Comment by notamy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notamy | Hacker News Reader

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Not the original commenter, but here's my stab at it:

> In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem.

Sure it does. It solves the problem of "I need something, I have money, and I don't have the time/ability/car/... to go to a physical location to buy it."

> Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can rent servers directly.

AWS gives you you

- The ability to spin up MANY classes of servers instantly, whereas traditional server renting is more limited ime.

- A host of extra services on top of it that all integrate fairly well with each other

- Paid support if you want/need

- ...

> I used Zoom for a call, but it solves nothing, I guess.

People like to see each other, phone calls can have quality issues and dead zones, ...

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Now, when I read the parent comments, I see:

> The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete financial system and, hence, probably a complete expression of operations on financial structures.

And while that *sounds* interesting, I have absolutely no IDEA what the utility of this is. With AWS, Zoom, Amazon, ... I can point to things that very very directly benefit both technical and non-technical users day-to-day. That's not to say that there ISN'T use to the EVM -- I'm sure there probably is! -- just that imo it's less-obvious.

I would disagree with all the reasons. I understand that it's some real problems the mentioned services solve for you, but I can easily point to a person who has none of those problems. Like my grandma. She doesn't see any point in any of the mentioned products. Even the coffee maker. So we must agree that it depends on the person and is not an objective criterion. Same for blockchan/defi/evm/etc. Some people argue that it solves some of their problems, and you may disagree with them, but it doesn't make their point invalid.

I can go with refusing the points you said about the mentioned products. Not because I want to argue, but because it's really not the reason and problems it solved for _me_. I just question myself why I use them and have no answer.

1) Rel. Amazon. I can go to the seller's website directly. I guess I used Amazon because they are so good at marketing, so they are the first to go. But I kind of agree that it solves the problem of simplicity/easier access because a seller's website may have a clumsy website. Some people say that something similar is solved for them by Defi.

2) For AWS, I don't use anything you mentioned. It sounds interesting, like spinning many instances, but I never witnessed it being used like that. Except for instances where someone was playing with the tech (and you can apply it the exact same way to EMV). Also, recently I played with Kubespray, a tool to easily roll out a Kubernetes cluster on a bare metal, and now I don't see a reason to use AWS or another cloud provider. Bare servers + Kubernetes is a way to go imho. Maybe the real reason people use AWS is b/c they simply don't know alternatives?

3) For Zoom, I disagree because I am not even sure we always needed to call, honestly. I mean, we have an email and slack, so what's the point of wasting everyone's time on a call. It's just a routine now.

Again, not arguing. Just trying to say that there could be multiple points of view. And if something works one way for someone, it may be completely useless and even stupid for others.

> I would disagree with all the reasons. I understand that it's some real problems the mentioned services solve for you, but I can easily point to a person who has none of those problems. Like my grandma. She doesn't see any point in any of the mentioned products.

This doesn't make any sense, there's nothing in the world except food, water and shelter that's actually needed for every living human being.

You're grossly mischaracterising or misinterpreting the meaning of "solving a real problem".

What exactly is all this crypto-technobabble solving that isn't just feeding the system to make it work? Where is the end where a person is going to use all this bumbling infrastructure of finance primitives to actually solve a problem they face? Again, not a problem created or caused by the other mumbo-jumbo lying around, piling solutions on top of solutions still looking for a problem is ultimately not solving any problem. If the fundamental piece of technology you are working on doesn't have any applicable uses in the end, all the other pieces supporting this fundamental are not solving anything of value.

I really, really don't follow your line of argumentation, I keep looking for the base argument and there's none except for "if some people believe this has value, then it has value". No, like Matt Levine said to SBF, the fundamental economical value of this thing is zero.

Right, it doesn't make much sense and that's my point. If we don't have an objective criteria we cannot judge what is a good tech and what is a bad tech.

You think one techonoly is not important, another person think it's very important. I'm sure you're must better person that the any other person so we have to rely on your judgement, but it's not very scalable.

> Again, not arguing. Just trying to say that there could be multiple points of view. And if something works one way for someone, it may be completely useless and even stupid for others.

Yeah, but it's about who the thing is useful to, and how many people are in that category.

Amazon is very useful to the general population.

AWS is very useful to startup and corporations in general.

Zoom is very useful to the large amounts of people that like human interactions and consider text-only to be cold and distant.

Crypto so far is useful to... not that many people, and worst of all, many of those people are scammers and grifters and criminals. Many of the others it's "useful" to look a lot like marks, gullible people that lose a lot of money.

When a business the size of AWS decides it's not worth investing into it, that's a bad sign. They'll go for anything that can make them a ton of money long term.

I've just googled the number. There are about 1M users of AWS, which compared to global population of 7B people makes it useful for about 0.01%. So it's a pretty negligible number, outside of NH. With that low number anything can be comparable useful imho.

I'm not sure how you measure share of scammers, so it's hard to compare. But I'm wondering you you care about scammers but not legit people who want to use blockchain tech? Latter is a magnitude larger audience.

The fact that AWS didn't find anyone to talk to about blockchain doesn't mean anything. They are just in their own bubble, talking to the CTO/CIO of large corps.

But just look at the mobile apps of the major enterprises, all of them are completely awful. But it doesn't mean that mobile tech is dead, right? Or even further, just go to any web app of any major US bank. It seems that they still think that Web is not for them. I guess all those CIO/CTO still believe that sending a paper check is a very efficient tech. So what can they say about blockchain? Nothing. I don't think any of the current enterprises would even catch it. They missed mobile and still catching the web.

According to a public stat, right now there are about 3000 Ethereum nodes hosted on AWS. Maybe similar numbers for other blockchains. But AWS didn't go to ask those customers about their use of blockchain. Maybe because it's mostly college kids, and AWS Sales Managers don't care about them. But that's the only people who can answer the question why exactly they use AWS for their blockchain hosting and how AWS can help them.

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