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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> Once all the smoke and hullabaloo has cleared, and all the grandiose promises have fallen to the wayside, what remains is a core of genuinely useful and relatively simple core concepts that enter the canon, along with standards and protocols

has this happened with blockchain yet? I'm not seeing it.

Maybe I haven't been around the block enough because blockchain is the first hype tech I've seen that keeps not doing anything that existing tech can't do better. And yes I've looked, a lot.

The underlying tech sounds super promising and I hope someone figures something out. Not much luck so far.

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> has this happened with blockchain yet? I'm not seeing it.

No one wants to admit it for some reason, but Bitcoin is the killer app for Blockchain.

> The underlying tech sounds super promising and I hope someone figures something out. Not much luck so far.

Plenty of luck for me at least. Bitcoin solved exactly the problem it told me it would when it was created - permissionless digital "cash" transactions that cannot be reversed. It's a very specific use case, but one I am quite happy exists when I need it.

Those who have never had their money stolen by the banking system or denied the ability to use their money as they see fit likely won't understand my take. Those that do are using the currency today.

All the other crud around blockchain is line noise hype. Cryptocurrency already solved exactly the problem it set out to, it's just not easy to get rich off it.

>Bitcoin is the killer app for Blockchain

If the killer app of the Blockchain is Bitcoin, what does it say about the underlaying technology that the "killer app" is useful only as an extremely volatile speculation vehicle, and an ecologically disastrous one at that, with a tertiary use case of paying for illegal goods and services?

I think OP was saying the ledger mechanics are the useful part here, not the volatile speculation.

The ledger mechanics have no practical use beyond Bitcoin, which itself useless except for the cases I outlined.

> a tertiary use case of paying for illegal goods and services?

This is the use case mentioned. The OP is saying that everything else about it is useless.

Having the option to do something illegal should the need arise is a benefit to some people, and government control of the financial sector is not beloved by everyone.

But it seems like everyone is (mostly indirectly) impacted by the ransomware epidemic that Bitcoin has enabled.

Yup. That's considered an acceptable trade-off in the circles I'm talking about.

It's actually primarily useful for buying legal goods that credit card companies won't touch, like research chemicals.

It's not good for crimes because Chainalysis can track the coin movements afterward - though maybe it's good enough. And porn doesn't seem to use it, maybe because the transaction costs are too high or it's too unethical even for them.

And it's not good for speculation because it turns out it's just correlated to US tech stocks.

> Those who have never had their money stolen by the banking system or denied the ability to use their money as they see fit likely won't understand my take.

Neither I nor any of my friends or family members have ever had their money "stolen" by the banking system.

People I know have lost their wallet keys and lost significant value in their Bitcoin "investments" they made in just the last year.

> has this happened with blockchain yet? I'm not seeing it.

It's a unique situation in that hype is easily and definitely measurable: market cap. You would arguably need to subtract any use for real-world applications, i. e. the drug business using it, which can easily be approximated (to the closest full percentage point of market cap) by the formula x = 0.

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