Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by scott_s on Friday January 28, 2022 @05:37PM (#30121425)

BitCoin is 13 years old. The blockchain is not a new technology, and it is not extremely early days. We have over a decade of people trying to use blockchain and cryptocurrencies to solve real problems - and not just from startups, but also from large, international tech companies with research divisions. They have tried to use blockchain to solve real problems, and they have failed.

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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by spopejoy on Saturday January 29, 2022 @09:30PM (#30133258)

Bitcoin is also a laughably primitive blockchain, and Ethereum is holding back potential applications with it's innumerable flaws. You're right that "it's not early" as crypto hasn't been able to progress as fast as other tech because it's being hampered by its own success, in the time-honored worse-is-better tradition.

Blockchains are unusual tech in that it's strangely hard to upgrade them. In 2017-18 it was a common belief that some Bitcoin fork would "win" and become the "real Bitcoin", under the moniker "it's not the network, it's the ledger". Turns out it _is_ the network AND the ledger, unfortunately.

However, I maintain that the technology is still _immature_ and in that sense "it's still early": there is still some extremely low-hanging fruit in scalability, safe computing and cryptography that Bitcoin/Eth can't touch. BTC and ETH can absolutely be dethroned with better tech just like other giants that seemed unstoppable at the time.

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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by thisisbrians on Friday January 28, 2022 @08:36PM (#30122871)

The transistor is 13 years old. The transistor is not a new technology...

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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by scott_s on Friday January 28, 2022 @10:51PM (#30123611)

The transistor was invented in 1947. By 1960, 13 years later, transistors had replaced vacuum tubes as the dominant technology for electronics.

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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by thisisbrians on Saturday January 29, 2022 @12:27PM (#30128250)

Yes, and then the internet took another 20+ years.

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Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by scott_s on Saturday January 29, 2022 @03:56PM (#30130353)

You made an implicit argument: it took a similar amount of time (13 years) after the invention of the transistor for them to be used to solve real problems. That is clearly wrong. What argument are you trying to make now?

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