Let's not forget that last year ETH fulfilled a promise and switched from PoW to PoS. Effectively decimating the entire GPU PoW mining industry almost overnight. This reduced crypto power usage significantly. The developers executed open heart surgery on a multi billion $ patient with live coverage, and it went off pretty much without a hitch. The complaint is no longer if they can do something ground breaking, but when.
All the while, AI is also taking over. Businesses are slurping up power from everywhere, without any regard for the environment. We hear about companies purchasing 10,000 H100's, but we don't hear about how it is going to be powered. Nobody outside the industry is talking about the fact that you can't get any meaningful (>5MW) data center space in the US because it has all been taken. It isn't being taken for generating hashes that secure billions in value, but for generating images and content... I'm not sure which one is more wasteful.
The difference would be that AI's power usage is performing useful calculations, and that everyone involved wants to reduce the power usage. Nobody in AI likes paying big power bills. If somebody invents a chip that uses 10% of the power, the industry would gladly adopt it and decrease consumption by 90%.
This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto. We start with room sized monsters like ENIAC and improve and improve until something better fits in a solar powered watch.
> The difference would be that AI's power usage is performing useful calculations
Subjective.
> Nobody in AI likes paying big power bills.
Nobody anywhere "likes" big power bills, including in crypto. That said for crypto, this actually had the effect of driving everyone to the lowest priced power sources on the planet (many of which ended up being 'green' energy) and building more efficient systems.
The fact of the matter is that AI is so hot right now that people are paying absurd rates for power and nobody is talking about the usage. Like I said above, datacenter demand is off the charts right now. They are announcing space on a Friday and it is gone by Monday.
> This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto. We start with room sized monsters like ENIAC and improve and improve until something better fits in a solar powered watch.
"except for crypto" is wrong.
ETH started as an ENIAC and now it is a solar powered watch. In fact, ETH pegged itself to GPUs from the start, which meant that it didn't have the same sort of hardware competition that Bitcoin has. ETH's PoW algo is memory hard and limited by the onboard controller bandwidth, which meant that the fastest GPUs were not always the more ROI efficient... you didn't need to continuously upgrade the hardware to latest greatest.
> AI's power usage is performing useful calculations
A lot of AI's power usage is going towards generating images, or writing fiction, or doing any number of other things that don't help people improve any kind of physical processes. That's not to get into the GPU usage of video games, which by every economic measure consist of entirely useless calculations. In both AI and crypto you can find people using the resources to perform "useful" and "not useful" calculations; it's all subjective and at the end of the day people have the right to run up their electricity bill on whatever they fancy.
> If somebody invents a chip that uses 10% of the power, the industry would gladly adopt it and decrease consumption by 90%.
If someone created an invention that used 0.012% of the power to run a blockchain, many chains would gladly adopt it and decrease their energy consumption by 99.988%.
In fact that's exactly what Ethereum did, with its move from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Now, almost every new chain is PoS.
> This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto.
It isn't being taken for generating hashes that secure billions in value, but for generating images and content... I'm not sure which one is more wasteful
Which is many orders of magnitude different from AI which is being used by literally everyone today (if not directly then through the various services they interact with nearly all of which are using AI in significant capacities).
I recently started working for a web3 company - and I am a crypto skeptic, I joined because it was founded by two former coworkers who I enjoyed working with. We're a data SaaS in the space and even though it's a bear market, we're doing pretty well. There are a lot of real businesses building on top of various chains that aren't just scams/shady (though there are plenty of those too). Just the sheer amount of business activity I see on a daily basis that looks like the web2 SaaS work I did for the prior 8 years when it wasn't a bear market makes me pretty optimistic that eventually these businesses (and many others) will find sustainable ways to operate using blockchains, it's just going to take some time, it's still really early in the space.
At least on the Ethereum side of things, I see success being less about a particular crypto currency and more about how smart contracts and the underlying EVM layers evolve to operate decentralized applications at scale. It's still not something I think is guaranteed. I didn't think Linux was a guaranteed success when I worked at Red Hat in the 90s either, but it became more certain when we started selling services and put less focus on box sales.
The answer is that it’s sparse. It’s still very early. Scammers and grifters were dominant on the Internet for decades, massive businesses were built on spam and popup ads, something every user universally hated.
