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doedoedoedoe commented on Ask HN: Am I wrong about blockchain? What is your legitimate blockchain project?    · Posted by u/doedoedoedoe
sharemywin · 4 years ago
- Using a crypto address as a login instead of a central authority like a social login.

- ipfs is way cheaper than s3.

- any trading network where the trade partners <1000 and you wanted redundancy then you could use a blockchain with ~20-100 nodes. especially across legal zones, so your want enforce trading rules without the need for international trade lawyers.

- Also think crypto innovation happens in waves. mostly when the market goes down and developers need to add more innovation to the market and the innovation cycle repeats.

doedoedoedoe · 4 years ago
Right on, are there any actual projects out there that do / use any of this?
doedoedoedoe commented on Ask HN: Am I wrong about blockchain? What is your legitimate blockchain project?    · Posted by u/doedoedoedoe
logicalmonster · 4 years ago
You're starting off by being skeptical about crypto and asking what's "not-a-total-scam".

That's a good thing when it comes to crypto. The less you trust other people makes things look better for crypto.

Crypto is better positioned to deal with a lack of trust in a transaction than any traditional business or government. It's designed to be trustless. You can (and IMO should) be a paranoid schizo and worry that every single human is trying to rip you off at all times: but in crypto, code is effectively law, and everything is effectively transparent.

You don't have to worry about somebody completing their end of a bargain when you can verify that money is held in escrow and contractually held until conditions are met and you can even examine every line of code. Even if somebody wants to rip you off in this circumstance, they can't.

You don't have to worry about how many tokens are in circulation when you can look it up and verify any time you need to.

How do centralized systems deal with proving that they're trustworthy? They don't, unless you trust that government and law enforcement is able and willing to find every scam, lying business and institution, and finding corrupt con-artist out there.

And they're not. An example I like to use to illustrate this is the concept of naked shorting in the stock market making it such that it's impossible to know how many shares are even in circulation to set the prices. See 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.

The NYSE has been around for over 200 years, seemingly can't or won't eliminate this practice, and if you don't trust them what recourse do you have? Imagine if trading was implemented on some kind of crypto though: you can instantly verify exactly how many shares actually exist with zero possibility of a lie.

Your question is asking about specific projects, and I can name and espouse the interesting and unique benefits of many, but I think you should start over and look at the basic attributes of crypto that centralized systems cannot provide.

PS: Speaking of being skeptical, it's a little odd that you create a random account and just dart in to make a couple of posts about crypto. Is this somebody with an agenda or somebody trying to farm accounts with hot-button topics here?

doedoedoedoe · 4 years ago
Regarding my account, I'll happily admit I am not a fan of speaking publicly about basically anything. If blockchain tech was confined to a bunch of gamblers loosing money amongst themselves and making wild speculative bets it wouldn't matter to me so much - The real issue is that it has gained too much support from people with MASSIVE financial incentives to push these scams onto the general population, and it ends up having two effects that I am strongly against:

First, from the financial and social perspective, cryptocurrencies and NFT's are straight up Greater Fool scams - theres really no way to argue it; The coins are only valuable if you are able to convince a greater fool to buy them. I understand that there are hundreds of categories where this is true, from beany-babies to diamonds, but fraud in one category does not justify rampant fraud in another. The major issue here is that, at their core, digital assets are (practically) infinitely available, and these systems exist to add false scarcity to an asset that legitimately has none.

The second part, which is why I'm so vocal about the issue, is that from a technological perspective blockchain is total garbage. There really is no nice way to say it, if a software engineer is a proponent of blockchain as the driver for "Web 3.0" they are either totally ignorant of how the technology works, or are blatantly lying so they can push a scumbag Ponzi scheme they are personally invested in. The technology has been around for as long as the iPhone, and I have yet to hear a single legitimate use case (besides wild speculative gambling and driving more crypto-related schemes) that can't be implemented cheaper, faster, safer, more private, and more secure using existing technologies. You'll hear the phrase "It's still in it's early stages" a lot, with proponents giving vague promises that one day it will work well - that is simply not how actual technological progress is made.

Mix these issues with the fact that there are only two ways to drive the technology - one that creates so much waste it uses more energy than Argentina (that is a legitimate fact, not an exaggeration), and the other is that we literally give the ultra-rich a system that rewards more money with more power and greater returns - and it should be pretty clear that blockchain and it's related assets are super, super dangerous.

doedoedoedoe commented on Ask HN: Am I wrong about blockchain? What is your legitimate blockchain project?    · Posted by u/doedoedoedoe
logicalmonster · 4 years ago
You're starting off by being skeptical about crypto and asking what's "not-a-total-scam".

