For those not familiar with the industry, the YouTube documentary "Line Goes Up" by Dan Olson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g) has been pointed to many times in HN threads, and is a great introduction to how dangerous these technologies really are. Within a few hours of following any tutorial on building a decentralized app, most developers should be able to see what an absolute disaster zone trying to work with this fundamentally broken technology would be, and what a nightmarish step backwards it is for developers concerned with cost, speed, privacy, safety, and ease.
I think it is important as technologists, engineers, and developers that we start making it very loud and clear to the public how fraud-ridden and dangerous these systems are. With most early-adopters running dry, the Ponzi scheme will only be able to continue by expanding into the average consumer market - and if as a community we stay silent about why and how these systems are simply convoluted scam practices, we are dooming ourselves to work with them.
It's equivalent to starting a conversation off with a loaded question - a useful tactic if you're trying to score points, but not likely to lead to anyone learning anything.
There are views to be shared (as with pure technical posts) and I can learn where the community stands on these issues.
But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as long as it looks like there's a profit to be made, even if the global outcome is to our own detriment.
If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.
I've consulted for several companies trying to do blockchain based non-money things and can't emphasize to them enough that no one outside computer science and math fields will ever associate them with anything but cryptocurrency (and thus scams) for the rest of our lifetimes.
Don't kid yourself, people follow the money.
How so? "Private blockchains" (with no general access + cryptographic proof of commitment) are practically indistinguishable from plain old Merkle trees, and yet I don't see many people arguing that git is some sort of "scam" even outside the CS and math community.
Bitcoin is a flagrant example of this property of capital.
up: Oh my god, capital as an emergent bigger entity, ok, ok, now I'm scared, thank you :)
up2: So you either fuel it or not, choices choices
up3: This is such a beautiful thing we are all mixed up in, don't you think?
Chasing power (be it financial, social, political) is a flagrant example of this property of People.
TL;DR: The problem isn't capital. It's humanity as a whole.
In the end, more efficient ways of achieving the same result will prevail in a well functioning market. Currently everything is skewed because crypto is mined with cheap coal power that the global society is subsidizing by paying for externalities.
I don't think crypto is unique in this. Gold and diamond production is also pretty expensive and useless (apart from their industrial applications, which are limited in comparison to their use to store value).
I disagree. Pricing externalities into energy costs isn't sufficient, because proof of work is basically pissing massive amounts of irreplaceable energy resources into the wind in order to play a stupid, unnecessary game. I think it's better those resources stay in the ground or be used for a more productive purposes, and making miners pay more for energy isn't going to change the fundamental wastefulness of their activity.
We are spitting distance from post-scarcity in the developed world. The problem is that we are addicted to power and status (which both feed on scarcity).
that's a perfect way to describe it. thanks. sigh.
I think there should be more political pressure behind banning crypto currencies and companies that deal with them should be cut out from banking system.
I would be even okay with just doing it for proof of work coins, if people want to keep doing their libertarian experiment it's okay for me, but at least remove this insane incentive to use more and more resources.
Shameless plug: basex.com
> BaseX measures "triple bottom line" - People Planet Prosperity - new definition of value - accounting for environmental impact and wellbeing.
It's is all about incentives.
https://www.acronymfinder.com/AGI.html
It seems to me that people that do an hour of research are polarized hard. Either love it or hate it. The more time you spend understanding the space the more nuanced it becomes. Many are using the technology to facilitate scams and overpromising, but that doesn't make the technology fundamentally useless or bad.
This is very frequent tone on many subreddits, whether you used it intentionally or not, you became part of the problem: none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is?
This week Solana had some problems with network congestion, subreddit was instantly flooded by what initially looked to be anti-CC movement, but quickly turned out to be Stellar supporters looking for new buyers, day before trading value dropped 15%...
Edit:
This is it, look at what I did. I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS but people jumped to comments to protect this project asking me to explain myself from something I did not say. I didn't even state my opinion on blockchain, PoS, Solana nor Stellar.
How is Solana bad for the planet exactly? I don't use Solana, or particularly like it, but it's proof of stake, so if you'd resist the urge to jump to conclusions, you'd find with a couple of minutes of research that its energy usage is comparable to a few average households.
>I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS
Isn't this a contradiction?
True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam.
You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.
Your comment reminds me of Guns... and how crazy the US people are about them haha.
As long as we transition to Proof of Stake networks, people who aren’t interested in blockchains should just ignore them and governments can go after anyone who uses blockchain (or any other technology) to scam people.
I reach this conclusion, not as a cynic, but as a skeptical advocate.
I ask everyone I can this line of question and have yet to get an answer that doesn't involve magical thinking.
