[peteforde]

The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.

It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.

You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.

[happytoexplain]

Consider that the GP said,

>Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023

And the parent said,

>I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze

And your response was,

>The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.

The parent in fact said a very straightforward, non-controversial thing, and you responded in anger, as if they said something like "AI is the same as crypto".

[peteforde]

Yeah, I didn't reply in anger. Pointing out false equivalency != angry unless you are deep in the "words I don't like are violence" camp.

Feel free to respond to what I actually said, though!

[johnfn]

I'm with GP here, there is nothing to respond in what you actually said because you misunderstood the comment you replied to.

[overfeed]

> It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift

Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-believwrs got really wealthy, and you're not going to convince them.

[thunky]

> Was it universally obvious?

Yes. Crypto was never productive.

But nice that your buddy financed a house with other people's dumb money.

[trumpdong]

Crypto is the best way to pay for illegal things online, which is a really big business.

In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.

[peteforde]

My point is that regardless of who got rich, the web 3.0 pitches themselves did not pass even the most casual review.

I was asked to audit a few proposals during that era and in every case I had to go back to the person asking me to say that it was a technical architecture L. Ron Hubbard would have admired. Just straight up making up words in most cases.

Far beyond "wait, is this actually a parody? how is this not a parody?" territory. 80% of them were effectively "tamagotchis + pyramid scheme".

This is why I say that you don't have to love LLMs, but you also can't compare them in terms of also bad. Jay-walking is bad and Jeffrey Dahmer was bad; they are not "both bad".

[trumpdong]

Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.

[FabHK]

Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".

[trumpdong]

Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"

[FabHK]

Yes. And while the law sometimes gets things wrong, in general it is good that it tries do distinguish between useful and harmful things, morally right and morally wrong.

And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting.

NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.

[hunterpayne]

It solves a CS problem called the Byzantine Generals problem. That problem was thought to have no solution before blockchains were created. The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

[FabHK]

That is complete nonsense, indicative of your lack of knowledge, and utterly typical of crypto hype: mendacious or ignorant or both.

The State Machine Replication problem in distributed computing has been studied since the 1960s or so, and indeed can be solved using Byzantine Broadcast. That has been solved for various settings:

* Permissioned (+ PKI), synchronous: SMR possible for any f (Dolev Strong 1983)

* Permissioned (no PKI), synchronous: SMR impossible if f≥n/3 (PSL 1980, FLM 1985)

* Permissioned, asynchronous setting: SMR impossible even with f=1 (FLP 1985)

* Permissioned, partially synchronous: deterministic SMR with "eventual liveness" possible if f<n/3 (late 1990s), stochastic if f<n/2, impossible otherwise.

The theory to achieve reliable state machine replication even in the presence of byzantine failures was sorted out in the 1980s, and the practice followed in the late 1990s (PBFT (Castro Liskov 1999), byzantine Paxos, etc.)

So, just to drive the point home: the Byzantine Generals problem (more precisely: Byzantine Broadcast & SMR) was a solved problem by the late 1990s.

What Bitcoin (ie LCR + PoW) added was to do it in the permissionless setting, just as I've said. (It also increased f from n/3 to n/2, modulo "selfish mining", and while earlier solutions were consistent always, available eventually, LCR + PoW is available always, consistent eventually, which is arguably the wrong tradeoff for finance.)

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

You don't say.

[peteforde]

That is a common blockchain myth.

There were solutions before blockchain, especially in the field of Byzantine fault tolerance. The original Byzantine Generals paper was from 1982, and practical algorithms existed before Bitcoin. For example: PBFT - Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance - published in 1999.

https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/papers/castro-practical...

Blockchain solved a different version of the problem: how can a large, open, permissionless network reach agreement when anyone can join and nobody has a fixed identity?

Classic BFT is like a committee of known people voting, where the system survives some liars.

Blockchain is like letting strangers on the internet vote, but making votes costly enough that cheating becomes economically difficult.

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

Right!?