You should also spend a week getting into homeopathy and a week writing horoscopes.

maybe you should-- i am an unrelentingly rational man, but i can't deny that of all the horoscope "archetypes", or whatever you want to call them (i'm by no means an expert or even an enthusiast), Virgo is by far the best description of my personality, and just so happens to be my astrological sign (I guess... like i said, i find the whole thing rather silly).

as a crypto skeptic, i did go through the exercise of learning about the space in various respects (Solidity + mostly niche, more cool, less-crypto-bro-y things like zero-knowledge proofs), and i actually must confess that i had a lot of fun, and was left with the feeling that there are certain classes of thing that the crypto mindset actually is valuable, or, at the very least, interesting.

for example: if you were to ask me "would you rather deal with the shitshow of oath, or use crypto-y / solidity-ish primitives for dealing with authentication/authorization?".... i have to admit that there are some blissful aspects to the crypto view of the world. which makes sense: it was literally built to "solve" some of these problems.

[written as someone who remains a "crypto-skeptic", whatever that means at this point]

Same with me and Capricorn, it's weird actually.

Yeah, it's sort of funny how much scorn people heap on astrology. I am not trying to convince anyone to take astrology seriously, but I think it's foolish to condescend to those who take an interest in it. The archetypes that astrology describes are undeniably true if you bother to read them and think about how you, yourself, and others relate to them. As a tool for forecasting what's going to happen tomorrow, it's of very dubious value. But if one thinks across longer time scales, if you are manifesting certain types of archetypal energies, and we all are, there are certain types of events: conflicts, romance, etc. that are very likely to happen and others that are quite unlikely to happen.

On a meta level, it's also interesting simply because so many people find that they strongly relate to their chart, even when they really do not want to believe that their time of birth has any meaning at all. You don't have to believe that there is actually some physical influence of the position of the stars to be curious about why it has that effect. Is it just one of the greatest magic tricks of all time? If so, it might be interesting to understand how that works from a human psychological perspective.

Did you do that test double blind?

The skeptical position on astrology is typically that the archtypes are so vauge that they apply to everyone equally, and people tend to discard any parts that don't fit.

Saying that the archetype applies to you isn't countering the skepticism. On the contrary that is precisely the outcome that someone who think astrology is bullshit would expect.

I kind of agree? Granted, many people have already done this over the decades and we have set answers on the validity of these methods.

why is it up to me to "learn the rea crypto"? the best things coming out the space should be enough to speak about the quality of the domain

I've spent far more than a week studying crypto and I've actually went from thinking it's a great thing to realizing it has too many limitations to be web3, the future of finance, etc.

Could you list some limitations?

And are you using the blockchain co-opted “web3” here, or the general “web3”?

Any suggestions on projects to look at?

Chainlink. Ignore the community. Look at the work of those involved and the things they are building.

Chainlink only makes sense in a blockchain-centric world. If you get rid of blockchain then you don't need chainlink....

Skiff Drive and Skiff Mail [0] and their use of ENS [1] and other naming systems is interesting. Endaoment is also another useful web3 project. [2]

[0] https://skiff.com/

[1] https://ens.domains/

[2] https://endaoment.org/

Skiff is exactly the type of service that uses crypto and chains for no reason.

Its essentially gmail/docs alternative that e2e encrypts the content and saves them on their servers. Services like protonmail have been working like that forever.

I am not saying its not a good product just that it doesnt require blockchain at all. They slap it on there to use it and get hype but thats all.

You could look at Chia. I don't think the base project with the typical token scheme is worth anything, but the way it uses disk space for mining is kind of neat.

The general idea is that you precompute a bunch of proofs and store them on disk. Challenges are issued and if you have a matching proof, you can claim the token for that challenge.

The part that I find interesting isn't the tokens. It's the concept that an algorithm can prove you've committed some disk space to the network. The reason I find it interesting is because, for small amounts of disk space, the incremental cost of participation is $0. If I plot proofs on unused disk space and only try to match proofs when my computer is on anyway, it basically costs me nothing.

Compare that to someone trying to farm (aka mine) on an industrial scale and they have a real, non-zero cost starting with the first byte of storage they buy. I find it interesting because it's different than normal economies of scale where a large operator eventually outperforms all the small operators (economically).

Unmatched, but valid proofs, are a byproduct of mining the tokens and those are what proves you have some idle capacity. Since normal PC owners pretty much have to buy excess capacity for something like a hard disk, participating in a system like that doesn't have much downside. It's that byproduct that I think is interesting.

