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Comment by thwayunion | Hacker News Reader

> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth

I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database.

Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough were exploring use cases for blockchain. AFAICT everyone in that space either left the space altogether, is still rambling about solving supply chain fraud (...), or pivoted to shovel salesmanship to support speculators (or speculate themselves).

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I worked on code that used a Merkle Tree before any of us had heard of a Merkle tree or this blockchain bullshit came around, so I never got starry eyed about any of this stuff.

That project was in an environment where chain of custody is an established mechanism for ensuring public safety. Layering a web of trust over the top of that was something the users could mostly digest. Consumers can only use software signed by a particular department or person, only approved software is signed, and approval requires a chain of approvals before it going back to an original signature that says "these are the bits we gave you".

That's a useful application of the Merkle Trees. But you'll note there's no distributed consensus, and there's no Proof of Work. Or rather, the proof inferred, backed by process and in this case legistlation.

Blockchain admits it's only barely a Merkle Tree right in the name. Our graph looked a lot more like trunk in a git repo. Slightly more tree-like but people only care about the last node.

A Block header includes a root hash of a Merkle tree of transactions. So yes, it is a tree, if you also consider the useful payload, not just block headers.

Then e.g. in Ethereum there's also a Merkle tree of the entire state as well.

> there's no distributed consensus

Distributed consensus is necessary if you want high availability and replication for your Merkle tree.

If data in your tree is important, you want to replicate it, right? You want to be sure it's stored on multiple nodes.

So this distributed consensus thing, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, it basically gives you a receipt that at least N nodes have this data stored.

You didn't implement it because it takes considerable effort. But if you implemented Merkle tree with high availability, you'd get something very similar to blockchain.

> If data in your tree is important, you want to replicate it, right?

Yes!

> You didn't implement it because it takes considerable effort.

I'd wager it's because he was smart enough to read the man page for rsync and didn't over-engineer a non-solution to a non-problem in his particular use-case.

Data integrity & availability generally considered to be important. So e.g. many databases implement synchronous replications, and Turing Award winning scientists Liskov and Lamport developed Byzantine Fault Tolerance solutions. I guess they were just too lazy to read the man page for rsync...

Something like that. The point was accuracy, not throughput.

> Distributed consensus is necessary if you want high availability and replication for your Merkle tree.

No, distributed consensus is necessary if you're willing to sacrifice correctness for availability.

>> public safety

> So this distributed consensus thing, Byzantine Fault Tolerance,

Show me a blockchain that actually implements BFT. Longest chain wins is not Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

> No, distributed consensus is necessary if you're willing to sacrifice correctness for availability.

?!?!

Do you think it's most correct to have only one replica?

> Show me a blockchain that actually implements BFT.

A lot of blockchains implement some variant of PBFT. Including the one I made: https://gitlab.com/chromaway/postchain/

Specifically, longest chain is Might Makes Right, which is not consensus, it’s leader following.

If I makes you feel any better, I see Raft as only BFT during leader election, the rest of the time if the leader is a bad actor then everything is fucked. It’s a game of Secret Hitler.

Remember, the Byzantine Generals problem is what the BFT term is acknowledging, and the problem with the generals was one of sabotage, not just missing messages. It’s only statistically unlikely that longest chain is created in earnest and not via malfeasance. But the bigger a system scales the more frequent counterexamples occur. That’s the lesson of every scalable system. Bad days that used to happen once a quarter now happen a couple times a week.

Edit:

> In a consortium blockchain, typically blocks must be approved (signed) by a majority of consortium members.

Well, well. Adults have finally joined the blockchain community. Maybe there’s hope yet.

It's been 10+ years of a costly solution desperately looking for a problem.

Bitcoin was always this fun nerdy hobby money, right up until the speculators came in and exploited it.

Now it's "investing" in the confidence of the future of a computing network that can only handle 7 transactions a second, but that still hasn't stopped it becoming the essential oils for tech bros either.

You're under selling the revolution that was buying LSD on the internet

Yeah, I almost mentioned Silk Road, but BTC has since been used to back trace and arrest online drug dealers so I feel like it was never really that good at it to begin with.

I suspect BTC has always been an US government honey pot...

Google dorian satoshi nakamoto newsweeks. The guy is probably behind btc. He worked previously as army contractor and in the finance sector...

