That quote is a product of its time, and only seems foolish or misguided with the benefit of hindsight. There is no shame in skepticism, even if it ultimately ends up being incorrect (likewise I'd have no misgivings about making a wrong decision rationally). There is also an element of survivorship bias: many such quotes about things which did fail were wagered on similar amounts of information, but have since fallen into obscurity. I don't think it's fair to call the author of that quote a Luddite.
Speaking as someone well acquainted with the technicalities of distributed systems and cryptography, I am deeply skeptical of blockchain technology. I think the vast majority (but not all) of it is "lame"[1], for lack of a better word. I would happily accept being quoted for a decade or two if I'm wrong.
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1. I'm skeptical for reasons I'm not going to try to defend, because they've been rehashed on Hacker News over and over. The justifications will likely not convince anyone who remains unconvinced.
"Only"? There were top-level comments in that very thread [1] that pointed out why it was misguided and foolish. Hindsight is not the requirement that some want it to be.
1. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
I believe in Bitcoin and the recent developments in both cryptography and distributed systems which are underlying many cryptocurrency projects. I think the skepticism of Hn is rational, valuable to the community and often correct. The cryptocurrency space is a great space to work in, but it requires a constant investment in skepticism and critical thought. I hope Hn always remains skeptical of technology.
> The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted.
I disagree with this statement. Ethereum DApps can fail, Ethereum can be rendered unavailable via: scalability issues, forks, bugs or failures in the P2P network. Furthermore the additional infrastructure that many DApps rely on can fail as well. Ethereum is not a solution for achieving high-availability, high-availability is probably harder to achieve with a DApp. Ethereum is a solution for building and managing assets outside the control of a single party or company. This intentional loss of control comes with many costs and does not provide universal business benefits.
To me there are strong parallels between the cryptocurrency boom and the previous P2P boom. P2P technology was exciting and super interesting, but people assumed that it would magically be the solution to a million problems just because the tech was awesome and decentralized. But that didn't happen, instead Netflix happened. Netflix found a way to solve the actual problems that people were having and at the end of the day the underlying technology didn't matter.
I expect to see something similar happen with a lot of the current crypto use cases. More centralized solutions like Amazon QLDB[1] will provide the majority of the benefits that people really need: a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log, while also being performant and highly available.
Many people see decentralization as the solution to all problems because it will finally make things fair, a level playing field for all. I just don't see it happening. Not because of some sinister world order trying to retain control, but simply because that is not how human interactions and trust tend to work. I think we can continue to move towards more decentralization, but it shouldn't be the end goal in and of itself and we should always be skeptical when there is more focus on that than there is on solving the problem at hand.
This, one thousand times this, it is always this. People have problems and they want solutions, they don't care about particular technology architectures.
(p2p wasn’t illegal, but what people wanted out of it was)
I can't believe that Netflix didn't seriously consider P2P. I imagine they didn't do it because there are issues with consuming limited upload bandwidth that doesn't belong to NF, and having poor control over the resulting complicated network flows and the ultimate customer experience (think about what your first customer service action for a customer having video quality issues would be).
No doubt there are many managers and system engineers who shy away from P2P because it's associated with bad actors. But there are sound reliability engineering and customer-facing reasons not to use it, too.
Unfortunately Bitcoin provides much less anonymity than cash or credit card payments. Bitcoin provides excellent censorship resistance, in that Bitcoin lets anyone who has Bitcoin send Bitcoin to anyone that wants Bitcoin (assuming of course internet access and fairly technical users). Additionally Bitcoin lets people custody Bitcoins like cash or gold and also lets those same users send Bitcoins digitally. This is a new development and something people couldn't do before. We are still in the early stages of seeing how people use this new capability. Check back in 20-100 years.
Smart contracts, especially legally enforceable smart contracts, have existed well before cryptocurrencies, however cryptocurrencies provide a fairly natural setting for them.
>Did not happen, because finance is still largely a business of relationships and trust.
Relationships and trust mean a high cost of doing business, both because trust is expensive and because relationships are not able to be automated. Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts offer a technical substitute for trust. This substitute is not good in all cases and has some serious tradeoffs. However there are some areas in which it is a clear improvement.
You generally have to give up your ssn and lots of private data to get a credit card. Your name is tied to it.
Cash is great, but does require you or someone to physically deliver it.
But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.
Credit card transactions are private between you, the merchant, the processor and your bank and anyone those parties sell your data to. Whereas Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public immutable ledger.
>But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.
