Since repetition is off topic here, we need to avoid this and stick to pathways that haven't fried yet.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I have personally found it rather difficult to tell the wheat from the chaff. If you have any suggestions on promising projects in the space then please do link me to it.
There are countless economy-changing experiments happening in the DeFi community. Rebuilding of Wall Street and insurance infrastructure being attempted on chain, where trust and centralization and scams or unfairness are ripe for disruption. Staking assets to provide liquidity pools has resulted in billions coming on chain.
Plenty of people are trying to make a quick buck. Plenty of hacks and bad engineering is happening. Most things don’t need a blockchain. I wish HN community looked deeper though.
There is value in almost every new technology, I think blockchain and co haven't gotten a bad rap thanks to the 'morons' who are basically just 'pumping and dumping' or 'hyping' to make quick money. Which IMO is a shame because it stops the real innovation taking place.
It could be something, but it's been given (rightly so) a stigma thanks to the cult of 'crypto bros'. So far a waste of potential.
I don't know that it counts since it's not a "blockchain" in the sense most people describe it, but Git is sort of "blockchain adjacent." It uses a Merkle tree to maintain a crytographically signed quasi-immutable ledger of transactions.
While it's probably not a "blockchain", I don't think that anyone disputes that Git (and its blockchain-like feature) is useful.
I suspect that this is going to be the "good" that comes from blockchain [1] and its ilk; a lot of interesting uses are going to pop up using blockchain concepts, and it will be cannibalized into something that is indisputably useful.
I agree that there are a lot of crypto idiots who act like all problems will be solved by Bitcoin or Ethereum, and I do think they give the legitimate research being done on blockchain (e.g. the Ouroboros protocol) a bad name.
[1] I know Git predates blockchain.
Solved problem: Hyperinflation caused by excessive governmental money printing.
Yes, I know you may not consider this as a "problem", but tell that to the millions of people who have had to watch their life savings being erased to zero value.
Yes, the Bitcoin price may be jumpy, but we aren't yet seeing kids playing with bricks of trillions of Bitcoins because they'd be so worthless that you can give them to your kids as toys.
That DID happen with fiat currency:
Enter "hyperinflation" into your favorite picture search engine.
I personally own a 1 billion bill of a previous currency of my country which I bought for the equivalent of $5 on eBay.
I think you're referencing BTC in use as some kind of ubiquitous currency ? That would be an interesting use, until someone owns enough to influence the market, which, already happens, so it would make matters worse for more people
Meaning acquiring it fairly from the market?
As compared to fiat currencies, which can be issued and moved around with the snap of a finger. That's a net improvement.
Uhm, why not?
As far as I see, the price of Bitcoin has actually even hyperDEFLATED.
It started below $1! Now it is at $40000.
The non-"print more money" version will reject its blocks.
So even if they throw 90% of hashpower at it then it will not be the consensus because nobody uses a version of Bitcoin which accepts the blocks it mines.
The problem is that the "social ledge" value of a blockchain is hilariously expensive, to the point that governments look cheap in comparison. And a private ledge doesn't bring a lot of value into any application (but where it does bring a bit more of value, it is getting adopted, like version control systems).
I don't think you will get an 'open and fair discussion' here, even if you list examples like Stripe (Using blockchain for crypto payouts) [0] and Skiff (Using ENS for identities for their E2E decentralized workspace) [1].
When asked about this earlier, you get random incomprehensible replies like "CrYPtO IS SCaM" and admitting they haven't even looked at the article and either cannot answer basic questions or reply back with another question without given a concrete answer to the first.
Good luck getting an 'open and fair discussion' about anything crypto without someone screeching absolutist scam nonsense or some die hard crypto supporter / investor pushing their 'NFTs is the future' nonsense.
Don't fall in *either* of those camps.
Looks like around 11 [1].
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=cryptocurrency&t...
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this is a huge distraction, and another way to divide people, and use tricks or marketing to cause them to act out of FOMO and greed.
it would be "interesting" if we were debating how to solve the supply line fragility, the need for soil, the need to keep the temperature down, the need to achieve some modicum of equality here in North America so that millions of intelligent humans dont become slaves and have their potential as inventors and scientists wasted.
who survives all this will not see your comment, probably, but the facile way that you declare these fundamental questions of survival as .... uninteresting ... makes me despair.
