wouldn't it make more sense to use fiat from elsewhere like EUR or USD?

That's a good question. The only use-case I can see where cryptocurrencies are a better fit is when digital/international payments need to be made. Crypto allows that without any formal approval, from the state, for a USD/EUR supporting payments/e-wallet/banking firm to operate in that country.

It could (in combination with Lightning) function as alternative to card payments in places where banking systems aren't functional.

Also international waters.

Also digital goods.

However it won't be soon. It's financial infrastructure - just different from the ordinary. And that takes decades to build. Cards were accepted at only few establishments at first too.

ERC20 stablecoins on zk-Rollups could function in that role. Lightning not so much.

Those people still overwhelmingly prefer dollars.

> middle/upper-class westerner

So is the view that PayPal/Zille will block their transactions.

> billions of people for whom censorship is an issue I would love to read a source on that. PayPal/Venmo isn’t the de facto exchange in the world and many newly industrialised countries have robust p2p payment systems like mPesa/UPI.

1) This indifferent attitude is what enables censorship to occur in the first place.

2) Not all currencies have the privacy implications of Bitcoin.

3) Not all currencies have the inherent environmental cost that 'proof of work' currencies like Bitcoin do. Is preventing the hoarding of wealth really a goal here?

Regarding censorship, that will continue. Anti money laundering laws for example tend to popular support. If crypto wins out it will have to have a mechanism for blocking or canceling some transactions due to people with guns deciding that.

More generally, I would say it solves "how do I do transactions when I can't trust the other party nor a middleman".

The reason this seems useless is that most of the time you can trust a third party, but sometimes (e.g. paying for illegal stuff) you can't.

How does Bitcoin solve the "can't trust the other party" problem? If you send bitcoin to someone to buy some fine pharmaceuticals and they just don't send the product, what recourse do you have?

Markets on darknet solve this problem.

You mean a trusted third party / middleman?

Nope. An account with good reviews.

I believe this is why ethereum was so popular, as it introduced the idea of "Smart contracts". So the transaction is dependent on something occurring in the real world. Obviously there have been a ton of developments since then with newer crypto currencies, including increased privacy, anonymity, linking to applications, etc. For instance, I think Chainlink rewards people for hosting datasets (like ML datasets, or waybackmachine) on ipfs, and also inherits the smart contracts from ETH. Additionally, I think Monero has made developments in smart contracts as well, and the price seems to be more steady, since people actually seem to be utilizing it more for buying things in the real world, like computer services and such.

Smart contracts can only depend on something happening in the real world if it's accurately reported by an oracle - ie. a trusted third party / middleman.

I’m genuinely curious, how would that solve the problem? The real world event - say, delivery a purchased good - would still have to be flagged by both parties as “delivered” before the smart contract can execute. If you only allow the receiver to flag, then the problem inverts! Now the receiver can just deny the item was delivered.

Middlemen are useful, as annoying as they may be. I’d love to be proven wrong here.

> Easy: it's censorship-resistant. You send a transaction and no middleman, no financial organization, no one can prevent you from sending it. You can transact with anyone, anywhere, 24/7/365, however much you want, $100 or $100 million.

This is not completely true. There are middleman and in bitcoin world they are called miners. They are the ones that need to add your transaction to a block and who you need to pay so that they do that. Control the miners and you can censor all you want.

Middlemen implies a few (or one) centrally controlable group (or unit). BTC miners are anything but this.

Is a router a middleman on the internet? No. Same thing.

> Middlemen implies a few (or one) centrally controlable group (or unit).

No it does not.

> Is a router a middleman on the internet?

If that router is controlled by a third party, then yes, a router(entity owning that router) is in fact a middleman.

Are you running a bitcoin node that successfully mines blocks?

If you were adding a hypothetical transaction that would heavily injure a majority of miners (think shifting a huge number of the Satoshi owned coins to the US Gov) do you think they would still happily process it?

na,

people are just hopes that things will be good... do you really know who built the bitcoin? is there any person you can point ? no? then do you really think that people are smart, decisive enough to keep this kind of systems up in spite of their loss of monry or etc.

do you really think that there ls no trust issue with the bitcoin? let say "some" guy "one" day finds a way to steal your wallet ... can you find a way to make it safe as it is with the current banking system? think about even if your credit card used by scammers you still have some kind of safety... banking systems are not there to be perfect but here to secure people's ( who are not thst smart ) money safe...

lastly censorship rsistant is my ear! it is clear that you have never lived in an opressed country..

The authoritarian tech/finance cartel will gladly close your PayPal account without recourse to claim the balance, close your bank account, prevent you from getting access to payment processors, delist your products, kick you off of web hosting, ban your social media accounts, and otherwise shut you out of 99% of what people use the internet for, just for crossing one of them.

I never hold more than leftovers-worth of Bitcoin, so I'm not tied up in its success financially, but it has been a great way to support people who have been oppressed governments and corporations, many of whom who have never even been accused of a crime.

>> The authoritarian tech/finance cartel will gladly close your PayPal account without recourse to claim the balance, close your bank account, prevent you from getting access to payment processors, delist your products, kick you off of web hosting, ban your social media accounts, and otherwise shut you out of 99% of what people use the internet for,

Wouldn't this effectively make it impossible to exchange bitcoin for currency rendering it utterly useless?

That seems to be the consensus of what people say, but I think that all of those things are false or atleast assuming functional parts that aren't actually guaranteed.

No anonymity, means sure you are free to transfer, but the gov is free to track you down, and if you live in an anti crypto gov, that means entering or exiting the crypto universe is very difficult.

You say $100 or $100 million, but this is a large failure of Bitcoin. You are tying it's value to fiat. That compounds on my previous point, if all governments crack down on crypto, would it actually have any value? If tomorrow, all exchanges were shut down, the truth is, Bitcoin would be dead.

Lastly, the largest flaw of Bitcoin is it's failures to scale. That means that in the golden crypto universe that every follower dreams of, every text, transaction, breath, thought, all exists on the blockchain, Bitcoin inevitably collapses. You have the problem of both the blockchain size has grown to such a size that the barrier to entry for nodes becomes too large, as well as the failure for Bitcoin to handle any rate of transactions/seconds to handle the real world.

> if all governments crack down on crypto, would it actually have any value?

Which puts cryptocurrency at a minimal advantage over other currencies: it's easier to crack down on currencies whch have centralized control.

Other currencies have addressed the issues of anonymity and environmental impact, and the block size can be scaled dynamically. If the block size increases too much, there is an argument for sharding/pruning- this is an open question, and probably not the one which will crypto-currencies.

Current Bitcoin blockchain size is at something like 500 GB. Which is definitely not out of reach for most people in the first world.

And his comment was referring to:

> in the golden crypto universe that every follower dreams of, every text, transaction, breath, thought, all exists on the blockchain

Bitcoin is necessarily, explicitly inefficient, by virtue of being an immutable append-only log. A first-year CS student with a week of Data Structures and Algorithms classes could tell you that.

And it's not even being widely used as a payment system yet - at that point the transaction volume would explode, and the computational and storage inefficiency would become even more salient issues than they are now.

Doesn't the common method of obtaining Bitcoin force the same system on you.

If you are buying from coinbase like most Americans you are forced to provide identity to buy, sell or receive over various levels. Same on the other exchanges. Exchanges do freeze accounts.

How does a regular person who doesn't mine get around these same controls?

Bisq

P2P fiat on/off-ramps

Actually, it's the opposite as far as censorship resistance goes. Because all transactions are public, any bitcoin can be traced and tainted. Taints can be enforced easily because the process of detecting tainted coins can be cheaply automated by all involved. Mixers are of little consequence, just like money laundering schemes aren't a magical loophole around laws regulating transactions and tracking asset ownership.

Paper fiat is much better in this regard as bills are much more difficult to trace and taint. The infrastructure isn't in place to comprehensively enforce serial tracking. More importantly, there are usually laws that guarantee the fungibility of bills, which means it's usually very difficult as a legal matter to force a current, honest holder of a circulating bill to relinquish it. Such laws exist precisely because of the difficulty of cheaply tracking the provenance of bills.

A large country like the U.S. could easily mandate verification by its citizens and businesses of all bitcoin transactions against a central registry. Then in a blink of an eye it could begin flagging bitcoins the way car VINs can be flagged.

Sure, you can send it to people not subject to the mandate or otherwise willing to risk accepting it, but the value of that bitcoin is now diminished as compared to the rest of them because the market will be smaller. Transparency means they're not perfectly fungible, yet perfect fungibility is what you need for censorship resistance. To avoid the cost of receiving coins from illegal activity there'll be various escrow and insurance schemes which will make bitcoin transactions even less efficient than they currently are.

The flip-side, however, is that for law abiding people without privacy concerns, bitcoin might prove an excellent asset store. Nobody could steal it from you, at least not without fooling the legal system and/or central authorities, which [ideally] would require alot of non-anonymous, conspicuous activity. Which is why NFTs are enticing. Relatedly, NFTs make no sense without a centralized, easily queryable database linking legal ownership of an asset to the NFT. But, ironically, it would be the central database, not the NFT itself, that truly establishes ownership. Similar to how land title registries, not occupation of a piece of real estate or chain of title, establish rightful ownership in jurisdictions with such registries.

«Taints can be enforced»

You can't. You would need to control 100% of miners.

You can, in practice, by forcing exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, etc, to refuse tainted coins. Their value in the market would instantly go down.

If you don't control miners you have to do something even harder:

You would need to control or force 100% of exchanges, 100% of merchants, in fact 100% of all participants in the Bitcoin network to reject tainted coins. See how this can't work?

The tainted coins remain usable everywhere and anywhere that doesn't track tainted coins. The owner of such coins only has to find a SINGLE such party to be able to launder the coins.

And then what? The poor shmuck who wasn't aware they received tainted coins, eg. an online store in Oceania, would get scolded by The Tainted Coins Authority who would maybe decide, after investigation, he was a victim, and would "untaint" the coins.

Multiply these incidents by a thousand per day. Unworkable.

Who funds all this effort?

And who actually would be "The Tainted Coins Authority"? It sounds just like a centralized thing that pretty much all Bitcoin exchanges & participants are against.

You're confusing the technical aspects of Bitcoin--concensus on which entity possesses a Bitcoin--with someone's ability to derive value from that possession.

If the government passes a law that says nobody is allowed to transfer a US $100 note with serial 123-456-789, then if it catches you transferring the note, it can penalize you. It doesn't need to void the transfer that changed possession as technically defined by the system. It needn't care about what happens to that particular note, it only cares about your behavior. And through controlling your behavior (as all laws do, good and bad), it can ultimately effect how the system is used, even the parts not directly under its control or authority.

For a variety of reasons it's very cost prohibitive to enforce such a system for paper fiat. But most of those costs disappear in a transactional system that is inherently electronic, online, and real-time. There are still costs--like needing to maintain and make available a blacklist, and compliance costs for both users and legal authority--but they're still unfathomably cheaper than requiring and enforcing verification when passing a bill to a clerk at a grocery store.