You can certainly obfuscate Bitcoin transactions. I even wrote a tumbling protocol for Bitcoin[0] and have been involved with other cryptocurrency privacy projects. I believe that cryptocurrencies can achieve a high degree of privacy, but we aren't there yet.
Note you can do similar things to make credit card payments more privacy. For instance by buying and trading gift cards or store credits.
At the end of the day if you buy physical goods online you have to have them delivered to your house, drop site or PO box. That means giving out a physical address which greatly reduces your anonymity.
As a side comment, just two hours ago I paid an IPTV service with BTC using coinpayments.net and it was easy (scan QR code and click send) and quite fast (at first I was going to pay for BCH because usually it is faster, but I only had BTC in my wallet).
Really cool as payments technology if you tell me.
Censorship resistant, electronic, financial transactions.
You can make an electronic payment to anyone, and nobody is going to stop you. No transactions are currently being censored on most of the big crypto platforms, so we have provable evidence that it works for this usecase right now.
I think following the reasoning of many BTC optimists, your quote is equivalent to saying "PPP (the one in OSI layer 2) is a shitty way to have globally distributed, secured real-time chats"
1. lack of developers to adapt to cheap 51% attacks,
2. cheap 51% attacks will lead to those coins getting delisted from exchanges since attacks will cheat exchanges via 51% double spending attacks (something which has happened a few times already)
3. With no ability for people to safely buy or sell coins those coins will die.
I don't think this will happen to BTC or ETH. I think Ethereum will look very different in 5-10 years.
When you hold Bitcoin...you don't hold anything which can convert into something useful at the end of the day - you hold the useless result of expended computing power. A bitcoin isn't a password which unlocks anything, it doesn't convert back into computing power - it can't do anything into the future.
1. is that you can pay your US federal and state taxes in USD
2. and many companies and individuals will accept USD in trade for goods and services.
Measuring BTC by that same rule you'll find:
1. You can pay your Ohio state taxes in Bitcoin [0],
2. and you can trade BTC (Bitcoin) for some goods and services (overstock for example).
Thus if USD has value by the measure above than BTC must share some of that value. The value of BTC might be significantly smaller than USD but it must be non-zero.
>When you hold stocks you hold actual ownership of a productive corporation
Not every company is productive. The stock is worth what someone is willing to pay for it now or at some future point. Companies have issued stock as cryptocurrency tokens.
>When you hold Bitcoin...you don't hold anything which can convert into something useful at the end of the day - you hold the useless result of expended computing power
You raise an interesting point here. Should currencies have a use other than being a medium of exchange? For example you can burn paper money to generate heat or melt down coinage into useful metals. Does having that property make paper money or physical coins better as a currency? Goldbugs would say yes, I'm less sure.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pay-taxes-with-bitcoin-ohio-say...
>>2. and many companies and individuals will accept USD in trade for goods and services.
First of all to have USD someone needed to borrow it first and they need to return it. The USD you hold is useful for someone else to pay their debt back. This is much more important than taxes.
>>Thus if USD has value by the measure above than BTC must share some of that value.
No, the reasoning is based on missing the point of fiat currency: someone else owns USD to the central authority with a lot of power.
>>For example you can burn paper money to generate heat or melt down coinage into useful metals. Does having that property make paper money or physical coins better as a currency? Goldbugs would say yes, I'm less sure.
The point is that USD represents someone's debt. They will need to come up with goods/services to pay that debt back if they don't currently own enough USD. BTC represents wasted power and its only value is a hope someone wants to accept it as payment even though no one really needs to (unlike USD).
This is a novel concept to me - could you please elaborate on that or provide suitable search keywords?
Most stock today doesn't pay dividents and has no direct relationship to the company's assets. You own some tradeable tokens and you bet on them going up or down in value. Implying stock ownership gives you something that's tangible and non-speculative is the real pretending.
https://www.dividend.com/investor-resources/sp-500-companies...
Haha you're funny.
On a more serious note, I don't think the current generation of blockchains is "The Future". They offer basically nothing more than what you can achieve with a publicly hosted git repository with post-commit hooks that enforce signatures. Actually, Ethereum is far worse, because all computations are repeated by every node (as far as I know), which is a huge waste of energy. If you want reliable distributed computation, you need to make sure there's some way of smart distribution of work... e.g. offer exponentially diminishing returns for each "duplicated" evaluation of the same piece of code beyond the 2nd.
> Ethereum [...] apps [...] never fail
Just...
wow.