Just like TOR network was the work of 2 previously army contractors (I remember that quite well, even if wikipedia doesn't seem to remember as well).

Beside, Belgian and other CB (not even ECB) never had a thing to say about crypto with public blockchain of any sort. But monero, which has a private blockchain, has been prohibited in nearly all EU juridiction soon after its launch.

Definitely useful in Argentina: https://www.freethink.com/technology/crypto-argentina-black-... - fabulous article

I have found one: Sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the olympics. I highly doubt that this could have been done based on Postgres. Postgres is too boring and stable to attract the necessary attention.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/265060754...

TFA: Dogecoin was sent for 30k of the 184k raised

So no this effort was not enabled by crypto

Yes because we all know the only way to raise money is via shitcoins.

I learned that by watching Cool Runnings.

As noted elsewhere, most of the money wasn't transferred via dogecoin. But reasonable financial transaction systems don't attract the advertising attention that this was able to.

Does that make it a good financial system? To the degree that a clown car is a good public transport system.

I think you have to want or need decentralization in order to buy into most of the use-cases of the technology, either because you don't trust institutions or because you're in a part of the world where either the institutions aren't safe or the currency isn't.

Assuming you do believe that decentralization is nice to have, applications like decentralized banking (ie. lending, borrowing, exchange of assets) become valuable.

There are also emergent culture sources of "value" in the industry, such as medium native artforms in on-chain generative artworks, distributed multiplayer "runtime" systems artworks, on-chain gaming and metagaming, etc.

I understand that for many people, even if you grant that _some_ people might find the above legitimately valuable or useful you may still believe that it doesn't justify the energy costs. To that my response would be that all of the above are serviced by networks like ethereum and its various layer two solutions, none of which utilize proof of work, and the sum of which have a fairly modest carbon footprint, as with other computationally inexpensive digital technologies.

If you take issue with Bitcoin specifically I can't really offer an argument with conviction. BTC is what got me into the industry, and I think the BTC whitepaper is a brilliant example of human ingenuity, but more recent advancements in the technology leave me skeptical about the societal ROI on large scale PoW operations.

I do not see any need in my life for the combination of high finance and decentralization. Centralized and highly regulated high finance is bad enough, and already something I try to avoid except when absolutely necessary. My economic life is highly decentralized, but with extremely high trust and very little financialization, so no need for what crypto people mean when they say "decentralization". DeFi, in my life, means the neighbor down the street leaves a you-owe-me note when she drops off eggs, a debt instrument that I can settle using any number of currencies recognized by the local economy; I most often opt to pay in HomeBrewCoin.

> I think the BTC whitepaper is a brilliant example of human ingenuity

I largely have the same problem as hinkley (sibling comment): I had seen most or all of these ideas prior to the emergence of BTC. I first countered Merkle trees... gosh, forever ago. Got really into cryptography in the 90s. Etc. The idea of creating a currency backed by PoW didn't seem ingenious; it seemed like a particularly silly application of otherwise quite useful technologies. AFAICT it still is mostly useless, except that it made some people very wealthy.

Anyways, I'll go back to yelling at kids to stop picking my tulips.

I don't trust you, you don't trust me, neither of us trust the guy who owns the git server but I need to give you something without anyone being able to stop us.

> give you something

Eh? You can’t like give me anything - you can give me a token - which can also effectively be money. The latter usually occurs due to some other trust relationship needing to be established - we are back at square one.

Luckily there's a fairly liquid market for the things we're handing around (usually)

I acknowledged “something you can exchange for money” - that was not the objection.

It doesn’t solve the underlying difficulty of exchanging physical goods and services that are not tokens - you, know, the actual hard part. It also doesn’t solve the laundering aspect once you try to get those tokens liquidated to something not volatile as fuck.

Signed git commits, as per the parent.

Git guy took the server offline. You want to refer to the commit to give someone else the token but now you can't.

You can't trust the git guy.

This isn't a coherent problem statement, and to the extent that it is, it's solved by TCP/IP (this isn't the early 1980s; why are you using some random third party's server if you explicitly don't trust them to keep the server running? Run it from your own box. This has been solved since the early 90s.)

It's funny how after over a decade the best bitcoin can do is an almost half solution to a problem more contrived than the plot of a daytime soap opera. Who the fuck actually has this problem?

