I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To
weh.wtf
weh.wtf
Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.
Please don't do this. We want curious conversation, not repetitive talking points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a serious problem with all threads on this topic.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
You can't, because you want a site that values free speech. But any site that values free speech is going to have to repeatedly answer the same basic questions on Crypto and Communism. It's going to have to repeatedly say "No, we're not trying to censor you because of chosen group X that claims to be innate, we're banning you because of actual crimes you have committed"
It's fine to argue about crimes in the sense of whether they should be illegal and whether people have actually committed them. At some point, you need to acknowledge that criminals will continue to argue their points, and that you either need to ban them or acknowledge that the same arguments will be repeated against them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I really cant spot a reason to treat “crypto” differently
The similarity being that there is just other aspects of these projects and technology to focus on, that can be interesting
It's intrinsic to what Bitcoin is.
Given this keeps happening, the fact is, there are no new arguments from both those totally for and those totally against it and they keep having to repeat themselves or at worst their arguments are not in good faith and they are not attacking the best representation of it in each crypto-related thread.
I'm lead to believe that in all these threads, it isn't 100% going to get destroyed no matter how upset and angry the anti-crypto folks are or how much they want it to, but it is neither going to take over the world as well; a narrative made by the delusional and aggressive pro-crypto folks. Both of them will be very disappointed in their utopian goals.
Posts like this one only confirm this, and both maximalists and the critics are giving very narrow extreme responses which sounds like both of them are trying to boost replies and clickbait.
Either way, it is inevitably going to get regulated and crypto will continue to survive with 90% of the meme coins and useless projects dead and with the rest of the useful ones being here to stay.
Up to a certain point I guess. There’s never nothing new under the sun regarding blockchains: they’re useless. Curiosity doesn’t change that.
When you say “in 10 years” when did that 10 year time frame start and end? Are talking about the 1960s or the 1990s? Because most people I knew didn’t start using the internet regularly until the mid to late 90s or about 30 or so years after it’s inception. 10 years is still pretty early in terms of adoption. I know people who still have never used email…
- Which countries?
- What portion of the population are benefiting from crypto? Is it a tiny portion of nerds or has it become more mainstream now?
- With the crash in cryptocurrency over the last few months are these people in those countries still glad that they used this, or are they regretting it?
I don't doubt that there exist individuals in countries with high inflation who have befitted from the crypto boom. I want more than just anecdotes about individuals: I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.
As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press.
Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
It does note that: "So far it is the preserve of a minority - largely a young, male, tech-savvy, and relatively affluent population. It's tech workers, not farmers, who are being paid in Bitcoin."
That story is also from April. I'd like to see updated coverage now that the crypto market has crashed. How many people in Argentina got burned badly by that?
I don't understand this "crypto market has crashed" narrativ. Ether is +60% in the last month... It's crypto. It never really crashs. A crypto crash would be something like -99.99%. Everything else is business as usual.
Seeing as you’re the CTO of a nft company you clearly have bias.
Here’s an informative episode on a podcast if you actually care https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bitcoin-standard-p...
> I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.
Why? What if there is not widespread trend and it is only anecdotes? Why should every new technology be "widely adopted or bust" instead of simply being a new interesting tech which a hacker can tinker with just because? Blockchains, NFTs and smart contracts are far more interesting than yet another iteration of a web framework or yet another way to track user data.
I want to see evidence that the benefits of blockchains etc are outweighing the very obvious harms they are causing.
A genuine one I am concerned about is the energy consumption of Proof of Work chains. But the tide is shifting towards Proof of Stake, with Ethereum network achieving 2 significant milestones towards that recently (Ropsten, Sepolia) and a third penultimate one (Goerli) planned in the week of Aug 6th. So the main chain's transition towards Proof of Stake is likely to happen in September and Ethereum's energy consumption drops 99% or even more.
Other purported disadvantages (gambling, sucking in capital and brains etc etc) are totally non-obvious and highly debatable.
Half of the world currencies has done worse than crypto even on small time scales.
(Hint: the fact that people were rioting in the streets to _avoid_ it suggests the answer is not many)
If the value of bitcoin as speculative asset is going to rise, then it is best to not spend it, but to hoard it. If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?
If it is a currency then it needs to have a stable value. If the value stabilizes, then no one will want to invest in it. Since it does not have any "real" commodity value it would then death spiral. I don't know how you square this circle.
> If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?
When people need something more than bitcoin, they'll trade for it. Food, shelter, medicine, etc. People will certainly trade for these things. But maybe they'll pass on replacing a phone that's only 2 years old or getting an xbox or 6 pack of beer.
It's fascinating to me that people say currency can't be deflationary or people will hoard it. You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money? People act like the economy will stop, but no matter how deflationary a currency is, people will still trade it for needs like food and shelter.
The problem with this kind of system: It's not just about saving. What's actually happening is those who have saved more are accumulating even more money by doing nothing, and everyone else who needs to spend it to buy food and shelter is suddenly losing more and more of their money. When it starts happening at a faster rate than the economy is producing actual value then you hit hyperdeflation and the economy spirals.
> When speculative investing involves the purchase of a foreign currency, it is known as currency speculation. In this scenario, an investor buys a currency in an effort to later sell that currency at an appreciated rate, as opposed to an investor who buys a currency in order to pay for an import or to finance a foreign investment.
BTC has been subject to massive swings. Just looking at CoinDesk, it was easy to find a time where it doubled in value in less than a month. Why would any reasonable person spend that sort asset?
I think the dynamics of the market are as important as the technical features that some digital currency has.
