Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

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> Cryptocurrency was (and still is to an extent) a really interesting idea that has a ton of real world utility, especially as government surveillance continues its march towards panopticon.

Cryptocurrency not only doesn't help much, but even goes backwards there. You think the government is bad? Imagine life in NFT land. Your gym ticket is a NFT. Your movie ticket is a NFT. Your house deed is a NFT.

So everyone you interact with knows where you work, how much you earn, what you own, where's your house, what you buy, what groups you belong to... and they can keep tracking you forever if you tell them who you are just once.

They can treat you preferentially or charge you more or ban you depending on your past history.

Sure, there's Monero, but nobody seems to really care about that one.

> It's a shame that the "get rich quick" grifters and speculators took ahold of it and have killed any chance of normal people adopting it as a regular form of payment.

It's built into the system. The early makers like Satoshi wanted a deflationary system. A deflationary system is inherently undesirable for usage as a currency, and makes it just the thing for HODLing and speculation.

You could have inflation, but who controls it? There are no good answers.

They can do more than just track you. "All members of the NAACP are banned from this space" becomes trivial when membership to everything is a NFT.

There is a lot of crypto usage possibility without the need for NFT proliferation. The only necessary "NFT" may be licenses granting access to decentralized cloud software platforms on a perpetual or monthly subscription basis.

Wouldn't it be ideal if open source apps and platforms could go beyond the slow and risky traditional donation model, not have to be entirely user-hosted or hosted by a paid company, and fully accessible to non-technical users? Imagine social media platforms not susceptible to the pettiness of absolutist employees and owners, MMORPGs not debilitated by IP holders, cryptographically secured cloud software that follows the needs of its users. Perhaps like communes such projects are forever limited by the requirement of a modicum of participant interest and cost-sharing.

> So everyone you interact with knows where you work, how much you earn, what you own, where's your house, what you buy, what groups you belong to... and they can keep tracking you forever if you tell them who you are just once.

Granted public blockchain is a lot more discoverable, but a lot of this already is public. Property ownership is public (at least in the US), credit cards sell your data, facebook knows which groups you belong to, etc.

Not nearly to the same level, and a lot of that is proprietary info. Facebook collects lots of data but doesn't like to share it.

Some of it is, but things like property ownership are completely open in some countries. I have a map overlay that lets me see ownership for parcels.

Granted you can have an LLC own property, but that's a different obfuscation mechanism.

Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. Conventional technologies can do the same thing with far less overhead. The issue is that they're 'conventional' and not 'new/shiny/sexy'.

New doesn't always mean better, and it's often objectively and demonstrably worse than what preceded it.

I'm not defending blockchain, just pointing out that part of the example wasn't really a good one. Property ownership being something that's already completely public.

I have a public map overlay on my phone that gives me deed information for (AFAIK) every parcel I can see in the USA.

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