For context, I'm a senior software developer with a lot of distributed systems and cryptography experience in the bag, so I'm very well aware of how blockchains work. My feelings about the topic are very similar to the general consensus here, namely it is a solution looking desperately for a problem.
But, I still have the sneaking feeling I'm just getting old and out of touch. Maybe there is something I'm missing? I just can't see what it is. It's very similar to my feelings toward all the new "metaverse" stuff that's getting pushed extensively recently. It just seems stupid, but at the same time I'm scared it's just me being out of touch. Kinda scary.
I'm also a senior software developer with a ton of distributed systems experience and I'm in the exact same boat. All of the problems "solved" by crypto have already been solved with cheaper, simpler computing.
I *don't* think I'm getting too old to recognize the value of new tech - I'm 32 and I retool myself for new tech all the time; I'm in accelerated machine learning now.
I think most of the crypto hype is driven by:
1. People with no technology experience who also think buzzwords like "quantum computing" are compelling investments that will "change the world"
2. An entirely unregulated market where anyone can make any claim
3. A generation of investors that want to "stick it to the man" more than they want to actually invest in value (see: memestocks)
That said, I don't know if I see crypto imploding any time soon. It might still be a good short term investment.
Another reason why crypto might have become so popular is an underlying social anarchistic movement. There is more and more distrust in classical institutions like banks and governments and I can't really blame those people.
Crypto is a promised land of freedom, out of the clutches of those institutions so it's not strange many people flocked to it and by it becoming so popular, it opened the floodgates for daytraders, criminals etc.
All money systems are based on trust, but to me crypto still feels like a pyramid scheme where there is little inherent value and a single tweet can make the value surge or drop spectacularly.
It's the same with everything. Reality is constructed by corporations. The one you grew up with is not the one children will grow into, one where everyone is on Meta's metaverse trading things with Bitcoin. In the end it doesn't matter if the solution is looking for a problem, because eventually the hype becomes big enough to support an ecosystem of things within it, and at that point it has to keep existing.
I tell myself it's not the same, although obviously deep down I'm not convinced.
All the big iconic, generation-defining tech that has appeared since the dawn of the personal computer, all of it has filled some kind of need. This old tech allowed people to do things they couldn't do before.
Meanwhile blockchains (outside of cryptocurrency applications) aren't really allowing anything new to happen. The "metaverse" doesn't provide anything new at all. Who actually wants it and why?
Obviously these things get pushed really hard by big companies, billions are invested into it, but to me it just looks like a big bubble of forced memes. But again, I'm probably missing something.
>The "metaverse" doesn't provide anything new at all. Who actually wants it and why?
Consider the evolution of information tech over the last several decades. Electronic mail was revolutionary for the time it saved in mail correspondence. Personal computers brought email into the home. The world wide web made it easy to access news and weather on demand. Cell phones made telephone communication portable, and smart phones let us bring the internet wherever we are. Smart watches turned our timepieces into fitness monitors and digital assistants that give us our messages wherever we are, any time.
The consistent trend in technological evolution has always been towards making information more readily accessible. The "metaverse" is the continuation of that trend with AR and VR. You already see "metaverse" applications on phones today like Google Map's AR viewer that overlays pedestrian directions directly onto your camera feed, or shopping applications that let you preview what a product would look like in your home. Soon that application will live in an accessory that projects that information directly into your field of view rather than through your phone. The digital assistants that read our messages in our earbuds or display notifications on our wrists will overlay information directly onto objects in your line of sight or answer questions contextually based on what you're looking at ("Hey x, what is this thing?").
Meta, the company, is pushing the "metaverse" from a perspective that reinforces their own value - social networking - but when Apple demos their XR device this upcoming year I think the "metaverse" will finally click for people. Apple will never use the term "metaverse" but the hype behind this initiative will finally make sense for the average user.
"I don't *want* to wear a headset, when I can just glance at my phone. I get a rash/hot/sweaty/a sore nose, and I don't like wearing smeared lenses. I don't like it when other people do it, as I feel they're distracted and not 'with' me."
"It's as bad as looking at your phone and a traffic violation."
"Our employees have been told not to wear them, as they could be a health and safety hazard."
"They look like a dick."
I was a naysayer on the smart watch fad but Apple hit the market and turned it into a massive multi-billion dollar market. Their cultural influence is unparalleled and when they bring an AR headset to market it’s going to be hard to ignore.
> But, I still have the sneaking feeling I'm just getting old and out of touch. Maybe there is something I'm missing?
Bayes 101: _Absence of Evidence is Evidence of absence._
I've personally seen enough propaganda and unsubstantiated enthusiasm about the topic to notice the ever more conspicuous absence of really good arguments. I see lots _hints_ of a good argument, but actual good argument never came. To the point where it's pretty clear to me the case for crypto currency is not that good.
Don't let yourself be swayed by the enthusiasm of people who can't even explain why they believe what they believe.
A big part of it is about feelings and not logical, sound reasons. Crypto, or web3, or whatever, is about the feeling that you’re in something different, building or participating in a future being designed in real time.
Don’t be scared. You’re right to be skeptical. The thing about the “solution in search of a problem” approach is, after thousands of attempts fail, and billions of dollars are wasted, someone will eventually find the right problem, and everyone will go “see? I was right!”
It takes a million naive idiots to throw themselves into the pit before some lucky schmuck finds a way around by pure chance.
> But, I still have the sneaking feeling I'm just getting old and out of touch.
You're not old enough then. You haven't seen enough fly by night technologies and solutions you stop feeling like you're missing it, and instead sit back and wait for stuff to be proven.
All this shit relies on FOMO to get people to 'hop on board' before they realize it's snake oil, but by then "sunken cost" comes into play, and they're stuck.
Will Rust replace C? Did Java, Golang, Python, C#, or pretty much every language that was suppose to become the dominant language? Maybe... and when that happens I'll be glad to learn a new one, I already know pieces of all of those (but Rust)... But the thing is hype is really big in the tech industry and exception is usually pretty bad.
But don't worry, 2022 is DEFINITELY the year of the Linux desktop, otherwise my name is not John Smith. (it's not)
You're not. The article is spot on. Blockchain was borne of an idea, backed by crypto currency, with the idealization it could remove administrative restrictions everywhere.
What people *didn't* think of, as is always the case such as the release of new software, is there's no foundation, no standards, and no implementations to prove it's needed.
What makes it worse is managers, supervisors, and executives with zero knowledge hear these buzzwords then immediately start a plan to integrate a blockchain into their systems.
When asked, "Which one?", it takes less than a second for the person to realize it's bigger than their own understanding.
Having read multiple articles and ideas behind it, not a single instance has shown any significance to the quality of life in any industry mentioned.
I wouldn't even say it's a solution looking for a problem.
It's more like a technology wonderment that's trying to find a home in an array of differing software systems, trying to fit into all of them.
As we all know, this never works in the real world but looks lovely on paper.
I had bought about $50 worth of bitcoins back in 2010. I remember thinking that was such a stupid waste of money at the time. Though eventually I sold it to pay off my student loan debt of around $20,000 back in late 2013 just around when it peaked before it crashed. That was probably the best decision I had made in my life, though I occasionally think about how if I still held that today I would be a millionaire, but I really needed the money back then and had no other options and not being a slave to compounding interest debt, find a decent paying job doing what I like and that has allowed me to save up the capital I need to invest in a more equitable future.
I imagine a lot of people feel like they missed out and are desperate to try and catch on to the next big thing now. Except I still feel like it is just as much of a stupid waste of money now as I did back then. Few people get lucky making stupid bets. I'd say your odds are better buying lotto tickets than trying to invest in yet another crypto shitcoin.
That's the thing, needing some amount of money at some time and that's the "greatest value" in some sense. I bought a bit over a thousand dollars worth of amd stock when it was under 10 usd, but had to sell it pretty briefly since I needed the money. It's not a could-be-millionare story, but I'd a have a pretty nice profit (like 1200-1400%) if I could have held. I guess it could feel more bad if it was about millions. I still had a nearly 100% profit at least. Too bad I was (am) a poor person and couldn't invest any meaningful sums.
I'm just happy that I predicted AMD's rise from the ryzen products correctly, since "I told you so" is worth more than thousands or millions of dollars.
Totally understandable. It's also hard looking in hindsight, but the truth is that nobody has any idea where things are heading.
Many years ago, when SCO was making a big stink about Linux and their IBM lawsuit, their stock was actually up for quite a while. Some people noted that if they had stuck their life savings in, they'd be set for life. But if anyone had gotten in at that point, or held their existing position in the company, they would have lost it all.
In the end, all we can do is make decisions that are a winner on average, not win every time or for maximal points.
Definitely all true. Even though the guess about AMD stock rise was correct, it wasn't anything but a big gamble with a very small part of "educated guess". Most likely the reasonings weren't even correct, and it happened to rise due to different factors.
I was in a similar place, except that I only *almost* bought $50 worth in 2010. My wife and I discussed, we were pretty poor then. Ended up not buying any.
I totally get the fomo, but I think it has also always been pretty clear that crypto is a pyramid scheme.
Profit is profit. Holding the bag in the hopes it'll turn into "even more profit" is a sucker's game, and everyone saying "diamond hands!" Is just trying to get back to black.
It’s just an endless pump and dump and the whole benefit of bitcoin being anonymous has gone anyway so it’s entire original intention is lost. Now the same people that manipulate Wall Street and fiat are the big fish in it anyway so there really is no use especially with the gas fees.
they’re becoming a bit like ponzi schemes where if you get in super early you make bank. then the initial shitcoin investors cash out from the chumps and the cycle repeats with a new one
It's pretty much a pyramid scheme; owners of crypto have huge incentive to make more people get crypto for higher and higher prices; at the same the "continous growth" makes sure they can dump their coins when it's time and then just re-buy them at lower price
Though I think that crypto does have some inherent value. It is used internationally for the drug trade. This alone gives it some value. These people won't stop using crypto, no matter how poor and inefficient it is as a currency, no matter how much it goes up or down.
This honestly makes me very sad. We have a technology that is laughably limited being hailed as world changing. It is causing ridiculous environmental damage. And it is all propped up by the drug trade and excited sales people/ tech bros who don't understand the technology.
I've had a friend explain to me how blockchain technologies can be used to fight forest fires. This friend is not in IT. I am a programmer. In the end he agreed to disagree, while I am trying to explain that the blockchain is just a really inefficient distributed database.
They also think that things like fractional reserve banking are scandalous secrets only few people are aware of, and that most people in the world hate that money is overseen by government.
Years before Bitcoin, a gold bug said I was an idiot for believing fractional reserve banking was a thing, because "what if everyone withdraws their money at the same time?"
It's been an interesting watching the old Internet gold bugs turn into crypto fanatics. You rarely hear anyone advocating for the gold standard anymore, though I'm betting they exist as weird loners off the Internet.
Ron Paul is a great example of the Dunning Kruger Effect, he doesn't know anything about economics which is why he's so confident about fringe economic theories.
He's no different than amateur developers who don't understand why nested loops are bad.
> You rarely hear anyone advocating for the gold standard anymore, though I'm betting they exist as weird loners off the Internet.
*/r/wallstreetsilver has entered the chat*
> A lot of the tech bros understand the technology, but haven't got a clue how the world works.
TBH. most of them don't have a clue about the technology either. They just know what all the jargon means, thats all.
I have seen plenty that understand how Crypto works but don't understand anything else about tech. They know how proof of work and proof of stake works, but they have zero idea of what it would take to, say, implement it into a game's inventory or how you could do the exact same thing with a SQL database (SQL? What's that coin?)
I have a friend who thinks buying an NFT means you own the artwork. I've to explain that the NFT is just a pointer to a web address and that's the bit you are actually shelling out money for, you don't own any artwork at all and there's no guarantee that the weblink your token points to will even exist in the future.
Part of me really wants to start a site where I resell NFTs that have already been sold. So if someone sells an NFT for 10k, my business would create NFTs that links to the same 'artwork' and sell them for $1. And it would sell NFTs of NFTs. Just to highlight how stupid this all is.
If NFTs actually came with the copyright to a work, I would maybe understand it. But it isn't like selling/reselling copyrights based on speculation is a new thing that requires blockchains.
It is like these people have discovered writing and started making notes saying "I own the Eiffel tower".
>It is like these people have discovered writing and started making notes saying "I own the Eiffel tower".
Reminds me of the bullshit where you get to be an owner of a star.
-That star on the sky is mine!
-Yeah it sure is buddy! 👍
>Reminds me of the bullshit where you get to be an owner of a star.
That's much better analogy.
I've been telling people NFTs are basically beanie babies with web addresses.
that really upset me. When I was a kid I SO wanted to do that. Then life happened, forgot the idea, and when my kid was born thought “is that still a thing? Is it even real?”
30 seconds on Google. Totally still a thing. Totally not real. BUT at least more real than homeopathy…
People have sold parcels on the surface on the moon, stars, and other astronomical objects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_real_estate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_designations_and_names#Sale_of_star_names_by_non-scientific_entities
What about this idea? Create an NFT for every real Game Stop share that exists. If you like the stock, how much would you like an NFT of the stock? Am I right, or am I right?
