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.

Asking a tangential question, is a data store like Oracle DB, Postgres, or MongoDB inherently bad?

If you answered yes to one and NOT the other, please rethink about how you view blockchain or any data store. Because perhaps your intention was to be extremely polarizing, which is fair, but I also think your wording is dishonest.

> the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud, scams, and Greater Fool schemes

I agree there are endless frauds, scams, and Greater Fool schemes every single day, but these types of generalizations are almost always strictly false, especially when talking about a global multi-trillion dollar industry.

The stock market has had its fair share of scams since its inception, but that doesn't mean EVERYONE who traded in the stock market in the 1700/1800s was a scam, hack, ponzi-schemer. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/09/hi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stock_Exchange_Fraud_of_... https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/02/12/385...

Yet here we are today with several stock markets.

Do people get scammed in the stock market? every day. For millions of dollars? definitely. Is there a lot of GOOD regulation to help with that? 100%

And guess what - that GOOD regulation that exists to help control scams doesn't exist in crypto, so it's like we're back in the 1700s where the stock market is brand new and people are figuring out what you can and can't do.

But don't blame the technology, you're being completely dishonest with yourself by doing so and dishonest to those who read this.

Here there is no public policy, and there is unlikely to be any for most countries in the near future. This is why OP voices their concerns that we should step in and advocate for people’s safety. Not because the technology it self is inherently evil, but because it is dangerous and—as the linked video argues—had little utility outside of harmful activity.

Ps. There are indeed some of us that do think the stock market is a scam and the world would be better of without one. In the mean time at least it is highly regulated and financially literate folks do talk loudly about fishy stuff that happens there.

However, pairing that with a proof-of-work consensus mechanism is incredibly inefficient, energy-consuming (requires at least 50% of all available compute to be engaged with the blockchain or risk bad actors taking over).

As-is, the cryptocurrencies we've seen have all been incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Any that would be efficient, both energy-wise and for speed-of-transactions would most probably require ditching complete decentralisation and thus be unacceptable to hard-core ideologues in the "crypto space".

For a rough estimate of the "transactions per second" you'd need to be a global, practical, "we handle all transactions", we can do a rough estimate. There are, what, 6 * 10^9 people on the planet. At a conservative guess, each person does about one exconomic transaction per day. Let's assume that is approximately evenly distributed through each day. A day is 86400 seconds, that's close enough to 10^5 that we might as well use that. That gives us at a minimum 6k transactions per second to be viable for a single global electronic currency.

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.

I think that the fact that this applies to capital in general and to abstract SHA256 capability in particular is much more interesting. After all, a bitcoin ASIC is not an interpersonal relationship or a goal of anyone or any group of people.

It's easy to misread that as something like everybody wins, but it's worth noting that such exchanges can still be extremely exploitative.

One could say something similar about "betterment" in your original statement.

> Capitalism/free markets do not guarantee that humans are not shitty

Obviously.

> but I challenge you to find a social system that does.

We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It irks me when "capitalism/free markets" is presented as some kind of "best possible economic system," or that it cannot be challenged unless the challenger is perfect. It's a set of trade offs (advocated by people with their own agendas), and I see little reason why different people shouldn't advocate different sets of trade-offs.

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.

I don't see how humans doing what they want fits in there. People aren't slaves to their desires that have a mind of their own, people are the minds which make up desires and destroy them. On the other hand, a paperclip maximizer - or, I think, capital - has a singular desire, which is to make as many paperclips as possible or as much profit as possible, everything else be damned, forever.

Forex yes, futures yes, derivatives yes - these are speculative or hedging instruments. Not investments. I've never heard anyone advocate people HODL /NQ futures in their investment account and borrow against them as an investment strategy. Let alone calling them "the future of money." But this is basically what crypto is.

Money market funds aren't investments, they're cash equivalents, but they still facilitate lending. They're the present of money.

Equities are positive-sum instruments where you purchase a fractional ownership stake in a business that employs people and uses the revenue from their business to return capital to investors in the form of dividends, buybacks or intrinsic value appreciation. Their performance is inherently tied to labor.