You really shouldn't be doing a significant amount of your business with people who don't trust you and who you don't trust. Blockchain advocates really underestimate how much of functioning economies simply work because of trust (with lawyers and courts as a backup), and how small the potential "I don't trust you" market is.

It is okay to do business with people you don't trust, but the crux is that pow/pos doesn't actually solve most of the substantive trust problems.

Eg: all of the weird supply chain nonsense around blockchain. You can keep a ledger and so on, but if there's corruption/theft in the physical warehouse then the ledger is worth only and exactly the disk space to which it's written. No amount of distributed consensus will change anything about the fact that Joe's cousin's friend heard about the shipment and stole 10% of the bulk good and replaced it with dirt to make the weights match.

The problem of doing business with people who you don't completely trust is very real. However, blockchain offers no solution (except and unless the thing you are trading is something that literally be placed on a blockchain, ie nothing physical and nothing that depends on a legal system to enforce).

Courts and lawyers are the opposite of trusting who you're doing business with. If you actually trusted them, there would be no need for courts.

The "I don't trust you" market consists of everyone who does business using written contracts. So, nearly everyone.

I'm sorry but this is a take I completely disagree with. Fundamentally, I do business with people I trust. If I don't trust someone, I'll simply never do business with them. No amount of bullet proof mathematical constructs will change this.

Now, I may trust someone now, but circumstances change. People change. I don't trust the universe to be constant. I thus want to enshrine agreements in contracts and and I want there to be institutions that can offer objective (within reason) arbitration in case my counterparty and I come to disagree in the future.

I don't know what sort of business you operate in, but in my industry, trust is paramount and is practically equivalent to capital. You'll simply not even be employed unless you are trusted. It takes a long time to build a track record and you can lose it in the matter of seconds if you make poor decisions.

So yes, IMO the world operates fundamentally on the basis of trust. I don't believe for a moment that long term successful business can be conducted in an environment without fundamental trust between counterparties. Again, trust does not equal blindly taking people at their word or neglecting due diligence. "Trust, but verify" is the saying.

> Now, I may trust someone now, but circumstances change. People change.

Trust is inherently a forwards-looking thing. If you don't trust someone not to change in a way that breaks the promises they've made to you, that's not trust at all.

> Fundamentally, I do business with people I trust.

> I don't know what sort of business you operate in

Software industry. When employers have tried to screw me out of things they promised me, I've pointed to sections of written contracts (with the unspoken understanding of a lawsuit if their side of the contract is not upheld) and it's saved me multiple times. These companies just don't care about what they promised you, you can't trust them, they only respond to the looming threat of legal action. On the flip side, I've been screwed before at those times where I didn't keep a meticulous paper trail. The last one was particularly tough because I thought I had made close friends with the person I was doing business with, and I genuinely thought they could be trusted, but they ended up stiffing me out of payment in the end.

In the software industry and in particular working at start-ups, promises are worth jack shit unless they're in a written contract. Nobody trusts anyone to uphold promises. I would love to work in an industry where people could trust each other to uphold their word. What industry are you in?

> Courts and lawyers are the opposite of trusting who you're doing business with.

Courts are extremely expensive and time-consuming. Contracts are definitely not the opposite of trusting who you're doing business with. If you do not trust someone to fulfill their side of a contract, you probably don't bother writing up the contract. The contract is there to punish breach of trust, not to establish trust.

Security is the opposite of trusting who you're doing business with. There's a reason super markets -- the most common type of business operating without high trust -- employ loss prevention professionals.

Notice that the blockchain offers no substantive defense to a five finger discount...

> The contract is there to punish breach of trust, not to establish trust.

If someone can only be trusted under threat of punishment, that means that they aren't actually trustworthy in the first place. I think we might have different definitions of trust. If I fully trust someone, to me that means that I know there's no need for the threat of court at all, because I can be sure that they will uphold their word even if it's in their better financial interest to break it.

We place trust in the courts of justice so we don't have trust every single party that we interact with. If the courts of justice or the government at large cannot be trusted, then society cannot function, and no amount of cryptography or technology of any kind can fix that.

Do you trust the bank, credit bureaus or some other establishment that you deal with to not leak your sensitive info? Maybe you do. But in case you don't, which is a rational response to the past performance of some establishments (e.g. Equifax), your life still has to go on.