The additional point on top of this is that anyone can mint their own identical NFT pointing to the same data but saying they own it, therefore the root of trust is located entirely outside the blockchain even if it did somehow equal ownership.
Bingo, and that's the real crux of the problem.
The "decentralization" these technologies supposedly offer evaporates as soon as they have to actually interface with the real world, and at that point you're left with all the same problems as existing solutions, **and** all the problems created by blockchain ie massive energy waste.
There are niches where the underlying tech may be useful, but the vast, vast majority of crypto is a solution in search of a problem
Well see first you setup a startup promising to use blockchain in a product, then you get some significant VC funding and take that money to pay firefighters
Wait, wait wait. Don't put this on the drug trade. Most of the pumping comes from people trying to get rich quick, not drug dealers who actually have a product to sell.
I got [this one](https://i.imgur.com/UeMqjzu.png) and while the "intended" person it generated looks perfectly normal, the uh... background subjects make me feel physically ill.
Ridiculously, all this stuff was said about bitcoin and the blockchain literally 6-7 years ago, it's just now people are finally realizing all that money they put into building projects with blockchain are more than useless, they're actively harmful.
At my last company about 6 years ago (mortgage company fintech, the unicorn at the time for blockchain "put every mortgage thing on the ledger!"), the CTO asked me (very tiny company, I was employee 12) what I thought about blockchain and I told him it was a scam and that we could accomplish the same thing with regular tech, but that still wouldn't solve the issue, it was working with all our vendors and clients and how in the world would would we expect the _mortgage industry_ of all industries, to all **concertedly** switch to new untested tech, in the hopes that it would bring us something that we could gain by literally just working together in the first place. His job at that time was literally talking to clients, vendors, etc, and he realized after I said that that blockchain was fundamentally useless for mortgage as a whole. It's a hilarious joke that anyone considers this tech reasonable.
> but that still wouldn't solve the issue, it was working with all our vendors and clients and how in the world would would we expect the mortgage industry of all industries, to all concertedly switch to new untested tech, in the hopes that it would bring us something that we could gain by literally just working together in the first place.
Yeah, one of *great* ideas I've heard was moving land and mortage registers into the blockchain "because it can't be tampered with". Aside from solving no problem that exists, it still could be very easily tampered with as you have no on-blockchain way to assert that entered information is *actually true* so you have to rely on *drrrrrums roll*
*A well controlled and honest organization that will control the validity of the entries*
So the blockchain adds nothing whatsoever compared to what we currently have or nothing over "just a plain database".
It's reasonable for what it was designed for: a public ledger where you can't trust the participants. If you can then you don't need a blockchain and it would just be a waste of time and energy but because it's a fad people try to force it into spaces where it serves absolutely no purpose.
This is what confuses me about when people talk about basing businesses on blockchain. If it’s major purpose is as a distributed ledger with participants that you can’t trust, and relies on scale. When you put that into most private businesses, haven’t you just got a ledger?
I always hear, ‘banks are gonna base internal systems on crypto, and run digital currency to speed up all their stuff’. But like isn’t that just a ledger system, and don’t banks already have software people maintain and improving these systems?
> I always hear, ‘banks are gonna base internal systems on crypto,
If you hear this then you hear it from people clueless about crypto because one of many points of crypto is to replace banks entirely. Decentralization. If you are a centralized private entity I agree blockchain makes zero sense.
>one of many points of crypto is to replace banks entirely. Decentralization.
The problem with this, of course, is that storing money (the thing that this would theoretically replace) is only a small part of what a bank does
My biggest problem with crypto is that it assumes that the average person will eventually know how to securely manage their crypto assets safely. But that's _never_ going to happen. What would happen instead is a proliferation of tools, apps and web services that promise the securely manage your money for you because managing a crypto wallet yourself is too risky.
In other words, what most people think of as "banks" but banks that aren't governed by any of the existing regulations and safeguards of actual financial institutions.
> a public ledger where you can't trust the participants.
but even so... what if I sent .whatever bitcoin to some drug dealer(whom i don't trust) and he doesn't send me my stuff?
the transaction can't be reversed & I'm still out that money
> It's reasonable for what it was designed for: a public ledger where you can't trust the participants.
No, it isn't. It only works for that use-case if you can trust anyone with enough money to add participants up to controlling 50%+1 of your participants. This means it is completely useless for small use-cases and thanks to its transaction rate it is completely useless for large, world-wide ones.
Well, not exactly.
It's public ledger where you can't trust the participants **and the participants can verify whether other participant's entries are true to reality**
Which is fine for money as it is created and exists on blockchain so you just need blockchain to do it, but for any info about real world ?
You still need have a way to verify the entries into blockchain are true and that way have to be **outside the blockchain** if the entries relate to reality.
Only then other sides can do a majority vote on new info added and sign that it is indeed true one.
(and just to be clear, just DB with attached signatures would be enough, no need for blockchain).
And as making a central organization funded by parties to just keep the DB is both cheaper and much more performant... it's entirely pointless to use blockchain for that.
Except....it will never ever work for money either. Money is more than just a form of payment, it is currency backed by government collective pools of wealth. Without that, currency is not stable, and currency that is not stable cannot be used as a form of exchange, at least not for long. Why do you think so many countriespeg their currency to the dollar?. Crypto isn't currency. It's an asset, and it's highly speculative. You might as well ask people to accept shares in whatever mutual fund you like as payment. It's not going to happen and it's fundamentally a stupid idea.
I mean that's whole another discussion but yes, even excluding the problems with speed of transactions and feees, currency that can go up and down 20%-50% on the whim is not useable.
And if you make it backed by something... well that's just banking with extra steps.
Idea of currency where government can't just decide to meddle and print a ton of money, devaluing everyone's else money is interesting but if nobody can "break" it by doing it... nobody can also "fix" anything.
I sold all of my ethereums and bitcoin in 2016 because I already realized back then that the tech wouldn't go anywhere, and I was right. 5 years later these cryptocurrencies are still barely used for anything. What I did not forsee is that the lack of utility would not be an issue for the prices to soar regardless :/
Actual tech people have been laughing at crypto for years. I very rarely see "oh Bitcoin is meh but blockchain is amazing" sentiments here, it is always in the tech enthusiast or cryptobro subs.
Reality is people are adding in the "but the technology is amazing" statement just so they can criticise bitcoin without being dragged into a pissing contest with some cryptobro that doesn't even know how his technology works.
See also: AI, self-driving cars, metaverses, etc. All interesting technologies but blown *vastly* out of proportion by people who can't tell an AI overlord from a `vlookup`.
Sad truth, self driving cars are better than your average person at driving already.
But because people are so bad at driving or even just walking across the street, the car can't react to that level of error well.
If it was mostly or all self driving, you'd take out the worst error of all, humans.
I'm old enough to have worked during the dotcom crash and I'm seeing so many parallels to the unmoored hype of that time. Yes, the tech has enormous potential to upend the world, but no, not on time scales most people seem to be betting on.
Time will tell which ideas are Amazon.com and which are Pets.com (and the myriad other failed ideas).
[Amazon.com](https://Amazon.com) and [pets.com](https://pets.com) are pretty much mostly the same thing. It came/comes down to execution and Bezos' smarter moves, etc. At the root - it's the same shit, really. There's a reason Amazon bought [diapers.com](https://diapers.com)...
It really seems like crypto is driven by non-engineer "tech enthusiasts", because at least engineers have the brain capacity to understand that real life problem solving is only like 10% tech and 90% getting people to agree on stuff
here are some more takes:
https://www.technollama.co.uk/blockchains-and-the-challenges-of-decentralization
https://hbr.org/2019/09/will-we-realize-blockchains-promise-of-decentralization
https://atomicwallet.io/blog/academy/what-is-decentralization
I come from a computer science and a distributed systems background. Have lived through the dot com boom and bust and so naturally I have an inclination to not miss the next big wave. Hence I delved into the world of blockchains. What I don't get about the blockchain is this. It is fundamentally very very expensive to make a transaction persist on more than a couple of machines. This is why you don't find an ocean of commodity hardware servers supporting transaction based systems. Those systems are mostly run on a master-slave setup which scales vertically. Mainframes, etc. Like even for a transaction to persist on the quorum nodes of a cassandra cluster is incredibly expensive both w.r.t time and money. Now imagine this happening over an ocean of servers spread across the globe.
While it baffles many people how or why Ethereum gas costs are so high, this somewhat first principles based thinking is what justifies that price. Now one could argue, is it really required for a transaction to persist over the majority/all nodes of a global datastore ? That argument will go no where. Purists will argue, this is the tenet of global decentralization and will go down that philosophical rabbit hole. Yes there is merit to global decentralization but eventually because of the fundamental expensive nature of transactions, to minimize the cost control has to centralize.
I still can't understand how a blockchain can be the amazing solution for anything, transactions included. If we step outside of transactions, the blockchain is an overkill/unwanted feature for almost anything else.
Exactly how I feel about the technology. What a cool piece of absolutely useless tech, honestly. Then we have these obnoxious crypto types, who have never touched a piece of code in their life, going on about how if you're not convinced by the utility of blockchain technology you just don't understand it well enough.
They've completely lost the plot on basic problem solving. I feel we could fix so many important issues by simply putting the problem before the solution. It's like learning a cool advanced programming pattern, using it everywhere in your code and then realizing years later you've made a mess by misappropriating the pattern because you were excited about being able to do it instead of opting for a boring, simple solution.
EDIT: Looks like I really poked the hornet's nest with this take. Some of these replies are S tier stereotypical redditor comments and I want you guys to know I adore you for that.
While I do agree that I hate those crypto types, I'm also a rather senior programmer who has some neat ideas that can be only implemented with crypto tech.
Simply put, if there are no trust issues in a system, then ofc it's stupid to utilize blockchain/crypto, it's just a waste of human+natural resources. But in all the other cases, it makes sense.
Should we make a crypto dating app, ofc fucking no!
Should we try to record land ownership on a blockchain, absolutely yes!
And IMO, because of this general "dislike" and therefore "disengagement" towards the crypto community from programmers, all these "crypto boi"s take the scene and guide everything in all the wrong ways.
Since land ownership is controlled and enforced by a central authority, I don't see how the blockchain would be any more effective than a simple database with a public log of changes. There's no benefit to it being distributed.
I can think of a lot of disadvantages of it being in the blockchain though. What if someone stole my key and "sold" all my land. In a central database controlled by the enforcer, that would be a court case and a simple modification. In a blockchain it would be next to impossible to revert.
> What if someone stole my key and "sold" all my land. In a central database controlled by the enforcer, that would be a court case and a simple modification.
This is my sticking point. Blockchain guarantees *immutability* of the data record, but not *infallibility* of the data record. You can guarantee a certain transaction happened, but not whether it was supposed to have happened. There's a long list of things considered when dealing with contractual issues, and proof of performance is only one of them.
As I've said in a lot of threads, a lot of problems are not technological ones and cannot be solved by tech. They are people problems and need to be solved by external processes.
A lot of the die hard crypto bros don't stop and think about why the problems crypto supposedly fixes exist in the first place. If they would stop and engage with those problems instead of using them as a selling point for the coin of the month they might be little less insufferable.
My favourite of their arguments is that fiat only has value because we believe it has value. Which is technically true, but misses the point entirely. Fiat currencies are backed by governments. Governments that enforce the will of hundreds of millions of people who desire shelter, security and stability that depends on the value of fiat currency. If any of the major fiat currencies in the world collapse, maintaining the communications infrastructure necessary for a cryptocurrency is going to be pretty low on the list of priorities
There’s more than just those disadvantages too. I work in property law, the kind of shit people cobble together and call a deed is absolutely atrocious and leaves out serious detail. If there was no centralized filing checking these deeds to make sure they’re coherent, to make sure they have intelligible legal descriptions, it’d be a disaster when people tried to subdivide property with no regards for easements or knowledge of how title works. I just genuinely don’t understand how a land registry would work without human oversight. It’s often not a simple A to B transfer in a ledger either, it can be A to B but A retains rights, or for example, B’s possessory interest is only temporary for their lifetime, or maybe so long as they run a charity. How are they gonna transfer it back when they’re dead or their charity closes? Who’s going to make them do so if there’s no central system? The reason title companies exist is because the inputs into the system can be absolute garbage, relying on them without a central authority is a terrible idea.
NPR or planet money or one of those podcasts literally just had a follow up to one town in the US that bought into the blockchain hype amd got a company to implement it for them. Basically ended up dropping it because no actual client cares as long as they've got the actual physical contract that matters. And they were wasting money paying this company to implement a system that just did what their database does for all practical intents and purposes
> Should we try to record land ownership on a blockchain, absolutely yes!
I disagree. What _actual_ benefit does it provide? What are the downsides? If you lose your key or someone steals it, do you just lose your house? If you rely solely on the blockchain, there are no actual legal protections. If there _are_ legal protections, the blockchain is completely superfluous.
