[hnthrow1010]

>Crypto has its uses.

No, this is wrong. By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. The technology fundamentally doesn't enable anything else, if you take that out it's just a really niche and inefficient distributed database. You may be suggesting that some companies have been able to build useful things on top of a blockchain. That might be true but out of all the examples you gave, they're useful in spite of cryptocurrency, not because of it. The exercise for crypto builders now becomes how to separate the useful parts from the ponzi tokens and build just those.

[tatertots1234]

> By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling.

And the earth is flat, and I refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary.

A simple example of crypto being useful is as a timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger of cryptographically signed messages. That is one use case for it besides gambling, ergo your statement is easily refuted. I presume you will move the goalposts, though.

[hnthrow1010]

Well first of all, cryptocurrency isn't "censorship-resistant" any more than any other encrypted distributed system, so you can take that phrase out. Take a look at Tor or Freenet to see how this is done without the ponzi tokens.

Second of all, you can easily build a timestamped and tamper-proof ledger without making people pay to access it using speculative tokens. The aspect of trying to assign money value to these tokens is the problem, not the tamper-proof part. Conflating all these concepts together under the roof of "blockchain" is one of the many sins of web3 companies, but it's not true. Another sin is this constant attempt by people to "refute" critics. You don't need to do that, the fact that it happens so often should tip you off that the technology is not the focus of the discussion here. If you ever find yourself getting hostile about this, you're falling for the trap that the marketers are setting.

[tatertots1234]

re: censorship, prove to us how you would go about censoring an Ethereum transaction please?

re: timestamp, prove to us how easy it is to build a distributed and tamper-proof append-only ledger without a BFT consensus mechanism?

The technology is absolutely the focus of this discussion here.

[hnthrow1010]

>censorship, prove to us how you would go about censoring an Ethereum transaction please?

Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail. I don't know why you're asking this question, you should be able to answer the same question about Tor or Freenet and extrapolate from there.

>re: timestamp, prove to us how easy it is to build a distributed and tamper-proof append-only ledger without a BFT consensus mechanism?

I also don't know why you're asking this question or what it has to do with cryptocurrency or what I said at all. There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require the use of speculative tokens. BFT algorithms are by and large, good and useful; the problem comes in when people try to solve this by handing out tokens and convincing people to use them as money. In that way web3 is actually very intellectually lazy to me, the only proposed solutions it appears that most of them have for this is to simply mint more and more tokens.

[tatertots1234]

> Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail.

This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application, which remains widely distributed across all nodes in the network. Tor is great but has different design goals, such as consensus of the entire network secured by about 10 nodes.

> There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require the use of speculative tokens.

What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely distributed network of untrusted nodes? Common choices are PoW or PoS, or PoA with a small number of trusted authorities as it is used in Tor.

[hnthrow1010]

>This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application

Sure, but you can't make those when you're locked in jail with no access to the internet. I believe this was made obvious all the way back in 2013 with the Silk Road bust.

>What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely distributed network of untrusted nodes?

Out of what you said, PoA is the only one that has any chance at being fair over a long period of time because it's a lot easier to eject bad actors from the network. If you use PoA there's not much point to using a blockchain, but this is good actually; it gives you the freedom to choose between any number of more efficient datastructures. PoS is mostly just a loose approximation of another form of PoA (whomever stakes the most is the authority) and it's wholly unnecessary if you get rid of the speculative tokens; PoW (and some PoS algorithms too) are quite literally based around consensus-by-lottery, in my view that's another reason why it will never be useful for anything beyond gambling on speculative tokens. I've seen a lot of variations on the algorithms but none of them can get away from that basic problem without morphing back into another form of PoA.

[anon2020dot00]

Don't you get tired of the endless recycling of pro and con crypto arguments? It's the same thing every time ad-infinitum.

[tatertots1234]

Yep, every time crypto is on the front page you have nocoiners and web3 pumpers making the same ridiculous blanket statements, and then some people in between trying to discern the reality of the situation.

[hnthrow1010]

The reality of the situation is that blockchains are a mostly useless and inefficient datastructure that by and large don't solve any real problems. I find it insulting that I can't say this without someone labeling me a "nocoiner." Yes you can make money with them, that isn't the point. Sometimes an algorithm can just be bad. If you can't look at an algorithm objectively, maybe consider that you're not trying to discern the reality of the situation?

[kybernetikos]

'blockchains' (the ecosystems generally, not the datastructure specifically which wasn't the innovative part) solve the problem of arbitrary, mutually unknown individuals making transactions about things of value. They're pretty much the only way we know to solve that problem.

