Blockchains don't solve problems that are interesting to me | Hacker News Reader

Blockchains don't solve problems that are interesting to me

blog.yossarian.net

95 pointswoodruffw115 comments

The biggest problem with all of this blockchain stuff is that all the incentives are around publicizing the scams.

On the upswing, the scammer is trying to recruit marks for their pump and dump scheme, so they market their scam to as many people as they can.

Then the axe falls and the anti-blockchain take the opportunity to point out how everything is wrong and call for government destruction of the entire technology.

Meanwhile some open source developers are trying to decentralize finance and because they're not scammers, they have no marketing budget and nobody knows about what they're trying to do.

Who are these open source developers? What projects are they working on? Help them with some marketing, don't just claim they exist.

https://github.com/ong/awesome-decentralized-finance

But I'd actually be interested in hearing about ones I don't already know about. That's the thing I'm complaining about. Why is every story about some schmucks who are obviously on their way to jail or bankruptcy court and not any of this kind of stuff?

anybody working with threshold signatures and zero-knowledge proofs.

> The biggest problem with all of this blockchain stuff is that all the incentives are around publicizing the scams.

I think you want to differentiate between cryptocurrencies and other blockchain applications here, don't you? Everything[0] I've seen that could be characterized as a straight up scam has been someone pump & dumping their new cryptocoin.

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[0]: Except NFTs, at least as they've been used so far. The concept of an immutable, digital record of ownership of a thing seems good to me (think real property deeds, for instance). But, the idea of using them to claim "ownership" of a JPEG or something seems ridiculous to me on its face. Either I don't understand how it's supposed to work, or a lot of people have been very publicly taken for a lot of money via NFTs.

The best way to think about NFTs for JPEGs is as buying the "original" of a work of art, as opposed to a reproduction. Their value is the status value of rich people being able to say they own it, and their resale value is that some other rich person will want to be able to say that tomorrow. And it's a method of supporting digital artists or causes, e.g.:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388548/edward-snowden-n...

Of course, the hype is stupefying. People expect that some no-name artist with no cause is going to be able to sell their NFT for a billion dollars.

Before I get into my comment, I do want to thank you and note that you're trying to be helpful here. I just don't think you've hit the mark.

Regarding the analogy of NFTs to original art, that analogy breaks down almost immediately upon examination. You would compare the NFT to a certificate of ownership of a genuine original versus just copying the JPEG being like a reproduction. The thing is, a genuine original, physical artwork can't be exactly copied and distributed to practically the entire world, over and over again, just by issuing a command inside a computer.

I get that an original Picasso is valuable just because it's the only one, and Picasso was a well known and respected artist. I can certainly hang a print or other copy of one of his works on my wall, but, it won't be worth millions of dollars like an original would be.

I don't actually have any Picasso reproductions hanging on my wall, but I do own some original artwork, much by no-names, but some by well respected, listed artists [0]. I own these pieces because I have receipts of purchase, but, also, possession being metaphorically 9/10 of the law, because I physically have them in my possession. Because they're physical objects, me having them means nobody else can have them at the same time. Not so with the JPEG.

In this scenario, I believe the NFT actually corresponds to my purchase receipts. After all, if someone sent the police to my apartment and claimed my artworks didn't actually belong to me, that's how I'd prove it. And, that seems to be what an NFT is trying to establish: that the holder of the token in some sense owns something essential about the thing it's referencing.

Now, maybe I have this all wrong, and the NFT actually corresponds to a certificate of ownership of some kind of rights attached to the artwork. For instance, maybe the NFT is essentially a grant of the right of duplication. To which I say: well, okay... I guess if I don't hold the NFT, I can't duplicate the entirety of the work you own, because the NFT corresponds to ownership of something inherent to the work that can only initially be transferred by the creator of the work under the world's current copyright framework.

But, again, I can just copy the bits of the JPEG and do whatever with it. I can take the images and remix them into a mosaic image of a hand right clicking a mouse [1] if I want. But, I can't claim that the resulting work is made up of 10,000 NFTs by whatever artist; because I don't hold the NFTs themselves, I don't hold that right. So, it's not like I "own a JPEG," but, I own a right associated with the JPEG, which is the right to say "I own this NFT associated with this JPEG image," and I can sell or transfer that right.

That all to me seems like a distinction without a difference, given that the JPEG itself is, upon creation, a copyrighted work, and the original creator can sell or transfer that right without the associated crypto baggage.

TL;DR: ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯

---

[0]: For those not familiar with the term, a "listed artist" is just an artist who has a large enough number of public auction records that those records can be used as a basis for valuing / appraising their work.

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3abnwv/this-powerful-right-c...