FWIW, forgery of paper currency also imposes costs. The street value of a US $100 bill is actually worth slightly less than 5 x $20 bills. But the cost is very small because enforcement is difficult. A bank may refuse deposit of a forged note, but a store can almost as easily pass it on directly to another payee as when it received it. The more places you can easily utilize and enforce verification, then the more difficult it is to pass on forged bills, diminishing the value of forging bills in the first place. And this happens even if forged bills can be and are still exchanged among some subset of people. Unsurprisingly, this ease of verification is precisely what makes Bitcoin so seemingly useful. You can't forge Bitcoin because provenance is easy (i.e. relatively cheap) to track and enforce. But fundamentally that ease of identification cuts both ways--easy to detect forgery, but even easier to match a Bitcoin against a blacklist registry. And if its cheap for you to make the match, then there's less inherent cost to burdening someone with a legal mandate to make that verification. (And it's even easier to verify compliance because the government could regularly taint a Bitcoin, test passing it on, and track it as it goes through the system. Everybody who accepts it is busted, at least up to the last entity that didn't verify the legal identity of a payee, but you can impose even costlier fines in that case, which we actually do today--ever apply for a mortgage recently?)

I don't know what version of my post you read, but I just did a major edit rewriting 90% of it.

This already happens with “stolen” NFTs each marketplace blacklists them. There’s only a few popular platforms.

You can obviously still trade in them off platform but a lot of value is lost due to that.

There are ways to anonymize Bitcoin transcations, but I don't know how reliable they are. But there are other coins that attempt to be anonymous by default. I don't think it is a fundamentally unsolvable aspect.

That’s the part covered by this:

> Mixers are of little consequence, just like money laundering schemes aren't a magical loophole around laws regulating transactions and tracking asset ownership.

The key is understanding that governments don’t just say “oh, it involves computers, guess we have to give up”. Once something grows to the point where it’s worth caring about, blockchains are easily censored as we’ve seen in e.g. China. It’s not just that they’re a complex high-volume network stream which is easily blocked but, more importantly, that most of what people want to do happens in the real world where those governments control things.

If businesses are required to report their customers, a blockchain doesn’t help you because the auditors are going put them out of business if they don’t comply.

If you are linked to a mixer or anonymous coin network, congratulations, you’re now at risk of being charged as an accomplice for the worst crime committed using that system – better hope you can prove and they care that you weren’t knowingly helping them! (Are you sure that service isn’t run by the police so you can pay them to make a confession?)

All of this is fully retroactive, too: you might think you’ve evaded attention but that changes when someone you transacted with turns over their transaction history. How many of the people you’ve transacted with are you willing to go to jail for rather than testify against them? If the government published a list of tainted addresses involved in illegal activity, it’s going to be quite expensive to ignore it since whoever does do is taking on both the risk of prosecution and a reduced pool of potential buyers.

All of those things cut into legitimate usage: most people have alternatives so if a blockchain isn’t cheaper people aren’t going to touch it if it involves legal risks.

Nobody expects governments to simply give up. But for a country to have to go full China to be able to prevent the use of Bitcoin is still quite an effort. And even if that happens, you can memoize your master key and try to escape into another country. Much easier than if you have to transport several pounds of gold.

So it isn't perfect yet, but still a lot better than any other approach.

The argument "but it is against the law" (like money laundering) isn't really a good argument against an attempt to hedge against unfair governmental interventions.

The infrastructure isn't in place to comprehensively enforce serial tracking.

It is in China, since 2013.[1] ATMs which do "cash recycling", giving out bills they took in earlier, have the hardware for it, because they have to do a detailed scan of incoming bills for counterfeits and wear anyway.

[1] https://hkmb.hktdc.com/en/1X09V6YK/hktdc-research/ATMs-to-pr...

But does China restrict paper fiat transactions?

The basic question is whether you can force forfeiture of an innocent receiver of a tainted bill. You can always legally do this, but it diminishes the utility of the medium--the very purpose of currency, afterall, is to provide an efficient substitute for barter, and the greater the fungibility the greater the efficiency. Is the benefit in suppressing criminal activity worth the cost imposed on economic activity? The more potential innocent, protected receivers, the greater potential for effective money laundering, the less effectively you can suppress illegal activity.

The cost is a function of determining provenance at the point of a transaction, and the benefit a function of degree of ubiquity. This cost is most minimal when all transactions already occur electronically, online, and in real-time, as with Bitcoin. Similarly, it's precisely such a system where you can impose the burden most ubiquitously--literally every individual and every transaction subject to your legal authority without very much technical effort. So it's with something like Bitcoin where you're most likely to see heavy reliance on tracing and tainting because shifting the burden onto innocent receivers imposes the least cost to them individually and to the transaction system generally. By contrast, paper fiat is the place you're least likely to see this strictly employed, so long as it remains a substantial medium for exchange. (Rather, the tracing is most useful for catching criminals, not passively diminishing their ability to utilize the transactional system itself.)

AFAIU, not only does China have systems in place to more ubiquitously trace bills at certain points in the system, they're also actively encouraging (i.e. forcing) a shift to electronic payment platforms. The details of precisely what they're doing, when, and how I don't know much about. But the basic principles and concepts are clear, making the trajectory of what they need to accomplish easy to predict.

Especially in jurisdictions with long established, legally mandated fungibility guarantees regarding paper fiat, many Bitcoin advocates are unwittingly ushering in the future they claim to fear most.

The basic question is whether you can force forfeiture of an innocent receiver of a tainted bill. You can always legally do this

Depends on the jurisdiction. US, probably. France, probably not.

This cost is most minimal when all transactions already occur electronically

Tracking bills through ATMs is picking up as ATMs add "recycling", where received bills can later be dispensed to another customer. That requires much better scanning of bills. Serial number recording is a by-product of counterfeit detection and bill-damage detection. So the hardware and software come standard.

A motivated government will surrly be able to blacklist certain transactions, penalising any known entity that receives/uses BTC derived from those.

> censorship-resistant

This entirely depends on your point of view. What you call a problem, I call a feature. I do not want the monetary system I'm apart of supporting Organised Crime, Terrorism, etc. Things like Sanctions, Unexplained Wealth Orders, Proceeds of Crime, suspicious transactions etc.. Are there to protect me.

At best, I would say Bitcoin is resistant to unjust-censorship. However the only real instance I'm aware of that I would call unjust is Visa refusing to accept WikiLeaks donations.

> I do not want the monetary system I'm apart of supporting Organised Crime, Terrorism, etc.

This is true of all significant monetary systems. It's also notable that btc is not anonymous, so leave as much as (or more) of a papertrail.

> the only real instance I'm aware of that I would call unjust is Visa refusing to accept WikiLeaks donations

What about the practise of Civil forfeiture?

> What about the practise of Civil forfeiture?

That's not a feature of a particular monetary system, it's a US-specific legal doctrine governing any kind of property.

> any kind of property.

I'd imagine that includes BTC too

I don't think it does. Rights to search & seize physical goods isn't the same to search a digital device and force a transaction. At the very least, you can with-hold passwords i.e. refuse to participate, in a way you can't prevent police from searching your vehicle.

And the feature of many monetary systems is they are "property" i.e physical currency, and so must yield to US legal doctrines about physical property.

It's not relevant that this is US-specific, because this is an example, which must be based somewhere.

> What about the practise of Civil forfeiture?

As I say, it depends on your point of view. There are proponents and critics of Civil Forfeiture but as an Englishman I do not have the Cultural/Societal understanding of America to form my own view on the subject that doesn't directly affect me.

> Easy: it's censorship-resistant. You send a transaction and no middleman, no financial organization, no one can prevent you from sending it.

Devil's advocate here: How is a state not going to see that as a bug not a feature? Do you think that governments will let the loophole stand and grow? Won't there inevitably be a choice eventually: get regulation and oversight like any other mass payment method, or be banned outright, and driven to the margins of society?

Yes but all too often the problem with capital is precisely that it is secretly owned and moved (see "Moneyland").

That cryptocurrencies make money more private and easier to move is not really a benefit at all.

> One question I have constantly asked, and never gotten an answer to - What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

i just can’t tell if these comments are in good faith or not anymore. every thread on HN that even brushes up against crypto has about a million comments explaining what problems these things solve. you can disagree with the solutions, you can find it hard to relate to the problems being solved, but don’t play the “i’ve never gotten an answer to <x>“ game here, because you absolutely have.

> every thread on HN that even brushes up against crypto has about a million comments explaining what problems these things solve.

More accurately, they have plenty of people with a financial stake saying that the technology can solve a particular problem. It’s exceedingly rare that they can discuss the problem at a level of detail demonstrating real understanding of the problem, the systems currently being used, or, especially, non-hypothetical ways to deal with the limitations of the proposed system.

> “i’ve never gotten an answer to <x>“ game here, because you absolutely have.

How about “i’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer to <x>?“

I would say this, as someone who was deep into Bitcoin until 2012 or so, got out but still use it ocasionally as payment method.

For me, coming from a country ravaged by corrupt politicians, that controlled the Central Bank, and destroyed the country with years of hyperinflation, among other tools of destruction, the biggest problem Bitcoin seems to solve is Economic Dependency on Public Policy

What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untrustworthy parties. The underlying problem is "how do you make a secure distributed ledger that all parties can agree on". Using the previous entries to sign new entries is a good solution.

The problem is that Bitcoin has nothing to do with that problem.

> Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untrustworthy parties.

People keep repeating this, but this isn't true. It doesn't solve this problem for the general case, it only solve this under very special circumstances and it has yet to be proven that these circumstances allows blockchain to be useful for anything but as a currency. This is what the crypto proponents doesn't understand, they think like you do here that you can just slap blockchain on stuff and now it is trustworthy.

The interesting thing is that it is people believing that blockchain makes something trustworthy that is its real value. If you can slap blockchain on a scam to make people believe it is trustworthy, now that is worth many billions of dollars! That is the true value of blockchain. And it wont be valuable as anything other than as a scam as long as people can't tell the difference between a blockchain scam and a real blockchain business, and since it seems basically nobody who is pro-crypto can do this I don't see a bright future for it.

People keep repeating this, but this isn't true. It doesn't solve this problem for the general case

Why not? A signed distributed ledger isn't a complicated thing, so it's hard to see how a blockchain would fail in.

Cryptocurrencies are an application of blockchain as a technology. They may or may not need to use one. That doesn't have any impact on the use of blockchain in other areas, like supply chain validation for example.

> A signed distributed ledger isn't a complicated thing, so it's hard to see how a blockchain would fail in.

Right, but a signed distributed ledger doesn't inherently provide any trust, so that is where your thinking fails.

> Cryptocurrencies are an application of blockchain as a technology. They may or may not need to use one. That doesn't have any impact on the use of blockchain in other areas, like supply chain validation for example.

Certificate authorities for signing things like products or documents already exists for many things, blockchain isn't a new solution to that.

Right, but a signed distributed ledger doesn't inherently provide any trust, so that is where your thinking fails.

A blockchain does provide trust insofar as it's cryptographically impossible to tamper with the previous ledger entries. Obviously that trust only extends as far as trusting the crypto software, the ledger software and that people's entries in to the ledger are authentic at the time of entry, but that's the same as any ledger whether it's signed or not. The advantage of a blockchain is that a third party (eg someone joining the ledger at a later date) can verify the previous transactions and continue the chain with a good level of trust that the previous entries are true.

So, a signed distributed ledger like a blockchain does provide a level of trust that the ledger data hasn't been modified. As that's what a ledger is for (trust in the individual parties or transactions is done outside of the ledger) it does work.

Certificate authorities for signing things like products or documents already exists for many things, blockchain isn't a new solution to that.

A blockchain isn't a new solution. They've been around for decades. It's a different solution to something like a signing authority though. Using a signing authority requires everyone to trust a third party. That can be difficult. A blockchain doesn't require that.