Question:
Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do?
My sense is that the answer is "nothing" (except decentralization).
If that's correct, then all of the technical complexity is to be able to achieve decentralization.
However...
The mass market (everyone to the right of the chasm... early majority, late majority and laggards) has proven with our dollars that we don't care about a goal of decentralization. In fact we make sacrifices to have more centralization because we love it. It simplifies our lives.
So if the major market doesn't care about the only real value, then there is no real mass market value.
In that case, blockchain would be just another early adopter solution trying to not die off in the chasm.
My opinion: The problem is not that traditional technology can't provide the same value. It could, but it doesn't. The world is still in the process of mapping all societal/legal/finacial rules and procedures to a digital framework. In germany it is called "digitalization". And (at least) germany mostly sucks at doing this. In a way, blockchains provide a playground to explore possibilities no traditional framework i know of does.
> For example, in April and May alone, more than 30 thousand unique wallets bought NFTs from popular marketplaces such as nonfungible.com on any given day this month! This is down slightly from the 39,000 buyers throughout March.
I've heard on a podcast that there are only 400 000 wallets owning NFTs. It's a minuscule market, and it's not getting invariably hotter. It's very possible we're hearing so much about them now because the market is already contracting.
And this terrible detail coming from a scourge of the Earth website all in on NFTs and other scams: https://earthweb.com/nft-statistics/
the point of blockchain technology is decentralization, the chain going down over some "features", design flaws; barely qualifies it as a layer 1
"you know you've done something wrong when a blockchain has a status page"
1) There's a lot of research and development into blockchain technology by very smart people. The systems are improving. What technology we'll have 5, 10, or 25 years from now is going to be much different than what exists now. It's a lack of imagination to think that because crypto is "slow" now (and not all of it is by the way), that it will always be the case. The equivalent is looking at a 5.25" floppy disk in the early 80s and thinking that all physical media is forever going to be too small and too slow to be usable.
2) Low cost, speed, privacy, safety, and usability are great attributes to have: and in many cases are currently superior on established centralized systems. But don't other important attributes exist?
* What about resistance to censorship? A centralized system can ban you because of what you say or even because of who you are. Maybe a purely decentralized system cannot. I guess that's one reason why a lot of people fear it.
* And what about trust? Many people do not trust a lot of centralized systems from powerful groups: such as how many shares of stock are even in existence given the practice of naked shorting. Check out this story.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/rsaevv/in_march...
> In March of 2005 this guy bought 100% of shares (1.1M shares) in a traded company to prove the corruption. The next two days that same stock traded 50 million times and dropping the price 99% in two hours. All this with LITERALLY NO SHARES AVAILABLE TO BORROW OR SHORT.
Isn't it possible that the drawbacks of blockchains might be worth it if they can prove perfectly transparent and reduce or eliminate corruption? Imagine a stock market that ran on some next generation blockchain tech that was perfectly transparent without any doubt about the number of shares in existence. No more dirty tricks or fraud possible. Are the upsides of this not worth any discussion?
A blockchain is like having an append-only log in someone's house. Everyone can look at it, nobody can erase from it, and everyone can buy an expensive pen to create a new entry. The people who own the house can replace the log with an older copy if they wanted to, if they don't like the new entries for example, which is what happened to Ethereum, but the real opportunity is not compromising the blockchain, it's running scams with it and on it. With no oversight, no fraud detection, no customer protection anything goes. All the blockchain can do is setting the fraud in stone.
We already have better cryptographic tools for verifiability supporting transparency and censorship resistance, and they are much faster and more pratical.
You can't replace existing things with a Merkle tree and proof of whatever consensus, because the powerful will always have more of that whatever. Once they do you get a centralized system worst than any existing one.
The same applies to blockchain in general. If a new layer-1 is released you audit the code, the token supply, distribution - if its not put out clearly to you its suspicious, otherwise you go through the same process. Those who can read first hand what the risks are can get in early, those who cannot wait. Its not rocket science.
If you cared so much about fraud victims, you would drill into new, atomic contracts and protocols, but instead you take the lazy, spiteful approach of calling the whole space a fraud and expect people to believe you because you work with computers. Can you fix my printer while you rationalize your position?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the 5.25" floppy disk actually transferred data slower then if you had handwritten it between the machines, you couldn’t use the data from the 5.25" floppy disk unless you first validated it which would take several kW hours of power. You also could claim a stake at the data and could potentially sue other disk users for patent violations if you validated some patent more often then them. Now you have a case of a technology that is: a) worse then the alternative, b) expensive to use, and c) has harmful unintended consequences. Now I would consider the 5.25" floppy disk a good comparison to cryptocurrency. However the 5.25" floppy disk was none of these things, as it was a perfectly good technology at the time for data interchange despite it’s limitation. The same can not be said about cryptocurrency.
