Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

426 pointsdoedoedoedoe382 comments

Any technologist familiar with blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs is almost certainly aware that the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes. As a legitimate technological framework for the mythical decentralized "Web 3.0", anyone who spends more then an hour learning about how enthusiasts propose to actually implement "Web 3.0" tech on blockchains knows that there is not a shred of legitimacy to the thought that blockchain can drive even a tiny, mundane application - never-mind the "new web".

For those not familiar with the industry, the YouTube documentary "Line Goes Up" by Dan Olson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g) has been pointed to many times in HN threads, and is a great introduction to how dangerous these technologies really are. Within a few hours of following any tutorial on building a decentralized app, most developers should be able to see what an absolute disaster zone trying to work with this fundamentally broken technology would be, and what a nightmarish step backwards it is for developers concerned with cost, speed, privacy, safety, and ease.

I think it is important as technologists, engineers, and developers that we start making it very loud and clear to the public how fraud-ridden and dangerous these systems are. With most early-adopters running dry, the Ponzi scheme will only be able to continue by expanding into the average consumer market - and if as a community we stay silent about why and how these systems are simply convoluted scam practices, we are dooming ourselves to work with them.

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I dislike this kind of consensus-building rhetoric and I don't like seeing it on the front page of HN. By all means present critiques of crypto/web3, but don't make false claims along the lines of "all right-thinking people agree that X is a scourge upon the earth".

It's equivalent to starting a conversation off with a loaded question - a useful tactic if you're trying to score points, but not likely to lead to anyone learning anything.

He's not talking to people that have to learn, but people that already made up their mind and share what he says.

I think there’s something to be said about this sort of approach on communication and the site guidelines, but I’m sure someone else would word it better than I.

Is blockchain inherently bad?

Asking a tangential question, is a data store like Oracle DB, Postgres, or MongoDB inherently bad?

If you answered yes to one and NOT the other, please rethink about how you view blockchain or any data store. Because perhaps your intention was to be extremely polarizing, which is fair, but I also think your wording is dishonest.

> the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes

I agree there are endless frauds, scams, and Greater Fool schemes every single day, but these types of generalizations are almost always strictly false, especially when talking about a global multi-trillion dollar industry.

The stock market has had its fair share of scams since its inception, but that doesn't mean EVERYONE who traded in the stock market in the 1700/1800s was a scam, hack, ponzi-schemer. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/09/hi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stock_Exchange_Fraud_of_... https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/02/12/385...

Yet here we are today with several stock markets.

Do people get scammed in the stock market? every day. For millions of dollars? definitely. Is there a lot of GOOD regulation to help with that? 100%

And guess what - that GOOD regulation that exists to help control scams doesn't exist in crypto, so it's like we're back in the 1700s where the stock market is brand new and people are figuring out what you can and can't do.

But don't blame the technology, you're being completely dishonest with yourself by doing so and dishonest to those who read this.

I don’t think the logic is this simple. Tools and technology might not be inherently bad, but they may still be dangerous. Proponents of some dangerous technology often want said technology to become public policy, which increases the risk significantly for everybody. Think guns, nuclear weapons, lottery, and even the stock market. These all have varying levels of risk and utility. When the risk outweighs the utility perhaps there should be a public policy which warns against their use, outright bans them when the risk is severe and the utility minuscule. Especially so if the industry is growing bigger and bigger.

Here there is no public policy, and there is unlikely to be any for most countries in the near future. This is why OP voices their concerns that we should step in and advocate for people’s safety. Not because the technology it self is inherently evil, but because it is dangerous and—as the linked video argues—had little utility outside of harmful activity.

Ps. There are indeed some of us that do think the stock market is a scam and the world would be better of without one. In the mean time at least it is highly regulated and financially literate folks do talk loudly about fishy stuff that happens there.

I wasn’t staking a claim here or there. I was more referring to epolanski‘s statement that the post was not intended as a learning experience.

Technically, Blockchain is an inefficient (bad) data structure that is supposed to control transfer of assets (an important infrastructure). So yes, it is objectively bad just like O(n) is objectively better than O(e^n).

"Blockchain" is basically just a Merkle tree with a branching factor extremely close to 1. That is, in and of itself, neithre inefficient nor bad.

However, pairing that with a proof-of-work consensus mechanism is incredibly inefficient, energy-consuming (requires at least 50% of all available compute to be engaged with the blockchain or risk bad actors taking over).

AFAIK There is no application of Blockchain other than consensus. Do you know of any to justify this distinction? (also why merkle tree? looks like a plain old list to me, with very few exceptions while it is being distributed)

Well, a degenerate Merkle tree is a list (any degenerate tree is a list). As a consensus mechanism, I could potentially think of many ways of getting that, but none that are both efficient and trustless.

As-is, the cryptocurrencies we've seen have all been incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Any that would be efficient, both energy-wise and for speed-of-transactions would most probably require ditching complete decentralisation and thus be unacceptable to hard-core ideologues in the "crypto space".

For a rough estimate of the "transactions per second" you'd need to be a global, practical, "we handle all transactions", we can do a rough estimate. There are, what, 6 * 10^9 people on the planet. At a conservative guess, each person does about one exconomic transaction per day. Let's assume that is approximately evenly distributed through each day. A day is 86400 seconds, that's close enough to 10^5 that we might as well use that. That gives us at a minimum 6k transactions per second to be viable for a single global electronic currency.

I think it is one of the undocumented features of HN that polarizing posts tend to be downvoted even though they are technologically interesting. I’m one of the people here on HN that actually enjoy political discussions on HN, particularly those that intersect with technology (like the case is with this post). Apparently there are enough of us here that occasionally a post like this is deemed interesting enough that the community votes to keep it on the front page for a little while.

There are views to be shared (as with pure technical posts) and I can learn where the community stands on these issues.

People on HN tend to hide from and downvote the conversations they don’t want to have. Read into it as to why on your own.

Your comment is literally the ideological problem.

Like many people back then, I also found the whole proof-of-work / blockchain concept to be interesting from a theoretical computer science / distributed systems perspective.

But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as long as it looks like there's a profit to be made, even if the global outcome is to our own detriment.

If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.

The leviathan is loose and it's never going back in a pen until the whole thing collapses under the weight of the fraud. Even legal restrictions on it will only help a little bit as enough moneyed interests are invested in keeping the hype train rolling.

I've consulted for several companies trying to do blockchain based non-money things and can't emphasize to them enough that no one outside computer science and math fields will ever associate them with anything but cryptocurrency (and thus scams) for the rest of our lifetimes.

> can't emphasize to them enough that no one outside computer science and math fields will ever associate them with anything but cryptocurrency (and thus scams)

How so? "Private blockchains" (with no general access + cryptographic proof of commitment) are practically indistinguishable from plain old Merkle trees, and yet I don't see many people arguing that git is some sort of "scam" even outside the CS and math community.

No one called git a “blockchain” until the cryptocurrency fad. The point is that the zero-trust aspect is useless if you can control the source of truth.

It’s it a blockchain one any definition. The current commit does not have a hash of the previous commit.

See that's my point. People who understand what Merkle trees are mostly understand the various utilities in using them, but that has very little to do with what "normal people" think of when they hear blockchain.

Anecdotal, but I hosted a friend and her husband at my place a few months ago (Facebook Product Manager). She was telling me that her team of brilliant engineers are all either leaving to go to TikTok or crypto startups.

Don't kid yourself, people follow the money.

Well FB is the new Phillip Morris so it's relative

Following the money does not mean success. Without market adoption they may well be just destroying their careers.

Capital in general is a paperclip maximizer, not just Bitcoin. All investors are slaves to their capital that takes a mind of its own, a sort of real-world Egregore.

Bitcoin is a flagrant example of this property of capital.

I will risk taking downvotes for not meaningful post, but thank you for this message, really. It is a good connection (the paper clip maximizer <-> capital, I will have to familiarize myself with Egrogore still :)

up: Oh my god, capital as an emergent bigger entity, ok, ok, now I'm scared, thank you :)

up2: So you either fuel it or not, choices choices

up3: This is such a beautiful thing we are all mixed up in, don't you think?

Isn't this statement trivially true for any sort of social system, where you can stand in social capital for Capital.

Capital has tended to trump social capital in the long term, particularly since sufficient capital can shape the public discourse.

Economic capital is interesting because 1) it's not a zero sum game. Most exchanges of economic capital result in the betterment of both parties. 2) in order to get some, you usually provide a good or service to someone else. These things are not necessarily true of other forms of social capital; you can definitely accrue political capital by killing people (or in a less dramatic sense, by being feared by people).

> Most exchanges of economic capital result in the betterment of both parties. 2) in order to get some, you usually provide a good or service to someone else.

It's easy to misread that as something like everybody wins, but it's worth noting that such exchanges can still be extremely exploitative.

Exploitativeness is extremely ill-defined and often used to push an agenda that is not really aligned with the interest of the party "being exploited". In any case, acknowledging that exchanges can be "unfair" for some definition of "unfair", I did use the word "Most". Capitalism/free markets do not guarantee that humans are not shitty but I challenge you to find a social system that does.

Exploitativeness is not necessarily ill-defined. It's just that when you define it rigourously, it either never happens or happens too often for the definers' ideological persuasion.

And by the way, your statement is also extremely ill-defined. If you say that most transactions are not zero-sum, you are presupposing some kind of value system, which you didn't specify, and the value system for which that is true are also very ill-defined.

It's also true that a positive sum interaction could absolutely be exploitative. So the actual amount of exploitative interactions is strictly higher than the number of zero sum or negative sum interactions.

> Exploitativeness is extremely ill-defined and often used to push an agenda that is not really aligned with the interest of the party "being exploited".

One could say something similar about "betterment" in your original statement.

> Capitalism/free markets do not guarantee that humans are not shitty

Obviously.

> but I challenge you to find a social system that does.

We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It irks me when "capitalism/free markets" is presented as some kind of "best possible economic system," or that it cannot be challenged unless the challenger is perfect. It's a set of trade offs (advocated by people with their own agendas), and I see little reason why different people shouldn't advocate different sets of trade-offs.

For social capital, the statement is tautological and has no meaning. Social capital is generally defined as the set of all interpersonal relationships and shared or individual ideas. This isn't a paperclip maximizer nor is it meaningful that groups of people are compelled to act in ways that follow what people in that group believe, do, and how they interact with each other; it's a tautology.

I think that the fact that this applies to capital in general and to abstract SHA256 capability in particular is much more interesting. After all, a bitcoin ASIC is not an interpersonal relationship or a goal of anyone or any group of people.

If you don't think that maximization of social capital doesnt lead people to do dumb shit things allow me to introduce you to real stuff with escalating degrees of real consequence over millennia like TikTok, eating competitions, luxury yachts, most of Hollywood, Jeffrey Epstein, various wars over the course of milennia like Assad murdering his citizens in Syria to dumb wars in Europe for centuries, crusades, pol pot, e.g.

Yeah I just don't understand how any of those things are bizarre or non-obvious. People want to be entertained, have power over other people, have more resources, etc...

I also like to think of it as something analogous to drug addiction with the dopamine positive feedback loop.

Crypto is the crystal meth of finance. Capital completely divorced from labor.

In that sense, crypto is exactly the same as forex, money markets, equities markets, futures markets, derivatives markets, etc. We haven't been coupling markets with labor for like 300 years now.

Not at all.

Forex yes, futures yes, derivatives yes - these are speculative or hedging instruments. Not investments. I've never heard anyone advocate people HODL /NQ futures in their investment account and borrow against them as an investment strategy. Let alone calling them "the future of money." But this is basically what crypto is.

Money market funds aren't investments, they're cash equivalents, but they still facilitate lending. They're the present of money.

Equities are positive-sum instruments where you purchase a fractional ownership stake in a business that employs people and uses the revenue from their business to return capital to investors in the form of dividends, buybacks or intrinsic value appreciation. Their performance is inherently tied to labor.

These are not at all the same thing.

> Not investments.

The idea that there's any viable technical reasoning behind TSLA trading as high as it is, or behind what happened with GME and AMC last year is simply fanciful. It's like you've never seen an IPO pump and dump. It's literally the exact same market behavior you saw with ICOs; side-note: it's even worsened now with the advent of SPACs.

Yeah, you can argue until the cows come home that "equities are positive-sum instruments where you purchase a fractional ownership stake in a business," but that doesn't mean that hedge funds won't treat them as speculative instruments, particularly around earnings calls. Or that hedge funds won't try to spin the narrative to justify their risky positions (e.g.: the short squeeze on GME).

Again, just to reiterate: the markets are almost completely decoupled from labor (for better or for worse). It's all speculation (to certain degrees).

Again you're conflating a bunch of unrelated concepts.

Equities may trade above a fair valuation - individually, or as a group. That doesn't mean they're not as a group positive-sum instruments. You may lose money on a positive-sum instrument. They're also not money, and never claimed to be.

You're forcing a narrative around short timeframes. Equity markets are tied to the performance of the business in the full course of time which is tied to labor.

Crypto like futures and options are zero-sum or negative-sum instruments if you include the rake. Every dollar in appreciation comes from a new investor. Every, single, one. That's the difference. It's just trading bags of air back and forth.

> Equity markets are tied to the performance of the business in the full course of time which is tied to labor.

They're not though, and they haven't been for centuries. I gave you 3 examples off the top of my head. Markets are tied to sentiment; let me refer you to the Keynesian beauty contest[1]. This is very basic economic theory.

> Crypto like futures and options are zero-sum or negative-sum instruments if you include the rake. Every dollar in appreciation comes from a new investor. Every, single, one. That's the difference.

There is no "rake" in crypto, so I'm not even sure what you mean by that. Second, every dollar in appreciation on a decentralized exchange (say, SushiSwap) is a result of the automated market maker's supply and demand response. This is functionally exactly the same as what happens with order books (like on the stock market) but it just happens to use liquidity pools to facilitate this (because volume is much lower). For every seller, there's a buyer, and for every buyer, there's a seller: that's how markets work. Third, crypto is actually not at all like options because whereas option contracts can expire worthless (e.g. they run out of time and can no longer be exercised), if you buy some poopcoin, even if it tanks, you'll still own said coin (kind of like a penny stock).

> It's just trading bags of air back and forth.

This might be true, but people trade all kinds of things I personally find dumb (Pokémon cards, rare sneakers, etc.). Looks like a lot of people see value in cryptocurrency, who am I to judge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Markets are tied to sentiment in the short term, but to labor performance in the long term - this is the distinction I was trying to make. I'm just re-stating the adage that in the short term the market is a popularity content but in the long term it is a weighing machine. You called out AMC and GME. AMC was trading at like $8 in 2020. It spiked to $60, and its back down to $15. Which honestly I could make a case for since they took advantage of the speculative mania to clear a bunch of debt off their books.

Give GME a hot minute and the same thing will happen - it has already started. Peaked at $500 and is sitting at $98.50.

> There is no "rake" in crypto, so I'm not even sure what you mean by that.

There's a few different rakes. The overwhelming majority of crypto trading takes place on centralized exchanges where they take a commission on each trade. Off exchanges, in PoW currencies, new coins are issued which are then sold on these centralized exchanges to pay the bills. This exerts negative price pressure socializing the cost of running the network - another form of rake. In a PoS currency new tokens are issued to validators where non-stakers are diluted - another form of rake.