> The best way to think about NFTs for JPEGs is as buying the "original" of a work of art

The word "original" shouldn't really be used here, because original implies a type of uniqueness that NFTs don't confer. Say I'm a famous artist, and I make a piece of artwork. I might mint 3 NFTs that point to that artwork; let's say I even get the transactions all in the same block. In that scenario, which one of them is the original artwork? They all point to the exact some URL, they all point to the exact same content. They're not reproductions, all 3 of them are identical to each other in regards to how and where they display the image, and all 3 are issued by the same artist at the same time. The only thing that's different between them, both technically and socially, is the serial number on the token.

The non-fungible part of NFTs refer to the tokens themselves, not the things they're pointing at. The artwork conveys some amount of context around the NFT that may make you want it more (ie, "this is the only NFT issued by the original artist for piece X"). And the artist might choose to only mint one token for a piece of artwork. But it's a mistake to look at the NFTs as being intrinsically linked to the "original" status of the artwork. The context of the NFT is what you are buying, not the artwork. It is questionable whether that context has value, but apparently some people think it does.

This problem of original/reproduction becomes even more obvious when NFTs are minted by the authors of existing pieces of artwork that may have already been online for years. In that case, it would make more sense to say that NFT itself points to a replication of the original artwork since it will almost certainly point towards a new URL where the artwork has been replicated over from the original URL.

The broader problem here is that "originality" isn't really a concept that makes sense with bits of information. A piece of artwork might get copied and pasted across multiple computers before it's even finished. It might be rendered out to 3 different resolutions and posted to 5 websites simultaneously as part of its initial release. There is no concept of original/copy that stands up to scrutiny with any part of digital art.

The meatspace art analogy would be prints: many artists make several prints of the same artwork. Originality isn't what's important, but provenance is. If the original author made the print from the plates, the work is "genuine", but if somebody else got the plates and made more copies those are considered less valuable. Copies made from copying the plates themselves would be considered forgeries.

NFTs are the same. You can have "geniune" NFTs minted by the original artist (any number can be minted) and "forged" NFTs minted by anyone else. Of course since NFTs don't actually contain the work they're more like certificates of provenance for prints, or forgeries thereof.

Personally I find the whole thing ridiculous. Even in the physical art world, why should it matter who made the print if the plates are the originals? NFTs are just like buying certificates of authenticity of prints without buying a copy of the print, which is utterly moronic!

> But, the idea of using them to claim "ownership" of a JPEG or something seems ridiculous to me on its face.

IIRC, it's worse than that. You don't "own" a JPEG. A database says that you "own" a URL, but there's nothing about that URL that is owned. You don't have any rights to what's at that URL. Heck, there's no guarantee that the URL even loads now, let alone in six months. And the content can change at any time.

> Either I don't understand how it's supposed to work, or a lot of people have been very publicly taken for a lot of money via NFTs.

It's a reputation/status thing.

> Meanwhile some open source developers are trying to decentralize finance and because they're not scammers, they have no marketing budget and nobody knows about what they're trying to do.

I don't know how to separate open source blockchain technology from scams. The point of blockchains AFAICT is obscene profit if your "coin" becomes popular. Remove that and you remove most of the development on blockchain. Most developers seem to be in it for the money because well, why else would you be a developing blockchain?

I've heard that the following are blockchain scams:

   * selling "magical" numbers which have no inherent value for state backed money.  
   * selling coins when the developer controls the majority of them.  
   * Elon Musk pumping Dogecoin on twitter without anyone knowing his true stake.
   * Tether not being backed 1:1.  
   * Bitfinex using those Tethers to prop up the price of BTC when BTC price falls.

Some of these to be clearly scams more than others, but the first one is why China banned Bitcoin mining in their country.

Just look at how the comments on Elon Musk's tweets look like. On every tweet, the top comments are almost exclusively crypto scammers.

That is a pretty limited view of what blockchains solve these days. This reads like someone looked into Bitcoin once ten years ago and then applied that to everything that came after it.

You don’t have to be interested in it but I hardly find this blog as a compelling or well thought out reason for finding them boring. It’s more like a reason for why you want to stay ignorant about the tech which no one asked you to know about in the first place.

You're right that I don't keep up with it. The post is an explanation of why I don't: I look into how things are progressing every once in a while, and none of the things I want are solved.

Consider me a lazy consumer, waiting for my niche(s) to be filled.

So in the meantime, you'll bitch about things and post it to HN. Why? Personal gratification? You're a "security researcher" who doesn't care about arguably one of the more interesting security problems on the planet.

Once again, HN doesn't disappoint. As a community, we continue to promote solutions to technology problems, but as soon as it involves finances, we draw the line in the sand and don't dare cross it.

It's my professional opinion that the proactive side of security should be as boring as possible. Not that I don't get a kick out of my work, of course.

Boring != Lazy

I’m not sure where the two were equivocated? I’m both lazy and I think security should be boring, but they’re not the same thing.

> You're a "security researcher" who doesn't care about arguably one of the more interesting security problems on the planet.