I invested in bitcoin five years ago and I an happy.
Ukrainians are heavily invested in crypto and consider crypto (at a governmental level) to be a significant contribution to their efforts in maintaining their sovereignty.
It's tiresome waiting for the unimaginative and uninsightful to open their eyes
They can't take a bitcoin out of their wallet and pay for something at their local store. They can't use their bitcoin like a credit card.
If you looked at my daily spending habits, you'd say "that guy doesn't have any crypto or stocks, look, he buys everything with a debit card which takes fiat currency out of his back account".
You can't see crypto with your eyes, but look at blockchain activity, and ask people what the source of their currency is.
Obviously it's a TINY TEENSY bit that is held in crypto. I'm not suggesting it is a majority. Crypto is hard to work with for the average person, it's volatile, and scary, but so was trading on the internet in the early days. Trust isn't there, the paypal of crypto does not yet exist.
Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
I feel that's a geek dream far outside of reality we live in.
Making it illegal to adopt or trade Crypto is possible and feasible. If your employer doesn't pay you in crypto,your landlord and bank and grocery store and public transport and health services don't take Crypto, then you're basically limited to the black market. Which tends to work well enough without complications of Crypto.
People envisioning dystopian future that needs Crypto, severely underestimate the ability of that dystopian future to prevent Crypto. Basically, their imagination of dystopian future is limited and naive. Humans can get bad and nasty and societies can get scary and Crypto is not the way out of such for ordinary citizens. Paper money, maybe. But Crypto requires so much equipment through so many telltales with so many ways for regular humans to reveal themselves accidentally that it's a totalitarian regimes' wet dream.
Just as we've seen; they can regulate the on/off ramps between local currency and crypto.
If you've got a method to turn meaningful amounts of BTC into USD without being subject to KYC regulations; then the US government is probably already building a federal money laundering case against it.
This does not even address the huge number of "unbanked" people in the US who have to pay a fortune in fees for their payments to family back "home" - crypto offers them a much cheaper alternative. They don't care what the crypto is worth as it gets spent again back "home" as a currency, not as an investment.
If your country's currency is in a state of hyperinflation and you want to buy crypto to shield yourself from it, who's your counterparty? Who is willing to sell you that crypto and expose themselves to that inflation, and how are they able to do so profitably?
An actual currency should have a stable value. Bitcoin will never have a stable value (at least not while it is popular) due to speculation. People who believe Bitcoin is a safer store of value than their country's fiat currency are in dire, dire straits indeed.
I do absolutely agree that people should be free from fear that their currency of choice/necessity should be safe from the possibility of 100-1000% inflation per year, but I wish we could do better than Bitcoin, of all things, as a "solution".
Countries with hyperinflation lend to not have a ton of assets. Even if this were a use-case, it doesn't seem to justify anywhere near the valuation of BTC or other crypto.
And why on earth you would you use BTC as opposed to a stable-coin in that case?
(Well, maybe in the medium term, I guess this can fit some use cases, but the illusion of stability still seems to be a concern ?)
Sucks if you need to run though. But usually if you're wealthy in an unwealthy/poorly banked country and can't leave for some reason, you keep your assets in the place you'd run to if you really had to.
I'm not saying everyone should store their savings in bitcoin, but I am saying it serves a very real, potentially life changing purpose for some people and that shouldn't be discounted.
Regardless, the article you link does not actually claim what the title says it claims:
> PYMNTS research reveals that many consumers (24%) see the option to send funds in cryptocurrency as a key motivator in choosing a payment services provider (PSP), in fact.
That does not mean 24% of cross-border payments are made in cryptocurrencies. It means that 24% of people think that it's important that their payments provider supports cryptocurrency as an option (and says nothing about whether or not they exercise that option, or even have an account with such a provider).
Also, even if this were true, that does not mean you are correct in stating that cryptocurrencies are about payments. It's pretty clear that far, far more people use them for investing speculation.
Their assertion:
> There are a lot of much better assets to buy as an inflation hedge
.. was in indirect response to a parent comment:
> Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.
I think clarifying that there is a material population of crypto users who use Bitcoin as a currency not an investment is material in this context?
However, recently Argentina has banned banks from converting crypto to pesos.
So, I think we can say that it was happening enough that the gov't took action. If it wasn't happening at all, they wouldn't have done anything.
To be fair, cryptocurrency as a way for transferring money is excellent; people here move money with Bitcoin, which can be immediately converted into foreign fiat, avoiding the absurd exchange rates and taxes the government imposes. In my opinion that is something that could be done with any black/grey market tool for transferring value, and as I see it, currently cryptocurrency is filling that niche because of network effects, not because of its inherent properties.
Within the crazy insanity that's the system, it does end up working out somehow.
I just don’t buy this at all.
Finally, the Internet was useful by 1982 — there's a reason why universities, governments, etc. all jumped online and agencies like NSF were funding this to support other research, not just development of TCP/IP, by then. The other big trend to keep in mind are the BBS scene and especially online services like CompuServe (which was already 13 years old by 1982) which had profitable businesses selling access to people who found it was useful to have in their lives for many reasons not related to developing or selling computer networking. Again, there was zero question of demand: computer hardware was expensive and networking was positively usurious but it was clear that growth would accelerate as soon as that changed because normal people found it useful for various parts of their lives.