These are not at all the same thing.

The idea that there's any viable technical reasoning behind TSLA trading as high as it is, or behind what happened with GME and AMC last year is simply fanciful. It's like you've never seen an IPO pump and dump. It's literally the exact same market behavior you saw with ICOs; side-note: it's even worsened now with the advent of SPACs.

Yeah, you can argue until the cows come home that "equities are positive-sum instruments where you purchase a fractional ownership stake in a business," but that doesn't mean that hedge funds won't treat them as speculative instruments, particularly around earnings calls. Or that hedge funds won't try to spin the narrative to justify their risky positions (e.g.: the short squeeze on GME).

Again, just to reiterate: the markets are almost completely decoupled from labor (for better or for worse). It's all speculation (to certain degrees).

Equities may trade above a fair valuation - individually, or as a group. That doesn't mean they're not as a group positive-sum instruments. You may lose money on a positive-sum instrument. They're also not money, and never claimed to be.

You're forcing a narrative around short timeframes. Equity markets are tied to the performance of the business in the full course of time which is tied to labor.

Crypto like futures and options are zero-sum or negative-sum instruments if you include the rake. Every dollar in appreciation comes from a new investor. Every, single, one. That's the difference. It's just trading bags of air back and forth.

They're not though, and they haven't been for centuries. I gave you 3 examples off the top of my head. Markets are tied to sentiment; let me refer you to the Keynesian beauty contest[1]. This is very basic economic theory.

> Crypto like futures and options are zero-sum or negative-sum instruments if you include the rake. Every dollar in appreciation comes from a new investor. Every, single, one. That's the difference.

There is no "rake" in crypto, so I'm not even sure what you mean by that. Second, every dollar in appreciation on a decentralized exchange (say, SushiSwap) is a result of the automated market maker's supply and demand response. This is functionally exactly the same as what happens with order books (like on the stock market) but it just happens to use liquidity pools to facilitate this (because volume is much lower). For every seller, there's a buyer, and for every buyer, there's a seller: that's how markets work. Third, crypto is actually not at all like options because whereas option contracts can expire worthless (e.g. they run out of time and can no longer be exercised), if you buy some poopcoin, even if it tanks, you'll still own said coin (kind of like a penny stock).

> It's just trading bags of air back and forth.

This might be true, but people trade all kinds of things I personally find dumb (Pokémon cards, rare sneakers, etc.). Looks like a lot of people see value in cryptocurrency, who am I to judge.

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

Give GME a hot minute and the same thing will happen - it has already started. Peaked at $500 and is sitting at $98.50.

> There is no "rake" in crypto, so I'm not even sure what you mean by that.

There's a few different rakes. The overwhelming majority of crypto trading takes place on centralized exchanges where they take a commission on each trade. Off exchanges, in PoW currencies, new coins are issued which are then sold on these centralized exchanges to pay the bills. This exerts negative price pressure socializing the cost of running the network - another form of rake. In a PoS currency new tokens are issued to validators where non-stakers are diluted - another form of rake.

In each case (exchanges, miners, stakers) a commission is taken by the folks operating the game, which is exactly what a rake is in poker.

Expiry is not why options are the same as crypto. It's the zero-sum nature that's the same. Winners pay the losers, no new value is created in the options market. Ditto the crypto market.

> This might be true, but people trade all kinds of things I personally find dumb (Pokémon cards, rare sneakers, etc.). Looks like a lot of people see value in cryptocurrency, who am I to judge.

For sure, but Pokemon cards aren't claiming to be money and aren't legal tender in one of the poorest countries on earth. It's an issue due to scale, not due to its intrinsically being dumb, which to be clear, it also is. We cannot allow it to get to the point where its stupidity represents a systemic risk to the rest of us who choose not to treat Pokemon cards as money.

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.

https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...

>> …uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households.

>>> How much does AWS use for a comparable number of transactions? Your numbers don’t mean anything without additional context.

lol

From your own link though, with the current usage of the Solana network, a transaction consumes about as much energy as a google search. Not exactly something worth drawing out the energy pitchforks over.

