It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.
You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting.
NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.
The State Machine Replication problem in distributed computing has been studied since the 1960s or so, and indeed can be solved using Byzantine Broadcast. That has been solved for various settings:
* Permissioned (+ PKI), synchronous: SMR possible for any f, Dolev Strong (1983)
* Permissioned (no PKI), synchronous: SMR impossible if f≥n/3 (PSL 1980, FLM 1985)
* Permissioned, asynchronous setting: SMR impossible even with f=1 (FLP 1985)
* Permissioned, partially synchronous: deterministic SMR with "eventual liveness" possible if f<n/3 (late 1990s), stochastic if f<n/2, impossible otherwise.
The theory to achieve reliable state machine replication even in the presence of byzantine failures was sorted out in the 1980s, and the practice followed in the late 1990s (PBFT, byzantine Paxos, etc.)
So, just to drive the point home: the Byzantine Generals problem (more precisely: Byzantine Broadcast & SMR) was a solved problem by the late 1990s.
What Bitcoin (ie LCR + PoW) added was to do it in the permissionless setting, just as I've said. (It also increased f from n/3 to n/2, modulo "selfish mining", and while earlier solutions were consistent always, available eventually, LCR + PoW is available always, consistent eventually, which is arguably the wrong tradeoff for finance.)
> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.
You don't say.
Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-believwrs got really wealthy, and you're not going to convince them.
Yes. Crypto was never productive.
But nice that your buddy financed a house with other people's dumb money.
In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.
I was asked to audit a few proposals during that era and in every case I had to go back to the person asking me to say that it was a technical architecture L. Ron Hubbard would have admired. Just straight up making up words in most cases.
Far beyond "wait, is this actually a parody? how is this not a parody?" territory. 80% of them were effectively "tamagotchis + pyramid scheme".
This is why I say that you don't have to love LLMs, but you also can't compare them in terms of also bad. Jay-walking is bad and Jeffrey Dahmer was bad; they are not "both bad".
>Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023
And the parent said,
>I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze
And your response was,
>The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.
The parent in fact said a very straightforward, non-controversial thing, and you responded in anger, as if they said something like "AI is the same as crypto".