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0 pointssimias8y ago0 comments

>The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles.

You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies?

>Further, I gave specific examples

That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography".

>you reply with a joke tweet (which, as an aside, no one has any duty or obligation wasting their time replying to

It's true, but they did reply nonetheless, wouldn't have hurt to actually come up with a decent argument while they were at it.

Still, it's really a common pattern in bitcoin discussions in my experience (just say that the author doesn't know what they're talking about without coming with any counterargument). You can find plenty of examples in the comments of this very much non-joke article: https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-al...

I could probably come up with other examples but I don't have any duty or obligation to waste my time doing that so...

> then more hand waving.

Who's waving hands at whom in this scenario?

>The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves.

Godspeed. I don't have any problem with that. I just wish the discussion around these technologies revolved more around technical arguments than ambiguous terminology.

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dsacco8y ago

> You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies?

Academic cryptographers and computer scientists specializing in Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed systems have been working on blockchain technology for several years now - since one Bitcoin was worth merely hundreds of dollars.

To put this gently: you're being very snarky and combative in this thread, but you do not appear to be familiar with the basic academic literature and engineering that has gone into very legitimate blockchain technology research. Obviously there has been an influx of uninformed, trend-following funding recently, but it's a serious mistake to conflate those parties with the totality of work in the field. In fact, I gave two specific examples in a reply to another of your comments.

endorphone8y ago

People have been talking about blockchains for many years (and in the financial space there are massive orgs all working together on concrete implementations. Change takes time). The fevered anti-blockchain pitch, on the other hand, has picked up in lockstep with the cryptocurrency hype. If you can't separate them that's a failing.

It's a bit like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, with people who woke up to cryptocurrency hype thinking that everyone became aware simultaneous with them.

That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography".

That is the literal definition of a blockchain. In these sorts of arguments people are so desperate to shoot down "Bitcoin" that we end up with a No True Scotsman situation where everyone completely loses sight of the technology.

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