>I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS

Isn't this a contradiction?

This is the opinion i started finding on subreddits more and more often, not my opinion.

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.

https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in the 1850s, and how many decades did it take for international phone calls to be essentially free?

The first road vehicles were unreliable and suffered from poor roads, it took decades for the Model T to arrive.

The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, how long did it take for there to be cell service across most of the world?

So, to answer your question, technologies can be in their "early phases" for quite a long time before they have any meaningful impact.

To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.

The web is a network application on the internet.

Blockchain is a network application on the internet.

After 13 years the total number of blockchain users is likely less than 100 million worldwide. From 1993-2006 the web grew to a billion users. In 1993 only 8% of US households had a computer with a modem…

Considering the web, mobile, and social media that blockchain has been able to leverage over the past 13 years it should have at least 20X the number of users.

Blockchain user adoption has been a complete failure up to this point.

I wrote a rant about this earlier this week:

https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...

In terms of replacing the financial system - I've been active in this space for a while now. I've been to meetups, events, large confs, etc in addition to the usual online hangouts. The overwhelmingly majority of users interacting with the blockchain don't know or care about "replacing the financial system". You can tell because they can't go 10 seconds without referencing their investment in dollars (how much they made or lost) or "I 100x'd it" or whatever. There are a few true believers who think in terms of "replacing the financial system" but out the 13% of US households that have anything to do with crypto the vast majority of usage is speculative trading. The blockchain to them is just another ticker symbol someone told them about and they click around in a web interface to buy/sell/trade.

We have a historical example of a new and "innovative" consumer financial product - the credit card. The Diners Club Card was introduced in 1950. By 1970 51% of US households had one. I don't have to tell you that is pretty good adoption for a completely different time and era but when something is immediately and obviously useful people adopt it. Always have, always will.

Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after.

Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.

He gets totally annihilated by Letterman. Bill can't even say a single use-case that is better than what already exists.

Bill mentioned email, and that's better in some ways, they just didn't get into it.

There wasn't in 1995 much that was dramatically valuable for regular folks. The conversation doesn't get into what the potential would be.

This is Bill being reasonable. He comes across as a fair-minded person, not a delusional zealot. He's about the opposite of what crypto-enthusiasts sound like. He doesn't come across as someone making outrageous claims and thus undermining his credibility.

Blockchain does not fit that meaning.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”.

I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.

If you wanted something to be immutably published you probably want to get it into a major print newspaper; it would be extremely difficult to find and destroy every single copy of the WSJ for 2022-01-28.

Even that is not immutable though, finding and destroying every single copy is possible. Hopefully you agree that it is nice to have the word "immutable". And maybe you agree that most of the times you have called something "immutable" what you have really meant is that mutating it would be extremely expensive.

Historic bitcoin blocks are mutable, but mutating them is very expensive and also has never happened, this seems like a good use-case for the word "immutable".

I assure you I am not. I am simply pointing out the ridiculousness of someone stating that blockchains are immutable when they are changeable and have changed.

In contrast, your example of snatching up every copy of a major print newspaper for a single day has never happened and will never happen.

But blockchains have changed and once regulators and courts get involved, you'll see just how malleable they are.

I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code.

To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.

Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much about.

I think it's fairly destructive to just discount new technology based on feeling. It really is a fun technology to learn and the more minds like we see on HN that research the topic, the more likelihood we will have in expanding the usefulness and security of blockchain use-cases.

If it's illegal to transact with the US under a previous version of this hypothetical blockchain banking technology, that's your 51% right there.

How could blockchain allow legal banking institutions to refuse to follow the law?

https://www.crypto51.app/

You only mentioned BTC but that’s just one coin. Several alt coins (with multi billion market caps) have had 51% attacks including ETC and BSV.

But anyway the original point was that it is literally wrong to say that blockchains are immutable. You didn’t address that point at all, so I guess you agree with it?

Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.

You do not know what you are talking about. The fact that grifters often don't know what they are talking about and use that to whip up positive spin on blockchain tech does not give you any good excuse to do the opposite - you are both morons.

