[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.