Did you trust the POTUS when he said that Iraq had WMD before starting a war? I suppose he's a painter now so everything's peachy.

A lot of people have been giving reminders of the general untrustworthiness of establishments, including Snowden & Assange. Establishments that many people are forced to deal with.

It would be nice if everybody could be safely trusted. For those who readily trust, there is no problem to solve.

However, some other people see untrustworthiness everywhere, so they take opportunities to try to opt out of the system by engaging in a trustless system that does not require privileged middlemen. It's been baby steps so far.

you cannot opt out, there is no escape, its a closed system. misanthropy is harmful. decentralization is a fantasy

Why is this called misanthropy? Before there were big establishments, there were already people.

Simple: there's no way to do this transaction - at least not scalably. Are you implying that BTC can somehow solve this?

For those of us living on the right side of a relatively stable rules based society where we have reasonable expectation of personal property rights, it is not useful.

For those either on the wrong side of the society (eg. Source of income is what the society defines as crime etc) or living in a society where your wealth (possibly acquired through corruption) can be seized without recourse, it is potentially a useful way to store and transfer wealth in a way that is difficult and expensive to interfere with or detect. This is a real use case though possibly not a morally defensible one to most of us.

The other theoriticical use case of having a form of liquidish currency that is not devaluable at whim by governments has not come to pass due to speculation and volatility.

The rest are either speculating OR selling shovels to the gold diggers.

>I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database.

I've heard a lot of people used it to buy drugs on the internet.

That works for a while - when it's an obscure new thing that the government doesn't know to look for. Afterwards, it becomes a public unchangeable ledger of the entire network of illegal trading.

The IRS currently has a $600k bounty on the ability to de-anonymize Monero transactions, which has so far gone unclaimed. Most crypto drug sales are transacted in Monero nowadays. Not every crypto has public and traceable transactions.

You're still betting your future on this privacy holding. If they do find a way to attack it, they will likely still be able to reconstruct the whole history, unlike with cash.

Also, the bounty was awarded to a company who is theoretically developing a solution. I'm not holding my breath, and anyway I hope for the sake of everyone guilty of harmless "crimes" (buying recreational drugs) that the anonymity holds.

I actually don't believe it's possible to retroactively reconstruct Monero history, in an information-theoretic sense. The data just isn't there, because it gets thrown out along the way after each ring-signature is completed. It's on a similar playing field as cash in that regard.

To track cash, you need to surveil each point at which the cash changes hands, otherwise that information is lost forever. To track XMR, you likewise need to surveil each point at which XMR changes hands. In some ways, the process is similar to reconstructing TOR traffic - you can't passively observe and deanonymize the entire network, you have to actively target a specific actor. I believe that's what the IRS is talking about when they offer their bounty.

I've tried to read the white paper, but I'm not confident I understood enough, and it seems Monero does some extra things as well beside protocol described in the paper. It didn't seem to me that the information is destroyed in any way, but it did seem true that many pieces that are absolutely required to de-anonymize were never part of the network, so they can't be gleaned.

It did seem though that some targeted attacks where you obtain the private keys of separate individuals could allow you to confirm that they transacted via Monero in the past by inspecting the block chain with these keys.

I believe that's true - if you can get ahold of someone's private keys, you have free access not only to their money but also to their money's transaction history. The security and anonymity of the system is predicated on the person wanting to be anonymous being able to keep their private keys private.

However, private keys are easy to strongly encrypt, typically don't leave your own machine, and can be safeguarded in many other ways. So in practice, they are impossible to lift from a sophisticated user without performing an equally sophisticated attack of deception, for example an evil maid attack with specialized hardware/software.

600k is peanuts compared to how much that ability would be worth.

A real bounty would be close to 100x that number.

You're forgetting that the IRS is basically perpetually handicapped by people who are protecting their friends who do sketchy tax based things to make more money that they then feed back to the people that kneecap the IRS

also pizza, for a short time

A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships would be extremely valuable and could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages.

But the blockchain space has an extreme bias against the existing finance world. Frequently products in the space want to tear it down as they view it as predatory.

This leaves us with the current situation, the crypto industry speed running the history of finance and a technology in search of a problem.

How is it currently run? From my layperson experience, every time I do a wire transfer, I feel like I'm inputting data into a mainframe or something...

Well technically...

