Thats not exactly true. Every 2016 blocks the network compares the actual blocks mined with the target blocks (at 10 mins per block), and adjusts the difficulty accordingly.

If you suddenly had less miners the current difficulty would mean that the time to mine a block would be greater than 10 mins. Depending on where it is in the 2016 block cycle it could also mean an extended period of time before the difficulty is rectified.

If the network suddenly dropped to a VERY low hashrate (like a single PC), it is possible it would take (at current difficulty) tens of millions of years to mine a single block - let alone 2016 of them. Of course, thats probably not going to happen, im just using it as an example to show that its not a fixed period of time per block.

The sentiment on HN against crypto strikes me as odd… it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s …

Give it some time to evolve and embrace the future!

I've known about crypto for almost ten years. I worked in the field writing bits of the rippled code for a couple of years. And I still have no idea why anyone would want to use cryptocurrencies, except of course for crime.

> it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s …

Hmm, is this comment intended to be a parody? Well, it certainly turned out that the car was the Devil's tool, because we are running as fast as we can to devastate our climate by turning fossil fuels into carbon dioxide.

To be fair, mankind evolved a lot due to the use of cars. Off-rail transportation has changed the way we live, not just for the worse. The coffee and bananas I bought today was transported by a motor vehicle for the last mile. The ambulance that drove my friend to the hospital was also a motor vehicle.

Most of our agriculture that is responsible for us having cheap food, is also powered by motor vehicles.

Motor vehicles have benefited nearly everyone, whereas crypto currencies haven't benefited almost anyone so far except the speculators who advocate for more people to buy in, to push the price up, so they can cash out (in fiat of course) at a higher price.

If so many individual people across America didn't need to own multiple cars to commute long distances to work every day, and could simply take decent government subsidized public transportation, or ride their bike safely on well designed ubiquitous bike paths, like I can where I live in Amsterdam, then the world would be a much better place.

Just as the world would be a better place if cryptocurrency's shrill shills and speculating "investors" didn't gamble their money and buy their drugs by burning huge quantities of coal.

There are much more efficient heath-friendly and eco-friendly ways of gambling money and buying drugs than by burning coal to mine cryptocurrency.

That sounds preachy and pretentious. Like Paris Hilton saying homeless people should just stop being poor and go to an ATM and take out money to buy a house like she did. Not everyone has access to Amsterdam like infrastructure since not everyone lives in Amsterdam and usually people have no direct say in the public infrastructure of the place they live so they adapt in way that improves their live, the best way they can, usually by owning cars.

Have you considered why 85% of Germans own cars and drive almost everywhere? Same in Austria, outside of Vienna or the city center of the other "bigger" cities, you absolutely need a private car to get anywhere in a timely manner as public transport is sparse and infrequent.

You can't just come in on your high horse flat and dense rich city with top infrastructure and preach that everyone else is doing it wrong and should live like you do, because most people don't have that luxury of such choices where they live and instead have to deal as best they can with poor infrastructure choices made by governments and interest groups way before they were even born, choices which take decades and millions to reverse, if they ever even do.

So please consider this next time.

But once they get L2/L3 chains properly into place, so that every interaction is just a fraction of a fraction of the new state, and you can deploy say a little chat room, or a game world, or a marketplace, a collection of router configs, etc, etc, and not have to think too hard about the state, that's getting pretty cool to me. And combine that with the dev experience starting to get good (I recently used hardhat to make a fully typed, hot reload front end, working with hot reloading fully on chain backend) - it's going to be a new frontier for hacking and side projects like the early internet was

It doesn't make sense the jump from keeping state in a distributed, trusted store for a finite state machine to deploying chat rooms, etc., what do you mean? Synchronising those states through a blockchain just to enforce some kind of distributed trust? I really don't get it.

I might be too stupid for this, bear with me. I've heard the argument about L2+ chains for a long time, Lightning has been around since 2017 and I still see this comment popping up, I still see TX fees high as fuck.

I really would like a more clear explanation of what you see as benefits, this whole paragraph reads as pure techno-babble to me.

So like, you want to make a chat room, and someone has a special power to ban people, and the chat room remembers who is banned. If the banning person doesn’t log in for a while, the power moves to someone else randomly. There’s also membership tiers, so people can pay a small fee to have fancier names if they really like the room, and there are little mini games in there with leaderboards. And there’s also no one in charge, it’s just a room with some rules that exists because the people in it sort of like those rules, and anyone in it can spool another one up with different settings if they want.

All of that stuff would take quuuiiite a bit of backend logic to code. But with smart contracts you can take basically all of it for granted, it might be like… a few pages at most of contract code. And then you can focus on writing a really good user interface instead.

Anyone can then just grab that front end code that just runs in a browser, chuck a tiny bit of crypto in to fuel it, and suddenly the backend exists purely on chain. Wherever there’s a group of people, and they have some kind of collaborative set of rules they’d like to agree to, like a marketplace or anything like that, crypto makes it really really easy

The biggest issue is really just the cost. Currently it’s ~$5 to transact which is… too high for any side project or toy. But with L2’s (rolling out now) it should come down to almost nothing, so I reckon we’ll start to see some pretty cool stuff popping up soon