In each case (exchanges, miners, stakers) a commission is taken by the folks operating the game, which is exactly what a rake is in poker.

Expiry is not why options are the same as crypto. It's the zero-sum nature that's the same. Winners pay the losers, no new value is created in the options market. Ditto the crypto market.

> This might be true, but people trade all kinds of things I personally find dumb (Pokémon cards, rare sneakers, etc.). Looks like a lot of people see value in cryptocurrency, who am I to judge.

For sure, but Pokemon cards aren't claiming to be money and aren't legal tender in one of the poorest countries on earth. It's an issue due to scale, not due to its intrinsically being dumb, which to be clear, it also is. We cannot allow it to get to the point where its stupidity represents a systemic risk to the rest of us who choose not to treat Pokemon cards as money.

People in general are paperclip maximizers, not just Capital. All people are slaves to their desires that takes a mind of its own, a sort of real-world Incentives System.

Chasing power (be it financial, social, political) is a flagrant example of this property of People.

TL;DR: The problem isn't capital. It's humanity as a whole.

I think that this is just devolving the concept of "paperclip maximizer" past the point of absurdity. As I understand it, a paperclip maximizer is a device which has some utility function that it maximizes to an extreme point that it actually ends up providing negative utility to whoever built it or society in general.

I don't see how humans doing what they want fits in there. People aren't slaves to their desires that have a mind of their own, people are the minds which make up desires and destroy them. On the other hand, a paperclip maximizer - or, I think, capital - has a singular desire, which is to make as many paperclips as possible or as much profit as possible, everything else be damned, forever.

Cryptocurrency started as a challenge to financial capitalism and ended up becoming an absurdist parody of it.

Incentives are key to bring the technology back into the realm of usefulness (in the grand scheme of things). Externalities need to be priced into energy costs. In principle there is no problem with using the electric power of a small country for proof of work purposes, as long as the production of that energy is not harmful to everybody via global warming or pollution.

In the end, more efficient ways of achieving the same result will prevail in a well functioning market. Currently everything is skewed because crypto is mined with cheap coal power that the global society is subsidizing by paying for externalities.

I don't think crypto is unique in this. Gold and diamond production is also pretty expensive and useless (apart from their industrial applications, which are limited in comparison to their use to store value).

> Incentives are key to bring the technology back into the realm of usefulness (in the grand scheme of things). Externalities need to be priced into energy costs. In principle there is no problem with using the electric power of a small country for proof of work purposes, as long as the production of that energy is not harmful to everybody via global warming or pollution.

I disagree. Pricing externalities into energy costs isn't sufficient, because proof of work is basically pissing massive amounts of irreplaceable energy resources into the wind in order to play a stupid, unnecessary game. I think it's better those resources stay in the ground or be used for a more productive purposes, and making miners pay more for energy isn't going to change the fundamental wastefulness of their activity.

You convinced me. Eventually it should be forbidden (or made prohibitively expensive) to use fossil fuels for energy generation or transportation purposes because the reserves that are left should be used in the chemical industry and others. I didn't want to defend mining (it is wasteful, even when powered by 100% renewables), just wanted to point out that most of the current harm to society is caused by its fossil fuel electricity generation needs.

> we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first

that's a perfect way to describe it. thanks. sigh.

TIL: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer

> we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.

We are spitting distance from post-scarcity in the developed world. The problem is that we are addicted to power and status (which both feed on scarcity).

> If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.

I think there should be more political pressure behind banning crypto currencies and companies that deal with them should be cut out from banking system.

I would be even okay with just doing it for proof of work coins, if people want to keep doing their libertarian experiment it's okay for me, but at least remove this insane incentive to use more and more resources.

You need to define AGI.

https://www.acronymfinder.com/AGI.html

> "we need to find a way to change the incentives globally"

Shameless plug: basex.com

> BaseX measures "triple bottom line" - People Planet Prosperity - new definition of value - accounting for environmental impact and wellbeing.

It's is all about incentives.

I find it strange that people keep promoting that YouTube documentary. Ignoring tone issues, there is a lot of cherry picking and other logical fallacies. For example, he talks about how terrible Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies.

It seems to me that people that do an hour of research are polarized hard. Either love it or hate it. The more time you spend understanding the space the more nuanced it becomes. Many are using the technology to facilitate scams and overpromising, but that doesn't make the technology fundamentally useless or bad.

> Many are using the technology to facilitate scams and overpromising, but that doesn't make the technology fundamentally useless or bad.

True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam.

Blockchain is an immutable ledger. Sure there are scams, just like there are on the regular internet, however, I think there is a lot of potential for blockchain. We're in the early phases of it, but there is more to blockchain that just the currency aspect of it.

«We're in the early phases of it» I've been hearing this for years now. How long can something stay in early phases ?

Defi is roughly 2-3 years old, and smart contracts are less than 7.

To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.

Yeah, but wen the World Wide Web was 7 years old we already had MSN, Google, imdb, geocities, the Space Jam website, etc.

Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after.

Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.

Using the internet is a terrible comparison because of the physical and hardware issues at play. The web is an appropriate comparison.

The web is a network application on the internet.

Blockchain is a network application on the internet.

After 13 years the total number of blockchain users is likely less than 100 million worldwide. From 1993-2006 the web grew to a billion users. In 1993 only 8% of US households had a computer with a modem…

Considering the web, mobile, and social media that blockchain has been able to leverage over the past 13 years it should have at least 20X the number of users.

Blockchain user adoption has been a complete failure up to this point.

I wrote a rant about this earlier this week:

https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...

You think it's that easy to replace the existing financial system?

I'm not talking about the financial system - I'm talking about blockchain as a technology platform to do /something/ people actually want or need. The Web, Facebook, Android, etc were all platforms that people embraced (for obvious reasons) - at the rate of 10-35x that of blockchain. Where is the killer app/functionality built on blockchain where the average person walking down the street sees it and says "I NEED THAT"? After 13 years it does not exist and the user adoption numbers very clearly reflect that.

In terms of replacing the financial system - I've been active in this space for a while now. I've been to meetups, events, large confs, etc in addition to the usual online hangouts. The overwhelmingly majority of users interacting with the blockchain don't know or care about "replacing the financial system". You can tell because they can't go 10 seconds without referencing their investment in dollars (how much they made or lost) or "I 100x'd it" or whatever. There are a few true believers who think in terms of "replacing the financial system" but out the 13% of US households that have anything to do with crypto the vast majority of usage is speculative trading. The blockchain to them is just another ticker symbol someone told them about and they click around in a web interface to buy/sell/trade.

We have a historical example of a new and "innovative" consumer financial product - the credit card. The Diners Club Card was introduced in 1950. By 1970 51% of US households had one. I don't have to tell you that is pretty good adoption for a completely different time and era but when something is immediately and obviously useful people adopt it. Always have, always will.

The internet and world wide web were both useful immediately since they were both a solution to a problem. Blockchain seems like a solution searching for a problem.

Some things take time to develop, be adopted and optimized. Not everything in tech is a Javascript framework.

Not being snarky, but was anyone still saying this about the web in 2006 when it was 13 years old? Going from Mosaic to what we had in 2006 was quite a bit more effort than a JavaScript framework - multiple browser engines and JS frameworks themselves were created in that time. Not to mention JavaScript itself.

The first steam engine was invented in, well, it really depends on your definition of steam engine, but let's use Newcomen's engine and say 1712. That engine was HUGE, and the idea it would ever be made portable is comical. The first usable steam engine doesn't seem to have come along until 1769.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in the 1850s, and how many decades did it take for international phone calls to be essentially free?

The first road vehicles were unreliable and suffered from poor roads, it took decades for the Model T to arrive.

The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, how long did it take for there to be cell service across most of the world?

So, to answer your question, technologies can be in their "early phases" for quite a long time before they have any meaningful impact.

Here's Bill Gates defending "internet" in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk.

He gets totally annihilated by Letterman. Bill can't even say a single use-case that is better than what already exists.

Gosh, either you read too much clickbait or you write it. That's not what "totally annihilated" means.

Bill mentioned email, and that's better in some ways, they just didn't get into it.

There wasn't in 1995 much that was dramatically valuable for regular folks. The conversation doesn't get into what the potential would be.

This is Bill being reasonable. He comes across as a fair-minded person, not a delusional zealot. He's about the opposite of what crypto-enthusiasts sound like. He doesn't come across as someone making outrageous claims and thus undermining his credibility.

The word immutable has a meaning.

Blockchain does not fit that meaning.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”.

I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.

The statistical likelihood of a 51% attack happening on the blockchain seems statistically way less likely than a hack targeting our existing financial system.

I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code.

To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.

Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much about.

yah, I have actually thought about this. Tbf, I'm not advocating strongly for or against blockchain. I'm just keeping an open mind in the same way when web 1.0 was being developed and researched.

I think it's fairly destructive to just discount new technology based on feeling. It really is a fun technology to learn and the more minds like we see on HN that research the topic, the more likelihood we will have in expanding the usefulness and security of blockchain use-cases.

No, but you can discount the technology based on it’s historical records compared to it’s promises. Web 1.0 promised to be a good system of exchanging documents which could refer to each other. It delivered that pretty nicely and later improved on it.

Bitcoin promised to be a decentralized alternative to fiat currency and failed when it couldn’t scale to be even a tiny fraction of the global transaction. When people tried to improve on the original proposal they also failed at the very same thing while inventing new problems in the mean time. As of yet the only realized potentials of the technology are scams (which were never promised—at least to my knowledge).

Compared to Web 1.0 I think it is pretty safe for you to discount the technology based on a history of scams and failure to realize promised potentials.

The OP's point was that 51% of miners could agree to a change, and in a system where there are very large players that might not involve that many people.

And it already happened a bunch of times. Bitcoin has been forked a bunch of times, and one could argue the fork that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash was a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin itself.

It isn’t as expensive as you think to 51% attack various coins.

https://www.crypto51.app/

You only mentioned BTC but that’s just one coin. Several alt coins (with multi billion market caps) have had 51% attacks including ETC and BSV.

But anyway the original point was that it is literally wrong to say that blockchains are immutable. You didn’t address that point at all, so I guess you agree with it?

Let's say the world's banking is running on blockchain. The US Congress is basically a veto on world banking, and I don't see how blockchain technologies can change any of that. The US Congress can pass a law saying any US bank and anyone transacting with them must use a specific version of the blockchain code, decided by the Department of Commerce.

If it's illegal to transact with the US under a previous version of this hypothetical blockchain banking technology, that's your 51% right there.

How could blockchain allow legal banking institutions to refuse to follow the law?

If 51% of miners could change anything everyone would be spinning up Alpine Virtual Machines with minuscule hash power. You fundamentally misunderstand how blockchain works.

Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.

You do not know what you are talking about. The fact that grifters often don't know what they are talking about and use that to whip up positive spin on blockchain tech does not give you any good excuse to do the opposite - you are both morons.

> Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.

So... you’re saying it’s mutable.

You both are talking from the unsaid point of view that an immutable public ledger is a good thing. The reality of our world disagrees with your unsaid compact.

Nothing needs an immutable public ledger. Any fraud due to shipping, or banking, or taxes, is a problem of inaccurate entry of data into a ledger, not nefarious changes to what already exists.

Immutable ledgers are a godsend and are useful in many different contexts:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_notebook

- https://www.newamerica.org/digital-impact-governance-initiat...

Adjustments needed for shipping, banking, or taxes are trivially accommodated; those are additional events which can be appended to the log.

None of your examples are all, at the same time, immutable, public, or ledgers. The Georgian land thingie is the most interesting, but a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.

> a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. The ledger is immutable. That doesn't mean the state is immutable! Immutable state is not very useful. A judge could absolutely order that the ownership of some parcel is changed, but the change will appear as a separate record and everybody will be able to see the change and nobody can credibly deny that the change happened, not even the judge.

Blockchains are not immutable because nothing made of matter is immutable.

If you wanted something to be immutably published you probably want to get it into a major print newspaper; it would be extremely difficult to find and destroy every single copy of the WSJ for 2022-01-28.

Even that is not immutable though, finding and destroying every single copy is possible. Hopefully you agree that it is nice to have the word "immutable". And maybe you agree that most of the times you have called something "immutable" what you have really meant is that mutating it would be extremely expensive.

Historic bitcoin blocks are mutable, but mutating them is very expensive and also has never happened, this seems like a good use-case for the word "immutable".

You seem to be assuming that I am making the mistake of robotically defining the word "immutable" to some impossible level of unchanging.

I assure you I am not. I am simply pointing out the ridiculousness of someone stating that blockchains are immutable when they are changeable and have changed.

In contrast, your example of snatching up every copy of a major print newspaper for a single day has never happened and will never happen.

But blockchains have changed and once regulators and courts get involved, you'll see just how malleable they are.

You've been kind enough to make a testable prediction here! Let me make it a little more concrete. Currently Bitcoin block 700000 has the hash 0000000000000000000590fc0f3eba193a278534220b2b37e9849e1a770ca959, I'm very confident that 5 years from now it will have the same hash. What do you think is the chance that history will have been rewritten?

People keep saying that and yet when pressed for some hypothetical application that might make sense to do with a Blockchain they just put forth ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny like deed management or transferable game assets.

I took things a different direction:

https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...

> True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam.

Your comment reminds me of Guns... and how crazy the US people are about them haha.

Has it ever occurred to you that the scammers are just loudest voice in the room? They're not known for being passive.

Filecoin offers an S3-like service for a radically lower price: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back...

You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.

I don't get it. Why does this need crypto to work?

From what I've seen, its an auction to provide a service.

Why would I ask my neighbour to host data, rather than two or three expert companies that understand backups, power- and temperature requirements?

I'm no storage expert, but it seems like the reputable cloud storage providers tend to have lousy pricing. A quick search turns up the quote "I’d be surprised if their S3 gross margin were lower than 70%".

I think people use S3 not because their prices are great, but because they're not comfortable trusting some no-name company that offers better pricing. Protocols like Filecoin aim to remove the need for trust, by having untrusted storage providers prove that they're storing some data.

These anonymous storage providers almost certain aren't following convention best practices in terms of RAID, UPSs etc, so a single copy of the data has a greater likelihood of being lost, but we can compensate for that with extra redundancy.

I'll start by saying it doesn't matter whether you get it. The GP made a claim that there is no use for the technology which is not a scam. But people, today, are using filecoin to store files and are not being scammed. It doesn't matter whether you personally would want to use Filecoin; the point I'm trying to make is that claims of the form "the entire space is a giant scam" are simply false.

But I'll also try to answer your new question: You're right that it's just an auction to provide a service, but crypto enables the auction!

S3 can charge such high margins because they're a trusted brand, the chance they'll lose my data is much lower than the chance I'll lose my own data, but this makes it hard for anyone else to enter the market without spending a lot of time proving themselves. Filecoin includes fancy cryptography and incentive schemes which, if you trust them, allow you to trust any storage provider using Filecoin.

Crypto payments means that anybody, anywhere in the world, can participate in the auction without spending any time negotiating contracts or setting payment rails. They can turn their computer on and start storing files.

This turns file storage into a commodity service and allows you to store your files for commodity prices, that's an incredible win!

>Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies.

This is very frequent tone on many subreddits, whether you used it intentionally or not, you became part of the problem: none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is?