That's a good thing when it comes to crypto. The less you trust other people makes things look better for crypto.

Crypto is better positioned to deal with a lack of trust in a transaction than any traditional business or government. It's designed to be trustless. You can (and IMO should) be a paranoid schizo and worry that every single human is trying to rip you off at all times: but in crypto, code is effectively law, and everything is effectively transparent.

You don't have to worry about somebody completing their end of a bargain when you can verify that money is held in escrow and contractually held until conditions are met and you can even examine every line of code. Even if somebody wants to rip you off in this circumstance, they can't.

You don't have to worry about how many tokens are in circulation when you can look it up and verify any time you need to.

How do centralized systems deal with proving that they're trustworthy? They don't, unless you trust that government and law enforcement is able and willing to find every scam, lying business and institution, and finding corrupt con-artist out there.

And they're not. An example I like to use to illustrate this is the concept of naked shorting in the stock market making it such that it's impossible to know how many shares are even in circulation to set the prices. See 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.

The NYSE has been around for over 200 years, seemingly can't or won't eliminate this practice, and if you don't trust them what recourse do you have? Imagine if trading was implemented on some kind of crypto though: you can instantly verify exactly how many shares actually exist with zero possibility of a lie.

Your question is asking about specific projects, and I can name and espouse the interesting and unique benefits of many, but I think you should start over and look at the basic attributes of crypto that centralized systems cannot provide.

PS: Speaking of being skeptical, it's a little odd that you create a random account and just dart in to make a couple of posts about crypto. Is this somebody with an agenda or somebody trying to farm accounts with hot-button topics here?

doedoedoedoe · 4 years ago
It seems like you maybe could have provided just one example based on the length of your reply...
doedoedoedoe commented on Ask HN: Am I wrong about blockchain? What is your legitimate blockchain project?    · Posted by u/doedoedoedoe
alexandrerond · 4 years ago
Please explain why a website is the better solution for your project than existing technologies, and please no projects that exist solely for the purpose of reaching a browser-based audience, enabling webapps and so on!

I look forward to seeing your replies!

--

Repeat excercise with the Internet, the punch hole card, the steam machine, the landline telephone etc etc.

Even if some tech eventually fails, that doesn't mean it was pointless.

doedoedoedoe · 4 years ago
I can't quite tell if you're being serious or not, but just in case you are:

Literally every technology you listed there was a massive step forward technologically and was a significantly better solution for the problems they addressed...

You also skewed the question into a completely non-sensical argument - Obviously there are lots of websites that provide purpose beyond self-promotion.

I'm looking for one example of blockchain technology that isn't circular or self-promoting, and solves any problem better than existing technologies. Not some theoretical future use case, just one existing project.

doedoedoedoe commented on Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies    · Posted by u/doedoedoedoe
logicalmonster · 4 years ago
> what a nightmarish step backwards it is for developers concerned with cost, speed, privacy, safety, and ease.

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?

doedoedoedoe · 4 years ago
This strikes me as a pretty bizarre argument, like a reverse slippery-slope fallacy, and I've heard it repeated by advocates. You are staying that yes, the technology is awful and scam ridden, but maybe sometime in the future in some way no one can think of it will be ok. This is obviously not a meaningful argument.

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.

doedoedoedoe commented on Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies    · Posted by u/doedoedoedoe
abzolv · 4 years ago
From a technical perspective you are correct.

However, in the midst of a mania, unfortunately nobody is going to listen to a group of engineers telling them about the dangers of blockchain.

The only thing that will, and can, stop the madness is politicians getting off their backsides and implementing related laws and regulations.

If you want to talk to anyone, and have any potential effect, talk to the people in government.

doedoedoedoe · 4 years ago
I think that there is still time to inform general consumers so the vast majority are aware of the dangers before cryptocurrencies are made friendly enough to use for the average non-tech or finance folk. We are definitely hitting a point where these scams have to reach out beyond crypto-bros, finance gamblers, and the tech-savvy so that they can sustain the pyramid - and if people are aware before that happens, hopefully the bubble will burst and the fad will end.

u/doedoedoedoe

KarmaCake day262January 28, 2022View Original