Now this is a silly example I know, I couldn’t find a more realistic case of unintended consequence for the 5.25" floppy disk.
In regards to censorship, trust, and any other perceived benefit of blockchain technology for applications, those benefits rely solely on the organization that controls the application - ultimately landing users in the exact same space. Blockchain is hailed as a way to build decentralized applications without any regard to the fact that those applications would still need to be built by a central organization.
The final note that advocates seem to profess as some great proof of why blockchain is ok is that other systems are flawed, as if proving that some other system is flawed is proof that it's ok for their system to be a sesspool of fraud and waste.
The technology is perfectly legitimate and mostly not awful as long as you stick to big reputable projects such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Monero, Litecoin and others who have been on the market for a long time with a proven track record.
> In regards to censorship, trust, and any other perceived benefit of blockchain technology for applications
These are not "perceived" benefits, they are in fact benefits.
Monero represents digital, anonymous, fungible, untraceable, censorship-resistant cash, the same properties that real world cash provides. It can be transacted worldwide with extremely low transaction fees.
> those benefits rely solely on the organization that controls the application - ultimately landing users in the exact same space
Who is the organization that "controls" the "application"? As cliche as it is, "code is law".
> as if proving that some other system is flawed is proof that it's ok for their system to be a sesspool of fraud and waste
You may not like crypto, but it does have use cases that people in the real world are relying on and find useful. The crypto space indeed has many scam projects, but not every project is a scam. That's just the nature of open source software - people will copy an idea and use it for their own personal gain if it proves to be profitable.
There are so many things that are far less useful and far more wasteful than cryptocurrency. I could start taking this argument seriously if we first ban all addictive social media platforms, the whole adtech industry, gas-guzzling trucks and so on.
Trust comes from when I know who the other person is, not just his/her/its attributes. A good debate comes from strengthening the things that bind us in an open forum.
Sofar blockchain seems to be about making money (and I agree with OP on this point) and doing its version of the .com bubble.
Not saying that nothing of value might come from it, but at this point I don’t see anything of that kind.
The bit about the stock is that shares counting issue isn't a 'problem' for the stock market, its a feature. They could easily solve this with existing technology. They don't because they make too much money playing the games. Blockchain won't fix that any more than it will solve censorship or cure cancer.
So can anyone who builds a service on top of blockchain technology™ which is something a user ultimately has to interface with. Just because you have some unremovable flags set on your magical decentralized database that doesn't mean a service can't choose to ignore it.
> eliminate corruption
> Imagine a stock market that ran on some next generation blockchain tech that was perfectly transparent without any doubt about the number of shares in existence. No more dirty tricks or fraud possible.
Please elaborate, how does any of what you vaguely describe "eliminate corruption". How would it prevent dirty tricks and fraud?
That is precisely why this is such a societally detrimental technology. The communities that are forming around it are self-reinforcing and suck up both monetary and intellectual capital.
All of this hype about crypto's "potential" is demolished in Dan's excellent work.
>It's a lack of imagination to think that because crypto is "slow" now (and not all of it is by the way), that it will always be the case.
Proof of work combined with the deflationary nature of these currencies is literally the antithesis of efficiency. The system necessarily needs to become less efficient over time because new coins need to become asymptotically harder to mint.
>Maybe a purely decentralized system cannot.
It's clear that the systems that interpret the blockchain (and even the blockchain itself, if wealthy and well-connected folks decide to fork) can be pressured into "censorship."
>if they can prove perfectly transparent and reduce or eliminate corruption?
No system that relies on human inputs can prove to be perfectly transparent or eliminate corruption. The blockchain itself can have provably unbreakable crypto that prevents man-in-the-middle manipulation of data but that in and of itself does not govern the interface between the chain and the people feeding it data.
1) First of all, are we discussing crypto as a currency or blockchains as a technology? Your criticisms seem all over the place here.
2) Maybe talking negatively about the dangers of deflationary currencies while we're in a period of economic inflation and peoples' purchasing power is being deliberately destroyed is not the best idea.
3) I'm not convinced that deflation in a currency is a bad thing. Mainstream economics schools hate deflation, but the Austrian school writes very favorably on the merits of deflation: https://mises.org/library/deflating-deflation-myth
4) Proof of work might or might not be around in the future: who knows? But that doesn't mean that blockchains are unworkable, just that one implementation might not stand the test of time.
> No system that relies on human inputs can prove to be perfectly transparent or eliminate corruption.