This week Solana had some problems with network congestion, subreddit was instantly flooded by what initially looked to be anti-CC movement, but quickly turned out to be Stellar supporters looking for new buyers, day before trading value dropped 15%...

Edit:

This is it, look at what I did. I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS but people jumped to comments to protect this project asking me to explain myself from something I did not say. I didn't even state my opinion on blockchain, PoS, Solana nor Stellar.

Why is Proof of Stake bad for the planet?

> none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet

How is Solana bad for the planet exactly? I don't use Solana, or particularly like it, but it's proof of stake, so if you'd resist the urge to jump to conclusions, you'd find with a couple of minutes of research that its energy usage is comparable to a few average households.

> In total, the entire Solana network — with 1,196 validator nodes and an estimated 20,000,000,000 transactions — uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households.

https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...

How much does AWS use for a comparable number of transactions? Your numbers don’t mean anything without additional context.

> …you'd resist the urge to jump to conclusions, you'd find with a couple of minutes of research that its energy usage is comparable to a few average households.

>> …uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households.

>>> How much does AWS use for a comparable number of transactions? Your numbers don’t mean anything without additional context.

lol

Fair enough, the energy usage is an order of magnitude higher (but other proof of stake cryptos with fewer validators do run on a much leaner network, though I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing)

From your own link though, with the current usage of the Solana network, a transaction consumes about as much energy as a google search. Not exactly something worth drawing out the energy pitchforks over.

>none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet

>I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS

Isn't this a contradiction?

>none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is?

This is the opinion i started finding on subreddits more and more often, not my opinion.

Yes, if you remove two compatible lines from their carefully positioned contexts then they risk becoming contradictions. This is the exact point that the comment you are replying to is making.

At this point the enthusiasts need to start getting very specific about how blockchains or cryptocurrency is making the world a better place if they want people to stop calling for it to be banned globally, because the explicit harms caused by it are piling up really fast.

The issue is with what it means to “make the world a better place”. Many people think blockchains are working towards that while others don’t see value in what is offered.

As long as we transition to Proof of Stake networks, people who aren’t interested in blockchains should just ignore them and governments can go after anyone who uses blockchain (or any other technology) to scam people.

Bitcoin has made it very clear that proof of waste is a hill they will die on

didn’t Solana have an outage this weekend?

SOL has been ddosed multiple times, its laughable that people consider solana anything but a centralized vc shitcoin

the point of blockchain technology is decentralization, the chain going down over some "features", design flaws; barely qualifies it as a layer 1

"you know you've done something wrong when a blockchain has a status page"

Yes, even the good people at r.cryptocurrency turned on the project and see it as a naked cash grab

I've begun to watch the video, I'm about 15 minutes in. Already I've seen an admission of bias against "hypercapitalism" as a cornerstone to the entire viewpoint, several obvious attempts to gloss over inconvenient details that the filmmaker is clearly aware of and understands, and a sequence of ad hominem attacks against prominent capitalist figures in the industry. Still, I'll hold judgment on the documentary as a whole until I've completed it, which I will.

There are definitely some weak spots in the video that are easy to attack, but it doesn't discredit the overall premise. Also, it's too long which is unfortunate because few people will watch to the end.

I'm about an hour in now, the video doesn't actually present a compelling case so far as to the validity of it's premise. I'm entering NFT land in the video and they appear to be overall right about the NFT market, not right about a lot of the technical details but right about the market being an empty hole, but up until this point it's all been hand wavy self supporting nothingness. And even though I agree with their premise on NFTs, I have yet to see an explanation of the premise on them.

All in all it seems the guy is preaching to the choir and grinning along with head nodders and not actually educating anyone on anything.

Edit: finally finished the video, the guy did a pretty good job criticizing the current state of affairs, the relative uselessness of organization on blockchains, NFTs in particular, web3 and the tokenization of the universe, but I think he's wrong about the utility of cryptocurrency as currency, and the potential to tokenize real world assets that are already bought and sold, for record keeping purposes.

Solans is centralized. The fact devs can take it down for maintenance or that it can be trivially ddosed is proof it is not nearly as decentralized or robust as cryptos promise.

I argue that the whole blockchain approach is a solution designed for the needs of the early adopter... and is just seeking a mass market problem to solve.

I reach this conclusion, not as a cynic, but as a skeptical advocate.

I ask everyone I can this line of question and have yet to get an answer that doesn't involve magical thinking.

Question:

Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do?

My sense is that the answer is "nothing" (except decentralization).

If that's correct, then all of the technical complexity is to be able to achieve decentralization.

However...

The mass market (everyone to the right of the chasm... early majority, late majority and laggards) has proven with our dollars that we don't care about a goal of decentralization. In fact we make sacrifices to have more centralization because we love it. It simplifies our lives.

So if the major market doesn't care about the only real value, then there is no real mass market value.

In that case, blockchain would be just another early adopter solution trying to not die off in the chasm.

I always come back to this detail :

> For example, in April and May alone, more than 30 thousand unique wallets bought NFTs from popular marketplaces such as nonfungible.com on any given day this month! This is down slightly from the 39,000 buyers throughout March.

I've heard on a podcast that there are only 400 000 wallets owning NFTs. It's a minuscule market, and it's not getting invariably hotter. It's very possible we're hearing so much about them now because the market is already contracting.

And this terrible detail coming from a scourge of the Earth website all in on NFTs and other scams: https://earthweb.com/nft-statistics/

>Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do?

My opinion: The problem is not that traditional technology can't provide the same value. It could, but it doesn't. The world is still in the process of mapping all societal/legal/finacial rules and procedures to a digital framework. In germany it is called "digitalization". And (at least) germany mostly sucks at doing this. In a way, blockchains provide a playground to explore possibilities no traditional framework i know of does.

> what a nightmarish step backwards it is for developers concerned with cost, speed, privacy, safety, and ease.

1) There's a lot of research and development into blockchain technology by very smart people. The systems are improving. What technology we'll have 5, 10, or 25 years from now is going to be much different than what exists now. It's a lack of imagination to think that because crypto is "slow" now (and not all of it is by the way), that it will always be the case. The equivalent is looking at a 5.25" floppy disk in the early 80s and thinking that all physical media is forever going to be too small and too slow to be usable.

2) Low cost, speed, privacy, safety, and usability are great attributes to have: and in many cases are currently superior on established centralized systems. But don't other important attributes exist?

* What about resistance to censorship? A centralized system can ban you because of what you say or even because of who you are. Maybe a purely decentralized system cannot. I guess that's one reason why a lot of people fear it.

* And what about trust? Many people do not trust a lot of centralized systems from powerful groups: such as how many shares of stock are even in existence given the practice of naked shorting. Check out this story.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/rsaevv/in_march...

> In March of 2005 this guy bought 100% of shares (1.1M shares) in a traded company to prove the corruption. The next two days that same stock traded 50 million times and dropping the price 99% in two hours. All this with LITERALLY NO SHARES AVAILABLE TO BORROW OR SHORT.

Isn't it possible that the drawbacks of blockchains might be worth it if they can prove perfectly transparent and reduce or eliminate corruption? Imagine a stock market that ran on some next generation blockchain tech that was perfectly transparent without any doubt about the number of shares in existence. No more dirty tricks or fraud possible. Are the upsides of this not worth any discussion?

> A centralized system can ban you because of what you say or even because of who you are.

So can anyone who builds a service on top of blockchain technology™ which is something a user ultimately has to interface with. Just because you have some unremovable flags set on your magical decentralized database that doesn't mean a service can't choose to ignore it.

> eliminate corruption

> Imagine a stock market that ran on some next generation blockchain tech that was perfectly transparent without any doubt about the number of shares in existence. No more dirty tricks or fraud possible.

Please elaborate, how does any of what you vaguely describe "eliminate corruption". How would it prevent dirty tricks and fraud?

One of the points of the folding ideas video is that systems always become centralized in one way or another over time. Even the current ones are not nearly as decentralized as is claimed.

The bit about the stock is that shares counting issue isn't a 'problem' for the stock market, its a feature. They could easily solve this with existing technology. They don't because they make too much money playing the games. Blockchain won't fix that any more than it will solve censorship or cure cancer.

>There's a lot of research and development into blockchain technology by very smart people.

That is precisely why this is such a societally detrimental technology. The communities that are forming around it are self-reinforcing and suck up both monetary and intellectual capital.

All of this hype about crypto's "potential" is demolished in Dan's excellent work.

>It's a lack of imagination to think that because crypto is "slow" now (and not all of it is by the way), that it will always be the case.

Proof of work combined with the deflationary nature of these currencies is literally the antithesis of efficiency. The system necessarily needs to become less efficient over time because new coins need to become asymptotically harder to mint.

>Maybe a purely decentralized system cannot.

It's clear that the systems that interpret the blockchain (and even the blockchain itself, if wealthy and well-connected folks decide to fork) can be pressured into "censorship."

>if they can prove perfectly transparent and reduce or eliminate corruption?

No system that relies on human inputs can prove to be perfectly transparent or eliminate corruption. The blockchain itself can have provably unbreakable crypto that prevents man-in-the-middle manipulation of data but that in and of itself does not govern the interface between the chain and the people feeding it data.

> Proof of work combined with the deflationary nature of these currencies is literally the antithesis of efficiency.

1) First of all, are we discussing crypto as a currency or blockchains as a technology? Your criticisms seem all over the place here.

2) Maybe talking negatively about the dangers of deflationary currencies while we're in a period of economic inflation and peoples' purchasing power is being deliberately destroyed is not the best idea.

3) I'm not convinced that deflation in a currency is a bad thing. Mainstream economics schools hate deflation, but the Austrian school writes very favorably on the merits of deflation: https://mises.org/library/deflating-deflation-myth

4) Proof of work might or might not be around in the future: who knows? But that doesn't mean that blockchains are unworkable, just that one implementation might not stand the test of time.

> No system that relies on human inputs can prove to be perfectly transparent or eliminate corruption.

Look into what Oracles are and how they can guarantee the reliability of information and the concept of cryptoeconomic security. Who knows where this ends up going and if it's widely used or not, but there's a very high chance that all of the theoretical objections you would make here have been addressed.

>First of all, are we discussing crypto as a currency or blockchains as a technology?

Blockchains require an incentive for members of their network to maintain a copy of the shared ledger. Modeling it after a deflationary currency creates a first-mover advantage that generates this momentum. We're not talking about "theoretical objections" or hypothetical better systems, the commonly implemented blockchain systems are creating problems that are manifesting themselves today, and every ounce of capital invested into them creates real inertia against changing how they fundamentally work.

>Proof of work might or might not be around in the future: who knows?

We can not afford to be ambivalent about how this technology evolves.

> If an oracle relies on a single source of truth (centralized), that can lead to issues: the data source can be hacked in a man-in-the-middle attack, or altered by its owner, in order to sway smart contracts. Decentralized oracles (consensus oracles) increase the reliability of the information provided to smart contracts by querying multiple data sources, thus distributing trust between participants. However, this does not achieve trustlessness, since oracles are not part of the main blockchain consensus, and thus not part of the security mechanisms of public blockchains.

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Blockchain_oracle

If this is a topic you're curious about, look into some of Sergey Nazarov's interviews and/or pay attention to the topic of "cryptoeconomic security" in relation to oracles. Basically the idea is to have a system where the cost of corrupting the information on a network is always far more than the potential gain. Whether or not this is possible or will succeed is a question mark, but I'd think many potential objections and question marks have been addressed.

> Proof of work might or might not be around in the future: who knows?

Let's not argument in terms of 'what ifs'. Proof of waste is real here and now.

I fear that a decentralized web that can’t be moderated also creates a 4chan like culture with extra steps. People, when anonymous, seem to race to the bottom in terms of ethics and accountability.

Trust comes from when I know who the other person is, not just his/her/its attributes. A good debate comes from strengthening the things that bind us in an open forum.

Sofar blockchain seems to be about making money (and I agree with OP on this point) and doing its version of the .com bubble.

Not saying that nothing of value might come from it, but at this point I don’t see anything of that kind.

People can be anonymous but still accountable. Require users to post a cryptocurrency bond to post, and let others lay bets against the user's future score in some sort of crowd-sourced karma system. This lets other users gain if they successfully predict that the user's post will be disapproved of (get paid for reporting, e.g. obvious spam!) while conversely rewarding the user for good content that others are maliciously trying to bury or "cancel".

Is this an already implemented system, or is this a potential technology?

Ok. Who is the arbitrator then? A centralised party? If not, then maybe people who stake the most? Because that way you can literally pay for the right to decide what is "truth".

It reminds me of the democratic bus analogy. A bus with no driver and everyone with a steering wheel. All the input gets averaged out. Such a bus would get nowhere.

Reminds me of this https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/17/5418690/play-this-twitch-...

They did manage to get through some of the game at least!

Has anyone ever tried this? Sounds like a fascinating experiment. Of course it's basically all game theory. If a critical mass of people cooperated it could work.

I read it in a really old science magazine at a family gathering, and I think it was an article on democracy by some science institute. That’s all I remember. It would be an interesting thing to research, but it should be in the literature already.

The best (or at least, most successful) answer to this has come through federation. Platform owners are allowed to create and moderate their own groups with their own distinct rules and regulation. From there, each group decides which of the other groups it would like to interact with, as well as ones that it would like to ignore. The result is a system where everyone can live happily; 4chan trolls can federate with 4chan trolls, mainstream instances can block objectionable content, and people who want to use both can freely make accounts for either group. The result is a pretty good balance of freedom with highly-moderated content, even highly sensitive groups have had a pretty good experience using this tactic, since if all else fails the group can defederate from everyone else and choose only to interact with other group members, or selectively federate with other groups that share their same values.

The entire crypto landscape is dirty tricks and frauds already. The blockchain is just an immutable data structure (a hash or vector commitment tree). It works like ink on a paper, but it's publicly verifiable. What happens on it, and how that's interpreted is a different question.

A blockchain is like having an append-only log in someone's house. Everyone can look at it, nobody can erase from it, and everyone can buy an expensive pen to create a new entry. The people who own the house can replace the log with an older copy if they wanted to, if they don't like the new entries for example, which is what happened to Ethereum, but the real opportunity is not compromising the blockchain, it's running scams with it and on it. With no oversight, no fraud detection, no customer protection anything goes. All the blockchain can do is setting the fraud in stone.

We already have better cryptographic tools for verifiability supporting transparency and censorship resistance, and they are much faster and more pratical.

You can't replace existing things with a Merkle tree and proof of whatever consensus, because the powerful will always have more of that whatever. Once they do you get a centralized system worst than any existing one.

Why be afraid of fraud on blockchain? In the case of DeFi the contracts are technically readable (though EVM is not a good platform for readability; if you can't name projects which have fixed this you don't have the right to make fun of "its early"), and those that cannot read contracts for whatever reason are fully aware of the risk they take - when more versed people agree in unison there are no inbuilt scams the laymen can remove their risk.

The same applies to blockchain in general. If a new layer-1 is released you audit the code, the token supply, distribution - if its not put out clearly to you its suspicious, otherwise you go through the same process. Those who can read first hand what the risks are can get in early, those who cannot wait. Its not rocket science.

If you cared so much about fraud victims, you would drill into new, atomic contracts and protocols, but instead you take the lazy, spiteful approach of calling the whole space a fraud and expect people to believe you because you work with computers. Can you fix my printer while you rationalize your position?