I'm not sure if there are any pragmatic use cases, since the 500GB of free space a normal user has might not exceed the value of pretending to be a real person, but being able to say "I have $50 of idle capacity and I can prove it" could be a novel way to combat large scale networks of bots and bad actors.

chia is a terrible idea. investment wise, and also tech. Great theory, but a miss in execution.

- ex chia farmer

this comment does nothing for me, it's like saying the internet is a terrible idea and then no explanation why you think so.

I'm still missing where this model achieves anything relatable to the real world beyond "less destructive than BitCoin", which honestly is a pretty compelling value proposition.

part of the reality is that it's an open question. interesting things may pan out, or may not, as with other innovation / R&D efforts

Proving you’ve committed disk space is every bit as wasteful as PoW, it gives a financial incentive to manufacture more, pushing up the associated waste and prices for people wanting to actually use storage.

It’s a horrible set of ideas.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a smattering of some of the bigger projects doing neat things.

The graph protocol - decentralized blockchain indexing feeding a network of graphQL servers hosting the data powering dapps https://thegraph.com/en/

Chainlink - decentralized on-chain oracles for basically any piece of data from the real world - https://chain.link/

MakerDAO - creator of the first “soft pegged” stablecoin, it is a series of smart contracts that allow people to lock up crypto as collateral and mint DAI, uses a number of neat and novel mechanisms to keep peg by adjusting interest rates and incentivizing economic behavior https://makerdao.com/en/

Compound - a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol with no centralized authority handling liquidations/collateral pricing/etc. https://compound.finance/

Uniswap - a decentralized exchange for swapping assets in a trustless way, has neat features like flash loans where you can borrow a large amount of money (millions of dollars) for the length of one transaction, as long as the money is returned with a fee. This allows anyone to do things like capture arbitrage opportunities, liquidate large positions, or whatever else can be done in one transaction. https://uniswap.org/faq

A lot of these are DAOs using smart contracts to propose and vote on binding proposals on chain and adjust parameters within the protocol or paying contributors and whatnot. You can see an example here https://compound.finance/governance

Beyond that there’s other blockchains focused on specific use cases like GameFi, bridges connecting together different blockchains and moving liquidity between them in a mostly seamless way, massive research attention being paid to zero knowledge proofs (which have a lot of potential implications in the real world), and multi-sig contracts for only doing things when a quorum of key holders come together and signal their intent.

This comment has the same energy as “research flat earth”.

Reddit-tier comment. Ad hominem. Ignoring.

> Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto projects.

Most of us have looked at this space extensively over the last decade plus. Can you offer pointers to the things you think are delivering real benefits to anyone whose primary goal isn't finding buyers for random hashes?

I add that last qualifier because literally every time this question comes up the only things people seem to come up with which aren't outright scams are projects which only make sense if you've already decided that everything you work with should be on a blockchain and you need to deal with the ensuing problems. I'm looking for things where someone who works at a normal non-crypto business — say a coffee shop or a company which makes toasters — could go to their boss and say “If we spend money setting up X we'd save $Y over what we're doing now or gain $Z from new sales”. The closest people come are things like supply chain verification, which is certainly useful but nobody can explain why that idea only works if you pay the extra blockchain overhead relative to just using basic digital signatures from the human you're already trusting to do a particular task.

Also as a starting premise, remember that most of us are quite familiar with things which aren't great now. The idea of getting rid of PayPal or not having people login using Facebook/Google sounds great to a lot of us, but that needs to be predicated on system which would actually get normal people to switch by being cheaper, safer, etc. Appeals to ideological purity don't tend to get traction when the “Login with Facebook” button is right there.

The Internet Computer[0] hosts whatever kind of service you can cram in a smart contract form-factor. In exchange for having to deal with things like oracles to retrieve information from the outside world, it costs absolute peanuts[1]. I tend to use it whenever I want to PoC a web app because it's usually lower-friction than a VM. Unfortunately there aren't that many things to show as an example that aren't just NFT silliness, but one big one is OpenChat[2], which also shows off the basically zero-friction single-sign-on[3] that can't be tracked across services.

Will it pan out? I have no earthly idea. But it's cool enough to try.

[0]: https://internetcomputer.org

[1]: https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/dep...

