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Comment by jrflo | Hacker News Reader

I know what you're saying, there is a lot of speculation going on in AI right now. The difference is there is hard evidence of AI capabilities accelerating now: we've gone from toy chatbots to sort-of useful coding helpers to agents solving novel math problems in 3.5 years. We could plateau any day and a lot of investors would be stuck holding the bag, or we could continue on that trajectory and they'll make crazy profits. With crypto, the bet was always "how much money will people keep sticking in this market?" which seems a lot more flawed to me.

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The irony with blockchain is that it also had a bunch of real life use cases but the sheer extremity of the hype cycle managed to actually prevent them from being effectively brought to life.

There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin.

I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is getting washed out by the hype simply because it's a gradual improvement and not "disruptive". Meanwhile the stuff sold as disruptive like vibe coding is mostly bullshit.

What was the useful blockchain tech? It seemed to me to all be different ways of avoiding regulations or bypassing existing system or addressing issues that were already solved by using centralized systems.

it let you decentralize trust. as one example, I was hoping that as well as "sign in with google" I could sign in with a blockchain based decentralized identity service where nobody could one day decide to revoke my identity on a whim.

i remember my friends excitedly telling me how cross border container trade is still done with paperwork because nobody trusts each others' IT systems. I'm pretty sure it still is because they can't be convinced to trust blockchain systems either.

trustworthy voting is another application. ive yet to see a political party that runs an internal voting system that doesnt rely upon you trusting a central server run by a few people. this is crazy.

So, they resolved solved problems but without centralized systems.

It seems to me that people don't want to run their own security upon which they have no recourse if they fail, and don't think that benefits of centralized systems are worth giving up for the dubious benefits of a decentralized trust. Imagine if the scams for the currencies occurred with voting systems, with no way to undo it.

The technologies just didn't do anything that more than a small number of people wanted.

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