> Why be afraid of fraud on blockchain? In the case of DeFi the contracts are technically readable (though EVM is not a good platform for readability; if you can't name projects which have fixed this you don't have the right to make fun of "its early"), and those that cannot read contracts for whatever reason are fully aware of the risk they take - when more versed people agree in unison there are no inbuilt scams the laymen can remove their risk.

Being readable will not stop bugs. This is the history of software engineering. Heartbleed went unnoticed for years, for instance. Putting the onus on the participants to verify a bug-free smart contract is kind of absurd if you ask me. It's just not possible and definitely won't scale.

You can audit everything yourself, and if everyone could and would there would be much less opportunities for bad behavior. But that's why trust was invented. Trustless means you have to do everything yourself.

In society there are incentives for example for a bakery to not poison you. The obvious one is the financial gain, reputation, but also the threat from not following laws, regulations. There are health inspections and so on. Even with that a lot of things a bakery sells is not healthy for you.

It doesn't matter how smart the tools are, if the only incentive is to defraud people, which is how the crypto economy works today. It's all lions and hyenas, and there is no algorithm to fix that, if anything decentralized consensus makes it easier for people to obfuscate and shrug responsibility.

The 5.25" floppy disk was pretty good at transferring data between machines at the time and didn’t introduce many unintended consequences.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the 5.25" floppy disk actually transferred data slower then if you had handwritten it between the machines, you couldn’t use the data from the 5.25" floppy disk unless you first validated it which would take several kW hours of power. You also could claim a stake at the data and could potentially sue other disk users for patent violations if you validated some patent more often then them. Now you have a case of a technology that is: a) worse then the alternative, b) expensive to use, and c) has harmful unintended consequences. Now I would consider the 5.25" floppy disk a good comparison to cryptocurrency. However the 5.25" floppy disk was none of these things, as it was a perfectly good technology at the time for data interchange despite it’s limitation. The same can not be said about cryptocurrency.

Now this is a silly example I know, I couldn’t find a more realistic case of unintended consequence for the 5.25" floppy disk.

This strikes me as a pretty bizarre argument, like a reverse slippery-slope fallacy, and I've heard it repeated by advocates. You are staying that yes, the technology is awful and scam ridden, but maybe sometime in the future in some way no one can think of it will be ok. This is obviously not a meaningful argument.

In regards to censorship, trust, and any other perceived benefit of blockchain technology for applications, those benefits rely solely on the organization that controls the application - ultimately landing users in the exact same space. Blockchain is hailed as a way to build decentralized applications without any regard to the fact that those applications would still need to be built by a central organization.

The final note that advocates seem to profess as some great proof of why blockchain is ok is that other systems are flawed, as if proving that some other system is flawed is proof that it's ok for their system to be a sesspool of fraud and waste.

> the technology is awful and scam ridden

The technology is perfectly legitimate and mostly not awful as long as you stick to big reputable projects such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Monero, Litecoin and others who have been on the market for a long time with a proven track record.

> In regards to censorship, trust, and any other perceived benefit of blockchain technology for applications

These are not "perceived" benefits, they are in fact benefits.

Monero represents digital, anonymous, fungible, untraceable, censorship-resistant cash, the same properties that real world cash provides. It can be transacted worldwide with extremely low transaction fees.

> those benefits rely solely on the organization that controls the application - ultimately landing users in the exact same space

Who is the organization that "controls" the "application"? As cliche as it is, "code is law".

> as if proving that some other system is flawed is proof that it's ok for their system to be a sesspool of fraud and waste

You may not like crypto, but it does have use cases that people in the real world are relying on and find useful. The crypto space indeed has many scam projects, but not every project is a scam. That's just the nature of open source software - people will copy an idea and use it for their own personal gain if it proves to be profitable.

There are so many things that are far less useful and far more wasteful than cryptocurrency. I could start taking this argument seriously if we first ban all addictive social media platforms, the whole adtech industry, gas-guzzling trucks and so on.

Labeling the entire sector as dangerous and fraudulent is incredibly short-sighted, dismissive, and at the end of the day, a lie. I don't buy into the crypto craze of Web 3.0 and NFTs (in terms of digital art), but I do think the technology already has applications that are useful to many, and many that still remain to be discovered.

I agree that we should inform people about the risks and scams that are currently common in the crypto space, but you're advocating for a lot more than that.

You can speak for yourself, but you shouldn't pretend that your opinion is shared by, or that you speak for, the majority of people working in IT.

> but I do think the technology already has applications that are useful to many

For example?

How about international money transfer for a start? I can and have moved money internationally in minutes for less than it would cost through the SWIFT system which would take days.

This is all fine and good for me, as I live in a developed country, so I "could" just use SWIFT ,but what about remittance payments? For people who have a mobile phone, but no bank (a large number of people in the developing world), a relative in the US used to send money via Western Union, the receiver would travel to the nearest Western Union branch, of course WU would take a chunk of that money, and then you're walking around with your cash. With crypto, it gets sent to a wallet, and they can use that. This isn't some pie in the sky idea, it's happening today, but will increase as crypto gains mass adoption.

The only people who could be making any serious of cryptocurrency for international money transfer is organized crime and money launderers.

Sending remittance payments in cryptocurrency does not make sense for people who are sending their hard earned dollars back to their home country to support their impoverished families. The risk exposure to exchange rate fluctuations, and risk of loss of funds in transit (due to fraud, hacking, losing a crypto wallet, sending money to the wrong wallet, etc), the fees associated with cryptocurrency transfers, and the extremely slow transfer times, all makes cryptocurrency a totally inappropriate product for the demographic that you are suggesting be targeted. You are basically suggesting that crypto bros should get rich off of selling a product to poor people that will only make them poorer. It's disturbing. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me agree with title of this post.

Fortunately, most people have other options available for international remittance payments. For example, you can now transfer money to people using Visa in over 80 countries, all you need is their Visa card number, and the transfer time is 30 minutes or less for Visa debit. All the major retail banks have similar services, and there are plenty of money transfer apps (including a Western Union app), none of which depend on "blockchain technology."

> The risk exposure to exchange rate fluctuations,

This is true to a degree, but intra-day fluctuation are typically not going to be severe enough to pose a significant risk. The "risk" of the value going up is pretty much the same as the value going down on such short time scales, so any fluctuations should realistically even out after some time.

> and risk of loss of funds in transit (due to fraud, hacking, losing a crypto wallet, sending money to the wrong wallet, etc),

The risk of that happening is minimal to none depending on how well you prepare. Loss of funds is not something that typically "happens" to you, it's something you do. And it's usually pretty hard to do that.

If you're sending funds to someone repeatedly, you only need to get their address once. Send a small, let's say $1 transaction to see if you have the correct address.

Hardware wallets eliminate the risk of hacking, but you can avoid it through other means as well.

> the fees associated with cryptocurrency transfers,

Outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum, fees for cryptocurrency transfers are practically zero. Prime examples of this are Monero and Litecoin where transfers might cost $0.01, but you might get away without paying a fee at all.

> and the extremely slow transfer times,

Both Monero and Litecoin have a block time of around 2 minutes and transactions are usually completed within 5 minutes. Deposits to exchanges might take up to 30 minutes due to stricter requirements.

Traditional banking system usually takes at least 1 working day or more.

> all makes cryptocurrency a totally inappropriate product for the demographic that you are suggesting be targeted.

I'm not going to support or refute that, but I did want to point out that all of your claims above are wrong and don't support the argument you're trying to make.

I am neither a money launderer, or organized (or disorganized) criminal . So your first statement is absolutely false.

In no way am I suggesting "crypto bros should get rich off selling product to poor people". The only point where any interaction with a crypto-bro may be necessary is in transferring fiat to crypto.

And your "fraud" comment makes me think you don't understand crypto. "Sending money to the wrong wallet" is a lame reason, it's the equivalent of giving money to the wrong person. Though there is likely to come a better/safer method, how many people have sent money to the wrong wallet by mistake?

The exposure of exchange fluctuations is real, but won't continue for ever as greater adoption leads to greater stability. You are also sometimes dealing in countries where the local currency is also susceptible to similar fluctuations.

Decentralized lending markets like Algofi which went through YC

To be very clear, fully collateralised loans are not really lending per se. They are repurchase agreements. I am not even sure what use such 'loans' have when you need to have $2 to take a loan of $1. They certainly solve some issues that Cryptocurrencies introduce for themselves but outside of that world they are useless

> To be very clear, fully collateralised loans are not really lending per se. They are repurchase agreements.

I agree with your assessment. It's an overcollateralized repo agreement. In the the "centralized finance" world, the purpose of the repo market is to provide investors with leverage at low cost. It's similar getting a mortgage from your bank to invest in a real estate property - you give the bank a down payment (let's say 20% down), and the bank lends you the remaining 80% to buy the property. In this way, your initial investment (20% down payment) is leveraged 4 times. Despite your leverage, the mortgage on the interest rate stays low because the bank has a lien on the real estate property so they can recover their loan value by selling the property if you don't pay back the loan.

> I am not even sure what use such 'loans' have when you need to have $2 to take a loan of $1. They certainly solve some issues that Cryptocurrencies introduce for themselves but outside of that world they are useless

But what issues in cryptocurrencies does it even solve? What is the business model of these DeFi businesses? They advertise to crypto investors that they can earn impossibly high rates of "interest and rewards," and there are plenty of crypto HODLs who would be happy to lock up their crypto in a DeFi to earn interest, but where is the demand side? Who needs to borrow $1 worth of crypto while posting $2 of crypto as collateral and paying impossibly high interest? Who needs to borrow cryptocurrency at all? The only purpose I can see of borrowing crypto would be to short sell it, but how many people are crazy enough to do that? I can't help but feel like DeFi is some kind of scam and a reincarnation of the ICO bubble.

Many top cryptocurrencies serve as a way to transfer funds internationally at incredibly low cost, Monero serves as fungible digital cash, Ethereum has smart contracts that can be used to build e.g. decentralized exchanges.

Well said. These POW/ energy waste arguments are getting really old. They act as if there aren't existing solutions. Take Algorand for an example, which is carbon negative and (Pure) Proof of Stake...

Until you realize the largest two cryptocurrencies are still using POW. Also, let me guess, who has stakes in this Algorand thing you mentioned.

Not everything needs to happen immediately, Proof of Work isn't some existential threat to human kind and Ethereum is already moving to PoS.

It's still early days for blockchain/crypto world. Alarmist comments don't really add anything to the discussion.

I am willing to bet in 5 years time, the largest crypto currency will still be BTC and it will still be POW.

Maybe, maybe not. If you're worried about the climate change impact, you can start now by charging additional taxes on all energy consumption.

Why should cryptocurrency be singled out? Just because some people dislike it? We haven't done much about climate change and the big pollutants in decades, but as soon as cryptocurrencies come up, it's suddenly treated as an existential threat to human kind - I don't buy it.

> Maybe, maybe not.

If we are talking about climate change, time is quickly running out. So talking about wishful thinking while reality is actually other way around does not seems to be helpful.

Can you quantify the impact on climate change that PoW is going to have if we don't act against it immediately?

> These POW/ energy waste arguments are getting really old. They act as if there aren't existing solutions.

And solution for the Bitcoin is what?

Literally everyone (100%) I knew that are into cryptocurrencies are primarily using them as speculative asset. That alone is not a problem. The problem is when they advocate cryptocurrencies or blockchains, they always talk about "decentralization", "uncensorable", "privacy", "future of web" or some other crap that they are not use the cryptocurrencies primarily for. That is what makes cryptocurrencies fraudulent.

If most (in my personal observation, 100%) use cases of such sector seems fraudulent, I do believe it is justified to generalize to the entire sector.

Decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance are indeed goals of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. In addition, they also serve as speculative assets.

What's fraudulent about that? Cryptocurrencies do in fact provide all of that (not all of them provide all of these guarantees, but some do).

You completely missed my point.

Simply put: People use cryptocurrencies as speculative asset while they claim they are using them for decentralization and other properties.

I still don't see the fraud? Just because your friends/associates aren't using cryptocurrencies for that purpose right now, doesn't mean that other people aren't, or that they won't be in the future.

This is akin to saying that seat belts are fraudulent because they aren't saving your life every single day. You might not need the properties of censorship resistance, privacy and so on right now, until one day you do.

I would much rather live in a world where such currencies are available in case I need to rely on them.

Yes but do you understand what speculation means? Speculation means betting on future value.

Those things aren't so incompatible. You can hope they'll go up because they have useful properties.

Yes, dumb people exist; and, apparently, you are even surrounded them! However, that doesn't mean that an entire concept of technology is inherently without substance: it just means that when something involves money and the world is in an uncertain time that lots of people are going to go overboard with it without any real understanding.

Alright, go for it. Speak out all you want. Cryptocurrency users will continue ignoring and/or deriding you.

Telling people that you don't like what they're doing is not an effective way to modify their behavior. You need to provide competing incentives, and somehow I doubt y'all are up to that.

The point isn't to convince cryptocurrency users, the point is to convince the average person ("the public").

But aren't the current users the problem?

Crypto is hot because there's some greater fool to sell to. Eliminate that greater fool (by informing) and the whole pyramid scheme comes tumbling down.

That only works until they see other people getting rich by not listening to you.

Meanwhile, another centralized platform for hodling your crypto got hacked to the tune of $80M.

The OP doesn't say complain to crypto users. It says that we need to inform the general public so that they are immunised against the draw of these schemes.

Immunized against what exactly though?

Is there even one thing about owning crypto that people need protection from?

Its an asset class like any other and if you want an NFT buy an NFT. If you want to buy a pokemon card, buy a pokemon card. If you'd rather spend it on a car, buy a car.

You're gonna get fraudsters with any asset. People will sell you houses that have bug problems hidden from you. Car dealerships will fleece you and have been since the first car salesman existed. Scammers have been counterfeiting dollars since they have been printed. McDonalds has been selling tasty unhealthy foods since they became a franchise. Mail order brides have been scamming the purchasers of their wife and money.

Are we supposed to now shout out about every scam in existence? What makes crypto so unique among scammable things (literally everything) that it needs an army of anti-cryptocurrency advocates running down the streets with pitchforks and cardboard signs?

Crypto so far is largely a vast space with little intrinsic value.

The "technological veil" over it seems to confer more legitimacy to crypto projects than is really warranted.

E.g. people buying land in the "metaverse", which is really just some hastily implemented crap game/mmo.

Less technical people aren't going to understand that the perfectly legitimate technology is a ruse covering up illegitimate investment ideas.

But personally, Im not too worried. Fiscally irresponsible people will always find a way to throw away their money one way or another. It will seem quite obvious in hindsight, however.

> Crypto so far is largely a vast space with little intrinsic value.

So was pokemon. By my definition that's a crap game even without crypto. But millions of people have fun playing it and its a big part of their lives, so who am I to judge?

The intrinsic value of pokemon is the enjoyment you get out of playing. Thus people are willing to pay money to play it.

"Investments" in crypto tend to have value because you can sell it to somebody else for more, not because the intrinsic value increases over time. E.g. like a cashflowing business increasing their cashflow, or raising rents on a rental property.

This is self referential, people aren't paying more because it provides higher intrinsic value, but due to speculation.