I could give a few examples but I think it’s still at an early enough stage that they won’t appeal to the general public any more than internet chat did to the general public in the mid 90s. It’s still too early. It’s fine to ignore emerging tech that you find annoying or useless. I just tend to be attracted to it because it’s quite fun to be along for the ride to see it become more mainstream and useful. Not everything succeeds. :) prime example from my previous time in web2 SaaS: box subscription companies were a popular growth and acquisition model but ended up not being sustainably aligned with what people actually wanted: consistent and reliable products they love.
I don't think HN is the general public, I'm just curious if there is a real use case beyond cryptocurrency to bet on. There are some interesting stuff, for example I really want BAT and Brave Browser happen, it's just doesn't appear so far(although the browser has plenty of real users because it's actually a good browser).
The biggest real use is right now is (IMO) USDC for payments. It's a much better experience than banking rails, from the cheap & instant settlements to the traceable accounting and programmable security controls.
Why do you go around and post the same link? I did not ask for list of crypto projects anyway, I asked for actual products that actual people use beyond betting on the underlaying asset crypto asset.
It’s funny though because one of the first examples is a cool product called proof of presence protocol. To make an analogy to video games it’s like badges for doing a raid but more like a badge for going to a conference that’s saved in your digital wallet. These kinds of products are also used to “feature gate” other real life events or products or services. Kind of like a member card but it can be used pretty dynamically and it’s product agnostic.
Just a reminder that there was an example of a company using blockchain to track inventory, admittedly in a pilot project, shared on HN just ten days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469811
Their reasons was: "If you are wondering about using a p-Chip instead of an RFID tag, the former boasts several advantages. According to the maker, p-Chip devices are smaller, cheaper (a few cents each), tougher, and more secure than nearest competitor RFID."
I don't claim to be sufficiently versed in these fields to critique, and I'm not trying to start an ideological war here, but I felt it important to highlight that legitimate companies in America continue to explore its use cases.
It seems to me that the actual relevant innovation has to do with a better chip than with the blockchain.
Ultimately, there's a single source of truth: whoever certifies the cheese to be authentic. And there's the requirement to shoot a laser at this thing. It's a device you have to physically interact with.
So this at best requires what, a standard cryptographic signature emitted by a trusted party? The blockchain part is complete fluff.
The main point of this seems to be that for a third party it's hard to obtain this very specific chip to insert into their non-authentic cheese, which is why they use a physical chip instead of printing a QR code on the rind. So that'd be what provides the benefit, not the blockchain.
Like with anything else with blockchain, the question is how that is any better than using centralized database. I don't even see any mention of a blockchain in the article.
Hyperledger is used by quite a few organisations, mainly to share data trustlessly. There are some interesting governance structures growing out of DAO contracts too.
These don't get talked about much because real-world use cases are often too boring to make for good internet arguments. Talk of scams and bubbles and grifts spreads much more easily.
IBM built its entire blockchain business around the idea of logistics and ran expensive TV ads promoting the IBM blockchain for years.
The problem is that for all that was promised, in reality what we have are a few very specialized niche uses. The fundamental issue with the blockchain is that the case for a “trustless” database as opposed to outsourcing it to a single trustworthy are very limited. And the cases where the benefits outweigh the significant operational complexities are even more limited.
And that’s before you consider that 50%+1 attacks exist. So even the “trustless”ness is vulnerable to attacks.
I read through the HackerNews discussion on the article before sharing. It still felt worthwhile to me to share this here. Please don't make assumptions in bad faith.
Been in the Web3 space as a side hustle for something like 2 years now and the only real usecase I’ve seen is something like USDC transfers over Solana.
Everything else is just a scam and/or ponzi.
Add to that that the price of coins is manipulated by market makers and exchanges (CEX and DEX) and it’s not looking good, honestly.
Regulation would actually improve the space a lot. Something like a national ticker for coins would go a long way to clearing out a lot of the scum.
Technically speaking, it's a JavaScript library used for interacting with EVM blockchains.
Practically speaking, people use the term to mean just about whatever they want nowadays. Often it's used as a generic buzzword to sell products on some vague idea of a better, more equitable internet.
you are describing just parts of a larger, complicated system. Everything you say is true no doubt, but that is not all that is going on, in the entirety.
On the other side, six hundred years of modern finance with insurance and performance-based outcomes, have been leveraged with top-heavy monopoly players. In daily finance on a very large scale, industry companies use "trust" or credit-ratings, or regulatory capture even, to hold on to transaction flows with a lot of overhead.
The promise of automatable chains of transactions is a kind of no-boss, no-outsized fee "free market." The largest currency issuers of the world know this, and have been busily building their own, controlled versions.
