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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

" Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented "

Actually AI may be more like blockchain then you give it credit for. Blockchain feels useless to you because you either don't care about or value the use cases it's good for. For those that do, it opens a whole new world they eagerly look forward to. As a coder, it's magical to describe a world, and then to see AI build it. As a copyeditor it may be scary to see AI take my job. Maybe you've seen it hilucinate a few times, and you just don't trust it.

I like the idea of interoperable money legos. If you hate that, and you live in a place where the banking system is protected and reliable, you may not understand blockchain. It may feel useless or scary. I think AI is the same. To some it's very useful, to others it's scary at best and useless at worst.

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Blockchain is essentially useless.

You need legal systems to enforce trust in societies, not code. Otherwise you'll end up with endless $10 wrench attacks until we all agree to let someone else hold our personal wealth for us in a secure, easy-to-access place. We might call it a bank.

The end state of crypto is always just a nightmarish dystopia. Wealth isn't created by hoarding digital currency, it's created by productivity. People just think they found a shortcut, but it's not the first (or last) time humans will learn this lesson.

I call blockchain an instantiation of Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer running on a hybrid human-machine topology.

We are burning through scarce fuel in amounts sufficient to power a small developed nation in order to reverse engineer... one way hashcodes! Literally that is even less value than turning matter into paperclips.

Humanities biggest ever wealth storing thing is literally a ROCK

Yeah, because rocks EXIST.

If gold loses its speculative value, you still have a very heavy, extremely conductive, corrosion resistant, malleable metal with substantial cultural importance.

When crypto collapses, you have literally nothing. It is supported entirely and exclusively by its value to speculators who only buy so that they can resell for profit and never intend to use it.

Well, not literally nothing. You have all that lovely carbon you burned to generate meaningless hashes polluting your biosphere for the next century. That part stays around long after crypto collapses.

These?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

The first photo in Wikipedia is great. I wonder how often foreigners bought them and then lugged them back home to have in their garden.

gold

The “$10 wrench attack” isn’t an argument against crypto—it’s an argument against human vulnerability.

By that logic, banks don’t work either, since people get kidnapped and forced to drain accounts. The difference is that with crypto, you can design custody systems (multi-sig, social recovery, hardware wallets, decentralized custody) that make such attacks far less effective than just targeting a centralized bank vault or insider.

As for the “end state” being dystopian, history shows centralized finance has already produced dystopias: hyperinflations, banking crises, mass surveillance, de-banking of political opponents, and global inequality enabled by monetary monopolies. Crypto doesn’t claim to magically create productivity—it creates an alternative infrastructure where value can be exchanged without gatekeepers. Productivity and crypto aren’t at odds: blockchains enable new forms of coordination, ownership, and global markets that can expand productive potential.

People now have the option of choosing between institutional trust and cryptographic trust—or even blending them. Dismissing crypto as doomed to dystopia ignores why it exists: because our current systems already fail millions every day.

What they are saying is that we have a system that evolved over time to address real world concerns. You are designing defenses to attacks that may or not be useful, but no one has been able to design past criminals and this is evident because if we could there would be no criminality.

> Dismissing crypto as doomed to dystopia ignores why it exists: because our current systems already fail millions every day.

This only makes sense if crypto solves the problems that current systems fail at. This have not been shown to be the case despite many years of attempts.

People in countries with high inflation or where the banking system is unreliable are not using blockchains, either.

Do you have any proof to support this claim? Stable coins use alone is in the 10's (possibly hundreds now) of billions in daily transaction globally. I'd be interested to hear your source for your claim.

I'm from a high inflation country. Let's see your evidence of use in such countries, since you are throwing numbers out.

First of all, you are the one who stated this as a fact, and then provided only anecdotal evidence in support of the broad claim. Your singular limited experience in one country cannot blindly extend to all such countries, so the onus is on you to provide support for your claim.

____________

I was also under the impression that adoption was fairly strong in many of these regions, and after looking into it, I see far more evidence in favor of that than a single anecdotal claim on a discussion board...

>Venezuela remains one of Latin America’s fastest-growing crypto markets. Venezuela’s year-over-year growth of 110% far exceeds that of any other country in the region. -Chainalysis

>Cryptocurrency Remittances Spike 40% in Latin America -AUSTRAC

>Crypto adoption has grown so entrenched that even policymakers are rumored to be considering it as part of the solution. -CCN

>By mid-2021, trading volumes had risen 75%, making Venezuela a regional leader. -Binance

_______

It actually wouldn't surprise me if most of this was hot air, but certainly you have actual data backing up the claim, not just an anecdotal view?

Using relative growth is one of the favorite tricks of hucksters that allows them to say "100% growth over the last year" to hide the fact of it growing from $5 to $10.

I don't really care enough about this to do proper research, but as another anecdote from someone living under 40% yearly inflation: nobody here gives a shit about cryptocurrencies. Those who can afford it buy foreign stock, houses and apartments; those who cannot, buy up whatever USD and EUR we can find.

Cryptocurrency was used by very few people for short-term speculation around 5 years ago, but even that died down to nothing.

It may not be the absolute most useless, but it's awfully niche. You can use it to transfer money if you live somewhere with a crap banking system. And it's very useful for certain kinds of crime. And that's about it, after almost two decades. Plenty of other possibilities have been proposed and attempted, but nothing has actually stuck. (Remember NFTs? That was an amusing few weeks.) The technology is interesting and cool, but that's different from being useful. LLM chatbots are already way more generally useful than that and they're only three years old.

Gambling! That's actually the number one use case by far. Far beyond eg buying illicit substances. Regular money is much better for that.

Matt Levine (of Money Stuff fame) came up with another use case in a corporate setting: in many companies, especially banks, their systems are fragmented and full of technical debt. As a CEO it's hard to get workers and shareholders excited about a database cleanup. But for a time, it was easy to get people fired up about blockchain. Well, and the first thing you have to do before you can put all your data on the blockchain, is get all your data into common formats.

Thus the exciting but useless blockchain can provide motivational cover for the useful but dull sounding database cleanup.

(Feel free to be as cynical as you want to be about this.)

This is so true, from 2018-2021 my internal banking product was able to use blockchain hype to clean up a lot of our database schema. Our CTO was rubber stamping everything with the words blockchain and our customers were beating down the door to throw money at it.

Well that's hilarious. I wonder if LLMs might have a similar use case. I fear they tend to do the opposite: why clean up data when the computer can pretend to understand any crap you throw at it?

"I'm not the target audience and I would never do the convoluted alternative I imagined on the spot that I think are better than what blockchain users do"

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