Arguing that there's an alternative to a blockchain is not an indication that blockchain won't work. It's possible, and usually good, to have more than one solution to a problem.

> The advantage of a blockchain is that a third party (eg someone joining the ledger at a later date) can verify the previous transactions and continue the chain with a good level of trust that the previous entries are true.

You don't need blockchain for this. I've worked in this space (the non blockchain part of online trust), tamper proof logs is already a service provided by central Certificate Authorities. All you need to do is to continuously sign a log and the CA can keep the chain of signatures, and thus provide proof that you didn't tamper with the log. That way the CA can both validate the identity of the signer and validate that the signer didn't tamper, meaning it is a better service than blockchains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tamper_software

There is great value in software signatures. But that value is already captured and used everywhere, in SSL, software signing, document signing etc, blockchains doesn't add any value at all to that space as far as I've seen.

> Using a signing authority requires everyone to trust a third party. That can be difficult.

Finding a third party both trust more than they trust each other is trivial in almost every transaction. When you buy from Amazon you trust your bank more than you trust Amazon, and Amazon trusts your bank more than they trust you. Your bank is the third party. Can you name any significant usecases where there isn't a third party both participants would trust more than they trust each other?

already a service provided by central Certificate Authorities

Yes, and that's great if everyone agrees to trust the CA. Now try to solve the problem if they don't. I guarantee that your solution will look a lot like a blockchain.

In the case of certificate transparency, the CAs know that the browsers will nuke their business if they’re caught cheating and the design of the system makes tampering evident so they’d primarily only be able to cheat by issuing a certificate without logging it.

I think that’s an important point because it touches on the challenges of a blockchain: if trust can be based entirely on the information in the chain, it can work. If security depends on outside oracles, legal enforcement, or other trust relationships anyway, you don’t need the expense of a blockchain relative to something like a distributed signature system. This is why the supply chain stuff never goes anywhere unless it pivots because the hardest part is trusting your auditors, and the expense / fragility of an always-on networked system isn’t worth it when it can’t solve that problem.

Yeah, this can be done with a normal sql database too. Saving a representation of a linked list is not hard at all. Blockchains are not that special and can be made with less than 50 lines of code (that's with the ability to "mine" a block with x difficulty, but on the CPU). Add some persistence (flat file, sql, etc) and you end up with less than 200 lines of code. Then you can use that to build your ledger/currency system. What makes crypto currency systems interesting to me is the networked consensus and distributed parts. But blockchain itself is dead simple. It doesn't solve any problems for banks because they already have solutions to ensure data integrity and to survive audits.

A bank could theoretically rewrite your account balance with terminal command. Now this example is contrived because banks are under strong government regulations, but what about similar deals you make with your peers? When there are an infinite type of deals you can come up with and no regulation could ever keep up with every single deal that you would ever want to make, how do you trust that the other party will keep their word?

Blockchains solve a human problem, not a technical one.

No, they don't. Because you need people with guns, in the end, to enforce stuff in cases of non compliance.

I'm not sure what you mean by "they don't." But you don't need guns for compliance.

If can make it so that people will lose money if they don't follow the deal, then no you don't need guns. People will comply because it's good for themselves. That's how compliance is enforced under a capitalist system and it's the main reason we live in a modern, golden age of cooperation rather than a medieval age of conflict.

> What problem does Bitcoin, solve?

Moving away from an inflationary currency that the government is able to keep printing more of and devaluing everyone's hard work, to something closer to the gold standard.

Of course, things are very volatile now, but hopefully in the future the price of the major crypto currencies stabilizes.

We already have gold, though.

But not a gold standard. The powers that be have manipulated the price of gold such that its an open secret that it will never be worth anything.

Gold is heavy, needs to be physically sent, and where do you store loads of it?

Crypto seems more practical to own and trade.

Or do you mean owning a document that is backed by gold? Not the same is it?

You don't actually own cryto currencies either. You own the key, equivalent to the document you mentioned.

If something happened to the blockchain, your key would be worthless. Much like a bank that got robbed.

Storing crypto currencies is also very expensive, at least for all popular ones. Proof of Work requires to chrun out hashes to secure the network from external threats and in the car of Bitcoin it costs billions each year. Compared to the relatively low number of users it's very expensive and resource intensive.

this is just false. the document is just assignment of rights while they key is literal asset. trying to equate the two means you either don't understand or you have some agenda.

Why don't you explain why it isn't like this? Instead you accuse me of having an agenda, that is a very weak argument in a discussion.

The fact is, you cannot touch crypto currency or take it home, you can just tell somebody else to move it to another vault. You cannot do it yourself unless you are lucky enough to mine the block with the transaction in it, which is futile unless you have a mining farm.

It's closer to a document than a physical key to a safe deposit box at a bank.

absolutely false and misses the entire point - with document you own nothing but the document. whatever that document says can become false in an instant. whatever gold you are promised by that document might not even be where it purports to be.

with bitcoin key you own the bitcoin and you always know (can trivially verify) that your bitcoin is there.

You don't own the Bitcoin. You own a private key. If somebody else got the private key, they could drain the funds. That far from owning something. There is a saying in the CC world: not your keys, not your coins.

What you are talking about in regards to documents are scams. There have also been a plethora of scams in the crypto currency world. Making the distinction there is quite strange.

> What you are talking about in regards to documents are scams

yes, thanks, that's exactly what current financial and banking system is - a gigantic scam. all you own is bunch of documents pinky-promising that your assets are there, except they are not.

and yes, if your private key is stolen - your asset is stolen, that's how real ownership of a digital asset works.

strange is you trying to equate ownership of IOUs, that make you entirely dependent on some third party, in terms of accessing your assets, and ownership of a private key, which is the only way anybody can ever access your assets.

And there it is, you are the one with an agenda.

I just wanted to have a discussion about the meta model of crypto currencies, you rather want to destroy the current bankingsystem instead.

> And there it is, you are the one with an agenda

nice try. my only agenda is to clear up the confusion in your mind about cryptocurrency ownership.

> you rather want to destroy the current bankingsystem

who said anything about destruction? i know full well that i will need to suffer through the scam of fractional reserve banking until i die. bitcoin is just a partial escape hatch.

> I just wanted to have a discussion about the meta model of crypto currencies

if you did, you wouldn't begin with logical fallacies and prejudice.

notice how you don't even respond anymore about ownership aspect, yet this was your central argument - that crypto is no different from gold in that aspect.

i'll just wait for you to actually address that central point - that will indeed signify if you want to have a discussion.

The key is literally the bitcoin. So if you own the key, you own the bitcoin. Duh! And if you lose your key, you lose your bitcoin. That's what it means to own something.

And if you lose your gold bar or coin, you also lose your gold.

No, you are absolutely wrong. Owning something is way beyond having access to it. If I leave my bike unlocked and somebody took it, it would still be stealing.

so is stealing private keys

So crypto currencies don't work without a working legal system to back it up? Why the hassle with ever increasing transaction logs, and decentralization with all its drawbacks then?

what are you talking about? the concept of ownership exists outside of any legal system. legal system is there to have a recourse if your ownership rights were infringed upon, regardless of whether it was gold or bitcoin or sheep.

They work with and without a legal system, and you can still steal them. When I know you stole my bitcoins, I won't go through the legal system either ;D

Gold doesn't give you near instant finality and requires either transporting heavy gold for large txns or transact in IOUs which is like transacting in cash, since a centralized party handling your gold is to be trusted with the issued currency.

Gold can be confiscated by the state also as happened in the past.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

It seems that bitcoin can be too.

https://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2020/febbitcoinauction/

Not if I use a brain wallet. Short of torture they cannot take your bitcoin without your keys.

> Moving away from an inflationary currency that the government is able to keep printing more of and devaluing everyone's hard work, to something closer to the gold standard.

That is Bitcoin creating a problem, not solving one.

Inflation does not "devalue everyone's hard work", deflation does, by pumping up the value of debt relative to labor, i.e. making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

> hopefully in the future the price of the major crypto currencies stabilizes.

Given that their price is 100% based on speculation: not bloody likely.

Government flooding the market with cheap money has so far gone mostly to inflating asset prices. Who owns the assets? The rich. Who does not? The poor.

Note that I did not mention assets, I mentioned debt. Who is in debt? The poor. Who owns that debt as creditors? The rich.

The rich does not hoard fiat, they own assets which go up in price as the money supply increases.

Meanwhile the poor has its savings eroded, their paychecks have less and less buying power and they are forced to negotiate to get a raise to simply stop becoming poorer.

If you have substantial savings, you are not poor. "The poor" generally is in debt. As are states. And that debt in turn forms part of the assets held by the rich.

The rich are also in debt, because the debt is cheap, especially if you're already rich. So inflation benefits the rich not only by increasing the value of their assets but also by wiping out their debt.

> by pumping up the value of debt relative to labor, i.e. making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

In other words, interest based debt is bad because it is exploitative. Something we've known for a long time now. Interest based lending is prohibited in Islam for that reason (as well as in Judaism and Christianity).

Whether it's interest based or not makes zero difference in regard to how it's affected by inflation and deflation.

> to something closer to the gold standard.

So you prefer the great depression style of economic crisis as opposed to inflationary periods?

Also people here greatly benefited from vast liquidity flowing into startups. You think that is possible in an inelastic currency?

Crypto solves problems very few people have. The enthusiasm relies on uneducated naivete.

> Crypto solves problems very few people have. The enthusiasm relies on uneducated naivete.

About half of the world's population lives in an authoritarian regime. Having a savings account that is not tied to your ID, is not seizable by the State and that can be easily transferred if you have to flee the country is important.

> is not seizable by the State and that can be easily transferred if you have to flee the country is important.

So refugees who have the knowledge, internet and banking such that would allow them to purchase crypto.

You don't need to have a bank account to buy Bitcoin. P2P trading is huge in Nigeria.

I have some news for you: Gold has been both deflationary and inflationary over historical time... because its supply varies based on how much miners can dig out of the ground. That quantity may or may not relate whatsoever to the amount of value the economy created over the same time period. Instead of being at the mercy of a central bank you're at the mercy of the mining industry and how many gold deposits have been found.

When the Spanish brought their stolen Gold back from the Americas it more or less ruined their economy by flooding it with cheap money (tons of Gold chasing too few things of value). A similar crash in Silver happened when the Comstock Lode was found.

If you imagine that a precious metal standard would make the economy more stable you are absolutely wrong and history proves that. Gold is only preferable when the monetary authority has lost so much credibility they can't control the value of the currency anymore. Pegging one's currency to the US dollar is a modern equivalent of that idea. Of course now your entire economy is at the mercy of (US Dollar/Gold/Silver).

If things go really well and you produce 25% more widgets... well congrats, prices across the economy must fall because there is a fixed amount of gold available to circulate or be stored. Of course that's not really possible so the distortions happen in lots of other ways and people inevitably turn to privately issued paper or bartering just to make life possible.

Bitcoin has many of the same problems (inability to adjust money supply to economic activity) but it is slightly better than gold: we know it is deflationary (the supply of new coins decreases over time) so in theory all BT loans can have negative interest rates to account for that (deflation "cancelling out" part of the negative rate).

Even taking for the sake of argument that inflation is a bad thing, what's to stop a government forking the blockchain to expand the money supply?

A decentralized, global currency that makes sending/receiving money cheap & easy anywhere in the globe. I do think payments will come in time as well with Visa & Square both heavily invested in the space.

It doesn't need to be optimal or better than any of the other solutions. Because the above is enough.

