Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious, ludicrously implausible.

I get that Andreesen-Horowitz has a lot of money at stake in this area and would love to make some of it back, but it's been more than 10 years since bitcoin emerged with the promise that the blockchain would have world-changing repercussions and _I still don't see even one meaningful application of the technology_ ?

Please go ahead and tell me how important NFTs are again. Or how Venezuelans are supposed to use bitcoin as an inflation hedge. Or how smart contracts are going to revolutionize... the exchange of goods (?), as soon as developers can figure out how to program them entirely without bugs.

On the basis of all of the applications of blockchains I've seen over the past decade (which I can count on one hand), why should I expect that ANY of the predictions in this piece will come to pass? Let alone something as world-changing as displacing the corporation as the leading organizational form for economic activity.

The more I look into DAOs, the more they look like companies that are:

1) registered on a global level instead of a local or national level

2) skirt US securities laws by allowing anyone to buy and sell ownership, whereas companies normally restrict that to accredited investors, unless they register with the SEC

3) often have a more democratic ethos of governance, although many seem to be based on one token = one vote, which sounds almost identical to how companies operate with one stock = one vote.

So, the main thing that I think they do that is quite different is giving people the ability to register a company on a global level, as there isn't a governmental way to do that right now. Other than that, what they seem to offer is a way to organize and collect money that goes around financial and securities laws.

>but it's been more than 10 years since bitcoin emerged with the promise that the blockchain would have world-changing repercussions and _I still don't see even one meaningful application of the technology_ ?

I see this critique often but I don't get it: bitcoin was essentially an early prototype, the story of crypto since gone through lots of twists and turns. Make it programmable (ETH), try to make it scalable in one chain (lots of failures, now things like Solana), figure out how to split consensus/data/computation (current ETH L2 road map).

The technology is still young and evolving.

There are a lot of other things worth critiquing (PoW is wasteful, permission-less systems are socially bad, &c) but saying "this technology has been here for 10 years" misses that it's a big complex roadmap, a lot of which (like zero knowledge rollup L2s) just showed up this year.

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