Well if the author of the post really hated cryptocurrencies and being a 'security researcher' as well, just find the bugs inside the cryptocurrency industry (exchanges, smart contracts, etc) and then highlight these bugs in your post as to why cryptocurrencies still have a long way to go. Maybe then the author might be taken a bit more seriously when it comes to that.

After all, one even said they are so called 'self-paying bug bounties' [0] A great way to show the world that these systems are still in their infancy.

> as soon as it involves finances, we draw the line in the sand and don't dare cross it.

Just don't ask about stocks, cryptocurrencies or investing on HN. This is why. [1] [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29451300

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355360

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809235

You misused the word "interesting" in your title then.

"Interesting problems" implies wanting to work on them or being curious about the solution.

You don't want to work these problems, whether they involve cryptocurrencies or not. You want solutions as a consumer, which is an important voice to be heard, but different.

For example, a quiet running refrigerator would be useful to me but is not an interesting problem to me.

A title better aligned with the content would be "Problems I want solved as a consumer that crytocurrencies do not solve" or "As a consumer, cryptocurrencies haven't solved my problems".

It really does boil down to a bunch of ignorant hot takes thrown around to convince each other that they are morally superior for maintaining an uninformed skepticism presented in bad faith.

What problems do blockchains solve these days vs ten years ago?

It is not about the problems it solves now. It is about the potential it has to solve problems……

What problems does it have the potential to solve?

This is kind of the article's point though, because there are other federated/decentralized efforts going on outside of blockchains that do solve problems now. Having the potential to solve problems possibly in the future isn't that special, lots of things have the potential to solve problems eventually.

The questions are:

- how long will it take to solve those problems?

- how much effort will it be?

- how likely is it to succeed?

- are there other efforts that are more promising?

- what are the costs/downsides associated?

- etc...

And when you start asking those practical questions about the real world, and not just thinking about "maybe this will be great someday", then cryptocurrencies start to look a lot less attractive.

Apparently the six dots at the end of my reply where not clear enough of an indication that this was sarcasm, a joke. A bad joke. Ah well.

Ransomware payment

You mean "distributed involuntary bug bounties". /s

It's like arguing with people who believe in their system to win at lotteries: "you can't criticize it until you understand every little detail". MLM proponents use the same argument: look at this amazing double binary balanced pyramid and 10 pages of detailed description of how pay-offs work when you recruit people to the left and right branches underneath you.

With those as with crypto you are better off taking a view from above. The only problem crypto solves is going around regulation. It's a sleight of hand, if you convert dollars to tokens suddenly regulators won't go after you. This and 101 ways of trading imaginary tokens hoping there is going to be a bigger sucker or that you won't be the last to sell. To increase chances of either happening you scream: "it's still early", "diamond hands" and "hodl!" creating a sense of companionship to promote behaviors that increase your chances to cash out before the whole thing collapses.

> That is a pretty limited view of what blockchains solve these days. This reads like someone looked into Bitcoin once ten years ago and then applied that to everything that came after it.

I didn't take it that way. I interpreted it as the author's personal list of "stuff I wish cryptocurrencies could do for me today." And, of that list, micropayments stuck out to me as a problem people have really, really wanted to solve for a long time, but just can't manage to make a solution work yet. Of course, the problem of micropayments effectively reduces to the problem of reducing transaction costs to a point where it becomes feasible to pay someone 5..10..50 cents without having to pay the payment processor an equal or near equal amount. But, that, unfortunately, seems like less of a technical problem and more of a social problem, which makes it a Hard Problem(tm).

Regarding being asked about blockchains: I think people might just be trying to make conversation with the author because they know crypto is a place their interests intersect tech, and clearly the author has an opinion on the subject.

But how many of these “takes” can we see on HN? What am I supposed to take away from this? Personally, I don’t think farm animal sanctuaries solve a problem that’s interesting. There just isn’t much to gain by sharing my opinion on farm animal sanctuaries with others though, especially multiple times a day.

The reason you hear people say that this stuff sucks, while not addressing the menace of animal sanctuaries, is big and obvious and reasonable: one of these things has massive externalities on the world and the other has animals in it.

Sure, but after reading that PoW is bad for the environment for the 1000th time, what am I supposed to do? It feels like the conversation has stalled.

repetita iuvant

Can you explain to me what conversation you think should be happening past that?

It's not just proof of work that's bad either. Proof of stake still burns resources for no nameable gain save to the earliest movers on a particular memetic pyramid--just fewer of them.

I think I've seen someone make this point before, so to recycle it poorly: a lot of the "cool" technology in the blockchain space looks almost like CS information hazards: things like Merkle trees and SNARKS are just so cool that we engineers get all hot in the pants to try and use them, practicality or performance be damned. I think we're finally starting to see some reasonable spillover from that, thankfully.

It makes people feel good to hear other people confirm their beliefs. We’re all guilty of it, we just have to not let it fully blind us.

I think blockchain right now is in the dot-com bubble phase. Eventually the scammers will fade into the background as the real players emerge.

