| > How long can it possibly be “early days”? 70-ish years. I'd say we just recently came out of the early days of computing around the 1990s or 2010s. >How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? Currency is inefficient? It's sure better than trading cows. Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient. "Bitcoin was the beginning of the end for the state" – geohot. And I can't imagine much more of an inefficient system than the state and central banking. > How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains? Energy production problem, not a blockchain problem. > How many people must be scammed for all they’re worth while technologists talk about just beginning to think about building safeguards into their platforms? God, devs, please don't put restrictions on your platforms under the guise of "safety". Same goes for governments. Stay out. If you have no clue how something works, it's partly on you if you gamble all your savings on it. But also, who is excusing scams? We all think scams are bad. Nobody is seeing someone who fell for BitConnect and saying "Well, it's the early days, so it's fine that you got scammed." It seems to me that this lady really wants to dislike. In general. She enjoys disliking things. |
Currency is a problem that's already solved much more efficiently in a lot of countries.
> Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient.
Writing a bulletproof smart contract is difficult, as demonstrated by endless exploits despite the contracts being written & reviewed by specialists paid lots of money.
The advantage of the legal system is that when shit hits the fan, humans (in court) can step in and determine what the intent of the contract was despite potential loopholes, whereas in code, there is no difference between "loophole" and "intended behavior". Now you can of course have an authority that has power over smart contracts and can step in and rollback exploits, but that's just the current legal system with extra steps, at which point you may as well not use a smart contract at all.
> And I can't imagine much more of an inefficient system than the state and central banking.
There are obviously edge-cases and cryptocurrency is valuable in those, but in the vast majority of the world banking is a solved problem and much more efficient than cryptocurrencies. Compare the total cost (fee + environmental impact due to energy use, etc) of a card transaction or bank transfer with a cryptocurrency transfer.
I'm not saying that cryptocurrencies are useless - there are use-cases for them including in countries where the established monetary system is broken. But outside of those edge-cases, cryptocurrency would be a very wasteful downgrade from the status-quo.