Cryptocurrencies are different: since these systems rely on the now-pervasive web, most people on the planet have had access immediately. What hasn't happened yet is most of them having a reason to bother with it. Speculation has been the biggest driver but buy-and-hold is toxic to developing a useful currency and few people have built a business or life which depends on it except for gambling like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
In 1998, I was working for a web design business which had a mix of startups and established companies (a couple of F100s and some F500s, as well as smaller local companies). None of those were “web” companies - they sold things like pet supplies or knives, offered financial services, did biomedical research, etc. but what they all had in common was that they benefited from being on the web because their customers were moving there and they could offer them a better experience and/or lower costs this way.
That still hasn’t happened for cryptocurrencies despite a much larger potential customer base, lower barriers to entry, and twice as much time. If Bitcoin abruptly halted today, almost no businesses outside of the field would even notice and the few who did would mostly be removing the least used payment option on their site. That’s the difference: there’s been just as much marketing, the same level of squandering VC money on Super Bowl ads and stadium naming rights, etc. but there doesn’t seem to be anything more than that sizzle this time.
We live in an age where we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this.
If you keep cash or gold in a safe place. You are only allowed to keep a certain amount. It can be seized at will.
Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.
We do not own any of these things without the requirement of having to trust a person, a comp ay or a government.
Blockchain technology allows us to own anything that can be documented on a ledger. Indefinitely. Trustlessly.
With cryptocurrencies, you need to trust:
* The exchanges (and other ramps for getting useful money into the system and out of the system)
* The developers of the chain
* The developers of the smart contracts
* The developers of wallets
* The miners
* The internet providers
* The hardware manufacturers
* The government (yes, they could punish usage of cryptocurrencies hard if they wanted to)
> Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.
Which can all be lost or stolen easily without a central authority and a judicial system. Do not underestimate the power of phishing, especially if it is directed towards specific people.
A trustless ledger documenting that I own the land my house is on, doesn't make me any safer against a government determined to steal my land.
A car lease ultimately requires me to trust that the leasing company is going to abide by their contractual obligations, just as they are trusting that I will abide by mine, and the contract enumerates what happens if either party fails to uphold their obligations, which is ultimately enforced by the court system. A ledger doesn't really change any of that.
etc.
Also, how can crypto not be seized at will? If they want to take your hardware wallet, they can just keep that just the same. Not to mention getting people to give over the keys if it is kept in a centralized exchange, which a lot of people are.
Wills, deeds, leases etc... are worthless on their own, with or without a blockchain. Sure they can be documented on a blockchain, but the blockchain has no ability to enforce the documents in the real world. If your ownership for somethings is on the blockchain, and someone steals it, then proof of ownership does not matter if there are not government agents with guns willing to enforce your ownership. Libertarians always believe this weird non-aggression principle, as if someone with more guns would respect your rights to property. Civil forfeiture only works because the government has the most guns.
Serious question, what/where does this apply to? I get NFTs for digital authenticity, but PKI solves this too. How does one "own nothing without blockchain" when we have property deeds, automobile titles, jewelry and fine art certificates of authenticity all without blockchain? Your comment comes off as a solution looking for a problem.
When any of these deeds, titles or certificates are lost, burnt or stolen. You have to rely on an outside body to keep a backup safe for you.
Blockchain allows us to be super efficient too. Which is a perk. Rather than the need of waiting for someone to certify, deliver, inspect, notify, return, process. Depending on the industry, this could take years. Blockchain tech allows everyone to see the validity of a claim in real time.
My family sold out family home a few years ago. It took 6 years of unnecessary admin work to get it sold. If we relied on blockchain tech, it would've been processed in a day.
[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
Why? This is an unsubstantiated claim. Blockchains still have an outside body that you're required to trust, several in fact. The most prominent one is the miners.
I can't tell what the admin issues with your sale were because you didn't mention them, but it seems like being able to see the validity of the claim wasn't the issue that took 6 years for lawyers to resolve. You can show them the validity in person on the day of the sale.
This phrase pretty much sums up almost everything related to cryptocurrency/blockchain.
The first part is simply not true (ownership isn't exactly uncommon). Can you specify the problem more precisely and explain how blockchains solve this? I've been following the space since the day Satoshi's manifesto hit HN so please include as many details as possible.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ has tracked $10B in losses due to grift. And that doesn't include the losses used to pay off ransomware.
Money laundering for good is still money laundering.
[1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest_I
Killer app if ever there was one.
It wasn’t on the growth curve post-1992, but its value for technology companies and universities was not even a question.
Is the value marginal next to what the web does today? Sure. But its more than enough value for people 50 years from now to get rose tinted glasses around, as many are doing in this thread concerning the early internet
There is nothing that can be done on blockchain that cannot be done cheaper, faster, easier, and more securely without blockchain. Blockchain has negative value, and no matter where you measure the start of the Internet from, it had more positive externalities fourteen years on than anything blockchain will ever have, not least because so-called "blockchain" has an insurmountable set of negative externalities that would need to be overcome if a single real-world productive use could be found for it.
TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher
# The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C)
HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types.
[No-crypto P2P]
# Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,)
Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate
# ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,)
Linked Data; RDF, RDFa
5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/
- Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW
# Web3 ("Zero-Trust")
SK: Secret Key
PK: Public Key
Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure
ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs.
(A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs)
(DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)
I'm also not sure why "the technology is in its infancy and doesn't give us great indications at if it is usable in the real world, but right now is full of scammers and fraud" isn't an acceptable position. Why does it have to either be the next great new thing or a grift? People grifting with new technology and taking advantage of the tech illiterate is pretty common.
Because it’s far far easier to use for ransomware and to hide your trail than any traditional bank transaction or money transfer.
99% of internet based ransoms are still being paid via Bank Wires.
That would be decisive if it were true.
But I always thought that it is much easier to get ill-gotten gains out of BTC than out of the banking system.
