> You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking.
And as you can see all over HN, most of us are quite tired of this diatribe...
This appeal to HN requiring us to be open-minded about a technology that had more than a decade to prove itself in a real world application is tiresome. I mentioned in another comment just this week, I was really excited about Bitcoin in 2012 and kept watching the whole space for opportunities to try a product that could improve my life.
Nothing has appeared, in 10 years, worse, in 10 years it all became a space filled with mumbo-jumbo, grifters and scams. In 10 years I've not seen any of these pie-in-the-sky proposals of digital attestation come to fruition.
It's a technology looking for problems, when something more exciting than Cryptokitties or pure speculation of shitcoins pops up I can definitely give it a try. Unfortunately as each day passes and more scams appear it eclipses any dreams that people like you have to sell to me, it's been thoroughly tarnished over 10 years, the space is a mess in every aspect, including information. Nowadays if you search for anything blockchain/cryptocurrency-related you will only find piles and piles of trash, of shit articles trying to peddle yet-another-scam.
It's really hard to keep any optimism when there was absolutely nothing gained from the technology in the real world.
No, remittances from developing countries is not really a gain, I personally know people that emigrated from places like Venezuela and Iran and absolutely no one is using blockchains/cryptocurrencies anymore, the few ones that tried got burnt after yet-another-crash.
A decentralised ledger might have uses, no one has shown any so far, at least none that got any traction even close to the amount of money poured into this bullshit.
It is incorrect to say nothing has happened during the last 10 years. Zero-knowledge proofs, as discussed in the potential research collaboration between Ethereum Foundation and LibreOffice, are more recent. The most useful, or compact, zero-knowledge proof systems have been created during the last few years. This can be partially contributed to the blockchain research.
You can more about the history of zero knowledge in this Wikipedia article:
Zero-knowledge proofs do not need a blockchain. They are "old crypto" (cryptography, not cryptocurrency) and actually predate blockchains by several decades.
Sensible, I'm gonna wait for real applications of ZKPs though, it's an interesting piece of technology, just like a decentralised ledger. When it gets applied I can form a better opinion if it was worth the US$ billions poured into blockchains that enabled more research of it :)
And as you can see all over HN, most of us are quite tired of this diatribe...
This appeal to HN requiring us to be open-minded about a technology that had more than a decade to prove itself in a real world application is tiresome. I mentioned in another comment just this week, I was really excited about Bitcoin in 2012 and kept watching the whole space for opportunities to try a product that could improve my life.
Nothing has appeared, in 10 years, worse, in 10 years it all became a space filled with mumbo-jumbo, grifters and scams. In 10 years I've not seen any of these pie-in-the-sky proposals of digital attestation come to fruition.
It's a technology looking for problems, when something more exciting than Cryptokitties or pure speculation of shitcoins pops up I can definitely give it a try. Unfortunately as each day passes and more scams appear it eclipses any dreams that people like you have to sell to me, it's been thoroughly tarnished over 10 years, the space is a mess in every aspect, including information. Nowadays if you search for anything blockchain/cryptocurrency-related you will only find piles and piles of trash, of shit articles trying to peddle yet-another-scam.
It's really hard to keep any optimism when there was absolutely nothing gained from the technology in the real world.
No, remittances from developing countries is not really a gain, I personally know people that emigrated from places like Venezuela and Iran and absolutely no one is using blockchains/cryptocurrencies anymore, the few ones that tried got burnt after yet-another-crash.
A decentralised ledger might have uses, no one has shown any so far, at least none that got any traction even close to the amount of money poured into this bullshit.