Yes HN has an irrational hatred for everything blockchain which especially gets magnified if there is a lot of money involved.
As for why.. this is interesting as on the surface you'd expect HN to be on the forefront of new technology. My guess would be a combination of these:
1) If you research anything about blockchain/cryptocurrency you inevitably stumble into fanatics who shill the project without knowing anything technical. As this is the usual method for the HN crowd to understand subjects it turns them off immediately.
2) The HN crowd mostly have cushy US jobs and as such do not value trustless systems as much as people in other parts of the world. Banking mostly works for Americans and alternatives don't seem to give much benefit.
3) It threatens US control of the international monetary system. Swift, USD etc.
4) The environmental impact of the first generation PoW systems, mostly Bitcoin at this point, is a waste of energy in the mind of HN. The trust and security that it provides to the blockchain is not valued.
5) Many are tired of getting asked about blockchain/crypto by people who have made a lot of money on it, especially if the HN people have not. It has to be a bubble since the tech savvy guys don't believe in it.. right?
I don't think you can call it "irrational". The moment when people buy power plants just to mine bitcoins you have to admit we have a serious problem. So when you say:
> The environmental impact of the first generation PoW systems, mostly Bitcoin at this point, is a waste of energy in the mind of HN. The trust and security that it provides to the blockchain is not valued.
First, we don't care what generation it is: the fact is that Bitcoin causes significant environmental damage. It is not "in the mind of HN", it's physical. As for what you call "trust and security", Bitcoin is an instrument of speculation (or investment, depending as you see it) and as such is extremely unstable, so for me it provides much lower level of trust and security than fiat currency. Not to mention alternative coins that appear and disappear every day.
You're proving my point here right? The trust and security of the Bitcoin blockchain does not have value to you, so in your mind we're completely wasting all that energy.
The fact is that a lot of "useless" things cost a lot of energy - Facebook? Useless to some, not to others.
Personally I view Bitcoin as the first implementation, we can and should improve on that concept. See Polkadot, Algorand, Eth 2.0 etc. as the new generation which does not use up a lot of energy.
No, I don't think you are completely wasting the energy. I think the waste is disproportionately large in relation to other services providing some value to society, including the ones by FAANG.
I understand that you personally view Bitcoin as the first implementation, but the reality is that it is now the dominant one that is starting to exert non-negligible influence on the planet we are all living in. And it is not fixable, because it is one of the core features of Bitcoin. Good luck convincing people holding millions in Bitcoins to migrate to altcoins.
I've been wondering about this recently too. I've been really interested in Algorand lately - a very impressive project with lots for an HN person to sink their teeth into. Similar to Polkadot in various ways. But it has surprisingly few mentions on Hacker News.
At first I wondered if I'd missed some guideline somewhere that cryptocurrency isn't meant to be discussed here, or that cryptocurrency stories are weighted less favourably, but I can't find any evidence of that.
I remember in the earlier days of Bitcoin, Hacker News was awash with discussion of it and the entire ecosystem. And I really enjoyed reading it all!
> I remember in the earlier days of Bitcoin, Hacker News was awash with discussion of it and the entire ecosystem. And I really enjoyed reading it all!
Maybe because back in these days we didn't have an idea of what it would become. We hoped for decentralized digital currency, democratic in the sense everybody could use for payments everywhere on the web. The sad reality now is that this revolutionary design is causing trouble to our planet in a really serious way, you can't really use it to buy and sell everyday things because of high transaction fees, and it became just an object of speculation.
Because we're still waiting for some useful applications of blockchains apart from fraud and scamming people. Every day new cryptocurrencies appear hoping to repeat the "success" (or disaster, depending on the POV) of Bitcoin, but basically nobody cares except the people who create them and maybe some gullible folks that hope for high gains and have some cash to burn.
I'll bite. Here are some things you can currently do with blockchains/crypto currencies that are neither fraud nor scamming people:
- Earn yield on stablecoins or cryptoassets by providing liquidity on an automated market maker. The yield comes from trading fees that are redistributed to liquidity providers (i.e. no one is getting defrauded).
- Earn more yield using a yield optimization service such as yEarn
- Use your cryptocurrency as a collateral to take out a loan for half its value with Alchemix. The collateral is invested in yEarn and the yield received slowly pays back the loan.