The reason I feel compelled to express my crypto-skepticism is that I see well organized efforts to convert some or all of our financial system to crypto and I think that could be disasterous.

It's tiresome to discuss and HN doesn't like tiresome but this is a technology/business issue so I don't think we can/should avoid it.

The big takeaway is that there are better cryptocurrencies out there that have real-world use-cases and are suitable for fast, scaleable, efficient and cheap payments like paying for your groceries at your local supermarket.

The fact that they are unable to ignore the rise of cryptocurrencies probably means it is not going anywhere anytime soon. Some are just useful than others and the ones that are useless and don't adapt to regulations will wither away.

The decentralization of the internet should be increasingly important as we see government and corporate censorship increase. I couldn't care less about the money aspect, I look forward to decentralized apps replacing corporate controlled public spaces.

you don't need a blockchain to have decentralized networks

No, but, considering a blockchain is literally just a distributed log, it certainly helps to have decentralized networks in order to implement blockchains.

Internet is already decentralized

TCP/IP doesn't care who you are and where you come from

blockchains solve problems like "how can we order all our transactions and write them on this global immutable, append only log, so that anybody can see them?"

a problem I never had, honestly.

I keep reading how the web must mean something politically but so far all I see is weakening of spirits and noisy if not dangerous distraction (and mob mentality).

To me less web, and less means imply deeper human investment.

I'll add on top of the article's claims, crypto is also not solving any decentralization problems that are interesting to me.

There are a few interesting ideas with the blockchain, and it was something that was worth looking into at least initially. It's something that could be iterated on, it's not useless. But at this point, it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that as a general strategy, federation is a better approach to decentralization than the blockchains' vision.

Around the parts of decentralization that actually matter to me, and in particular in regards to anti-corporate/anarchist spaces, blockchains have almost universally ended up fairing worse than simpler federated projects. The introduction of a "ledger" in the first place seems to be a magnet for the exact corporate/government attention that people say they want to avoid. I've also seen a lot of attempts at turning the blockchain into a tool for app creation and community management, but as far as I can tell none of them have turned out to be particularly noteworthy or useful -- there's not a lot there where I'm looking at it and thinking, "this shows massive potential."

So when I think about my limited time on this earth, I am much more inclined to spend it following and supporting stuff like Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube; heck, even the really "boring" stuff like just increased pressure on Apple to support web apps better on iOS is going to have a much bigger impact on decentralized, anti-corporate app creation than almost anything I can see coming out of Ethereum right now. It's not that there's zero value in the blockchain as a concept or zero potential, if people want to do engineering in that space then fine, I guess. But I look at what the blockchain spaces are putting out right now, and it's just not comparable to any of the other efforts that are going on with decentralization. It turns out that securely syncing an uncontrolled ledger is not as important of a problem or as useful as we thought it might be.

The closest thing I've seen here to an actually exciting project is Handshake, and Handshake has a ton of problems, it's not a great, permanent solution to the problem of DNS ownership. It just happens to be one of the very few, narrow areas where a shared ledger really does matter.

Don't cryptocurrencies just centralize the power for whatever groups own the most miners? Sure one group won't have a dictatorship, but it's essentially an oligopoly.

It's like if you claim the U.S. congress is decentralized because there are representatives from each of the 50 states, which is a valid argument despite congress ultimately becoming a centralized power unit, but in this case each of the representatives just buys more mining equipment compared to their competitors.

We can already do this without blockchain.

Think about Wikipedia. Yes there is still some bias injected into the editorial process - but is it a better or worse than a truly decentralized free for all?

The internet was decentralised, for years, before it got enclosed into a series of corporate walled gardens. We already have all the technology we need for a decentralised internet.

As soon as you do anything the old way you get sued. You cant even allow a user to upload a profile picture to your server because the user could upload something illegal and you dont have team of lawyer like the big guys. They just turn you off and sue your lifesaving away. That we have the old tech is completely meaningless.

The best founder I personally know (5 startups, all positive exits) tried his hand at blockchain for enterprise with his recent startup and had to pivot months into it because there wasn’t a valid use case.

I haven’t explored it myself, but his experience gave me enough reason to pause for B2B applications.

There are actually some interesting tools that are being marketed under the name "blockchain" but have very little to do with Bitcoin. For example IBM's "Kafka with digital signatures" technology.

It's kind of boring, very useful, but by marketing it as "blockchain" they can convince some clueless CEOs that it's worth the extra 0's they're asking for.

Or there are cryptocurrencies innovating in a space that is much more general than blockchains. For example, zero knowledge proofs or threshold signatures, which I’m convinced will see many more applications as a result of the cryptocurrencies innovations.

We're using ZKP in our covid credential system; crypto and "blockchain" are - rightfully - nowhere to be seen.

Nice. It’s starting to spread :)

IBM canceled all that stuff.

If someone disagrees with the article and believes any of these problems are solved, can you detail how?

