It's been 16 years since the original Satoshi whitepaper. You have to assume if there were tons of viable applications for blockchain, we'd have seen more of them by now.
The past decade and a half of big promises and "is there actually anything to this?" debates on HN is just night and day in comparison.
Your point might be that there just hasn't been another breakthrough on top of blockchains the way chatgpt was a breakthrough on top of neural networks. I think that's a reasonable point, but I still see a notable difference in that blockchains have been hyped as a product technology that has already arrived for nearly this whole time, rather than as an enabling technology still looking for its mainstream niche.
The fundamental problem with blockchains is that the computational cost of doing anything increases with the number of users, and there are network effects involved in cryptocurrencies. None of the "layer solutions" like rollups and payment channels can change these fundamental rules.
None of that applies to modern AI.
The best case of this is something like filecoin or namecoin. Two very old projects as well.
To a lot of groups, inventing another redundant cryptocurrency is a feature not a bug. A lot of these companies (big ones like Ripple Labs come to mind) essentially want to use the excuse of "cryptocurrency" to release an unregulated funding coin that essentially acts as a security.
Even as a cryptocurrency supporter, it is easy to see how this is detrimental to "real" cryptocurrency because is diluting the purpose of decentralized money with centralized funding tokens and nonsense. It's obvious that blockchains have little use outside of decentralized money due to their obvious inefficiencies.
Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work. They're accountable for everything from roads to retirement plans.
When cryptocurrency advocates push to separate money from government, they're not just pursuing financial innovation. They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance.
This isn't freedom - it's freeloading. Cryptocurrency, at its philosophical core, enables wealth hoarding while disconnecting the hoarders from any responsibility to the communities that made their wealth possible in the first place.
But tax is coercion. Make it voluntary, and people won't pay it. Despite this, a lot of people are fine with it because it gets them roads and state pensions and healthcare or whatever. Some people want it to be increased, thereby volunteering to pay more and volunteering others to do the same. Everything is based on force, and the social contract is a kind of Stockholm syndrome.
One could always retreat to wildlands of Siberia and live their own happy life away from roads and reddit. One would not survive for long without the same society, which produced the survival knowledge, but one could at least try.
> Everything is based on force
How do you reconcile "what's stopping me from hitting you with 5 euro wrench" without the fantasyland non-aggression principle? Without that "social contract" and with absolute personal liberty, any rights/liberties/freedoms exist solely to the extent one themselves can enforce them against the mighty five euro wrench.
They don't need to understand the whole household. They only need to understand if they are being mistreated, in which case they can choose to leave and hunt vermon until the end of their (very few) days.
So I think it is better to be a housecat than a lapdog at least.
Imagine saying this to someone who lost their home in the LA wildfires despite paying high taxes all their life to live there. Some social contract.
>After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades.
https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-...
1. Created dangerous conditions through inadequate fire management.
2. Prevented the private market from adequately communicating the risk through price increases. As a result, 7/12 of insurers stopped or restricted selling new policies.
3. Created a moral hazard by selling it's own policies to homeowners who were dropped by the private market.
4. Failed to respond to the fires.
5. Failed to cover claims through its insurance program.
6. Is trying to bail itself out by extracting $1 billion tax from the rest of the state.
Yet we're supposed to be thankful for this?
You could say the people whose homes burned are grateful they are being bailed out at everyone else's expense. But I bet they would be much happier if their homes had never burned down in the first place - a debacle that was entirely avoidable.
Separately, as convenient as it is to blame the state for the fire happening in the first place, the truth is just that wildfires are more common now, and are going to continue being more common, because of climate change. That's a bummer, but it isn't the fault of the state of California alone.
No, it wasn't subsidized by the state. The state has actually made fire insurance more expensive for everyone - including the people who lost their homes.
>Separately, as convenient as it is to blame the state for the fire happening in the first place, the truth is just that wildfires are more common now, and are going to continue being more common, because of climate change.
What's actually convenient is blaming a series of predictable policy failures on "climate change" - something that cannot be held accountable - rather than the politicians who can be.
> 3. Created a moral hazard by selling it's own policies to homeowners who were dropped by the private market.
My friend, that's the subsidy. Those are public policies with subsidized premiums.
It also isn't clear what "predictable policy failures" you think caused the fire and allowed it to spread.
The problem is that fire risk is way up in a lot of places, including LA. Insurers know this, so all else equal, their premiums would also be way up. However, the premiums are now too high for most people to afford. So policy makers can either just let people be priced out of areas with high fire risk, or they can subsidize insuring those areas. Neither option is a good one.