Two Arrested for Alleged Conspiracy to Launder $4.5 Billion in Stolen Cryptocurrency
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...
Internet “invented” а 1969 and never was used widely till 1982. Neural networks was developed at 1980 but real applications started at 2011. Speech recognition showed at 1962 and still looks like “pretty new piece of tech” for humanity.
We have to admit, we are really slow in adopting tech.
If there was a "super-centralized" network that already had major success (for example, imagine a world in which teletext or something was dominant before the internet) then the internet/web may have had a serious competitor. Instead, the internet was largely reverse-compatible with previous networks such as the phone network through dial-up.
Additionally, the latest wave of cryptocurrency hucksters have been selling their cryptocurrencies as a solution for a problem that cryptocurrency just does not solve. It is one thing to claim that they're wrong; it's another to claim that cryptocurrency has failed its original purpose entirely.
There were absolutely successful networks. AOL (America Online) was the biggest, while CompuServe was the older one.
I remember (alas) consciously choosing not to invest in .com domain names in the mid-90's because I assumed both they and AOL room names (if that was the term?) would just be passing fads on the way to whatever better newer network would exist ten years later, with a newer name system.
The internet absolutely had to overcome America Online, at least in the US. (It helped that, early on, many/most people could access the internet via AOL, before local ISP's became widespread.)
It's hard to imagine how one could define the growth of the Internet as anything other than network effects - its value to end users has always been a function of how many end users there are, which is literally the definition of a network effect.
Edit: To expand a little, considering I don't know if you were aware of the early/mid 1990s, but in those days most people didn't have a computer at home, and in many places phone calls were charged per-minute. It was a significant thing to buy a PC and learn how to use it and pay a lot to go online.
This line of thinking is extremely dangerous, even moreso for something that's claiming to be a currency. This is the mentality that lead to these ponzi-like schemes; the promoters are prioritizing growth at all costs for the sole purpose of overcoming the network effects. Not because they actually built decent products.
> And The Winner Is…
> Chainalysis helps the government track down tax evasion,darknet markets and CSAM providers & consumers.
This article agrees with you. It supports your argument. Because all of these dead projects have a vast amount of losers. People who invested in the cryptocurrency (as far as it ever was a currency), and who now own a useless pile of bits. The cherry on top is the main project which does make sense is one involving all the negative sides of cryptocurrencies in general, aiding law enforcement in their goal to combat crime involving cryptocurrencies.
The Internet took 30+ years, granted "the start of the Internet" could be debated.
Were we to do some word replacements Internet to radio, and Bitcoin to Internet your words would sound just as accurate following the dot-com bust.
I do think we can agree some of the early decisions have led to disastrous consequences (proof of work power consumption is concerning high).
The idea was patented in 1979.
That's how old it actually is, and it's found its way into numerous useful things. However, exactly zero of them have been as revolutionary or transformative as say the automobile or the internet and are about a million more orders of magnitude short of all the promises made by people using it as a means to burn electricity to sustain a marketplace addicted to financialization instead of actual productivity.
Disclaimer: has dealt with Merkle Trees and cryptographic assurance in distributed database, global payments (root of trust & settlement), and safety-critical systems use cases.
[0] https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...
Regardless, I think it's safe to assume the Stellar Foundation polled their own users, and not a representative sample of the general population. "Cryptocurrency enthusiasts use cryptocurrency" is not exactly an interesting or surprising survey result.
If the survey was of 2,079 people, then how does this extrapolate to 8 million? They say 23% of the respondents represent 8 million people, but that does not mean that 8 million people actually used crypto.
Adding nodes to a linked list in the least efficient way possible to promote an mlm doesn't create any value.
Where we are now as still deciding whether the equivalent of TCP/IP will be what to move forward with, and by that metric I am pretty impressed with the progress of the blockchain concept and sentiment coordination.
I can only imagine you held the same beliefs then as now
So after 10 years, is Bitcoin the only one though?
> In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place.
The Internet? In the 1980s there were virtually little to no users. Until the Web came around in the 1990s so did the dotcom speculators and then after the crash, 90% of those internet startups died. Only then the survivors added value to it. Even Web 2.0 was seen as a 'scam' [0].
I'm sure you meant the web?
[0] https://www.wired.com/2005/10/web-2-0-cracks-start-to-show/
Did you miss 2008, shitty CDOs?
> and an staggering amount of crime
How has BTC enabled crime more than cash?
It’s trivial to be paid in BTC.
Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right … https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/crypto-crime-hit-an...
Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021 - https://chargebacks911.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/
And that’s just credit cards. It’s not wire fraud or other fraud.
Why do you focus on the mode of criminality and not the crime or criminals itself?
I’ll give you that Bitcoin like ALL the other value transfer mechanisms has some criminals using it but surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime.
As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention?
Sure, but both the internet and fiat currencies have facilitated a huge amount of legitimate activities, far, far more than crime. I would assert that the vast majority of users of Bitcoin (>90%) are either speculators or criminals (the vast majority of that majority being speculators, with some small but significant minority being criminals).
> Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right [...] Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021
Those numbers are meaningless without comparing them to the total monetary value of transactions pushed through them yearly. I suspect you'll find that, when talking about percent of total, Bitcoin fraud is higher than credit card fraud (and I would suspect that's still true if you consider other kinds of fraud in addition to CC fraud).
> surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I would suggest exactly that. The vast majority of Bitcoin use is either speculation or crime. And speculation basically destroys it as a stable store of value, which is something that's essential for a currency. Sure, there are people using it for legitimate purposes, or to get around unjust currency controls perpetrated by their governments. But I'd wager that's a tiny percentage of users, and they do so at great risk, both legally and financially.