People buy expensive art because its popular. They also do nothing but stare at it every once in a while. Is that intrinsic value? Because if that is, then so is crypto.

People buy expensive art because it's an exclusive item, and they value the bragging rights it confers to them (generally).

It's different from NFTs, which are just pointers to an item rather than the actual item itself.

But I agree with you that crypto bears some similarity to art/gold/collectibles. However crypto can be spawned out of thin air and these other things can't.

Why would the world settle on using a Blockchain where a few whales hold huge percentages of the coins? People will just invent a new one and standardize on that. If decentralized apps become the new norm.

This would devalue existing blockchains and their tokens greatly. The only ones motivated to stay on a Blockchain with enormous inequality are the few early adopters. The public would create a standard and adopt that in longer run if Blockchain backed decentralized apps are truly the future.

> People buy expensive art because its popular.

Let's say I can magically create thousands of copies of the mona lisa, perfect 100% copies of the original at the Louvre with no method known to man now or in the future to distinguish them.

Now imagine that I shuffle those 100% perfect copies with the original and distribute them all across the world in galleries, auction houses, museums, some universities etc. (basically any facilities with a chance to have access to people with the ability to notice that this might be the original painting).

Assuming that the experts trying to find the original now that it is gone from the Louvre are honest and don't lie:

Do you believe the Mona Lisa would still retain its value assessment?

The argument you're presenting is an inherently political one but you're talking about it as though these ideas are new and haven't been debated already.

Yes, we're aware that capitalism has a lot of things that look a lot like crypto. Do you know what? Those are the worst parts of capitalism. You're describing artificial scarcity. You're seeing large sums of money go to things you don't personally value and that probably don't deserve as much as more noble efforts. Is it fair? Fuck no. Does that somehow merit _more_ of it? Absolutely not.

Arguing against these inherently political notions with regard to crypto is _exhausting_. You are basically implying that other people who don't get on board are hypocrites when the fact is that reality is so much more nuanced than these low-effort reactionary whataboutisms and many people see that as clear as day.

> By my definition that's a crap game

Even in the context of the original game release in 1996?

> But millions of people have fun playing it and its a big part of their lives

Yes and all they have to do for that is buy one of the many Pokemon games between 1996 and 2021 and start playing and enjoying the game for whatever it is they get out of it, be it story, gameplay, collecting or PvP.

Now where is the connection to cryptocurrencies and NFTs? Could you be specific?

> Even in the context of the original game release in 1996?

The point of that comment was to say "crap" is an entirely subjective opinion. Myself telling you that yes it was crap even in 1996 is not going to change the validity of the sentence I just said.

The connection which you aren't able to see which to me is extremely obvious, is that people who play with crypto "start playing and enjoying the game for whatever it is they get out of it, be it story, gameplay, collecting or PvP."

Oh I got that, make no mistake. It's just that while that might be true for you or gp, I find the comparison dishonest.

Cryptobros aren't in it as a hobby or because they "just enjoy the tech like other people enjoy pokemon", they want to make money with a speculative asset and spread false promises to rope in as many people as possible to drive up the price.

If that is not the case, well let it crash. After all: You can still enjoy it without the gambling aspect or even popularity, can't you?

You don’t understand the real reason behind all this. The true naked reason is that people want more regulation and government interference. Step 1 is to paint a dire picture of the need for regulation.

And to what end do people want more regulation? If anything regulation would legitimise crypto so either it should be banned or it should not be touched

I don't think you realize how much the laughably obtuse skeptic and the crypto die-hards have in common. Both agree that 98% of the space is a scam (though not in market cap terms), its just some people actually look in to find the pockets of progress and value, while others ignore it all and stay poor and resentful. I hate using the term "stay poor," but when I continually see these forever skeptics less versed in blockchain space and current progress than those who simply read and make a moderate effort its hard to conclude that these skeptics are drawing conclusions from their deep understanding of what is going on; it must be something more shallow, like missing out.

I wouldn't be so sure about market caps. Tether (#3) and USDC (#5) have a combined market cap of 120 billion. Both are backed by nothing more than IoUs

Regarding 'stay poor', the vast majority of crypto 'investors' bought in during 2021, meaning that most of them have lost money. Which is of course expected for any net negative 'investment'. It is not cryptoskeptics who are staying poor, I'm afraid

You missed proof of waste in your conclusion.

There is no "competing incentive" for those organising pump+dumps and other assorted cons. We can only warn those who could fall victim to them.

Sure — complain all you want, it's gonna keep happening. Even if I agreed with the classification that all crypto buyers are greater fools, it's not like standard finance is hurting for idiots who want to get rich quick.

I don’t think OP was advocating telling cryptocurrency users that it’s a scam.

I think it was more aimed at people thinking of getting into cryptocurrency.

For what it’s worth, I mined BTC when you could profitably with a GPU. I mine ETH today using gminer on flexpool.io. I actually made money on DOGE and several other alt coins.

I’ve spent years studying cryptocurrency. I don’t get it. I think it’s a scam too and I believe the world would be better off had it never been invented.

Your assessment of affairs is drenched in obvious bias. The downsides of these new technologies get plenty of airtime (your post included), but completely fail to acknowledge the genuine and useful innovations that are now possible (yes, there are many). Why was there no similar outcry from the technology community over the invention and proliferation of machine learning? It can be used for good or evil (there are plenty of cases of the latter that I'm sure the crowd can think of). It's extremely early days for groundbreaking technologies that have a lot of potential beyond the obvious scams we can all point to. We shouldn't banish a technology merely because it has the potential to harm (almost all technology does). What we should do is educate folks so they can decide whether they want to participate for themselves, rather than telling them how to think.

> the genuine and useful innovations that are now possible (yes, there are many)

Not trying to troll, but can you explain some of them? Not in the abstract, but in end-user/product terms.

As a crypto critic, monero is basically the only useful innovation to come out of crypto. Unfortunately, most people buy crypto on exchanges so the idea of decentralised, uncensorable etc are really oversold

Can you explain that more? I'm not familiar with Monero. What apps couldn't be made without it?

Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. It obfuscates transactions while keeping the technical perks of a decentralized ledger.

Thank you. Would it correct to compare it to using cash in person, but online?

Yes, it is the international cash for drug dealers and the like

Yes! It’s a currency that’s probably closest to peoples intuitive ideas of what a cryptocurrency is. It absolutely can be used for criminal transactions but people who are very pro-privacy also argue for it.

> As a crypto critic, monero is basically the only useful innovation to come out of crypto.

I sort of agree with this assessment. I think it depends on what you mean by useful. Unfortunately, the only real-world, practical use of Monero is money laundering. I wouldn't want to trade a currency or work on a technology whose best use case is helping violent drug cartels conduct their financial transactions.

My favorite example of late is http://royal.io. You can purchase a token (NFT) that represents fractional ownership in the licensing rights of a musician's song or album, and also comes along with other perks (such as free or discounted merch and concert tickets). The proceeds from the NFT sales help fund the artist's project, and then you participate in the upside by receiving a share of royalties for holding the token.

Thanks for the reply. Royal looks interesting, but I may be missing why an NFT is needed for this. Fractional ownership was existed for a long time before crypto. What does the part NFT provide?

Where else can you go purchase the rights to the work of an artist you like as a consumer?

NFT for this use-case provides

- the uncorruptible chain of custody. While it's well known for decades that "just a database" would solve ASCAP/BMI robbing countless artists because "it's too hard to track them down", they're not going to do it. A royalty is meaningless if there's no mechanism to enforce it, and an autonomous one is simply superior. If you're then going to say "but I could do that with XYZ" then now the rhetorical burden is yours to explain to me why it NEVER caught on.

- fractional ownership is a doodad, but a particularly hard doodad to set up, especially alongside a royalty mechanism. Once again "but you can do that with" -- what? A Delaware corp? With specialized technology? Some combination of buggy lambdas on AWS? And _how_ are you going to offer this to artists and still make money?

NFT for royalties just makes sense. It's no wonder it's not making anywhere near the money that art NFTs do -- but that's art: you'd have to look far and wide to find a more contemptible and corrupted marketplace than fine art. It's no wonder they like crypto :)

You’ve described a share in a private company. Not only do you not need an NFT for that, using an NFT provides you no additional guarantees.

Cool! How would you like to open a private company and manage that, including accounts and taxes, for every song?

NFTs don’t do that for you. The company linked still has to do that.

NFTs can absolutely do that. They're programmable tokens that can be coded to do anything.

When people purchase songs though the smart contract, part of the value can be automatically sent to the wallet of the person who owns the NFT that corresponds to that song.

The problem is most people, even on here still think NFTs are just some dumb pointer.

You're begging the question; you are assuming all transactions will happen on chain. That's not reasonable. Most transactions will happen with normal currency, using normal means. This company then needs to track all of that and do the distribution on chain.

And if they only allow people to compensate artists through cryptocurrency, then it's not viable for artists.

An NFT is just a receipt, it doesn't do any of the above. It's only better than a paper receipt in that it can be transmitted electronically.

Please point me to a musician who has created a private company and sold shares in order to compensate investors for royalties from their work.

That’s beside the point. This company does not need NFTs to do it.

Perhaps an even more germane example for the crowd would be the use of blockchain to manage cap tables: https://balajis.com/mirrortable/

Maybe I'm just too old, but I just don't understand what stuff like this is saying:

> A mirrortable is a way to take a legally compliant cap table held in a system like Carta and mirror it on the blockchain. It consists of an on-chain smart contract and a bidirectional interface that syncs changes made on-chain to the off-chain cap table and vice versa. In this it is similar to a stablecoin, which similarly links an on-chain asset like USDC to a legally compliant set of off-chain USD bank accounts.

It's basically saying the cap table is held 'offline', that is off of the blockchain, in a legally compliant digital place. There is then a copy of that cap table on the blockchain with a smart contract - an API if you will - to modify the cap table on the blockchain, which will then update the legally compliant one or vice versa. Not sure what the perks are here, but that's what it is.

Why is this useful? I assume it is, but I don’t know why…

BitCoin is 13 years old. The blockchain is not a new technology, and it is not extremely early days. We have over a decade of people trying to use blockchain and cryptocurrencies to solve real problems - and not just from startups, but also from large, international tech companies with research divisions. They have tried to use blockchain to solve real problems, and they have failed.

The transistor is 13 years old. The transistor is not a new technology...

The transistor was invented in 1947. By 1960, 13 years later, transistors had replaced vacuum tubes as the dominant technology for electronics.

Yes, and then the internet took another 20+ years.

You made an implicit argument: it took a similar amount of time (13 years) after the invention of the transistor for them to be used to solve real problems. That is clearly wrong. What argument are you trying to make now?

Bitcoin is also a laughably primitive blockchain, and Ethereum is holding back potential applications with it's innumerable flaws. You're right that "it's not early" as crypto hasn't been able to progress as fast as other tech because it's being hampered by its own success, in the time-honored worse-is-better tradition.

Blockchains are unusual tech in that it's strangely hard to upgrade them. In 2017-18 it was a common belief that some Bitcoin fork would "win" and become the "real Bitcoin", under the moniker "it's not the network, it's the ledger". Turns out it _is_ the network AND the ledger, unfortunately.

However, I maintain that the technology is still _immature_ and in that sense "it's still early": there is still some extremely low-hanging fruit in scalability, safe computing and cryptography that Bitcoin/Eth can't touch. BTC and ETH can absolutely be dethroned with better tech just like other giants that seemed unstoppable at the time.

DLTs are not the problem. The problem is idiocracy. Most people don't think anymore. Some people even buy NFTs thinking ownership right come with those - not even asking legal questions...

DLTs can indeed be incredibly useful, e.g. when multiple parties use the tech as a trusted pseudonymous data log, e.g. drug tracking from production to pharmacies. Or decentralized certificate wallets which allow you to actually own certificates you earned and prove that those are valid.

Those are just not the stories media can sell as good as "some stupid link to an ape / rock picture has been sold for x gazillion USD".

> The problem is idiocracy. Most people don't think anymore

Most people are dumb and uninformed, that’s not something that is going to change. If this new blockchain world that is being created only work for an imaginary world where agents are rational logical, and well educated the result will be disastrous.

> Most people don't think anymore.

Do you really believe that making mistakes is somehow on the rise, or that as a race we are getting less intelligent? This doesn't seem like a genuine argument other than a generic "people are dumb and getting dumber" statement.

You're right, I didn't provide a single source. Sorry for that! Here is one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/04/29/te...

> DLTs can indeed be incredibly useful, e.g. when multiple parties use the tech as a trusted pseudonymous data log, e.g. drug tracking from production to pharmacies.

Why can't they just use a database? Tracking information isn't a new problem.

* Because traditional databases are owned by a specific party. You have to trust that party.

* Because most traditional databases are not designed to be decentralized.

* Because administrators by default can change data in databases. Of course you can work your way around that and get an audit for your solution. But it is a native feature of blockchains.

Let's say it is law pharmacies have to ensure each drug they sell was produced by a trusted vendor and rules regarding logistics (e.g. temperature) were respected. Nobody must be able to manipulate that data and it has to be available offline for all pharmacies in case the network goes down. It'd be almost trivial to set something like this up using a blockchain. In an early prototype, you'd just give each party one or more wallets (private keys), allow the pharma to mint a token for each package and track how those are sent between wallets, each representing a different state in the supply chain. Pharmacies run a full node to have data available in case anything goes down. I made it a bit easier here than it likely would be in reality, but I hope I can transport the beauty of the approach.

Why not just have the trusted vendor expose an api for all the info? An append only linked list is ludicrously expensive solution to this problem. To a person with a hammer, everything is a nail.

Also, the problem itself is very convoluted and likely doesn't exist in the real world. You trust the vendors enough to let them do the data entry but distrust them thinking that they will manipulate the entered data somehow? It's a very strange situation

I mean I graduated top 5% of my class and make early 6 figures. My friend who graduated bottom 5% is now a crypto millionaire living in Dubai. Meanwhile I can write complex Scala code but I have no idea what blockchain , NFT , crypto is all about apart from the fact that it made my friend rich and made early adopters rich . How , why , when I don’t know . What’s the gain, purpose of it - I don’t know . Then again I don’t know what’s the purpose of data processing for ad-tech ML models and how it helps humanity either . The world is a Ponzi scheme . Can I go back to 1995?

survivorship bias?

None of the people I know involved with crypto, including miners, daytraders, and HODLers, have not crushed the market in the last nine years.

Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?

> None of the people I know involved with crypto, including miners, daytraders, and HODLers, have not crushed the market in the last nine years.

This is what we call survivorship bias.

> Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?

This is utter nonsense.

Fractional reserve lending means that money enters the supply on loan. It has to be returned to the issuer, and once its returned, it blinks out of existence. The demand for repayment of the loan is what backs every dollar out there. Each dollar is fully backed by the demand to repay the loan that issued it and the social and institutional mechanisms that enforce this including the courts.

The attributes of a Ponzi scheme are:

1. People invest into it because they expect substantial profits, and ...

2. ... that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. And...

3. ... there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead...

4. ... the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while ...

5. ... the operators take away a large portion of this money.

Go ahead and explain how that maps to the world's reserve currency. After all category (1) is patently invalidated because nobody holds USD expecting a return in USD. They expect to lose 2% on average to inflation.

Should let forex traders know that they can't make money on USD.

They're not making money on USD.