[2]: https://oc.app

[3]: https://identity.ic0.app

(unfortunately obligatory: I am not a bot. please do not downvote singularly because of linking to a blockchain service, in response to a question about them.)

Those "peanuts" look more expensive that traditional hosting to me. It does help that they blatantly try to lie about their service being "more energy efficient than traditional IT".

> The idea of... not having people login using Facebook/Google sounds great to a lot of us, but that needs to be predicated on system which would actually get normal people to switch by being cheaper, safer, etc. Appeals to ideological purity don't tend to get traction

But it's quite the opposite of an appeal to ideological purity. If you care about building out widespread truly decentralized cryptography, the practical results of cryptocurrency are nothing short of incredible. Because of crypto, millions of people now self custody their own private encryption keys without any dependency on centralized services. Yes, they're doing so because they want to play in a giant on-chain casino. But the same ECDSA key that secures your Ethereum wallet can also serve as your decentralized cryptographic identity.

It's hard to overstate how much of a miracle this is compared to what anyone expected 15 years ago. Hardcore cryptography engineers would joke about how even their small, highly committed community couldn't build a decentralized a web of trust with decent opsec. Now even dentists are self-custodying their crypto keys with decentralized identity powered by ENS.

Quite the opposite the only reason to dismiss this achievement is an appeal to ideological purity. The cryptography infrastructure may have been built for the "wrong reason", to gamble in the world's largest casino, but a once undreamt of decentralized infrastructure now exists.

Why would I care about building widespread “truly” decentralised cryptography?

This also sounds like idealism. And I speak as someone that works in cryptography-related spaces including PKI.

How many of those millions of people get compromised in some way, lose their ‘money’ and are then chided for poor opsec? How many don’t even bother with self-custody and just use centralised services like exchanges?

Honestly it all seems ideological.

You don't see any value to people owning their own crypto keys and identity instead of relying on a centralized party like Facebook?

I'm not even talking about digital assets. I'm purely talking about the ability of someone to sign their own emails without being dependent on a monopoly like Gmail to do it for them.

I don’t see that for most people this any sort of enabling technology, no. In fact I think for average humans that delegation is a very worthwhile service.

> I'm purely talking about the ability of someone to sign their own emails without being dependent on a monopoly like Gmail to do it for them.

What is blockchain adding for this usecase that's beyond what PGP [1] offers?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

No.

The centralized platforms and social networks you reference have tens of millions to billions of users.

I would not be surprised at all if between all of them they do millions of password resets daily.

No matter how much the crypto community tries to force it people forget stuff and mess things up.

The concept of average users managing their own keys is DOA.

My personal project is a working case study proving the practicality of the idea. It’s not ideological and enables things you would dare do with prior existing server/client models.

> If you care about building out widespread truly decentralized cryptography, the practical results of cryptocurrency are nothing short of incredible. Because of crypto, millions of people now self custody their own private encryption keys without any dependency on centralized services.

You mean the exchanges the vast majority of cryptocurrency users rely on have control, right?

I mention that because a greater number of people already have cryptographic keys to use to assert their identity (every iOS user, most Android, and Windows Hello users) in the form of WebAuthn passkeys. Unlike Ethereum, that system does not cost money to use, is free for anyone to implement, and does not depend on a slow centralized data store being available.

One important note: ENS doesn’t in any way solve the question of identity, any more than DNS does. In both cases, they link a name to a machine id without solving the much harder problems of verifying identity or disambiguating people with the same name.

Most importantly, not conflating money with identity makes attacks harder (if I get your keys, I can compromise your brokerage account but I still have to convince them to transfer your assets) and lowers the costs of errors because I’m not pushed into having to decide whether I’m more concerned about losing access to my money if I don’t make a backup and having my money stolen because I did. That’s going to matter to their next of kin if our hypothetical dentist is run over by some SUV driver on their next bike ride.

That last part gets to back to the question of goals. Self-hosting cryptographic keys isn’t a goal anyone has for non-ideological reasons. People care about things like communicating privately and not being impersonated, and will gravitate to the systems which make that safe and easy. Cryptocurrency projects haven’t delivered on either of those so far and since they inevitably depend on real-world systems to handle identity or resolve disputes, it’s hard to offer a compelling reason to pay the extra cost to use them.

Going back to my hypothetical person at a non-crypto business, he goes to his boss and says “we should have our customers login using self-managed private keys”. When she says “how does that make us more money?”, what’s the answer?

