Your answer makes me think you're missing the forest for the trees if you still refuse to see the reduction in paperwork and the gains from automating/internalizing some stuff that most companies can't do (Microsoft can mint gamepass, what about you?)
Actually, it does, by solving an entire class of coordination problems!
> Blockchain is nothing but a very expensive way to maintain a shared spreadsheet. There is nothing crypto can do that a regular-ass database can't do faster, cheaper, and more reliably
Sure, if you accept the "small" constraints of requiring centralization or mutual trust, which usually requires paperwork and lots of procedures... which was the point of my comment.
You don't like crypto so it must be pointless or a mass delusion, and everyone is wrong but the HN is right?
Sure, just like how the iPod was called lame or how dropbox was nothing that anyone couldn't do with just a little bit of SFTP :)
Coordination problems that you wouldn't have if you just decided to not use crypto.
Proof of work helps resolve byzantine faults, big whoop. Know what else solves byzantine faults? Trusting an authority, which Reddit would be anyway in your hypothetical UpvoteCoin.
Also, the problems aren't "solved" in any new way. The crypto "solution" to the byzantine solution is the same as the classical one: assign an authority to set the ground truth. The only thing that's different is that instead of picking a single authority, the authority is randomly assigned via lottery with a ticket price in kilowatt-hours.
> Sure, if you accept the "small" constraints of requiring centralization or mutual trust, which usually requires paperwork and lots of procedures
Mutual trust does not require paperwork and procedure. Trust is absolutely trivial. You have, throughout this conversation, trusted that Hackernews will record your comments and render them faithfully to everyone else in this thread, without even thinking about it. What did that cost you? What paperwork did you have to sign? What taxes did you have to pay?
Trust is not a bad thing, and it costs nothing, certainly not as much as crypto transaction fees which fluctuate moment to moment with the needs of the network and frequently spike over $80. Would you be having this conversation if you knew that, upon hitting enter, your accounts would be charged an unknown transaction fee and miner tip?
> Sure, just like how the iPod was called lame or how dropbox was nothing that anyone couldn't do with just a little bit of SFTP :)
2010 called, they want their irrational optimism that crypto will ever have a use case outside of buying drugs, ponzi schemes, and money laundering back.
When I swipe my credit card at the grocery store, I'm not worried about whether or not it will show up on my bank statement. Switching that transaction to crypto solves nothing, it gives me no additional assurances to whether the food I just bought is poisonous, whether somebody was watching over my shoulder for my pin, whether a delivery for something out of stock that I ordered will arrive, or anything else.
In fact, using crypto would make me less confident about those things because, since crypto transactions are eternally immutable, I can't get my money back if they screw me.
Being able to trust the fact that a transaction happened is not a useful innovation.