[woah]

It's what's known as a mid-brow dismissal. The average HN commenter feels a gratifying sensation of intelligence when they point out that "a blockchain is just a database". They can feel that they are debunking a con with their razor-like intelligence, like Neo, escaping from the matrix.

[wdewind]

The "blockchain is just a database" critique is an application of Conway's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law). The basic critique is: the problem being solved with the overwhelming majority of blockchain tech seems to be a political, not a technical problem. It's a critique that says the issue with this thing you are fixing isn't actually that the data layer doesn't match the existing political structure, it's that the political structure doesn't actually seem to support a demand for this kind of data layer.

The reason this critique is so prevalent on HN is because a lot of us just watched the last 10 years of the internet go from "that thing that is going to democratize technology and knowledge" to "a centralized management system for privacy invasion." The reason for this seems to be, loosely stated: "no one wants to run their own mail server." Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us. The reason for this is because our economy is based on specialization of labor: it's by design. I can choose to spend my time running a server, but allowing someone to do it for me is orders of magnitude cheaper due to economies of scale, so unless I have a really strong demand it's probably not going to happen.

The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain, because, referring back to Conway's law, there are fundamental political aspects to our culture that do not support this architecture.

[asymmetric]

> The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain

The way I see it, one of the big assumptions of the technologies in this space is that participants are only acting out of self-interest. Meaning, that there's a strong push towards designing systems where behaviours that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding.

Meaning that in theory, cryptoeconomics could be seen as an attempt at finding a solution to the problem you mention.

[wdewind]

I'm saying the technology is derivative of the economics and politics of our culture, and it is unlikely that this relationship will invert itself. Tons of political science and economic thought has gone into designing systems where behaviors that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding, you're basically describing market economics. Nothing about cryptocurrency is novel from a political or economic theory standpoint.

[asymmetric]

It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).

Think of the incentivization layer built into something like Filecoin vs the voluntaristic approach of Freenet.

Which leads us back to your point:

> Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us.

Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.

[wdewind]

> It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains

We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff. Take banking: in fact by a lot of measures it's the most highly regulated industry, and most of the fundamentals (like the interest rates) are not set via markets, but via elected (or sometimes not) officials. We don't actually want market economics to run the vast majority of our systems, which is why we've never built frameworks for it before, not because it's particularly complicated.

> Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.

Why wont specialization of labor take over again, and make it so crypto just turns into a different set of centralized players running the infrastructure with a ton of consumers? What happens when it turns out the vast majority of people don't actually want to be involved in running their own banking infrastructure?

> (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).

Totally agree, upvoted :)

[asymmetric]

> We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff

I agree with you on this point and it's what scares me the most about the whole blockchain "revolution".

If you look at the people who actually started it though, it was mostly anarcho-capitalists/rightwing libertarians, so that isn't surprising.

> Why wont specialization of labor take over again

That could happen. But what could also happen is that people start relying less exclusively on one relatively massive source of income, and instead start relying on several, parallel smaller ones.

I think that's already the case in non-Western parts of the world, and one of the reasons why it hasn't taken place (at least in Europe) is regulation - think of how you can't just sell food on the side of the road in Paris, which you can do in, e.g. Bangkok.

[hudon]

How is your comment not a mid-brow dismissal?

There are so many projects that promised the world and did not deliver, as well as so many projects that ended up being outright scams, that it's not surprising that when someone says "but what about Blockchain X, Blockchain Y and Blockchain Z projects?", we all roll our eyes and think "I'll believe it when I see it."

It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation, in which case you calling us all idiots would be warranted. After 10 years of flops, the burden to show how interesting these technologies are is on you now.

[jMyles]

> It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation

I don't understand this assessment either. How do you square this with, for example, people who have been able to obtain psychoactive compounds and other medicines that were previously unavailable to them?