Blockchains has been solving my "problems". The issue is he has a very limited set of "problems" in life. and that's fine too.

and what would be your problems

There is a general pattern with Internet commentary where things that are decried as useless or not as good just become the most popular thing. I wonder what it is.

I recall this happening in my time here on HN and Reddit.

- The iPad

- AirPods

- Bitcoin

- Facebook

It’s almost at the point where I think it provides signal that something will be valuable.

My personal hypothesis is that it captures the idea “I think this should not be considered valuable but lots of people around me do think it is” which sort of happens only if that last condition exists.

So any time I read something like this, it means there’s some sort of invisible popularity for some product I don’t know about. Interesting idea.

It's apparent to me that cryptocurrencies have plenty of value tied up in them at this point. But the object of the post was to solicit a better understanding of whether they've solved the problems I'm interested in.

The money is there, VC people are eager, the concept has been around for years, and like you said, there is a cult base that is absolutely indoctrinated. The world is ready for one (1) implementation of blockchain that actually does something meaningful and better than what already exists. Yet here we are. People are spending their lives trying to convince others that blockchain is a good technology, but nobody actually doing anything with it. It's not like there's a grand conspiracy blocking any companies from being successful, blockchain/crypto is just for con artists and the gullible.

It’s because we have established living and survival conditions based on decisions we have made through life. These then form biases.

E.g.

* iPad vs Android ecosystem

* Bitcoin/crypto vs fiat

A lot of these takes are from disruptive technology.. It’s called disruptive for a reason and that reason gives it lots of arguments to why it could fail against established thinking.

So if something had a lot of haters in technology.. it could be a disruptive technology which has a good risk to reward ratio if it becomes adopted.

Tablet sales have been slowly dropping for 6 years now, while laptop sales have been increasing, at least according to this site:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

So the jury is still out on iPads.

AirPods are a niche Apple product, not sure what point you are making with them.

Bitcoin is even more of an obscure niche, a speculator's bubble.

Facebook is the only unambiguous winner from that list, and quite a bit of that is due to obvious monopolistic practices after they initially grew big (buying WA, Instagram, but also embedding themselves in the base internet access path in Africa and other places).

> AirPods are a niche Apple product

Have you walked around a city at any point in the last 2 years? AirPods are not niche.

And iPads are a huge success, about the only actual decent tablet out there. You see them _all over_, the jury is not out unless we move the goalposts so that it’s not successful until it replaces laptops.

>AirPods are a niche Apple product, not sure what point you are making with them.

This is such an HN comment, it bothers on the cliche.

Apple has generated more Airpods revenue this year than Nvidia has period. Apple has generated 2x Airpods revenue than ALL of AMD or Square or Spotify. Just Airpods. It's 5% of their revenue (and these are $129 devices competing with $1000+ devices in their portfolio for the revenue pie).

How is a product that generated $12B in revenue in one year niche? I'd take that niche. Literally every person on the street has them in their ears. Imagine a startup with $12B in revenue and >120% YoY growth and margins in the 50%.

I'd argue Airpods might be the second most successful Apple product ever after the iPhone.

You see! It’s like that. There’s a kind of weird sneering wrongness to the comment. “Just a niche”. As soon as you read that, you know something is up.

It’s clearly not fact based. So it must come from some deeper place. A feeling of being threatened or of envy or something like that. It’s far too strident in its incorrectness to be more than just garden variety wrongness.

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, it's coming more from a bubble and some hubris on my part for thinking my bubble is connected enough.

In my city, people don't visibly use AirPods a lot, none of my iPhone-using friends have one, and I haven't seen news/articles about AirPods at all since the original announcement hubub. I foolishly assumed that I am getting a representative sample of the world from this point of view, and I ended up commenting based on this foolish assumption.

All right. Sucks that I jumped to a conclusion on that with you. It's possible you're the common case and that all the people who treat Airpods like not a real thing are actually in places where they're not commonly used.

Interesting, I admit I was completely wrong on the AirPods at least. Personally, I had never heard about them after the original announcement discussions, and rarely see anyone with them on the streets. This is probably because I live in a poorer country (Romania, one of the poorest in the EU) and I am not very connected to the Apple ecosystem in general.

This was a massive blind-spot for me, I honestly had no idea that AirPods had become a huge phenomenon like this...

I think AirPods by themselves would be a fortune 100 company.

> It’s almost at the point where I think it provides signal that something will be valuable.

This is called survivor bias.

In reality when things are labeled as bad by the majority, they are probably bad and/or are going to fail.

but because they fail, you move on and forget about them.

Anyway, nobody ever said Facebook was useless when it started.

I had two invitations from friends in USA when it was still invite only and people actually offered me money for them...

the other examples are hardly revolutionary.

many people have said face masks are useless since covid started, but we wear them anyway, because covid actually kills people.

that's something I would describe as "considered useless, but became the most popular thing, out of precaution"

nobody is going to die without iPads, bitcoins and frankly why airpods are in the list is a mistery to me...