Forex is a highly-leveraged speculative zero-sum game where you're betting against a different trader. It's provably zero-sum like futures trading. Negative sum if you include the rake. The total supply of both sides of that trade remains the same, it's simply a redistribution of wealth from the losing trader to the winning trader.

It's also strictly a pair trade meaning that you're buying one currency and selling a different one at the same time, on the anticipation that you can unwind that for more than you spent to enter it. Forex trades are never just "USD" it's always "USD/YYY."

This is completely different than expecting to earn money by holding USD.

You're implying that other people have lost the equivalent amount of money. But the net effect is not zero. The society is losing badly if everyone is just playing in a casino.

If you had millions why would you pick Dubai to live in?

It’s become a fancy place for rich people with no taste or ethics.

My friend first moved to Hong Kong since they had a strong crypto community and something to do with regulations. After the recent issues with China in HK he moved base to Dubai . He told me it’s something to do with regulations of crypto - I don’t understand too much of it tbh.

Probably moved there before selling said crypto assets so they wouldn't need to pay capital gains taxes.

If you make money, it means you were right

Ah, so you’ve learned how meaningless it is to graduate top 5% in your class.

I think the best we can do is give our opinion when asked questions like

"Hey you know about these things. Is web3 the next evolution of the internet and should I buy in?"

"No and no"

"You're just mad because you missed out"

"Here's a collection of material I've been saving that says I'm right. You might want to take a look before you invest"

"You sound negative"

"Ok, consider me the 10th man then. Ignore me if you want"

And just leave it at that. You can lead a horse to water...

https://themindcollection.com/the-tenth-man-rule-devils-advo...

I disagree with your assumptions. There are many conflicting views, and to me it is an objective fact that barely anyone really understands the technology and what its ramifications will be. Morality and development is a very tricky thing. As an analogy, all of AI tech to me is leading toward a horrific future, but I don't see how anyone can stop that and Chinese autonomous military drones, mass surveillance etc; there was no way that early developers can predict how their tech will be used

> There are many conflicting views, and to me it is an objective fact that barely anyone really understands the technology and what its ramifications will be.

This isn't a new paper on quantum computing. Many of us understand the technology quite well.

Technology maybe, but what about ramifications?

How can anyone answer such a massive question honestly. What are the ramifications of any socially entwined technology?

why? i think it's the coolest thing ever.

anyone can write a contract to automate taking out a loan, investing it, and pulling out the money, develop exotic securities, and bespoke arbitration. anyone can do it regardless of credentials or connections; just a month of learning.

pretty darn cool to have unbridled access to a distributed computer.

The answer is pretty straight-forward. Every time we tried this before it collapsed into a giant ball of flame.

Nothing crypto is producing is new.

We've had stablecoins before in the form of wildcat banks. [1] They were backed at some point by barrels of nails with a few flakes of gold on top, and what little gold there was, was spirited around from bank to bank in front of the inspectors. That ended predictably.

We've had "ICOs" in the form of blue sky securities. [2] Companies that did nothing sold on the premise that you could simply sell the shares to someone else for more money. That ended predictably.

We've had "high yield investment platforms" in the form of actual honest-to-goodness Ponzi schemes before. That ended predictably.

We've had free reign access to leverage to buy more securities before - it led to the Great Depression. We had rhypothecation of securities and totally baseless collateral generation before - it led to the Great Recession.

Crypto hasn't created anything new fundamentally, it's just re-hashing all the stuff we outlawed before because it was an objective breeding ground of fraud and crime and grift. The only thing new about the crypto economy is that the pitches are structured as "${previously_failed_idea} except on the Internet."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_sky_law

> Crypto hasn't created anything new fundamentally

Orchids and Baseball cards and Beanie-Babies. We don't need a decentralized immutable, distributed ledger to verify something's value. We're already good at prescribing disproportionate value to arbitrary things. I don't think we ever cared that it was centralized or not.

> The answer is pretty straight-forward. Every time we tried this before it collapsed into a giant ball of flame.

This is availability heuristic. Many financial innovations work out well and power everything we do today without a second thought. Credit cards, internet banking, mobile banking, etc etc etc. Should we ban all financial innovations because a subset can cause collapse?

For stablecoins, the difference here is that all data is open. So for example with the latest news with MIM/abracadabra, all the loans/treasuries and collateralization ratios are viewable by everyone [1] and on chain as well. For Dai/frax/etc as well.

[1] https://dashboard.abracadabra.money/

For ICOs, this exists today as well in our regular regulated markets as well. Don't tell me you think AMC or GME is worth what they are worth.

> Crypto hasn't created anything new fundamentally, it's just re-hashing all the stuff we outlawed before because it was an objective breeding ground of fraud and crime and grift. The only thing new about the crypto economy is that the pitches are structured as "${previously_failed_idea} except on the Internet."

I'm not sure this is true.

> This is availability heuristic. Many financial innovations work out well and power everything we do today without a second thought. Credit cards, internet banking, mobile banking, etc etc etc. Should we ban all financial innovations because a subset can cause collapse?

All of these tools are strictly regulated specifically to avoid that collapse. Because we learned from when they collapsed before not to let them run wild and do whatever they wanted because it's a bad time.

> For stablecoins, the difference here is that all data is open.

Only some fraction of the data is open. You have no access to exchange books. You can see where things are on chain, but the backing is completely opaque. Have you seen Tether's audits? I haven't. I know they wired all the cash to back one attestation over from Bitfinex the morning of the attestation and wired it back. Hat tip to the New York Attorney General. And they're far and away the largest.

Trustlessness can by definition only extend to what can be wholly represented on chain. Stablecoins cannot.

> For ICOs, this exists today as well in our regular regulated markets as well. Don't tell me you think AMC or GME is worth what they are worth.

They're not good investments because they're overpriced, but they're not zero-sum. They have customers and the intrinsic value of the shares increases (ideally) through dividends, buybacks and capital reinvestment over time. This means returns aren't exclusively generated by other shareholders but instead through a third party (customers).

Not every equity will win, and you can of course lose money buying them, but equities are positive sum.

Don't conflate a stock being "worth what they're selling for" with them being a zero-sum game like token offerings.

> Trustlessness can by definition only extend to what can be wholly represented on chain. Stablecoins cannot.

Many algorithmic stablecoins like DAI can be fully audited on chain and have proved to be robust (so far, 4 years). They let you trustlessly borrow USD, top up your collateral and whatever else you would do with a loan but with no middlemen.

I've been reading your comments for a while, and have been getting real value from it but I think you are missing the mark on the detail. Unfortunately to really tell the difference, it requires an indepth exploration, preferably actually coding it. I know this is a cop out for an argument, but from experience it takes dozens of replies to really get to this depth.

> Many algorithmic stablecoins like DAI can be fully audited on chain and have proved to be robust (so far, 4 years).

You can't make something from nothing. Alogrithmic stablecoins are just the financial equivalent of honey pots. If you can knock them off their peg you can win big and this has happened many times. Perpetual motion doesn't exist and neither do stable long-term fractionally reserved algorithmic stablecoins.

This is true of all pegs - even in classical finance. This is literally how George Soros made all his money. [1]

MIM and UST are two fractionally reserved algorithmics that got knocked off their pegs yesterday. And this isn't even the first time for UST, I'm led to believe they required a capital infusion of a few hundred million greenbacks to maintain the peg a while ago.

> They let you trustlessly borrow USD ...

Not USD, no. A stablecoin with an opaque backing.

> ... top up your collateral and whatever else you would do with a loan but with no middlemen.

Of course there are middlemen, it's the validators or miners and contract authors and liquidity providers. There's a ton of middle men.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/soros.asp

Everything in the universe is built on something else. Let's speak the facts, can you demonstrate how DAI has been knocked off the peg substantially and with serious effects? Even with a reach should we find a an hour in history where it did wander more than 2-3%%, that by no means discounts it from the service that it provides in the rest of it's history.

> Of course there are middlemen, it's the validators or miners and contract authors and liquidity providers. There's a ton of middle men.

It's absurd to equate these entities with middlemen in the same sense as central banks and retail/investment banks are middlemen to loans. Again, let's speak the facts, demonstrate in DAIs history:

Where did a validator or miner, deny or cheat a loan? Plenty of examples in traditional finance.

Where did the contract authors or liquidity provides exercise power over the protocol that substantively affected the users of the protocol where it was not transparent and went against the rules which the users signed up for? The same happens all the time with tradfi.

> All of these tools are strictly regulated specifically to avoid that collapse. Because we learned from when they collapsed before not to let them run wild and do whatever they wanted because it's a bad time.

But regulations didn't come before the credit card did right? Only after they were invented were regulations built. Let builders build.

> Only some fraction of the data is open.

We're talking past each other here. I'm talking about a subset of algorithmic stablecoins

> They're not good investments because they're overpriced, but they're not zero-sum. They have customers and the intrinsic value of the shares increases (ideally) through dividends, buybacks and capital reinvestment over time.

They're not zero sum. AMC, GME do not make money, so profits don't cover corporate expenses. They are quickly bleeding money.

Why is it that everything a crypto die-hard says is held to the flame but when you are a skeptic you are allowed to be ignorant and obtuse? The space needs hard looks for every claim said, not just the positives.

Most people in crypto are aware of why Tether is bad. In fact a huge portion of stable-coins are handled algorithmically and backed by their network asset. You are building strawmen, likely out of ignorance.

> Most people in crypto are aware of why Tether is bad. In fact a huge portion of stable-coins are handled algorithmically and backed by their network asset. You are building strawmen, likely out of ignorance.

haha, I strongly suspect I know much more about this space than your average coiner. Simply because you disagree doesn't make my positions wrong. You haven't actually indicated anything wrong with my position other than your frustration and a few ad hominem attacks.

Algorithmic stablecoins are (a) a tiny fraction of the stablecoin space and (b) pegs. Pegs are honey pots for attackers. This is true in classical finance too - and attacking the peg can be extremely lucrative. Just yesterday MIM and UST got knocked off their pegs. I'm led to believe this isn't the first time UST got knocked off its peg and required airdropping hundreds of millions onto it. And knocking the GBP off its peg is how Soros made his money.

Fractionally reserved stablecoins that never lose their peg are a perpetual motion machine. [1]

[1] https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/07/27/my-second-appearance-o...

Except humans haven't developed ways to write bug free code except in a very few limited circumstances none of which crypto uses.

hence the recent renaissance in formal methods

eg.

https://www.certik.com/

Formal methods doesn't necessarily mean that you're building the right thing which catches quite a few projects out. I do really enjoy getting to work with them though :D

Who is offering automated loans? "Regardless of credentials or connections" sounds like I don't need any credit history or anything, how do they trust me with this free money?

And I already have unbridled access to my own computer, which seems to have more compute power than the EVM.

https://docs.aave.com/developers/v/2.0/guides/flash-loans

have fun :) play around on the testnets first.

Essentially, at the moment, over-collateralized loans. Deposit $100 and borrow $90, if you pay back $95 by tomorrow you get your original $100 back. There's actually some really cool and complex financial instruments you can build by combining these and the nature of atomic transactions on the blockchain (you can take a loan and pay it back in the same transaction while using the money in other txs to get a profit, it's really weird HFT).

> i think it's the coolest thing ever ... anyone can write a contract to automate taking out a loan, investing it, and pulling out the money, develop exotic securities, and bespoke arbitration. anyone can do it regardless of credentials or connections; just a month of learning.

That's all fine, until the SEC come knocking. The only advantage in the crypto space is that you try to skirt financial regulations. Establishing a new broker-dealer, bank, etc, requires a substantial capital investment to meet the minimum regulatory requirements. That gives some crypto companies an advantage (for now), since they can skip all that, but you can see sure that established interests are not taking this lying down and new regulations are in the pipeline. Once the global regulation of cryptocurrency is completed, either crypto will be dead or it will have to play the same rules as the rest of the financial industry.

I might be saying something wrong or outright stupid, but it seems you're not looking at all the areas this new tech is being used. I mean, I have looked at what The Coupon Bureau is doing with DLT tech, and I know it is /not/ proof of work, and it is very energy efficient, and it seems to be legitimately useful tech, regarding transparency, speed and security. Again, this is far from my area of expertise, so I may sound really ignorant and dumb, and I would really like to know more about why they're wrong. I only chose Coupon Bureau and the DLT company they partner with as an example because it's one of the more interesting use cases that I've seen from the research I did in this area. I don't mind if it is really a bad or irrelevant use of DLT/crypto, but I wish I could know why is that so, and how is it not a legitimate use case (from someone smarter and more knowledgeable in the area than myself).

Absolutely not. I completely disagree with your claims. https://mobile.twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/13807504757...

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/140404849753222758...

This kind of rhetoric can only be used by privileged (often white) western people with access to international financial markets, PayPal, stocks, and free (or cheap) cross-country transfers like and unified banking regions like USA or SEPA (EU).

I will continue to strongly and energetically defend that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are just a tool. Tools aren't good or bad. A knife can kill people but can also feed a family.

Sure, there are scams occasionally but it is nowhere as bad as some people seem to think it is. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are two technologies that vastly improve distributed systems design as well as allow otherwise financially oppressed people to conduct their finances in a secure way and spend the money wherever they want.

I will never shut up about it. But unfortunately, because of this ridiculous cancel culture, I also can't publicly defend cryptocurrencies under my real name, as I'm not privileged enough to not face consequences.

You seem to have other problems to deal with...

> Tools aren't good or bad.

Proof of waste is bad for environment.

Anyway I was born in to occupied country. You should rather fight for your democracy.

Blaming the technology for its misuses is always a dubious position to take.

The promoters of said technology (and it's misuses) will always argue that you could say the same about <actually useful technology> which allows <some bad guys> to do this <bad thing> and are you saying this means we should ban this <useful technology> ??!

They would argue this and they would have a point. Also, in an open democratic/non-surveillance state, you can't really ban a technology like this. Instead you focus on regulating the marketing of its misuses or launching information campaigns (I guess that's what you're doing).

Like cigarettes, pink-sheet stocks, multi-level marketing and gambling or any other large revenue sources that are either zero-sum or have net negative social impact, you're better off convincing the public of its dangers than pointing the finger at the underlying technology.

In proof of waste case: uses and misuses goes hand in hand.

You should also speak out against the internet. So much crime, scams and heinous acts happen there. I don't get your point, is the technology a scam or are the people using it to perpetuate scams? In the latter case you have a people and legal problem not a tech problem.

I don't see a problem with NFTs being used in in-game credits and ownership tracking. I also see nothing wrong with blockchain being used to replace certificate authorities. Every technology gets abused. You have laws to regulate technology for this reason.

Instead of speaking out against the tech, maybe call your lawmakers and tell them about how the tech is being abused and how it can be regulated.

> the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes

With this statement the author shows bias and a lack of serious interest in discussion.

Indeed most cryptocurrency projects are frankly illegitimate, but certainly not all.

Which are which?

Therein lies the challenge.

As far as blockchains themselves, I feel that Algorand is a very legitimate serious project. There are others, like Harmony, but with both projects you can have scam coins built on top of them.

Bitcoin is the only legit blockchain. You don't have to take my word for it; he proved it in the paper. The blockchain with the longest proof-of-work is always the real one, given multiple competing blockchains. All other cryptos are attempting (and failing) to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin's preexisting longer blockchain.

Yah, which? And why?

