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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Nah, man. The stink is all over crypto/blockchain like dead fish at the corner of the beach. If your product has anything at all to do with cryptocurrencies or blockchain, I'm closing that tab instantly and moving on with my life. I have zero interest in any product associated with a tech that is used solely by hucksters and criminals. They've had more than a decade to find a single usecase other than crime, and they haven't. We need to just ignore these last few stupid projects that are falling out of the pipeline generated by idiotic contracts signed during the 2020 blockchain fraud/hype bubble.

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If you end up being wrong, and crypto becomes a globally ubiquitous economic backbone, how will you rationalize having been incorrect in your present view?

You're a long-term hacker news community member. Like all of us, you pride yourself on the rational exploration of technology. Does "They've had more than a decade to find a single usecase other than crime, and they haven't" strike you as a particularly rigorous argument? Why would a decade be the magic number? Might there be more objective or intrinsic metrics of realization of potential than a set number of years? For example, Ethereum invented the crypto app layer and launched eight years ago, so perhaps ten years is both arbitrary and incorrect?

You seem to be somebody who is certain that crypto is- paraphrasing- useless for anything but crime. Given your conviction in this view, what up-to-date evidence do you have? For example, how would you contrast the capabilities of modern non-blockchain payment systems, like FedNow or India's UPI, versus the emerging network of public blockchains? If you can't answer the question, maybe your strong conviction is unjustified?

It seems that many technologists in the HN community have been whipped into an anti-crypto frenzy by crypto's many scams and now, blinded by rage and disgust, are unable to pursue any semblance of the kind of rational inquiry that otherwise is a fixture in their intellectual lives.

I'll rationalize it by being wrong. It's happened before, it'll happen again. But given that all the blockchain/crypto community has to show so far is "a really crummy database" and "a way for criminals to more easily avoid repercussions," I'm feeling pretty good about this one.

There is an example use case right in the article we're commenting on.

I say this as one strident HN loudmouth to another, not as a guy in a glass house with a rock in his hand.

If you have a substantive argument about how PayPal, or Paxos, or the regulators have blown this, or why it's a net-negative, or why this case is so exceptional that you aren't "closing the tab" this time: I will listen with avid interest, and I imagine everyone else on the site will do the same.

But as someone who takes too many cheap shots at groups of people too large and too diverse to generalize about too often myself: chip in on all of us being better.

If you think it's a bad thing, explain why. My read is that it's a net improvement in a flawed world, and if I've got that wrong, I'd like to get un-wrong.

But it's pretty much an unwritten rule of HN that "shitty X technology" and cavalier uses of the word "criminal" are party fouls (which I still make, I'm also working on this).

My read is that the consensus view of the community is that prohibition of e.g. drugs or prostitution or selling sex toys or whatever is stupid and ways around those things are necessary, and I'm basically sure that it's a consensus view that there are regimes in the world where being a criminal is the only ethical move. So even if "Bitcoin is for Drugs", I still think an argument with some meat on it's bones is merited here.

I appreciate that at an individual level it's reasonable to "close the tab" on a whole space when you're fed up with it, that's your prerogative.

But in terms of trashing the work of everyone who has worked on a blockchain in a public forum: `git` is a blockchain by any reasonable "degenerate Merkle tree" definition. Barbara Liskov who is the first female Turing winner (and would have gotten her Turing a lot sooner if it weren't for sexism) has been running a research group at MIT on PBFT for like 10 years. IO-HK has more Turning/Able/Fields-type folks than fucking Google per capita and might be pushing RenTech per-capita.

In 1995 the Internet had like three massive use cases: Usenet, penis pill spam, and porn, and by egress, mostly porn. Nothing wrong with porn, but but nothing wrong with some idiots trading Pokemon cards of monkeys for too much money either if this is a free country.

Tulip-scam Level 1 blockchains with a clear incentive for the treasury holders to make transactions expensive because they want to pump the fuck out of some stupid token and skip town before the bill comes due? Yeah, I think we're over that now.

But take it up with Linus and all the fucking Turing winners if you think the tech never has and never will have any legitimate application.

Neither [1] nor [2] contain the word "blockchain". I don't think you get to retroactively claim those projects & research as part of the blockchain movement. It was a nice try, though ;)

IO-HK's products page is just a list of 2020-era buzzwordy wallet & smart contract junk I've never heard of that all smells like dead fish.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git

[2] Well, except in the context of Bitcoin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

There's nothing retroactive about it: I've been in the distributed systems space since I met the former Akamai guys who founded Basho and built Riak in 2008. so cool it with the "nice try" stuff and read up:

"Hash trees are used in hash-based cryptography. Hash trees are also used in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Btrfs and ZFS file systems[4] (to counter data degradation[5]); Dat protocol; Apache Wave protocol;[6] Git and Mercurial distributed revision control systems; the Tahoe-LAFS backup system; Zeronet; the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks;[7] the Certificate Transparency framework; the Nix package manager and descendants like GNU Guix;[8] and a number of NoSQL systems such as Apache Cassandra, Riak, and Dynamo.[9] Suggestions have been made to use hash trees in trusted computing systems.[10]" [1], and if you still have a difference of opinion, get Wikipedia edited if you can.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

When people say "blockchain" this is what they're thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

> Uses >> Cryptocurrencies >> Smart contracts >> Financial services >> [Blockchain video] games

You know, all those dead fish smelly things from the 2020/2021 hype bubble, just like this junk from Paypal, and whatever IO-HK is faffing around with. You don't get to claim all possible usages of a tree data structure as retroactively part of the blockchain movement.

There's a limit to how deeply I'm going to nest a thread with someone who seems to have already made up their mind: after 15 years on this site, I'm starting to get it into my head that "winning" an HN fight might be fun in the moment, but as my grandma used to say: ain't no money in it.

