[ketzo]

I'm taking a little of my holiday break to try and apply this to cryptocurrencies and blockchain stuff.

Horrible, terrible, tragic, I know. But if I feel like I'm going to be ridiculing this stuff on a fairly regular basis, then I should at least know what the fuck I'm talking about, right?

I mean, what number of HN commenters who dismiss crypto out of hand have literally never made an effort to be curious about the guts of it all? Probably a pretty sizeable majority, if I had to guess – myself included.

[psyc]

I think I have a general policy of withholding judgement until I've researched a thing, with as little prejudice as I can manage. But if I spend a lot of time researching a thing, and still reach the conclusion that it's stupid, and everybody buying it is stupid, then woe unto that thing (in internet comment threads).

[ketzo]

Yeah, I'm with you. I just feel like a lot of my "research" so far – crypto-wise – has mostly just been people talking about it, instead of me making an actual effort to understand any of it myself. So now I gotta go do that.

[Ensorceled]

The technology is actually not that hard to understand, at least at a high level, it's getting through the "people talking about it" down to what is actually being done with the technology and why it needs to be a "distributed ledger". Often it doesn't and understanding that disconnect seems to often be the hard part.

[Ensorceled]

> I mean, what number of HN commenters who dismiss crypto out of hand have literally never made an effort to be curious about the guts of it all?

I think most people on HN don't dismiss the "guts of it". I don't think blockchain is technically deficient, though proof of work is an ecological disaster, and I don't think most other people do either.

But it seems to be a technology in search of a problem; the problems blockchain/crypto answer are often things like enabling Ponzi schemes, money laundering, ransomware and, rarely, currency in despotic regimes.

Whenever we ask crypto supporters WHY blockchain?, WHY NFTs?, WHY so many ICOs?, isn't this a ponzi scheme?, the answer is some form of "you don't understand" or "good luck, stay poor".

[Vetch]

One start on this question is with another question: What advantage does Nakamoto consensus have over typical Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance? It, surprisingly enough, scales better and is also open with permisionless participation. It's inefficient but a big part of that is because it's both open and seeks consensus with essentially no subjectivity.

The combination of these features: a distributed, open, permissionless, minimal subjectivity, practical double spend immunity, and malicious actor or sybil resistance log of transactions, are what make it as it is and difficult to improve upon without weakening one of those aspects. To answer your why questions would be to defend those properties.

My experience is people from oppressed corruption filled countries tend to be sympathetic of those properties and those from wealthy stable countries tend to think them not worth the cost. It probably can't be used as a global currency but can (in theory) be there for scenarios where trust and subjectivity tolerance are minimal.

> isn't this a ponzi scheme

I would say no, it's more like a speculative bubble and casino that breeds pump and dump schemes. If most participants are uninformed then it's a scam, if most are informed it's senseless gambling. There are some legit uses such as funding civil disobedience or hedging against serious inflation in countries with constrained access to dollars (this usecase is why it fails to be a ponzi scheme, you don't want value to increase, stability is preferred).