A needlessly open ended statement when multiplied by -1 yields the same nonsense just with a different sign. Right?

I don't think you understand what Bitcoin has brought to the table. Consider its fundamentals and its network effect. Other blockchain tech, most prominently permissioned blockchains, should be reprobated, since they don't require blockchain tech and could be better implemented using tech that relies on standard database systems.

What Bitcoin has brought to the table:

- More convenient ways for malicious individuals to conduct ransomware attacks

- Fraudulent exchanges

- Persistent and global GPU shortages

- Anonymity to criminals

- Staggering consumption of real-life energy supplies, produced mostly with fossil fuels

What Bitcoin has not brought to the table:

- A store of value

- A trusted unit of account

- A widespread medium of exchange

Please try to expand your lists. Also, please try to create the same kind of expanded lists for other such related tech you're comparing Bitcoin with.

Classic. Bitcoin is not a store of value or trusted unit of account despite its massive market cap.

The primary objective measure of value is invalidated because you disagree with it and believe everyone else is wrong. You are a Kafka character.

something being used for massive financial speculation doesn't make it a store of value or a trusted unit of account.

All of those problems existed before Bitcoin, so Bitcoin evidently did not "bring them to the table"

And if Bitcoin is not a store of value, why are the Bitcoin I own seemingly maintaining (and increasing) their original value?

No you don't have any responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies, that's for luddites. You can speak out against cryptocurrency, NFTs, false promises and poor implementations of the technology, but to speak out against technology as if you're a point of authority on technology when you're really concerned with economics and society, is insincere to present if you've given consideration to it purely from that tech lens - it's an appeal to authority logical fallacy.

There are plenty of opportunities for people to "lose their shirt" in the current environment, but that's not technology's fault, it is the result of illogical human behavior falling to a scam artist selling something for more than its worth and someone falling for it because they are not informed. It can happen with any pseudo-commodity. If we go back to the popular "Tulip bulb bubble" analogy, if you were a horticulturalist would it be your duty to point out how Tulip bulbs need to be banned for everyone's safety, or would you be stepping outside your domain into that of an economist? Nothing changed functionally about tulip bulbs, except the price and that's not up to the average horticulturist.

By all means, remain skeptical when investing and do your own research, set expectations based on reason. You don't have to hate 100% things about crypto-currency when you really only hate 99% of it, you may find the 1% you do like has to do with purely technical things (technology) vs investor speculation (people). I hate a lot of things about the blockchain space, but technology is certainly not the reason, it's people's relationship/understanding of it and insanity/PR around low value/highly priced things that aren't innovative or useful - the noise + hype if you will is a bit nonsensical at times, not the tech itself, imho.

PS [edit] : And as far as a lot of the problems people have on the blockchain as far as trustworthiness can be solved by blockchain tech itself, it just hasn't happened. It is the "killer dapp" and I've given it some thought, but I won't give it all away unless someone wants to help me build it :)

From a technical perspective you are correct.

However, in the midst of a mania, unfortunately nobody is going to listen to a group of engineers telling them about the dangers of blockchain.

The only thing that will, and can, stop the madness is politicians getting off their backsides and implementing related laws and regulations.

If you want to talk to anyone, and have any potential effect, talk to the people in government.

I think that there is still time to inform general consumers so the vast majority are aware of the dangers before cryptocurrencies are made friendly enough to use for the average non-tech or finance folk. We are definitely hitting a point where these scams have to reach out beyond crypto-bros, finance gamblers, and the tech-savvy so that they can sustain the pyramid - and if people are aware before that happens, hopefully the bubble will burst and the fad will end.

Yesterday in Central London there was a van going around with LED displays on the side, I think flogging ape NFTs. They seem to be reaching out.

You're wrong. New flavors of crypto, blockchain apps, etc are almost entirely scams. But Bitcoin itself is an incredible technology, and I don't think its beautiful design gets appreciated enough in the midst of all the speculative investments, derivative currencies, and marketing.

Proof of work is a nice way to bridge digital and physical world - but it's also using a ridiculous amount of energy.

Bitcoin is a hack to get control back from government. It's a technical solution to a political problem.

I wouldn't use it in production. I'd rather have a network of private banks (without governments and central banks printing money as much as they like - and bailing out their friends) and a currency based on the value of a basket of everyday items (wheat, wood, iron).

You made a critical mistake in your opening sentence: you conflated 3 very different things, not a promising start. "Blockchain technology" is just a consensus protocol, cryptocurrencies are currencies (well, one of them is at least), and NFTs are effectively pet rocks at the moment. I'm having a hard time seeing why that demands a marshalling of all true "technologists"... to do what, exactly? Refuse to work on projects involving those three things? Demand governments coordinate a global round up of those who are presently doing such work? Is this the final form for those that have repeatedly declared bitcoin dead - year after year, growing more and more furious as they calculate how much their terrible opinion has cost?

Name one technology that was successfully eradicated by astroturfing and legislation, instead of genuine market forces. Now, if you somehow manage to do that - were the users of that technology compelled to act against their own interest in service to jetsetters gathered around Hillary Clinton in Davos Switzerland? Because that is exactly what you'll need to do in order to get your way.

https://www.profgalloway.com/web3/

Another valuable insight into the dubious, duplicit world of crypto.

This reminds me of the stories about Edison electrocuting elephants as a means of demonstrating the "danger" of alternating current.

Bad Application =/= Bad Technology

Most telephone calls are scam calls, it doesn't mean telephones were a bad idea. All scammers are humans, but not all humans are scammers. If there is a scam then call it out directly rather than wasting energy on the general platform.

Careful using the term ‘ponzi’ - they’ll show up and argue with you on semantics of what to call the scam while ignoring your other (valid) arguments.

Calling it a Ponzi shows a rather poor understanding of the area as if you say look at the Wikipedia article on them say, or similar sources it is apparent that Bitcoin isn't one. A passage from Wikipedia for example

>The scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity (e.g., product sales or successful investments), and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds.

Bit like anti vaxxers saying the vaccine isn't a vaccine because it doesn't have 100% sterilizing immunity. It just goes to show the argurers are not very well informed on what vaccines and or Ponzis are by the usual dictionary definitions.

Its almost like tossing a million shallow arguments at the wall and asking your opponent to spend time debunking each individual one is a duplicitous strategy in itself.

This comment on Reddit today shook me a bit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRaceTo10Million/comments/sem15u/...

The chutzpah has gone so far that anything proto-crypto is the solution to anything else.

This person is dealing with cancer and bankruptcy and some putz comes along and tells him to create some NFTs.

I wanted to scream.

I'd say the goal shouldn't be to convince the crypto fanatics.

It should be building awareness towards what cryptocurrencies and technologies based on the blockchain actually are and why they can't at all achieve what people invested in crypto promise. For the people that are vulnerable, politicians and organizations, in short: people being manipulated by outright false promises and deliberately vague "arguments" (like there always being that one coin nobody uses which of course solves all the problems of the topic at hand).

Crypto doesn't offer much in terms of decentralization, but one thing it does decentralize incredibly well is advertisement and evangelism because every single cryptocurrency holder has a true financial incentive to spread overhyped and false information around anything remotely connected to blockchain technologies in order to drive up the price.

My brother is currently working in the field. It brings him good money. Now, really good money. His work is 100% clean per se (infrastructure for mining).

I don't feel any moral grounds to say anything to him, he does it for engineering and fun and really actualizes himself. He is my older brother finally creating something meaningful for people and having rightful rewards. He is hidden in the moral waves, harvesting something he can, surfing in the sunshine. I don't know how to think about this.

I have friends who have made millions from crypto. But every dollar they made is a dollar that someone else paid into the system, that that person is going to lose when the bubble bursts. Enabling that loss is not morally clean.

But the question is: what is morally clean?

Is housing not a bubble? Then, how could prices be that inflated in most places, even with a stable (or just slightly increasing) population?

Is stock trading not a bubble, because "real companies exist and have a value"? But, their price is probably 20x their "real worth"?

Is selling vegetables in grocery stores at 20x the price the farmer gets morally clean?

Is it morally clean to keep putting CO2 into the air that everybody breaths?

There are a freaking lot of "unclean" things in the world. I don't understand why a lot of people seem to focus on cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

Taking your logic to its conclusion, any stock or other kind of trading should be banned because it will enable some people to lose money at some point. To clarify, is that your position, and if not, why not?

It's absolutely morally clean. The people losing money made their choice.

Similarly I don't see anything wrong working for a betting company or even a company that produce dangerous or addictive drugs.

I consider it morally wrong to work for the government or for criminal organisations which steal money under the threat of violence or kill people for reasons other than self defence.

Personally I find it immoral to support things that I believe cause more harm than good, regardless of whether the participants were compelled to do so by violence.

are you okay with trading precious metals? stocks? real estate?

all of those have so-called market cycles, which is what you described here. the price continues to increase (bull market), as each trader sells higher to another sucker, who wants to sell higher to another sucker... until eventually it runs out of new suckers and the price collapses for some time (bear market). each dollar you gain is a dollar someone else loses. those suckers at the end of the bullrun transfered their money to earlier suckers and lost everything.

the "ponzi" nature of crypto isnt specific to crypto at all - this is how all markets operate.

By that logic, anything with downside risk is not morally clean. If you buy anything with the plan, secondary or not, to sell it later for some profit of some kind, you're taking from a sucker. Housing, the used car market, commodities, the stock market, everything is a greater fool scam.

But when you look at these things from the individual perspective, we all take a risk when buying things. The people that don't assess their risk when they buy lose, the ones that do don't lose.

Assuming the bubble does burst which it may not.

I really don't follow. Can anyone enlighten me? I used to go with the casual notion 'tech isn't evil' / 'even a chair can be used as a weapon'. What have I missed here for blockchain?

A chair's proof of concept doesn't burn the energy of a small industrialized nation?

Nuclear energy vs nuclear bombs? How you use it makes a difference?

Computers as a whole burn the energy of many small industrialized nations. Is that to say computers shouldn't be used? Or is it simply a statement of how widely used computers are?

you need to take the cost/benefit. Computers may use a lot of energy but they're essentially the nervous system of collective humanity now - they're eminently useful. Cryptocurrencies on the other hand - their primary utility is taking person A's money and giving it to person B without producing any beneficial side effects.

The position of web3 is that we should be using "chairs" to run websites.

The infrastructure of crypto is blatantly inappropriate for the domains people are trying to apply it to. Which leaves open the question, why are they pushing for it?

The answer should be clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of the crypto scene.

Is this the position of crypto or the position of people driving crypto? I am trying to understand here if there something inherently wrong with the technology or just with the people running it.

Oh f** off. You know what’s even more damaging? Social networks impact on democracy in Western countries. Data mining from big tech and the impact on an individuals right to privacy. Making systems deliberately addictive which is highly likely to be related to the rise in mental health issues.

Bad crypto projects will die out. Maybe the tech will work for some use cases, like Visas work in the space, maybe it won’t. Crusading against a technology that you probably don’t understand entirely is frustrating to read, flame-war inducing, and repetitive on HN. Everyone understands that it’s like marmite, you either really like it or really hate it, but there are far more important things to take a moral stance against than blockchain tech. I wish we’d all just move on and talk about other things.

The worst part of it is the carbon cost to be frank, it's ridiculous.

But regardless, no one cares. I've been telling people for years, but all you get is either: "screw you, I didn't invest, and look where it's at now." or "well I was right not to listen to you".

Hopefully the Ponzi scheme stops with the fed tightening policy.

Oh, and it has expanding into the average consumer markets. A lot of retired people I know are in.

Wow, what a load of anti-analytical sensationalist crap from someone that obviously hasn't spent any real time in the ecosystem to see what is actually happening. The fact that more people are paying attention to this is a statement of ignorance rather than actual thoughtful discussion.

The only blockchain I'll ever accept is one with a guaranteed 1:1 identity/wallet as in you can only ever have one bank account. That has mechanisms for reversals in case of fraud, like the system collects insurance fees and maybe if there's verified fraud accepted by an elected board then you get like 50% paid back... or something at least not a total loss.

Furthermore your account can never hold more than 10 million dollars (or 50, ...but something reasonable) ... if this became the default currency it would basically outlaw billionaires from the start. It'd also stop money laundering since you can't have fake accounts, etc.

Finally it'd need to have progressive taxes baked in, or simply you pay a transaction fee which is determined by your average daily holdings / avg monthly transactions or something...(needs tweaked) but someone hodling hordes of cash would essentially pay monthly hodling taxes (storage fees), and larger transaction fees, of which this gets divied back to those who maybe never have more than 10k in their account and spend most of their money each month..

The currency would also have some UBI worked into it.

Essentially it'd make it so people could get the bear minimums, are rewarded for utilizing the currency as a normal currency, and penalized for using just as a store of value, and it ensures whales don't control everything, in fact I think the more you hodl the weaker your vote should be.

Apparently, all of these links point to people who are building nothing but "fraud, scams, and greater fool schemes":

- https://weekinethereumnews.com/

- https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back...

- https://zeroknowledge.fm/

- https://cbr.stanford.edu/sbc20/

- https://www.arweave.org/build#inspiration

I concede that if you have no previous exposure to crypto it will take more than an hour to find these links. I believe you that "a few hours" was not enough time for you to understand how things work. Were you really able to read and understand all of the Rust book in "a few hours"?

It's not just technologists anymore, there is a whole bunch of powerful investors, marketing agencies, media companies all pushing their agenda via Web 3.0 guise. Not to mention 'get rich quick' scammers taking full advantage of this.

I do believe there is value in 'Decentralation' and some other blockchain ideas but all implementations of it thus far as proven not very effective.

> I do believe there is value in 'Decentralation' and some other blockchain ideas but all implementations of it thus far as proven not very effective.

The blockchain concept is a very bad fit for almost every kind of decentralization you'd want, because it's basically a linked list with a central clock[1] limiting the number of blocks you can happen (and this is necessary to allow the consensus to converge).

[1] even though it's implemented in a distributed manner, there's still one and only one clock per chain and everyone must take its turn to use of of the precious clock slots.

Do you also have a responsibility to speak out against redlining? Or Banking deserts? Or keeping Afghanis from starving due to sanctions both external and internal? How about 0% savings accounts? Or being denied a mortgage from the only game in town? How about being put in prison because you cannot come up with the egregious fees larded onto your account because "reasons"? Are you prepared to defend us from all of that? Or just this? The one thing that has come along in the last few decades that we can use to empower ourselves with no interference necessary "from those who know better."

Every single payment method that has been invented has suffered from frauds, scams etc. People have found ways to remove mailed checks from mailboxes, wash the ink from them and make them out to new payees. Should we stop using checks now too? Should we go back to trading rocks and shells? Corda is already doing great work in the European insurance industry at lowering costs and increasing transparency. We won't be lucky enough to get it here, likewise moving the bond market to the ledger should do the same thing. No advancement is perfect, but going by what you have written here we should all go back to living in caves and running from sabertooths. I think I'll pass. And I'm not a techie....and I still feel like this post is nonsense.

I don't think you realize just how much these technologies benefit people in countries with poor currencies. You need to address this before painting with such a broad brush.

I love seeing this argument. You should really visit these countries.

Crypto does not help these countries whatsoever.

It does. Source: me, living in one of these countries.