Maybe if we put you in charge of all the governments in these areas, we would find that you do actually have the magical solution to square this circle, but I'm very skeptical. I think you're just doing the normal thing - which is your right as a citizen of a democratic system of government! - of complaining about whichever policy was chosen of the universally bad options available.
>So policy makers can either just let people be priced out of areas with high fire risk, or they can subsidize insuring those areas. Neither option is a good one.
No actually option #1 is exactly what the state should have done. You want to live in a dangerous place? That's your choice, but you should be prepared to pay the price for it. When the state offers these policies, they are encouraging people to live in harm's way. If those who died had been priced out of these areas, they might still be alive today - just living somewhere else.
To your second point. Sure, it's easy to say that as an ideological rando on the internet. In the real world, policymakers are going to try to figure out better solutions than "nobody can live in the western United States because the fire risk is too high everywhere".
You can just say that the public subsidy for insurance distorted the market in problematic ways. I totally agree with that. I don't understand why you got attached to saying that it isn't a subsidy.
But no, it's not as simple as "change the incentives so fewer people move to the very hazardous parts". This already is, and is only going to become more so, an existential problem for insurers, throughout very large swaths of the west.
The recent LA fires weren't in any particularly hazardous place. The hazard levels are higher than people can bear in more places than policymakers can bear to let private insurance markets sort it out. It's a real and giant problem. Just trying to hand wave it away with "foolish policymakers just didn't do the obvious thing" is convenient, but unhelpful.
California's FAIR plan is not a subsidy because it is not trying to lower the price of a good or service. It is rather a safety net program for those who cannot access private insurance (another policy failure caused by price controls). It's really as simple as that and I don't see why you're having so much trouble understanding it.
>This already is, and is only going to become more so, an existential problem for insurers, throughout very large swaths of the west.
Other western states are doing fine, probably because they do more controlled burns, so seasonal fires don't become conflagrations. That, as well as an insurance market where the state doesn't suppress price signals makes fires a non-issue for 99% of people. Also, since more and more people are living in urban areas I would expect fewer fatalities in the future, not more.
I don't get why you're so attached to doing contortions to deny that. It kind of seems like you think subsidies are good things, but that this subsidized insurance is bad, so thus it can't be a subsidy. But it's easy to square this circle: sometimes subsidies are good but often they aren't.
To your last paragraph, I think you just aren't aware how much other states are also struggling with this problem. You seem to live in California, so it's understandable to be most aware of what's going on in your own state.
So I pay income tax, property tax, road tax, sales tax and even my savings I have to put in the hands of the govt which has been unreliable, corrupt and mostly serves the interests of the few over the interests of the many regardless of which political party has been elected.
Why do you think cryptocurrency at its philosophical core enables wealth hoarding? If I don’t pay my property taxes, I lose my house, regardless of how much cryptocurrency I own.
Why can’t we have a separation of money and state where the state receives its due through taxes and is unable to inflate the money supply?
Just because the government and banking institutions can't easily censor and restrict the money supply, doesn't mean they can't collect taxes on it. In a word where crypto is the dominant form of money they can just throw you in jail if you don't pay taxes.
If you need to pay X amount of taxes, maybe the government should explicitly collect X amount of taxes transparently instead of collecting Y amount of taxes, selling a bunch of debt that needs to be financed at a later date, inflating the currency, etc. Because the more transparency in a democracy, the fewer ways for politicians to hijack taxation.
Sometimes I feel like a lot of you want to break things just so that you can then say "See! I told you it was broken!". I have very little patience for this.
What does that have to do with the fact that most citizens are struggling financially and fewer people than ever are able to buy property?
People struggling financially and being unable to buy property are policy choices that have nothing to do with reliability.
To illustrate: If we had never created the Social Security program, a lot more elderly people would be impoverished, but that wouldn't be unreliable, it would just be a different policy choice. But now that we do have the Social Security program, if people start being unable to get their payments, then that would be unreliable.
The distinction is: Are we keeping up our end of the bargains we've made? Historically, we have done so to an extremely high degree, which is why our credit is very good. And not just in financial terms. The current administration seems hell bent on ruining that long history of reliability, and that's very bad. But it's just not true that the US government has been unreliable historically.
To stick with the topic, the author argues for voting "openness may be too much, as we can see how each and every person votes, and thus can influence them" How is this different from putting a gun to your head and having you transfer your crypto currency to my account?
I find the topic really boring and unproductive. We have a few dozen kinds of robber barons and no amount of superficial conversation is going to change anything.
Everyone agrees really, everyone wants more for themselves or for the things they consider important.