Something like that takes time. Like you said it's not just about the technology (which itself has evolved a lot). It's about momentum, knowledge and trust.

We now have the crypto.com stadium in LA (ex Staples Center). It's gaining momentum with the public, corporations, and financial institutions. The decentralized nature has made it so far resilient to bans & attacks.

It's fine if crypto gets heavily regulated. In fact in my opinion that would only build trust in it. The space does not need to be the wild west.

But people take more time to change than technology.

Current fees are very high: eth $81!, Bitcoin $2.78

Time to confirmation varies from 300-600 seconds compared with ~ 1-3 seconds on traditional networks.

I’m afraid it is neither cheap nor easy.

0 fees on bitcoin with lightning. confirmation as fast as your internet latency. no tradeoff in security or underlying asset - it's still bitcoin.

There are other blockchains without those issues. I'm not naming names but if you care to research the space at all you'll find many, with various strengths and tradeoffs.

zksync, Optimism, Arbitrum, DyDx, Loopring are all available now, have instant confirmations, and cost <$1 for transactions.

They are layer 2's on top of Ethereum. This is why Visa and other major financial firms are building on Ethereum.

Won't regulations make it expensive? I don't think the technical aspects of money causes the high transaction cost. The regulations does.

> What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

Getting techies without connections to Big Finance rich.

A case could be made why that's a good thing for society. (Would you rather some entity like HSBC hoard the wealth instead?)

> What problem does Bitcoin solve?

"Other people are rich and I'm not."

It's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that is legal for now, worldwide, can be participated in from the comfort of your own home or mobile phone, and should be good for the next 120 years or so. It's had a lot of help from inflation, state failure, low interest rates and resulting high asset prices, and shortages of fundamental goods like housing and health care that lead people to believe that they'll never have them without getting rich. But fundamentally people invest in Bitcoin because they want to redirect other people's wealth into their wallets, and believe that they'll be the ones receiving wealth rather than losing it.

It's a cynical take, but fundamentally "other people are rich and I'm not" has been a prime driver of human behavior for millennia.

I don't think there's been any purely financial Ponzi scheme that lasted more than 50. And definitely not on this scale. At some point you run out of suckers :-)

I'm curious when this crash will happen and we see the hype go away and see some valid blockchain uses.

Bitcoin needs even more fresh meat than the average "purely financial" scheme because there's an unavoidable amount of value leaving the scheme every day just to pay for electricity to keep the whole show rolling.

Bitcoin yes, but the cryptocurrency market as a whole is moving towards proof of stake cryptocurrencies which don't have this specific issue. In 4-10 years I don't think Bitcoin will still be the most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap.

I think the problem is that the current nature of Bitcoin and its community is so silly, and so far from what it was intended to be, that it blinds people to its real potential. It is a good implementation of digital cash which could solve the problems that digital cash intends to solve, if it sorts out a few of its issues (computational inefficiency, latency, storage ineffiency).

TLDR: Bitcoin is a clever and nearly-adequate solution to the problem it meant to solve, which is being drastically misused, and yet that doesn't reflect on Bitcoin itself (any more than tulip mania reflected on the merits of tulips).

It’s sort of a genie in a bottle proof of concept. It becomes whatever its desiderants wish for, about half the time, maybe. I think if you really want to understand why it has become so powerful, then you have to change the question of “how does this solve a problem people have and therefore empower people?”, to “but how does it apparently empower its worshippers without solving a problem at all?”

I am basically not talking about the merits of its technical design; I am talking about the impact of having a software that a nontrivial minority of society view as a money pump whose only input resource constraint is lines of code + cheap hash compute.

In a way you can reframe it like this: when you learn lisp, you realize, code is just data. Bitcoin had some people conclude, code could also be money. Then the ethereum fans have another epiphany: money can be computation etc and so on w the others.

I think it’s less so fidelity to being the optimal remedy for the present’s ailments, and more being wedded to the inpouring of dedication of a few talented coders being caught up in a style of financialized mass sociotechnological engagement that was not really possible to witness until fairly recently w the modern internet

I like this framing. I think there's a rebellious undertone to some of the aforementioned "worshippers" -- and at least as many are definitely there for the money-pump effect.

The double spend problem. That enabled decentralised trust and interchange of value. You could tank the value of bitcoin or ethereum by imposing tough regulations to it but it will still be around regardless of what you do as long as we're here. The implications for what that means for banks and governments of today is huge.

In the meantime though what people actually use it for today: - To get richer because the price is going up - To get richer because it's an unregulated market so you can be a market maker today or dive into all the other trading variants programable money enables that don't have any counter-part in traditional finance. - To get richer starting a small project with no experience and getting overfunded. - To transact because you're part of the 1.7 billion unbanked - To keep your wealth because you're part of the masses that don't agree with your governments restrictions on your money (china comes to mind but you could expand it to westerners too that don't agree) - (less than 5% probably?) build stuff, experiment, learn, try to come up with the financial system of tomorrow.

Mid 2000s, I was interested in using rolling hash logging for tamper evident audit logs. For use cases in healthcare (medical records) and election integrity (did someone change the tally).

One logical extension (expansion of scope) would be sharing these audit logs, mostly intra-organizations. aka blockchains.

Once potential extension is to do accounting and finance on top of blockchains, potentially supplanting IRL trust relations with digital trust. Meaning doing biz with people you don't know. Voila! Cryptocurrency!

IMHO, the central conceit (deceit) of cryptocurrency is that it's a decentralized system that replaces IRL trust relations. That'd be really cool if true. But it's not.

And I'm not sure any wholly digital (financial) system can ever be decentralized, trustful, or both. Theoretically or practically.

>"I realized that technology should be in service of something, not just a thing to exist in and of itself."

While for me technology is just a tool to help me make what I want I do realize one can just practice / enjoy it as an art form. Nothing is wrong with it.

In service of art is still a legitimate and important use case! Not sure that's what crypto is for though.

Payments may very well be held back by regulation. But because crypto currencies are essentially permissionless protocols, they can kind of just…ignore all of that, which makes them useful but also of dubious legality. And it definitely results in adverse selection because then of course people who want to avoid the regular banking/payment system will use the next best thing available.

Still, it’s utility, even if it’s grey market (of course it can be used for black market stuff, but it’s a protocol agnostic of that). For me I have purchased legal stuff with crypto that regular payment processors had essentially banned, so crypto was actually a better option than alternatives like e-check.

Yeah. Let's ban the internet because of kiddie porn and hackers and drug dealers on the dark net. /s

Clearly HTTP is the problem here. Nobody would be committing crimes if they were limited to mail.

I suppose the classic answer to the problem it solves is the Byzantine general's problem, or in other words the combination of incentives and rules to allow records to be made on a distributed system that isn't actively managed by anyone.

But what problem does that solve?

Debts and units of account are arguably a foundational part of civilization. In David Graeber's 'Debt the first 5000 years' he argues that debit and credit appeared before money and barter. Regardless of which came first writing seems to have emerged out of a need to keep a ledger - so and so owes 5 loaves of bread and is owed 2 clay pots.[1]

The downside to such a system is that it either requires a central authority to manage the contracts, and have some sort of stick it can hit you with, or it can physically be changed. With a clay tablet contract for example I could destroy the tablet, or it could be held by the third Mesopotamian government and enforced by them to throw me in debtors prison or something if I refused to pay. This necessitates a central authority with something like "legitimate state monopoly over the means of violence" in a best case scenario to keep bad actors from violating their agreements. In a less than best case scenario, such a monopoly allows for exploitation of it's power.

A decentralized ledger allows for agreements to be made without the risk of the agreement being broken by the other person or the central authority. Precious metals fulfilled the same role previously, as an ounce of silver is an ounce of silver, regardless of what may happen in the future.

Frankly I have no idea if anything will come of it in favor of existing systems. Perhaps on the whole the existing system is more effect. But personally it's pretty exciting from a historical/economic perspective.

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39870485

At this point I kinda feel it’s a pointless to try to explain anyone on the values of crypto-currencies (and Bitcoin in particular).

In many online discussions I’ve brought up the values that I see in Bitcoin and then the discussion partner says most of these values are (in their view) not valid.

So I guess people have just dramatically different views on the values of cryptocurrencies that cannot be reconciled.

In the end it doesn’t really matter. I keep investing in Bitcoin and other people don’t. Live and let live. I don’t really see a need to try to convince other people to buy cryptos.

I think it facilitates the construction of non-hierarchical organizations where the participants don't have to know each other. In other words, it seems feasible to build companies that have low politics, low backstabbing and minimal profit siphoning.

Of course, it will probably take some sophisticated code and some time.

> What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

I'll bite.

Currently, digital goods are relatively useless, which disincentivizes their creation and usage. NFTs change this, by making digital goods far more useful, which will encourage the creation of innovative digital goods we've never seen before, and add useful new functionality to apps/websites/games.

What's a digital good? It's basically any data stored in a database: tweets, forum posts, upvotes, badges, items in video games, etc. These goods aren't very useful for numerous reasons. For example, they're typically leased rather than owned. If Twitter were to close its doors tomorrow, you would quickly find out that "your" tweets are really their tweets, and they can delete them from their database if they want to. Also, digital goods aren't portable. There's no real way for you to take your HN points with you to another website. Instead, that website would have to ping HN's API (if it even has one) with your credentials to ask how many points you have.

Imagine if the real world worked this way. If you went to buy alcohol from a restaurant or a store, you wouldn't actually own a driver's license that you could carry around with you. Instead, each establishment you patronize would have to call up the DMV and ask them to check their database to see if they have your license on file and if you're above the legal age to drink. This would obviously be a shitty way for goods to behave. But that's how they work online.

By making use of the blockchain, NFTs are a decentralized way to track ownership of digital goods. In essence, your crypto wallet(s) can serve as a "digital backpack" for you to store digital goods (NFTs) that you've acquired from apps, games, websites, or other people. That means real ownership -- none of your goods disappear just because the entity that gave them to you disappeared, nor can anyone tell you what you can and can't do with your goods. It also means portability. Today when you show up to a new app/website, they have no idea who you are. In the future, you'll show up with your digital backpacks in tow, and you can reveal their contents to the service you're using, and they can see what you have and react accordingly. That's what portability means, and it's obviously quite useful.

For example:

- Let's say Reddit granted you an NFT badge for being a moderator. When you sign up for Hacker News, you could share your digital backpack, and HN could look inside and see the moderator badge NFT you got from Reddit, and decide you're worth trusting more than the average Joe. Maybe HN would give you downvote privileges without making you earn the points first? Who knows. But one could imagine lots of trust-based use cases like this. What if colleges gave students NFT-representations of their degrees?

- I believe Lyft employees get $400 in free rides every month. Imagine if that was handled via an NFT: new employees get an NFT, and Lyft gives anyone who owns that NFT the free rides. Most would just keep it. But some employees might choose to sell, trade, or give it away. After all, it's their NFT that they own, not just some row in Lyft's database. You could apply this to other perks and awards as well. Suddenly, perks are granular and portable.

- What if games give you NFT representations of the items you earn? Then other games can see that you earned those items, and if their developers choose to, they can represent the items in their games, too. Perhaps if I get an NFT showing that I'm a grandmaster in StarCraft 2, some other game can skip me ahead in the ladder so I don't have to grind my way up. Or if I earn a magical sword in World of WarCraft, another game might give me their version of that sword just because they know I'll think it's cool.

