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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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I genuinely don't know if this is a sarcastic/troll post or a honest one. I assume it's sarcasm, but I have seen people earnestly suggest such complex and orthogonal solutions to a solved problem, so I have to check (I neither up voted nor down voted fwiw. As sarcasm it's kind of funny. If genuine, I don't even know where to begin - our axiomatic frameworks may be too far apart:)

This is an honest one. There are not many reasons to use a cryptocurrency and a blockchain, but this is one of them. It models the incentives properly.

In general - smart contracts can prevent a huge class of disputes, increasing clarity at scale and decreasing the costs of litigation after the fact.

Can you elaborate?

My thoughts:

* Typically, payment issues like this are at small scales - not a massive enterprise website for a multinational corporation, but a small businesses that need web presence.

* In such cases, scope management is key. Client typically underestimates the work required, so education and clear expectations are both a must and an uphill battle

* Anything that expands the scope without clear requirements tracing, risks derailing. Adding "tokens" and crypto, not just as a smart contract between web developer and business users, but with all the customers and users, seems like a huge expansion of scope, and likely orthogonal to the limited "web presence / small eCommerce" requirements

* Meanwhile, the traditional/boring commerce and law have this covered - a little bit of work ahead of time by the web developer to draft and sign appropriate contract / payment terms (which can and should be standardized once for all clients), can provide appropriate safety guardrails; in particular, far less overhead than building a whole new (possibly unbilled?) crypto/token facilities.

What are your thoughts on A/B comparison here?

Thanks for your time!

So if I understand it correctly, basically having a kind of "kill switch" into the code that turns automatically if a certain transaction has not been made on time and detected?

I've had trouble explaining to clients the what a "domain name" is and how it is different from the "website host". I can only begin to imagine having to also explain cryptocurrency and a convoluted system like this.

> 4 seconds after I posted it, it got downvoted. Then 10 seconds later, -2. Because it has the word cryptocurrency. No one can load, read and react that fast. This is getting ridiculous. Turn off the bots based on a word, and engage with the substance.

Because as soon as you said Cryptocurrency, you lost the plot.

Everything you said is literally how freelancing already works. You pay a certain amount upfront, and then pay more based on deliverables.

> Cryptocurrency is the right fit here because you want it to be tied to something the client can’t just mint unlimited amounts of

Can you tell me how to mint unlimited amounts of US Dollars? I would love this hack.

> just another use of cryptocurrency that properly aligns everyone’s incentives and prevents legal disputes through continuity instead of abruptness

How does a blockchain determine whether I built the site the owner wanted?

I normally think pg has been very reasonable in his views, but his historic approval of downvoting things merely to signal disagreement, or worse, being triggered by a word, is a mistake, this norm makes HN much less useful.

It chills speech to the point of not being able to suggest correct solutions to things, or correctly diagnose problems. Well, I refuse to participate in that.

I only downvote if I think the quality of a comment is bad, it is completely off-topic or absurd for example, or in bad faith. Not if I disagree with it and certainly not because it contains — gasp - a word for a technology I would prefer not to see discussed!

And I also refuse to be bullied into silence by some downvotes. I am saying that downvotes within 4 seconds is not likely to be organic, because it requires someone to have refreshed the page at nearly the exact time I posted, magically scroll down to the exact comment, read it first and downvote it. And then 4 downvotes in quick succession after. There is more going on here, I suspect, than mere “losing the plot”.

I could attempt to test this by posting comments with the ahem blacklisted word as a reply to some comments even further down the page, where it would be absurd for someone to scroll to that exact comment within, say, 10 seconds. But I have noticed that a specific set of words seems to produce that effect on HN.

> Not if I disagree with it and certainly not because it contains — gasp - a word for a technology I would prefer not to see discussed!

I'll stop you right there. You were downvoted because you were wrong, not because, - gasp - you used a certain word.

I'm a cryptographer. I'm not afraid of cryptocurrencies. I'm afraid of snake oil salesmen that sell things they don't understand.

> And I also refuse to be bullied into silence by some downvotes

K, well, I have no idea what this means. It's not bullying to downvote a wrong opinion.

I've been wrong lots of times. It's not a big deal...

“Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.” — https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Believe it or not, it’s prime daylight hours across most of the US sitting at their desks browsing HN.

I refuse to believe that people can do downvotes on a long-ish comment 4 seconds after something is posted.

Not even read. Posted. That means they had to refresh exactly at that moment, within a second of it being posted, scroll down the page to that comment, read it, and downvote it, in 4 seconds! Come on

Corrective votes will follow, if warranted.

I don't think automated downvote brigading is good for HN. It buries items and then by the time they are found and upvoted, it's basically been buried. Anyway...

I don't downvote things I disagree with though (only bad faith and anti-hn-rules behavior) and I didn't downvote this.

The substance seems very silly to me. Even if businesses were well versed in using crypto and it didn't have such a scam reputation it's still silly to me. Using a cryptocurrency blockchain for any of this, let alone all of this, lands squarely in the realm of what the haters brand as "a solution looking for a problem".

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