Listen, distributed ledgers are useful.
Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful.
These people just can't seem to see the difference.
> Breathless hyped up nonsense about "flaw-proof technologies that even YOU can use if you just give me 10 bucks!!!" (in used car salesman voice) ... yeah ... that's not so useful.
> These people just can't seem to see the difference.
To be clear, are you claiming the GGP (Sargos) can't see the difference between these two things?
For high-throughput computations, Golem is being developed, where there is (generally) no computation replication. www.golem.network. The repository is here: https://github.com/golemfactory
Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems. Blockchains solve only one problem, which is consensus formation on ontrusted networks. They do not solve politics, governance, downtime, and certainly not application failure.. these things all exist on blockchains.
Essentially none of the application ported from centralized systems to Ethereum or even Bitcoin actually face Byzantine consensus issues when deployed as centralized systems. Bitcoin can be used as a 24x7x365 global collateral and value transfer instrument - such a system would face consensus problems if implemented on top of traditional banking infrastructure. That's hugely valuable, but pretty much the only problem-solving application to date.
For things like asset ownership and transfer, any kind of voting, real estate, IPOs, etc, most people still have to deal with incredibly bad centralized systems, that would be amazing if rebuilt as centralized node.js apps that talk to a MySQL database. This stuff is low hanging fruit that's a huge pain for massive swathes of humanity. And despite the fact that no Palo Alto real estate broker is talking to the city's land deed system over unreliable networks, where enemy messengers might swoop in and assign your deed to the wrong buyer, there's this myth that we need distributed consensus for this and other problems best solved by... databases.
Nobody denies its slow, its a waste of resources, its buggy, its hyped. its a lot of things many early systems was. Its all challenges that people try to solve. What is interresting is if those things can be solved. And i dont understand Why so many dont see a benefit if we could one day build true decentralized systems... its not the distributed or avalibility thats important. Its not like goverments or companies always have the peoples best interrest when they make decissions.
A lot of people deny all of that, actually.
> slow
They say "there is no faster way to achieve distributed consensus".
> waste
They say "it's not wasteful because its securing the network".
> buggy
They say "unlike all other software systems, it's never been hacked!".
> hyped
They say "it's literally the greatest innovation since the internet"
> And i dont understand Why so many dont see a benefit if we could one day build true decentralized systems
I have no idea, I guess most engineers are just too jealous of early adopters getting rich to be willing to give cryptocurrency a chance. There are so many problems that can be solved right now with cryptocurrency if the community would just give cryptocurrency a fair shot instead of always trying to say that it doesn't solve any real problems.
Note: the previous paragraph is a satirical portrayal of a cryptocurrency enthusiast attempting to explain why the entire software community isn't hyped about cryptocurrency.
> open-source
Blockchain software is an amazing example of open-source software, but blockchain is ultimately unimportant with respect to the entire open-source movement as whole.
> decentralized
Blockchains are decentralized, but they can't "decentralize the world" because they don't exist in the world so they necessarily require outsourcing any real world effects to untrustworthy humans who do not have to respect the state of the blockchain in the material world.
> free information
Not sure what this even means, but whatever market incentives exist that might keep information from "being free" will always exist, regardless of blockchains.
> patentless
The patent system is a political institution that will exist regardless of blockchains.
> nobody can rewrite history
As has been demonstrated many times, blockchain history can be trivially rewritten given the appropriate political influence of those who control the nodes. The DAO is a classic example of that.
> force a monopoly down our throath
Blockchains do absolutely nothing to stop this.
> be unaccoubtable for their actions
Blockchains do absolutely nothing to stop this.
> censor us or run us around like sheep.
A government can effortlessly censor you and doesn't really care if are able to flip some bits in an arbitrary digital ledger.
> One day we stop shooting ourselves in the foot and pee our pants and stop being blind to the tech giants like they have our best interrest
The cryptocurrency community does not have our best interest at heart.
> A true decentralized system might be nesssary one day to avoid us being enslaved in democrazy
This is the height of cryptocurrency delusion. I regret that I have to sound so dismissive but I think the monumental assertions you're putting forward are fundamentally disconnected from history and our current reality.
Im thinking about civilations destroyed or Winners of war rewriting history, or powerfull companies and poltiticians covering up information that was already out there... eg recently we found out its easy to delete from waybackmachine. If you cannot Imagine we Can build true decentralized tamperproof systems or could ever have a neeed for one i suggest you study human history.
