What are those obviously more useful domains AND one tech person can have a very big impact in them?

Whatever Elon Musk’s shortcomings might be, he applied his intellect and skills to self-evidently useful domains such as EVs and space travel. It seems Vitalik is convinced his tech is beneficial to a similar extent, but I don’t share his enthusiasm, at least not at this point.

Genuine question but how is space travel self-evidently useful?

"Space travel" not so much at present. But reduced cost access to space, for sure.

- geolocation (GPS, GLONASS, etc.) - communications (Starlink, Iridium, etc.) - earth sensing (weather, climate, etc.)

All of these are multibillion $ activities that benefit from lowered launch costs.

Preservation of species, provided you accept that as an axiom. Also more immediate benefits such as reusable rockets, affordable satellite Internet etc.

A couple non contestable points:

1. It has been useful so far as a challenge for technological development that finds other uses on the ground, and this is certainly not about to change;

2. It has been useful so far, in direct applications, and there are still direct uses to be covered (dangerous asteroid avoidance, as an example);

3. It tackles the SPOF we have as a species: living on a single planet;

But the more important one, for me, is one that is contestable. Space faring provides humans with an aspirational goal. Without a long term goal, we are reduced to either an hedonist life, or a never-ending struggle against entropy. We are better, as individuals and as a society, when there is something to long for in the horizon.

The first two points can be said about cryptography

NASA Spinoff Technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

20 Inventions We Wouldn't Have Without Space Travel (actual post from NASA themselves): https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...

Those are evidence that unrestrained spending on scientists will generate incidental, largely unrelated discoveries. If we had poured as much money over as much time into the study of ghosts and psychic phenomena, we'd be able to make a similar list.

Your statements do not follow, much less is your initial premise demonstrably true as a generalized statement about all scientists.

But before doing all that, Elon Musk built an online payment system.

To my understanding, he was less individually influential in that particular company, which is the reason why I omitted it in my examples. Because in my view, developing an online payment system in 2000 is a far more important project than developing a Proof-of-Stake blockchain with Turing-complete smart contracts in 2022.

But your point stands: he may well go on to do much better things.

He was kicked out of if not fired from PayPal is why you left it out.

Not sure what you’re getting at.

And before that, he and his brother built an early precursor to Google Maps.

> Whatever Elon Musk’s shortcomings might be, he applied his intellect and skills to self-evidently useful domains such as EVs and space travel.

The self-evidence of such is unknown to me.

Let me gently point out the irony of you acknowledging Vitalik's intellect while simultaneously assuming that Vitalik, as such a smart person, hasn't puzzled through why the crypto industry will end up being obviously useful for humanity.

Do you think it's more likely that Vitalik is mistaken that crypto is obviously useful for humanity, or that he knows it isn't and doesn't care, or that your assessment of crypto being useless is incorrect?

My original claim was about his particular flavor of the tech, not crypto in general.

But in any case, there’s a difference between good judgement and intellect, and a difference between an idea and its execution. If he’s truly puzzled through Ethereum’s usefulness, he hasn’t offered an argument that’s convincing enough to me. However, I can still admire the thought and skill that went into its implementation.

It is of course entirely possible that I’m thoroughly mistaken.

This.

Vitalik has demonstrated an exhaustively thoughtful approach to building technology, is exceptionally humble, and seems to deeply contemplate the fifth-order implications of decisions being made.

It seems absurd to me that people think someone like this has not sufficiently thought through the societal value of their life's work.

> It seems absurd to me that people think someone like this has not sufficiently thought through the societal value of their life's work.

Is this a friend of yours? Because you have more confidence in him than I have with people I know personally. Sounds parasocial.

pessimizer writes: > Is this a friend of yours? Because you have more confidence in him than I have with people I know personally. Sounds parasocial.

If only! Given you've tied your identity to pessimism, which I assume implied you see it as a virtue, I think you might be somewhat more inclined to misanthropy than me. And that's ok. :)

> pessimizer

I’m guessing there’s an intentional link with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessary (from Latin Pessarium) as well as the computing term pessimal (same root as pessimism, from French pessimisme, from Latin pessimus “worst”) and optimizer.

Here is a blog post where he claims the halting problem is not undecidable: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/01/cantor.html "patent pending on this research"

He has a dangerous combination of self-delusion + intelligence

That was posted on April fools. That's not the only one he's done, either.

This is an April Fool's Day joke...

Ha, what irony? “I am smart in one area so I am therefore smart in everything” is the original sin of crypto (and, frankly, tech in general).

Go back through HN threads on the countless crypto failures and frauds and count how many times some variation of “I don’t understand, they were so smart!” comes up. Or the threads leading up to those failures where the defenders invariably trot out “there are a lot of smart people involved in this, you seriously think you know better?”

Why do people ask serious questions like this predicated upon some judgment of the guy's character. It's like a spooky kind of hero worship. As if only one of them could be right or wrong

> Do you think it's more likely that Vitalik is mistaken that crypto is obviously useful for humanity, or that he knows it isn't and doesn't care, or that your assessment of crypto being useless is incorrect?

I find it funny that you think this is an answerable or useful question, rather than an appeal to authority.

> Do you think it's more likely that Vitalik is mistaken that crypto is obviously useful for humanity, or that he knows it isn't and doesn't care, or that your assessment of crypto being useless is incorrect?

As the sibling comment says it, succinctly: "“I am smart in one area so I am therefore smart in everything” is the original sin of crypto"

Vitalik is very superficially smart in many areas. Refuting his oftentimes pseudo intellectual takes on what's happening takes too much time because "but he sounds so smart".

In this latest one the most obvious one is the entire "Hybrid applications" section. Which never worked, doesn't work and will never work the way he pretends blockchains will enable them to work. His statement "Voting is an excellent example" is patently, provably bullshit [1], but "he's smart so he's right" is hard to beat. Same goes for everything else he throws in there.

[1] To quote, not in full:

--- start quote ---

the purported advantages for a voting system in a weakly-governed country. “Keep your voting records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone” sounds right — yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to independently verify that his vote has been counted? Or will he rely on the mobile app of a trusted third party...

...Instead of relying on trust or regulation, in the blockchain world, individuals are on-purpose responsible for their own security precautions. And if the software they use is malicious or buggy, they should have read the software more carefully.

...

Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million addresses to their cronies.

https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

--- end quote ---

For government registries see this discussion about land registries from two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

And so on.

I really think cryptographic proof of identity tied to a wallet will become crypto’s killer app in the post-AI era.

Why would I want all of my logins on one easily hackable, publicly available 24/7 by tech requirement, deeply connected system? It's an advertiser's dream to have one ID that will track me through all of the internet. Fuck that.