Ah no, it's something more special. Like, everyone panned Juicero, but all the mainstream guys loved the iPad. TechCrunch loved it and they didn't even get a trial device. /r/technology made fun of it ("more like maxipad haha"/"4 iphones glued together haha"). I think the key element is watching techies act in a way that's clearly from some deeper place.

If Airpods were a separate company, they'd have more revenue than any company on half of the Forbes 500. I think your comment has a bit of this. On HN, everyone treats Airpods like some sort of fad toy. In real life, my friends love the device.

> On HN, everyone treats Airpods like some sort of fad toy

isn't it possible that this is just you generalizing a bit too much?

I've simply said they're just earphones and aren't going to change humanity as we know it

every brand offer some kind of earbuds, my phone came with a couple of them, never used them, having to charge another device that can fail at any moment is not my idea of comfort.

> In real life, my friends love the device.

Oh, well, if your friends love it, everyone else must be wrong then...

(it seems to me that your conclusion are based on very few observations and not representative of anything. for example you said in every city airpods are everywhere. I live in Italy, they are definitely not everywhere, they ate pretty rare. they are also very expensive for the general population , my friends with an iPhone buy Xiaomi earbuds, they are good enough and cost 1/10th)

> for example you said in every city airpods are everywhere

I didn’t say that because I concretely do not believe it. They’re an expensive device and still remarkably popular. 5x the revenue of Ferrari and Lamborghini combined.

yeah, toilet paper's market is larger than Ferrari market too.

No sh*t Sherlock!

It's all about volumes, Ferrari is the Mona Lisa, airpods are me drawing on a napkin when I was 5.

There are many more drawings on napkins, but they doubtfully have more value than La Gioconda.

> So any time I read something like this, it means there’s some sort of invisible popularity for some product I don’t know about. Interesting idea.

The problem with your theory is that it implies you should have also been investing into Twitter Fleets and WeWork. Hackernews tends to be cynical about most things in my experience. It's tricky to use it as a signal about anything.

Here are some answer to the question in the part "Overseas remittance without middlemen"

- Where does the money exit?

Cross-bolder payment+settlement trough crypto needs an bridge asset in the middle that would be crypto. So the in and out (exit) is done on either side trough a local cryptocurrency exchange or a liquidity provider potentially even a decentralize liquidity pool. But AFAIK currently its only done with normal exchanges. This means both sides could use fiat and theoretically do not need to know that the "money" went trough crypto at all. However there are ofc many people who do it manually i.e. they buy crypto send it to their families and explained to them how they can sell it.

- Again, the transaction fees. Western Union is expensive; is Bitcoin or Ethereum doing any better....

Short answer, No. Both BTC and ETH are way too expensive (for typical low value transactions). PoW/PoS can not be cheap to transact because there is always a middleman taking a cut (fee). However there are other systems based on FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) which are specifically made to not have a middleman that collects fees. This results in transaction cost of fractions of cents regardless of transaction value and a settlement time of a few seconds. Note that the "cost" can not be zero to prevent spam but that money doesn't go to anyone so no one could have an incentive to raise the cost. Instead the cost adjust to network load so its cheap for everyone who does not spam.

- Novel criminal potential.

I dont think this will be a problem for commercial implementations of crypto remittance. Companies use some form of risk management with insurance and all that doesn't change much. The actual part where cryoto is involved is probably the easiest to secure (assuming the system explained above is uses and end user never "touch" crypto unless they choose to)

For people dong it manually criminal do pose a risk but is it really larger than sending paper money via mail and then potentially take it to a bank to exchange it (yes people are forced to do this).

Is it a particularly interesting problem? Probably not for most people but its large, like really really large. Several hundred billion per year and growing 5-10% annually. Million of people affected. Low risk for the target people, they are not encouraged to hold highly volatile assets or use them to pay for something.

what about transportation? ive heard its heavy paperwork and payment to make sure they ship / pay / deliver things. blockchain would allow to cut many middlemen

How? Blockchains don't update themselves based on meatspace events, you'd still have to trust someone to keep track of shipments and add entries to the blockchain.

Is Nakamoto consensus not an interesting idea?

Web3 without crypto is what will work and not be bs.

I also really enjoy web3 over current web UX. Without crypto you mean non-finance stuff but still a blockchain, or something else?

Agreed. Nobody is solving any interesting problems in crypto-space, except for a few computer scientists. The rest are degenerate gamblers who don't realize cryptocurrency is exciting because it's no different than a slot machine at the casino.

There are so many problems I'd love to be solved by crypto, but it's so frustrating how caught up with winning the lottery these people seem to be. It's an ad nauseum cult.

The only good thing about crypto is how it occasionally decreases inflation in the US every time this digital "gold" is lost.