None of these are engineering or technical problems. They are all extremely complex meatspace-based problems that get solved (if they are even solvable at all, or even actual problems) well outside of the realm of computer code.
Bitcoin and Satoshi's Glorious Blockchain is, was, and always will be a solution in search of a problem.
In regard to bitcoin it works pretty well for a lot of things and not so much for others. Just as everything. Personally it served me well.
And Having background in lottery abd payment industries i Can tell you we are already using it.. current systems are a terrible mess Which Anyone who ever had to implement against visa mastercard banks etc can tell you All about. Private blockchain ledgers like in the mentioned corporations is already in use and even more in the future.
Admirable goals but lots of us have aspirations. You need to demonstrate how your suggestions can actually help, and at this point, explaining it is not enough, you and your community need to stop talking about it and actually do something. No other software requires so much vocal defense.
HN dislikes the never ending and unsubstantiated breathless hype surrounding cryptocurrency, this is painfully obvious if you actually engage genuinely instead of pretending that everyone is an idiot because they don't fawn over what has amounted to a novel and interesting but mostly useless technology.
> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Using hindsight to cherry-pick historical examples of when naysayers were wrong is obviously terribly flawed logic yet it is a routinely common defense among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It should be obvious to any engineer that this proves nothing and I personally take this reasoning as a sign that you might be arguing in bad faith.
> Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted.
A base layer for apps that nobody cares about. Give one example of a useful Ethereum app. I define "useful" as a product or service that has demonstrated market success but is cheaper or somehow improved through cryptocurrency. I don't count it as useful if its a niche use-case that is impractical or has no market demand (e.g. avoiding taxes). Also, the idea that these systems never fail is laughably absurd as they have failed to the tune of multiple millions of dollars at this point (i.e. badly written code that failed to do what it claimed, resulting in funds being stolen).
> You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages
This absurd comparison of cryptocurrency to the early internet has been so thoroughly debunked that it barely merits a response. Please stop saying this.
> In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful
Only in cryptocurrency software land is "in a few more years it might be useful" a defensible explanation of why cryptocurrency is the greatest innovation since the internet. Why can't you wait till its actually useful before broadcasting your condescendingly cliche cryptocurrency judgements regarding how HN is full of Luddites who are incapable of understanding technology? I'm sure cryptocurrency is just so complex and so new that todays engineers are just too dumb to understand it, it takes a special breed of elite hacker to fully grok the amazing potential of this new technology, Luddite software engineers be damned.
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
The flip side is handing over control over everything to Silicon Valley which is slowly coming to roost. Wonder what'll happen if the Discord store doesn't make enough money to pay for servers and investors demand RoI?
The first assessment isn't wrong but limited in its scope to people like them. The blind and illiterate might 'overvalue' it as a priority. Getting the actual value is hard to tell prior to knowing the whole state of the market with a lot of work. It might become a best selling memetic "gag item" like the horse head mask or be useless even in the target market practically.
Slack is not an alternative.
A lot of large open-source projects have Slack communities, often alongside IRC ones. Take Clojure for example, with its 14k-members “Clojurians” Slack project.
Yes. It’s free for non-profit orgs.
I wasn’t clear. It’s free for non-profit orgs. Open-source communities that aren’t registered organizations are by definition not non-profit orgs.
Source: worked on one such team at Amazon in 2017.
Instead of playing on our heartstrings to convince us that cryptocurrencies are useful, how about actually making something useful? We've been told for years that it was about to pay off, that "it's still building time". You've had billions poured in ICOs and pre-mined coins and you have nothing to show for it besides glorified pyramid schemes and currencies that are useless as currencies.
Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early internet is frankly absurd. Maybe people didn't imagine how huge is was going to become but the practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA (and then the world) is obvious. Besides the Internet grew fast and was useful almost from day 1, even though it involved a complex and expensive hardware infrastructure. By the 90's the Internet wasn't mainstream but it was definitely very useful. Sci-fi writers had expected something like the Internet long before ARPA, it's just immediately obvious that being able to connect to the entire world in real time would be greatly valuable.
Furthermore what prevented a more mainstream adoption were mainly hardware limitations. Internet on dial-up wasn't fun at all. Remember having to wait for a full minute to have a progressive JPEG load up? I do. It was clunky but there was nothing else like it. Once technology improved and got faster and cheaper adoption exploded. What's slowing down progress in CryptoCurrency? The infrastructure is there, yet hardly anybody wants to use it. And unlike the Internet, there are plenty of alternatives for the vast majority of the services offered through a blockchain.
