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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

As a programmer, I'm very impressed by the cleverness of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a tech demo, much the same way I'm impressed by 64k intros from the demo scene. And at the same time I'm as horrified by the notion that people have seriously invested billions in turning the former into the basis of a new real-world economy, as I would be if the same were done with the latter. It just blows my mind that so many highly intelligent people can so thoroughly believe in something so misguided.

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I worked for a blockchain startup and let me tell you, it was a ride. It was small operation not doing cryptocurrency (it had tried, failed, and pivoted). There was still a financial angle to it and the pitch enamored me enough to join them.

It turned out that the only value proposition they had was that they "used blockchain" but literally only in the sense that at some point a blockchain would have some data on it.

They were true believers too, but simultaneously didn't care that it was fakery. I have lingering PTSD from that gig.

The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

> I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.

I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".

I had an opportunity to get something going on Amazon once they started hosting Hyperledger Fabric (the stack that I used). I could not come up with a commercially viable service to launch on there.

I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.

git is a fantastic usage of blockchain, no?

Only if you redefine what is usually meant when people say "blockchain" to mean "some kind of linked data structure with checksums", then yes, git is a fantastic use of a linked data structure with checksums.

> Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.

Identity / authenticity. As we head into a world of digital (deep) fakes, being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important. Block chain seems well positioned for this?

I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful (after these short term stupids).

I'm not a fan of blockchain currencies mostly due to the preponderance of bad actors. Maybe some day, but it's a bit of a shit show atm, and not nearly as practical as originally hoped for.

> being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important

What would stop an actor with enough resources (Russia, China, USA) to put deepfakes onto the chain?

What would stop them from blackmailing service providers who act as gatekeepers / market platforms to put deepfakes into the chain?

Why would they even accept any single "Blockchain X" as the source of truth? Why wouldn't they just say "Oh that's the evil state Y, of course they're pretending that their fakes on their state-governed propaganda blockchain are authentical, whereas OUR blockchain tells the TRUTH!"

How would you correct honest mistakes on the chain? By a correction update? Then what would stop an evil actor (Taliban) who overturns the government, or takes over a giant corporation, from "correcting" an unpleasant truth, and rewriting history?

Once again, a social problem is attempted to be solved with technology. This never works.

> I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful

What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?

NFTs are nothing but a scam and provide no intrinsic value (other than cover for money laundering).

I think that the way would be to use a permission-based, id-linked, reputation-maintaining mechanism. No PoW or PoS -- proof of self. It would have to be designed from the start to account for hostile manipulation. Easier said than done, of course.

> What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?

I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses. Practical in the same way as identifying originals in meatspace. I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market), but suspect that'll eventually settle down. I don't see any issue with the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original if we (society?) all agree that it as an original, same as a material painting.

Maybe NFTs are a misstep on the way to that, I don't know, and I don't care to be honest (I'm not invested in anything crypto related). There's at least a useful idea there.

> I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses

I agree. I don't agree that blockchain, or NFTs, can ever deliver on their promises to contribute to that matter, because of their nature. How do you think would the blockchain, or NFTs, help to identify and authenticate original works?

> I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market)

Can you name an example of another market where this was the case - i.e. bad actors were the majority of actors, and then something (what?) happened that made the market unviable for scams?

> the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original

What does the "original" .gif of the Nyan Cat do for you that my copy of it doesn't?

> same as a material painting

I see 2 purposes of the "original" in a material world: 1. speculation, 2. paying the original artist. Since 2. isn't possible for e.g. the Mona Lisa, what remains is that it's a pure speculation object. You could argue that experts could distinguish the orginal Mona Lisa from any copy, but that wouldn't work in the digital world, where my copy of the Nyan Cap .gif would gif just as your original would.

What is the problem statement here, and how would NFTs, or blockchain, contribute to a solution here?

What does it practically solve that a normal cryptographic signature does not?

Even distributed trust doesn't need a blockchain; web of trust is an example of that.

This is all fairly irrelevant anyway as people do not do not check things before sharing them anyway, and/or trust authenticated information from untrustworthy sources (if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth).

> if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth

There's two problems / truths here; 1) the source (E.g. Fox), which is what I think we'll need to verify, and 2) the truth of the content, which is an age old problem with no technical solution I'm aware of (or would even believe if presented with one).

Right, but for (1), what does blockchain specifically bring that, say, a normal cryptographic signature does not?

> The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

Which special qualities are you enamored with? And to what use would you like to put them?

> Which special qualities are you enamored with?

The shared ownership of state -- theoretically "serverless" in that there's not a specific server that rules them all.

> And to what use would you like to put them?

Something wiki-like, as well as service discovery.

IPFS seems like the most interesting non-financial blockchain project to me. Could be a decent way to make a decentralized backup of the internet in case the current centralized web starts falling into disrepair.

Yes it is intriguing but similarly so in how it hasn't really caught on. Perhaps some killer app will come around and change that.

there's no blockchain in IPFS, but there are cryptographic hashes

This sounds oddly like my experience with a blockchain startup for identity management…

For me blockchain is peer to peer 2.0.

Lot of hype back in the day that this technology e.g. torrent was going to revolutionise the internet and society would never be the same.

And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.

>And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.

This comment reminds me of the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo Saverin taunts Sean Parker about Napster losing to the record companies, and Parker says "you wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?"