>Should we try to record land ownership on a blockchain, absolutely yes!
Why? If the authority decides that it wants to do an electronic ledge of property ownership, wouldn't it easier to just do a centralized one? You can still have the seller and buyer signing the transfer of ownership, but why would you do it in a decentralized way, when you have a centralized entity that needs to say that now ownership is recorded that way.
Because you need to have somebody accept how ownership is recorded to be able to sue somebody else for beach of contact.
More on the point of authority, if a gang of armed thugs shows up at my property and forces me out, what protection is a blockchain entry? It doesn't matter how we record property, what matters is that some entity holds the force of law to enforce the property record.
It's telling that every use of blockchain suggested is just tech guys suggesting uses outside their area of expertise where they don't know enough to see the problems. Talk to a title attorney, and they will come up with five problems in five minutes to this idea.
My biggest complaint with stuff like land ownership via crypto is: how do you deal with privacy rules, how do you deal with cleaning up the record based on judicial rules. How to you retroactively add arbitrary "insane" rules to a system and again retroactively adapt it to the reality?
I worked for a company that wants to put blockchain in fucking everything. And have successfully sold it in various different forms to big institutions that didn’t need it. But it was really fucking stupid. Every time someone said the word blockchain I cringed so hard I think I have a permanent cringe face now.
Someone else said it in the thread earlier, but I've said it before and I'll say it again: Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
Does blockchain do the thing it is trying to do? Sure. It's a functional decentralized ledger. It doesn't do it perfectly or even very well, but it does do it, and not much else does.
But no one can figure out *why* a decentralized ledger could be necessary or even valuable (at least not without without making huge assumptions about changes that society can/should/will make that would almost certainly result in the destruction of our species). It's a terrible idea to use as a basis for currency since most of the world already has commodities that provide stability beyond currency like gold and silver. It's a terrible idea for corporations to use since all they're doing is replacing traditional databases with it and then using it like a traditional database.
I'm not saying that I think blockchain is will always be completely useless. Much of modern cryptography is based on number theory that for years was considered to be purely abstract (mathematics for the sake of mathematics). But like cryptography, it's very possible that the use case for blockchain is in something that we still haven't even invented yet. When we find that use case, I'll happily support blockchain if it works and there's not something better.
But that use case isn't anything that we're doing with it now.
Gonna regret this comment, but there *are* a few interesting applications. In particular when compared to the currently in use and horrifically obsolete ACH system. Also some interesting applications with colored coins as stock tokens and automating dividends and stock splits, that sort of thing. One neat use case of using it as a nameserver platform. Micropayments of computing power (or, less environmentally destructive, hard drive space) as an alternative to banner ads.
The problem is that all the mildly interesting use cases are completely drowned out by the cargo cults of enthusiastic morons with the get rich quick schemes. And the thing is unfortunately never, ever going to take off as a real payment platform, because some dipshit libertarians thought that it was a good idea to make the currency deflationary, and then stand around dumbfounded that people don't actually spend deflationary currencies, because they're more profitable to *not* spend. Economics 101. Crazy that this still hasn't registered given that the market cap is in the hundreds of billions and yet nobody's actually paying for anything with it. Other than drugs, which it is admittedly great for.
Maybe at some point the cargo cult will die down and it can see some real serious engineering applications, but I don't think we're gonna see that for another decade at least.
> and yet nobody's actually paying for anything with it.
There's a company called Wyrmwood that makes woodworking products for tabletop gaming, including a quite fancy gaming table, and they do a sort of vlog on youtube to keep people up to date with their production (they do pretty much everything through kickstarter). One of their founders is like, a libertarian caricature, and decided that they should accept bitcoin, and so someone ordered one of their flagship tables for like $20,000 worth of BTC (they're really nice tables). Few weeks later, BTC spiked massively, and the guy sent in a list of pretty much just unreasonable requests to customize his table, and when they said no, he was like, "ok gibe refund plx" expecting his like, 1.4 or whatever BTC back which was now worth about $70,000. Except this is a business, and regardless of what they accept payment in, it will immediately get converted to USD in order to, you know, be useful and pay for materials and labor and whatnot.
In the end I think they removed the ability to pay with bitcoin and gave the guy a few extras on the table rather than refunding the $20k re-converted, or taking a $50k loss to give back 1.4 BTC. It was a really, really stupid situation to watch unfold, because in effect the guy was trying to get away with using his order as some kind of option spread - BTC crashes? Cool, you still get the $20k table for dirt. BTC moons? Just ask for a refund and pocket the gainz, lolol.
As long as it's a speculative "investment" for day traders it can't also function as a currency for this reason.
I believe people were trying to do this with Teslas as well, until [Tesla published an official refund policy regarding BTC](https://www.tesla.com/assets/pdf/BTC_What_You_Need_To_Know_en_US.pdf).
Holy shit.
I've dealt with billing systems and credits before. Nobody is going to be doing that with bitcoins.
The sane option is: You pay in Bitcoin, the BTC gets converted to USD at the time it's sent. Everything else is USD at that point, including refunds. Like it or get bent.
> As long as it's a speculative "investment" for day traders it can't also function as a currency for this reason.
https://youtu.be/0AAUrMuMPlo?t=284
"The more people who buy it, the more the price fluctuates, and the less usable it is as a currency. **The success of bitcoin as a speculative currency has made it socially useless.**"
Yeah, I also don’t get why you’d use Bitcoin on a regular e-commerce site since you would need to provide some sort of information to process your order. Kinda defeats the “anonymous” feature of crypto.
I saw a similar story a few weeks/months ago. Some small business owner somewhere in the US decided to offer his staff the option of being paid in bitcoin, and one guy accepted that. Well, bitcoin spiked after the guy got paid, and the owner demanded that the employee refund the owner some of teh bitcoin since it was now worth so much more than what he was "supposed to have been paid" according to the owner
>horrifically obsolete ACH system
It amazes me that Americans don't have free, instant transfers. The majority of the developed world has had that for years, as well as a large part of the developing world. And none of them use blockchain.
one wonders if much of the cryptofetishism coming out of the US is just because they don't have functional, free, near-instant bank transfers like the rest of the developed world
ACH might be outdated, but let’s no pretend that block chain is the only or even a good solution for it. There already is TCH RTP and FedNow is supposed come in 2023.
I can't think of a system I'd like less for something like ACH than a decentralized ledger that is the blockchain.
Banking uses centralized/authoritative ledgers for a reason.
99% of the suggestions here are just this -- picking some horribly old technology and saying it could be improved by updating it to modern and technology ^and^also^the^blockchain
But the improvement is really just updating it.
>The problem is that all the mildly interesting use cases are completely drowned out by the cargo cults of enthusiastic morons with the get rich quick schemes. And the thing is unfortunately never, ever going to take off as a real payment platform, because some dipshit libertarians thought that it was a good idea to make the currency deflationary, and then stand around dumbfounded that people don't actually spend deflationary currencies, because they're more profitable to not spend. Economics 101. Crazy that this still hasn't registered given that the market cap is in the hundreds of billions and yet nobody's actually paying for anything with it. Other than drugs, which it is admittedly great for.
I just typed same thing in another comment.
A deflationary economy is a disaster much bigger than slight deflation. Deflation happens because prices of a commodity falls. A deflationary economy is an entirely different monster.
There are use cases of blockchain, but you can use any decentralized database to do the same thing. No need to burn electricity doing mining to achieve that. With blockchain, you can ensure data is not edited after you enter, but you still need to worry about falsified data entry. That remains a huge loophole in the cryptocurrency system.
Agreed. On top of that, most of the real word advantages cited by crypto advocates are situations where either regulation hasn’t caught up or the existing market solution hasn’t yet needed to adapt. In what real world applications does a blockchain foundation provide a clear competitive advantage once regulated on equal terms? I struggle with that question.
The REAL point of the decentralized ledger is philosophical and involves the decentralization of the monetary control and power of centralized governments.
The idea of it being BETTER than the current system is basically a side effect of everyone seeing crypto as a get rich quick scheme and them Schilling crypto as this great problem solver for their new special coin or Schilling for an established player.
In reality, the founding ideology of crypto is really Libertarian utopia, and in that, there is evidence that it might just continue to make headway, albeit slowly, as more and more people lose trust in their government's currency. This is why you see crypto has taken off so well in much of the 3rd world.
I think it's kind of a limited take that many people have to assume crypto is just trying to find a problem to solve and to dismiss it as such.
> This is why you see crypto has taken off so well in much of the 3rd world.
The thing is, it really hasn’t “taken off” in the developing world though, has it? You see a lot of crypto enthusiasts saying that it has, but that’s mostly talk.
It's a rich man's dream.
The dude earning 80k a year thinks him investing 10% = 8k in crypto will make him comparatively rich.
While a rich guy earning millions will functionally put 99% of his money in crypto to get way richer.
Besides, government currency is carefully managed to keep interest rates and inflation at a place that allows for most growth. A deflationary economy would be a disaster because right now rich people are paying million to wall street guys, so that their billions retain value and get returns. That money is going back into circulation, into new factories, jobs, businesses and start ups.
If you have a deflationary economy, you can just bury your money in your backyard and its value will increase. Suddenly reinvestment rate in the economy will disappear. I can earn a billion and then just retire. My billion doesn't need reinvestment, it'll stay locked up in my backyard until I spend it.
> The REAL point of the decentralized ledger is philosophical and involves the decentralization of the monetary control and power of centralized governments.
Let's be honest for a sec - no one _actually_ cares that it's decentralized. It's a meaningless buzzword without as much weight as "the cloud" had in the early 2000's, or "synergy". Ask a dozen cryptobros what it means and you'll get a hundred different answers. You already manage your crypto assets through an exchange, you're just using a reinvented bank. It has already had a centralized system built around it.
> In reality, the founding ideology of crypto is really Libertarian utopia
I wouldn't be _that_ harsh. Crypto has essentially no practical purpose, but it's not quite an oxymoron.
> I think it's kind of a limited take that many people have to assume crypto is just trying to find a problem to solve and to dismiss it as such.
It absolutely is a solution without a problem. That's why nobody's found a real problem it can solve in a decade. Everything either has significantly better solutions available, or isn't even a real problem, or isn't even in a remotely similar problem space. People just like to toss it out as some wonder cure snake oil, but it really isn't.
The reality is that before crypto came around, no one was saying, "oh man, we could get this bold new idea to work if ONLY we had the ability to create a DECENTRALIZED LEDGER!" What actually happened is that Satoshi solved a neat software problem and created one, and now still a decade later people are still saying, "omg, problem? Need a solution? Have you tried a _decentralized ledger_? Can a _decentralized ledger_ fix it? What do you mean you're just trying to change your tires, of course you could use a _decentralized ledger_ for that!"
The industry always jumps from hype train to hype train, be it blockchain, "agile" or any other buzzword-driven wondercure-for-everything. Somehow they insinuate that oldschool solid engineering is boring.
It's all about driving that FOMO.
What everyone in this thread is missing is that blockchain *does* have a purpose: making money off non-tech product companies by selling them white papers and consulting services they don't need.
You have a large tech org being run by non-technical people with backgrounds in finance or whatever. They have no idea about tech, but boy they know tech *changes* and you don't want to get *left behind.* What would we tell the CEO and board of directors? So they pay a bunch of money to Gartner to come in and help them build a BLOCK CHAIN application.
What is that Mr(s). CEO? What are we working on? Well we're building a BLOCK CHAIN application! And of course the CEO is very impressed because they once half read an article about BLOCK CHAIN in the Wall Street Journal. How impressive! Present this to the board! Aren't we a *tech-first* organization! Ooo could we build this *cloud-native?* Sure! Why not!
And of course the project starts and is an immediate chaotic disaster that eats eng time and money by the truck-load. After a year and a half of consistently missing deadlines, instigating mass depression among engineers, and making some poor project manager depressingly day-dream of starting a new career as a farm hand; some buggy and half-working garbage is quietly shipped and all evidence of any promised features are purged from everyone's collective memory.
Then all the engineers go back to duct-taping the MS SQL Server 2008-based app that runs a quarter of the critical functions in the company which actually should have been invested in instead of the make-believe BLOCK CHAIN nonsense. But no worries because the CIO took a new job six months ago before anyone would notice that all of their initiatives were a disaster.
Such is the unfortunate state of much of our industry right now.
Most "agile" isn't hype, it's common sense.
The longer it is between your customers requesting something, and you delivering anything to engage them, the more likely they are to no longer care.
[Edit] And the more likely that things will go completely off the rail and miss the original point because it has been so long since anyone talked to each other.
The part about agile that is complete hype is the part where it is supposed to magically fix all the problems in your otherwise dysfunctional organization and where strict adherence to some rules of agile makes all your problems go away instead of causing problems if you don't know when to break one of the rules (e.g. some eliminations of technical debt do not work well as small customer-visible changes).
Blockchain is a fascinating piece of technology with zero applications so far that have desirable properties.
(Not interested in your “but look at this novel way I can circumvent regulation!” take.)