The thing I'm curious about is what it should actually cost to run a country. Can we even simplify the topic to a point where the different configurations are few enough for mere mortals to understand?
I don't see how I'm to judge your road tax without understanding that. You can do roads on many different scales. 200 years ago the people living in a street had to organize the pavement of it. The road to the next city was financed on a city level.
Like how is cryptocurrency even related to consolidating all taxes into one on the unimproved value of land, this seems like such a nonsequitur.
Bitcoin would probably make that easier for the government as you could now track merchants sales volumes directly on the blockchain.
For the federal government being able to deputize the banks to flag suspicious transactions certainly helps find tax avoidance, we've had an income tax way longer then we've had credit cards.
we figured out bank transfers decades ago, and there is no exponentially increasing challenges with a wire transfer.
A bank transfer costs me 15$ bucks, more than 10x the cost of a bitcoin transaction right now. That's incredible when you consider that the bitcoin is millions of times less computationally efficient than a bank transfer, but not so incredible when you consider that banks need to cover the cost of air conditioned boxes full of bean counters.
Want to set up a bitcoin account and accept bitcoin? Boom, done. You can set up a script to automate it. It's a an API. You can accept bitcoin with a public key, you can authenticate ownership of that key with signatures, and there is no risk of anyone using that public key to pull money out of your account.
Want to set up a bank account and accept bank transfers? Well you are gonna need to go in person, and don't forget your drivers license, your passport, proof of residence, and your mother's maiden name because that's your only form of identification and when this security model inevitably fails it's called "identity theft" and it's your fault. Oops, they're only open during business hours and weekdays, better luck tomorrow! Not to mention that you might get your funds frozen if you sneeze too hard.
I guess a bank is easier if you're over the age of 40 and can't learn new things
during times of chaos, centralized exchanges go down and RPC nodes go down. the incentive model is to run your own RPC node that has processing bandwidth so that your transactions can reach decentralized exchanges and continue doing whatever you wanted to do. times of chaos in this instance would be to swap to a stable value.
the answer truly is "you're holding it wrong"
I think there is plenty to criticize about what crypto proponents say, but there is a technical discussion worth having at the same level of parity we have about many other things on this forum
But my point is that if this is actually the target market for these products - people who are gonna run their own nodes - then that market is like five orders of magnitude smaller than the crypto industry wants it to be.
Speculation drives innovation and crypto is the rawest form of that we have, in a global, nonstop market with extremes of selective evolution: permission to fail, instead of guardrails
Practically none of the things that attract people to the space would have been developed without encountering frictions from speculation, and fixing them
You're 100% correct. The Eth L2s are all incredibly centralized. However most stablecoin transactions (ie payments) don't happen on Eth and it's various L2s anymore and I wonder if the same may be true to tokenized assets (RWAs).
the obsolescence of capital controls has been great as well, from the strictest nation state level ones, to the most benign private sector ones. all overridden and circumvented.
at this point I would just say if you're not the target audience that has nothing to do with anyone else that garners their own utility out of the ecosystem.
I think people kind of want to be convinced about why they should adopt with examples of a use case they only make rebuttals about, and that's unproductive for everyone.
tl;dr "you do you"
but if you want to know why and how other people are using this ecosystem, there are plenty of user stories
When a lot of other people derive value and extract value from the space and thats all that matters.
If you’re not those people, then dont worry about it.
If you want to be those people, ask them what they’re doing and what problems they have. They’ll pay you to solve them. Just like every other sector. But then you too will be a part of the crypto economy.
Seems to me they're trying to get me to give them my tax money these days. Not sure "you do you" is really a great response to obvious grift and fraud.
Nor is it an answer to the question of what crypto is actually useful for.
I've already told you that the most productive thing is asking people what they use it for.
these vendors and contractors are worldwide where either an international wire transfer is needed, which would have extremely high scrutiny and unknown settlement times, or other payment methods that are equally subject to random freezes or high fees or transaction size limits
thats one use case for me for 8 years now. I wish it wasnt a friction I would even need to consider but I dont really consider traditional finance a competitor, sometimes I want the currency used by my government and brokerage firms, sometimes I dont.
one person I ask “do you take crypto” and they laugh like its an uncomfortable absurd joke, the next person receives the business and often discounts it due to lower transaction fees and settlement times
Sure they're subject to KYC and so on, but that's kind of the point. Which is that crypto still has only two genuinely viable use cases: 1) speculation and 2) avoiding laws.
all the ways you listed are subject to arbitrary reviews, limits, and freezes even if KYC is done by all parties. and of course, dont cater to all countries.
yes speculation and reducing legal frictions are big use cases. the laws and private sector interpretation of those laws are the friction.