[hudon]

Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs, there will be little resistance when a bill gets proposed that bans the purchase and/or mining of bitcoin, "the payment currency for illegal drugs that uses more electricity than Ireland". And then that final use case is also gone, hence why I said "no long lasting use case".

And nice try with calling this contraband "medicines". The way to get legitimate medicinal drugs legalized is through careful analysis and discussions, and then you use democracy to make it happen. See California. What you DON'T do is invent some tech that wastes our planet's resources and invent some story about a decentralized future to fool regulators and then enable all kinds of illegal transactions, from human trafficking to terrorism, just so you can smoke a joint effortlessly.

[aianus]

> Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs

There are plenty of legal things that are difficult to purchase with conventional reversible electronic payments. Off the top of my head:

Gambling deposits (yes, these are legal in most of the world but plagued by chargebacks from losing punters)

porn/sex toys (legal, but people don't want it showing up on their CC statements and don't trust these sites with their CC number)

"Suspicious" purchases with too much chargeback risk (eg. someone wants to buy a Macbook online with a US credit card and a Nigerian shipping address)

"Cash-like purchases" like buying a gold bar or some foreign cash online and having it shipped to your house. The margins on these types of purchases are too small to cover the credit card fees and the chargeback risk is too high because it attracts carders.

I could probably go on, but if you don't think irreversible electronic cash has any legitimate applications, you're not thinking hard enough.

[hudon]

> if you don't think irreversible electronic cash has any legitimate applications, you're not thinking hard enough

I actually don't think blockchain-based ledgers are irreversible. The most exhaustive account for how these ledgers are reversible is captured in the Blockchain Folk Theorem paper [0]. We can brainstorm all kinds of fun use cases for irreversible digital cash, but given the growing evidence, I don't believe such digital cash exists.

[0] https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...

[jMyles]

Well, needless to say, I see it a bit differently.

Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind.

If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place.

Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has other, less controversial use-cases as well.

The current state of development in this field suggests that I'm right - again, see the technologies above; it's not obvious how they're possible without a distributed consensus mechanism.

I also think that the remark "smoke a joint effortlessly" is both a silly ad-hominen and a red herring. I have been effortlessly smoking joints in all sorts of jurisdictions for the past decade; the change in law really didn't do much to enable that any more than it was already trivial.

However, if I were a member of a less privileged class and wanted to retain some anonymity, or if I wanted access to a more esoteric plant or compound and didn't have the social connectivity to obtain it, then I think that I'd find a mechanism to subvert these prohibitions very helpful.

Not everyone has the same opportunities and protections as you. Your implicit suggestion that everyone simply live in California is very insensitive. Technologies that tend to smooth this disparity are reasonable to celebrate.

[jonnydubowsky]

Jmyles, your reasoned and compassionate tone and plea to consider the benefits of blockchain which might effect those less fortunate is right on. How about the thousands of people who have already sent millions of dollars back home to developing nations where they previously had to rely on western union and their exorbitant commission fees. For the unbanked, blockchain provides significant savings in remittance costs. Even with the higher costs of sending bitcoin and ETH, with a little ingenuity, use of lightning, and buying into the book on GDAX, these fees can be significantly reduced to a point much lower then western union. On the opposite side of the spectrum, for the ultra-wealthy, cryptocurrencies offer the ability to place a portion of one's capital in accounts which are not seizable by any means. This is a significant feature of the technology, and coupled with the level of encryption, already represents a small, yet sizable place in the world banking system. It is expected that the many offshore banking havens like Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Mann, will continue to expand this feature in providing protection for people's assets.

[wdewind]

> How about the thousands of people who have already sent millions of dollars back home to developing nations where they previously had to rely on western union and their exorbitant commission fees.

Sorry to be that guy but do you have a citation for this? I hear it all the time but it makes no sense to me. Can you explain what happens when people receive the bitcoin? For one thing there are frequently 20% spreads in countries that do not have good ways to export their fiat currency, like India, so bitcoin actually doesn't usually end up being cheaper when you consider conversion costs.

