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Comment by kylnew | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny to say ‘replacing’ bitcoin to me because we talk like it had a strong value and use in the past but really this has all just been speculation since the start. We all seem in agreement that blockchain as a technology is legitimate but none of these currency implementations float my boat yet because of how highly speculative the whole market is right now.

Aside: last week up I looked it up and sure enough there’s a ‘PonziCoin’ out there

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I don't think the blockchain is a good technology. Traditional databases or something like Git solve the same problems better. I have an ideological desire to see more trustless and peer-to-peer systems and I think they'll take hold eventually, but at the moment blockchains are worthless.

There’s a lot more I could know about the practicality of blockchain but the value of the technology is still more real than the currencies that live on it. It seems to me, in my perhaps naive opinion, that in the long run blockchain might just be a way to make digital certificates of authenticity for digital goods that need a guaranteed uniqueness feature.

It's a good technology if you agree with the goals of libertarians today which is that we should be able to do everything without trust. Having trust is such a huge shortcut of energy and enables you not to have to completely do everything yourself. It pretty much enabled civilization to begin with, but many people now have given up on trusting anything and don't think they have the agency to improve any sort of trusted authority.

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