The underlying problem that blockchains solve is 'distributed consensus'. This is a solution with a much broader range of applications. For example Maersk has a system for signing handover of shipping containers in ports (https://www.maersk.com/apa-tradelens). This is an international problem with a lot of it happening in countries with a lot of corruption (i.e. you can't rely on legal mechanism). Not being able to forge who is responsible for which container eliminates a lot of problems.
Ethereum does something even more interesting, which is that the network can agree on the result of computations (these are called dapps for "distributed apps"). These can be used to implement simple "smart contracts" for financial purposes but they have a much broader applications. To some extent I'm slightly underwhelmed by the things people are doing with them, but the potential is enormous.
The Maersk thing is a fine example. It's one company. They already have the trust relationships and legal power that make distributed-consensus approaches unnecessary. That "blockchain" is involved makes no practical difference. It was a shiny bauble that got a lot of consulting hours for IBM, and surely helped getting the project approved because Maersk execs were seeing "blockchain" in the news a lot when it was kicked off.
I have little trust in cryptocurrency beyond "people like hype markets", but a global consensus layer is an obvious step with many applications for whittling down every process to its barebones - with some guarantees at a protocol level that the savings aren't going to anyone in particular. This doesn't need to do anything new, it doesn't need to do anything flashy. It just needs to slowly devour every existing business and reduce them to essentially open source software, uncontrolled by any middlemen or power brokers, accessible by anyone for pennies. And it probably will!
The blockchain hype cycle peaked nearly five years ago: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...
There were many pilot projects that soaked up vast sums of money. But in reply to a comment saying I haven't been able to find any practical results, what do I get? No practical results, just the same sci-fi guff.
Is it possible that there will be "a relatively-uncontrollable internet consensus layer won't be built upon with some interesting results down the line"? Sure. Lots of things are possible. But it's also very possible that after another decade of Bitcoin, et al, we'll still have just a bunch of stuff that's not adding at all to the world beyond a playground for scammers and some tooling for light financial crime.
Sometimes a small and ugly technology turns out to be the Internet. But most of the time, it's just a bit of garbage that never went anywhere.
A transaction on the Ethereum base layer takes 12 seconds to be confirmed once. There is a vast variety of second layer tech available to allow faster transactions.
There are very different amounts of risk associated with accepting a transaction on the base layer of Bitcoin vs Ethereum after n blocks. For example, Coinbase accepts Bitcoin deposits after 3 confirmations (30 minutes) and Ethereum deposits after 35 confirmations (7 minutes).
Compare to traditional banking: Coinbase accepts ACH deposits instantly (up to a limit) and wires of any size can take 24 hours.
Secondly, is Bitcoin + Lightning in combo decentralized in practice?
I don't know. I'm much more interested in Ethereum, personally.
Solana: 0.12 seconds
Bitcoin: 1.2 seconds (on Lightning)
Ethereum: 12.0 seconds
Banking System: ~30 days (2 hours to 5 days for usable funds)
Payment Card Industry: 180 days (2 seconds to a few minutes for usable funds)
15 minutes is 75 confirmations.
The Ethereum network has never deviated by more than 2 confirmations (24 seconds) and with PoS this is even less likely to happen.
Finally, the likelihood of that happening AND a car buyer colluding with block producers to scam you is effectively zero.
You're FAR more likely to be struck by lightning in the 15 seconds it takes the driver to leave than you are to have their transaction reversed on the Eth2 blockchain.
Many in tech look at crypto, and blockchain specifically as if it is another technicalogical capability they can integrate into their enterprise architecture. From that perspective blockchain in general doesn't really make sense. As cool as the composability of tokens and smart contracts are, that's not a capability only blockchain can deliver (in fact that's not the blockchain at all... that's the standards that have been built on top of it).
Others in tech look at blockchain as a currency to replace traditional currencies issued by governments. A reasonable world view, as that's kind of how it's been sold for a very long time, but it's pretty clear to me at least, that's not really possible. The US Gov is always going to require taxes to be paid for in dollars. The US, EU, China... everyone, they're not going to give up monetary sovereignty.
