[ricochet11]

> Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros.

the issue is that we show the things being made and hn calls them all scams and ponzis and fraud.

we show the rates adoption, and the growth in use and hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal.

we point out that crypto is in many ways doing better than other industries to represent marginalized communities and we all get labelled cryptobros and any of us who arent that get erased from the picture.

if we post anything positive linking to a twitter account that account starts getting endless abuse.

there are very few people who bother coming to hn anymore, pretty much everyone working in the space has given up on it.

We have automated stable currencies, permission-less loans and lending, streaming payments, UBI experiments, co-ops governing land use, automated taxation and public goods funding experiments, sybil resistance mechanisms for 1p1v governance, resilient p2p infrastructure that people are using every day to pay each other and run their businesses. Composability for all of these things to quickly build your own business logic on top of it. Standards for tokenising royalties/payments/tickets... All running on p2p infrastructure anyone can participate in. Thats pretty amazing imo.

At what point will what we've been building be considered useful? If you took any of these things and wrap it in a saas startup connected to stripe hn would eat it up and claim its the greatest startup of the decade. but because its built on crypto it can only ever be world destroying disaster capitalist alt-right incubating cartoon villain fraudulent vc led scammers right? its just so tiring.

[kkielhofner]

Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Visa has 1B transactions per day and virtually every single one of them is someone purchasing a good or service.

Credit cards were "invented" in 1951. By 1970 51% of US households had at least one. All happening well before the internet. Even with all of the hype an estimated 13% of American households even traded crypto last year. Want to guess how many households used it to purchase a good or service?

Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading.

Regarding the abuse here on HN - tweet something negative about blockchain and I think your perspective on the "abuse" coming from the HN community will change. By nature "cryptobros" and other people pumping these things are doing so for their own financial gain. People that are negative about crypto typically don't have any skin in the game and even if they do (somehow) their ferocity pales in comparison to the portions of the population that are expecting to retire with it.

[Quindecillion]

> Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges).

Source for this?

Also, all of these transaction numbers are for on-chain transactions. They don't include layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. Given that the Lightning Network is built for micro-transactions, where sats can literally be streamed to a creator, while someone listens to a podcast for example, it's possible (though impossible to definitively confirm?) that on-chain AND off-chain transactions already exceed credit card services.

You have to understand that Bitcoin (the blockchain network) isn't trying to be a credit card network. It's a settlement layer/clearing house. Traditionally for a transaction to occur with finality would take days, perhaps weeks to occur. When you make a purchase with a credit card that payment isn't occurring with finality in the banking system. It takes days to "lock in". On Bitcoin it takes 10 minutes and is completely automated and trustless.

The Lightning Network (enabled by the SegWit upgrade) allows for payments to occur instantly, with low fees, and can be used for micro-transactions. The tradeoff to that convenience is it's less secure. This is why you would have a Lightning wallet for your day to day usage, and your "savings account" in cold storage on-chain. You would only use on-chain transactions for big purchases, or to open a Lightning channel.

> Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading.

It literally is, you're just not paying attention. As already mentioned it is being used to stream payments in podcasts as your listen, it is being used in competitive video games, there are gift card services like Bitrefill,

The Lightning Labs blog does a good job of summarizing the state of the Lightning Network.

https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-flywheel-is-startin...

https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-lightning...

[kkielhofner]

I understand and am aware of L2 solutions like lightning. My own startup uses Polygon (Ethereum L2) to store copies of user asset verification records.

Generally speaking, L2s are interesting because they all make compromises from the principals of blockchain (as you mention - but that's for another day). It's been interesting, to say the least, to watch some of the fundamental definitions and principals such as "decentralized" and "secure" get redefined over the years.

I use statistics for Bitcoin transaction volume in these comments for several reasons:

1) Bitcoin is more widely known than any other blockchain based technology.

2) It's (essentially) only used for payments so transaction volume is more easily directly compared to other uses. For example, Ethereum has roughly double the daily transaction rate of Bitcoin but it's not clear to me how to easily breakout payments for direct comparison to Bitcoin, Visa, etc.

3) I'd use Lightning transaction volumes if I could find them. Anywhere. I've researched this quite a bit and all I can find are posts like the ones you provided (from Lightning Labs themselves) or from places like the Dailyhodl, etc talking about how big all of the markets Lightning is going to take over are, how much potential there is, etc. The typical "by 2030 we'll be doing (insert astronomical number)".

If you have a reputable/reliable source for the number of transactions on the Lightning Network I'd love to see it. The amount of bitcoin on it, the number of channels, the number of nodes, etc make for some impressive looking graphs but I suspect the transaction volume (to me the only real number that matters in terms of adoption) is still extremely low. If it wasn't everyone in the blockchain sphere would be hyping that too.

Let's circle back - I use blockchain at my current startup. I had 200 GPUs mining Ethereum in 2017. I'm not anti-blockchain by any means. I bring up what I consider to be valid criticisms because the bubble inside a bubble wrapped in an echo chamber present in blockchain today isn't doing anyone any favors. The reality is that (zooming out) after 10 years blockchain is still a toy. If it has any chance of ever living up to the promise and hype at least some people need to step out of the bubble and ask themselves why it's actually been one of the most slowly adopted technologies in the last 100 years.

