[eudoxus]

I do find at least amusing to point out you started this thread with a comment that adamantly stated that "There's nothing unique or special about it [blockchains]"

Only to immediately follow it up by conceding your main point > "he PoW system used is one way to prevent Sybil attacks when distributing work among untrusted peers, and that's it. Novel, neat, but useless"

Ok, so you shifted the goal post from "there's nothing special about it" to "being novel and neat is insufficient for being 'special'". Whatever special means here.

The weirdest part is that your convictions (and concessions) are based on the Bitcoin whitepaper, which is quite literally the oldest part of modern day blockchains/cryptocurrencies.

Nakamoto style PoW consensus and the UTXO model bitcoin uses - never mind being very much novel and "special" - is the bedrock of the past 13 years of distributed systems and cryptographic research.

I'm more than happy to walk you through the landscape in question and the novel, neat, and useful things therein, but you seem quite content in your veil of ignorance. Feel free to prove me wrong.

[Kbelicius]

> I do find at least amusing to point out you started this thread with a comment that adamantly stated that "There's nothing unique or special about it [blockchains]"

> Only to immediately follow it up by conceding your main point > "he PoW system used is one way to prevent Sybil attacks when distributing work among untrusted peers, and that's it. Novel, neat, but useless"

I don't see any goalpost moving. PoW is not blockchain.

[eudoxus]

> I don't see any goalpost moving. PoW is not blockchain.

Blockchains are exactly 3 things

- A ledger of "things"

- Consensus to agree on "things"

- A state machine that that transitions based on "things"

PoW is how Bitcoin achieves consensus. The brute-force operations that "waste" energy is actually a highly robost leader election algorithm.

So sure, "PoW is not a blockchain" is technically accurate, but a useless statement on its own.

OP states there is nothing unique or special about blockchains, then notes a unique and special fundamental aspect that enables (some) blockchains.

[Kbelicius]

> OP states there is nothing unique or special about blockchains, then notes a unique and special fundamental aspect that enables (some) blockchains.

PoW precedes bitcoin by quite some time so the idea that it is a unique and special thing about (some) blockchains is false.

[Banana699]

PoW precedes bitcoin but was never used as a distributed consensus algorithm before it, blockchain precedes bitcoin but was never used as a distributed data structure before it, this is all acknowledged in my original comment. Do you argue that innovations composed of several ideas are exactly as novel as those ideas themselves? that would lead you to believe that there is no innovation at all happening in computers and computer science since the 1980s. Neural Networks were invented and reinvented several times since the 1940s, is GPT3 just a boring exercise in implementing common knowledge in your view?

The person I replied to means by the 'it' that they see no novel unique thing about the bitcoin system itself, or perhaps any arbitary cryptocurrency system in general. It's reasonable to assume that in a discussion titled "In defence of cryptocurrency", saying "it" without qualification references the main thing everyone is talking about, not any single part or sub-idea.

But the brilliance of bitcoin is exactly how it merged 2 completely different ideas to obtain a breathtakingly novel 3rd idea that is much more valuable than the sum of its constituents. A centralized blockchain gives you exactly as much trust in its contents as the amount you're willing to put in whoever holds the root hash pointer, a PoW posting/updating algorithm gives you trust that writes by anonymous nodes probably cost that node some amount of computational work (as much trust as the underlying work function has anyway).

On the face of it, those previous 2 things have nothing to do with each other, none of them references (even implicitly) the other in any interesting way. It takes intelligence to look at those 2 things and imagine a distributed append-only database with untrusted unnamed peers, and then come up with the all the rest of details and rules that make it work, and then implement all of this in a (relatively) bug-free open source real system. To the extent that any of this seems obvious or inevitable in retrospect, it's all the more evidence for how genius it is.

It doesn't matter a single gram that the technology later attracted scammers, radicals, and con men who think it's a silver bullet for solving any problem, I can say just as much about OOP. And yet nobody disputes the genius of Alan Kay and the novelty of Smalltalk.

[agentultra]

As GP mentions I talk about them separately.

The reason I don't think there's anything genius about cryptocurrency as a technology is because it's not impressive. It's been more than 13 years or so now and wow, PoW managed to do exactly what we said it would: burn a ton of energy on useless work in order to prevent Sybil attacks.

PoS is also really stupid.

Cryptocurrency was cute and easy to ignore when it was a bunch of libertarian crypto hackers messing around in their bedrooms and writing long, naive forum posts about how they were going to replace banking and form a new world order. They made themselves sound like conspiracy crack pots without any help from critics.

But the technology was built and designed by people with dangerous political beliefs and poor understanding of economics. And whether they were naive and had good intentions in the beginning matters little now that it has been completely co-opted by conspiracy theorists and fascists.

They're trying to convince senators to pass bills that would regulate cryptocurrency by the CFTC and not the SEC. They are undermining every possible avenue to regulating cryptocurrencies, exchanges, DAOs and all of the systems built on this technology.

They're doing it because they're making too much money ripping off regular people, retail investors, etc and right now there are few consequences to doing so. The people making money off of cryptocurrencies are suckering people into departing with their life savings, leaving piles of e-waste and new coal plants in the global south, and are generally not interested in helping anyone but themselves. They literally do not give one single ounce for any Joe-Bitcoin user out there. As long as there are enough new people coming in so they can cash out they're happy to say anything.

This is the world that cryptocurrency people want. Small government, no regulation, no sanctions, gold-standard deflationary "money", untraceability, etc.

Regular people don't benefit from this. They benefit from the existing banking and legal system that put limits on what is acceptable to protect them and their businesses from fraud and crime.

There's nothing to defend. Cryptocurrency has spoken for itself. It's not genius magical technology that's going to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. It's a community run like a conspiracy convention where any crack pot can come in and share their theories about the evils of governments and the global banking system coming for you. It's garbage technolgy promoted by terrible people who want to extract wealth from poor people, commit crimes, and not be subject to regulation by governments.