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Comment by mizzao | Hacker News Reader

How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment".

https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado...

This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applications of machine learning became industrial tools.

I'm personally in agreement with the author that crypto is probably a waste of energy and a way to scam people, but I can look at the 30,000 foot view and admit there might be some applications in the future as we climb the "slope of enlightenment".

My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.

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> My wife recently suggested one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.

This is once again better served by a database. Diplomas are inherently centralized and issued by a trusted authority.

Guess we gotta keep brainstorming for use cases -- that's how technology development works, right?

> Guess we gotta keep brainstorming for use cases -- that's how technology development works, right?

Unironically, yes.

I'll grant you that sometimes there's just such a cool tech that you gotta hammer your head against the wall until you find something worth using it for. And sometimes maybe that creates something awesome (though I can't conjure anything at the moment.) I think that's usually a money-loser, and someone else building something like 140 character messaging ends up making the money.

In general though, I believe solving real-world problems with whatever tech is available creates the most value. (And I mean real value, not some numbers on a ledger that don't mean anything at all.) That doesn't mean tech for tech's sake isn't interesting.

The university can shut down, suffer data loss or get hacked. Decentralized storage is an improvement.

No sense in diplomas being transferable though.

Is it the time to invent NTTs? Non-transferable tokens?

Except NFT storage is actually highly centralized?

What happens if OpenSea shuts down?

another market pops up. opensea is just reading on-chain data, just like everyone else.

Except it isn’t. The actual Jorge are hosted on open sea. No one actually stores the “product” on chain because it would be prohibitively expensive for anything pastba few bytes.

No need for a blockchain though. The University can just key-sign the diploma. Then the user can choose to keep it wherever they like.

What makes you think you can’t sign as a trusted authority a decentralized object? Maybe before you condescend you should learn the utter basics of what you are talking about.

> NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.

The problem with this an many similar examples is that there already exists a solution for this sort of authenticity problem: digital signatures. Basically, the university creates a public and secret key pair, makes the public key available on its website, and signs all diplomas with its secret key. This is a much more efficient solution than the one based on blockchain.

Or is that a problem in first place. If someone really wanted to check your diploma. They could ask a proof of permission from you and then contact the issuer...

A cryptographically signed diploma could be sufficient for this use case, no specific need to commit it to a ledger. Certainly the transferability property of NFTs is not desired in this case.

Yes, a machine readable section on the diploma, like a QR code, would suffice here.

Covid vaccination certificates in the EU use this method. No blockchain required, just some good old public/private key cryptography.

"My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again."

This is already happening: https://www.5gnewsroom.com/2022/01/12/iit-kanpur-awards-bloc...

> My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.

You could already do this using x509 certificates signed by a university owned CA. No need to use blockchain here.

Why would people want to be able to sell unique receipts of having acquired their diplomas to each other?

Did Moore ever talk about the time length of such cycles? I imagine it differs from industry to industry. Is blockchain on a 10 year cycle like Uber/Facebook, or a longer cycle?

(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

The hype cycle isn't Moore, it's Gartner -- the research firm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Same question I suppose. The parent diagram featured both the hype cycle and Moore's chasm. Do they both operate on different timescales or are they usually a decade end-to-end?

Honestly? I think it's similar to a lot of pop-business constructions. Post hoc, and it sounds insightful enough to inspire pattern matching, but doesn't actually have any real explanatory power.

Anecdotally, I have heard people applying different timescales for the hype cycle for different technologies. Makes the pattern that much easier to match.

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