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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

Another test is whether kids use it w/o being forced to. My kids are obsessed with both MidJourney and ChatGPT. They have found use cases w/o any profit motive and w/o any outside pressure.

No amount of Blockchain "Webinars" would have convinced my kids to use the blockchain.

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If blockchain did fulfill the claims of it revolutionizing the world of finance, it's still unlikely your kids would have become obsessed and regular users of it. If room temperature and pressure superconducting or nuclear fusion became viable, your kids might also be unlikely to play around with them on their own. Kids apparently love Roblox and most adults think the metaverse is dead. What kids like seems pretty orthogonal to what is legit or snake oil.

> If room temperature and pressure superconducting or nuclear fusion became viable, your kids might also be unlikely to play around with them on their own.

I disagree. Kids will turn anything not too abstract into toys. An improvised radioactive sample (actually some neon indicator bulbs in a box) + Geiger counter brought by my parents = a version of a hide-and-seek game from my own past.

Also, a model maglev train is something so obvious that I am sure such toys will appear immediately once the technology becomes viable.

Point taken, but how about these:

- My mom cant figure out Blockchain either

- My sister (doctor) and brother (3 degrees) cant figure out Blockchain either, because they are too afraid of scanning the wrong QR code and having their balance drained

My mom, sister, and brother all use ChatGPT. My brother uses it actively for work.

You can dig deeper.... what exactly are the real-world applications of an immutable transaction ledger? I can't think of very many. Let alone a bunch of kids.

Immutable decentralized public ledgers could have many usages, but the biggest problem is: who is authorized to add new entries? There are different answers to this question depending on use case, but it is really the crux of the matter.

Decentralized is critical to the recipe as well. 'Immutable' centralized ledgers are largely a non-starter because the scenarios you want to use block chain for are zero-trust type scenarios. With centralization, the promise of immutability holds exactly as long as it's convenient for the centralizing power.

In any case, defining public use or accessibility as the metric of relevance of something is quite illogical. You end up with countless absurdities like relativity being worthless and CocaCola being the most relevant invention ever.

I don't blame them since the stakes are much higher, but it probably doesn't help to say "they can't figure out blockchain" because that doesn't make any sense.

Which 'blockchain'? Blockchain is a singular noun, that's like saying "they can't figure out phone".

Sure. I'm not saying Blockchain fulfilled it's promise. I'm just not convinced that every major new thing will be immediately adopted by kids. It seems like it's an orthogonal thing.

> it without being forced to

I think this is an important detail. A lot of "forced into it" numbers will get presented as "happy users" in various unfair metrics comparisons.

> Kids apparently love Roblox and most adults think the metaverse is dead.

Can you define what a metaverse is in this case and how is it different from what we used to call an MMORPG?

Roblox involves no block chain and no VR, so what exactly is "metaverse-y" about it?

Anyone can create and monetize their content in a world where a user's character can access all of the content. MMORPGs generally seem to be built by a single developer who controls the whole experience. They're also generally a single game instead of thousands of mini games.

Plenty of kids I know use the blockchain, for their fake ids I think it is the backing financial infrastructure (crypto knowledgeable friend purchases ids and redistributes), for drug purchases

Midjourney and ChatGPT are both free to try, if someone gave me free bitcoin I might have made a wallet.

They had this in the early days. Bitcoin Faucet

Sigh... I "parked" my free bitcoin in the wrong place. Didn't know yet about just holding on to the private key and let it sit on the chain.

Not a great test, teens in the last few years sometimes get into crypto.

Trading it on a centralized exchange to speculate on its future value doesn’t involve using it at all, it’s just a MySQL database at Coinbase tracking your bids and balances.

I’d wager the biggest non-speculative use case is pig butchering scams and ransomware.

> I’d wager the biggest non-speculative use case is pig butchering scams and ransomware.

Probably, but drugs are also a big use-case (and I don't just mean retail, its used in wholesale for transferring sums of money internationally to buy precursors, for example)

Only for the investment purpose by thinking they will get rich quick. I have never seen anyone using crypto other than that. Author specifically said not for profit.

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