You are wandering among flea-market stalls and wondering where the sense is, one might say.
I went from being very positive about cryptocurrencies when they got started to being a bit disgusted the last few years as it seemed to be completely dominated by scams and get-rich-quick people. It's starting to feel like that is fading away, that the ecosystem is going back to basics and providing value to people again. Great to hear!
I went through a similar arch of sentiment since discovering crypto in about 2014. the field really is full of scams, but I think that's being cleared out. Bitcoin and Ethereum are emerging from that as legitimate projects. Still government regulation could squash them, or they might just fail, but if they were scams, I think they would have pulled the rug by now.
“The developing world will keep the crypto revolution going” means “we haven’t been driven out of the developing world for scamming too many people yet so we can keep recruiting fresh marks to make number go up.”
You know what will save the crypto revolution? Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.
> You know what will save the crypto revolution? Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.
I think the problem is actually deeper than that. It's not just a lack of good use cases, cryptocurrency's fundamental design goals are things that most people not only don't care about but would actively try to avoid. An immutable financial ledger where you manage your own keys is actually a terrible solution for the average person, so you need a super compelling use case to make up for the downsides.
It can't just be an alternative to traditional finance. That's fine for people who are ideologically sold on the concept, but people who just want to go shopping or save money aren't going to find that super compelling. It has to do something way better that normal people actually care about. Really the best use case that's developed is cryptocurrency investing as a get rich quick scheme, but it's hard to see that as a sustainable model for any "revolution".
This seems like a very hostile and unreasonable take. People in developing countries have far greater need for access to financial services, banking and loans. rich countries have that already because they have stable governments. Poor countries don't. While crypto has its risks, the risks of unstable national currencies can be greater. So it's a reasonable decision to consider crypto in that context. People in rich countries have less need. For rich stable nations, crypto will have to offer more than simple services and better-than-Venezuela security.
Issue them digital wallets to enable holding global reserve currencies. It is an AML/KYC problem. Imagine if, just for the sake of argument, any of these unbanked folks in countries you mentioned could install something like TransferWise (which app doesn’t matter, but the ability to tie your identity to your account holding various value stores) and hold whichever currency they wanted digitally. No stablecoin, CBDC, or blockchain required.
By the same token, exchanges will also freeze funds.
If you want to avoid that you have to follow the original Bitcoin vision where everyone had their own node, but I don't think anybody actually works like that these days, to a very small rounding error. Everything interacts with some sort of very centralized service that can screw you over.
Centralized node services cannot screw you over other than refusing to provide service. Even when using a centralized node, your wallet still manages its own keys.
Who measures inflation? Why, the same central bankers crypto people inveigh against. This coin will give them a lovely arbitrage opportunity against all the holders.
Agreed. To make any real inroads, there needs to be a generally accepted use case that the existing systems don’t handle sufficiently well that crypto excels at.
That isn’t to say that the existing systems do things well, but the networking effect they have and the friction, risk, and learning curve of dealing with crypto tend to make it less fluid of the options.
Frankly, I’ve not heard of a use case that fits that description. It isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, but I don’t expect to see crypto regain its hyped status until that generally accepted case comes up.
It’s worth noting that gambling and crime (of the evading money transfer restrictions variety not the stealing kind) are perfectly useful applications for a technology.
That’s all crypto has ever been and all it will be. But that’s pretty big. Gambling is one of the most enduring and appealing activities humans engage in. Lock people in a prison with only walls and cigarettes and they’ll figure out how to do it. People will populate an empty desert to do it.
>of the evading money transfer restrictions variety not the stealing kind
At least in the western world these are synonyms, and everywhere else it's still more often that the tech is used for theft than for authorized-but-illegal transactions. Irreversible, censorship-resistant transactions are like rocket fuel for cybercriminals.
Putting out a laundry list of projects (that are inferior to those that operate within the fiat ecosystem) isn't going to change the fact that 95% of people in crypto are looking to enrich themselves on speculation or to part said fools with their money.
I challenge you to pick a single example from this list that at the same time can't be done without blockchain, warrants the monstrous overhead, and provides utility other than "make money".
I would be hard pressed to find someone who could more cheaply and easily smuggle physical dollars into Argentina than they could smuggle in stablecoins.
What Bitcoin exchange does an Argentinian citizen have access to if Bitcoin exchanges are banned? It's the same thing. You just have to know somebody willing to act as a bank outside Argentina, just like you would have to know someone who is willing to break the law to sell Bitcoin to you.