There is value to be achieved, I think, in a more nuanced approach.
The above highlights my point in a sense.
Also, the practical upshot of the previous dynamic was that only people who could afford thousands of GPUs/ASICs/FPGAs could verify transactions, so it was basically the same effect with more steps.
Comparing energy usage of a global system with the total energy usage of a country is absurd, and people doing it should feel ashamed they didnt rationally think about what they said/wrote.
Let's take Bitcoin for instance. I'm pretty sure that the electricity required to perform one single BTC transaction has grown by multiple orders of magnitude since Bitcoin first appeared, regardless of the possible efficiency improvements in GPUs or ASICs, and will continue to grow—hence, profitability will always scale linearly with the willingness and capability to waste.
On the other hand, dryers, Christmas lights, appliances, cars and laptops etc. have, if anything, all become more energy-efficient in the past decade, being able to perform the same funcion or better while using less power. On top of that, there's only so much washing you want to dry, or so many places you want to drive to—you don't want to indefinitely scale up the size of your dryer, or the number of cars you drive. And if you were to find a reason to scale up either of them, it would be because there is a business opportunity in providing a material service to customers, either laundry or transport. In that case, your profitability would be limited by how many people want their clothes dried or to be driven somewhere, and not just by how big you can afford the dryer or how many cars you can accumulate.
A single bitcoin transaction uses more electricity than my apartment does in two months (at least during the spring).
You could compare a blockchain transaction's energy use to that of a credit card payment. But that would not convey the scale difference.
"We are building distributed filesystems" as a new(ish) practical user control is one such example. IPFS has been around for much longer than a year, so I'm not sure what the author means by "past year." Regardless, it is slow. Regardless, isn't privacy-preserving.
Perhaps the speed issue could be solved with improvements to the software. Let's imagine it's fast, then-- what are we going do with it? We can't house Scihub there-- otherwise the nodes replicating it will get hit with lawsuits. Similarly, we can't build a new Demonoid or any other sharing service that lets students and scholars pool together the various copies of reference materials that they own.
At the same time, college students are constantly bootstrapping all kinds of private content collections on private centralized services, and sharing it among themselves (and, unfortunately, not re-sharing it outside their group so these collections keep getting rebuild opportunistically), jumping from app to app as tastes for apps change. That's achieved with the current internet plus all the walled gardens that people use to get their work done. If our distributed filesystem cannot include the content these users are already sharing amongst themselves, then it's functionally equivalent to a hard-drive that won't allow writing based on certain content hashes. Moreover, if users still have to do cartwheels to use the distributed filesystem in a privacy-preserving way, they may as well use their current walled garden apps that are probably decades ahead in terms of UX.
Yes, blockchain certainly has its share of hot air from finance. But this pairing of blockchain plus decentralize-all-the-things overlays (which will be done baking real soon now!) is particularly prone to magical thinking. One because blockchain fans typically handwave scaling issues (or pivot to a non-blockchain approach which isn't functionally equivalent to blockchain), and two because decentralization zealots are prone to releasing vaporware.
I hope that clarifies things. I've certainly reacted on this list with hostility to low-effort blockchain pitches from people who have a clear conflict-of-interest. My hostility is probably like other people's here-- based in knowledge of the disappearing act that these magic-thinking systems can perform on the money of ordinary folks. That's real damage, and it's bad. The day someone makes a repo for "sloth sort" by pasting a jpeg of a sloth in a readme for sleep sort and performs a pump and dump scheme on it, I'll be sure to be hostile towards that, too. Meanwhile, people seem to only be doing that with blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. That more likely explains the hostility here than the idea that anyone is (unwittingly or otherwise) biased against blockchain.
Edit: typos, clarifications
However, can we take a moment to acknowledge how biased the crowd here is against blockchain? I know you’re tired of the buzzwords, but the other side is also tired of the hostility towards there maybe being something useful on the chain.
As the author has pointed out, things have evolved substantially over the last year and it deserves open and fair discussion.