> As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention?
Yes, absolutely. Your average person should not be investing in individual stocks. They should have the bulk of their investment assets in index funds, or at most, actively-managed funds.
Regarding specific company stocks, sure, you can always cherry-pick examples that did worse than Bitcoin. That doesn't prove anything, though. Regardless, looking at the all-time history of BTC does not inspire confidence in it as an investment, especially were I to consider opening a position today.
But I appreciate your thoughts and you sharing them.
That said, it is true that companies like Chainalysis (it is in no way alone in this field, of course), which bring visibility, analytics, risk assessment and so on into the blockchain world, have a real world impact. I think the accusation of "censoring transactions" is misplaced - first of all, on a decentralized blockchain you can not really censor a transaction (you can do it if you're a centralized exchange gatekeeping an access route to the chain, but that's a different thing) - but the impact is there and is going to grow nevertheless.
> Apart from being the top #1 result, and a reasonably recent article, Builtin.com has 300+ employees (per linkedin), and is a company built around the tech startup community. Part of their business seems to be maintaining a database of startup companies, including the ones mentioned in the Blockchain article — so they have some business incentive for the data to be accurate.
This is not true. Even though blockchain is decentralized there could be a single chain/few chains of truth if you want to convert it to real money. And that chain could only be the one that would be approved by coinbase, bitfinex etc. If they want to censor an address they simply could stop accepting those transactions, and then miners will have no choice but to censor those transaction else they couldn't convert it to money. The same affect could also be created by bitcoin developers or government. Till now, AFAIK only developers along with exchange have been successful in censoring a transaction[1][2], but government came close[3].
[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident [2]: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-... [3]: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-hav...
> if there's a reasonable valid reason
Who says it's a valid reason? Who says the reason is what they say it is? Who decides the best fix would be to censor a transaction?
What if FakeBlockchainCorp decides to target you, then says there was a bug with these transactions, everyone agrees... Where's your bitcoin?
I think I answered this question above - the majority of miners. If you succeed in convincing the majority of miners, then it will be valid. That's what "decentralized" means - it doesn't mean nobody is in control. It means the control is not concentrated in one place - it is spread between miners.
> then says there was a bug with these transactions, everyone agrees
If everyone agrees, then you've lost. It's not a magic woodoo to make you the invincible king of the world, it's just a way to make control more distributed, nothing more. If the FakeBlockchainCorp succeeds in convincing the majority of bitcoin miners that your bitcoin should be taken from you - it will be taken from you.
I don't think this is fair to say because what you are describing here is a situation that is occuring off a blockchain or one that is occurring on the blockchain but where the individual transacting has chosen to allow someone to censor their transactions.
Your overall point that a decentralised system consists of centralised links that can and will be attacked by a hostile entity or node(s) is valid though.
I think the same thing applies to technology infrastructure. ETH came out in 2015 but it took a few years before it became as ubiquitous as it is today. Basically, it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product.
You've omitted a significant portion of YouTube's history. A dating website turned video sharing platform that struggled for years until one of the world's largest bought them, has become a bedrock of the content creator community.
The core of what YouTube was has little relation to their current position in the industry.
No one would have laughed at you for saying in 2002 that a video sharing website would enable people to make money. Video streaming (Real, QuickTime, Flash) had already been around for years. Porn websites were already selling access to videos (MPEG-1 or WMV) in 2002. Affordable DV cameras existed as did user friendly editing software. The first 3G cellular services were rolling out as were phones that could stream video over those networks.
Computing power, storage, and bandwidth were limitations in 2002 but no one at that time would have laughed if you said "this will improve over the next two decades". Apple was by 2002 selling computers by advertising how easy video editing was on their platform.
You'd have a better point if your horizon was a little further off. YouTube (in concept) would be far more laughable to someone in 1992 or 1982 than someone in 2002. Everything for YouTube needed to exist was extant in 2002. YouTube itself was only two years from existing. Cryptocurrency is a lot less interesting today if it's utility will take another 30 years to become evident.
If you don't understand the industry, you can't. That's what hype is for - to make you unable to distinguish those. If you really need to do that - you find somebody who knows the industry and who you can trust, and ask them. Otherwise, you just accept that you have no idea and would have to wait till the results are clear to know.
> it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product.
Yes. Even for people that know what it is about. Virtually impossible for people that don't.
It would be like a construction-focused publication hand-curating the top N/most important N construction projects in the world, of which N-1 are some mixture of cancelled, fictional, or not actually having anything to do with construction. It would, of course, be utterly farcical - in any space other than web3. But in this space, we smile, nod, close our eyes, and hope that our token/ico/ape.jpg will go to the moon.
This isn't actually a good thing.
The author's credentials are:
Sam Daley is a Built In associate product manager who formerly covered AI, blockchain and emerging tech trends for BuiltIn.com. Prior to Built In, Daley worked as a CNN production assistant and development coordinator for Rotary International.
Which does not suggest he has any special insight into any blockchain technology or industry beyond being assigned to "write about all that new stuff because you young people understand those". OTOH, his previous title on Linkedin is "SEO Strategist" - which may be the explanation for the #1 result. At least we know he's good at that job, congrats, Sam. His credentials on being the arbiter of blockchain project prominence are still not clear - and I suspect his methodology of compiling the list differs little from the original article's methodology. Maybe I'm wrong but his bio doesn't show any signs of any relation to crypto. Maybe he still has huge knowledge of it, I don't know, there's no way for me to see it at least.
