Comment by hashmap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hashmap | Hacker News Reader

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> I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

Why is it so popular for someone in tech to assign everyone else the task of thinking up something useful to do with technology x they think is cool?

> It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.

> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.

There was a period of ~1000 years where you could also make this argument against some high-minded guy advocating for democracy.

It is both telling and very, very funny to confuse asking for specifics for making an argument against something.

> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.

These technologies can be used by people to coordinate amongst themselves whether the outgroup likes it or not.

If you google "network state" you will find things that you might like, and things that you might not like. It's not up to you whether other people create these things. You can only control your own participation.

Cryptography is really the study of incredibly rigged games, games that one side almost always wins, even when both players play perfectly. If human society is a game where humans try to coordinate with other humans to be better off, sometimes at the expense of other humans, then distributed ledgers have totally changed the meta.

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