And I think we agree about the failure of what used to be called "Web 3": it was an experiment that became a hype cycle that got hijacked by the unscrupulous and my bet is that history will mark the spectacular collapse of FTX last fall as the "end of Web 3".

But behind all the headlines and scandals and shit, a lot of serious distributed systems pros were doing real research and writing real code, and that stuff represents a bunch of tools in our toolbox as engineers that we didn't have 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I think it's foolish to throw the baby (tools) out with the bathwater (exit scam scandals).

All you have to do is pick up a newspaper on either side of the blood/crip political knife fight and you'll see a bunch of problems that the Internet created directly or indirectly and haven't solved yet, and many if not most of them are related to "proving things".

- We're having arguments about vote tallies, and who "double spent" their vote - We're having arguments about who created a piece of IP that got vacuumed up by a big AI model - We're having arguments about who should be able to post their views on the Internet (i.e. at all) and how to prevent political grand mal seizures from censoring dissenting opinion - The story on international remittances is still a nightmare, and wildly impacts some of the most vulnerable members of our global community - USDC or something is still the only way I know about to get paid by an overseas employer in any kind of timely way without a nightmare set of bank interactions and also be totally above-board regarding e.g. taxes and stuff

The list goes on, and while I don't think this is totally demonstrated yet, as a long-time distributed systems guy, I think it's at least plausible demonstrably (and in my opinion even pretty likely) that some of the tools that went in the toolbox in the last 10 years (and got inadvertently funded by token scam assholes: win) are pretty friggin adjacent to any solution I can think of to any of these.

> Neither [1] nor [2] contain the word "blockchain". I don't think you get to retroactively claim those projects & research as part of the blockchain movement.

Curiously, Crypto-critics like to do the same, aka Ben McKenzie / Stephen Diehl "it's 30y old technology".

I agree that it isn't helpful to use "blockchain" to mean git.

That's simple prejudice. It's a very effective strategy for protecting yourself in the world, but it is also manifestly unfair to the technology that you are maligning (and more importantly, its proponents and practitioners).

How can an intangible "technology" be a victim of prejudice?

Pretty sure GP meant that maligning a bunch of serious engineers because a 1-bit generalization lumped them in with a bunch of scam artists is prejudice.

Oil companies employ large numbers of serious engineers. If I make a 1-bit generalization that I don't want fracking or drilling or refining in my neighborhood, or anywhere in the world for that matter, I'm now guilty of "prejudice" because I'm maligning those serious engineers and their work?

If you call Barbara Liskov's work bad or stupid or irrelevant or anything like that, bring your fucking Turing award to the debate.

I honestly have no idea what the point of your comment is, other than deflection, I guess. What does Barbara Liskov have to do with either of my comments?

If you don’t care who that is, what they work on, the results of it, and don’t think this merits walking back the blanket slurs then I’ve got nothing for you.

what slurs?

Let's start with what seems to me like a pretty nasty and pretty ill-informed blanket dismissal of everyone who works in the traditional energy business. There are some pretty serious downsides to the way we use fossil fuels as a society, but it's a hard problem that a lot of well-intentioned and wildly qualified people are working on around the clock. I don't know you, so you might be in some wild tail of the distribution who isn't enjoying reliable base load electricity via those people's efforts, but you're posting these comments on a computer, which means it's impossible that you're not at the end of a supply chain that only exists via their efforts. So let's start with fuck that.

From there it's (heavily) implied, but we move on to effectively asserting that anyone who has touched a byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism is a priori also someone who should be slammed into a 1-bit, good/evil generalization.

It takes 30 seconds of reading the rest of the the thread, or twice that searching, to know who Ms. Liskov is, and enough about her achievements to understand why she is a recipient of the most highly regarded award in computer science. Which makes it's a very dicey proposition to sweep that into the "bad" category of the 1-bit generalization. It takes 2 hours tops to read the Jepsen website enough to know that this technology is a lot more interesting than just "HODL for lambos". So I'm a "fuck that" there too.

You've also managed to wrap some double-digit percentage of all the distributed systems people on HN into this good/evil bifurcation as though doing anything on BFT ever is like selling Oxycontin to teenagers like the Sackler family or something, whether or not any of them ever made a dime speculating on cyber money. So fuck that too.

The word slur doesn't refer solely to racial epithets and stuff like that, a slur can be a backhanded dog whistle as well.

Dude- I made two comments, the point of which, was that using the word "prejudice" against user "coldpie" was hyperbolic and unfair. How you got from those two comments, neither of which mentioned anything about crypto or blockchain, to all of this, is completely uncomprehensible to me, and I'm guessing most anyone else who reads this far.

The trivial prejudice of the other commenter’s initial reply, which they seem to have elected to not double down on is vastly less concerning than your comfort with both embracing a 1-bit generalization and in the same breath maligning the tireless efforts of the kind of engineers that with stupendously overwhelming likelihood make your entire lifestyle possible, and then doubling down on it twice.

It takes a lot to get me to follow someone this far down a reply chain these days, but this is pretty fucking epic.

I think it’s the obligation of the more tenured members of the community to give the less tenured folks some outs when things go a bit sideways. So I’m going to propose two.

The strictly utilitarian game-theory play with zero risk is to concede nothing, walk away, and sink the sunk cost.

The ethical high road answer is to concede that you were out of line and watch all be forgotten thereby, which has a utilitarian premium as well: you’d make a friend.

The stupid answer is to raise 2,6 off suit repeatedly with someone representing suited royalty who has clearly committed to shoving the flop on principle.

You do you, but I see two good calls and one bad call.

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