[Quindecillion]

> why it's actually been one of the most slowly adopted technologies in the last 100 years.

That doesn't agree with the data I've seen for Bitcoin: https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1356310219215699968?s=19

And "blockchain" is pointless outside of Bitcoin, which might explain why its adoption has been slow as a more general technology. The blockchain was created to solve a very specific problem related to Bitcoin's mission statement (as defined by Satoshi). With that problem solved by Bitcoin, what else is there to use "blockchain" as a technology on exactly? Ok, there might be some very niche use cases that are applicable, but those aren't going to see the technology widely adopted.

> If you have a reputable/reliable source for the number of transactions on the Lightning Network I'd love to see it.

I don't think it's actually possible to determine this. There's no way to see transactions that occur across the entire network. Nodes are only aware of the transactions that route through them. Maybe some clever people have determined a way to infer it, but I'm not aware of any. The metric most people use to judge growth of the Lightning Network is btc capacity i.e. how many bitcoin are "held" in channels between nodes, which is open information.

[kkielhofner]

That's an interesting graph. They appear to have cherry picked data and used strange start dates for each. Based on numbers I've seen it looks more like this:

Bitcoin launched 1/2009 - as of now there are 100M users (your graph says 135M, which seems to be a very high estimate but lets go with that).

World Wide Web was released 4/1993 - 13 years later there were at least 700M users (very conservative estimate). Mind you this growth depended on everything from having a computer (22.9% of US households had a computer in 1993) to laying untold miles of fiber optics, undersea cables, building out physical datacenters, etc. Literally people digging ditches and ships circling the globe - many thousands of miles over.

By being essentially just another internet application (most people consider WWW = internet) taking advantage of all of this infrastructure Bitcoin/blockchain had/has a HUGE advantage over the WWW. To be a bitcoin user in 2009 you had to have a computer and install a program. To be a bitcoin user for the vast majority of its life you could/can hear about bitcoin at a bar, pull your phone out, and install an app on your smartphone to be a "bitcoin user" for next to nothing in under five minutes.

To be a WWW user in 1993 you had to have a computer that could handle it (Windows? Trumpet Winsock?, CPU, RAM, modem, etc) and a local ISP, etc. I remember in 1994 having to install a modem, a second phone line, and dial into an ISP that was LONG DISTANCE... It literally took weeks to get on the internet in 1994 and especially in my case, it was very expensive and very technically challenging (Hayes commands anyone? Chat scripts? PPP/SLIP?).

Then a little later America Online (still crazy expensive), maybe have it at work or university, or in the later years get lucky and have broadband in your area. I couldn't get DSL until 2004, for example (and it was still very expensive).

Even with all of these monumental challenges the WWW grew at least 5x faster than bitcoin (and it's really probably closer to 10x).

I suspected that was the case with Lightning. I'll keep digging into this because as I'm sure you can tell I'm fascinated with this. Overall I'm really trying to ask:

Why has adoption in the "cryptosphere" been so terrible (arguably the worst rate of any recent technology)? This is a question every honest blockchain advocate needs to ask themselves because there are clearly significant issues impeding mass adoption. Whatever these issues are need to be identified and rectified to the extent they can. I truly hope it's not the obvious answer - "It doesn't provide anything most people want or need".

[ctvo]

> At what point will what we've been building be considered useful?

Can you share some of the numbers you're citing? Who is using what to run their businesses daily? What's the number of transactions relative to current financial systems? How many actual users do you have for these things? The problem is anyone digging deeper sees it's all marketing and bullshit.

It starts being useful when it's not motivated by VCs and others with a financial stake trying to get higher exists hyping up products with no utility and no users.

[oblio]

I've worked for a crypto startup.

They were frank enough to tell me that their business could have done the same thing in a centralized fashion, but they wouldn't have gotten funding.

Cryptocurrencies don't have a "killer app". Something for the common person.

I suspect that even when they do, it will be incidental. Something that could have been developed as part of a centralized architecture, but built with cryptocurrencies because the financial support was there.

> permission-less loans and lending

What does this mean?

[aww_dang]

>... hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal.

This is the part that confuses me. What is the theory of value here? If you don't like it don't buy it. If you're not interested, don't buy it. If you don't see the benefits, don't develop cryptocurrency applications.

Nobody is compelling developers or users to use this technology. Meanwhile state run currencies are forced upon us. Walled gardens and browsers force tech choices on developers.

Isn't it enough to dislike something and avoid it entirely? Why advocate for limiting the choices of others? How is this not authoritarian paternalism?

[oblio]

> Nobody is compelling developers or users to use this technology.

Ummm.. have you seen the mountains of hype and cash poured from the cryptocurrency community onto regular folks?

> Isn't it enough to dislike something and avoid it entirely?

I would, but the cryptocurrency community isn't letting me do that.