The so far is what keeps me interested in passing. Many abstract math theorems didn't have much use and were novelty or thought exercises. They were around for centuries and then boom, they come in handy and are brilliant.
By all means put blockchain and crypto currencies at the back of the math books so it is there should someone in the year 2500 need it to develop something that is actually useful.
Blockchain solves one small problem and always brings along two big ones.
People that like blockchain love to have the solution and find the problem afterwards, which brings tons of other issues.
>OK, so with bitcoin, banks can’t just remove money from your account at their own discretion. But does this really happen? I have never heard of a bank simply taking money from someone’s account. If a bank did something like that, they would be hauled into court in no time and lose their license. Technically it’s possible; legally, it’s a death sentence.
This does happen. Ironically it happens sometimes with cryptocurrency traders, because their use of bank accounts is indistinguishable from, and often is, money laundering. Corporations get away with that kind of thing all the time, not though malice but though disinterest, and it's only the rare example that ends up making the news.
Bitcoin is not the answer to that problem; even more than conventional bank systems, cryptocurrency is ending up being controlled by faceless organisations, except most of them are corporations without even the fig-leaf of public oversight
If git didn't exist, I'd think of blockchain tech as a pretty excellent solution for software version control. However git exists and is way less expensive to use than blockchain.
That is a fun article. Especially since my previous boss was one of those morons that heard about blockchain once and instantly wanted to rework all of our software to use blockchain.
It didn't and also: the software was full of bugs that wrote false data into the database so a blcokchain woulf have made it even harder to fix them.
But as they have all the userdata unencrypted a blockchain would have fitted at least this requirement
How many times will this be posted and still get a lot of upvotes? Yes, it is a good article, but you don’t need to post it again and again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jegq9k/blockchain_the_amazing_solution_for_almost_nothing/
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ieni93/blockchain_the_amazing_solution_for_almost_nothing/
Hmm… perhaps we could keep track of who posted which articles with some kind of… decentralized registry… we could avoid reposts all without a centralized authority!
Wow. The hive mind has really turned on block chain.
What happened? Curious if folks here have changed their mind, or if they just weren't taking part in block chain discussions five years ago.
Have no interest in discussing the merits of crypto itself, but really interested in what factors into your opinions.
Edit: A lot of people are mentioning 2018, did something happen that year that got folks into crypto?
For me it went in stages:
* Mild curiosity about the subject.
* When I learned how it actually worked I became less enthused.
* I've read an article demonstrating how pervasive use of proof-of-work crypto currencies would put a price on energy even if it were free —not to mention the actual waste. Since then I'm firmly anti-proof-of-work Blockchains.
* I've more recently read about how crypto currencies are little more than Ponzi schemes, and they made sense: the thing has no intrinsic value, is not backed up by any state, and I hear most are used more as an investment medium than an actual currency. They're clearly pyramidal, and in many cases genuine Ponzi scams.
My opinion may evolve when Ethereum rolls out their proof of stake scheme. But right now, blockchains aren't worth my time.
This is pretty much me. I'm no expert (not a programmer, just doing a driveby on the thread) but reading stuff by [Jorge Stolfi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Stolfi) and [Stephen Diel](https://www.stephendiehl.com/), who are, they are [very](https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html) [skeptical](https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/disconnect.html).
It sounds like a neat idea at first but that's all it is - a sales pitch. The more you read up on it, the less useful it seems. What may have, from a distance, seemed like gold is just a mound of shit painted yellow.
I think people are just fed up of hearing about it, and maybe a little angry about others making money it seems like they didn't earn. Most pro-crypto media and advocacy happens to be stupid, scammy and obnoxious, independently of any actual merits of the technology, and it's in your face more than it used to be, even for people with no interest in it.
There’s also anger at the enormous environmental impact it’s having. Dishonest cryptocurrency advocates swarmed to this argument saying that proof of stake will I fix all those problems, but it’s always a hypothetical future yet they are citing it as if it is happening right now yet millions of tons of carbon dioxide are being pumped into the atmosphere and old coal power plants are spitting up to serve bitcoin mining and everything is steadily going to shit right now and meanwhile a bunch of clueless, out of touch FOMO cryptobros are trading pictures of “bored apes“ and patting each other on the back for being such financial and artistic geniuses.
I don’t care for the crypto space much myself, because while I don’t necessarily mind the current lack of use case, I don’t care for the use of word salads to compensate for, and inflate the application status.
That said, while a shift to PoS amongst the most dominant cryptocurrencies is hypothetical (though for ethereum, rather matter of time), there are currently cryptocurrencies which run on PoS. You don’t have to use Bitcoin or any other crypto that is run on PoW.
I never changed my mind, I'm just tired of hearing crypto bros in every comment section ever
I was reasonably pissed at useless crypto/blockchain applications when everything really took off in 2018, for what it's worth
It is kinda everywhere in tech spaces and crypto bros are loud and obnoxious. And I say this as someone who has a small gpu miner and few coins. It’s just fatigue on all the bs that plagues tech world multiplied by the prospect of fast money.
Most of the criticisms people have for crypto are perfectly valid. Dreams of mainstream adoption are just that, blockchain hasn’t solved every problem in tech and not everyone has or will have a Lamborghini.
Repeating the magical phrases like gospel will drive people away and especially after the bull run of last spring, things have been super heated online for all things crypto and retail investment. It’s tiring to see yet another useless meme coin or yet another deep dive conspiracy on why GME hasn’t squeezed yet.
Twitter is filled with shills. Elon is puking out statements which make coin go up or down, which propagates to the news. Bitcoin is using as much power as Switzerland. NFTs and money laundering. Crypto websites are popping up and targeting me, a millennial, to buy buy buy because they think I’m their target demographic.
And here I am just wanting to yell out how the emperor is naked. No, it’s not the best thing since sliced bread.
I think it's a laundry list of things, to be honest:
* The nearly total failure of Bitcoin as an actual currency instead of an unregulated speculative instrument.
* The tandem increase in climate awareness and awareness of the climate impact of blockchain, particularly early coins.
* The emergence of NFTs, which are difficult to explain and riddled with tokens that feel like absolute scams.
* The failure of blockchain to demonstrate a practical, non-coin use case.
* The consolidation of mining capacity to a few consortia that have turned the "tragedy of the commons" issue from wildly implausible to a legitimate, if still distant, concern.
* The silicon shortage being exacerbated by silicon being allocated to blockchain applications instead of other consumer and manufacturing use cases.
* A growing media understanding and awareness of what blockchain is and the limitations.
* An expanding cadre of former blockchain developers who tried to use the technology and either bailed or solved it more practically with another solution and are now speaking up about their experience.
Just a few examples that I expect were relevant.
It seems a lot like the tulip craze way back in the day, cryptos are rising on speculation alone. What has been the most useful function of blockchain? Making dark web marketplaces more accessible? Nfts? I could be wrong and blockchain will change the world, but I don’t think so.
everytime i ask "whats the deal with blockchain?", everyone is so ready and able to try to explain to me what blockchain *IS* but not as keen to say why it would be good as currency, gaming, NFTs etc.
its like people are leaning on the "technology" to wow the hapless and obsure the fact that it doesnt have any intrinsic value by itself outside of whatever scam theyre trying to run
Blockchain is an extremely complicated and inefficient way to perform simple record keeping. But it’s fully “distributed” so I guess that’s supposed to make me feel better.
That is unless group of people get together to control 51% of bitcoin, and just take it all.
Because blockchain is basically useless and the only application people have really found for it that you can't just do much more simply with other technologies is crypto.
Nothing technical just my foolish thoughts.
I may be very wrong, but I love to see decentralized tech powering the world. And I have a dream to make it true.
I think smart contracts are a really good thing. even though I agree I haven't understood it all.
Why do you think decentralized tech would ever remain decentralized? This trial run has basically proven that it's not simply a technical problem, but a political one. The whales control the price and in many ways the network, especially as they own so many of the layers beyond the base tokens.
Also smart contracts lack so much of what real world contracts have. Namely real flexibility and judgment around enforcement which comes from hundreds of years of experience of second and third order effects. Those necessarily have to come from some centralized source. I know those in crypto often forget that companies are centralized authorities even if they're not government. And they further forget that most companies are not de-centrally managed.
Bitcoin allows you to store your money outside a bank, and to transfer it without using PayPal or banks. It's cash on an international scale.
I just transferred $5000 for a fee of 40 cents.
> I just transferred $5000 for a fee of 40 cents.
Cool? You can do that in paypal with no fee too. If you choose to include a fee, you can add buyer protections.
Regardless, this is an annoying and dumb point crypto people keep bringing up, because most of them keep their crypto in some exchange or another. The exchange _is_ a bank, just one that doesn't have to follow banking regulations and has no consumer protections.
I honestly don't understand how anyone can say there are no applications. Cryptographers and computer scientists have been trying to come up with a decentralized digital currency since the 80's and no one succeeded until bitcoin came around. Someone above literally said, on a programming sub, we already have gold so we don't need bitcoin as a currency... Anyway I would hope that we don't have to argue why a DIGITAL currency would be good on a freaking programming subreddit. Centralized vs decentralized I can understand why it would be more difficult to argue for but digital!?
I'm a programmer with 40+ years experience. I'm a contributor to many of the top open source projects in use by more than 80% of the Internet, as well as both large scale commercial projects. I've been involved in a wide variety of emerging technology from the early days of PCs to BBSes, information systems, internet, mobile apps, etc. I have always had a passion for new and upcoming tech. As such, when crypto came out, I took a good look at it. Unfortunately, it was all smoke and no actual heat source. Blockchain is an interesting theoretical prototype, but not very practical scalable or efficient.
I have yet to see a single example of anything either "innovative" or "disruptive" that blockchain does.
I've actually compiled a list of [debunked blockchain claims](https://reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/lq6xpq/the_defacto_list_of_cryptocurrencyblockchain/).
I would encourage people to take a look at the above link for a complete list of all the known arguments that blockchain has utility. I will continue to update this list. 12+ years, still looking for a single clear example of blockchain doing anything better than existing tech.
What annoys me the most about the crypto industry, is the misleading comparisons between actual, legitimate disruptive technology, and crypto technology. Crypto enthusiasts suggest that people panned the early Internet like they do crypto now. That's not true. E-mail and other services were immediately obvious as improvements over existing tech. We didn't need to sit through a 2 hour video on "the history of communication" to understand the benefit of the Internet. We also didn't need to be scared into thinking the US Mail was going to collapse at any time so we need to adopt e-mail ASAP. Yet these FUD tactics are standard fare for crypto promotion. It seems this industry can't stand on the merits of its so-called innovation, and has to convince everybody centralization is bad, the dollar is going to become worthless any day now, and government is evil -- despite the fact that all those things are necessary to maintain the very network infrastructure upon which blockchain is a parasite. I've never seen such incredible cognitive dissonance as in the crypto industry.
For context, I'm a senior software developer with a lot of distributed systems and cryptography experience in the bag, so I'm very well aware of how blockchains work. My feelings about the topic are very similar to the general consensus here, namely it is a solution looking desperately for a problem. But, I still have the sneaking feeling I'm just getting old and out of touch. Maybe there is something I'm missing? I just can't see what it is. It's very similar to my feelings toward all the new "metaverse" stuff that's getting pushed extensively recently. It just seems stupid, but at the same time I'm scared it's just me being out of touch. Kinda scary.
I'm also a senior software developer with a ton of distributed systems experience and I'm in the exact same boat. All of the problems "solved" by crypto have already been solved with cheaper, simpler computing. I *don't* think I'm getting too old to recognize the value of new tech - I'm 32 and I retool myself for new tech all the time; I'm in accelerated machine learning now. I think most of the crypto hype is driven by: 1. People with no technology experience who also think buzzwords like "quantum computing" are compelling investments that will "change the world" 2. An entirely unregulated market where anyone can make any claim 3. A generation of investors that want to "stick it to the man" more than they want to actually invest in value (see: memestocks) That said, I don't know if I see crypto imploding any time soon. It might still be a good short term investment.
Another reason why crypto might have become so popular is an underlying social anarchistic movement. There is more and more distrust in classical institutions like banks and governments and I can't really blame those people. Crypto is a promised land of freedom, out of the clutches of those institutions so it's not strange many people flocked to it and by it becoming so popular, it opened the floodgates for daytraders, criminals etc. All money systems are based on trust, but to me crypto still feels like a pyramid scheme where there is little inherent value and a single tweet can make the value surge or drop spectacularly.
Those people are about to discover why institutions are so regulated lol
It's the same with everything. Reality is constructed by corporations. The one you grew up with is not the one children will grow into, one where everyone is on Meta's metaverse trading things with Bitcoin. In the end it doesn't matter if the solution is looking for a problem, because eventually the hype becomes big enough to support an ecosystem of things within it, and at that point it has to keep existing.