>I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.
That's faith, not reason.
Replace "data" with "money", and "USA" with "anywhere in the world"... do you see any value in that?
I had this problem one time over a long-weekend, and the only solution I had was to use Western Union. Because I didn't warn my bank that I wanted to use my own money, they disabled my account until they were open again (3 days).
> relatively fast
Maybe 5 days is relatively fast to you, but it's not to me. 1 horsepower was relatively fast to people before cars were common also.
dapps nobody uses? ICO pump and dumps? you lost the crowd there Sir.
We are not luddites, I don't think you fully comprehend what that word means.
You are assuming blockchain right now, in it's current shape and form, a ReallSlowDatabase(tm), with no real Fortune 500 or the military using it to power their major operations, the so called ledger already exists in Datomic and now AWS, the alleged decentralized PoW tx verification process is bullshit, mining pools have centralized, every fucking meetup I go to I get people like you getting in my fucking face telling me why im a fucking idiot for not buying to their pump and dump schemes that SEC is looking into, it's litearlly the ultimate hyperereality-using social media accounts to shill and attack unbelievers for not HODL, blindly calling any piece of fact or reality as FUD or FakeNews(tm)
Shut the fuck up.
Seriously. We are not luddites, HN users range from NASA engineers to lawyers, who all exercise common sense and have seen this type of pump and dump of technological hype probably far far longer than most blockchain thumpers.
God. I don't care if dang bans me for this post, I just had to get this off my chest. A fucking cult has hijacked the internet.
That's human behavior, not technology. Fiat cash could easily (and has) replace cryptocurrency for this purpose. The argument is irrelevant either way: it doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies are bad and doesn't prove that cryptocurrencies have use.
The iPod was released at that point and you could hold it in your hands and see for yourself.
Can you give me some examples of real world applications of Ethereum's protocol that you think are being undercounted?
I recently looked for some using smart contracts but all I see is hype and a lot of VC/bitcoin money thrown at things that haven't been able to deliver and don't even need blockchain. I saw Dubai putting property records into a blockchain but not sure it has smart contracts. Perhaps something will come up in the future, but what does it have to do with excessive crypto-profit and hype money being put into startups that lack fundamentals? I am not saying experimentation is bad, but I felt like we were/are reaching dotcom pets.com levels of hype and mania.
If you ask me, HN mostly seems to be saying that the hype has been out of control over blockchain. I don't see people saying blockchain technology is lame or unreliable, do you? I have seen comparisons of bitcoin to tulip mania and ponzis, but that's not the same as discounting blockchain technologies.
A stablecoin run in a contract is pretty amazing and becoming more and more popular.
Most "stable" coins are trading at over $1 right now, presumably as people try to flee sinking cryptocurrencies and have no practical and/or legal means to turn them into real money.
They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan
Most of the nobles he asked for money were actually better educated than him, so the error was obvious to them. And since noone could know about America's existence it was reasonable to assume that Columbus will simply run out of supplies and starve to death in the middle of the ocean. Which almost happened, they've found the land at the very last moment.
Blockchains don’t have that simple path of development. They fundamentally don’t make practical sense compared to centralized services. There’s a reason that everyone gets their power from a small number of centralized power plants instead of everyone throwing a few solar panels on their roof and trading their power on the marketplace to create a decentralized power grid. It sounds really cool but it’s just wildly illogical in the real world. That’s blockchain.
Sure satellite dishes are worse in latency and cost than running a cable but if the cable gets too unreasonable in comparison you can tell them to get bent and switch to satellite.
When ETH was hundreds of dollars, the cost of running code on the blockchain (gas price) could get up to $50 during these attacks.
Imagine adding a column in a database table cost $50. Forget about it.
I recall the founder of CryptoKitties saying that the transaction cost was significantly higher than the kitty cost. Isn't that a failure state for the network?
it depends on what you define as a failure state. Technically, the network is still working - but business-case wise, it failed.
Or we were just chalking it up to "Irrational Exuberance." Instead of addressing initial concerns economists had about it, most proponents were arrogant in their belief that old school economics wouldn't apply to cryptocurrency.
And that gets me to the second point. The people arguing for cryptocurrency weren't transparent in their holdings of it. And that seems to be what created the bubble. Now people are questioning where the basement price is on bitcoin, and it seems like there's nothing but arguments like "It's the money of the future".
That is the exact thing that everybody warns about for deflationary currencies so of course they were skeptical about it. Combine the gratuitous use of processing and power for speculation you can see why they would be less than sanguine about it even before money laundering got involved.