So... you’re saying it’s mutable.

Nothing needs an immutable public ledger. Any fraud due to shipping, or banking, or taxes, is a problem of inaccurate entry of data into a ledger, not nefarious changes to what already exists.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_notebook

- https://www.newamerica.org/digital-impact-governance-initiat...

Adjustments needed for shipping, banking, or taxes are trivially accommodated; those are additional events which can be appended to the log.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. The ledger is immutable. That doesn't mean the state is immutable! Immutable state is not very useful. A judge could absolutely order that the ownership of some parcel is changed, but the change will appear as a separate record and everybody will be able to see the change and nobody can credibly deny that the change happened, not even the judge.

You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.

From what I've seen, its an auction to provide a service.

Why would I ask my neighbour to host data, rather than two or three expert companies that understand backups, power- and temperature requirements?

I think people use S3 not because their prices are great, but because they're not comfortable trusting some no-name company that offers better pricing. Protocols like Filecoin aim to remove the need for trust, by having untrusted storage providers prove that they're storing some data.

These anonymous storage providers almost certain aren't following convention best practices in terms of RAID, UPSs etc, so a single copy of the data has a greater likelihood of being lost, but we can compensate for that with extra redundancy.

But I'll also try to answer your new question: You're right that it's just an auction to provide a service, but crypto enables the auction!

S3 can charge such high margins because they're a trusted brand, the chance they'll lose my data is much lower than the chance I'll lose my own data, but this makes it hard for anyone else to enter the market without spending a lot of time proving themselves. Filecoin includes fancy cryptography and incentive schemes which, if you trust them, allow you to trust any storage provider using Filecoin.

Crypto payments means that anybody, anywhere in the world, can participate in the auction without spending any time negotiating contracts or setting payment rails. They can turn their computer on and start storing files.

This turns file storage into a commodity service and allows you to store your files for commodity prices, that's an incredible win!

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"

All in all it seems the guy is preaching to the choir and grinning along with head nodders and not actually educating anyone on anything.

Edit: finally finished the video, the guy did a pretty good job criticizing the current state of affairs, the relative uselessness of organization on blockchains, NFTs in particular, web3 and the tokenization of the universe, but I think he's wrong about the utility of cryptocurrency as currency, and the potential to tokenize real world assets that are already bought and sold, for record keeping purposes.

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?

Being readable will not stop bugs. This is the history of software engineering. Heartbleed went unnoticed for years, for instance. Putting the onus on the participants to verify a bug-free smart contract is kind of absurd if you ask me. It's just not possible and definitely won't scale.

In society there are incentives for example for a bakery to not poison you. The obvious one is the financial gain, reputation, but also the threat from not following laws, regulations. There are health inspections and so on. Even with that a lot of things a bakery sells is not healthy for you.

It doesn't matter how smart the tools are, if the only incentive is to defraud people, which is how the crypto economy works today. It's all lions and hyenas, and there is no algorithm to fix that, if anything decentralized consensus makes it easier for people to obfuscate and shrug responsibility.

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.

They did manage to get through some of the game at least!

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.

Blockchains require an incentive for members of their network to maintain a copy of the shared ledger. Modeling it after a deflationary currency creates a first-mover advantage that generates this momentum. We're not talking about "theoretical objections" or hypothetical better systems, the commonly implemented blockchain systems are creating problems that are manifesting themselves today, and every ounce of capital invested into them creates real inertia against changing how they fundamentally work.

>Proof of work might or might not be around in the future: who knows?

We can not afford to be ambivalent about how this technology evolves.

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Blockchain_oracle

Let's not argument in terms of 'what ifs'. Proof of waste is real here and now.

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).

Simply put: People use cryptocurrencies as speculative asset while they claim they are using them for decentralization and other properties.

This is akin to saying that seat belts are fraudulent because they aren't saving your life every single day. You might not need the properties of censorship resistance, privacy and so on right now, until one day you do.

I would much rather live in a world where such currencies are available in case I need to rely on them.

It's still early days for blockchain/crypto world. Alarmist comments don't really add anything to the discussion.

