I don't buy the early part. 3 years into the internet we already had emails and tcp. 13 years into blockchains we have nothing.
In hindsight, it seems like "3 years into the internet we already had emails and TCP", but the seeds for these things had been in the works for a decade plus. It's a testament to the massive success of the internet that we _think_ in hindsight that "3 years into the internet we had emails and tcp".
I'm not sure what you mean. Nothing has been in the works for a decade plus in 1971 when the first email was sent - it just two years after the very first internet connection was made. In contrast, it's been 13 years since bitcoins appeared, and aside from a potentially easier way to pay for illegal goods, I don't see any useful applications of crypto technology.
ARPANET was built with the idea to allow remote access to expensive computing resources, mainframes, at universities and government research institutions. This is far from the idea that "the computers of the world should be connected", which is roughly the idea behind the internet. Electronic mail was reimplemented in parallel on multiple different networks. But for a long time, the internet was indeed a solution looking for a problem. Why do Joe and Anu's computers have to be connected together, who cares when they can call each other on the phone or meet in person? I mean, can Joe or Anu even afford a private computer?? Private networks for research or commercial purposes were already in regular use.
> I don't see any useful applications of crypto technology.
I think in your anti-crypto zeal, you're assuming a position I don't have. I don't actually think it's valid to say "cryptocurrency is early". The early computer networks were created at a time when huge monopolies, state-run or corporatist, owned most telecoms networks around the world. It was bound to take time when entrenched interests had interest in maintaining the status quo. I also think that comparing blockchains to the Internet is silly; the Internet is the Internet, blockchains are blockchains. My point here is simply that "we had emails and TCP in 3 years" is plain factually incorrect. The internet as we know it now (a system of networks connected via L2 links that are then bridged using IP/L3 on an IP virtual address space) actually took a long time to be developed. If you're looking for an analogy to show that 13 years is too long for usable innovation, then the Web would be a better one, as the Web legitimately was used within a mere couple years of its inception. I still think making analogy between the Web and blockchains is silly for the same reason I think making the analogy between the Internet and blockchains is silly.
I think the technology is "early" but that is also a risk. If the problems can't be worked out before the space develops a reputation for fraud and malarky, then few people are going to be excited to transact in that space. I think there's potential if crypto can figure out how to switch from PoW to a less hungry algorithm (like PoS) and if crypto can make development easier (deploying and testing smart contracts on Eth is a gigantic PITA which is why there's so many security vulnerabilities in smart contracts), if crypto can address Moxie's criticisms, and if chain fees can go back down to ~ 2016 BTC levels. There's chains like Algorand that show potential but I'm not sure if it's too little too late. Maybe with the amount of investment capital lying around, they can weather the storm, but plenty of otherwise perfectly good technologies have tanked due to too slow execution.
There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries (discovery of the concept of data availability, the application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The software engineering effort required to implement such research is colossal as well. Eventually we'll even see e.g. specialized hardware for efficiently producing or verifying zero-knowledge proofs.
It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled.
Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve. So they were plenty useful. Your statement is nonsensical.
- Bitcoin offers a transferrable store of value which cannot be inflated by governments,
- Stablecoins, thanks to being cross-border, are often used in e.g. Argentina where the local currency is unstable and it's not legal to buy dollars,
- Proof of Humanity + universal basic income has provided extra income to Argentinian people (e.g. heard of someone who was able to purchase a ticket to visit their family for Christmas thanks to crypto UBI),
- Crypto has been used to send remittances to economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)
- Gitcoin has provided public goods funding and advanced our conception of mechanism design,
- Helium has created a new 5G network that people can actually roam onto,
- NFTs have provided a new funding model for artists (who create public goods),
- Zcash and Monero have allowed for fully private digital transfers,
- Dark Forest (https://zkga.me/) has been an amusing game,
- Snapshot has helped create a delegative voting system that governs a $3B treasury,
These might not be problems that you face or believe are important, but all these are examples of intended problems being solved.
P.S. the tone of your comment made me a little sad :(
This would be cheaper if you didn't use the crypto part. The reason people use crypto is just that the governments have not yet noticed they're running an illegal money transmitter.
On what formula? Because if I have a 500 MB video file and I want to distribute to some tens of maybe even hundreds of people, I don't see S3 being cheaper. Just sending out 500 MB from S3 to the Internet 10 times costs between $0.25 and $0.45.
There's a reason why I didn't touch S3 when I had to transfer up to 1 TB of video content per day to clients.
Either purely technical solutions, or previously solved problems.
For example, IoT scale global 5G networks you can roan into? That's a solved issue already. Same for programming bounties, proof of humanity, UBI, transferrable assets (though Bitcoin is in some ways more transferable) etc...
Others are fully technical problems, like fully private digital transfers.
Others yet are pretty much just temporary workaround. The fact that you can send remittances to Lebanon or Venezuela was never inherently problematic because of the instability of their currency, rather, it's because the government (in some cases other governments) decided to make it more difficult.
If a government wanted to, they could make sending remittances via crypto just as difficult as by any other way.
NFTs as a funding model is not inherently different from the existing comission and copyright system. What NFTs brought was hype, which made people who wouldn't previously comission artwork to now do so. Attesting ownership or transfering ownership of a piece of art with a contemporary author is not more difficult without than with NFTs. Especially because you still need to trust whoever minted the NFT.
There are few, actual, real world problems that have been solved by Web3 tech. I wish it wasn't the case, but it's true.
