Side note but I wish hacketnews wasn’t always so anti-crypto. Makes it a pretty depressing forum for those of us working in the space earnestly
What do you guys work on all day long ? How to convert a DOGE to USDT to BTC then to a bored ape NFT looking to the right ? Hope you dont work at SafeMoon or other such "project" you guys call "crypto" because there's 1 hash function somewhere and one key elsewhere :p
You see, this is the issue I have. This is just twattish behaviour.
> What do you guys work on all day long?
Pretty interesting problems. In the last year or two I've worked with some of the founding designers of Haskell on compiler profiling. I've heard from Leslie Lamport on using TLA+ to formally prove consensus algorithms. I profiled worst-case-performance of cloud infrastructure across the world. Stephen Wolfram and Vint Cerf gave internal talks to us at monthly learning sessions. I've written systems code in Rust, Haskell, Golang, F#, and multiple other 'cool' languages. I got to ask the guy who introduced monads to functional programming wtf is a monad? I spoke to SPJ about programming. Been taught property-based testing by the creator of QuickCheck. Etc... It's a really cool space if you like tech with some great minds in it.
Sounds a lot like university, what do you guys produce as a result ? Do you work at BlockOne, I hear a lot of such dilettante feedback where work is more about learning fun things at random without any specific purpose. I mean from compiler profiling to property testing, do you have time to focus on a tight deadline ? How many systems do you focus on, if you have to touch 4+ languages just to apply a change ? I hope at least it's not each end to end feature that requires all those languages -_-.
But at least, good you accept to work on all of them, problem where I work, where we do more classical Python/Java/C#/JS,is I have trouble to convince my colleagues just to touch a second one and de-specialize.
But this submission got nuked. It went to #4 in an hour, and then disappeared. Maybe we need decentralized HN!
Perhaps you should look at why people become anti-crypto. Most of us have had bad experiences with it and have decided that the problems outweigh the benefits.
I still think it's an interesting experiment, but I won't invest another cent in it.
What problem can it solve that a central database can't?
Half the scams I've seen are stopped because a central 3rd party (like OpenSea) refuses to deal in the "stolen" property. At which point, there's no decentralisation.
Look, I'm pro-decentralisation and pro-cryptography. But no one working in your space has built anything which has convinced me you're on to something brilliant.
I hope I'm wrong though. Because if not - an awful lot of money, talent, and goodwill have been wasted.
Don't you dream of doing work that people actually use ?
Charity is when the taxpayers failed :(
And I'm glad at least you helped people buy clothes, that sounds more rewarding than selling them debt and misery :) And I've sold personal loans, I know :D
It's like working as a food expert at Herbalife. Sure it must be interesting to invent new receipe, but can you really Van Braun your way out of what misery you're helping produce just because it s fun to optimise the Haskell compiler ?
Another way to say it: project yourself 5/10 years in the future and the entire thing collapsed. Everyone knows where you work and what you contributed to: was it worth it, net? Did you learn more than the suicide rate of the people losing their savings cost ? You can leave now, imagine you're an employee of Theranos a year before Carreyrou.
My mind isn't made up. But I'm struggling to find use cases which fit the Blockchain model.
Phone credit based economies still exist in Africa. They have internet but no banking infrastructure. Using a blockchain allows people to create accounts and build a credit history as opposed to phone credit balances.
The Gates foundation mentioned a lot of pain points in direct giving was the fees taken along the way. Again, something that could be looked at with crypto.
Digital licenses - they aren’t transferable because the resale market doesn’t give returns to the creators. With NFT licenses you could trade them with fixed royalties going back to the creator.
Etc
One killer feature that doesn't get nearly enough hype is uptime. Check out these stats: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ The last incident to cause downtime for bitcoin was in 2013. Ethereum has never had downtime.
Another is speed. People like to talk about how slow web3 is, but even Ethereum is super fast compared to a traditional banking transfer. Traditional accounting isn't expected to be instant, so it has a lot of waiting periods and days-long SLAs.
Also trust. Not everyone can trust their local bank or local government. And even if they can, why should the default preference be to have a company with a spreadsheet tell me how many assets they have marked to my name? I'd rather have a decentralized ledger that doesn't require me to place my trust in an individual company or government.
You can't really build these features without some sort of "blockchain". You could try to put together a consortium of companies or individuals to run a shared database with consensus and vote about administration, having it backed by contracts that would be enforceable by world governments. That'd get you 95% of the way there, but it'd still be less good than a public blockchain run by volunteers that provides the same trustless features.
Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.
Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?
There are some amazing theoretical gains for Blockchain technology. I hope they become practical in the near future.
If you believe that all the world is really the divine right of the queen, I suppose sending payments instantly within the UK is more than sufficient.
> Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.
Way more powerful, but practically useless, as 100% uptime globally is the requirement.
> Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?
Blockchains completely prevent chargeback fraud by simply not allowing for reversal of transactions. You might not want this feature if you're buying a cup of coffee, but it's very important if you're dealing with large sums.