> The only good thing about crypto is how it occasionally decreases inflation in the US every time this digital "gold" is lost.

when they buy the crypto - dollars are sent to the seller. Only thing "lost" is the crypto coins themselves.

The crypto is not lost either, just the value.

Agreed. Nonsense tulip bulbs! I for one appreciate inflation and the fed printing money. Its for our own good. As with most if not all government entities they have the people’s best interest in mind and refuse to serve a small elite group of friends. I’ll be happy when this whole decentralized thingy ends and goes to zero.

> Nonsense tulip bulbs!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

Calling it degenerate gambling is uncouth and reeks of classism. I think the adequately paid tech workers who frequent HN miss something very important that crypto attempts to solve that appeals very much to common people. I say adequately paid because a FAANG salary is more analogous to a skilled factory salary a half century ago, allowing you to buy a house and car and put your children through college, something out of reach for people making the median income.

These are people who aren't stupid and understand that inflation is happening and purchasing power is going down and who realize that their fearless leaders don't actually have an answer to it besides gestures and platitudes. Putting some hope in crypto gives the common man a non-zero chance of his purchasing power going up. Holding regular savings accounts does not. Crypto may or may not be the answer but I see it as a rational bet.

Nothing prevents you from focusing on the problems you personally are interested in. My reason to get interested in cryptocurrencies was that I didnt have much money. Now I have generational wealth thanks to Bitcoin. It is nice, but also I am not that interested i cryptocurrencies any more, they were very effective at solving my problems and now the problems are gone. Now I am focusing on music production instead.

vechain had a pragmatic case

Can you expand on this for someone like me, who's not a crypto wonk?

I didn't dig deep but:

- vechain lead worked in supply chain

- he thought having a unified blockchain based tracking system would be great

my few insight in the world made me like the idea because a lot of people are basically doing semi manual tracking, boring and slow.. so a system for this would be a good benefit

It's fine for the author to not be interested in crypto, but his focus on financial examples indicates that he's probably not really thinking about the most interesting problems that could be solved with Crypto. Digital Money is a huge deal, but it's just the first phase of Crypto's potential.

Crypto isn't just about an easy way to send cash from the US to Brazil.

Think about smart contracts. Think about Oracles. Think about distributed apps and computation and API access. Crypto might enable radical new things we have barely conceived of yet.

I tried to mention the kind of things I'd expect smart contracts to help me with, like creating a debit pool for me and my friends when we go to a bar. The parts that I'm missing are (1) a practical cryptocurrency thingy that actually does that without charging me more than the drinks, and (2) a reason why it shouldn't just be a service that connects to ACH or another settlement layer.

> (1) a practical cryptocurrency thingy that actually does that without charging me more than the drinks, and

I don't understand why some people are so cash-averse, but the problem you mention seems best suited to cash at the moment, or perhaps one person having a tab and the rest throwing him some cash at the end of the night.

Once Crypto becomes more efficient for this kind of thing (different tech like Algorand, or second layers like Matic) maybe there's a better use case for this kind of smaller problem.

> (2) a reason why it shouldn't just be a service that connects to ACH or another settlement layer.

Privacy seems like an important enough reason.

I don't want the government to know if I choose to go to a gay bar.

I don't want my bank who controls whether or not I get a mortgage to know how much I chose to drink one evening.

I use cash a lot. The example was me attempting to come up with a use case that I might conceivably actually use.

The privacy point is a good one, but it’s also orthogonal: your privacy isn’t particularly well preserved by a global immutable ledger.

> Think about smart contracts. Think about Oracles. Think about distributed apps and computation and API access.

No. None of these are uses.

> Crypto might enable radical new things we have barely conceived of yet.

Well, if it does, make a post about it. Until then, crypto still looks useless.

Stellar (XLM) I think solves all these, including clawbacks.

https://developers.stellar.org/docs/glossary/clawback/

https://stellar.org

Author here: I was actually pretty excited about XLM, until I flushed about $50 (at the time) of it into the void from the Keybase thing. I still don't really know what I did wrong, other than it never ending up in my (since liquidated) Coinbase wallet.

You may have missed the memo_id[1]. If you still have access to your Keybase account, you can try Coinbase support. Assuming you sent it to the correct address, they should have the funds and may return it to you if you can prove you own the sending address. (No idea if this will actually work).

Stellar has since fixed this by enabling exchanges to require a memo.[2]

[1]https://www.lumenauts.com/guides/what-are-memos

[2]https://www.stellar.org/developers-blog/fixing-memo-less-pay...

This reads as though you were only interested in the Keybase airdrop to immediately cash out and not actually interested in learning about the technology.

Like other commenters have said, I think Stellar either accomplishes lots of the things you're hoping for or gives you the tools to build them and if you're genuinely interested in these problems I think it's worth another look.

If you send me your Keybase address or a coinbase deposit address and memo I'll send you $50 worth of XLM at current prices. In return, please try using Stellar and learning more about it.