Look into what Oracles are and how they can guarantee the reliability of information and the concept of cryptoeconomic security. Who knows where this ends up going and if it's widely used or not, but there's a very high chance that all of the theoretical objections you would make here have been addressed.
I agree that we should inform people about the risks and scams that are currently common in the crypto space, but you're advocating for a lot more than that.
You can speak for yourself, but you shouldn't pretend that your opinion is shared by, or that you speak for, the majority of people working in IT.
If most (in my personal observation, 100%) use cases of such sector seems fraudulent, I do believe it is justified to generalize to the entire sector.
What's fraudulent about that? Cryptocurrencies do in fact provide all of that (not all of them provide all of these guarantees, but some do).
And solution for the Bitcoin is what?
For example?
This is all fine and good for me, as I live in a developed country, so I "could" just use SWIFT ,but what about remittance payments? For people who have a mobile phone, but no bank (a large number of people in the developing world), a relative in the US used to send money via Western Union, the receiver would travel to the nearest Western Union branch, of course WU would take a chunk of that money, and then you're walking around with your cash. With crypto, it gets sent to a wallet, and they can use that. This isn't some pie in the sky idea, it's happening today, but will increase as crypto gains mass adoption.
Telling people that you don't like what they're doing is not an effective way to modify their behavior. You need to provide competing incentives, and somehow I doubt y'all are up to that.
Is there even one thing about owning crypto that people need protection from?
Its an asset class like any other and if you want an NFT buy an NFT. If you want to buy a pokemon card, buy a pokemon card. If you'd rather spend it on a car, buy a car.
You're gonna get fraudsters with any asset. People will sell you houses that have bug problems hidden from you. Car dealerships will fleece you and have been since the first car salesman existed. Scammers have been counterfeiting dollars since they have been printed. McDonalds has been selling tasty unhealthy foods since they became a franchise. Mail order brides have been scamming the purchasers of their wife and money.
Are we supposed to now shout out about every scam in existence? What makes crypto so unique among scammable things (literally everything) that it needs an army of anti-cryptocurrency advocates running down the streets with pitchforks and cardboard signs?
I think it was more aimed at people thinking of getting into cryptocurrency.
For what it’s worth, I mined BTC when you could profitably with a GPU. I mine ETH today using gminer on flexpool.io. I actually made money on DOGE and several other alt coins.
I’ve spent years studying cryptocurrency. I don’t get it. I think it’s a scam too and I believe the world would be better off had it never been invented.
Blockchains are unusual tech in that it's strangely hard to upgrade them. In 2017-18 it was a common belief that some Bitcoin fork would "win" and become the "real Bitcoin", under the moniker "it's not the network, it's the ledger". Turns out it _is_ the network AND the ledger, unfortunately.
However, I maintain that the technology is still _immature_ and in that sense "it's still early": there is still some extremely low-hanging fruit in scalability, safe computing and cryptography that Bitcoin/Eth can't touch. BTC and ETH can absolutely be dethroned with better tech just like other giants that seemed unstoppable at the time.
Not trying to troll, but can you explain some of them? Not in the abstract, but in end-user/product terms.
DLTs can indeed be incredibly useful, e.g. when multiple parties use the tech as a trusted pseudonymous data log, e.g. drug tracking from production to pharmacies. Or decentralized certificate wallets which allow you to actually own certificates you earned and prove that those are valid.
Those are just not the stories media can sell as good as "some stupid link to an ape / rock picture has been sold for x gazillion USD".
Most people are dumb and uninformed, that’s not something that is going to change. If this new blockchain world that is being created only work for an imaginary world where agents are rational logical, and well educated the result will be disastrous.
Do you really believe that making mistakes is somehow on the rise, or that as a race we are getting less intelligent? This doesn't seem like a genuine argument other than a generic "people are dumb and getting dumber" statement.
Why can't they just use a database? Tracking information isn't a new problem.
* Because most traditional databases are not designed to be decentralized.
* Because administrators by default can change data in databases. Of course you can work your way around that and get an audit for your solution. But it is a native feature of blockchains.
Let's say it is law pharmacies have to ensure each drug they sell was produced by a trusted vendor and rules regarding logistics (e.g. temperature) were respected. Nobody must be able to manipulate that data and it has to be available offline for all pharmacies in case the network goes down. It'd be almost trivial to set something like this up using a blockchain. In an early prototype, you'd just give each party one or more wallets (private keys), allow the pharma to mint a token for each package and track how those are sent between wallets, each representing a different state in the supply chain. Pharmacies run a full node to have data available in case anything goes down. I made it a bit easier here than it likely would be in reality, but I hope I can transport the beauty of the approach.