What's preventing people from engaging in these transactions is not a technological problem, but generally a regulatory one.
"This allows people to break the law", which is what you are saying, is not a good thing, even if a subset of the laws being bypassed are unjust. It's the opposite of utility as far as I'm concerned.
Your second point is entirely fair, but only insofar as the added value provided by blockchain cannot be attained by other means.
Many people would argue that it's ethical to break an unjust law, and in fact that's the only way any real societal progress has been made. From drug decriminalization (including alcohol), to minority rights, to the very founding of many countries. Still other people seem to hold a conflicting stance where they rightfully idolize historic lawbreakers like George Washington or Rosa Parks, but any breaking of current laws is "always a bad thing".
That said, in many countries it is only illegal for residents of that country to facilitate foreign money services for others, it's not strictly illegal for them to take advantage of money services that do exist. In those cases, a borderless app doesn't actually break the law.
Basically, I can't agree with you that it's "not a good thing" that Argentinians are able to hold 10 dollar balances on their phone so that they can afford groceries next month. I think that's a good thing. People can afford groceries who weren't able to before.
By the way, I'm going to adjust that bar one more time. Good applications are ones where the added value "cannot be attained with less effort by other means", not where the added value "cannot be attained by other means".
This is not correct. If I send money to a random dev in Russia I don’t break any law. But I simply cannot do this because it is technically impossible. Crypto is tech that makes it possible.
Absolutely not. The gas fee is not moved up or down based on the cost to settle a transaction. It's an independent market based on supply and demand for blockspace. Supply is constrained because for the network to remain decentralized you need to be able to run a node inexpensively, demand is just a result of value added.
Saw this comment too late, sorry. Yes, that's overhead for the operator of the service. But this is not what I was referring to, nor the OP to which I answered. He made the false assumption that the gas fee moves up or down because node operators in the network reflect the costs to settle a transaction in the price, if the costs to them goes up then, he assumed, gas fees go up. This is not how it works. Node operators don't have a mechanism to reflect the costs to settle a transaction in the gas fee. Those two prices are allowed to float independently, then there are some mechanisms coded into the protocol that tend to produce equilibriums so that there is never too much disparity and the network remains profitable.
But I'm also that OP whom you replied to and I never once mentioned that gas prices have anything to do with the cost of operating the blockchain.
It's only people trying to tell me that the overhead is negligible who seem to be under the impression that low technical overhead means low overhead in general. Gas prices are evidence to the contrary of that.
Then you have not understood it. High gas prices are not evidence of high cost (as in the cost to the network to settle the transaction). In a bit analogous way high price of a luxury item is not evidence of its high cost of production. But instead of its desirability with respect to its abundance.
Cost and value are two different things. Ethereum blockspace is in high demand with respect to its supply and that drives its value (gas prices), and this is irrespective of its cost to settle that blockspace (energy consumption, HW costs, etc...).
That's not how it works. There's negligible "overhead" to paint a famous work of art, but that doesn't mean the sale price of the art will be negligible too.
That's because like fine art, the mechanism that produces block space can only generate a very limited amount per unit time, and latent demand is always orders of magnitude higher than the supply. You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.
> There's negligible "overhead" to paint a famous work of art
...no? Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead. Either paying an expert to laboriously reproduce tiny intricacies of the original, or building and programming a robot to do it.
And of course you'd have to research all the paints, strokes, etc, involved.
> You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.
And that's the overhead, yeah. Even after PoS, it's still a network that doesn't scale. Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.
Duplicates don't sell. This is very similar in crypto - if you duplicate an existing blockchain, its block space doesn't sell. Art - and blockchains - sell because they are original, liquid, come with durable social proof, and have resale prospects and/or utility (real or perceived).
> Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.
I think I get what you're saying - if a blockchain were able to run on a single computer, then gas would be very cheap because each calculation would only need to be run once.
Current blockchain protocols, of course, do not work like that. So if I might try to paraphrase your argument about overhead, it boils down to "if blockchains did not work the way they do, then gas costs would be cheaper." Which I can't really argue with.
All the while, AI is also taking over. Businesses are slurping up power from everywhere, without any regard for the environment. We hear about companies purchasing 10,000 H100's, but we don't hear about how it is going to be powered. Nobody outside the industry is talking about the fact that you can't get any meaningful (>5MW) data center space in the US because it has all been taken. It isn't being taken for generating hashes that secure billions in value, but for generating images and content... I'm not sure which one is more wasteful.