So what does crypto provide then? In my opinion, the sole thing the blockchain provides, when sufficiently decentralized is digital sovereignty... but more importantly an unlimited amount of digital sovereignties. Opt-in self governing communities that can decide for themselves what's fair. An enforcable user bill of rights that's global in nature. This doesn't replace the real-world sovereign nations, it's like a new layer in the digital world for digital applications. I've personally come to realization that Crypto doesn't really work well in the physical world. But in the digital world, it's proving quite adept...
Technology is still evolving, ETH2 is a huge leap forward... and glad to see it. Personally, I'm still attached to the Avalanche community because I personally think the technology is still superior. But the technology is kind of not the important part. It kind of just needs a minimunm spec, and then it's not important. It's how you treat the users who are using the stuff built on top of the technology. Libertarians were the first to understand that (though i'd argue they fail to understand that need to have a foreign policy, and real world governments are legitimate trading partners that you need to negotiate with. Their insistence on idelogical purity will be their undoing) But crypto is big enough for all kind of communities to crop up, and you can choose to join or not.
That's ultimately the thing, any app you can build in Web 3, you can replicate in Web 2 with a single server. But in Web3, the users can own it, and they can decide for themselves how to govern themselves. That's the value. We live in feudal system, a world dominated by Web 2 companies. Web3 in my opinion is the way we can build a diverse economic ecosystem of free (as in speech, not beer) digital services.
One thing I Think a lot about... today, all people in crypto are dual citizens. They have citizenship in their geogrpahic world, and in the digital world. But there's a future where AI can be pure digital citizens (citizens who have needs, such as compute, and they will trade their AI skills for that compute). I view a lot of the debate around crypto as a debate about foreign policy, and that gets really interesting when it's AI on the other end.... maybe a free AI :D
First problem is that the owner(s) of majority of voting tokens can unilaterally decide anything in the community. Because they work on "winner takes it all" principle. This means they are not self governing (because minority stakers are effectively excluded from any governing), and they are not decentralised.
Second problem is that there are no "people"/"humans" in the token infrastructure, there are only wallets. And there is no public mapping between wallets and humans (unless they expose themselves). This leads to the ability of "oligarchs" who own the majority of tokens (see problem #1) to obfuscate their existence. Creators of the community will false advertise that "oh no, we have no majority stakers, here people can truly decide anything by voting", but in reality there can be majority staker who owns majority of voting tokens, just spread out across the several wallets.
Basically these DAOs are recreating feudal fiefdoms in the digital realm but obfuscated by lies or omissions of information.
This is fairly new tech academically btw, and it's only possible anonymously since the ZSnark cryptography tricks.
Fingerprints, I infer that's basically digital signatures in use today - also controlled by centralised entity
Social networks - to base your auth on the bot moderated and bot infested 3rd party platform with zero support functions is a laughable idea
Stake based bounties - what does this even mean? Inferring from stake based, you meant that the auth will be based on the stake, meaning on the wallet with tokens? Then that's precisely the problem I've described above.
There is no clever technical way to solve social problem. Human identification is a social problem. You can't anonymously identify a person, unless dragnetting through his life with spyware scripts and fingerprinting (great idea for privacy, I'm already dreaming about it).
Passports - the cost of creating fake passports or removing valid ones to most lawful countries is prohibitive enough and visible enough to watchdog groups that we're not under any serious threat from governments going rogue here anytime soon. It's a decent start. At least a few thousand $ cost to forge security wise - increased the better your security market is watching for it.
Social networks - I mean furthering social verification by having networks of users (probably bootstrapped with their passports, and whatever other verification data - video, fingerprints, documents, etc) vouch for each other as real-world connections. You dont need Facebook etc for that - you build that into your identity system as a second layer which compounds the trust. A network discovering a fake user gets financially penalized for vouching (stake based bounties) so there's incentive to really do what you're asked - verify in person someone you've known for some time.
We don't need to anonymously identify a person. In fact, I'm expecting people will be willingly supplying some ungodly amount of data to prove they're real for the financial incentive alone (securing larger loans based on trust). But we can make the verification functions taking all this data go through smart contracts with zero knowledge proofs that can ensure said data doesn't leak to anyone the user doesn't want to share it with - and the protocol can establish a trust score.