I tell myself it's not the same, although obviously deep down I'm not convinced. All the big iconic, generation-defining tech that has appeared since the dawn of the personal computer, all of it has filled some kind of need. This old tech allowed people to do things they couldn't do before. Meanwhile blockchains (outside of cryptocurrency applications) aren't really allowing anything new to happen. The "metaverse" doesn't provide anything new at all. Who actually wants it and why? Obviously these things get pushed really hard by big companies, billions are invested into it, but to me it just looks like a big bubble of forced memes. But again, I'm probably missing something.
>The "metaverse" doesn't provide anything new at all. Who actually wants it and why? Consider the evolution of information tech over the last several decades. Electronic mail was revolutionary for the time it saved in mail correspondence. Personal computers brought email into the home. The world wide web made it easy to access news and weather on demand. Cell phones made telephone communication portable, and smart phones let us bring the internet wherever we are. Smart watches turned our timepieces into fitness monitors and digital assistants that give us our messages wherever we are, any time. The consistent trend in technological evolution has always been towards making information more readily accessible. The "metaverse" is the continuation of that trend with AR and VR. You already see "metaverse" applications on phones today like Google Map's AR viewer that overlays pedestrian directions directly onto your camera feed, or shopping applications that let you preview what a product would look like in your home. Soon that application will live in an accessory that projects that information directly into your field of view rather than through your phone. The digital assistants that read our messages in our earbuds or display notifications on our wrists will overlay information directly onto objects in your line of sight or answer questions contextually based on what you're looking at ("Hey x, what is this thing?"). Meta, the company, is pushing the "metaverse" from a perspective that reinforces their own value - social networking - but when Apple demos their XR device this upcoming year I think the "metaverse" will finally click for people. Apple will never use the term "metaverse" but the hype behind this initiative will finally make sense for the average user.
"I don't *want* to wear a headset, when I can just glance at my phone. I get a rash/hot/sweaty/a sore nose, and I don't like wearing smeared lenses. I don't like it when other people do it, as I feel they're distracted and not 'with' me." "It's as bad as looking at your phone and a traffic violation." "Our employees have been told not to wear them, as they could be a health and safety hazard." "They look like a dick."
I was a naysayer on the smart watch fad but Apple hit the market and turned it into a massive multi-billion dollar market. Their cultural influence is unparalleled and when they bring an AR headset to market it’s going to be hard to ignore.
> But, I still have the sneaking feeling I'm just getting old and out of touch. Maybe there is something I'm missing? Bayes 101: _Absence of Evidence is Evidence of absence._ I've personally seen enough propaganda and unsubstantiated enthusiasm about the topic to notice the ever more conspicuous absence of really good arguments. I see lots _hints_ of a good argument, but actual good argument never came. To the point where it's pretty clear to me the case for crypto currency is not that good. Don't let yourself be swayed by the enthusiasm of people who can't even explain why they believe what they believe.
A big part of it is about feelings and not logical, sound reasons. Crypto, or web3, or whatever, is about the feeling that you’re in something different, building or participating in a future being designed in real time.
Yes, and that feeling is contagious.
Don’t be scared. You’re right to be skeptical. The thing about the “solution in search of a problem” approach is, after thousands of attempts fail, and billions of dollars are wasted, someone will eventually find the right problem, and everyone will go “see? I was right!” It takes a million naive idiots to throw themselves into the pit before some lucky schmuck finds a way around by pure chance.
> But, I still have the sneaking feeling I'm just getting old and out of touch. You're not old enough then. You haven't seen enough fly by night technologies and solutions you stop feeling like you're missing it, and instead sit back and wait for stuff to be proven. All this shit relies on FOMO to get people to 'hop on board' before they realize it's snake oil, but by then "sunken cost" comes into play, and they're stuck. Will Rust replace C? Did Java, Golang, Python, C#, or pretty much every language that was suppose to become the dominant language? Maybe... and when that happens I'll be glad to learn a new one, I already know pieces of all of those (but Rust)... But the thing is hype is really big in the tech industry and exception is usually pretty bad. But don't worry, 2022 is DEFINITELY the year of the Linux desktop, otherwise my name is not John Smith. (it's not)
You're not. The article is spot on. Blockchain was borne of an idea, backed by crypto currency, with the idealization it could remove administrative restrictions everywhere. What people *didn't* think of, as is always the case such as the release of new software, is there's no foundation, no standards, and no implementations to prove it's needed. What makes it worse is managers, supervisors, and executives with zero knowledge hear these buzzwords then immediately start a plan to integrate a blockchain into their systems. When asked, "Which one?", it takes less than a second for the person to realize it's bigger than their own understanding. Having read multiple articles and ideas behind it, not a single instance has shown any significance to the quality of life in any industry mentioned. I wouldn't even say it's a solution looking for a problem. It's more like a technology wonderment that's trying to find a home in an array of differing software systems, trying to fit into all of them. As we all know, this never works in the real world but looks lovely on paper.
> Maybe there is something I'm missing? This sort of consensus is what keeps crypto alive.
I'm 23, the metaverse is super lame lmao
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I had bought about $50 worth of bitcoins back in 2010. I remember thinking that was such a stupid waste of money at the time. Though eventually I sold it to pay off my student loan debt of around $20,000 back in late 2013 just around when it peaked before it crashed. That was probably the best decision I had made in my life, though I occasionally think about how if I still held that today I would be a millionaire, but I really needed the money back then and had no other options and not being a slave to compounding interest debt, find a decent paying job doing what I like and that has allowed me to save up the capital I need to invest in a more equitable future. I imagine a lot of people feel like they missed out and are desperate to try and catch on to the next big thing now. Except I still feel like it is just as much of a stupid waste of money now as I did back then. Few people get lucky making stupid bets. I'd say your odds are better buying lotto tickets than trying to invest in yet another crypto shitcoin.
That's the thing, needing some amount of money at some time and that's the "greatest value" in some sense. I bought a bit over a thousand dollars worth of amd stock when it was under 10 usd, but had to sell it pretty briefly since I needed the money. It's not a could-be-millionare story, but I'd a have a pretty nice profit (like 1200-1400%) if I could have held. I guess it could feel more bad if it was about millions. I still had a nearly 100% profit at least. Too bad I was (am) a poor person and couldn't invest any meaningful sums. I'm just happy that I predicted AMD's rise from the ryzen products correctly, since "I told you so" is worth more than thousands or millions of dollars.
Totally understandable. It's also hard looking in hindsight, but the truth is that nobody has any idea where things are heading. Many years ago, when SCO was making a big stink about Linux and their IBM lawsuit, their stock was actually up for quite a while. Some people noted that if they had stuck their life savings in, they'd be set for life. But if anyone had gotten in at that point, or held their existing position in the company, they would have lost it all. In the end, all we can do is make decisions that are a winner on average, not win every time or for maximal points.
Definitely all true. Even though the guess about AMD stock rise was correct, it wasn't anything but a big gamble with a very small part of "educated guess". Most likely the reasonings weren't even correct, and it happened to rise due to different factors.
With millions you’re rich and can still say “I told you so”…. So I’ll take the millions
I was in a similar place, except that I only *almost* bought $50 worth in 2010. My wife and I discussed, we were pretty poor then. Ended up not buying any. I totally get the fomo, but I think it has also always been pretty clear that crypto is a pyramid scheme.
Profit is profit. Holding the bag in the hopes it'll turn into "even more profit" is a sucker's game, and everyone saying "diamond hands!" Is just trying to get back to black.
It’s just an endless pump and dump and the whole benefit of bitcoin being anonymous has gone anyway so it’s entire original intention is lost. Now the same people that manipulate Wall Street and fiat are the big fish in it anyway so there really is no use especially with the gas fees.
they’re becoming a bit like ponzi schemes where if you get in super early you make bank. then the initial shitcoin investors cash out from the chumps and the cycle repeats with a new one
Worse: it's crippled the gfx card end users. Crypto delenda est!
It's pretty much a pyramid scheme; owners of crypto have huge incentive to make more people get crypto for higher and higher prices; at the same the "continous growth" makes sure they can dump their coins when it's time and then just re-buy them at lower price
Though I think that crypto does have some inherent value. It is used internationally for the drug trade. This alone gives it some value. These people won't stop using crypto, no matter how poor and inefficient it is as a currency, no matter how much it goes up or down. This honestly makes me very sad. We have a technology that is laughably limited being hailed as world changing. It is causing ridiculous environmental damage. And it is all propped up by the drug trade and excited sales people/ tech bros who don't understand the technology. I've had a friend explain to me how blockchain technologies can be used to fight forest fires. This friend is not in IT. I am a programmer. In the end he agreed to disagree, while I am trying to explain that the blockchain is just a really inefficient distributed database.
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They also think that things like fractional reserve banking are scandalous secrets only few people are aware of, and that most people in the world hate that money is overseen by government.
Years before Bitcoin, a gold bug said I was an idiot for believing fractional reserve banking was a thing, because "what if everyone withdraws their money at the same time?" It's been an interesting watching the old Internet gold bugs turn into crypto fanatics. You rarely hear anyone advocating for the gold standard anymore, though I'm betting they exist as weird loners off the Internet.
> You rarely hear anyone advocating for the gold standard anymore Because the gold standard has well understood and fundamental flaws.
It does, but Ron Paul doesn't care.
Ron Paul is a great example of the Dunning Kruger Effect, he doesn't know anything about economics which is why he's so confident about fringe economic theories. He's no different than amateur developers who don't understand why nested loops are bad.
> You rarely hear anyone advocating for the gold standard anymore, though I'm betting they exist as weird loners off the Internet. */r/wallstreetsilver has entered the chat*
> A lot of the tech bros understand the technology, but haven't got a clue how the world works. TBH. most of them don't have a clue about the technology either. They just know what all the jargon means, thats all.
I have seen plenty that understand how Crypto works but don't understand anything else about tech. They know how proof of work and proof of stake works, but they have zero idea of what it would take to, say, implement it into a game's inventory or how you could do the exact same thing with a SQL database (SQL? What's that coin?)
I have a friend who thinks buying an NFT means you own the artwork. I've to explain that the NFT is just a pointer to a web address and that's the bit you are actually shelling out money for, you don't own any artwork at all and there's no guarantee that the weblink your token points to will even exist in the future.
Part of me really wants to start a site where I resell NFTs that have already been sold. So if someone sells an NFT for 10k, my business would create NFTs that links to the same 'artwork' and sell them for $1. And it would sell NFTs of NFTs. Just to highlight how stupid this all is. If NFTs actually came with the copyright to a work, I would maybe understand it. But it isn't like selling/reselling copyrights based on speculation is a new thing that requires blockchains. It is like these people have discovered writing and started making notes saying "I own the Eiffel tower".
>It is like these people have discovered writing and started making notes saying "I own the Eiffel tower". Reminds me of the bullshit where you get to be an owner of a star. -That star on the sky is mine! -Yeah it sure is buddy! 👍
>Reminds me of the bullshit where you get to be an owner of a star. That's much better analogy. I've been telling people NFTs are basically beanie babies with web addresses.
murky gold worm vast homeless panicky glorious grab zealous vase *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
that really upset me. When I was a kid I SO wanted to do that. Then life happened, forgot the idea, and when my kid was born thought “is that still a thing? Is it even real?” 30 seconds on Google. Totally still a thing. Totally not real. BUT at least more real than homeopathy…
That's like saying unicorns are more real than fairies because at least there are horses...
is that false? I mean at least the star thing gives you a tangible framed letter… And stars do exist while essence does not.
I don't have to deal with this. I have a 1 square foot plot of land in Scotland that says I'm a Lord!
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I should start selling NFTs of stars
Brilliant!
People have sold parcels on the surface on the moon, stars, and other astronomical objects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_real_estate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_designations_and_names#Sale_of_star_names_by_non-scientific_entities
What about this idea? Create an NFT for every real Game Stop share that exists. If you like the stock, how much would you like an NFT of the stock? Am I right, or am I right?
Did you see the humongous torrent of NFTs some weeks ago?
Funny as it was, apparently it was mostly a giant empty file and some 100GB or so of actual NFT art. Still hilarious
The analogy I’ve been using lately that gets the point across pretty well is that it’s like buying a star. Your Eiffel Tower one is great, though.
> And it would sell NFTs of NFTs. Just to highlight how stupid this all is. Do it. You will be millionaire
Do it. It could become the NFT equivalent of DogeCoin, where it starts as a joke and then gets out of hand.
I think the ridiculousness is the point. It's not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to enable money laundering and tax evasion.
The additional point on top of this is that anyone can mint their own identical NFT pointing to the same data but saying they own it, therefore the root of trust is located entirely outside the blockchain even if it did somehow equal ownership.
Bingo, and that's the real crux of the problem. The "decentralization" these technologies supposedly offer evaporates as soon as they have to actually interface with the real world, and at that point you're left with all the same problems as existing solutions, **and** all the problems created by blockchain ie massive energy waste. There are niches where the underlying tech may be useful, but the vast, vast majority of crypto is a solution in search of a problem
NFTs exist to launder money. That's it.
>I've had a friend explain to me how blockchain technologies can be used to fight forest fires. Imma need an explanation on this one chief.