- Every time I sign up for a new social network, forum, or dating site, I have to reenter my biographical information from scratch. This is tedious. What if I could just write down my bio and keep it in one of my backpacks as an NFT? Now every time I sign up for a website, I can show them my backpack, and they can autofill my bio.

- etc. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, it's difficult to imagine what types of digital goods will be created 5 or 10 years from now, just like nobody imagined Airbnb or Uber back in 1993 when the web was new.

What this essentially does is transform the internet into a metaverse. Instead of a bunch of silo'd apps that store all their data in silo'd databases, we as individuals own and control our own data, that we take with us from place to place. Instead of apps having to make NxM API calls to interact, there's one global API (the blockchain) that every app can write to and read from. Suddenly, everything on the internet is interoperable.

> What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer.

This doesn't matter that much. Is HTML the best technology imaginable to build web apps front ends? Certainly not. But it's the one that won, so that's what we have.

Similarly, blockchains are winning handily. For various reasons, they're gaining mass adoption. It's quite likely that the internet of the future will be built on top of blockchains. In fact it's already happening.

I appreciate your comment. It's one of the better pro-NFT comments I've read. That said, I don't think your examples stand up to scrutiny.

- NFTs between communities. Your second example illustrates why this is a bad idea. Is the new user that trusted reddit moderator or are they are a spammer, disinfo troll, or bad actor who just bought the NFT off of a trusted reddit mod? And how trusted is the general class of reddit mods anyway? Some of them are probably trustworthy, others are probably less trustworthy by dint of the subreddits they moderate. Still others could just create subreddits to moderate them to get the token to troll your forum.

In your example you'd need to hope that reddit subclasses all of their NFTs in a way that fits your use case and then you'd have to have special cases for all the subclasses. Okay, you moderated a 1k+ sub community that wasn't on the restricted list for more than a year...

It's also possible to do this now and I don't see this kind of thing except in rare circumstances. For example, when you are registering with our forum, if you wanted to claim special privileges, we could give you a GUID and ask you to message us with that GUID in the next 5 minutes on platform X. Then, we use the Platform X API to confirm you have exactly the attributes we want and confer those privileges on you. Nobody is really doing this now (to my knowledge) so it makes me question how useful this would be in our glorious NFT future.

- Lyft NFTs for benefits. Here similar objections apply. It's possible to make such perks transferable without a blockchain. That seems like a pretty simple feature to implement. Presumably, Lyft does not do this because first, they expect less than one hundred percent utilization of the benefit so it won't cost them quite as much as 400 X number of employees, but more importantly because they want their employees to use their service. The NFT would work against them because it would encourage employees to sell the perk which Lyft doesn't want them to do.

If you think about the problem of abuse, e.g. a Lyft driver buys the free rides NFT and does 400 dollars worth of rides with himself every month to get driver bonuses and extra cash, then Lyft would probably want to be able to disable those NFTs to stop people using the program when Lyft would prefer they not. And Lyft would have this capability! You notice that NFT X is being used in an abusive pattern, so you add X to a blocklist and now the app doesn't respect its free rides anymore. Uh oh, it looks like we had the appearance of decentralization, but actually full control over the valuable part of this rested in Lyft's hands the whole time. How is this ultimately any different from Lyft implementing the feature themselves - which they don't seem to want to do?

- Items that transfer between games. Again, this is possible now and doesn't happen. In order for your NFT sword to come from game1 and get imported to game2 we need g1 to mint NFTs. In modern day g1 could just expose an API that would let us query game object ownership and we could accomplish the same thing.

Maybe NFTs make this a bit easier or standardize it, but the fact that this is possible now and doesn't happen makes me think it's unlikely to happen in the NFT future either. My guess is that it's not worth the headache to add cross-game balance issues and the hard part of adding more content is not checking ownership but creating the assets and determining how that content should behave in your game.

Furthermore, what if g1 gets hacked or someone duplicates items or g1 becomes pay to play and users buy the powerful sword in a way that upsets g2 players? Either g2 accepts the damage to their game and continues to respect the NFTs, or g2 just makes an update and stops respecting the problematic NFTs. In this case, same as with the Lyft example, we see that things aren't really decentralized, it's the g2 servers deciding the reality of game2. Just, for a while they decided to respect the output of g1 servers.

- etc. I agree that it's impossible to know what these things will be used for in the future. To me it doesn't seem like they add any new capability and are basically just used as a Ponzi Scheme.

I think the biggest potential use for NFTs would be the transfer of games/movies/books between services and users, e.g. buy a movie on Amazon Prime and than watch it inside Netflix or sell your used digital movies to somebody else.

The reason I could see this working is because being allowed to sell your used goods, even digital ones, is already the law in many countries. But so far it has just been utterly impractical. NFTs provide the framework in which this could work. It would also be a good way to break up monopolies, as it would make switching between services much easier and companies would have to compete on the actual services they offer, instead of just relying on the lock-in to keep the competition away.

Now getting companies to join in on NFT-based license management ain't going to be easy. But due to there already being laws that regulate the sale of used copies, there might be a way to force them to.

Epic Games is currently having a lot of lawsuits around App stores and is talking about having an universal app store that works across different platforms. Maybe something will grow out of that.

What does an NFT add over a PKI signature? The rights holders aren’t going to allow their materials to be published without restriction and they’re not going to accept claims from anyone they don’t trust, not to mention many people won’t want their media purchase history being published.

A useful example of what this would likely look like is Movies Anywhere. That was created by the big studios to limit the tech companies’ control, and it limits transfers to the stores they trust.

I think a key question for NFT licensing would be how it would get the power to force something different, especially when that costs more.

NFT behave like physical goods, they can't be duplicated, but they can be transferred. A plain PKI signature does not and if you surround it by additional bookkeeping that you can, you are just reinventing your own NFT.

Furthermore you have to consider the long game here, what happens if the company you bought the good from goes under? Stops running the service, etc.? With NFTs that is in theory a complete non-issue, you can just go to your next library, show them your NFT and they give you a copy of the movie. NFTs basically allow you to ignore copyright, as the NFT proves that no "copy" in the traditional sense took place, as you already owned the content. So you no longer are required to get your movie from the rights holder, you can get it from anybody that has a copy. If you own the NFT you are allowed to get a copy of the movie. And the NFT can be found on a used market if the company no longer sells it themselves.

As for companies not joining in, that's not for them to decide. You are already allowed by law to sell your goods. That's existing law. It's just difficult to enforce when there is no system in place that allows selling used digital good. NFTs could provide the foundation for such a system.

> NFTs basically allow you to ignore copyright, as the NFT proves that no "copy" in the traditional sense took place, as you already owned the content. So you no longer are required to get your movie from the rights holder, you can get it from anybody that has a copy.

I think this is the core misunderstanding which makes NFTs appear useful. NFTs in fact do not allow you to ignore copyright and NFTs do not show ownership unless there's a separate contract conveying legal rights to the current NFT holder. That's why the entire scenario outlined doesn't work: if Amazon goes out of business, I can show Apple my receipts (PKI signed or not) but whether Apple will grant me the ability to get a copy comes down to the legal terms under which I licensed a copy from Amazon and what Apple has negotiated with the actual owner.

If those parties want to allow me to do this — as, for example, they did with Movies Anywhere — they don't need a blockchain because the key legal requirement is Amazon originally saying they sold me a license.

If the owner doesn't want to add a transfer clause which wasn't already there, or allows Apple to charge me a transfer fee, an NFT again does nothing to change the situation because legally I do not have any right to the content: what I bought was permission to use Amazon's service to display it.

There's absolutely no reason to have NFTs involved there, or even for there to be a "there". You're accepting a false premise of artificial scarcity that is being pushed by dinosaurs. Humankind needs to just accept that information costs nothing to copy now.

Copyright isn't going away anyway soon and with the way things are going, we are going towards a future where Disney basically owns everything. I don't find that very desirable.

NFTs provide a way out of this, as the rights holder is no longer the one who completely controls the content. Once they sold a copy, it can circulate in the used market, completely outside their control. This also makes it much easier for new players to enter the market, as they do not need to Disney's permission to resell used copies.

But Disney is just going to tell Netflix they can't do that, and then lobby for laws to enforce that. Then NFTs will be as useless as they are now.

The only real option is to stridently reject the false premise of "copyright". Otherwise, you're playing a sucker's game where the mouse always wins.

Thanks, and I appreciate your thoughtful response!

- With the Reddit example, you're pointing out how NFTs and digital property shines in comparison to physical property. Specifically, you can trace the history of any NFT or token on the blockchain. HN could choose to only trust NFT holders who are one hop away from the origin, i.e. NFTs that were directly granted by Reddit. HN would thus be ignoring any moderator NFT that's been transferred or sold.

As for whether or not Reddit mods are trustworthy, that's a moot point, as it's just a contrived example. There are infinite possibilities, and it's doubtful that I'm going to think of a the best use cases, just as it was doubtful that an internet pundit in 1993 was going to think up the best websites. But a better example might be, let's say FAANG companies grant NFTs to senior engineers. Perhaps StackOverflow might want to show that status as a badge next to user accounts.

Yes, it's possible to do this now, but there is little incentive to, because these digital goods suck for the most part. Because digital goods aren't portable, they require the development of N × M propriety API calls for anyone apps or services to use them. Or in your case, HN mods would have to create a Reddit account and monitor it for messages. Total pain in the ass. We do see APIs used often regardless, despite the pain. It's hard not to imagine that use cases and creativity increase as a result of the tech getting easier.

- If Lyft wanted to allow employees to trade or sell perks, they'd have to create a marketplace for this, build features to support all of it, all for users to register accounts, etc. It'd be a lot of work. And it likely wouldn't do well, because it'd be a small silo'd market. So it's not worth the effort.

If Lyft instead distributed perks as NFTs, that's it. That's all they'd have to do. The blockchain would take care of the rest, as NFTs are automatically portable and sellable and tradable to anyone on the internet, without Lyft needing to lift a finger build some proprietary market connected to its databases.

Just because Lyft retains control of who does and doesn't get the perk doesn't affect much re:decentralization. The point of decentralization is to allow us to own our digital property that we control rather than that companies control, not to force companies and apps to lose all power in every other respect. Lyft can't delete your NFT or stop you from selling/trading it, and that's it. That's the goal. The rest is fine. It's the same in the real world: if I buy a ticket to a sporting event, it doesn't mean the stadium can't deny me entry or throw me out if I get drunk.

- Yes, games don't tend to share digital goods today, for the same reason websites don't: There's little consumer demand, because digital goods aren't useful, because they require N × M API requests to achieve portability + because there's no true consumer ownership.

And again, it doesn't matter if g1 or g2 want to make their own rules and changes. That's perfectly fine, and doesn't make digital property useless. It happens with real-world property, too. I had a Google Glass early on, and at first everyone loved it, but after a few weeks bars and restaurants banned me from coming in with them on. No big deal.

What you're pointing out are indeed problems, but they aren't problems that are going to stop proliferation and adoption of this new technology. It's similar to when the web was new, and pundits criticized it for being a hodgepodge of mediocre information that was difficult to sort through. Okay sure, that was true and it was a problem. But it didn't stop the web from spreading. It just resulted in the birth of Google, a $2T company that solve this problem. And social networks, which let you sort information by the people who you know/follow based on your personal connections or their popularity.

- You could argue that the most popular current use case (speculating on art and collectibles) are a Ponzi scheme I suppose. But the other use cases I proposed seem quite useful despite the minor problems pointed out, and it's hard not to imagine there will be many creative use cases in the future. Again, who could've predicted Airbnb or Uber or TikTok in 1995?

