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Comment by calibas | Hacker News Reader

All the "Bitcoin advocates" that I've ever talked to couldn't tell a merkle tree from an oak.

That speaks more about the people you're surrounded by than it does the incredible people actually doing the very interesting work of developing the bitcoin ecosystem behind the scenes.

It is a shame that your only exposure to the space comes from pump monkeys who don't understand that a blockchain is barely more than a distributed linked list (hell, it's basically just glorified git) and the real innovation was not the data structure, but the integration of proof of work to create Byzantine fault tolerance.

I'm pretty sure the only difference between a Merkle tree and an Oak is the theoretically infinite branching. Is that right? /s

FYI, I regularly interact with people who actually understand blockchain and cryptocurrencies, so your assumptions are a little mistaken. None of those people are telling me to buy Bitcoin though, so I don't count them among "Bitcoin advocates".

Well I think both of you will need to swap “Bitcoin advocates” and “crypto pumpers” so you can communicate

My (very rough) estimate is that somewhere between 1% and 5% of those who enthuse about crypto-currencies are actually interested in the underlying tech. The rest being in it for one of "it's a safe way to do nefarious economy" and/or "it's easy money".

Me? I think the tech is intellectually interesting, but doesn't really scale to the point where it can provide a "world economy". If nothing else, with Proof-of-Work, you need 51% of ALL available computing resources dedicated to maintaining the chain, which is an incredible waste (if you don't have a majority of all available computing power, the chain is vulnerable). With Proof-of-Stake, you need a majority of the economic system dedicated to just maintaining the economic system.

So, intellectually interesting, but practically useless.

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