And even if we failed to keep personal data off the internet, regardless of how public your profile is you'll always be able to use those zero knowledge proofs to setup an anonymous avatar with a proof hash that it belongs to (exactly) one existing profile from the set of verified profiles, allowing you to vote with the avatar while the system can still guarantee one-person-one-vote. So - anonymous voting.
Because you don't really own it in web3 either. Until normal people get comfortable with self hosting their own stuff there will always be gate keepers and places where governments can apply pressure.
You don't really own your crypto coins unless you have your own wallet on your own hardware (with proper backups as well). And for most normal people even just that is too much.
And we are rapidly approaching a point where we don't really even own our hardware any more.
And everything else, that is build on top of that needs to run on top of some machine somewhere and unless you own it, you can't really rely on it. It's all encrypted so they can't steel from you (unless bugs), but they can also shut it down. Sure there are plenty(and jet still not enough) of nodes on ipfs system now. But many someone's need to run them and it's always possible that people will loose interest or economies will change and number of nodes goes down enough that it becomes practically unusable.
Same problem is with much of the other web3 stack. With few companies controlling much of the developers/stack and infrastructure needed.
Sure it's all open source and distributed, but even nowadays in early stages, before the masses come in, we are talking about lot of infrastructure needed to run everything.
And right now there are VC's putting billions in investments in this space, so having lots of infrastructure for "free" seems like it works. But sooner or later this people will want their money back, with interest, and regular people will be even more screwed, because this is completely unregulated (which is why VC's love it so much ) as a design principle.
On the other hand if you are technical enough to be able to self host your own stuff, boring old federated systems, like smtp, jabber , matrix, ... are a lot easier, cheaper, with a lot less moving part - easier to administer etc.
I am all for federated content and people owning their own digital features in their own hands and I think crypto chains are a distraction/overcomplication at best and could possibly be a trap for ultimate corporate walled gardens.
So my focus is on boring old self hosted federated services.
Well, that's the thing about freedom. It's a pretty big responsibility. You can't offload the responsibility and still be free. True in the real world, and true in crypto.
You always need to rely on third parties for finance (even if you manage your own crypto wallet) and for other stuff in life.
Perhaps my biggest issue then is I'm not all in on the purely digital world that you describe and admit doesn't really exist, yet. That is to say, my plumber doesn't care about any of this and just wants cash. In the future, that can and probably will change, of course.
But today, in our current world, very few industries and virtually no blue collar industries accept such currency.
So then the question becomes, what is the value of <insert coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or efficiency. Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk tech merits. But nobody to date has been able to convince me that it has any real value. There are no armies or economies validating it.
I think in simple terms, perhaps I'm a luddite. If someone, say completely disconnected from modern conveniences, were selling an item, I could perhaps trade physical goods for it. Or perhaps shiny metals, and explain why they're valuable(assuming they didn't know). Or explain dollars, and the guarantee behind them. How would you sell them on cryptocoins having value? The tech doesn't matter a ton here to a person, so onto the value. Why are bitcoins worth more than say, beanie babies of yore? Both seem to be run purely on speculation, at this point.
Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I have faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring our awful inflation). If someone gave me 10k in bitcoins, I have zero faith it would be worth anything tomorrow.
The world doesn't need to be purely digital, and crypto doesn't need to be the entire worlds economy. In fact, my argument is that it's NOT. It's something seperate, and unique and new. It's not a replacement for the economy, it's an addition to it. Though i'm sure a plumber could find a useful digital service hosted in crypto... i'd argue crypto isn't for plumbers. Not their plumbing business at least.
Imagine a git + smart contract service (this doesn't really exist today, and it's my side project i'm trying to build) which is integrated with a hosting service like Akash (cosmos). You can build new digital services/games/worlds that are governed in a decentralized way. You could build a new Facebook for example. The difference here, are changes are voted on by the owners of the token. I'm not even sure the token would be worth a whole lot monetarily (depends how the owners). But as a user, how much is having control over the social media you use daily worth? To me, A lot.
Everything in crypto is open source, but unlike the open source world today, crypto provides a mechanism and culture to pay contributors. So a lot of crypto applications are designed to capture that value in a communial way to pay people (or bots) for their work. The value of the crypto is access to these services. It's no different from the value our digital economy today provides. Just governed differently. Instead of Zuck controlling the digital service, the users can control the digital service.