I think these use-cases are a pipe dream. Platforms tend to build walled gardens instead of opening up. There is no reason to believe that NFTs will solve what could be solved by open data protocols long ago. A platform will only implement features if they are profitable. That is why CSGO lootboxes work as a closed system. If CSGO lootbox was an nft and it was recognized by let's say Overwatch game that would mean a some sort of business partnership between two games would have to be established. There is no other reason why Overwatch would implement and maintain features that would promote competitor games. RSS was also a nice idea, but it was not well aligned with individual private company interests and that is why it failed to be globally adopted.

When it comes to innovation, it's a mistake to assume big incumbents must lead the way. It's called disruptive innovation for a reason -- because incumbents who refuse to change often get disrupted. We've seen this time and time again.

That doesn't mean incumbents are powerless. They can resist top-down changes. But they often have trouble resisting technological innovation that spreads bottom-up.

The blockchain is a decentralized protocol that's spreading from the bottom up due to popularity with consumers, similar to the web. Did newspaper companies want to be on the web in the 1990s and early 2000s? No. But they were forced to by new web-based competitors that readers found more convenient. The same pathway is quite possible here. There are already lots of games and apps being funded that support NFTs. Assuming they're any good and consumers like them, what are incumbents to do? Continue making inferior products? They won't win like that in the long run.

And FWIW, Meta already announced it'll be supporting NFTs, and Jack Dorsey from Twitter has been musing about doing the same.

> There is no reason to believe that NFTs will solve what could be solved by open data protocols long ago.

HN has a history of prioritizing technological specifications over real-world adoption and human psychology. The fact of the matter is that NFTs and the blockchain are seeing adoption, whereas the other protocols you're alluding to are not.

I'm not an expert on the technology, but I've seen this same argument from friends of mine who are into a blockchain they claim will allow people to carry their Universities degrees / Academic qualifications with them. Similar to your "wallet" idea I guess.

So, by dint of being tokens, accreditation, land deeds, car papers, game items etc etc etc must all be able to be transferred right? Which means they can also be stolen or attributed to the wrong people right? So, if you get hacked and your car registration token gets stolen, or if someone steals your degree and starts walking around pretending to be a doctor using your token, what do you do? In fact, what happens if the University accidentally gives your degree to someone with the same surname as you, and you get a Diploma in Basket Weaving instead of your medical degree and they refuse to give it back? Because these things will happen endlessly.

Well, as always, you'll go to the DMV or the cops or the Uni and they'll.....what exactly? The answer, necessarily, will be to check their master records to see who should have what, and then change it. Which totally obliviates the purpose of the decentralised blockchain.

You can see this in action with that dope who had his cartoon ape NFT stolen. What did he do? Immediately appealed to the closest thing to a centralised authority there is, Twitter and the ape community, and begged them not to buy "his" NFTs. Then contacted the exchanges and begged them not to sell. Then contacted the cops. Then, in a move with a jaw-dropping lack of self awareness said it "didn't matter" that the NFT had been stolen, because he "still owned those apes". So in the space of about ten minutes, he firebombed every core tenet of NFTs, and that was over a cartoon ape in the first moments of NFTs even being a "thing".

What's your solution for the guy who gets his house token stolen?

The solution? ... crickets ... :-)

I think a house token is an interesting idea, once you accept the inevitability of having to interface with the real world.

If you had one and it got stolen, you'd file a court case with your state or local authority. They would then add a record saying that the ownership is disputed. If you won the case, they'd add a new record saying that the house still belongs to you. It turns it from "I'm screwed" to "Ugh, a legal hassle", the exact same as if your paper deed got stolen.

You'll probably say "but why bother then?" The main reason is standardization. I have no idea how to check housing records for other states, let alone other countries. Some shitty broken website created by a lowest bidder contractor? Request a copy by mail that probably costs money because someone has to physically print out a copy themselves? Instead, everybody everywhere can use the same software stack instead of reinventing the wheel N times. Checking the current state of things becomes trivial.

It's also trivial to do private house sales then. One transaction signed by both parties, and you're done.

That's not a solution. Most places have computerised land records, and maybe they aren't so great, but that is an argument for a new modern database, not a worse one (blockchain).

I don't fully understand your logic. Are you saying that theft will prevent the adoption of this technology?

People get shit stolen in the real world, and in the current implementation of the internet all the time. What happens when your Google account gets fished and someone steals tens of millions of dollars from your company? Do we shut down the internet and call it a day? No, not really. It has no effect on adoption.

The fact is that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. So it goes with all new technologies, and so it always has. Have we ever simply said, "Welp, there are costs to go along with the benefits of this new tech. Let's just give up here!" Not to my recollection. We simply make the ships more crash-resistant.

The problems with new tech are almost always obvious early on, but the solutions require creativity and frequently result in hugely successful businesses.

Consider early criticisms[0] of the internet from 1995:

> "Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen." True enough. There's a cacophony. So what? The internet survives. Algorithms rank posts and tweets and surface the best insights.

> "How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach." True enough. So what? We got Kindles, and smart phones, and higher-res screens, and people bring laptops to cafes instead of beaches.

> "…the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them…" True enough. So what? A few years later this problem was largely solved by Google, which is now worth a trillion dollars.

> "…who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?"* Hundreds of millions of people are addicted to porn. Not saying it's a great result, but the fact remains that problems don't stop adoption.

And do you remember how much credit card fraud there was in 90s e-commerce, when security was trash and almost nobody was used to regularly checking their digital bank statements, so it would take weeks or months for people to even notice? Hell, there's still a lot of fraud today. E-commerce still reigns supreme.

Sure, people will get their NFT good stolen. It will happen frequently. It already has happened many times. This will not hurt NFT adoption. It will simply spur innovation in security and defense, which it already has if you actually look into early solutions (e.g. custodians, insurance).

At best, you're simply pointing out problems that people will innovate to solve.

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

This is really dumb sorry. Just one great big "waddabout" going on and on about problems OTHER tech has, and not addressing my question at all. I'll ask again.

The University sends your medical degree to someone with the same surname as you by mistake and you get their basket weaving degree. They refuse to return it.

What do you do? You go to the university, and they check their CENTRALISED MASTER RECORD, notice the mistake, and fix it.

So. #1: Why do you need blockchain at all? #2: How can you have your blockchain system WITHOUT also having a centralised database somewhere?

The answer, as always with blockchain, is "So I can sell you a token." Always.

In your example, who cares if the university has a centralized master record of the degrees they choose to recognize? If they choose to tell everyone on earth that the degree they gave me was baloney or false or was revoked, that's their prerogative. If they choose to record coin NFTs and the blockchain aren't meant to prevent that.

What NFTs guarantee is that the degree the school gave me is still mine. Without NFTs, they could not only revoke my degree, but also delete it from their database and leave me with no proof I graduated from there whatsoever, since I never really owned the degree as property. But with NFTs, no matter what they change or delete in their centralized database, my degree still exists as my property in my decentralized NFT wallet, and the school can't delete or take that back. Which is how property should work! In the real world, if my alma mater were to revoke my degree, they'd update their databases, but they wouldn't also come to my house, find my paper degree, and rip it up.

Now this is obviously a contrived example, because the entire point of a degree is to say, "Look! <AuthorityX> thinks highly of me!" So of course if the authority changes their mind about that, then your degree is worthless whether you still own it or not.

In a less contrived example, there might be property you own that's valuable regardless of the original owner's opinion of you or any records they keep in their database. For example, if you get a magical sword in World of WarCraft in NFT form, you now own that, and you can use it in other games that choose to recognize and represent that NFT. Even if you get in a fight with Blizzard's CEO, and he orders his minions to delete your account from their servers, you'll still have the NFT, and other games will still respect it.

Whereas in a world without NFTs, the only way for other games to even know you had the sword would be to query Blizzard's servers, so you would be fucked in this scenario, because Blizzard would delete all records, because they owned the records, not you.

That's your example? A sword in a video game? Honestly though, I guess it makes sense, because NFTs are arse for anything that has actual real life meaning. Even you, yourself, realised that halfway through your post. Yeah, no shit your degree is worthless if the university says it's worthless.

So, on to video games. You think it would work that way huh? Your sword would still be worth something if Blizzard revoked it because you "own" it? You are making the mistake of thinking that whatever game you want to use the sword in wouldn't check with Blizzard to find out if you are a douchebag who has been banned or not, before they allowed you to use the sword for something in their game. They'd check, see that Blizzard has no record of it on their database, then decide that you'd either been banned or had stolen it, then block you.

Btw: Even this won't happen. Read what an actual game developer says about it. https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-o...

1. The NFT degree actually could still be useful for proving that you were accepted to the college and that you graduated. Not every entity cares if the college subsequently revoked your degree, and not every entity will check.

2. Other "real world" use cases abound, especially with intangibles. Degrees, certifications, licenses, tickets, contracts and invoices, perks, discounts, coupons, identifications, you name it. And these are just physical goods becoming NFTs, to say nothing of digital goods. Turning any good into an NFT adds it to a blockchain, which (a) enables ownership, (b) makes it part of a publicly accessible API that unlocks infinite creativity, (c) plugs it into a booming and a liquid market where owners can buy, sell, and trade their goods, and (d) guarantees its existence and accessibility for the long term.

3. I completely disagree with you that most games would check to see if Blizzard has marked you as a douchebag. Why would GameX care if a player broke some arbitrary rule that Blizzard has? They wouldn't.

4. The person who wrote that post barely even understands what an NFT is, and gets a whole bunch wrong. For example, they write that the concept of ownership of NFTs is "unenforceable," as if the blockchain needs some sort of enforcement. I'm not sure you want to get your predictions from somebody who doesn't understand the technology. There are plenty of smarter game developers working on NFT companies and writing much more intelligent posts.

1: It doesn't prove it. The only thing it proves is that you have the NFT. The only way to prove you have the degree is to contact the central authority, thereby invalidating the need for the blockchain entirely.

2: All your examples can be done easily without blockchain. Perks, discounts, coupons, tickets etc. We already do all of this just fine.

3: "They wouldn't". Lol. Why not? It takes them zero effort, it would be an automated system, and guess what, it totally destroys your whole assertation. Doesn't it? GameX would check with Blizzard for reason that Blizzard would also check with GameX.

4: Ownership with NFTs is entirely unenforceable. Contrary to your point, you are the one who actually doesn't understand NFTs, nor the real world it seems. You seem to want to turn everything into a bearer bond, when in fact nothing in real life will ever work that way.

ID's? Ok, you have some ID token that "proves" you are 21. Does that mean you are 21? No, the only thing it proves is that you have the token. In any consequential case, the entity wanting to verify your age would have to check back with a central authority to determine if it's valid or not, thereby invalidating the need for the blockchain.

Tickets? You somehow think any ticketing agency on earth will hard over all control to what happens to the tickets they have sold?

Coupons? You've seen all the legalese and prohibitions written on coupons I take it. There are more rules about what you can and can't do with a 10% Off Pizza Hut token than many contracts. Yet you think they'll start putting them on the blockchain?

You live in fantasy-land mate. No game company is going to devote a whole bunch of effort and programming time into allowing someone with assets from a competitor to use them in their game.

