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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this.

Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probably the opposite. We ought to try new tech and keep an open mind.

Before people go off on Boston Dynamics - there are thousands of spin-offs, pick some other charitable example. The point isn’t about BD.

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Boston Dynamics is and always has been on a trajectory to build useful products based on technology that is promising. Whether they're going to be successful or not is dependent on financing and time and luck of technology.

Blockchain was awesome technology in 2008, and Ethereum brought very interesting developments. But in the end there's only one thing it can do, and that's be an irrefutable ledger, and for most purposes that are of interest to the common person that is an insignificant improvement on centrally governed ledgers.

boston dynamics has never even been close to being on a trajectory to build useful products. they’re a grant-harvesting company first and foremost. they simply do not know how to build efficient and useful locomotors despite at least 3 decades of practice and millions of years of evolutionary precedents literally living right outside its doors.

in that way, the analogy to blockchain is apt: technology focused efforts are not product (read: marketing) oriented ventures.

They literally have a product for sale now. You make it sound like they're somehow worse at making locomotors than other companies are. Do you have any competitors in mind that achieved more with less practice?

there is no market, other than the DoD (a literal monopsony). having a product for sale is for show, not a profitability move.

My company seriously considered buying a couple. There will be a market, especially if they perform well.

the difference is that boston dynamics does not advertise get rich quick schemes to poor people. for example, 70% of the ads on the london tube are blockchain related. if blockchain was just something industry and academia poured money into, no one would have cared so much about it

Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.

I don’t understand your point. So if University research makes it out to the world - but the world decides to create scams from it, is it University’s fault?

I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.

I don't think people are angry about blockchain (the technology) but about promises people make that with this technology will solve almost any society or world problem and then attracting people to invest and then if it does not work make the promise larger and atrract more money.

To use your example: it is like Boston Dynamics and people around will start saying invest in our IRO (Initial Robot Offering) as we will solve with robots everything. We can fix with our robots democracy flaws, we can fix with our robots inflation ... and when asked how will this actually work world wide they will say "We will just build more robots, invest more money into this and then when everybody will have one then that is how we fix those problems".

See the problem here? The problem is not the robot but the company/organisation and business model trying to sell it as a solution for everything without actually talking about the solution itself nor explaining how a robot will help with our financial system at large scale. At every critique they will just say "The solution is to build more robots and thus having robots everywhere so people will think about robots and not about other stuff".

Right. Maybe the big problem is not the lack of solutions, but the fact that we don't really understand the problems?

There's no big problem, science and technology are progressing at a great pace. The whole marketing of snake oil solutions is just a nuisance, they're not really affecting anything of value significantly.

People are annoyed by Blockchain the same way people were annoyed by Justin Bieber, it's a whole lot to do about a person who is just a kid, a cool kid maybe, and he did make some good songs when he got older, but he didn't change the world, and he probably isn't going to either.

People hated Justin Bieber because he appealed to young girls, and tons of men automatically hate everything young girls like as some kind of twisted self defense of their masculinity.

People hate bitcoin because it appeals to people they find really annoying.

> People hated Justin Bieber because he appealed to young girls, and tons of men automatically hate everything young girls like as some kind of twisted self defense of their masculinity.

Naah, nothing to do with "self defense of their masculinity". We were just jealous that they found him so sexy and not us.

That’s just the downside of money being involved

The primary difference is that basic research is conducted with everyone's money -- mostly via grants, and a lot of it in the US underwritten by the federal government -- for everyone's benefit. Even the venture capital industry is largely averse to basic research; they want more Ubers, or companies that can bring University tech to market.

Blockchain? The money flowing in is substantially from retail investors. And that's the problem. This is why we have regulations.

If Bitcoin is like gold, then there's really not much money going into it, into how to make better bit-coin, how to make better gold. All the money just goes into buying the bit-gold itself, or perhaps buying more mining equipment. But Bitcoin is not a replenishable resource so mining it will have diminishing returns, and like with every mining industry the nature is at risk.

From my very (admittedly very inexperienced) perspective, both views here are valid: it's foolish to scour the world for nails, but it doesn't hurt to make a hammer.

Build the technology, think of how it could help, and if you can't find a niche in the world that it fits, don't force the issue. Move onto new things: perhaps re-use some old ideas, of course, but actively get a wider experience, so that you increase your surface area of finding some way for your technology to help.

I have no idea what blockchain does or not. But just because its applications have turned out to be scammy, is it possible that it still has good uses in the future?

May be and may be not. OP is saying more generally that we should stop looking at tech that has no uses. I am disagreeing with that stance and it is just silly to be so wound up about Blockchain zeitgeist to not see through the fog.

the problem with Blockchain is that it is strictly less efficient than centralized databases. therefore the only reason to use it is if you can't trust a centralized database. it's like torrents in the alternate universe where torrents were slower than a download from a server.

It's not a bad analogy. Torrents have more cumbersome UX and are less data efficients than direct downloads, yet they are widely used for some types of applications.

How is a torrent less efficient in data transfer? Do you mean protocol overhead?

This is waste to keep throwing resources at something because maybe someday something good will come out of it. There’s many more areas like sequencing genomes and fighting cancer that these programmers could be spending their time on.

Now that we have the hammer, the biggest advance is.... wait for it.... NFT's.

On the other hand, if you're a criminal looking to launder money, crypto is the biggest advance in years.

Anything with billions in capitalization will never stop looking for customers, and will bend and break the world to find them if needs be.

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