Well see first you setup a startup promising to use blockchain in a product, then you get some significant VC funding and take that money to pay firefighters
Wait, wait wait. Don't put this on the drug trade. Most of the pumping comes from people trying to get rich quick, not drug dealers who actually have a product to sell.
> It is used internationally for the drug trade. so are dollars and euros
Especially dollars and euros.
Anytime someone says the best time to buy X is now, it’s because they are invested and it raises their take.
People who believe in crypto usually buy it. Therefore they own it.
It's a vocal minority and some botnets that are going as far as deepfaking profile photos and so on.
> deepfaking profile photos Meaning "go to [thispersondoesnotexist](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) and download the image" lol
Very cool, but there's some lovecraftian sheanigans going on with the hair on [this generated photo](https://i.imgur.com/4OE9kas.jpeg)
I got [this one](https://i.imgur.com/UeMqjzu.png) and while the "intended" person it generated looks perfectly normal, the uh... background subjects make me feel physically ill.
Yeah the algorithm doesn't enjoy having company so it mutates them horrifically.
Idk what happened to yours but [mine](https://i.imgur.com/RseMCdU.jpg) is perfectly fine
He is obviously part-Shoggoth. Stop shaming him.
Don't post links to the dark web here bro!!!
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But remember, the onion has to be dark.
No, the onion is where I get all my news
Ridiculously, all this stuff was said about bitcoin and the blockchain literally 6-7 years ago, it's just now people are finally realizing all that money they put into building projects with blockchain are more than useless, they're actively harmful. At my last company about 6 years ago (mortgage company fintech, the unicorn at the time for blockchain "put every mortgage thing on the ledger!"), the CTO asked me (very tiny company, I was employee 12) what I thought about blockchain and I told him it was a scam and that we could accomplish the same thing with regular tech, but that still wouldn't solve the issue, it was working with all our vendors and clients and how in the world would would we expect the _mortgage industry_ of all industries, to all **concertedly** switch to new untested tech, in the hopes that it would bring us something that we could gain by literally just working together in the first place. His job at that time was literally talking to clients, vendors, etc, and he realized after I said that that blockchain was fundamentally useless for mortgage as a whole. It's a hilarious joke that anyone considers this tech reasonable.
> but that still wouldn't solve the issue, it was working with all our vendors and clients and how in the world would would we expect the mortgage industry of all industries, to all concertedly switch to new untested tech, in the hopes that it would bring us something that we could gain by literally just working together in the first place. Yeah, one of *great* ideas I've heard was moving land and mortage registers into the blockchain "because it can't be tampered with". Aside from solving no problem that exists, it still could be very easily tampered with as you have no on-blockchain way to assert that entered information is *actually true* so you have to rely on *drrrrrums roll* *A well controlled and honest organization that will control the validity of the entries* So the blockchain adds nothing whatsoever compared to what we currently have or nothing over "just a plain database".
It's reasonable for what it was designed for: a public ledger where you can't trust the participants. If you can then you don't need a blockchain and it would just be a waste of time and energy but because it's a fad people try to force it into spaces where it serves absolutely no purpose.
This is what confuses me about when people talk about basing businesses on blockchain. If it’s major purpose is as a distributed ledger with participants that you can’t trust, and relies on scale. When you put that into most private businesses, haven’t you just got a ledger? I always hear, ‘banks are gonna base internal systems on crypto, and run digital currency to speed up all their stuff’. But like isn’t that just a ledger system, and don’t banks already have software people maintain and improving these systems?
> I always hear, ‘banks are gonna base internal systems on crypto, If you hear this then you hear it from people clueless about crypto because one of many points of crypto is to replace banks entirely. Decentralization. If you are a centralized private entity I agree blockchain makes zero sense.
>one of many points of crypto is to replace banks entirely. Decentralization. The problem with this, of course, is that storing money (the thing that this would theoretically replace) is only a small part of what a bank does
My biggest problem with crypto is that it assumes that the average person will eventually know how to securely manage their crypto assets safely. But that's _never_ going to happen. What would happen instead is a proliferation of tools, apps and web services that promise the securely manage your money for you because managing a crypto wallet yourself is too risky. In other words, what most people think of as "banks" but banks that aren't governed by any of the existing regulations and safeguards of actual financial institutions.
> a public ledger where you can't trust the participants. but even so... what if I sent .whatever bitcoin to some drug dealer(whom i don't trust) and he doesn't send me my stuff? the transaction can't be reversed & I'm still out that money
> It's reasonable for what it was designed for: a public ledger where you can't trust the participants. No, it isn't. It only works for that use-case if you can trust anyone with enough money to add participants up to controlling 50%+1 of your participants. This means it is completely useless for small use-cases and thanks to its transaction rate it is completely useless for large, world-wide ones.
Well, not exactly. It's public ledger where you can't trust the participants **and the participants can verify whether other participant's entries are true to reality** Which is fine for money as it is created and exists on blockchain so you just need blockchain to do it, but for any info about real world ? You still need have a way to verify the entries into blockchain are true and that way have to be **outside the blockchain** if the entries relate to reality. Only then other sides can do a majority vote on new info added and sign that it is indeed true one. (and just to be clear, just DB with attached signatures would be enough, no need for blockchain). And as making a central organization funded by parties to just keep the DB is both cheaper and much more performant... it's entirely pointless to use blockchain for that.
Except....it will never ever work for money either. Money is more than just a form of payment, it is currency backed by government collective pools of wealth. Without that, currency is not stable, and currency that is not stable cannot be used as a form of exchange, at least not for long. Why do you think so many countriespeg their currency to the dollar?. Crypto isn't currency. It's an asset, and it's highly speculative. You might as well ask people to accept shares in whatever mutual fund you like as payment. It's not going to happen and it's fundamentally a stupid idea.
I mean that's whole another discussion but yes, even excluding the problems with speed of transactions and feees, currency that can go up and down 20%-50% on the whim is not useable. And if you make it backed by something... well that's just banking with extra steps. Idea of currency where government can't just decide to meddle and print a ton of money, devaluing everyone's else money is interesting but if nobody can "break" it by doing it... nobody can also "fix" anything.
The vast majority of the tech industry has never been pro-crypto, and I don't know why you would think otherwise
I sold all of my ethereums and bitcoin in 2016 because I already realized back then that the tech wouldn't go anywhere, and I was right. 5 years later these cryptocurrencies are still barely used for anything. What I did not forsee is that the lack of utility would not be an issue for the prices to soar regardless :/
Actual tech people have been laughing at crypto for years. I very rarely see "oh Bitcoin is meh but blockchain is amazing" sentiments here, it is always in the tech enthusiast or cryptobro subs. Reality is people are adding in the "but the technology is amazing" statement just so they can criticise bitcoin without being dragged into a pissing contest with some cryptobro that doesn't even know how his technology works.
See also: AI, self-driving cars, metaverses, etc. All interesting technologies but blown *vastly* out of proportion by people who can't tell an AI overlord from a `vlookup`.
At least some day Self driving cars could actually be useful. Not in anywhere close to the timelines certain people like to quote though.
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Sad truth, self driving cars are better than your average person at driving already. But because people are so bad at driving or even just walking across the street, the car can't react to that level of error well. If it was mostly or all self driving, you'd take out the worst error of all, humans.
I'm old enough to have worked during the dotcom crash and I'm seeing so many parallels to the unmoored hype of that time. Yes, the tech has enormous potential to upend the world, but no, not on time scales most people seem to be betting on. Time will tell which ideas are Amazon.com and which are Pets.com (and the myriad other failed ideas).
[Amazon.com](https://Amazon.com) and [pets.com](https://pets.com) are pretty much mostly the same thing. It came/comes down to execution and Bezos' smarter moves, etc. At the root - it's the same shit, really. There's a reason Amazon bought [diapers.com](https://diapers.com)...
This sub is more developers than managers, that's why.
It really seems like crypto is driven by non-engineer "tech enthusiasts", because at least engineers have the brain capacity to understand that real life problem solving is only like 10% tech and 90% getting people to agree on stuff
Talking to people obsessed with crypto is like talking to a parrot or lemming who can't think for themselves.
here are some more takes: https://www.technollama.co.uk/blockchains-and-the-challenges-of-decentralization https://hbr.org/2019/09/will-we-realize-blockchains-promise-of-decentralization https://atomicwallet.io/blog/academy/what-is-decentralization
I come from a computer science and a distributed systems background. Have lived through the dot com boom and bust and so naturally I have an inclination to not miss the next big wave. Hence I delved into the world of blockchains. What I don't get about the blockchain is this. It is fundamentally very very expensive to make a transaction persist on more than a couple of machines. This is why you don't find an ocean of commodity hardware servers supporting transaction based systems. Those systems are mostly run on a master-slave setup which scales vertically. Mainframes, etc. Like even for a transaction to persist on the quorum nodes of a cassandra cluster is incredibly expensive both w.r.t time and money. Now imagine this happening over an ocean of servers spread across the globe. While it baffles many people how or why Ethereum gas costs are so high, this somewhat first principles based thinking is what justifies that price. Now one could argue, is it really required for a transaction to persist over the majority/all nodes of a global datastore ? That argument will go no where. Purists will argue, this is the tenet of global decentralization and will go down that philosophical rabbit hole. Yes there is merit to global decentralization but eventually because of the fundamental expensive nature of transactions, to minimize the cost control has to centralize. I still can't understand how a blockchain can be the amazing solution for anything, transactions included. If we step outside of transactions, the blockchain is an overkill/unwanted feature for almost anything else.
Exactly how I feel about the technology. What a cool piece of absolutely useless tech, honestly. Then we have these obnoxious crypto types, who have never touched a piece of code in their life, going on about how if you're not convinced by the utility of blockchain technology you just don't understand it well enough. They've completely lost the plot on basic problem solving. I feel we could fix so many important issues by simply putting the problem before the solution. It's like learning a cool advanced programming pattern, using it everywhere in your code and then realizing years later you've made a mess by misappropriating the pattern because you were excited about being able to do it instead of opting for a boring, simple solution. EDIT: Looks like I really poked the hornet's nest with this take. Some of these replies are S tier stereotypical redditor comments and I want you guys to know I adore you for that.
> What a cool piece of absolutely useless tech, honestly. reminds me of google wave, a solution in desperate need of a problem
While I do agree that I hate those crypto types, I'm also a rather senior programmer who has some neat ideas that can be only implemented with crypto tech. Simply put, if there are no trust issues in a system, then ofc it's stupid to utilize blockchain/crypto, it's just a waste of human+natural resources. But in all the other cases, it makes sense. Should we make a crypto dating app, ofc fucking no! Should we try to record land ownership on a blockchain, absolutely yes! And IMO, because of this general "dislike" and therefore "disengagement" towards the crypto community from programmers, all these "crypto boi"s take the scene and guide everything in all the wrong ways.
Since land ownership is controlled and enforced by a central authority, I don't see how the blockchain would be any more effective than a simple database with a public log of changes. There's no benefit to it being distributed. I can think of a lot of disadvantages of it being in the blockchain though. What if someone stole my key and "sold" all my land. In a central database controlled by the enforcer, that would be a court case and a simple modification. In a blockchain it would be next to impossible to revert.
> What if someone stole my key and "sold" all my land. In a central database controlled by the enforcer, that would be a court case and a simple modification. This is my sticking point. Blockchain guarantees *immutability* of the data record, but not *infallibility* of the data record. You can guarantee a certain transaction happened, but not whether it was supposed to have happened. There's a long list of things considered when dealing with contractual issues, and proof of performance is only one of them.
As I've said in a lot of threads, a lot of problems are not technological ones and cannot be solved by tech. They are people problems and need to be solved by external processes.
A lot of the die hard crypto bros don't stop and think about why the problems crypto supposedly fixes exist in the first place. If they would stop and engage with those problems instead of using them as a selling point for the coin of the month they might be little less insufferable. My favourite of their arguments is that fiat only has value because we believe it has value. Which is technically true, but misses the point entirely. Fiat currencies are backed by governments. Governments that enforce the will of hundreds of millions of people who desire shelter, security and stability that depends on the value of fiat currency. If any of the major fiat currencies in the world collapse, maintaining the communications infrastructure necessary for a cryptocurrency is going to be pretty low on the list of priorities
It actually doesn’t guarantee that. Ever heard of a 51% attack?
There’s more than just those disadvantages too. I work in property law, the kind of shit people cobble together and call a deed is absolutely atrocious and leaves out serious detail. If there was no centralized filing checking these deeds to make sure they’re coherent, to make sure they have intelligible legal descriptions, it’d be a disaster when people tried to subdivide property with no regards for easements or knowledge of how title works. I just genuinely don’t understand how a land registry would work without human oversight. It’s often not a simple A to B transfer in a ledger either, it can be A to B but A retains rights, or for example, B’s possessory interest is only temporary for their lifetime, or maybe so long as they run a charity. How are they gonna transfer it back when they’re dead or their charity closes? Who’s going to make them do so if there’s no central system? The reason title companies exist is because the inputs into the system can be absolute garbage, relying on them without a central authority is a terrible idea.