[1] - "How Mainframes Keep The Financial Industry Up And Running"

"...92 of the top 100 banks use the mainframe to provide banking services to customers, and other types of financial services companies depend on the mainframe, as well. Visa, for example, uses the mainframe to process billions of credit and debit card payments every year. According to some estimates, up to $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through mainframes..."

[1] https://blog.share.org/Article/mainframe-matters-how-mainfra...

Technically technically, you're feeding data into a system whose purpose is the care and feeding of a mainframe. That veneer is pretty thin in places and so it tends to feel like you're talking to a mainframe even when you're talking to an arbitrator for the mainframe.

Oh I see...you are here for an argument... https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ

Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type makes me puke! You vacuous, toffee-nosed malodorous pervert!

I am sorry, but I am not allowed to argue on my free time... :-)

You basically are.

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/ach/ and https://www.swift.com handle much of the US, and it's a system developed in the 70s (or earlier) and it works.

It could be modernized and things like https://explore.fednow.org are trying to do that.

But the problems involved are not things a blockchain would secure because there's a trusted intermediary which can just run a database.

I swear to god, half of the problem with cryptocurrency is Americans not understanding what a functional personal banking system looks like. The big American banks just never bothered to move beyond the 1970s, and so otherwise fairly well-informed Americans in tech assume you need some sort of completely mad system like "consume the power of Spain making a distributed merkel tree full of partial hash collisions" to make bank transfers work.

in every other rich country, you just log in to your bank's web ui thing, click "SEND MONEY TO MY MUM", and then it sends it, for free, to your mum, with no risk of your mum being able to take more money, no random intermediary, no worry about if it actually gets there, no third party holding it in a non-bank cash account, no pre-authorisation, etc. you enter a bank identification number and an account number (and a name, usually, to avoid mistakes) and it just happens and it just works. in most countries this is quick, even, e.g. in the UK it's almost always < 5 seconds.

FOR FREE.

no blockchains, no multi-billion ponzi schemes, just a boring and simple service offered by every bank in the country.

making the Fed make banks just introduce free, instant bank transfers could have saved the world tens of billions of dollars and apparently tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases.

Snake oil comes around every couple of generations once the people who lived it are too feeble or too few to get the message out to the latest crop of people with enough income to grab the attention of con artists.

These are in theory lessons that are meant to be passed along by the Public Education system but ours is pretty broken.

Exactly this, I'm in Canada and can transfer money to anyone in Canada (and maybe worldwide, never tried it though) for free, instantly. That's how most people pay rent up here.

Most of the problems people perceive with the banking system are completely societal, 0% technical. If your bank doesn't let you send money instantly to your friend for free, that isn't because your bank needs a blockchain.

> Most of the problems people perceive with the banking system are completely societal, 0% technical. If your bank doesn't let you send money instantly to your friend for free, that isn't because your bank needs a blockchain.

that's excellent, thank you for putting it better than I did.

See also Uber vs countries that can and did simply regulate taxis well for decades, without burning billions of VC dollars.

I've never been impressed by tech startups "disrupting" boring traditional industries. Except that perhaps some of their technology problems may be interesting. But overall, you're now working/investing in a boring industry.

> In every other rich country

Let's not ignore the non-"rich" countries

yes, sorry, good point.

Most of Africa has more robust money transferring systems than the US. You can literally text someone currency, and this has been around longer than bitcoin.

If you're referring to M-pesa, it's an app like Venmo. The US has apps too (for example Venmo).

I think I'm referring to M-pesa, but I'm pretty sure implementations and uses existed in this system before app stores existed, ie before 2007

It is not quite true that this is the way in every other country. It took Europe quite some time to adopt the IBAN. Money transfer between banks is still mostly cleared only daily (even if the transfer is shown as instantaneous).

Also the name given during the transfer aside the IBAN won't make the transfer fail as far as I know if incorrect.

Well I mean the US is the biggest and richest rich country by a large margin. And has maintained a continuously functioning financial system for centuries now (though I do wish they would let it crash and be replaced sometimes when it so-richly deserved to). So it is kinda hardest to implement here, especially with every state having their own banking rules.

The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though.