My project datalisp.is about making something useful.

Can you explain more about what it does? The website is a bit vague but it looks like you're encoding S-expressions on a blockchain, so my first question would be what this gives us that traditional PKI would not.

> Can you offer pointers to the things you think are delivering real benefits to anyone whose primary goal isn't finding buyers for random hashes?

I prepared this post summarizing the real world usage of Bitcoin just for people like you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

Another news from the last couple of days: https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/nyic/project-cedar [submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33479015]

Let’s go with those. Truly beneficial for the parties referenced.

At the risk of sounding somewhat cold and calculating:

Is that worth the carbon emissions of the entire country of Argentina? How many people are dying from the resulting climate impact?

How many lives have been ruined from the gambling related to bitcoin? How many times have bitcoin forums had to post suicide hotline numbers?

How many criminal enterprises, oppressive governments (like North Korea), etc have been enabled by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from ransomware and countless, endless scams?

While I do acknowledge the use cases you’ve provided and truly do sympathize with the (relatively few - tiny) people who benefit I cannot see how it could possibly be net positive.

Okay, let's go with those — and we'll even assume that they're fully accurate and representative. Money laundering wasn't exactly impossible before so the two questions here are whether it was cost-effective for the users (someone in Nigeria has less capacity to soak up one of those speculative swings, after all) and safe to use.

That last part is significant because while the Bitcoin marketing team likes to talk about it being anonymous or “censorship resistant”, it's extremely risky for anyone to use when their threat model includes the government they live under. Yes, I'm sure someone has been able to transfer money to a Russian or Chinese dissident but once that becomes at all significant, consider the incredible risk that poses to the recipient. They can't make a transaction without making highly-distinctive network traffic, they can't use the funds locally without finding someone willing to take them which is risky to both parties since you're betting that the other party isn't compromised, and unlike regular currency transactions you're leaving an immutable public audit trail. If any party involved ever has records which the police obtain, they now have hard evidence to go after everyone they've ever transacted with rather than just the ones they observed after learning of that blackmarket activity. Better hope that you and everyone you ever do business with has perfect opsec…

This isn't some idle speculation, either — there have been a number of cases where Bitcoin provided key evidence linking people's activity and allowing the police to wrap up an entire group rather than the one guy they caught. Here's an example of where that was used for good:

https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...

Now, I personally would not like to see political dissidents in China or Russia meet the same fate so I would not want to tell them Bitcoin is suitable for this task.

What do you think about NY Fed's project I linked, which demonstrated that "blockchain-enabled cross-border payments can be faster, simultaneous, and safer" (their words, not mine).

Speaking of dissidents subverting their governments, I personally know people who are using cryptocurrencies to assist their families stuck under the said governments. There might be some risks, but when they don't have any other way to exchange value, crypto is a lifeline.

It’s a prototype but also not how most cryptocurrency people use blockchain. It’s a shared ledger between a couple of banks, organized by a central bank. It’s no surprise that this works because it doesn’t drag in all of the notorious drawbacks trying to do the pseudo-anonymous permission-less stuff, or trying to be a separate currency.

What is the specific drawback of pseudo-anonymous permission-less stuff?

> trying to be a separate currency.

None of the serious crypto projects I am aware of (which are Bitcoin, Ethererum and its L2's basically) claim to be a currency. Bitcoin is an asset. ETH is a currency only for the ETH ecosystem and does not claim to be something along the lines of a popular definition of currency.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-the-crypto-story/ is the best general overview of the space I've ever read. Covers most of what makes sense and what sucks.

People always say things like this, but i never see the interesting projects. Yes some are not as batshit insane as the ones that make the news for being crazy, but none of them seem "good" either.

It feels a bit like an unfalsifiable premise. You should do your own research until you find one that is good. If you haven't found a good one yet, you just haven't researched hard enough, so keep going.

What do you think of Uniswap?

My understanding is that its basically a decentralized crypto exchange.

I'm not sure what's to really get excited about. It does solve a problem which makes it miles better than most crypto things. Nonetheless its basically solving a problem that only exists due to crypto currency stuff in the first place. So it doesn't really get me excited about the promise of "web3".

I cannot tell you how many people have said the exact same thing as you and when pressed to show what is exciting to them, all that comes out is yet another financial motivated, inward looking solution searching for a problem.

I've done some serious searching. There is absolutely nothing exciting in this space for people who aren't already bought in to it. It's like a cult