By which I mean: just because peer-to-peer didn't win as a technology, does not mean it wasn't transformative. We live in a world where the iPod could launch and we have access to $10/mo unlimited (centralized) streaming. This world exists because the mere existence of p2p technology places limits on the way that the content industry can operate.

Maybe if so many intelligent people believe in it...

There's really something worth it, perhaps?

In this case there are intelligent people on both sides though. Who can say which side is correct?

Like most things, it's pretty obviously not black and white.

I think the same of intelligent people in the blockchain space the same that I think of intelligent people that have joined cults. Either they're in on the scam or a victim of their own naïveté and/or ignorance.

Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.

I think the real lesson to be learned here is that it's extremely possible for a bunch of really smart people to completely miss the mark.

If there's one thing Dungeons and Dragons has taught me, it's that intelligence and wisdom are two completely different stats.

And INT is basically irrelevant outside of niche wizardy whereas nobody should be dumping wisdom.

There were and are a surprising number of people such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who studied and practiced an actual thing called ‘Magick’. I have yet to see any honest-to-God evidence of such a thing.

Just because whom you believe may be credible people might back something up doesn’t give it value. It’s value does.

Intelligent, pro-blockchain people should be relatively easily able to explain the value and utility provided by it though. It shouldn't be necessary to say "I'm intelligent and I think this is good".

Blockchain is a super simple data structure. So any bc product with a incomprehensible buzzwordy description is fraud.

Even I can name a few: uncensorable payments (especially important as I'm from an extremely corrupted country where we can't use PayPal), also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs), moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards), smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger). While some of those can also be implemented non-blockchain too, decentralization and having everything public and distributed is the key here. I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc. And as a bonus everyone can come and say "hey if you have this card you can play this other game I made" which empowers creative freedom.

Eventhough I consider myself above average, I'm sure there are smarter and more creative people that can come up with more use cases by time.

Just like the Internet evolved to what it is over decades, crypto space also will. We're in the "animated gifs, visitor counts, and unskippable huge flash intros" era of the crypto space.

With your last sentence, I think you're conflating the utility of blockchains as implemented today with the potential of the technology that has yet to be realized. I'm not asking for someone to point me to an incredible crypto project that exists today, but rather to explain why they think a decentralized, low-trust consensus protocol will change the world as we know it. Like, what are the killer use cases. If what you're saying is (like the early internet) we don't know what they are yet but expect it will be transformational in the long term, that's fine, but that's not really what people are saying.

Regarding your use cases.

> uncensorable payments

would your corrupt country not eventually catch up by regulating the ability to convert your BTC into fiat to buy things, or do you anticipate doing all your payments on the blockchain and never converting to fiat?

> also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs)

a global payment system does seem very useful, assuming the currency is stable; not justified to the current hype though

> moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards)

I have failed to understand this one. If you own NFT 1 on Blockchain X, how do you enforce your ownership rights in the real world if someone else chooses not to acknowledge the authority of this decentralized system? If it's a real world asset, and I steal it from you, who do you appeal to? If it's a digital asset, and I copy and use it, who do you appeal to? Or is the utility here people who all buy into and respect the authority of this chain's ownership ledger being able to trade these things within that ecosystem?

> smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger)

I haven't found this one that compelling, but maybe I'm missing something. Code isn't immutable, so what's to stop my "smart contract" from changing? I may be unaware of some guarantees that the blockchain provides that the code itself is also immutable.

> uncensorable payments

While it's true that you can't really censor the blockchain transfer, how much that allows someone to 'take' a payment depends a great deal on the legal circumstances where they live. I don't mean that the core transfer mechanism isn't cool - but there's a pretty big gap between a digital currency and acquiring physical goods where authorities can step in.

> super quick payments

Blockchain technology is, on average, pretty much the slowest possible way to make a payment. The slowness of other techniques are not because of any underlying technical reason - they're based on laws and policies. It's true that it can be faster than other methods in certain circumstances - but that has more to do with gaps in regulation than the technology.

I fully agree that distributed ownership is cool, but I wanted to note something about this:

> I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc

You are still bound by them not crashing, losing your data, going bankrupt or changing the rules. Many blockchains have gone down, lost history, shut down entirely, or changed the rules. There are ways that these problems are more easily addressed in a blockchain ecosystem, but it's not straightforwardly "better." If your usecase suffers from a bug, and a majority of the nodes benefit from that bug, you will likely never be able to get that bug fixed on the main chain.

I also think that copyright is the elephant in the room. Imagine two versions of...a world of warcraft sword. One is the texture & model that are included with the game - the other is, additionally, an NFT. The material reality of adding that sword to another game are identical in both cases: you can just put the sword in another game if you have the assets. That has never been a technical challenge. The challenge is legal and NFTs do not help with the legal problems.

If I sign a contract with you saying you can use the sword in another game the contract is the thing that matters. It does not matter if the contract is in an NFT or references an NFT. If anything, creating a system to manage & mint NFTs is an additional technical lift in creating multi-game assets.

I'm hard pressed think of how NFTs would be better than a centralized server that publishes daily signed database dumps of all owned assets. The cryptographic guarantees are the same and in either case the service continuing to sell assets depends on their willingness to assign copyright.

The more intelligent people are, the easier they find it to rationalise their own decisions.

midwits belive in blockchain

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