Hacker News Reader

Comment by capkutay | Hacker News Reader

Zoom and Netflix both lost 60-80% of their value in the last year and I don't see anyone declaring them dead. I don't work in crypto but I think there's a bit of a knee jerk reaction to seeing all the vaporware projects being wiped out (rightfully so). Consolidation and pruning of wasteful projects is good. If you feel like the work you're personally doing is positive, then don't worry about people dancing on the graves of LUNA and Celsius. ETH is still a legitimate technology with real use cases.

View on HN

> ETH is still a legitimate technology with real use cases.

what would be an example of a real use-case that ETH does well? The core promise of ETH is smart contracts and that code is somehow "law". But that got exposed for the idiotic reasoning that it was and went out of the window when they had to hard-fork in 2017.

No matter what they did since then to improve the old pre-2017 ETH nobody can tell me that bugs don't happen and if they do on this scale then human intervention in inevitable. This is however contra the promise that everything is decentralized by design and not under control of a single actor. Then there are the countless promises about its potential driven up by Gavin Wood & Vitalik Buterin that in hindsight look just like stalling for more time to ensure further funding rounds.

Woods & Buterin are both scammers that extracted millions from their mark. And they were able to do so because they have the technical background to pull it off and are also slightly smarter than the average mobbed-up shit-coin peddler like Dr. Ruja Ignatova or that Australian Satoshi-cosplaying clown Craig Wright.

ETH maybe hasn't been exposed as a scam yet but it is still an example of "fake it till you make it" at all cost and is in the same territorry as "Theranos", "Inventing Anna" - a series of broken promises, stalling techniques for more funding and lost egos of the founders who think of themselves as too big to fail.

> This is however contra the promise that everything is decentralized by design and not under control of a single actor

This is still decentralized because people need to coordinate to make a change. Decentralisation doesn't mean a system without human deciding what happens. It just means decentralisation of the power between the participants and ability to enter the room without creditionalism.

But it demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that code is not law since they breached that law with the hard fork.

That’s more of a demonstration that code is law but laws can change by the consensus of the participants, measured transparently and verifiable by their willingness to mine the fork.

That was the system working as intended, even if not everyone in the community agrees with it.

I'd say it was more like committing secrets Into an early alpha repo... understandable at that stage of the project, likely never to be repeated.

> nobody can tell me that bugs don't happen

They do happen. And whenever someone does make use of them, that's considered unlawful - which is absurd considering that the bug is part of the code and thus part of the law.

cross border multi currency accounts and transfers

ETH has been a legitimate technology with real use cases for a decade now and all we’ve got is jpeg’s of apes. With the amount of real money, talent and hard work being pumped into this space we should have seen the use cases materialize by now. But there’s nothing. I’m sure someone uses it for something real, but I haven’t seen crypto actually solve a real problem any better than a plain old database. Please correct me if I’m wrong,

Use case: decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money. Sorry if it takes more than a decade to disrupt the most entrenched and powerful status quo on earth.

Personally, I never thought it would come this far so quickly, and am quite happy with the pace of adoption and progress.

> decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money

accepted by nobody who has something valuable to offer

Still has you talking about it. So, you must in theory accept it if you talk about it. My friend that's logic at play :)

A very important part of any use case is that you clearly define a goal. What is the goal of "decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money"? These are crypto invented words that have no meaning outside of the crypto ecosystem.

An unregulated market where consumers can be exploited.

That's incorrect. Decoupling money from the government is a goal that predates crypto by quite a bit[0][1].

For most people in the first world, cryptocurrency is not an app that will instantly make your life better like Airbnb or Uber. It's a lot more deep and abstract than that. The idea is to separate money from the government. If you don't value financial privacy or don't think the government's ability to arbitrarily inflate the money supply is problematic, it's going to be hard to convince you. How would you respond to someone in China asking: "How does free speech make my life better?" or "How does democracy make my life better?". It's not really a question that can be easily answered with an elevator pitch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Federal_Reser...

[1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

It's an alternative financial system with many of the same (and some different) primitives than the existing ones: Liquidity via AMMs (instead of human or HFT MMs), derivatives, loans, yields, fixed-rate instruments, etc. These are used in the same way the equivalents in TradFi are used, just implemented differently, permissionless and with an API.

