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Comment by jonwalch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

> 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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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