- Use an insurance protocol to take out a cover on the money you have put in either of the above mentioned protocol to protect them in case of a hack
- Manage an entire organization (DAO) and its payroll, where you currency serves as both voting rights for the strategic decision of the organization and as a way to reward contributors without having to deal with the headache of local currencies.
- Mobilize thousands people around the world to act as arbitrators to resolve an ongoing dispute (Kleros)
- Store files in cloud service built on top of a decentralized and censorship resistant way (Filecoin)
- Sell unused or underutilised cloud resources (iExec)
I know people here are skeptical of crypto, and it's fine. Maybe it won't change the world. Maybe the bubble will pop. But even then, I find it hard to not be at least a little bit intellectually excited by the new forms of organizations and new financial models that are emerging out of the space.
Also, as by disaster I assume you are referencing the ecological costs of Bitcoin, most of current blockchains have moved or are moving towards a proof of stake model that is much more environmentally friendly. With Avalanche, for instance, developed by Emin Gun Sirer at Cornell you can still run a node on a Raspberry Pi.
While I understand what you mean by self-referential and it is true that a lot of the economic activity in the crypto space is centered on crypto-assets, it's also becoming more and more connected to the real financial system. Stablecoins mirror real world currencies, synthetics mirror real world assets such as stocks. You have to keep in mind that decentralized finance currently only has 2 million wallets (so even less users) and has been around for less than 2 years. But the space is growing and tokenization of real world assets is increasingly common. [0]
Alchemix may be self-referential because it relies on crypto yields, but you could replicate its organizational model in the real world. It would be something like an overcollaterized hypothecation union with none of the overhead of the IT and employees. The way you can use the funds you get from your loan are also very much non-referential. Here [1], one user mentions several potential use cases from charity to crowdfunding.
I don't think there are DAOs outside of the crypto space, that does not make them less interesting as social experiments. Andre Cronje from iYearn recently introduced a decentralized payment system for the organization. [2] Even if its use is for a "self-referential" project, it's still fascinating to see how the relationship between wages, labor and consumers is being redefined in a model that is fundamentally different from that of the corporation.
Kleros is an arbitration layer, it has suffered from Ethereum gas prices recently (since it's meant to be a mean of primarily adjudicating small claims) but is very much active in development and user base. They've also developed a proof of humanity system as an extension to their arbitration offering. People have used the Kleros courts to contest payment of poorly done translation jobs and resolve ecommerce disputes. It may sound unimpressive, but at the size of ecommerce it's a potentially big market that would give any online retailer the opportunity to outsource their dispute resolution service.
Filecoin is used, although I'd say it still mainly serves crypto-savvy customers (I've used it for personal file storage as it's cheaper than s3). iExec has built projects with a number of corporate partners. I'll agree that the actual adoption is small compared to the valuation if you compare to real world companies, but that does not make the possibilities less interesting.
Thank you for these two posts. Very informative and unbiased. People here simply don’t want to know. They have become what they despise in other people that are ignorant of certain technologies. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to change their mind. They will simply be surprised one day to find that every single interaction they have with money and finance is intermediated by a Blockchain. They will then accept it. But they will have missed out on being part of the adventure to build up the infrastructure. And that’s fine.
None of this is true. People are interested, they want to learn new useful things. The problem with blockchain is that the environment is literally filled with fraudsters and you can't trust anyone. One ugly case after another and at the end of the day you just feel distrust whenever someone is advertising a "new revolutionary blockchain scheme" or whatever.
Tell me clearly what your project is, why it's useful in real life, who is actually using it - and if it makes sense for me, I'll be glad to use it.
> It may sound unimpressive, but at the size of ecommerce it's a potentially big market that would give any online retailer the opportunity to outsource their dispute resolution service.
Just like many other blockchain uses, it is very interesting and in theory has a great potential, but in practice the interest and popularity is limited. Personally I consider these 600 cases in the Kleros court a huge success already. And using it for ecommerce reviews sounds interesting in theory, but in practice, just like any other, can be gamed to the advantage of the more powerful party.
To my surprise, nobody ever said anything about Polkadot. Even though it is one of the top Blockchains with over $30B in market cap.
Is there a reason for this?