I believe that many people don't understand the traditional financial world or how any of the above are useful. They want to see something like Twitter on the Blockchain because that's what they can wrap their head around. That's why so many people in the crypto space come from a more traditional finance background. They understand how the above instruments are crucial for an economy even though they are not end-user products like Twitter is. They are one layer below that.

Also, the decade argument is misleading in the case of Ethereum. It's true that ETH itself has been around for a while, but DeFi with sufficient liquidity has really only been a thing for 2-3 years and has made quite rapid progress since then.

>They understand how the above instruments are crucial for an economy even though they are not end-user products like Twitter is.

Do they actually know these instruments are crucial for the economy or do they just know how to make money with it? I'd think the latter would be enough.

Can you recommmend any resources to understand the importance of financial instruments to the economy?

>Do they actually know these instruments are crucial for the economy or do they just know how to make money with it? I'd think the latter would be enough.

There is no difference in capitalism between something being "crucial" for economy or just a way "to make money." They are equivalent.

That's hard for me to understand. I'd take 'crucial to the enconomy' to mean 'positively coupled to the rest of the economy' or 'the rest of the economy would be worse off/less efficient if this financial instrument were to be outlawed.

Why does this follow from 'makes a lot of money'? That seems like a very complicated question to me.

I was trying to say that these are equivalent, crucial to economy and way to make money. To me they are equivalent because capitalism will find the shortest and most efficient path, if it doesn't make money it will not exist. Hence, crucial means survives by making money.

Most relationships in capitalism are symbiotic, yes, but just like the natural world, predatory and even parasitic relationships abound as well.

I understand it's an alternative, but if you can't explain why it's a better alternative, than it's just making simple things complex. You argue that people who ask for practical use cases don't understand because "they can't wrap their heads around it". I'd argue exactly the opposite: you're in too deep to understand that the burden of proof is on you (or anyone else in crypto), not on everyone else, and you can't wrap your around the fact that everything related to finance is lubricant for life. How is crypto better lubricant than the current financial system? That's a very valid question, and if takes your more than two sentences and all kinds of words that no one outside of crypto understands, I'm afraid you don't have an answer at all.

> How is crypto better lubricant than the current financial system?

That's easier to answer, but it's not what's usually asked. The OP asked "what's the use case of crypto" which is kind of like asking "what is the use case of financial instruments" and that's pretty difficult to explain to someone who has zero background in finance.

So why is a financial ecosystem based on crypto better? It's permissionless and makes the same services globally accessible to anyone in the world. It can to move and evolve faster because everything comes with open composable APIs allowing developers to implement new ideas quickly. It can be significantly cheaper due to eliminating middleman, which is already happening with AMMs that have liquidity and volume comparable to centralized counterparts. It's transparent in that you can see the current state of the market (e.g. collateralization ratios) and protect yourself accordingly. And it can protect you from bad centralized actors that manipulate monetary policy for their own benefit.

These are pretty convincing pros for me. Of course they also come with cons. If anyone can create financial instruments by copying & pasting a token template you'll end up with tons of scams. If you need distributed consensus to make decisions things move more slowly. For some people the cons will outweigh the pros. But there aren't many "consumer use cases" like Twitter on a blockchain that are easy to explain because it's fundamentally a financial infrastructure layer.

All of those things are contingent on perfect scenarios. As in, bug free contracts; which not to even mention the human willful engineering part of manipulating trust. Many people confuse permission and trust.

The things you outline are optimistic visions for what cryptocurrencies can offer as an alternative to the "root" financial system; however it is certainly not better in every case, and only maybe better in some very specific cases. Perhaps this will change overtime, but one thing I know for sure.... every piece of software ever written and every piece of hardware ever built has bugs and has been hacked. The human is even weaker to exploitation, so... without middle-men to act as a safety net, lawlessness and ill incentive can run rampant. Unfortunately the human condition optimizes for this opportunity if it shows itself.

You do admit there are cons, and I appreciate that. I think anyone who has some technical know-how should do what they can to at least point out any dogma. Dogma has clearly ruined a lot of the cool things about the technology.