Why should cryptocurrency be singled out? Just because some people dislike it? We haven't done much about climate change and the big pollutants in decades, but as soon as cryptocurrencies come up, it's suddenly treated as an existential threat to human kind - I don't buy it.

If we are talking about climate change, time is quickly running out. So talking about wishful thinking while reality is actually other way around does not seems to be helpful.

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.

Sending remittance payments in cryptocurrency does not make sense for people who are sending their hard earned dollars back to their home country to support their impoverished families. The risk exposure to exchange rate fluctuations, and risk of loss of funds in transit (due to fraud, hacking, losing a crypto wallet, sending money to the wrong wallet, etc), the fees associated with cryptocurrency transfers, and the extremely slow transfer times, all makes cryptocurrency a totally inappropriate product for the demographic that you are suggesting be targeted. You are basically suggesting that crypto bros should get rich off of selling a product to poor people that will only make them poorer. It's disturbing. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me agree with title of this post.

Fortunately, most people have other options available for international remittance payments. For example, you can now transfer money to people using Visa in over 80 countries, all you need is their Visa card number, and the transfer time is 30 minutes or less for Visa debit. All the major retail banks have similar services, and there are plenty of money transfer apps (including a Western Union app), none of which depend on "blockchain technology."

This is true to a degree, but intra-day fluctuation are typically not going to be severe enough to pose a significant risk. The "risk" of the value going up is pretty much the same as the value going down on such short time scales, so any fluctuations should realistically even out after some time.

> and risk of loss of funds in transit (due to fraud, hacking, losing a crypto wallet, sending money to the wrong wallet, etc),

The risk of that happening is minimal to none depending on how well you prepare. Loss of funds is not something that typically "happens" to you, it's something you do. And it's usually pretty hard to do that.

If you're sending funds to someone repeatedly, you only need to get their address once. Send a small, let's say $1 transaction to see if you have the correct address.

Hardware wallets eliminate the risk of hacking, but you can avoid it through other means as well.

> the fees associated with cryptocurrency transfers,

Outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum, fees for cryptocurrency transfers are practically zero. Prime examples of this are Monero and Litecoin where transfers might cost $0.01, but you might get away without paying a fee at all.

> and the extremely slow transfer times,

Both Monero and Litecoin have a block time of around 2 minutes and transactions are usually completed within 5 minutes. Deposits to exchanges might take up to 30 minutes due to stricter requirements.

Traditional banking system usually takes at least 1 working day or more.

> all makes cryptocurrency a totally inappropriate product for the demographic that you are suggesting be targeted.

I'm not going to support or refute that, but I did want to point out that all of your claims above are wrong and don't support the argument you're trying to make.

In no way am I suggesting "crypto bros should get rich off selling product to poor people". The only point where any interaction with a crypto-bro may be necessary is in transferring fiat to crypto.

And your "fraud" comment makes me think you don't understand crypto. "Sending money to the wrong wallet" is a lame reason, it's the equivalent of giving money to the wrong person. Though there is likely to come a better/safer method, how many people have sent money to the wrong wallet by mistake?

The exposure of exchange fluctuations is real, but won't continue for ever as greater adoption leads to greater stability. You are also sometimes dealing in countries where the local currency is also susceptible to similar fluctuations.

I agree with your assessment. It's an overcollateralized repo agreement. In the the "centralized finance" world, the purpose of the repo market is to provide investors with leverage at low cost. It's similar getting a mortgage from your bank to invest in a real estate property - you give the bank a down payment (let's say 20% down), and the bank lends you the remaining 80% to buy the property. In this way, your initial investment (20% down payment) is leveraged 4 times. Despite your leverage, the mortgage on the interest rate stays low because the bank has a lien on the real estate property so they can recover their loan value by selling the property if you don't pay back the loan.