So, not a "construction-focused publication" but more like "local newspaper worker who covers any news about manufacturing industry, construction, agriculture, food industry and anything else nobody wants to". So yeah, random list of startups has most of them dead or pivoted in several years. That's how it works with startups.
Let's all respect that some people work on this and try to come up something good for everybody. And also, some people don't or have had bad experiences. Love <3
Dapper Labs is legit. Steem was a 2017-era source of ridicule within crypto. Gemini is just a conventional crypto exchange (like Coinbase). Algorand has some interesting tech but was a mixed bag from launch. The rest of these projects are totally obscure.
I’m just glad they clearly stuck with ads and let all these scam projects rot.
There certainly is a massive amount of wasted talent here.
Yeah, taking a career in developing surveillance capitalist products and building real world spyware to harvest our personal data only to run it on tons of planet incinerating data centres (which don't work) just to try push and target more spyware ads to auction and sell their personal info around, is surely improving the world and a great career to have in big tech. /s It's no better than the scams rife in the crypto industry.
What big tech has done in the past 20+ years was a complete waste and a total violation to one's privacy which they have gotten away with for a long time and with regulations for both industries around the corner (especially big tech) they deserve massive multi-billion dollar fines for that.
No exceptions.
It’s really sad in general how much money there is in bullshit and how little there is in things like medical research and exploration.
The luxury of useful work is quite rare it seems.
This is true, but this just means that there's something wrong with both ads and gambling
Edit: this timely link appeared on my feed: https://blog.mollywhite.net/celsius-letters/
But as far as the blockchain and gambling goes, that's not some silly vacation vice the guys go out to vegas for a few times a year/decade.
This stuff is advertised hard by influencers, misrepresented as investments, advertised at children, using foreign jurisdictions to be unaccountable.
It's not "it's bad because gambling bad".
It's bad because gambling is being forced shamelessly into the rest of the economy, often under false pretenses.
[1] and that is regulated to help reduce the amount it takes advantage of people who can't help it.
Blogger randomly selects other bloggers garbage article to hand select a comprehensive list of projects no one has ever heard of and rightly bashes them. Of course, ostensibly this is representative of all projects (even those that actually have a following)
Beyond a bore.
A ledger is the oldest (Sumer) recorded instrument used in organized society. We now have an immutable ledger that requires zero intermediaries.
How is it possible for people to fail in understanding that value?
Can anyone speak to the timeframe after 99-00 implosion of the internet when people finally stopped claiming it was a sham?
I just want to know when to expect this kind of boring shortsightedness to taper off
Because so far nobody has shown me a way in which an immutable ledger can let me do something desirable that I can't already do, or transform a thing I currently do into a more desirable version of it.
The point is that you cannot do those things without an intermediary. That's it. That's the difference. I'm showing you.
Try, really think, to see yourself in another country, one where the currency isn't guaranteed.
How about having your home shelled after you have been evacuated? You have a safe deposit box? Not any more, confiscated.
There are countries around the world where people lack basic security. They cannot store wealth.
It's not just about the first world
Like, sure, that's a use case, but if that's the best we've gotten so far, I'm fine with continuing to think that this isn't as universally beneficial as the Internet was.
It isn't a "use case". Don't you see that?
>universally beneficial...
Of course it isn't! The ones that benefit the most are the ones that currently don't have security in part or due to their own government. That could also one day be your government.
Moreover, I certainly never made any statement about changing the world.
Not only that, you have ignored my previous point and deflected from it by assuming some new argument...
ftw!
Sounds like you aren't interested in merits.
By now, most people have a healthy skepticism of blockchain projects.
All that said, kudos to the author for spending a good amount of time looking into these projects.
Oh? Like a story about all the various cryptocurrency scams that cost so many people their life savings?
Or a story about the massive overuse of energy causing brownouts for unfortunate towns that happen to be too close to a mining datacenter?
Or a story about the bright-eyed college graduates sucke(re)d into working for cryptocurrency startups that then either quickly go belly-up or gradually become more and more obviously scams?
NIST's answer to "Do you need a blockchain?": https://m.imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed
... together with a trusted third party covers something like 90-95% of the supposed applications if blockchain. It's insufficient for typical mass-adopted, international currency, but for damned near everything else it is "more than good enough".
In the real world, before blockchain, what mutually distrusting corporations or people would do is set up a distinct third party organisation to keep the "ledger" (or whatever).
For example, banks use non-bank companies like Experian to do cross-bank fraud analysis. Similarly, many industries send their sales stats to a third-party non-competitor org that aggregates the data, and then sells back industry-wide anonymised sales stat reports. This lets companies that don't trust each other exchange data, etc...
This was a solved problem centuries ago, and technologies like Azure SQL Database Ledger make it nearly as robust as blockchain, with none of the downsides.
In other words, the NIST flow chart needs more steps towards the bottom pointing to both existing and new non-blockchain solutions.
Okay.
>Mostly the answer to do you need a blockchain is no.
But... that's the same thing that the wrong chart says...
You want people to agree on which chain is the main chain, so that you can only add things to the list, and you can't go back or substitute it with another list without breaking proof of work.
The purpose of bitcoin is to make people agree that a spent transaction is irrevocably spent.
https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chainarchive
Crypto is more and more centralised because the hardware to run your own node is now thousands of dollars. That is without even getting into miners...It is kinda failing.
1) You don't need an archive node to fully verify the current state of the chain. A full geth node in full sync mode (about 600gb) will process every transaction of every block and get you the current state. You only need an archive node if you want the history of each account and contract separately indexed.