You've essentially responded with the statement that all software has bugs: "every piece of software ever written and every piece of hardware ever built has bugs and has been hacked".

The person you're responding to provided a number of cogent points. To take the bad faith interpretation of your argument we'd never use computers or online banking.

They break. Humans fix it. Nobody can fix broken hacked contracts and act as intermediaries to solve issue. 3 party responsibility is key for stability.

The fiat financial system works because all the financial engineering is underlying the real capital economy.

Ethereum has the financialization but not a real capital economy -- no one starts a non-cryptoc biz with Ethereum.

So, all the defi stuff only works when its bridged to the fiat money world, but that bridge is so full of scams and speculative bubbles that it's useless for legit work.

IPFS and Internet Computer are the bests idea for a real economy on the blockchain money. But anything non-computational, like physical manufacturing and offline services, are much harder to connect to cryptoc.

ETH launched in 2015, which is 7 years ago, and has been working through fundamental limitations of the technology, building out the technological primitives that will enable mass-consumer blockchain applications in the future.

A list of areas where Ethereum has made huge progress:

* building secure smart contracts - more sophisticated auditing programmes by more experienced companies, improvements in programming languages, including Solidity, and improvements in formal verification techiques, have reduced the prevalence of major hacks of blue chip smart contracts significantly since 2015

* enabling privacy with public validation. Zk-SNARK and other zkp based mixers have gone from theory to reality with the launches of Tornado Cash, the AZTEC Network, and CAPE.

* Protocol fine-tuning, like the implementation of EIP1559, to improve fee predictability

* The creation of a Proof of Stake consensus protocol that maintains the same decentralization of Proof of Work, while providing a given level of security at a much lower economic cost

* Scalability technologies like Optimistic and ZK-Rollups

* Protocol upgrades like sharding to expand the capabilities of Rollups

These all took time to build, and will take more time still to reach production quality, but are shaping up to provide a vastly more useful blockchain platform than what was launched in 2015.

Your bullet points list a bunch of navel-gazing crypto improvements for crypto, but the previous poster was asking for examples where "crypto actually solve[a] a real problem any better than a plain old database". Got any?

Be your own bank cannot be solved by a plain database, as it doesn't ship with the trustless features most blockchain networks offer. The network is there. When bitcoin came out it solved that problem but the network took years to expand enough to guarantee integrity.

That's what has been happening in crypto, in the early years, network expansion, fed by speculative investment (speculation can have its merit, see).

Then came more elaborated DeFI and non DeFI supporting techs. (Smart contract, faster and cheaper blocks networks for micro transactions, anonymity/privacy networks etc).

Yes, business use cases continue to lag, but in a decade the progress is to me so astonishing, not so disappointing.

Perhaps worth mentioning, the traditional system via, via regulators working for we know who, and massive media fear mongering is not to be ignored, the injustice will lose in the long run, but it's pretty clear it has contributed to limit adoption, hence the emergence of more concrete, useful to socity use cases, other than auto generated Punk Monkeys for degenerated moneybgrabbers.

What problem does being your own bank solve? You're posing crypto as a solution to crypto-defined problems that no one actually has. How does crypto improve my life? How will it make me happier, healthier and how will it help me contribute more to the wellbeing of others and the planet? I can easily answer this question for PostgreSQL.

Well over 1B people remains unbanked, either excluded from banking or due to non intentional accessibility issues. That alone means crypto may be a solution to a signicant issue so many are having. Would that be enough?

Even among the banked, and in the very developed world, the traditional system has caused the loss of people' life long savings, loss of the ability to even continue business operations, that day someone in a centralised office decided it was OK to unilateraly freeze their accounts without notice (the many reporting their anecdotes but somehow rarely making mainstream news), or even the sudden withdrawal of the funds for dubious or faulty reasons (Greece, and other countries which faced economical turmoils and saw even democratically elected administrations basically steal people's money to recover from their own mismanagement flaws).

If you aren't impacted by any of the freedom and justice proven serious freedom and justice infringements listed above, which sometimes put people in life threatening positions, at least of financial tremendous distress, then Good for you! If you don't see any benefit in adopting blockchain technologies in your day to day life, fine! It will come around. And for now, billions would disagree with your perspective.