> I am not even sure what use such 'loans' have when you need to have $2 to take a loan of $1. They certainly solve some issues that Cryptocurrencies introduce for themselves but outside of that world they are useless

But what issues in cryptocurrencies does it even solve? What is the business model of these DeFi businesses? They advertise to crypto investors that they can earn impossibly high rates of "interest and rewards," and there are plenty of crypto HODLs who would be happy to lock up their crypto in a DeFi to earn interest, but where is the demand side? Who needs to borrow $1 worth of crypto while posting $2 of crypto as collateral and paying impossibly high interest? Who needs to borrow cryptocurrency at all? The only purpose I can see of borrowing crypto would be to short sell it, but how many people are crazy enough to do that? I can't help but feel like DeFi is some kind of scam and a reincarnation of the ICO bubble.

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?

The "technological veil" over it seems to confer more legitimacy to crypto projects than is really warranted.

E.g. people buying land in the "metaverse", which is really just some hastily implemented crap game/mmo.

Less technical people aren't going to understand that the perfectly legitimate technology is a ruse covering up illegitimate investment ideas.

But personally, Im not too worried. Fiscally irresponsible people will always find a way to throw away their money one way or another. It will seem quite obvious in hindsight, however.

So was pokemon. By my definition that's a crap game even without crypto. But millions of people have fun playing it and its a big part of their lives, so who am I to judge?

"Investments" in crypto tend to have value because you can sell it to somebody else for more, not because the intrinsic value increases over time. E.g. like a cashflowing business increasing their cashflow, or raising rents on a rental property.

This is self referential, people aren't paying more because it provides higher intrinsic value, but due to speculation.

Let's say I can magically create thousands of copies of the mona lisa, perfect 100% copies of the original at the Louvre with no method known to man now or in the future to distinguish them.

Now imagine that I shuffle those 100% perfect copies with the original and distribute them all across the world in galleries, auction houses, museums, some universities etc. (basically any facilities with a chance to have access to people with the ability to notice that this might be the original painting).

Assuming that the experts trying to find the original now that it is gone from the Louvre are honest and don't lie:

Do you believe the Mona Lisa would still retain its value assessment?

It's different from NFTs, which are just pointers to an item rather than the actual item itself.

But I agree with you that crypto bears some similarity to art/gold/collectibles. However crypto can be spawned out of thin air and these other things can't.

Why would the world settle on using a Blockchain where a few whales hold huge percentages of the coins? People will just invent a new one and standardize on that. If decentralized apps become the new norm.

This would devalue existing blockchains and their tokens greatly. The only ones motivated to stay on a Blockchain with enormous inequality are the few early adopters. The public would create a standard and adopt that in longer run if Blockchain backed decentralized apps are truly the future.

Yes, we're aware that capitalism has a lot of things that look a lot like crypto. Do you know what? Those are the worst parts of capitalism. You're describing artificial scarcity. You're seeing large sums of money go to things you don't personally value and that probably don't deserve as much as more noble efforts. Is it fair? Fuck no. Does that somehow merit _more_ of it? Absolutely not.

Arguing against these inherently political notions with regard to crypto is _exhausting_. You are basically implying that other people who don't get on board are hypocrites when the fact is that reality is so much more nuanced than these low-effort reactionary whataboutisms and many people see that as clear as day.

Even in the context of the original game release in 1996?

> But millions of people have fun playing it and its a big part of their lives

Yes and all they have to do for that is buy one of the many Pokemon games between 1996 and 2021 and start playing and enjoying the game for whatever it is they get out of it, be it story, gameplay, collecting or PvP.

Now where is the connection to cryptocurrencies and NFTs? Could you be specific?

The point of that comment was to say "crap" is an entirely subjective opinion. Myself telling you that yes it was crap even in 1996 is not going to change the validity of the sentence I just said.

The connection which you aren't able to see which to me is extremely obvious, is that people who play with crypto "start playing and enjoying the game for whatever it is they get out of it, be it story, gameplay, collecting or PvP."

Cryptobros aren't in it as a hobby or because they "just enjoy the tech like other people enjoy pokemon", they want to make money with a speculative asset and spread false promises to rope in as many people as possible to drive up the price.

If that is not the case, well let it crash. After all: You can still enjoy it without the gambling aspect or even popularity, can't you?