1. You misunderstand how NFTs work. They are proof, because anything on the blockchain can be easily traced back to the original distributor, which in this case would be the university. Thats why it's called a blockCHAIN -- you can easily follow the chain of blocks. What do you think the school is going to do if you contact them? Check their database. The blockchain is no different. It's a public database, which obviates the need to call the school to ask them to check their non-public database.

2. None of these things have digital ownership enabled, none are part of a global publicly accessible API that others can connect to, none are part of a market where they can be bought/sold/traded. So all would be better with NFTs.

3. You haven't given a single reason why GameX would care to ban PlayerA just because Blizzard banned them. We see the opposite online all the time: people getting kicked off of one social network while be allowed to operate on others.

4. All of your examples here once again misunderstand how NFTs and the blockchain work, just like with #1 above. With IDs, the central authority that granted you the "21 years old" NFT would be listed as its origin on the blockchain, which obviates the need to check with them.

Anyway, at this point discussion is futile. You don't understand the technical details of how the blockchain works, and the rest of your points are just negative predictions of the future in the vein of, "This is how things work today, therefore this is how things must always work." It's very similar to people in the 90s claiming that no serious company would ever put anything on the internet.

Come back to these comments in a year or two.

Not sure why your comment reply to mine got flagged, but I can't respond to it, so will respond here.

1. You can get around this trivially, by simply either (1) looking at transactions originating from the node that distributes degrees, or (2) looking at the degree directly from a person's wallet. You don't need to use the blockchain for searching. It's not going to replace databases. You can have databases, too. But an NFT degree originating from a school's degree-distributing node is just as good as proof and doesn't require some additional step of contacting the school to find out if it's legit.

2. You've still said zero about the utility of a market where these things can be bought/sold/traded, or the API being publicly accessible, etc.

3. No company was putting their assets on the internet before the adoption of the web started compelling them to.

4. See #3. I'm trying to see your point here, but so far it amounts to, "People are doing X today, so they will always do X," which ignores the fact that technology takes a while to adopt. NFTs are new, and their utility is based on network effects, which means they'll become more useful with more adoption. Of course Apple isn't jumping in to use them right now. That says nothing about the future. That'd be like going back to 2011 and saying, "Nobody is using Zoom yet when they could be." Okay sure, but what does that say about the future? Little to nothing.

Again, of course it's possible that this won't catch on. Likely even. But the reasons you're listing don't seem like deterrents.

No, you are correct. You could do it the way you claim. Build in workarounds, try and get everyone to use less efficient tech, try and fix problems of errors and fraud, but I don't think it ever will happen. It's not going to replace a database? So why do we need it?

Centralized control will always be faster and more efficient and less fragile. Errors can be fixed, fraud can be blocked. Fans of blockchain would be a lot less certain that the tech had value if they were unable to shill a token.

Why isn't Apple jumping in to use them? They could set up their own blockchain right? Well, because the central issuing authority doesn't want to lose control of them. Why aren't ticket resales on the blockchain? Because the central issuing authority doesn't want to lose control of them. And that's what you will run into, every time.

All the things you claim that will be able to be done with the blockchain can already be done. So yeah, I guess we'll wait and see.

> In essence, your crypto wallet(s) can serve as a "digital backpack" for you to store digital goods (NFTs) that you've acquired from apps, games, websites, or other people.

I got vaccinated this summer, there is this virus going around, maybe you heard.

The vaccinator gave me a signed digital token (a QR code) which I can carry around (in paper form or digital) to prove that I am vaccinated. No blockchains involved. Why do you use cases need a blockchain at all?

Afair one lunatic bidder for building that signing thing talked about involving 5 (five) blockchains for that thing. Everybody laughed at them.

Riffing with some Web 2.0 perspective on your use cases:

> Let's say Reddit granted you an NFT badge for being a moderator. When you sign up for Hacker News, you could share your digital backpack, and HN could look inside …

Or, you could give HN your reddit username and HN could query the Reddit API if you’re a moderator and by doing the API requests could find out if that privilege is still current and if those subreddit’s stats match HNs criteria for “trust”. Time and trust seem rather relevant to me. Would you want reddit “moderators” like u/violentacrez in perpetuity have privileges on HN and other forums?

> Every time I sign up for a new social network, forum, or dating site, I have to reenter my biographical information from scratch.

You could be identified by the URL of your home page and the new service simply could fetch machine readable information from there. The Indie Web over two decades did multiple stuff in that regard, from OpenID, over OAuth to rel=me and web-sign-in:

https://indieweb.org/rel-me

In a way individual homepages/profiles and a standardised API solve the N×M problem of APIs and could solve as a digital strongbox for your use cases of common information and other acquired signed trinkets. I don’t really see the need for a distributed ledger which needs computing power just to keep running. In your answer you concentrate on access to tokens but IMHO didn’t really answer the blockchain part.

> Why do you use cases need a blockchain at all?

Your example is one of a physical good. Of course you don't need an NFT to display a card physically. But what if you want to display it digitally? Your best option at this case is to take a photo, upload it to the web, then the consuming websites can hire people to scrutinize a bunch of grainy vaccination card photos from their users. Meh.

On the blockchain, you'd have an NFT representation of your card, and its origin (i.e. which authority gave it to you) could be easily programmatically tracked.

Obviously, vaccination cards aren't the best example, because COVID-19 is a real-world virus, not a computer virus, so it's doubtful that digital applications will care much about your vaccination card. But you get the idea, hopefully.

> Or, you could give HN your reddit username and HN could query the Reddit API if you’re a moderator…

This is the N × M problem.

> …and by doing the API requests could find out if that privilege is still current and if those subreddit’s stats match HNs criteria for “trust”. Time and trust seem rather relevant to me. Would you want reddit “moderators” like u/violentacrez in perpetuity have privileges on HN and other forums?

We solve this in the real world by putting expiration dates on licenses and badges. Is that perfect? No. But the benefit of portable certifications dwarfs the costs of the occasional expired or revoked cert.

In addition, NFTs are just code. You could easily include a URL with each NFT, which would point to some endpoint that responds with "revoked" or "expired" or "active". Best of both worlds.

> In a way individual homepages/profiles and a standardised API solve the N×M problem of APIs and could solve as a digital strongbox for your use cases of common information and other acquired signed trinkets.

Sure, that could work. But that standardized API does not exist, or if it does, it's clearly not being adopted, so it's a moot point. Where is the Indie Web in terms of adoption?

IMO HNers often focus too much on the merits of a particular technology, and not enough on the adoption. Often it's the case that worse technologies win, because they enjoy network effects that allow them to grow quickly and then maintain their lead. Again, look at HTML, CSS, and JavaScript -- hardly the best tools to build the web on, but that's what we've got, regardless of the fact that other tools "could" solve the problem better.

You're also neglecting the fact that blockchains are decentralized, but the web is not. The web is based on renting. Renting hosting from some other company, renting space in some company's database, etc. It's fine for today of course, we all do this and it works well.

But the blockchain and NFTs are about improving digital property, and one major improvement is moving from rental to ownership, as I pointed out in my original comment. No company can delete your "backpack" of NFTs, or shut you down because you're a sex worker and they think that's immoral, or tell you who you can and can't sell your items to. Sure, the authorities can try to track you down and punish you after the fact, but that's how things work in the real world, and getting the digital world to that point is the goal here.

For various reasons, this is catching on with NFTs in a big way that it didn't and won't with the Indie Web and other efforts. Adoption matters.

> Your example is one of a physical good. Of course you don't need an NFT to display a card physically. But what if you want to display it digitally?

It's a QR code, it's already digital

QR codes aren't digital, they're physical. The purpose of a QR code is for physical entities (scanners, cell phone cameras) to be able to read digital information. Compare to an NFT, whose purpose is for digital entities (apps/websites/games) to read digital information.

The goal here is to make your online data portable, so you can take it with you as if you're wearing a backpack. What that looks like in practice is, when you show up to an app/website/game, to tell them the address of your backpack + proof you own it. A QR code could not accomplish this.

How's that any different? I can print out a QR code with the NFT info as well and make it "physical". The vaccination certificate is a digital code along with your details to "proof that you own it". The DB is even distributed among EU member states so the code points to the "backpack" (database) of the state where you got your shot

https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-re...

I guess I don't understand your point. Are you trying to say that QR codes are a replacement for NFTs? Because I can list dozens of things that NFTs can do that QR either can't do, or would be much clunkier to do.

You said this:

"Your example is one of a physical good. Of course you don't need an NFT to display a card physically. But what if you want to display it digitally? Your best option at this case is to take a photo, upload it to the web, then the consuming websites can hire people to scrutinize a bunch of grainy vaccination card photos from their users. Meh.

On the blockchain, you'd have an NFT representation of your card, and its origin (i.e. which authority gave it to you) could be easily programmatically tracked."

I'm saying we already have all of that and more without having to complicate it with an NFT that doesn't add anything.

The QR code does not get you everything an NFT gets you and more. It gets you significantly less.

NFTs are stored on blockchains, which are distributed databases, which anyone can read from. Those serve as public APIs, basically. That means anyone can incorporate NFTs into their apps in whatever creative and innovative ways they want to. And since these blockchains are digital, NFTs can easily be accessed, browsed, filtered, and searched. Again, not so with QR codes.

For example, let's say there's a sporting event and the league grants complementary NFTs to fans who buy a ticket. And let's say this particular event goes down in history as being a legendary game. Everyone will now have blockchain-based proof that they were a ticket holder, in NFT form. In fact, anybody can look and see who all the ticket holders were and take action based on that. For example, the league could throw a celebratory 10th anniversary party only original ticket holders are able to attend, or send a memento to everyone who attended, or those tickets could become collectors' items that holders display or sell.

This isn't going to happen with real-world tickets or QR codes, unless every organization that issues them feels like building their own database of people it distributes QR codes to, and making it a publicly-accessible via API. Even then, that would still be worse, because developers would have to find the proprietary API for every distributor of QE codes and then learn how to connect to it. One API > n APIs.

And even then, those databases would lack functionality, because the holders of the tickets wouldn't have control over the data. If the original maintainers disappear and the database is deleted, everyone loses their data. And they can't exactly sell or transfer their data, since they don't own the database row it lives in, unlike with the blockchain.

> Sure, that could work. But that standardized API does not exist, or if it does, it's clearly not being adopted, so it's a moot point. Where is the Indie Web in terms of adoption?

The same argument could simply made forward: the idealistic hopes of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 of an distributed, interoperable web did not materialise because walled gardens arose which then embraced and extended™ and then sabotaged the open web. Somehow I think Zuckerberg will not build his metaverse on a digital wallet which enables his users to possible leave his walled garden.

Au contraire, Meta already announced that they'll be supporting NFTs, and so has Twitter.

Meta wants to build a metaverse, a goal which has no chance of success if they try to wall it off and prevent portability of data and information. If they see the metaverse and decentralized portable goods as an inevitability in the evolution of the web, then their best bet is to play along and find new ways to capture value instead of hoping the old ways will work.

I'd compare it to the NYTimes reinventing itself 10 years ago. I'm sure they would've preferred the old world of print media dominance, but the writing was on the wall, and they made bold steps to go fully digital, hire a tech team, and lead the way on paid media subscriptions instead of continuing to rely on print ads and physical distribution.

Also, in most earlier versions of the web, I'd say embrace and extend failed. Incumbents were either disrupted or they adapted. The biggest internet giants today are examples of new disruptors who supplanted incumbents, or the incumbents who adapted. Assuming web3 is a Thing, the same should happen. Some incumbents will die, some incumbents will adapt, and some new players will supplant incumbents. Looks like Meta and Microsoft are attempting to adapt very quickly.