On PostgresQL, amazing solution,my favorite RDBS I think. Worth pointing out the main original author of this software was/is a hero in the fight against system oppression, he would probably have to say that PostgressQL is a beautiful solution for what it solves, and that blockchain is a revolution pending to solve many other issues, if only he could have access to this thread and not be inhumainly restrained in jail for many years with very questionable treatment, decided by the same clique of tyrants who sold us the banking system we still have today.

> the main original author of this software was/is a hero in the fight against system oppression

...is this a reference to Assange? IIRC, his contributions were ~0.7% of the commits in 1996, focused on psql and libpq. Promoting him to "main original author" is quite a leap.

My mistake, not the main contributor or orignal author, just a mere contributor. Assange, yes. All there rest stands I think.

PostgreSQL was created by Michael Stonebreaker and Larry Rowe, neither of whom are imprisoned. Who are you talking about?

I won’t make secret deals with Citadel. Unlike my broker.

I'm still not sure why all of that is useful. A lot of clever infrastructure, but for exactly what?

Also, it's worth reminding people that ETH might be useful, but still worth less than its current price. There's a ton of speculation propping up the current price.

Right now Ethereum is only useful for niche applications, like using your ETH as collateral for an autonomously issued DAI loan.

This is because its disadvantages, like lack of privacy and very limited throughput capacity, make traditional finance better for all but the highest value blockchain applications, where the extreme integrity of process provided by its highly redundant and collectively managed ledger outweighs its disadvantages, like extremely narrow write bandwidth.

But once those disadvantages disappear, as a result of the aforementioned infrastructure development, I believe that will change, and we'll see Ethereum's advantages make it the preferred platform for mass-consumer applications.

I think you mean "if", not "once".

This is somewhere between self driving cars and flying cars in the feasibility scale.

The solutions to throughput limitations are already proven out in testnets and alpha releases, and well understood conceptually.

You're not wrong. The entire cryprocurrency space has been a colossal waste of time and energy.

you are completely wrong. I don't want to explain other use cases here but even though for jpeg's of apes, Ethereum or blockchain industry created a more inclusive economy. (now all the artists, they know at least one more way to monetize their art.)

You don’t want to explain the other use-cases? Would you mind linking to a place that does explain them?

DeFi has concrete use cases. Just look at how derivatives and options work in DeFi. You will see how financial products work in traditional finance. You can understand them by reading their smart contract code. Another example would be reading the code of uniswap [0]. It is a decentralized exchange in other words, it lets you exchange your value without intermediaries and a central authority by having an algorithmic pricing. (Actually, by saying algorithmic, It is actually pretty simple pricing curve :) but it works :).

I hope it is clear.

thank you.

> You will see how financial products work in traditional finance. You can understand them by reading their smart contract code.

But this doesn't need DeFi. You could have open-source trading software without Ethereum.

You could have many things but practically speaking we don't have it :)

Can you tell me a completely centralized alternative to the Brave/BAT ecosystem?

Block ads, reward creators, and get paid. No big tech company is paying their users or doing machine learning locally so they “can’t be evil.”

Plain old databases cut secret deals with Citadel.

It’s just a database. And you just got “justed.”

Zoom and Netflix are companies that actually produce valueable goods. Both companies have a lot of happy customers. There is a lower bound for the stock price roughly equal to the physical assets of the company. There's no such limit for crypto coins. It can go to 0. There's no reason to assume otherwise.

All of crypto is down that much. Not all of the stock market is. Stop comparing these things.

I pretty much think both are dead, or to be more precise: downscaled.

Netflix has been making bad woke movies for too long. If they had good content at least it would be ok, but they don't.

Most people are back in the office and the competition has caught up, so what is Zoom's justification for existence?

People don't seem to graps the cocept that equity prices are fair market values: the current consensus is that netflix is 80% lower than the high peak. At the height, money was free and i flation low. Now, and in the future, money will be very expensive and inflation high, so why would you hold growth stocks that also don't seem to be producing anything valuable (like netflix bad movie quality).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com