He's not talking to people that have to learn, but people that already made up their mind and share what he says.

I think there’s something to be said about this sort of approach on communication and the site guidelines, but I’m sure someone else would word it better than I.

Is blockchain inherently bad?

Asking a tangential question, is a data store like Oracle DB, Postgres, or MongoDB inherently bad?

If you answered yes to one and NOT the other, please rethink about how you view blockchain or any data store. Because perhaps your intention was to be extremely polarizing, which is fair, but I also think your wording is dishonest.

> the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes

I agree there are endless frauds, scams, and Greater Fool schemes every single day, but these types of generalizations are almost always strictly false, especially when talking about a global multi-trillion dollar industry.

The stock market has had its fair share of scams since its inception, but that doesn't mean EVERYONE who traded in the stock market in the 1700/1800s was a scam, hack, ponzi-schemer. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/09/hi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stock_Exchange_Fraud_of_... https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/02/12/385...

Yet here we are today with several stock markets.

Do people get scammed in the stock market? every day. For millions of dollars? definitely. Is there a lot of GOOD regulation to help with that? 100%

And guess what - that GOOD regulation that exists to help control scams doesn't exist in crypto, so it's like we're back in the 1700s where the stock market is brand new and people are figuring out what you can and can't do.

But don't blame the technology, you're being completely dishonest with yourself by doing so and dishonest to those who read this.

I don’t think the logic is this simple. Tools and technology might not be inherently bad, but they may still be dangerous. Proponents of some dangerous technology often want said technology to become public policy, which increases the risk significantly for everybody. Think guns, nuclear weapons, lottery, and even the stock market. These all have varying levels of risk and utility. When the risk outweighs the utility perhaps there should be a public policy which warns against their use, outright bans them when the risk is severe and the utility minuscule. Especially so if the industry is growing bigger and bigger.

Here there is no public policy, and there is unlikely to be any for most countries in the near future. This is why OP voices their concerns that we should step in and advocate for people’s safety. Not because the technology it self is inherently evil, but because it is dangerous and—as the linked video argues—had little utility outside of harmful activity.

Ps. There are indeed some of us that do think the stock market is a scam and the world would be better of without one. In the mean time at least it is highly regulated and financially literate folks do talk loudly about fishy stuff that happens there.

Technically, Blockchain is an inefficient (bad) data structure that is supposed to control transfer of assets (an important infrastructure). So yes, it is objectively bad just like O(n) is objectively better than O(e^n).

"Blockchain" is basically just a Merkle tree with a branching factor extremely close to 1. That is, in and of itself, neithre inefficient nor bad.

However, pairing that with a proof-of-work consensus mechanism is incredibly inefficient, energy-consuming (requires at least 50% of all available compute to be engaged with the blockchain or risk bad actors taking over).

AFAIK There is no application of Blockchain other than consensus. Do you know of any to justify this distinction? (also why merkle tree? looks like a plain old list to me, with very few exceptions while it is being distributed)

Well, a degenerate Merkle tree is a list (any degenerate tree is a list). As a consensus mechanism, I could potentially think of many ways of getting that, but none that are both efficient and trustless.

As-is, the cryptocurrencies we've seen have all been incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Any that would be efficient, both energy-wise and for speed-of-transactions would most probably require ditching complete decentralisation and thus be unacceptable to hard-core ideologues in the "crypto space".

For a rough estimate of the "transactions per second" you'd need to be a global, practical, "we handle all transactions", we can do a rough estimate. There are, what, 6 * 10^9 people on the planet. At a conservative guess, each person does about one exconomic transaction per day. Let's assume that is approximately evenly distributed through each day. A day is 86400 seconds, that's close enough to 10^5 that we might as well use that. That gives us at a minimum 6k transactions per second to be viable for a single global electronic currency.

I wasn’t staking a claim here or there. I was more referring to epolanski‘s statement that the post was not intended as a learning experience.

I think it is one of the undocumented features of HN that polarizing posts tend to be downvoted even though they are technologically interesting. I’m one of the people here on HN that actually enjoy political discussions on HN, particularly those that intersect with technology (like the case is with this post). Apparently there are enough of us here that occasionally a post like this is deemed interesting enough that the community votes to keep it on the front page for a little while.

There are views to be shared (as with pure technical posts) and I can learn where the community stands on these issues.

People on HN tend to hide from and downvote the conversations they don’t want to have. Read into it as to why on your own.

Your comment is literally the ideological problem.