Hacker News Reader

Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunately how people get into the habit of thinking all crypto and blockchain is a scam - because a huge numbers of scams and silly ideas are indeed running in the space...

View on HN

What would you say is the ratio of genuine crypto innovation/research/companies compared to scams? Considering the signal-to-noise ratio, I don't think it's that weird to just say "it's all a scam anyway" since that rule of thumb actually works extraordinarily well. Unless you're talking to an expert or having a deep dive you've gotten the point across correctly.

I’m not sure what it is, it might be as high as 99-1. But the 1 is pretty incredible. Look at fxhash on Tezos, it’s created something truly incredible in generative art.

What's an actually useful, not-contrived use case that crypto enables that isn't otherwise possible _for the average resident of a stable/wealthy country_?

I work in crypto since a little while, and have following the tech since 2014 or so.

I’m still really skeptical of that trash fire going anywhere. Including my day job.

I can only thing of one application, and it still have to deliver:

Providing mesh network of wifi, LoRA or 5g where the node are administered by individuals.

The nodes are mining a proof of coverage. And effectively being payed to deliver a service ( providing wifi/LoRA/5g coverage )

The nodes cannot trust each other, and having a decentralized ledger help them split the bill and compensate the nodes for their work.

In my view it would provide a “last miles delivery of coverage”

I have a few project in mind that I won’t mention here. The crypto they are using is not subject to much speculation.

That my favorite use of that tech stack. ( since the decentralized land ledger projects seems to not go anywhere )

(I am hugely sceptical on most things crypto) generally speaking the view of a rich, stable country might make you blind to some real use cases because you just don't have them. But for people in less privileged countries having a permissionless system of digital dollars is actually extremely useful. Also my pet theory is that Bitcoin MIGHT suck money out of the property market and make home ownership more affordable.

Decentralized Identity for individuals and devices.

I've found the images here to be a good quick and dirty summary: https://www.gsma.com/identity/decentralised-identity

Maybe I'm just dense, but this seems more like a centralized identity more than a decentralized identity. Which, if you lose, like I have with various wallets I've had over the years, seems extremely sketchy.

there isn't one. but by the time people realise that a few unscrupulous people will have made a ton of - fiat - money out of the gullible masses.

NFTs have proven incredible for indie digital artists across the world, but particularly for artists from the third world where making a living off them is a bit easier. There’s a huge honest indie art movement on the Tezos NFT space.

Good places to look around in: Fxhash (amazing generative art market that creates uniques through interaction between the code and the blockchain) Hic Et Nunc (now multiple sites, fully decentralised art market) OBJKT (sort of a better UI for Tezos NFTs, same stuff as in Hic).

What does NFTs add to this that couldn’t be achieved by FXHash hosting ownership status in a PostgreSQL database?

Nobody trusts a single SQL database or any single developer or company. The advantage is that you have a trust less, decentralised database no one can alter and has thousands of people hosting it.

This is a common fallacy I’ve seen among developers - the idea that because the technical solution is inferior it’s social value must be inferior. Blockchain is not a technical solution, it’s a social solution. At least as far as NFTs it has solved an insoluble problem, which was no one trusted anyone in particular with a ledger about digital art ownership - but they do trust everyone/a a large group that’s incentivised to keep hosting it, and has problem to be tampering resistant.

Kind of baffled that nobody has mentioned this yet, but:

Buying illegal drugs online

It has been like this since the beginning.

The space is in dire need of regulation. Sociopaths go for the lowest level of effort with the maximum level of rewards. Right now making a dumb crypto token and shilling it is likely the easiest immoral way to make money in this world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com