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Comment by rp1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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