The fundamental issue is that Web3 tech can't fully replace centralised institutions. So we need to build centralised institutions anyways. If those fail, it can provide some palliation, as long as they don't fail so hard the government tries to fight it. So in the end, it doesn't truly solve any problem in the real world, though it can in some situations act as a Bandaid.
Lebanaon, Turkey and Venezuela are very much part of the real world!
Good. You're trying to hock snake pyramid schemes and claiming it's a revolution. Blockchains are slow and expensive databases. That is it. They have no authority over anything so the only
Cryptocurrencies are burning through the power usage of a small country for bullshit. The worthless shit being "created" is fueled by breathless hype of hucksters looking for the next sucker to trade actual useful money for their Geoffrey dollars.
You're part of a giant scam, or multiple scams. You're listing a bunch of shit which has existing prosaic solutions. You think the blockchain solutions are new and innovative because you never looked into the issues before. Someone came up with a wasteful "solution", slapped the word blockchain on it, and you've uncritically accepted it as some super great thing.
You've also been posting in the flamewar style in other comments too. Please stop doing that. It's not what this site is for, and it poisons what it is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here—not people smiting enemies and bashing each other.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Ok, so there is a massive amount of effort to be put forth to get something out of this, and even then it is still kind of up in the air what that "something" actually is.
Would it not be prudent to have at least some sort of roughly sketched map of what all this effort is supposed to bring about? other than Lambos...
Or maybe ask if we would be better served if all that effort was put forth in some other direction? Man hours are not a limitless resource.
In the limit, all this effort brings about an artifact that could be thought of as a "magic" computer where:
- Everyone trusts that the computer operates to spec,
- Anyone (or any user interface) can type whatever they want into the terminal and press "enter",
- Anyone (or any other computer program) can read state out,
- The computer has immense amounts of storage and compute,
- Anyone who wants to change the computer's state in some way that cannot be achieved by using the terminal can freely make a copy of the computer with whatever changes they want, and encourage others to use their version instead.
What, one might wonder, would the use be? There are many, many potential uses — it almost boggles the mind — it's kind of like trying to imagine the uses of the internet when it was first invented.
To name one example: you could use this magic computer to operate a VR metaverse, instead of relying on a centralized Facebook one. Failing to do that would lock meaningful sections of our lives into a single vendor whose motivation is profit. Using the magic computer instead would mean that the metaverse would operate according to its predefined rules (which could leave plenty of space for human elections or other forms of collective decision-making), and that if things went awry anyone could try to set us back on track by making a modified copy of the machine and raising awareness about using it instead.
Just like regular computers, this magic computer could also have plenty of negative consequences. It depends on how people opt to use it. I think we'll probably have more luck adopting technology and trying to drive it in the right direction, though — the alternative is widespread Luddism, which might actually be a good idea, but I don't see a realistic path to achieving it.
A lot of folks who are very skeptical of web3 due to its dark sides are probably people who probably have great values and, if they adopted web3, could probably do a lot to improve its trajectory.
We have a ton of money in unregulated markets sloshing around reinventing every financial scam known to man.
That's got to be something!
All money was tainted at some point in the past. The modern world used to be very corrupt and violent - everywhere.
I can see the hypothetical value in decentralized computing/public database.
Certain types of data could in theory be stored publicly, and anybody could build APIs around them. In particular, it would be cool if there was some common protocol and storage format for something like tweets, such that anybody could build Twitter client. Common protocol would especially benefit social media IMO.
We've long collaborated on open source code, but this would be more akin to open source data.
But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet?
The decentralized experience is worse, and there are privacy concerns around storing certain data publicly, I would guess. Can those problems be solved?
Because Ethereum was founded by early Bitcoiners to raise bitcoin for themselves, and the technology always came second to the pursuit of self-enrichment. Software projects can never lose their soul. If the soul was rotten from the very beginning, as the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out”.
I sincerely doubt if any of the inventors of the marketing phrase “web 3” ever thought it would come to this: where their investors are so desperate for yield that they begin taking the term seriously. Not that it matters to the founders of Ethereum, many of whom have long since become secretive Bitcoin billionaires.
The Ethereum project is best described as a series of cynical courtship displays designed purely to bootstrap the “network effect” for their newly created confidence game called ETH, which in 2014 they sold to — to borrow their own legal terminology — “philanthropists” in exchange for “donations”. A process they swore up and down bore no similarity at all to a securities offering.
People not privy to the way cryptocurrency works are shocked to find the various buzzwords hatched by the Ethereum people for their own self-enrichment in the described legacy era of ICOs turn out to be a whole lot of nothing. They shouldn’t be shocked, they should be embarassed for lowering themselves to investing in such a system, or angry if they did so in ignorance.
There's no tie to real world value... Everything is self referential and only implies value within world of crypto.
I do think there's potential behind the concept of standard protocols for "open source data", but blockchains have not delivered on the premise very well.
It's just one pyramid/ponzi scheme after the other, designed with self enrichment in mind first, as you say.
Are they, though? What's amazing about them? The amount of overhead per unit of useful work is mind boggling. So much so that a single raspberry pi 4 is 5,000x more powerful than the entire EVM network. And the initial smart contract language Solidity is notoriously poorly designed for the job.
Truly honestly what is the technology here that we're supposed to be appreciating?
Actually, the more "interesting" crypto projects are the more likely they are to be a scam using a "courtier's reply" defense.
I'm a technical person. Virtual machines and languages are a dime a dozen, and EVM is no different.
Moreover, Solidity was such a laughable attempt at a programming language that even first version of Javascript was better.