2) Folks that do want an archive node can now use much more space efficient clients then geth such as erigon (1.4tb) or besu (1.2 tb) if they want to run a block explorer or query the state of an account in the past.
2) Erigon has horrible bugs and is missing data. I filled a ticket against one such issue and they "fixed" it by making the exception go away and returning null. Their lack of attention to detail made me abandon the project.
If you know someone in the project I can produce MANY examples and would be willing to do so because running an archive geth node sucks.
IMHO the use cases that make some sense for blockchain are identity, ownership certificates and providence, and trustless exchange/settlement between institutions. ie where you want ot be sure you got your money, even if your counterparty goes bust overnight, eg for forex settlement, or anywhere some kind of escrow is currently used.
> Not real-world projects. As discussed in the introduction, I am only discussing projects that have real-world effects outside of cryptocurrency balances. Gemini, Circle as exchanges, and Algorand as a Blockchain implementation, don’t qualify here – they don’t actually add real-world utility other than moving tokens around.
Interesting take. These are very different "projects", but I don't see why they don't qualify as "having real-world effects".
Gemini and Circle are corporations that provide stablecoins backed by USD reserves (gUSD and USDC). The tokens these companies have created can be moved around on various blockchains without an intermediary and used to pay for goods and services.
Algorand is a blockchain protocol that can be used to build decentralized applications (similar to Ethereum). There are many "real-world" projects built on Algorand, for example lofty.ai (tokenized real-estate investing).
I don't see how the author defines "real-world utility" and why Algorand, Gemini and Circle wouldn't qualify. It seems like the author is trying to cherry-pick a few failed blockchain projects in an attempt to smear the whole industry.
Agree, IIRC this is a YC baby as well and will easily be a $1-10B startup over the next 5-10 years. They have unfortunately become less generous with fees since launch but the core product is still extremely solid. Probably should just keep my mouth shut because homes move so quickly now, but that wouldn't be in the spirit of SV.
- Uncensorable money: og bitcoin and pretty much everything else
- Uncensorable money + privacy: monero, tornado.cash, etc.
- Decentralized exchanges/automated market makers: curve.fi, uniswap, etc.
- Prediction markets: polymarket etc.
EDIT: looks like omen and augur are dead
"Company is a fucking joke. I invested upon launch and there's still nothing usable after half a decade. Been seeing the same "roadmaps" for 5+ years. Company raises hundreds of millions and can't manage to launch a simple UX for prediction markets lmfao..."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Augur/comments/mvsyf8/comment/gyu4s...
But even if there is a trusted entity involved, a smart contract I can interact with directly using blockchain transactions is better than having to provide my picture, passport and SSN to some company that builds a database of all my trades. This problem is even worse if I move to a jurisdiction where you need to be accredited to play, or where prediction markets are illegal.
For many of these financial applications, crypto/blockchain isn't strictly necessary, but it can be very useful.
The difference is that you consider the traditional banking world legit and the crypto one scammy and fake, which is a perfectly valid opinion to have, but completely begs the particular question of whether any of this shit has real world utility.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/technology/helium-cryptoc...
That was audacious of Helium.
Thanks for replying.
6.5k monthly - I wonder how much longer they have?
"HSBC and Wells Fargo are cutting out a key part of the currency market’s infrastructure from some trades after the two banks agreed to settle transactions directly on blockchain technology.
From Monday, they will use blockchain technology to reconcile and pay out on deals in dollars, sterling, euro and Canadian dollars between the two banks, using HSBC’s FX Everywhere platform. The agreement means they will bypass CLS, the nearly two-decades-old utility that central banks urge market participants to use to neutralise the risk of certain trade failures"
https://www.ft.com/content/1a4dcaf5-2b4b-4f0b-8c58-a8fa173f2... https://archive.ph/qs8Cg non-paywalled link
It looks like it's a private blockchain shared between two (at the moment) institutions, which means it's probably being used basically as an append-only log.
In hindsight, the Big Data hype wave was really just a good excuse to bring in a wider set of analytics tools than Excel, Access and inflexible, IT-administered databases.
If Bitcoin's value isn't stable, then it would be risky for these banks to hold a lot of it in order to settle trades. Perhaps this is what would sink this usage of the blockchain, but probably only a quant would be able to answer that.
I did find it somewhat amusing that the article claims a benefit of real-time visibility of settlement status. I believe some settlement systems still work by sending csv files over ftp (+ssh / sftp).
There isn’t a single blockchain that we can call “the blockchain”
Technically, a private append-only log is a blockchain if it includes some hashing in each entry to verify the previous entry. This creates a chain of blocks that can be verified to have occurred in a certain order without tampering, though it wouldn’t have the features of a distributed blockchain like cryptocurrencies. This is actually fine for a lot of applications. It’s especially fine if you get a vague business direction to “use blockchain somewhere” and you need to check that box for PR/marketing/investor-pleasing purposes.
They’re banks. They have lots of agreements and lawyers. They already trust eachother. And there’s no 3rd party involved.
I’d be surprised if there was an actual blockchain involved instead of spinning a simple log as a blockchain for hype.
This article is a refutation to the “blockchain all the things!” hype of the last few years.
Very often on HN and other places when problems come up with cryptocurrencies (like another scam implodes) defenders are quick to point out “yes but there are other uses besides cryptocurrency” or that blockchains will revolutionize tons of industries. Logistics is very frequently mentioned.
This article shows that no, not a single group seems to have succeeded at needing a blockchain in any non-crypto project. The few that might be running hide the blockchain in a central place behind a gateway making it totally superfluous.