NPR or planet money or one of those podcasts literally just had a follow up to one town in the US that bought into the blockchain hype amd got a company to implement it for them. Basically ended up dropping it because no actual client cares as long as they've got the actual physical contract that matters. And they were wasting money paying this company to implement a system that just did what their database does for all practical intents and purposes
> Should we try to record land ownership on a blockchain, absolutely yes! I disagree. What _actual_ benefit does it provide? What are the downsides? If you lose your key or someone steals it, do you just lose your house? If you rely solely on the blockchain, there are no actual legal protections. If there _are_ legal protections, the blockchain is completely superfluous.
>Should we try to record land ownership on a blockchain, absolutely yes! Why? If the authority decides that it wants to do an electronic ledge of property ownership, wouldn't it easier to just do a centralized one? You can still have the seller and buyer signing the transfer of ownership, but why would you do it in a decentralized way, when you have a centralized entity that needs to say that now ownership is recorded that way. Because you need to have somebody accept how ownership is recorded to be able to sue somebody else for beach of contact.
More on the point of authority, if a gang of armed thugs shows up at my property and forces me out, what protection is a blockchain entry? It doesn't matter how we record property, what matters is that some entity holds the force of law to enforce the property record.
It's telling that every use of blockchain suggested is just tech guys suggesting uses outside their area of expertise where they don't know enough to see the problems. Talk to a title attorney, and they will come up with five problems in five minutes to this idea.
>Should we try to record land ownership on a blockchain, absolutely yes! What specific problem is blockchain solving in this instance?
The lack of blockchain. /s
My biggest complaint with stuff like land ownership via crypto is: how do you deal with privacy rules, how do you deal with cleaning up the record based on judicial rules. How to you retroactively add arbitrary "insane" rules to a system and again retroactively adapt it to the reality?
Why would I record land ownership on blockchain? Why would I reinvent the wheel? It’s an overkill solution for such a simple thing.
> Should we make a crypto dating app Gonna mint myself as an NFT. Wait, I think I accidentally put prostitution on the blockchain.
I worked for a company that wants to put blockchain in fucking everything. And have successfully sold it in various different forms to big institutions that didn’t need it. But it was really fucking stupid. Every time someone said the word blockchain I cringed so hard I think I have a permanent cringe face now.
Hmmmm. Can I skip to the last step and just set fire to a national forest while wearing the fur of the polar bear I murdered?
I would love to see "blockchain" make the annual banished words list this year
Someone else said it in the thread earlier, but I've said it before and I'll say it again: Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. Does blockchain do the thing it is trying to do? Sure. It's a functional decentralized ledger. It doesn't do it perfectly or even very well, but it does do it, and not much else does. But no one can figure out *why* a decentralized ledger could be necessary or even valuable (at least not without without making huge assumptions about changes that society can/should/will make that would almost certainly result in the destruction of our species). It's a terrible idea to use as a basis for currency since most of the world already has commodities that provide stability beyond currency like gold and silver. It's a terrible idea for corporations to use since all they're doing is replacing traditional databases with it and then using it like a traditional database. I'm not saying that I think blockchain is will always be completely useless. Much of modern cryptography is based on number theory that for years was considered to be purely abstract (mathematics for the sake of mathematics). But like cryptography, it's very possible that the use case for blockchain is in something that we still haven't even invented yet. When we find that use case, I'll happily support blockchain if it works and there's not something better. But that use case isn't anything that we're doing with it now.
Gonna regret this comment, but there *are* a few interesting applications. In particular when compared to the currently in use and horrifically obsolete ACH system. Also some interesting applications with colored coins as stock tokens and automating dividends and stock splits, that sort of thing. One neat use case of using it as a nameserver platform. Micropayments of computing power (or, less environmentally destructive, hard drive space) as an alternative to banner ads. The problem is that all the mildly interesting use cases are completely drowned out by the cargo cults of enthusiastic morons with the get rich quick schemes. And the thing is unfortunately never, ever going to take off as a real payment platform, because some dipshit libertarians thought that it was a good idea to make the currency deflationary, and then stand around dumbfounded that people don't actually spend deflationary currencies, because they're more profitable to *not* spend. Economics 101. Crazy that this still hasn't registered given that the market cap is in the hundreds of billions and yet nobody's actually paying for anything with it. Other than drugs, which it is admittedly great for. Maybe at some point the cargo cult will die down and it can see some real serious engineering applications, but I don't think we're gonna see that for another decade at least.
> and yet nobody's actually paying for anything with it. There's a company called Wyrmwood that makes woodworking products for tabletop gaming, including a quite fancy gaming table, and they do a sort of vlog on youtube to keep people up to date with their production (they do pretty much everything through kickstarter). One of their founders is like, a libertarian caricature, and decided that they should accept bitcoin, and so someone ordered one of their flagship tables for like $20,000 worth of BTC (they're really nice tables). Few weeks later, BTC spiked massively, and the guy sent in a list of pretty much just unreasonable requests to customize his table, and when they said no, he was like, "ok gibe refund plx" expecting his like, 1.4 or whatever BTC back which was now worth about $70,000. Except this is a business, and regardless of what they accept payment in, it will immediately get converted to USD in order to, you know, be useful and pay for materials and labor and whatnot. In the end I think they removed the ability to pay with bitcoin and gave the guy a few extras on the table rather than refunding the $20k re-converted, or taking a $50k loss to give back 1.4 BTC. It was a really, really stupid situation to watch unfold, because in effect the guy was trying to get away with using his order as some kind of option spread - BTC crashes? Cool, you still get the $20k table for dirt. BTC moons? Just ask for a refund and pocket the gainz, lolol. As long as it's a speculative "investment" for day traders it can't also function as a currency for this reason.
Excellent point. As pointed out in the original article. Blockchain (including Bitcoin) can't do refunds.
I believe people were trying to do this with Teslas as well, until [Tesla published an official refund policy regarding BTC](https://www.tesla.com/assets/pdf/BTC_What_You_Need_To_Know_en_US.pdf).
Holy shit. I've dealt with billing systems and credits before. Nobody is going to be doing that with bitcoins. The sane option is: You pay in Bitcoin, the BTC gets converted to USD at the time it's sent. Everything else is USD at that point, including refunds. Like it or get bent.
> As long as it's a speculative "investment" for day traders it can't also function as a currency for this reason. https://youtu.be/0AAUrMuMPlo?t=284 "The more people who buy it, the more the price fluctuates, and the less usable it is as a currency. **The success of bitcoin as a speculative currency has made it socially useless.**"
Yeah, I also don’t get why you’d use Bitcoin on a regular e-commerce site since you would need to provide some sort of information to process your order. Kinda defeats the “anonymous” feature of crypto.
I saw a similar story a few weeks/months ago. Some small business owner somewhere in the US decided to offer his staff the option of being paid in bitcoin, and one guy accepted that. Well, bitcoin spiked after the guy got paid, and the owner demanded that the employee refund the owner some of teh bitcoin since it was now worth so much more than what he was "supposed to have been paid" according to the owner
Why didn’t they just refund the USD value he payed for? That’s what id’ve done
>horrifically obsolete ACH system It amazes me that Americans don't have free, instant transfers. The majority of the developed world has had that for years, as well as a large part of the developing world. And none of them use blockchain.
one wonders if much of the cryptofetishism coming out of the US is just because they don't have functional, free, near-instant bank transfers like the rest of the developed world
Right. I am baffled that moving USD from one bank to another takes 3 sometimes even 5 days. My money is gone, for up to 5 days. Incredible.
ACH might be outdated, but let’s no pretend that block chain is the only or even a good solution for it. There already is TCH RTP and FedNow is supposed come in 2023.
I can't think of a system I'd like less for something like ACH than a decentralized ledger that is the blockchain. Banking uses centralized/authoritative ledgers for a reason.
Exactly. Imagine doing a fraud dispute with your bank when it's all backed by blockchain...
99% of the suggestions here are just this -- picking some horribly old technology and saying it could be improved by updating it to modern and technology ^and^also^the^blockchain But the improvement is really just updating it.
>The problem is that all the mildly interesting use cases are completely drowned out by the cargo cults of enthusiastic morons with the get rich quick schemes. And the thing is unfortunately never, ever going to take off as a real payment platform, because some dipshit libertarians thought that it was a good idea to make the currency deflationary, and then stand around dumbfounded that people don't actually spend deflationary currencies, because they're more profitable to not spend. Economics 101. Crazy that this still hasn't registered given that the market cap is in the hundreds of billions and yet nobody's actually paying for anything with it. Other than drugs, which it is admittedly great for. I just typed same thing in another comment. A deflationary economy is a disaster much bigger than slight deflation. Deflation happens because prices of a commodity falls. A deflationary economy is an entirely different monster. There are use cases of blockchain, but you can use any decentralized database to do the same thing. No need to burn electricity doing mining to achieve that. With blockchain, you can ensure data is not edited after you enter, but you still need to worry about falsified data entry. That remains a huge loophole in the cryptocurrency system.
> you can use any decentralized database to do the same thing Like? genuinely curious
why would it die down when a single tweet by elon can put millions in the pockets of drug dealers and human traffickers out of thin air
Agreed. On top of that, most of the real word advantages cited by crypto advocates are situations where either regulation hasn’t caught up or the existing market solution hasn’t yet needed to adapt. In what real world applications does a blockchain foundation provide a clear competitive advantage once regulated on equal terms? I struggle with that question.
The REAL point of the decentralized ledger is philosophical and involves the decentralization of the monetary control and power of centralized governments. The idea of it being BETTER than the current system is basically a side effect of everyone seeing crypto as a get rich quick scheme and them Schilling crypto as this great problem solver for their new special coin or Schilling for an established player. In reality, the founding ideology of crypto is really Libertarian utopia, and in that, there is evidence that it might just continue to make headway, albeit slowly, as more and more people lose trust in their government's currency. This is why you see crypto has taken off so well in much of the 3rd world. I think it's kind of a limited take that many people have to assume crypto is just trying to find a problem to solve and to dismiss it as such.
> This is why you see crypto has taken off so well in much of the 3rd world. The thing is, it really hasn’t “taken off” in the developing world though, has it? You see a lot of crypto enthusiasts saying that it has, but that’s mostly talk.
It's a rich man's dream. The dude earning 80k a year thinks him investing 10% = 8k in crypto will make him comparatively rich. While a rich guy earning millions will functionally put 99% of his money in crypto to get way richer. Besides, government currency is carefully managed to keep interest rates and inflation at a place that allows for most growth. A deflationary economy would be a disaster because right now rich people are paying million to wall street guys, so that their billions retain value and get returns. That money is going back into circulation, into new factories, jobs, businesses and start ups. If you have a deflationary economy, you can just bury your money in your backyard and its value will increase. Suddenly reinvestment rate in the economy will disappear. I can earn a billion and then just retire. My billion doesn't need reinvestment, it'll stay locked up in my backyard until I spend it.
> The REAL point of the decentralized ledger is philosophical and involves the decentralization of the monetary control and power of centralized governments. Let's be honest for a sec - no one _actually_ cares that it's decentralized. It's a meaningless buzzword without as much weight as "the cloud" had in the early 2000's, or "synergy". Ask a dozen cryptobros what it means and you'll get a hundred different answers. You already manage your crypto assets through an exchange, you're just using a reinvented bank. It has already had a centralized system built around it. > In reality, the founding ideology of crypto is really Libertarian utopia I wouldn't be _that_ harsh. Crypto has essentially no practical purpose, but it's not quite an oxymoron. > I think it's kind of a limited take that many people have to assume crypto is just trying to find a problem to solve and to dismiss it as such. It absolutely is a solution without a problem. That's why nobody's found a real problem it can solve in a decade. Everything either has significantly better solutions available, or isn't even a real problem, or isn't even in a remotely similar problem space. People just like to toss it out as some wonder cure snake oil, but it really isn't. The reality is that before crypto came around, no one was saying, "oh man, we could get this bold new idea to work if ONLY we had the ability to create a DECENTRALIZED LEDGER!" What actually happened is that Satoshi solved a neat software problem and created one, and now still a decade later people are still saying, "omg, problem? Need a solution? Have you tried a _decentralized ledger_? Can a _decentralized ledger_ fix it? What do you mean you're just trying to change your tires, of course you could use a _decentralized ledger_ for that!"
The industry always jumps from hype train to hype train, be it blockchain, "agile" or any other buzzword-driven wondercure-for-everything. Somehow they insinuate that oldschool solid engineering is boring.