> Well being a medium for exchange is what gives bitcoins value.
I do want to separate out the concepts of "utility" vs "market value".
Probably a good example for this is a hammer. It has a great amount of utility for pounding in nails, securing lumber, etc. It's just not valued on the market though. $5 bucks maybe? You will save a bunch of time using one. However, being able to pound in nails doesn't justify a high cost in and of itself, since the market is flooded with them.
If, however, the utility of bitcoin(medium of exchange) is the only thing that is lifting bitcoin's market value (price), then its price depends upon it outperforming other cryptocurrencies and instruments of money. And the marginal cost of creating another cryptocurrency is maybe a weeks worth of time?
Because there appears to be an unlimited supply of numbers and algorithms, the market value of any cryptocurrency should approach zero over time even if it has great utility.
I've been hearing this argument for years, but you that doesn't take away that global broadcast doesn't scale to any kind of useful TPS rate unless you're willing to decrease the network diameter, which implies centralization.
All the wishful thinking in the world can't change the laws of mathematics and physics.
HN has, like many other circles, gotten sick of the breathless vaporware hype and scams.
Are you suggesting that Ethereum apps can have 100% uptime (never go down, never fail), and are completely secure (fully trusted)?
Because if so I've got some shares of a bridge to sell you.
I mean, I understand the idea that Google wants to increase their uptime because every lost query is lost revenue, but OP seemed to imply there's some intrinsic benefit that's more than just the incremental benefit...
It's great for evergreen software. Imagine a backpage that can't be shut down, for instance.
Well, as long as the underlying monetary policy of the cryptocurrencies is well tried and failed directly from the medieval times, I would personally:
1. Be quite careful who I blame being luddites. 2. Not holding my breath waiting for any kind of success as a currency.
Wait, wait, I thought the hype peak is far behind us. Ever heard about 51% Attack?
I have been using Google since 1999 and I've never seen it down once in more than 19 years.
Care to make an actual wager? longbets.org
And yet the iPod has been totally supplanted by products that came afterward.
This model can work with existing tech producing just some logs that can be hosted on CDN's, checked with hardware acceleration on commodity hardware, and even hosted on $5 VPS's if you want. That's a total cost of $5 per suspicious party running checks if minimizing costs and energy use. Current payment methods work at POS with 16-bit MCU's and such. The signed checks can themselves be sent in as just extra database transactions. The organizations should be non-profits or public-benefit companies whose charter, licensing agreements, and contracts make specific behaviors either mandatory if good or prohibited if bad. Possible sign auditing agreements with organizations that defend consumers with severe penalties for anything shady. Start with credit unions, though, combined with non-profit, payment processors with lean operations.
If you're wondering, the common pattern of my methods is to use the simplest, fastest, most-proven components, whether technical or legal, to build the improved version of current tech that solves the specific problems most people worry about. Nine times out of ten, it's just a shady, for-profit company being assholes due to their incentives. Just changing the model over to a public-benefit Paypal or Venmo with multinational implementation cross-checking each other by itself gets past most of that. Plus, using existing databases, crypto acceleration, and tamper-resistant smartcards keeps performance high with checking cost, hardware and energy, very low.
As I read cyptocurrency and blockchain stuff, it's like they never thought about any of this before going onto solve problems 99% of people with checking accounts and credit cards don't have. Volatile currencies, exchanges getting robbed, and no chargebacks allowed are good examples where most people wouldn't trade their bank and plastic. The folks working on these things should start with user requirements, look at existing solutions, enumerate problems, find simplest changes that fix those problems, deploy solutions, and iterate from there. Strangely, the exact advice YC gave to the startup founders that made it big.
Literally nothing more.. its why it doesnt work financially. The idea is cool though indeed
The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. That's something that future generations will take for granted but HN is largely ignoring right now. Even Google goes down (sometimes once or twice a month). Take a moment to imagine a few of the things you could do better if you had 100% reliable hosting that was safe and private. And basically free. (Either the user pays a penny or two when using your app or you pay a penny or two for each user).
You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages on Usenet which take a while to appear. The tech was being improved. Those short pieces of messages evolved into images and then later video and now we have the internet of today. This isn't going to happen overnight but it's going to happen faster than the improvement of the internet since Ethereum is just software and no hardware needs to be rolled out.
Go ahead and ignore it right now. It's still building time. But don't assume it's useless or beanie babies. In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful and I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.