Comment by adim86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adim86 | Hacker News Reader

I find the article disappointing. I would say this article itself is not what it says it is. Its title is written in click-bait fashion in that they are about to reveal something we don't know about blockchain technology and then the first paragraphs are written in the tone that they realize theoretically blockchain technology ideally runs a certain way but they want to tell us how it runs today and then proceeds to bash the implementation of the technology today even though they realize it probably wont work that way in the future.

It is like bashing the internet of not fulfilling the potential people pitched about it in the 90s. Blockchain is currently in the dail up stage of the internet, it is centralized, slow and needs adoption and lots of man hours to unleash its potential. There are second and third order effects that need to actualize before the "dream" of blockchain technology can be realised. The article purports the lack of this actualisation of the blockchain dream as if we are being deceived.

It's like when people bashed Tesla and said it wont work because there were not enough charging stations across the USA, as if world changing technologies are realized in a day. I find it boring that people push these kind of articles as think pieces. We can do better

It's like when people bashed Tesla and said it wont work because there were not enough charging stations across the USA, as if world changing technologies are realized in a day.

Tesla built a network of chargers to fix that problem. They didn't hand-wave it away with "it probably won't work that way in the future" - they came up with a real plan of action and executed on it. After that a lot of the skeptics came around.

The same is true for cryptocurrencies and NFTs I imagine. When devs in that industry come up with a workable solution and execute it people will change their minds. Until that happens it's entirely fair and reasonable to say that cryptocurrencies and NFTs have some serious problems, and claiming "it probably wont work that way in the future" is not an answer.

You can't just ignore problems by saying they're not problems. That doesn't work.

Same goes for Tesla's autodrive efforts. People are right to bash it while the promises are not delivered. When the cars can drive themselves properly, people will mostly forgive them.

The article makes some specific points, which you fail to address. Your objection is a generic "never mind that, just give it more time". You can do better.

We keep seeing this from the crypto crowd. "It's still early days" to solve these thorny social problems with yet more tech innovation. Always just around the corner.

And then you need network adoption. Once there is an environmentally friendly Blockchain, you still gotta shut down all the rest.

It was 2500 years from Thales first describing static electricity to Napster, so just give the blockchain some time!

Ethereum has been around since 2013. It's time to stop claiming "this is broken but we just need more time to fix it". Nearly 10 years later Ethereum still doesn't have a single app (or dApp) with more than a million daily active users (DAU). That's an extremely slow adoption rate for something that is touted as "revolutionary technology". For comparison, Facebook had about 482 million active users only 5 years after launch. TikTok reached 50 million daily active users in less than a couple years.

I agree wholeheartedly with you that these issues around web3 (immutability, decentralisation etc) will be solved in the future. Do I know how they’ll be solved? No! I could guess but doubt my guesses would be any good - but pretty much every single piece of technology or large tech company has started off with something that seemed a bit fragile or silly etc. It’s interesting that there’s so much scepticism around the future of web3 on HN (could it be mix of disappointment that marketing is running amok with the term “web 3”, that it’s currently over-hyped and under-delivering, that there’s so many scams and easy money-grabs going on?)

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