Based on the tech, this claim just makes no sense, and it doesn’t surprise me that all of their job ads are for normal sql skills. Trying to query a blockchain you are trying to reconstruct the state of an event-sourced system by replaying all the events (ie without using CQRS). It is incredibly painful to answer even basic questions, so anyone with an analytic question to answer ends up building/using an indexer and writing the results to a sql database so they can actually use the data is a flexible way (ie they use CQRS effectively). Source: I recently wrote a blockchain indexer to answer queries because I couldn’t do what I wanted directly by querying the chain even though all the data is there. It walks a chain using RPC queries and writes the results to a postgres database.
In and of itself this doesn’t invalidate the potential niche usefulness of a blockchain btw (say you need to share data between parties who don’t trust each other without having a central party because noone would trust that party) but the blockchain doesn’t in any sense enable the “big data”, in actual fact you are managing to achieve data analysis in spite of the blockchain.
Also, it’s 2022, can we just let the term “big data” have a decent burial at this point?
So Stellar and MoneyGram are not 'Money Transfer Use Cases'? [0] If not, why did they partner on this in the first place if they didn't think this was a possible or a feasible use case?
On NFTs, Blockchain domains like ENS (Ethereum Name Service [1], Handshake [2], etc) are the only valid NFTs that have a use case. Seem to work fine for Namecheap [3], Encirca [4], etc, with millions of these domains registered so far. Once again, 90% of all NFTs, including the JPEG ones will die with the remaining 10% still surviving including blockchain domains.
But yes as always, the extreme anti-crypto boosters like ghuntley will do anything to boost the most ridiculous of posts. Including this one.
Oh dear.
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moneygram-launches-...
"Consumers can now go into a MoneyGram location to either load their digital wallets to access the digital economy, or cash-out their digital currencies to increase the utility of their holdings."
So the real world use-case for Moneygram is to exchange cryptocurrency for cash and vice versa. How exactly does this refute his point?
And having blockchain domains that can only be accessed using a particular dns, a VPN service, certain browsers or having to install an extension is hilarious.
Not to mention ENS is running their "web3" on Cloudflare. The decentralization is truly mind boggling.
Oh and loved this part about handshake renewal fees:
"Renewal fees and ownership It’s important to understand that when you buy a traditional domain, you are hooked to pay the domains registrar a renewal fee each year. This is a fee to maintain ownership of your domain name. The renewal fees are subject to change and often times driven by ICANN and then the registrars. So with traditional domains, you don’t truly own them – you are simply leasing it"
And handshake domains solve this by:
"Handshake domain names provide true ownership. Which means there are yearly renewal fees*"
Gotcha, makes sense.
First of all, I hope you read the guidelines. [0]
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Whilst you were reading it, Did you ignore this?
>> The partnership focuses on delivering a service that revolutionizes the settlement process. For the first time, settlement with MoneyGram will occur in near-real-time using USDC, one of the world's fastest growing dollar digital currencies. This enables an accelerated collection of funds, improving efficiencies and reducing risks.
The claim: "Money transfer use-cases would fall directly in the category of “crypto-only”. For as long as Bitcoin has existed, this has been touted as a great use-case — but it never really materialized."
Indeed, Bitcoin cannot be used for that use case for a number of obvious reasons and it seems that Moneygram, Stellar, etc partnered for that use-case, otherwise that solution would not exist. The author seems to be trying their hardest to narrow the goal post for this one.
> And having blockchain domains that can only be accessed using a particular dns, a VPN service, certain browsers or having to install an extension is hilarious.
So that means you can't use it today and it is 'not a use case'? Perhaps it's 'hilarious' for users today especially those in either Russia or Ukraine to download a specific browser or extension to access the Tor Network or .onion links. Seems like all these users defending it don't see that as a problem? [1]. Beacon browser (Chromium derivative) does the same thing for Handshake, ENS domains: https://impervious.com/beacon
Assuming you have read the whole article in [2]:
Can you seize a Handshake / ETH domain away just like a private equity attempted to do for a .org domain? Surely they [3] saw that as a problem and were crying about it.
> "Handshake domain names provide true ownership. Which means there are yearly renewal fees"
The mining fees for a TLD are biannual and are for every 2 years and are 100,000x times cheaper compared to ICANN which is $180,000 per TLD filed for application + $5,000. But I thought you read the whole article from [2] which you failed to cite this. Clearly you did not.
If you want 'true' ownership, you will also find that in [4] that a Handshake TLD can be locked and verified in a decentralised registry forever [3] which has virtually zero renewal fees.
So once again, there's seems to be a valid use case in blockchain domains. Especially with the use-case in payments directly to readable names rather than unreadable addresses.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32288058
[2] https://learn.namebase.io/about-handshake/about-handshake
So basically the author found nothing good (and I haven't either, though I commend their depth of investigation). I'd be open of objective approaches any objectors would recommend doing differently to find a top 34
> Number of pins: 1286
> Repo size: 52.87 GB
> Rate In: 21.38 KB/s
> Rate Out: 6.49 KB/s
6kb/s out rate. For 1.2k videos.
s/blockchain/linked lists/g;
s/artificial intelligence/regression/g;
Edit: well it used to support it, it seems to be gone from the settings now.
Still can't quite understand if there's anything to it beyond hype and FOMO.
ghosts in the machine
in my mind they're both decentralized and distributed peer to peer systems which aim to provide global public internet infrastructure (which is what i find to be the interesting part).
handshake has a cryptoconomy and gnunet is more a traditional peer to peer network.
handshake is probably the cooler of the two, if you ask me.