Of course, humans have been around a long time and had to manage before the bitcoin white paper, so most problems where the best solution involved arbitrary, mutually unknown individuals making transactions about things of value have either been ignored and are considered 'not that important' or have been solved 'better' through the creation of trusted third parties (which doesn't solve the problem for truly arbitrary participants, just moves it), or just forcing the risk onto others who previously had no choice but to accept it. This point of view is mainly just because society has had thousands of years being built around a constraint that the publication of the bitcoin whitepaper removed, and it takes a certain amount of imagination to see the possibilities.

When you think about blockchains, you should be imagining what they enable: nonpermissioned (so even foreigners in war zones, or the homeless can take part), access to an international network that allows cross-party transactions dealing in hetrogenous kinds of goods. The network is by default API enabled and compatible (so I can write a smart contract that uses other smart contracts). It uses modern cryptography (unlike many Banks). Because it allows transactions across organisations and assets, things like flash loans where a loan can be made at zero risk to the lender (because the capital must be returned in the same transaction) are possible, something that is entirely impossible in traditional finance. They enable immediate transactional settlement, which is also hard in traditional finance (how do we swap something so that at no point one party has to take on the risk of the other party not delivering?). They enable groups of people that don't know each other to pool their money. This was impossible in the past without a trusted governing body that would incur costs and therefore need to take a cut.

In finance, the main strategy up to now has been to register a corporation with multiple governments, spend lots of money on large marble buildings and conservative (i.e. non-innovative) smartly dressed staff for hundreds of years in order to give a sense of solidity and trustworthiness. Sure, it works, but that's what's really inefficient.

[maccard]

That's not a use of crypto, that's what it does. What is a use for that? I'm with OP on this, I've yet to see a use for it that isn't speculative gambling.

[tatertots1234]

OP asks for a use, I provided. You say it is not a use, it’s “what it does.” Yes, it’s exactly what it does? That’s what it’s being used for.

[maccard]

That's like saying a use for a car is to turn the wheels when you press the accelerator - technically true but meaningless. What problem does

> timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger of cryptographically signed messages.

solve? _That_ is the question that people aren't answering.

[tatertots1234]

The engine’s use is to turn energy into mechanical motion, and from that we can build a variety of utility on top.

The chain’s use is to provide a secure layer for signed messages. It might be a dissident writing a message that cannot be revoked by their government; it might be a transfer of value from user A to B that is not reliant on a central clearing house to allow it; it may be a state change that represents the transfer of ownership of a digital asset like a ENS domain name alias; it might be a more complex application like USDC that enables a stable dollar-like currency to compose with the rest of the blockchain ecosystem. These are some use cases already occurring; there are other ways to achieve similar (like using PayPal instead of USDC) but all have different considerations and costs/benefits.

[maccard]

> The engine’s use is to turn energy into mechanical motion, and from that we can build a variety of utility on top. <...> The chain’s use is to provide a secure layer for signed messages.

I'm genuinely beginning to think you're trolling here.

> It might be a dissident writing a message that cannot be revoked by their government; it might be a transfer of value from user A to B that is not reliant on a central clearing house to allow it; it may be a state change that represents the transfer of ownership of a digital asset like a ENS domain name alias; it might be a more complex application like USDC that enables a stable dollar-like currency to compose with the rest of the blockchain ecosystem.

We're over a decade into cryptocurrencies, and years into the web3 world, and we're still talking about "might"? For comparison, kubernetes is a year younger than the term web3, and it is widely used across the world, with well documented solutions to problems.

Further, none of the use cases you mentioned actually work, or if they do they worked without a blockchain underneath them.

> It might be a dissident writing a message that cannot be revoked by their government

We've had that for over 30 years [0]. Putting that on a blockchain doesn't actually help.

> it might be a transfer of value from user A to B that is not reliant on a central clearing house to allow it

I do like this one because it's pretty much the textbook example of what's wrong with web3. This should be it's big selling point except 1) I can trade cash/gold/share certs with someone in person/via mail, 2) it's _way_ too expensive to use for normal transactions meaning that 3) People rely on services like coinbase (for coins) or OpenSEA (for NFTs), which are central clearing houses that you have to trust and abide by the rules of. The first link I found states that Coinbase holds over 11% [1] of the crypto market cap, you're _way_ past the point of "you're holding it wrong" here. If the usage of the solution requires throwing away the primary benefit of the solution, it's not a solution to the problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

[1]