> On the opposite side of the spectrum, for the ultra-wealthy, cryptocurrencies offer the ability to place a portion of one's capital in accounts which are not seizable by any means. This is a significant feature of the technology, and coupled with the level of encryption, already represents a small, yet sizable place in the world banking system.

I don't have a dog in the fight of whether or not this is a Good ThingTM, but a lot of people would call this a bug not a feature.

[hudon]

I did not argue that everyone should live in California, I argued that to declare that we need the blockchain, as if free speech and democracy were foregone conclusions, is anti-social and destructive. And I used California as an example of how legalization can happen.

You're right that some nations will be more oppressive than others, but you're forgetting that those places will more easily ban public blockchains than in places you've hinted don't need it. See Pakistan, Bangladesh, or China as examples.

So you either live in a place where you can fight for your right at a political and social level, and don't need the blockchain (eg. USA), or you live in a place where you cannot easily affect policy, in which case your government has probably also decided you cannot use tools that would circumvent their enforcement... such as the blockchain.

[jMyles]

> I did not argue that everyone should live in California

Fair enough. I still don't think that "see California" is a great argument to make to people who are suffering at the hands of the state throughout, for example, the rest of the USA. We have 2 million people in prison; nobody thinks that's OK.

> we need the blockchain, as if free speech and democracy were foregone conclusions

If you are sitting in a prison cell because you had a skin color which the state regards as the wrong one to use a particular plant or compound, then you might indeed feel forsaken by democracy.

> So you either live in a place where you can fight for your right at a political and social level, and don't need the blockchain (eg. USA), or you live in a place where you cannot easily affect policy

Do you think it's literally only those two possibilities? If that's true, then I understand and agree with your argument.

If instead, however, much of the world is in some gray area in the middle, then technologies which tend toward subversion of illegitimate state activity seem to me to be a welcome evolution for those who wish to help the political configuration in which they find themselves toward the former and away from the latter.

[jonnydubowsky]

You've presented a binary choice, but the reality is actually much more nuanced and complex then this. It is not a zero sum game, we can have blockchain solutions that are part of a wider push toward Web3 technologies where data is decoupled from the application layer, and this delivers more control at the user level over their identity and the use of their data. Most people don't/won't care to manage their data permissions and will opt into 3rd party centralized schemes where someone or business does this for them. Blockchain technology is part of a larger shift toward building agency for us as humans within our cyberphysical systems. In order for AI to truly benefit humanity, we have to include all of humanity in the process of training models, and deciding what algorithms we wish to manage various decisions for us on a daily basis. This has been happening for a while (algorithms managing decisions that effect us) but without any meaningful transparency. Most people will only care about the outcome, a la Cambridge Analytica, but in order to solve these problems we need some type of framework to manage our identity and connect that identity to our apps, through a portal that isn't owned by a company. Open source software gives us a lot of the tools and protocols to make this happen, and Blockchain technology, specifically self-sovereign identity, and the ability to link our identity to data and smart contracts, these are essential pieces to building out the web for the next generation. Blockchain tech was overhyped beyond measure, most ICOs were scams or will fail anyway, but the dust is now settling, as regulation reigns in the bad actors. The end result will unfold not in a huge explosion of the one killer blockchain app, but rather slowly, over the next 5 years, as part of a larger shift toward Web3 decentralized architecture, in combination with the existing cloud services that don't need to sell user data to deliver their value.

[jonnydubowsky]

Ethereum is still essentially in its "live demo" phase. The release of dApps and user-friendly-ish products in the blockchain space has had about 2 years of traction. Your application of skepticism is appropriate, the burden of proof is on the developers to show the value of these projects, but it typically takes a decade or so for disintermediating technology to reach the point of ready adoption. We are in the single prop plane phase not too far from kitty hawk.

[wdewind]

What's the dApp equivalent of the space shuttle?