I appreciate the offer, but I'd rather not. I should also be clear: I wrote this from the perspective of a lazy consumer; I'd rather pay and use a solution than write my own.

I'm not sure how Stellar will help me, unless my local bar has started taking XLM. I suppose I can ask them tonight.

Fair enough. I think this is a common misconception -- cryptocurrencies aren't for the "lazy consumer". They're financial plumbing and, especially at the moment, useful for very low level primitives.

To continue with your bar analogy and relate to Stellar, the bar would be unlikely to have any involvement with cryptocurrency. Someone else would build on top of Stellar so that you could pay USD at a Japanese bar and the bar would receive yen.

All of the features exist on Stellar to do that today for far less than a cent in transaction fees, settlement time in minutes, and less carbon impact than a single Facebook data center. The major barriers are all around regulation in the "real world", something that no cryptocurrency is equipped to solve. :)

> The major barriers are all around regulation in the "real world", something that no cryptocurrency is equipped to solve. :)

Correct. Unlike many other cryptocurrencies, the Stellar blockchain has the suitable use-case of powering CBDCs which is where more financial companies will side with if more regulations hit cryptocurrencies in the future.

[0] https://resources.stellar.org/stellar-for-cbdcs

There you go. Post like this are still thinking that Bitcoin / Ethereum represents all cryptocurrencies. These two have proven that it is unsuitable to use for paying for your groceries at the local supermarket. Hence the author of this post mentioning:

> I’m not one of them. But it’s hard enough to get my nonagenarian grandfather to let me pay for dinner with my own payment card; I am not going to try to get him to accept Ethereum.

There are better cryptocurrencies that solves all of this and Stellar is one of them which is also being used for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) [0]

[0] https://resources.stellar.org/stellar-for-cbdcs

I see so many first world people writing about crypto not solving problems for them. I'm sure it's not malicious, but crypto is trying to bring equality to finance. Of course it's not going to be obvious or even the focus of crypto to solve problems for the already overly catered to rich people.

There's nothing wrong with that and there's nothing wrong with writing about how it doesn't solve problems for you, but don't you think it's a little bit bad to not at least look at problems truly impoverished people have and mention those? I think it's something like 17% of the world is underbanked or unbanked - that means there is a huge issue where families can't save money and the people who work smart and/or hard can't grow out of their situation.

I don't mean all crypto is aiming to solve these problems, but it's certainly a category of problem solving that's important to me as a human who wants to see equality in finance, globally.

Crypto solved very nicely my problems, well the money related problems. Now I am rich and life is comfortable.

I have yet to see any clear explanation for how cryptocurrencies are supposed to solve the problem of people in third-world countries not having access to banking, in practice.

For one thing, it seems to me that step 1 in that is understanding why they are underbanked or unbanked, because if it's because they don't have reliable access to the internet...well, that's going to put a bit of a crimp in any plans to get crypto to them.

There are many articles describing how crypto can help in this category, from people who lack the proper documentation to open bank accounts to people who live in areas that are too high risk for traditional banks to include them.

Lack of stable internet is going to be an issue for many, but that's a problem that is being worked on by many organizations and I presume will be solved in time.

The fees on top of NFTs and platforms like Bitcoin are so egregious right now that they're basically only useful for large transfers.

Yes, yes, Lightning, whatever. It's very impressive that the Bitcoin space got the novel idea of solving blockchain problems by using the blockchain less. /s

But there are only narrow examples I can think of where cryptocurrency is helping: specifically 3rd-world transfers of money out of and into the country are maybe the strongest use-case today. But most cryptocurrencies that I see aren't optimized for that, and a lot worse, it's not clear to me that the popular cryptocurrencies will continue to be useful for that in the future, particularly as governments clamp down on them.

I question whether crypto is actually the best method of bringing banking to unbanked people, and more than that I question to what extent the space is actually focused on that, because I know at the very least, the majority of the US community around Bitcoin is not thinking about 3rd-world countries. I've seen cryptocurrencies evolve from their earliest stages where people were very earnestly talking about replacing financial systems, into the modern day were if I say Bitcoin is a bad currency somebody will jump on the thread and tell me that Bitcoin isn't supposed to be a currency.

----

> that means there is a huge issue where families can't save money and the people will to work smart or hard can't grow out of their situation.

I think it's tough to claim that currencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin are long-term answers to this problem; I don't see a movement of wealth redistribution happening, I think that people are trying to jump on early so they'll be rich later, and the underlying technology of these systems is such that they are literally designed to become less profitable to get on board with over time.

I can sort of imagine how a cryptocurrency that was specifically designed for money transfer across nations or for use by unbanked/poor communities might function, but I'm not sure it looks a lot like Bitcoin. Bitcoin has transaction fees, that's problem number 1. It requires an Internet connection, that's problem number 2. Decreasing rewards for transactions are designed to consolidate wealth among the early adopters, that's problem number 3.

I'm just not sure I buy it.

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