It does help me, living in Argentina

The blockchain is fine though. That's like trying to tell people to stop using linked lists or object-orientation; you're trying to disseminate a technical detail for an audience that doesn't understand nor care.

The modern crypto market is a disaster because cryptocurrency is a fiat, not a security or trading asset. People insist on it being the new gold though, so it's weaknesses are exploited and people get scammed left right and center. It's not surprising that when you abuse technology, bad things happen; it's put us in a situation where we're desperately trying to make these platforms safe for purposes they were never intended to fill. Of course there are going to be problems.

Even though I think NFTs are gaudy wastes of time, and Bitcoin is an inside joke for long-running IRC chats, I don't really care that much if the concept of a blockchain lives or dies. If anything, I'm glad that the recent publicity has gotten people to care about actually interesting and meaningful technology like IPFS and hashing algos.

Regardless of what any of us say, do or express, the blockchain is explicitly designed to keep on trucking. There's nothing you can do now, the only "ethical" way out is to ignore it and hope that your silence on the topic encourages other people to stop using it too. In the meantime, new technology is going to continue to be new, and gulliable individuals will continue to be scammed anywhere they choose to put their wallet on the line. There really is nothing new under the sun; not Bitcoin, not the blockchain, and certainly not scamming people online.

You have to admit it’s amusing how public sentiment of block chain mirrors the price trajectory.

It is important to inform people about the potential dangers with the technology and investing in it, especially since there are no regulations to create, e.g., new tokens. There are scams going on and it is easier to get away with it because it is an unregulated market. However, blockchain technology is an emerging area and it's bound to be chaotic in the beginning. We should highlight the risks but not condemn the tech. Also, stay positive!

How is it an "emerging area?" It came out in 2008. In the tech world that is a lifetime.

Smart contracts came out in 2015 on Ethereum apparently. What came out in 2008? Bitcoin 1.0? Things do move fast in tech, you may want to keep up with the latest versions before writing off the web saying you've got it figured out based on your experience with the Mosaic browser. Sometimes opinions need updating too, everything evolves.

Yes, I was referring to blockchain and bitcoin rather than ‘smart’ contracts.

It'll all disappear the moment the Federal Reserve meaningfully raises interest rates.

If it wasn't NFTs it would go into some other fraud addled speculative bubble.

I was hesitant yet excited about web 3.0. Decentralization sounds really cool, and it could solve it a lot of problems.

Then I read this article and realized that nothing is decentralized and it's not any better than the status quo: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I dunno. If big investors want to dump money into something that has ZERO real-world value and is just FOMO and GFT investing so be it. When people ask me about it I just say it's all a scam and they seem to accept that at face value since they couldn't really figure out what it's all about anyway. Keep your friends retirement funds out of it and let the rest play their game I say.

I wish I could make money on the ability to predict "that won't pan out" but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Example: Fully autonomous self driving cars - level 5 stuff. People are finally realizing A) how hard that is in practice - it really takes AGI and B) the huge liability that comes with it. But hey, a lot of people have been employed for 10 years now and have some impressive lane followers and sign readers while some have actually learned a lot about AI (google). Still, I had no way to bet against it 5-10 years ago.

you can easily short-sell bitcoin if you believe it "won't pan out"

I don't know wheere the ponzi scheme is in Smart contracts, decentralized identities, arbitrary data communication across and decentralized network, ZK-rollups, SK-Snarks, Automatic liquidation, leverage, and minting using other assets as an algorithmic backing, liquid staking, no loss lottery's, loaned crowdloans, algorithmic stablecoins, arbitrage based enabled trading platforms, decentralized incentived storage networks and a million other things.

Seems like we are going into another crypto winter :)

Every-time this happens, i slowly invest in all the projects i think are promising, then the next bitcoin halving us crypto nerds have 5-10 things to add to the list of 'Interesting things crypto can do', no one understands them so they are easily dismissed and people say "Well i still can't buy an apple with my btc' so thus all crypto has failed.

Taking the premise of this at face value then these people are just going to get scammed on something else. There is a fairly sizable segment of the population that is unable to be anything but poor as they invest in get rich quick garbage.

And they always will. Maybe it is crypto, or maybe it is LuLaRoe or Beanie Babies. There is no saving them.

It's getting seriously annoying how unintelligent posts like this make the front page.

Has Hacker News had it's time? Possibly.

OP, you are correct and you have motivated me to call my US rep who is on the "blockchain caucus" and tell him I think he needs to get on the right side of history and regulate this destructive fad (the "technology" is irrelevant and useless)

I read a paper called "the internet bond" discussing "smart contracts" (cringey name) and how they can be used to lay out and agree to conditions for workers to be paid.

I think this is interesting when /r/antiwork has blown up and gen z is brainwashed against their bosses "opressive" leadership extracting their labor. Orgs running on good will are crumbling, corps with iron fist rules are doing okay - what if the future is in getting gen z to write out what their preferred labor -> compensation function is, and commit it to the cloud instead of scapegoating your evil bougie boss for why you hate your contract?

You're already doomed to work with them.

I think you're right though. It is your responsibility as a skeptic to speak your mind, engage in discussion, offer compelling points, discuss technical details and social consequences and whatever else is important to you, and it is my responsibility as someone who understands and believes in (some of) this stuff to speak as well. And through it all, it is both of our responsibility to ourselves and those around us to be willing to learn from one another.

I think this is just the price you pay when talking about things people have vested financial interests in. I imagine there was a great deal of spin on BBS' around 2000 about dotcoms.

Unless you're going to ban talk around topics where spin and sway can directly make people money, you're just going to see this kind of thing. The best you can do is to engage honestly and openly with others and do your best to understand their viewpoints. Hopefully they do the same with you.

It is actually fun to look at old pre-2019 threads about Bitcoin. Not much has changed in the fundamentals but the politics and ideological warfare is on full-steam today.

To this, I say "hell yes"! I don't agree with the "entire scope of crypto is scams" concept but I respect you and am curious to learn more.

HN is full of anti-crypto complainers. Such comments are snarky and repetitive. And most damning they're boring.

This at least is a call to arms. Go get it!

Disclosure: own crypto

The problem is blockchain enables scams, but is not itself fundamentally "a scam". The culture is not the technology. "Line Goes Up" understably conflates the two, because right now 99% of what we see is the (generally terrible) culture surrounding blockchain.

When it comes up, I explain my position and move on. Sometimes, you need to learn for yourself. But with a good lesson comes a fresh perspective. Perhaps the general public will become more skeptical of 'technology' and make a greater effort to understand it themselves.

Blockchain is the most impactful technology since the internet.

It changes everything - foundation of trust. New economy. New incentives.

“If you don't believe it or don't get it, I don't have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”

I'm pretty sure some people were angry at the internet 30 years ago.

This crypto madness kept way too long. I say it from 2017:

https://meaningofstuff.blogspot.com/2017/12/why-bitcoin-will...

That's probably amongst the 444 Bitcoin Obituaries on https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ but I couldn't find it as all the terms - will fail - ponzi - etc are a bit generic.

This is hyperbole. We know private permissioned blockchain solves real world problems.

Could you give us an example?

Interbank trading

This isn't even just a question of individual responsibility. Yes, suckers will get fleeced and we will have to cope with that as a society. Yes, we should minimize that harm to the extent possible. However, there is a much broader systemic risk involved.

In 1997, Albania was transitioning from a communist state to a market economy. This created a power vacuum and a distrust in the institutions of government and finance. This allowed MLMs/pyramid schemes to blink into existence and multiply out of all proportion. At its peak, almost half of the entire GDP of Albania was locked up in them. "When the schemes collapsed, there was uncontained rioting, the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed." [1]

This isn't all fun and games and innocent gambling. This is a cancerous symptom of the failing of the state.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...

Romania had something similar going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caritas_(Ponzi_scheme)

> An estimate of Romanian newspaper România Liberă gives the amount of money involved as 1.4 trillion lei or about 20% of the 1993 expenditures of the Romanian government of 6.6 trillion. The New York Times estimated the scheme attracted between $1 billion and $5 billion

Anecdotally, people got involved in it fully knowing it was a Ponzi scheme, but hoping they could get their money out before the music stopped playing. And some of them did!

In fact, my first computer was bought by my parents with Caritas money.

"promoting fraud"? In a way, we could say that money too is promoting fraud. It's how we use technology that defines the moral issue, not the technology itself. Or am I missing the obvious?

Humans more than any other life form seem to constantly be playing with social, economic and political self-organization. How energy is distributed and what is fair. We’re a highly social almost hive-like species that is constantly trying out new hive patterns and arguing about them.

Crypto is useful because it lets people play with their own schemes and nobody can stop them. It seems like most uses of crypto are for some form of token gated community.

While token gates are a valuable concept, it is true that many communities themselves are not worth joining and are inflating their perceived value.

I do think that the recent spate of critiques are fairly poor also. Critiquing antiques like bitcoin or lolling about say early DAOs falling over due to bugs doesn’t really make a compelling argument.

- mostly scammer (pump and dump) - mostly nftheft - bad at energy usage

'__') good reason to against that, but let's wait and see if the reputation still can recover after those bans

Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120762

You aren't going to change the minds of the new middle men who want to take a cut of every transaction they can in the "cryptosphere":

Blockchain: a replicating dataset that spreads like a virus and grows in size exponentially using energy to sustain itself.

Sounds a little concerning.

You should print this on a big poster and walk on the street carrying ringing bell in your arm, trying to attract attention.

As far as I know the promised next version of the web aka "Web3" doesn't exist. Or does it?

Of course you're right. It's also a massive energy sink, in an era when the question of how that energy is produced matters more than almost anything else on the planet, for the very future of that planet.

And do you think anybody in the tech industry gives a shit? It makes easy money, and that's literally the only thing that matters to most people in our industry. The tech industry's general attitude is that all tech is morally and ethically neutral, and that we have no responsibility as to how people use or misuse it. If that's your initial position, what on Earth is going to make you care that most of the people in the blockchain world are sketchy and that it serves no practical purpose other than feeding into bullshit ancap ideology and making it easier to buy coke online?

HN is built off a VC incubator, which means that most of the people here buy thoroughly into free market capitalism and entrepreneurship as the heroic model thereof. So who's going to speak out about something they can pimp to Main Street as the new hotness and make a quick turnaround on?

I'm with you, man, but I doubt many other people are. But don't stop trying, by all means. Just from reading this, I know you have infinitely more faith in people, and people in tech especially, than I do, after 25 years in the industry.

Vaya con Dios, dude. Good luck.

I want to see this everyday. The experimentation is not over. The technology is not to blame.

Do what Dan Olson is doing but directly at your local representatives who can't understand any of it. Condense the info into to a letter or a flyer and get it into their hands. If the issue is not already on your local representatives' plates tell them how it will become so in the future.

Edit the title: We have a responsibility to challenge the narratives

Why is this flagged?

This post sounds kinda toxic and anti-innovation to me

Like how they spoke up about surveillance, misinformation, manipulation, tracking, walled gardens, monopolies, dark patterns, demonetization, censorship, encryption? Technologists don't rely on voice and speaking up, code is louder

Yawn. Controversial topic? Check. Inflamatory language ("fraud," "nightmarish," "Ponzi scheme")? Check. Brand new account? Check.

Flagging.

there is a difference between speaking out against technology and speaking out against how it's used

THANK YOU! I agree wholeheartedly! Downvote this comment into oblivion for providing little substance other than enthusiastic solidarity!

I did writing to a similar effect yesterday. https://justin.abrah.ms/2022-01-27-my-thoughts-on-crypto.htm...

tl;dr - I would really love to like the crypto stuff that's being worked on, I just can't get on board with the big problems I'm seeing.

I most certainly agree with the general goal. Whether on HN or in person I have spent tens and tens and tens of hours taking Bitcoin/crypto as recently as this week and last. People who know me know I don't like it, and why.

If I had funding, my preferred approach would be a consumer reports modality both in written form and on TV as consumer protection.

There is a palpable difference between seeing criticism as mere jealously or whining --- what 'Pubs and Dems talking heads do to each other on TV or headless voices on AM/FM do which by now is largely tuned out or wholly bought into the determinant of the country either way --- and education.

I do not think people who care about this are whiners; certainly not. But in the context of Trump, Covid, Jan-6, etc. there is a general climate of people posing as victims so they can take offense "righteously" which is an immediate turn off.

Education undercuts all that BS. It's empowering in the good way. If the goal is invest what'd be better? Who better to work with? How better to contextualize investment and money management? And how does that redound to the betterment of you and your loved ones? That's the game we wanna be in.

This anti-cryptocurrency rhetoric on HN made me realize that most people here are intellectual idiots.

Bye.

Boooo

Well... Here we are then... I completely agree. I've never been subtle about how stupid and useless I find blockchain technologies. Let's not fool ourselves, they are a quick way to make a buck off the back of someone naive. I've been saying this from the start, and so was a guy I used to work with in the past who had taken part in building one of the largest crypto mining operations. He also holds crypto but for the exact same reason - piggyback on someone naive when the time is right. To be clear, the fact that it takes effort to compute a hash does not add any value to the said hash. It's equally hard to compute pi, count the atoms in the universe or something like that. If anything, atoms and pi have a lot more value than 0x3df421daf43c if you ask me. Everything around crypto is purely mythical and Utopian - it's not anonymous, and it's not really a currency. It can be regulated extremely easily should governments desire to do so. Fact of the matter is that you can't buy your groceries with bitcoin in 99.999999999999999999999999999999999% of shops. And that is not going to change either. So whether you have 1 or a billion bitcoins, you need to exchange that for actual money. All a government needs to do is block the exchanges from operating and issuing transactions and you are done. Not to mention the inevitable and unquestionable existence of hash collisions which have the potential to take down any blockchain by rendering it useless. It's unlikely to find such but "Unlikely" != "Impossible" and in that sense it's a question of "when", not "if". Several years ago I had built a system, thinking that uuid4's would be a sufficient mechanism to prevent collisions. 2 years down the line with 5000 requests/second later, there I had it: 2 people on the opposite ends of the planet ended up with the exact same identifier, and me and 5 other people spent a week trying to work out how.

The other problem is the actual value and what the concept around blockchain implies: people buy crypto with the idea that it's value will exponentially grow so they can sell it, for, you guessed it, actual money. They sell it to their neighbors, who are also waiting for it's price to grow exponentially and make a profit. All while the world operates with a somewhat finite amount of cash. For example: someone buys a bitcoin for 1 dollar, sells 10 shares to 10 people for 10 dollars, he makes a 9 dollar profit. 9 people each wait for the price to rise, they sell each of their shares to another set of 100 people for a dollar, giving them each a 9 dollar profit. I'm scaling down the numbers for the sake of simplicity but that's not the point. Take a step back and tell me how this doesn't have every characteristic of a pyramid? Something which is outlawed in most countries and for a very good reason. I've been saying this from the very beginning: there are billions of ways to utilize this computational power for something meaningful and constructive but no, "{some}chain to the moon". /End of rant.

I do not know what to tell you. This is like Albania pyramid scheme in late 90s.

When I see Matt Damon, Tom Brady, Elon Musk, etc promoting NFTs it reminds so much of that. Now I see ads on YouTube telling people to take their 401k and invest in NFTs..

The only way we fix this with some laws - but even Elizabeth Warren is silent. We are fucked and I’m very pessimistic about the outcome.

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