> Well I mean the US is the biggest and richest rich country by a large margin. And has maintained a continuously functioning financial system for centuries now (though I do wish they would let it crash and be replaced sometimes when it so-richly deserved to). So it is kinda hardest to implement here, especially with every state having their own banking rules.

the EU did this, SPANNING TWENTY EIGHT COUNTRIES. they don't even all use the same CURRENCY.

edit: sorry, it's 36 - EU27 + EFTA + UK + microstates

> The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though.

it appears to me, judging from talking to Americans, and my own use of the US banking system, that customers do not even generally have ability to login to their bank's website and transfer money, AT ALL, forget "instant".

overall, this is such a bizarre reply, but emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation".

why do you think it would be hard? ACH exists, and lets banks transfer money. why can't banks make it better like Australia did? or have the same structure create a parallel, better transfer system banks can opt in to, like the UK did with FPS?

I would have said that letting venmo/paypal/etc do it was the worst possible solution, but then I could not have imagined that another solution people would seriously propose was "cryptocurrency".

> emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation".

This is what happens when you build a country with a disproportionate number of the sort of people who are willing to say "Fuck it. Building a decent living in my home country is too hard. I'm going to cross an ocean in a steam ship and start a new life on a new continent where I am a complete stranger."

I say this as an American who has made similar choices of questionable wisdom.

No this is what happens when you develop your culture's ideology to be "Helping other people is communism, and they deserve to suffer"

Yes of course we can do transfers online. I've been doing business this way for decades. Even in the very very early days of the internet they started "online bill payment" services, which would transfer electronically or else outright send a check as needed. It's how I paid rent in college. Also credit cards have been in widespread use for longer than that, so the need for an alternative was always only in narrow niches.

The new services (and the tech companies) only selling point is they can be instant and cheaper or free (though not all older approaches have fees). And serve groups like younger people with no credit.

And what is your post emblematic of with it's abuse of caps and stereotyping? I'm just talking about why they haven't replaced an older solution that "isn't broke" since it gets 99.9 percent of the job done already. No need to lose your mind.

Another great example (https://twitter.com/felixsalmon/status/1591193835886891009) from one of the worst VC funds:

> Problem: US healthcare is broken.

> Solution: Build a for-profit company that will generate trillions of dollars in value for its shareholders, all of which will come from payment for healthcare

Now do a transfer between an EU bank and one in Canada.

Or send money to a wallet in China.

I assure you I understand the rails going on in international money transfers, and the amount of different systems, protocols and hops to make it happen is staggering.

It can take sophisticated modern treasury operations years to get up and running in new jurisdictions independent of the regulatory challenges.

If we could isolate it to the compliance and risk management portions of the challenge it would increase innovation dramatically.

> A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships

KYC is a feature, not a bug, so there has to be at least some sort of relationship even if it's via mutual registration with a third party.

Also, modernization of banking systems, including inter-bank transfer, has been slowing happening in the background for the last decade. AFAIK no one is using pow, pos, or blockchains (except, maybe, just in the sense that traditional databases have many of the same desirable attributes as a blockchain).

> could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages.

Innovation in mortgages didn't work out so well last time, and honestly the actual origination of a mortgage is one of the least painful and inefficient parts of real estate.

When bitcoin launched we really did need innovation in payments. Apple Pay and Google Pay solved a lot of the problem, and the recent rise of "bank/lender as an api" startups popping up now solve a significant part of the rest of the problem.

The inadequacies of the traditional finance industry are not the "blockchain space"'s fault.

The promise was a trustless system that can operate on its own without central authorities. The problem is this proposed solution has yet to justify itself in terms of both efficiency and cost over existing alternatives which is relying on self-declared central authorities whose trust has been earned via either regulatory guarantees or well-established reputation.

... or they are off promoting "web 3", the definition of which changes as the weather does.

For me, enthusiasm for "the blockchain" is a quick way to identify a) people who promote technologies without bothering to research the fundamentals and b) crooks/charlatans.

> I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database.

The value is in a permissionless and censorship resistant financial network. You may not find that valuable, but that's ok.

>I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database.

You have always --always-- lived in a high trust society with trustworthy institutions

I live in the USA.

I will concede your point if it means you'll agree that at the very least cryptocurrency is useless to people in the USA.

(Even as a hedge. My resiliency to societal collapse comes from the social relationships I maintain in my local community and the collection of skills and knowledge we collectively have, not my ability to flee to New Zealand and hope my digital tokens still have perceived value.)

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