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Comment by nwiswell | Hacker News Reader

You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts; proof of stake is not 12 years old (Sunny King and Scott Nadal, 2012), and certainly there have been a lot of other hard problems solved since then.

There's a lot of other stuff beyond Ethereum, too. Privacy coins in particular look very little like what was envisioned in Satoshi's paper.

Whether that's all worth anything from an economic perspective, I'm not sure (and even less sure whether it's worth what it's valued), but crypto is legitimately a bunch of very clever technological solutions to hard problems, invented by actual hackers, so I'm a little sad to see people minimizing it on Hacker News.

Especially since this particular innovation is ameliorating the whole global warming problem, which is the prime criticism leveled at crypto. Take that away, and isn't it just open source software that we're talking about here?

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This is the thing I don't get about HN.

Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch.

Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent.

Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives.

Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.

It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of people on this planet. I was as excited as everyone was in 2012 but that plateu is just going on and on.

Since 2012 the situation has changed quite a bit. Adoption has increased massively. It's just doing it so slowly you aren't noticing it's happening.

Not to mention the adoption possibly going on behind the scenes.

> Adoption has increased massively.

Adoption? More like, speculation. I still don't know anyone who's doing any real world transactions with crypto, but I know people who hold it for speculation purposes.

Seems to me like adoption has gone backwards in some regards. Look at companies like Steam which at one point were accepting bitcoin but then pulled the plug on it. I also don't know anyone that owns crypto for any reason other than as an investment.

>Adoption has increased massively.

Adoption has mostly increased thanks to centralization, via exchanges, which seems antithetical to Bitcoin's foundation. What's the number one use case? Speculation and scams.

I'm not sure it's going in the right direction.

> It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of people on this planet.

To be fair, so is Linux.

Feels like arpanet atm, so give it some time. https://online.jefferson.edu/business/internet-history-timel...

I have a question to people who were around and have a memory of the times because I don’t as I was not born yet. But does the crypto thing feel similar to how the internet started in the late 80’s and early 90’s before finally taking off?

I recall some videos/articles dissing internet as a passing fad at that time - does anyone who remember what it was like then think the crypto industry going through something similar?

God no.

The utility of systems like email was very quickly apparent, and while the 90s web was much more about publishing structured information than any sort of interaction, again it was pretty immediately recognised as a powerful, useful thing.

I don’t recall any negativity to “the internet”, but a lot for the dot com hype cycle, which is what I think cryptocurrency most closely resembles, but it has dragged on for years

- https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2016/08/25-years-h...

"The Internet, bah. Hype alert"

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

"What is the Internet, Anyway?"

HN is -in essence- a collection of vocal minorities. Post something on Kubernetes, and you'll get every Linux Sysadmin complaining about how it was better before the age of containers and we didn't invent anything new. Post something on cloud infrastructure management, and you'll get people somewhat angry about its cost. Post something on Electron apps, and you'll get everyone to talk about how C++ and QT apps outshine them in 2022. Post something on crypto, and, you know, it's going to be about how it's not used, too complex, or too energy inefficient.

Good news is, those topics change and become more accepted after some time. It's an endless cycle of Bash-and-Move-on. If something is "too popular", then it's obviously the worse technology ever, according to HN.

Kubernetes solves a widespread problem. Cloud solves a widespread problem.

What is the widespread problem crypto is solving ?

sending money to family in countries with harsher financial systems, being able to donate to causes you support without it being traceable to you (through tornado cash and zcash/monero), being able to move large amounts of money instantly with minimal fees and no intervention, etc.

Yeah, the one and only crypto use case: go around financial regulations.

Ever wonder why we want to trace transactions? KYC, AML, all that jazz?

Hint: darkness and obscurity most of the time don't hide shy virtuous people.

Users rights

> The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this.

No it's not.

Web2 exploded largely because of XMLHTTPRequest which from the second it was released was simple to understand, simple to use and solved an immediate problem.

To this day I'm still yet to find a problem that Web3 solves uniqely well other than money laundering, sanctions evasion etc.

> To this day I'm still yet to find a problem that Web3 solves uniqely well other than money laundering, sanctions evasion etc.

Many of cryptographical constructs of the past 4 years were and are spearheaded by blockchains, in particular fast signature aggregation, threshold signatures protocols and zero knowledge proofs. This translates to protocols for:

- voting.

- splitting a critical company secret between say the CEO, COO, CFO, Head of HR, Compliance, Legal and requiring 4 out of 6 to sign off critical actions, without ever revealing that secret.

- proving that you did or you own something without revealing what. Which could be quite interesting for law enforcement for example.

Most people here aren’t hackers; they’re corporate employees. And you’re right. It shows.

Although reluctant to substantially invest (and hence still working for others ;-), I know some of the people involved.

They're as smart as they come.

So it's 10 years got it.

I don't understand why people are so excited about computers, integrated circuits have been around since the 60's. You have companies like Intel and AMD coming out every year with announcements like it's some new thing.

Because computers changed the world in the first decade, even the first year they came about. Crypto did not.

I remember the silk road, and bitcoin donations to wikileaks, and bitcoin pizza. I think it all got bogged down after that with the irrational exuberance of the bull run, and everyone was too distracted to pay attention to the XT dispute when it really mattered. But it is getting better now, I am optimistic that the crash will continue and we'll see sanity returned to cryptocurrency.

The problem is fundamentally that cryptocurrency requires network effects to work. Cryptocurrency is not an easy thing to explain to most people, and it can be quite dangerous, so the best thing you can do for new users is tell them to stay away.

imo, Silk Road deserves the credit for solving Bitcoin's chicken-and-egg problem with network effects.

a single enterprising dealer could have started it off - exchange rate basically didn't matter, as long as someone was buying and selling BTC, it'd work to keep the dealer's identity private. SR tapped into a massive new market, regular people started learning about crypto so they could buy drugs, this created a flow of money through the market. honestly, I was excited to see my friends using Tor and buying BTC for cash - it's the gritty, cypherpunk dream!

whenever there's a real market opportunity like that, network effects don't seem to get in the way. Monero and Zcash got very popular from all the ransomware, though I'm admittedly less exuberant about hospitals being ransomed than drugs.

PeerCoin was the first proof-of-stake system, not deletegated proof of stake system, in 2012.

Here is some more history on early cryptocurrencies and blockchains:

https://twitter.com/moo9000/status/1389573901815066627

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