Given that people won't pay when it's easy, why would they suddenly start paying when the barrier of converting cash to crypto is added on top?
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding and you're instead referring to actual ownership of said services. How does that differ from written agreements or stocks today?
What you may be describing seems similar to how Brave sees the world. I respect that and love the product, but don't see it as a reality.
NFT projects have demonstrated new forms of monetization that don't need ads or all users to pay, we can now experiment with these now that we have a value layer for the internet.
> So then the question becomes, what is the value of <insert coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or efficiency. Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk tech merits. But nobody to date has been able to convince me that it has any real value. There are no armies or economies validating it.
Why are stocks without dividends worth anything? Companies have earnings. Many protocols have earnings as well, and they are built on top of Ethereum, which provides the security layer. What do you mean by "real value"?
> Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I have faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring our awful inflation)
10k denominated in what? I think ignoring inflation is an example of why people care. You only trust your cash because you trust the US government, which may be reasonable, but people in other parts of the world don't trust their government with monetary policies, e.g. [0]. Imagine inflation gets worse, the EU needs bailout, or we have WW3, and the the US government says "Sorry, you're no longer allow to buy gold or move your assets abroad, you need to buy our bad government bonds" - stuff like this has happened before, in many countries. And you can't do anything about it other than watching your savings crumble. Crypto gives you optionality. A government-independent monetary ecosystem. Nobody can lock you out. I trust the "Ethereum government" more than most centralized governments due to the transparency, global footprint, and aligned incentives. I can hold my savings in a USD-backed stablecoin as long as I believe in the US government's monetary policy. If that changes, I can swap into something else in a matter of seconds, and I don't need permission from any government to do so.
My experience has been that the value people see in crypto is directly inversely proportional to how much they believe in their government and whether they have experienced governments being malicious due to misaligned incentives. Most middle-aged people in the US don't fall into this category - they have never experienced war or malicious governments because they were lucky being born at just the right time and place and enjoyed nothing but prosperity. Convincing them about crypto is hard.
[0] https://devonzuegel.com/post/inside-argentina-s-currency-exc...
That's an interesting thesis and 'feels' true, but I have a hard time reconciling HN's (seeming) indie ethos with it's cryptoskepticism if that's the overriding factor. Have you any theories to explain the seeming disconnect?
I think many of the more "indie communities" are now assembling in Discord, subreddits, etc.
I'm also somewhat surprised at the extreme crypto hate on HN, but I'd attribute that to demographics. I do think that quite a large number of HN users are middle-aged Americans significantly above middle class. They probably started using it when they were early 20s interested in tech/startups and YC, which means they're now ~35-40 and have probably made a decent amount of money in tech. And that demographic doesn't really benefit from crypto for the reasons above...
I'm waiting for a good relevant use Case.
Haven't found one yet which is purely digital.
No, rampant speculation made that.
I don't need to understand how an internal combustion engine works to know cars are not a fad. Same way I don't need to know how to reverse-engineer a distributed ledger system to know crypto is.
Other systems that do not use cryptography and instead often rely on trust in exchanging critical secrets, such as how the banking system generally works, are outdated.
You could argue the intermediary knows the info, but most crypto buyers also use an intermediary.
Crypto doesn't give a shit about borders, there's no intermediary who can freeze your assets (unless you decide to leave them on am exchange), etc.
It's ignorance.
You can easily do that with other tech.
Crypto right now is just to new to have been properly regulated yet.
And while you are true that you can run your own wallet, you are depending on the decentralized network, you do need a certain amount of stabity and you need to make sure you can recover and keep your wallet.
Enough people demonstrated at least with the last point and millions lost in locked away wallets that there are still fundamental problems.
Yes, this is due to regulations, but it's also due to the centralized nature of the technology which requires permission to use.
Even when more regulation is forced onto cryptocurrencies, the architecture will always be permissionless, as it's a decentralized network. That is a fundamental difference.
Because you actually need to convert your Fiat into crypto first.
The current limitations are real and the theoretical possibility is equally good of what currently exist: a black market.