Regarding 'stay poor', the vast majority of crypto 'investors' bought in during 2021, meaning that most of them have lost money. Which is of course expected for any net negative 'investment'. It is not cryptoskeptics who are staying poor, I'm afraid

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.

- the uncorruptible chain of custody. While it's well known for decades that "just a database" would solve ASCAP/BMI robbing countless artists because "it's too hard to track them down", they're not going to do it. A royalty is meaningless if there's no mechanism to enforce it, and an autonomous one is simply superior. If you're then going to say "but I could do that with XYZ" then now the rhetorical burden is yours to explain to me why it NEVER caught on.

- fractional ownership is a doodad, but a particularly hard doodad to set up, especially alongside a royalty mechanism. Once again "but you can do that with" -- what? A Delaware corp? With specialized technology? Some combination of buggy lambdas on AWS? And _how_ are you going to offer this to artists and still make money?

NFT for royalties just makes sense. It's no wonder it's not making anywhere near the money that art NFTs do -- but that's art: you'd have to look far and wide to find a more contemptible and corrupted marketplace than fine art. It's no wonder they like crypto :)

When people purchase songs though the smart contract, part of the value can be automatically sent to the wallet of the person who owns the NFT that corresponds to that song.

The problem is most people, even on here still think NFTs are just some dumb pointer.

And if they only allow people to compensate artists through cryptocurrency, then it's not viable for artists.

I sort of agree with this assessment. I think it depends on what you mean by useful. Unfortunately, the only real-world, practical use of Monero is money laundering. I wouldn't want to trade a currency or work on a technology whose best use case is helping violent drug cartels conduct their financial transactions.

> A mirrortable is a way to take a legally compliant cap table held in a system like Carta and mirror it on the blockchain. It consists of an on-chain smart contract and a bidirectional interface that syncs changes made on-chain to the off-chain cap table and vice versa. In this it is similar to a stablecoin, which similarly links an on-chain asset like USDC to a legally compliant set of off-chain USD bank accounts.

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.

Also, the problem itself is very convoluted and likely doesn't exist in the real world. You trust the vendors enough to let them do the data entry but distrust them thinking that they will manipulate the entered data somehow? It's a very strange situation

Scenarios like this are not "very strange" but very real. Europe and China are actively working on blockchain projects, e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/2021... or https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-selects-pilot-zone...

Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?

This is what we call survivorship bias.

> Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?

This is utter nonsense.

Fractional reserve lending means that money enters the supply on loan. It has to be returned to the issuer, and once its returned, it blinks out of existence. The demand for repayment of the loan is what backs every dollar out there. Each dollar is fully backed by the demand to repay the loan that issued it and the social and institutional mechanisms that enforce this including the courts.

The attributes of a Ponzi scheme are:

1. People invest into it because they expect substantial profits, and ...

2. ... that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. And...

3. ... there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead...

4. ... the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while ...

5. ... the operators take away a large portion of this money.

Go ahead and explain how that maps to the world's reserve currency. After all category (1) is patently invalidated because nobody holds USD expecting a return in USD. They expect to lose 2% on average to inflation.

Forex is a highly-leveraged speculative zero-sum game where you're betting against a different trader. It's provably zero-sum like futures trading. Negative sum if you include the rake. The total supply of both sides of that trade remains the same, it's simply a redistribution of wealth from the losing trader to the winning trader.

It's also strictly a pair trade meaning that you're buying one currency and selling a different one at the same time, on the anticipation that you can unwind that for more than you spent to enter it. Forex trades are never just "USD" it's always "USD/YYY."

This is completely different than expecting to earn money by holding USD.

"Hey you know about these things. Is web3 the next evolution of the internet and should I buy in?"

"No and no"

"You're just mad because you missed out"

"Here's a collection of material I've been saving that says I'm right. You might want to take a look before you invest"

"You sound negative"

"Ok, consider me the 10th man then. Ignore me if you want"

And just leave it at that. You can lead a horse to water...

https://themindcollection.com/the-tenth-man-rule-devils-advo...

This isn't a new paper on quantum computing. Many of us understand the technology quite well.