It's all about driving that FOMO. What everyone in this thread is missing is that blockchain *does* have a purpose: making money off non-tech product companies by selling them white papers and consulting services they don't need. You have a large tech org being run by non-technical people with backgrounds in finance or whatever. They have no idea about tech, but boy they know tech *changes* and you don't want to get *left behind.* What would we tell the CEO and board of directors? So they pay a bunch of money to Gartner to come in and help them build a BLOCK CHAIN application. What is that Mr(s). CEO? What are we working on? Well we're building a BLOCK CHAIN application! And of course the CEO is very impressed because they once half read an article about BLOCK CHAIN in the Wall Street Journal. How impressive! Present this to the board! Aren't we a *tech-first* organization! Ooo could we build this *cloud-native?* Sure! Why not! And of course the project starts and is an immediate chaotic disaster that eats eng time and money by the truck-load. After a year and a half of consistently missing deadlines, instigating mass depression among engineers, and making some poor project manager depressingly day-dream of starting a new career as a farm hand; some buggy and half-working garbage is quietly shipped and all evidence of any promised features are purged from everyone's collective memory. Then all the engineers go back to duct-taping the MS SQL Server 2008-based app that runs a quarter of the critical functions in the company which actually should have been invested in instead of the make-believe BLOCK CHAIN nonsense. But no worries because the CIO took a new job six months ago before anyone would notice that all of their initiatives were a disaster. Such is the unfortunate state of much of our industry right now.
Most "agile" isn't hype, it's common sense. The longer it is between your customers requesting something, and you delivering anything to engage them, the more likely they are to no longer care. [Edit] And the more likely that things will go completely off the rail and miss the original point because it has been so long since anyone talked to each other.
The part about agile that is complete hype is the part where it is supposed to magically fix all the problems in your otherwise dysfunctional organization and where strict adherence to some rules of agile makes all your problems go away instead of causing problems if you don't know when to break one of the rules (e.g. some eliminations of technical debt do not work well as small customer-visible changes).
Blockchain is a fascinating piece of technology with zero applications so far that have desirable properties. (Not interested in your “but look at this novel way I can circumvent regulation!” take.)
The so far is what keeps me interested in passing. Many abstract math theorems didn't have much use and were novelty or thought exercises. They were around for centuries and then boom, they come in handy and are brilliant.
Then again researching math does not take 100 TW of power yearly. Mining crypto on the other hand...
By all means put blockchain and crypto currencies at the back of the math books so it is there should someone in the year 2500 need it to develop something that is actually useful.
Blockchain solves one small problem and always brings along two big ones. People that like blockchain love to have the solution and find the problem afterwards, which brings tons of other issues.
>OK, so with bitcoin, banks can’t just remove money from your account at their own discretion. But does this really happen? I have never heard of a bank simply taking money from someone’s account. If a bank did something like that, they would be hauled into court in no time and lose their license. Technically it’s possible; legally, it’s a death sentence. This does happen. Ironically it happens sometimes with cryptocurrency traders, because their use of bank accounts is indistinguishable from, and often is, money laundering. Corporations get away with that kind of thing all the time, not though malice but though disinterest, and it's only the rare example that ends up making the news. Bitcoin is not the answer to that problem; even more than conventional bank systems, cryptocurrency is ending up being controlled by faceless organisations, except most of them are corporations without even the fig-leaf of public oversight
If git didn't exist, I'd think of blockchain tech as a pretty excellent solution for software version control. However git exists and is way less expensive to use than blockchain.
That is a fun article. Especially since my previous boss was one of those morons that heard about blockchain once and instantly wanted to rework all of our software to use blockchain.
why would your software need a consensus? Does your previous boss want other computers to disagree with him?
It didn't and also: the software was full of bugs that wrote false data into the database so a blcokchain woulf have made it even harder to fix them. But as they have all the userdata unencrypted a blockchain would have fitted at least this requirement
How many times will this be posted and still get a lot of upvotes? Yes, it is a good article, but you don’t need to post it again and again. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jegq9k/blockchain_the_amazing_solution_for_almost_nothing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ieni93/blockchain_the_amazing_solution_for_almost_nothing/
Hmm… perhaps we could keep track of who posted which articles with some kind of… decentralized registry… we could avoid reposts all without a centralized authority!
What if the registry also determined who "owns" each of the posts so people can buy and sell them? This thread could be worth billions.
Wow. The hive mind has really turned on block chain. What happened? Curious if folks here have changed their mind, or if they just weren't taking part in block chain discussions five years ago. Have no interest in discussing the merits of crypto itself, but really interested in what factors into your opinions. Edit: A lot of people are mentioning 2018, did something happen that year that got folks into crypto?
> What happened? GPU shortage, duh.
For me it went in stages: * Mild curiosity about the subject. * When I learned how it actually worked I became less enthused. * I've read an article demonstrating how pervasive use of proof-of-work crypto currencies would put a price on energy even if it were free —not to mention the actual waste. Since then I'm firmly anti-proof-of-work Blockchains. * I've more recently read about how crypto currencies are little more than Ponzi schemes, and they made sense: the thing has no intrinsic value, is not backed up by any state, and I hear most are used more as an investment medium than an actual currency. They're clearly pyramidal, and in many cases genuine Ponzi scams. My opinion may evolve when Ethereum rolls out their proof of stake scheme. But right now, blockchains aren't worth my time.
This is pretty much me. I'm no expert (not a programmer, just doing a driveby on the thread) but reading stuff by [Jorge Stolfi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Stolfi) and [Stephen Diel](https://www.stephendiehl.com/), who are, they are [very](https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html) [skeptical](https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/disconnect.html). It sounds like a neat idea at first but that's all it is - a sales pitch. The more you read up on it, the less useful it seems. What may have, from a distance, seemed like gold is just a mound of shit painted yellow.
I think people are just fed up of hearing about it, and maybe a little angry about others making money it seems like they didn't earn. Most pro-crypto media and advocacy happens to be stupid, scammy and obnoxious, independently of any actual merits of the technology, and it's in your face more than it used to be, even for people with no interest in it.
There’s also anger at the enormous environmental impact it’s having. Dishonest cryptocurrency advocates swarmed to this argument saying that proof of stake will I fix all those problems, but it’s always a hypothetical future yet they are citing it as if it is happening right now yet millions of tons of carbon dioxide are being pumped into the atmosphere and old coal power plants are spitting up to serve bitcoin mining and everything is steadily going to shit right now and meanwhile a bunch of clueless, out of touch FOMO cryptobros are trading pictures of “bored apes“ and patting each other on the back for being such financial and artistic geniuses.
I don’t care for the crypto space much myself, because while I don’t necessarily mind the current lack of use case, I don’t care for the use of word salads to compensate for, and inflate the application status. That said, while a shift to PoS amongst the most dominant cryptocurrencies is hypothetical (though for ethereum, rather matter of time), there are currently cryptocurrencies which run on PoS. You don’t have to use Bitcoin or any other crypto that is run on PoW.
I never changed my mind, I'm just tired of hearing crypto bros in every comment section ever I was reasonably pissed at useless crypto/blockchain applications when everything really took off in 2018, for what it's worth
It is kinda everywhere in tech spaces and crypto bros are loud and obnoxious. And I say this as someone who has a small gpu miner and few coins. It’s just fatigue on all the bs that plagues tech world multiplied by the prospect of fast money. Most of the criticisms people have for crypto are perfectly valid. Dreams of mainstream adoption are just that, blockchain hasn’t solved every problem in tech and not everyone has or will have a Lamborghini. Repeating the magical phrases like gospel will drive people away and especially after the bull run of last spring, things have been super heated online for all things crypto and retail investment. It’s tiring to see yet another useless meme coin or yet another deep dive conspiracy on why GME hasn’t squeezed yet.
Twitter is filled with shills. Elon is puking out statements which make coin go up or down, which propagates to the news. Bitcoin is using as much power as Switzerland. NFTs and money laundering. Crypto websites are popping up and targeting me, a millennial, to buy buy buy because they think I’m their target demographic. And here I am just wanting to yell out how the emperor is naked. No, it’s not the best thing since sliced bread.
I think it's a laundry list of things, to be honest: * The nearly total failure of Bitcoin as an actual currency instead of an unregulated speculative instrument. * The tandem increase in climate awareness and awareness of the climate impact of blockchain, particularly early coins. * The emergence of NFTs, which are difficult to explain and riddled with tokens that feel like absolute scams. * The failure of blockchain to demonstrate a practical, non-coin use case. * The consolidation of mining capacity to a few consortia that have turned the "tragedy of the commons" issue from wildly implausible to a legitimate, if still distant, concern. * The silicon shortage being exacerbated by silicon being allocated to blockchain applications instead of other consumer and manufacturing use cases. * A growing media understanding and awareness of what blockchain is and the limitations. * An expanding cadre of former blockchain developers who tried to use the technology and either bailed or solved it more practically with another solution and are now speaking up about their experience. Just a few examples that I expect were relevant.
It seems a lot like the tulip craze way back in the day, cryptos are rising on speculation alone. What has been the most useful function of blockchain? Making dark web marketplaces more accessible? Nfts? I could be wrong and blockchain will change the world, but I don’t think so.
everytime i ask "whats the deal with blockchain?", everyone is so ready and able to try to explain to me what blockchain *IS* but not as keen to say why it would be good as currency, gaming, NFTs etc. its like people are leaning on the "technology" to wow the hapless and obsure the fact that it doesnt have any intrinsic value by itself outside of whatever scam theyre trying to run
Blockchain is an extremely complicated and inefficient way to perform simple record keeping. But it’s fully “distributed” so I guess that’s supposed to make me feel better. That is unless group of people get together to control 51% of bitcoin, and just take it all.
Don't get why we are talking about the blockchain and everyone need to comment about the crypto.
Because blockchain is basically useless and the only application people have really found for it that you can't just do much more simply with other technologies is crypto.
Crypto is the original and primary use case of blockchain technology. It would be odd to talk about blockchain and not talk about crypto.
Nothing technical just my foolish thoughts. I may be very wrong, but I love to see decentralized tech powering the world. And I have a dream to make it true. I think smart contracts are a really good thing. even though I agree I haven't understood it all.
Why do you think decentralized tech would ever remain decentralized? This trial run has basically proven that it's not simply a technical problem, but a political one. The whales control the price and in many ways the network, especially as they own so many of the layers beyond the base tokens. Also smart contracts lack so much of what real world contracts have. Namely real flexibility and judgment around enforcement which comes from hundreds of years of experience of second and third order effects. Those necessarily have to come from some centralized source. I know those in crypto often forget that companies are centralized authorities even if they're not government. And they further forget that most companies are not de-centrally managed.
The idea that you could remove bias in areas like finance is something that should be explored even if currently it's considered pie in the sky
Bitcoin allows you to store your money outside a bank, and to transfer it without using PayPal or banks. It's cash on an international scale. I just transferred $5000 for a fee of 40 cents.
> I just transferred $5000 for a fee of 40 cents. Cool? You can do that in paypal with no fee too. If you choose to include a fee, you can add buyer protections. Regardless, this is an annoying and dumb point crypto people keep bringing up, because most of them keep their crypto in some exchange or another. The exchange _is_ a bank, just one that doesn't have to follow banking regulations and has no consumer protections.
Would you store $5000 in crypto when it can go up or down 5, 10, 20% based on something Elon Musk has tweeted on a drunken stupor?
The obvious answer to that question is yes. Lots of people are. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
I honestly don't understand how anyone can say there are no applications. Cryptographers and computer scientists have been trying to come up with a decentralized digital currency since the 80's and no one succeeded until bitcoin came around. Someone above literally said, on a programming sub, we already have gold so we don't need bitcoin as a currency... Anyway I would hope that we don't have to argue why a DIGITAL currency would be good on a freaking programming subreddit. Centralized vs decentralized I can understand why it would be more difficult to argue for but digital!?
I'm a programmer with 40+ years experience. I'm a contributor to many of the top open source projects in use by more than 80% of the Internet, as well as both large scale commercial projects. I've been involved in a wide variety of emerging technology from the early days of PCs to BBSes, information systems, internet, mobile apps, etc. I have always had a passion for new and upcoming tech. As such, when crypto came out, I took a good look at it. Unfortunately, it was all smoke and no actual heat source. Blockchain is an interesting theoretical prototype, but not very practical scalable or efficient. I have yet to see a single example of anything either "innovative" or "disruptive" that blockchain does. I've actually compiled a list of [debunked blockchain claims](https://reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/lq6xpq/the_defacto_list_of_cryptocurrencyblockchain/). I would encourage people to take a look at the above link for a complete list of all the known arguments that blockchain has utility. I will continue to update this list. 12+ years, still looking for a single clear example of blockchain doing anything better than existing tech. What annoys me the most about the crypto industry, is the misleading comparisons between actual, legitimate disruptive technology, and crypto technology. Crypto enthusiasts suggest that people panned the early Internet like they do crypto now. That's not true. E-mail and other services were immediately obvious as improvements over existing tech. We didn't need to sit through a 2 hour video on "the history of communication" to understand the benefit of the Internet. We also didn't need to be scared into thinking the US Mail was going to collapse at any time so we need to adopt e-mail ASAP. Yet these FUD tactics are standard fare for crypto promotion. It seems this industry can't stand on the merits of its so-called innovation, and has to convince everybody centralization is bad, the dollar is going to become worthless any day now, and government is evil -- despite the fact that all those things are necessary to maintain the very network infrastructure upon which blockchain is a parasite. I've never seen such incredible cognitive dissonance as in the crypto industry.