Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

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I really struggle with this. I'm reminded so often of the Douglas Adams quote:

> Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

> Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

> Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Do I just not get crypto?

So, I started doing the Certified Blockchain Professional course to understand the technology and hear first hand from the proponents.

I've come to the conclusion that Crypto / Blockchain just isn't solving any interesting problems. It is the epitome of a solution looking for a problem.

There's a huge amount of money being spent to convince the technologically illiterate that this is the next big thing - and I think that's morally abhorrent.

The amount of energy the space takes up is nothing short of an ecological crime against humanity.

Fundamentally, there are a couple of niche computer science problems in there - muddled in with some semi-interesting philosophy - and that's about it.

Most people here, I suspect, have seen hype-cycles come and go. Blockchain seems identical to all the other failed scams in the past.

Completely agree - Technology is supposed to solve a problem, and the usual approach is to say "Here is a problem I have identified, here are the requirements I want it to meet, and considering that here is an array of technology choices I can choose from, and based on that X is the best fit".

With Crypto, it seems to go the opposite way, i.e. "Let's think of possible problems that Crypto could tenuously solve, and then build a blockchain".

Going the other way though leads to solving problems that might not exist, and a technology choice that isn't necessarily best-fit. I work in Supply Chain, and as an example, while Supply Chain Traceability has long been touted as a 'golden child' example of where the blockchain can help, in the last 15 years centralised solutions have had much more traction and success. My personal explanation? Starting with blockchain as the solution led to the problem statement focussing on decentralisation, which actually hasn't turned out to be that important compared to other NFR's.

Look at other technologies such as a REST APIs, which solved lots more propblems across the first 15 years of their life despite being much a more subtle improvement from a technology perspective. Despite this, REST API's didn't come with the same level of hype from the general public, because you couldn't sell REST-API-COINS and speculate on them.

Yeah. And it goes beyond solution-in-search-of-problem; money clearly makes things worse here.

Finding great solutions might sometimes need thinking outside of the box; I can see solutions in search of problems as being that kind of long shot that's rarely but sometimes spectacularly useful.

But crypto is particularly tricky for that, because it's not just a solution in search of a problem; it's also a Ponzi scheme. And it's really hard to disentangle the two.

Were "crypto" merely a bunch of clever algorithms allowing an ever broader set of zero-knowledge proofs... then perhaps we'd find actually useful problems to solve with that. But instead, it's already a huge market by virtue of its artificial scarcity. Any new cool thing these algorithms might do is overshadowed by the lure of the Ponzi scheme; even a tiny probability of turning that pyramid into something solid is easily worth more than a long-shot at some revolutionary technology you probably couldn't even control if you did think it up.

It's the combination of so much money that drowns out everything else with a dash of gambling, a sprinkling of a pyramid scheme, all lathered onto a solution in search of a problem that makes it particularly dispiriting.

> Completely agree - Technology is supposed to solve a problem

Or give you new tools to make art with.

> a solution in search of a problem

Ding ding ding.

I'm still in the "new and exciting" part of my life, but crypto just doesn't solve any interesting problems.

The decentralisation of crypto currencies is great (i.e. there's no central bank that can devalue its currency to prop up their national economy), but it's way too volatile to actually be useful as a currency. Would you agree to be paid your salary in bitcoin? Without adjustments if it drops relative to the dollar? Heck no. It's a speculative device, not a currency.

Smart contracts are cool too. Zero trust transactions etc. Conceptually I think these are really cool, but I see no practical need for them (for 99.99% of people).

Blockchain as a data structure, again for 99.99% of applications a DB and PGP do the trick. (And I'm still waiting on that 0.01% to show up.) I'm a software engineer by trade, and firmly believe you should pick the simplest way to solve a problem, not the coolest.

All of the different uses of crypto are "cool" but pretty useless. A solution in search of a problem indeed.

> The decentralisation of crypto currencies is great (i.e. there's no central bank that can devalue its currency to prop up their national economy

Why? The "economy" isn't something abstract, everyone participates in it. Yes, losing money through inflation sucks, but losing your job due to an economic crisis sucks even more. Some central banks are downright inept ( Turkey) but in those cases it's not just them, it's the whole government, which is ruining the economy through other means as well, so even having the money as independent from their influence wouldn't be of huge help because their ineptitude will show up in other places.

> It is the epitome of a solution looking for a problem.

I can't entirely agree with this. Originally Bitcoin seemed it could be a solution to a problem (i.e. decentralized digital currency), and it turned out it became something a bit different: a kind of digital investment that is highly volatile but has some advantages over, say, traditional stock (and plenty of disadvantages, too). So for a few people, Bitcoin did solve some problems - and created many problems for others on the way.

Blockchain in general has proved to work for what it's been intended, that is not being able to forge transactions. Even though we don't have any really useful applications for it, it's good that it exists, because in 10, 50, or 100 years it will turn out it's a perfect missing puzzle piece for some invention we still don't have any idea about.

I mostly agree. I think the underlying technology for some of the social systems that have been in place for hundreds of years.

For example, a new country with a new government could set up their governing bodies on a blockchain for full transparency. Ditto with their financial and currency based systems

The real issue is that there's very limited _demand_ for any of these things at present, so the money sunk into it needs to look for something that siphons cash from the existing systems

I think there's an in theory use for the "digital gold" aspect of something like bitcoin, and some use for something like a smart contract to eliminate the need for middlemen in some exchanges.

The issue of course being that there's a LOT of new and exciting issues with things like this, and more importantly, some ancient and critical issues....like mass scamming and inconsistent tech. Decentralization sounds great until all your money goes out the window, never to be seen again.

I do think there's a home for the tech, and I think there's a small chance some of this really explodes (in the understanding that i don't understand something about it, which is likely), but I do feel that it's impossible to find any reasonable discussion of the topic because it's COVERED in bullshit.

It seriously reminds me of marketing. No one would say that marketing doesn't work. There's plenty of evidence it does. But actually trying to learn about certain facets of the industry is a NIGHTMARE because it's just other marketing people marketing to you, and sifting the bullshit from the legit is hell.

If I'm reading a scientific white paper, have doubts about its validity and the only evidence offered by a Google search is marketing-focused or internet comments, I tend to err on the side of caution and just assume it's probably bad information.

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