"Crypto" is a general set of fundamental primitives for decentralized infrastructure.

(1) A decentralized, "trustless" ledger. There are a ton of use cases here -- akin to databases, but without having to trust a central authority to not go in and just tweak the rows. Good examples: Land registries, stock ownership (current status quo with entities such as DTCC are "interesting" in the loopholes), etc. Bitcoin made this datastructure popular, but it has become (effectively) a Digital Gold; I do not think it will "win" the day due to some key limitations around Proof of Work.

(2) Futures contracts on compute power. Ethereum is a good example. Each "smart contract" lives on the blockchain and is akin to a perpetual AWS Lamda-style program. You can spend ETH to publish or execute programs. By owning ETH, you have a futures contract on said computation.

(3) Futures contract on file storage. The most prominent examples are IPFS/Filecoin & AR Weave. People earn tokens by storing files & spend tokens to have someone host files. Owning tokens gives you the ability to store files in the future.

(4) Decentralized governance (DAOs). These are new ways for people to organize and control the direction of projects. It makes things like voting trivial & verifiable. See recent US elections for examples of how this is beneficial.

(5) Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Combining the above, you can do amazing things in finance without relying on centralized institutions. For example: DEXs (decentralized exchanges) are marvelous -- you can convert between virtually any pair of crypto currencies automatically without restriction.

(6) You can build incentivization structures to enable microtransactions. A good example is Helium -- a LoRa wireless network (900MHz, super-low datarate IoT) ecosystem that covers vast areas. You earn Helium by providing area coverage & transferring data. You spend Helium by using bandwidth. All of it is done without a big central authority (e.g. legacy telcos). Currently in the process of supporting cellular & wifi.

Using these primitives, you can build a host of valuable applications. E.g. rideshare is really just a giant decentralized auction on moving things from A->B -- doesn't matter if it's Uber, Lyft, taxis, autonomous cars, or random people with a vehicle -- you could implement the auction via smart contracts and have "perfect" balance of supply, demand & pricing.

I would liken the state of crypto today to the internet in 1995-1998 -- bubble & all. My suggestion: Try not to judge the www by your experiences with usenet. The "toys" of today could very well become the most valuable institutions on the planet in 20 years. And above all, remember that in the scope of humanity, money is not that old -- and fiat less the gold standard even less so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nZkP2b-4vo

> When I first got into tech, the technology amazed me, not the problems it solved. The tech was enough, it was not a means to an end, it just was. As I got older, and started owning projects, managing teams, etc, I realized that technology should be in service of something, not just a thing to exist in and of itself.

This reminds me when somebody on an old project said: "well, Git is almost the same as our Subversion..."

But, in the end, why not be amazed by the technology?

Why can we gamble but not crypto trade? It's not logical.

Let's take smokers. They are burning their cash plus getting themselves sick, getting others to breathe their smoke and loading our universal healthcare through their individual addictions. What problem does smoking solve?

For the individual? Depends. The percentage of individuals with ADD smoking is 10x higher than in neurotypicals (whatever that may be). Dopamine deficiency may be one "problem" people self medicating with nicotine might try to "fix" (treating symptoms).

> "So, how does that relate to this? One question I have constantly asked, and never gotten an answer to - What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve? What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

> What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

My opinion - the most significant problem bitcoin (and, historically, gold) solves is it is a store of value that is difficult (arguably, technically impossible) to inflate - there will only be 21M bitcoin, ever.

We all trust the fiat USD as a store of value bc we have trust that the US treasury and central bank will not start to fund government operations by "printing" more money.[1] However, that is effectively what is happening.[2] This is a really hard pill for people to swallow bc it fundamentally changes our worldview - "the US government is the most trustworthy, I have saved all my money in USD, how could they do that to me?" That emotional response will look like anger, hate, denial, etc.

So, what the fed and the treasury are doing is very bad for everyone. Hopefully, the majority of Americans will come to that conclusion before it is forced upon them. How does bitcoin solve this? Bitcoin does the same thing gold did (except a lot better in a couple ways [3]). When I dig up a gold nugget, I worked to create it, which is another way of saying I spent some energy and that energy is represented in that nugget I hold in my hand.[4] Bitcoin is the nugget in electronic form. Digging those nuggets is hard bc they are rare, so I don't worry about more people competing with me with more nuggets.[5] Now the dollar has a competitor. I hope that bitcoin keeps the stewards of the USD honest, bc people can trade their dollars for bitcoin - that is the problem is solves.

[1] I am not a fan of the word "printing" when describing the mechanics of what's going on today. It's an over-simplification, but analogous enough for people who do not have the intellectual inclination to go into the specifics. Most people get bored very fast when I try to talk about economics.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csf4fdV-EOQ

[3] It weighs as much as the thing that holds the private keys, takes up almost no space, is divisible, can use it for a payment very quickly, very divisible, bitcoins supply is known, etc.

[4] If you take away anything from this post, please let it be this - energy is the master resource.

[5] This is the best starting point for people to dig deeper (trigger warning, Jordan Peterson is in it) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXvQcuIb5rU&t=65s

21M bitcoin, and 21M Bitcoin Cash, and however many ether, and doge, and shiba, and Floki, etc... Will all of these retain their current valuation? If not, why should any of them?

This exact question is brought up at around 7:30 in the [5] video.

Yeah nah. I can read.

> I have saved all my money in USD

If your entire life savings are in USD, you're doing it wrong. USD (any real currency, really) is to be spent. It has no returns. It is not a productive asset. The only reason to hold USD is to have liquidity. It is not a good thing for your non-productive medium of exchange to be one of the better stores of value, as it discourages investment into actually productive things. We shouldn't want a society that takes all their value and buries it in the backyard, we should want a society that is encouraged to invest in each other, trade, and grow.

This is like asking "what problem do computers solve?"

I recommend you have a look at the ecosystem where literally thousands of problems are being solved in new ways, and more every day than it's possible to keep up with.

Please be kind, and don't snipe or deride my question. Instead of hand waiving a recommendation, can you provide some answers?

Sorry, after awhile I've started to feel frustrated with the dominant narrative on HN.

When I'm interested to get a feel for the range of crypto projects with significant traction, I sometimes start here: https://snapshot.org/#/

But it's hard to point to a single place. There are many worlds in crypto. Twitter is a portal to some. One must go on an adventure.

Here's something a friend works on: https://www.regen.network/

For me, crypto enables experimenting with new kinds of corporate structures. That's what I work on. I think we have a decent shot at replacing the current model—basically psychopathic projections of sick humans minds—with something that won't destroy Earth.

It's very hard to do that without programmable money.

Oh the irony.

First gives a short answer. Other poster is not satisied with that. Then apologizes and gives a longer more informative answer.

Then gets downvoted to hell.

I wonder if next time, you will still give a longer answer, or just not bother anymore.

Welcome to the club.

Perhaps the downvotes were harsh (I was not one of them, can't downvote :), but the question was "what problem does bitcoin solve?". I'm having a hard time seeing any problem in the parent's comment. Instead of identifying a problem, poster is encouraging us to go on an adventure.

For me, I'm tired of really discussing it. I stated a powerful usecase before, but it seems a lot of HNers don't really want a use case, they just want something to bash on.

So if you want use cases, you can look it up on the net. And if you want something to bash on, you won't get it from me.

I get it, it can def be discouraging. For me, I really _want_ to know what the great problems of the day are that bitcoin/blockchain can solve (or assist in solving). I imagine many others are too. So far, from my cursory reading, I haven't seen anything that makes it click, especially when weighing off against energy costs to our planet.

Ok I'll bite :).

Energy cost can be very low when using Proof of Stake. For example a 7000 transactions per second network could run on the energy of a single windmill: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/7ucw1a/the_en...

And for use cases, the second hand car industry is ready for disruption. You could say all blockchain use cases can be also handled by a central database. But this has failed miserably in the car industry. There are plenty of companies trying to log metadata, and as a result none of them have the complete picture. Even data aggregator companies are not able to properly bundle it.

Blockchain could offer a very good trustless solution, where you could log a cars history, and a second hand buyer could consult it.

Therefore, big names are entering this space, and I'm confident we will see blockchain solutions in that market soon.

This is only 1 example: https://www.ledgerinsights.com/mercedes-benz-blockchain-used...

The DHL website also has a nice explanation on their use cases https://www.dhl.com/global-en/home/insights-and-innovation/i...

Thanks, that's a good answer. I am not 100% sold that any of these are "problems", but I could at least see why you think they are and pursue "solutions".

I think you are right the crypto can solve some problems, perhaps even useful and interesting problems. But I don’t think it currently solves useful problems dot average people.

I know that was not your claim, but it could be read as such and many people think that way of crypto.

Not saying that will not change in the future.

You aren't missing anything. Crypto doesn't solve an existing problem. It was created by arrogant software engineers who thought they know monetary policy better than people who devote their entire lives to the study.

It's survived because it happened to make a great natural ponzi scheme, which then made some people rich, and made some people financially invested in pumping the price higher, who now spend all their time telling you how useful it is in an attempt to get you to buy into the "Crypto" universe but really just want your fiat.

It's a libertarian currency. Don't be surprised that it's a greater-fool nightmare - that's exactly the point. There's a reason that the True Believers get the majority of the coins for no mining costs and the rest beg for fractions of a coin. It's pure FOMO and reflected in their unofficial motto: "Have fun staying poor".

All of the people replying to you trying to convince you that crypto makes sense have a personal financial interest in getting you onboard. They have a larger interest in shooting down dissent and mocking non-believers, because if people stop believing the whole house of cards comes down.

I stand to gain nothing if you believe me or don't believe me, so take it however you wish.

Ecosystem is the key word here. Crypto currency enables an economic ecosystem to expand where as without crypto this ecosystem and all the network effects and innovation of said ecosystem would not exist.

It’s possible to give many examples of problems computers solve.

For example: I can edit text on a computer more easily than with pencil and paper.

Blockchain proponents find it very difficult to give similar answers for what blockchains make possible.

> For example: I can edit text on a computer more easily than with pencil and paper.

So it was not a real problem to begin with. A computer didn't solve anything, it just made a small improvement on your usecase.

The computer made a huge improvement. Have you ever written and edited a significant document with pencil and paper?

The bigger point is that it's very easy to point to huge improvements computers have made or to new things computers enable (e.g. collaborative document editing with many authors around the globe and version control). It's much harder to point to things that crypto improves or enables - except for illicit activities.

> Have you ever written and edited a significant document with pencil and paper?

I'm from 1979, so yes. Now that you mention it, before writing a huge document, you had to think up front what you were going to write and how to write it.

So now that I think about it, the computer is actually a step backwards in some way.

I think the bigger point is that when computers were first introduced, there was a lot of similar pushback to what we see today. The answer is that they don't _directly_ solve a pressing problem, but are a canvas for others to come and use as a new paradigm to solve problems using its technology. Blockchain by itself is a canvas, and anyone can come and create applications on top of it that could solve real problems. Computers and the web are similar in this regard.

Yeah. Totally didn't solve anything. And in fact, it hurts the environment more. Terribly database, this blockchain thing.

I'll stick with my non-raid, not-backed-up, sqlite file on my 10yo hard drive, please and thank you. (Err.. I mean piece of paper)

Computers are Turing Machines - a paradigm of openness to implement processes. How you can compare them to the specific topic is as mysterious as attempting to put life and tree leaves on the same plane.

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