in the US, the executive branch and congress are fully aware that crypto to crypto transfers onchain do not require KYC. there is nothing illegal about that, and nothing wrong with avoiding the other law imposed on other systems in this particular way. additionally, the same feature works in creating freedom in authoritarian regimes, like are we supposed to be dismayed that chinese citizens have other ways of moving more than $50,000 worth out of the country annually? is your dismay towards crypto’s use cases because you are FOR oppression of chinese citizens? rhetorical and only mentioned to highlight the relative morality necessary to even come up with your devils advocacy. crypto is agnostic to the circumstance and opens up markets
if you’re not the audience for that use case then that has nothing to do with anyone else, theyre already in the crypto space and prefer that method
You just described evading laws governing money transfers again using a lot more words.
Everyone gets it. Crypto is useful for evading laws.
However saying that breaking the law has nothing to do with anyone else isn’t real compelling as an argument.
But ok this is a sticking point, for you. In a stacked bar chart of why people use it and demand block space, that is one of many use case and user story. Its not an argument it’s a fact of life. Any single person with a single use case validates the entire thing, because their use case is valid
You’re still looking for arguments and that isn’t the point. Its not about selling you, you heard an irrelevant person mention “mainstream adoption” or merchant adoption and thought they were for real, all while getting scammed by them. Lots of people have exposure like that just like lots of people fall for scams and phishing campaigns on the general internet. It has nothing to do with what else is going on.
Its not about selling you, People are already in crypto and prefer that method.
Huh? Capital doesn't have agency.
People either follow laws or break them.
The argument against crypto is that it's primarily a tool for breaking the law.
Which, you know, is fine for you if you don't care, but that's a pretty relevant point.
Remember: freedom for the people is authoritarianism to the monied and powerful[0]; and vice versa, the only freedom they care about is the one where they get to put us in chains.
Capital controls make the powerful accountable to democracy, because we're not letting them take their toys and go home. The obsolescence of such controls does not bring about more freedom for us. It just means the rich and powerful can play a shell game with the people.
[0] A pleonasm, I know.
But there are many reporting aspects, and scrutiny of various transaction methods at certain amounts, scrutiny which can cause delays and seizures. Crypto gets around those too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
Since 16 years later, in 1984 we still did not have Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Hacker News, the internet is obviously useless.
Oh wait, it's 57 years later and we DO use the internet ...
In 1984 the big hype was ISDN - digital telephony to the home - and all the wonky (and expensive) special services and gadgets you could layer on top of a whole two digital circuits. What killed that future was a combination of corporate ineptitude[0] and government action to kill AT&T's monopoly before AT&T got big enough to just buy out the US government.
The thing about the Internet is that while it was invented very early on, it wasn't accessible until far later. The Internet was a DARPA project that had escaped into college campuses. You needed a hookup at a local college campus in order to even access it. In fact, USENET users refer to the time when normal people could just sign up to AOL and get Internet access as "the Eternal September" because it was an immediate and measurable cultural change. I think it's fair to say that the Internet before September 1993 was a fundamentally different concept than what was available afterwards, and for most people, that is when the Internet launched. September 1993 to 2009 takes us from "hey AOL has these funny new 'Internet' forums" to "tweeting on my iPhone in the bathroom".
Other NLS ideas have similar trajectories. The mouse saw use in workstations but it took Apple and the Macintosh to try and actually make a mouse-driven computer for ordinary consumers. Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu was getting plenty of Autodesk money in 1984, but the hypertext protocol we actually use, HTTP, was invented at CERN in 1991. A lot of technologies are good ideas being held back by a world that isn't ready for them yet.
Blockchain finance[1] is more akin to Xanadu or ISDN: something that exists because it's creators would be rich if it took off rather than because it has some obvious value to it. It runs off hype. As a regular Internet user, it actually provides negative value, because the people who actually gain value from having a financial system with nobody to tell you no[2] are literal scammers and thieves.
[0] ISDN was notoriously poorly rolled out in the US, as BRI lines had been priced as a business service. Most people didn't need two lines over one wire and all the other usages of ISDN were purely speculative. Other countries whose local phone companies didn't have their heads up their asses actually did manage to sell it on the basis of clearer calls.
[1] Being very specific here in case someone shouts "Git is a blockchain, your argument is invalid"
[2] Well, unless what you want to do is raise the base block size of Bitcoin, then there's plenty of people who will tell you 'no'.
the Internet is that while it was
invented very early on, it wasn't
accessible until far later
But that does not mean there is no way to do self-custody in a safe manner. It has just not been ironed out yet.