In Iran everyone took euros or exchanged them on the spot. Even when the currency shop was closed people were waiting outside for us
The word works is doing a lot of work there. Every compromise, hack, scam, theft, and weird "oops I sent the crypto to an address that doesn't exist and now it's gone forever" incident screams for central authority. Even what we call Ethereum is a rage-quit to pretend the DAO thing didn't happen.
Or you can start trusting the individuals at the other side of the transaction. Perhaps these folks who do not have experience can also benefit from your exp... Oh wait, you've become an intermediary?
Cryptocurrency is just an asset that you can sell nearly everywhere in the world. But it depends on electricity, is volatile in value, and has long transaction times. It's just an inferior cash, except the fact that it's not physical so border control can't take it away from you. If you are optimizing for that... Maybe there can be a simpler solution? Buy art shares? I don't know.
In the case of crypto you're trusting that an adversary won't be able to control 50% of the computation power on the network for a substantial amount of time (and cryptographic theories, but you're trusting those whenever you use the internet anyway). Generally you're not even trusting the other party.
Yes, it depends on electricity, but so does 95%+ of the modern economy. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-fiv...
Depending on the level of trust you are willing to give the other party, you could use one of many automated eskrow services (that kick back to a human when one or both parties dispute the transaction), or on the other end of the spectrum, you can have a mostly automated smart contract with built in refund mechanisms where all of the rules of the transaction are declared upfront.
At the end of the day, reducing the number of parties you need to trust for a transaction to succeed is a strictly better outcome than the status quo (or expanding the number of parties that need to be trusted).
How do you think that would be better than paypal, ebay, or anything else? Do you think people who use cryptocurrency escrow services have less problems than people who use anything else?
I just searched and the first service I found had already exited the business after stealing the coins of many people: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1260582.0
Ebay isn't a payment provider, as far as I'm aware, so I'm not sure why they are relevant. They have certainly focused on the digital to physical mapping, but are overall rife with buyer and seller scams and they aren't really offering a solution beyond their easily gamed reputation system.
>Do you think people who use cryptocurrency escrow services have less problems than people who use anything else?
Typically, yes, the people using escrow have less problem by virtue of there being far less reports within the crypto community of actual escrow services being bad actors.
You brought up a random company from 2015 that happened to have eskrom in its name. That was not an eskrow service in the crypto sense of the word. If you are sending your crypto to a stranger and hoping they do the right thing, it's no eskrow. The typical eskrow setup will be some kind of multi-sig wallet (e.g. 2 of 3 signature) where the buyer, seller and eskrow service provider have a signature each, and two are required to release the funds.
Note: Eskrow systems are the very lowest tier of "zero-trust" when dealing with services or physical goods. It's a sliding scale of effort versus security, where a smart contract would be the "gold standard", and the eskrow is "better than nothing".
[1] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281
Also, you are still trusting humans, or a company as a trusted intermediary (and in the case of escrow services, most likely with no course of legal action if things go wrong). My argument still stands.
Paypal doesn't even appear on the radar (even if you overlook their outright predatory and scummy behaviour) when there is the option to outright remove the payment provider from the equation and reduce the number of involved parties by one, while still allowing for a third-party (a human for eskrow, or an oracle with human fallback for a smart contract) to arbitrate if necessary if one or both parties are malicious.
Also who says there is no legal action if it goes wrong? It's better to set things up such that things can't go wrong, but if they do, the rule of law doesn't cease to exist just because it happened online.
I haven't seen a coherent argument yet, but maybe I'm missing something...
It increases how much you have to trust them. You can also build the same escrow system with anything. You don't need cryptocurrency for that.
> the rule of law doesn't cease to exist just because it happened online
Is there any legible escrow businesses for cryptocurrencies? If yes, how are they "less amount of parties involved" in comparison to Paypal?
> I haven't seen a coherent argument yet, but maybe I'm missing something...
Maybe you don't want to?
The trust is that the bank recognizes when a transaction looks off, and holds it/notifies me, without my involvement
This describes any "push" payment system where you instruct your bank, service provider, wallet, device etc. to transfer funds, rather than providing the payee with your information, as well as any pull-based system with additional verification (such as 3DS and PIN-based payment cards), and isn't unique to crypto at all.
That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.