It's a buzzword that's used blindly in the hopes of attracting capital [2] that has no real meaning. Out of a dozen blockchain related job offers I was approached with, not a SINGLE founder could answer simple questions about how to assure verification or prevent blockchain manipulation.

Blockchain is up there with fad diets, crazy health claims for boring foods, and nonsense cancer treatments. Does it have a potential role? Sure, it'd probably be kind of a cute feature in a game.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bringing-blockchain-to-the-coff...

1. It has become more of a speculative instrument than an actual currency. People are more concerned about making money buying/selling/holding BTC. Defeats the original purpose of a "decentralized currency"

2. Not sure that decentralized currency is a good thing. Some things need to be regulated unfortunately. Yes, we all hate the central banks etc but I would trust a regular currency anyday over BTC. Not to mention that you are at the mercy of these "wallets" or even worse "centralized wallets" like coinbase etc which again defeats the purpose in my opinion.

3. It wastes electricity. A lot of it just to mine. Why do we need to mine it again ? Oh it is because there is only so much of it ? Is that a good thing ? I don't know.

4. Most importantly: adoption. My mother has no idea what BTC is and will ever know. It is far too away from being a currency that can be used by regular people. Perhaps that day will come but not yet.

5. Too many scams due to the gold rush of BTC. Again, that is a bad thing.

Disclaimer: I don't know much about BTC but still have these thoughts about it.

My $0.02: it wastes electricity to solve a non-problem.

That being said I still have not found the problem that it is the solution for other than addressing our CTO's case of FOMO.

- Lots of crypto links posted to HN are scams or have no technical merit

- No one has come up[1] with a use case for blockchain that actually requires blockchain, outside of cryptocurrency (which is something non-technical people and speculators don't understand or won't admit)

- Because of rampant scams and speculation, a lot of online blockchain/crypto conversations have a high noise-to-signal ratio

1. https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

Personal anecdote: a friend of mine was working on a project to utilize extremely counterfeit-resistant holographic tags to authenticate organic produce in China (where anything can be faked). 2-3 years and he still didn't have any significant customers. Enter Blockchain. They replaced the tag with a QR code, "blockchain cannot be faked" mantra, and within 6 months got $4 million investment and some customers. So when you scan the QR code, it opens a web page that shows some fancy data like id, date of packaging, etc. Who provides this data? The company. Who provides the web page? The company. Who can alter this data in any way they want? The company. And now the punchline: there is no blockchain in the code. Zero.

Other than Bitcoin, three other coins that are sometimes talked about here are Ethereum, Monero, Zcash.

Ethereum was the first ICO. Many other tokens operate on its blockchain.

Monero is an open source project with lots of development and progress (third behind Bitcoin and Ethereum). Its transactions are private.

Zcash is open source but mainly developed by a for-profit company and uses interesting mathematics. Its transactions are public, with the option of being private.

Disclaimer: I'm only "invested" in one of the three coins I mentioned.

The primary property of a good currency is stability. The crypto currencies are exactly the opposite.

I like smart contracts but I don't think public/permission-less blockchains are feasible/very useful in the real world. Engaging in a tech and electricity spending race doesn't look like a good way to verify transactions and protect the blockchain against attacks.

I like permissioned blockchains.

Why is it that blockchains weren't invented sooner? I'll contend that you'd be laughed out of any distributed systems conference if you suggested any protocol where the workload capacity doesn't increase when you add nodes.

If you have ten traders who trade under a buttonwood tree, then having ten copies of the database makes the system bulletproof. If you have ten million traders, there is no additional gain, but there is a huge cost because you have ten million copies of the database.

Blockchains attract people who know nothing about money or technology the same way that pot startups attract stoners. It's just a bad scene.

It's over-hyped in general. Beyond that, often implemented in was suggested that don't really add much value compared to any number of other less complicated solutions.

If you are in a situation, where you have competing parties not aligned who want to ensure a given transaction is applied, and don't mind the implementation of that transaction being completely public, then blockchain might be the right solution.

If you are wanting to use cryptocurrency for financial transactions, then there is some merit, but in many cases suggested it's effectively a corporatist overload control over currency (such as Facebook's currency suggestion). If it's actual bitcoin or a handful of other alt-coins, at least it's decentralized but not as anonymous as many think. It's also, in general difficult to use without some centralization.

In the end, someone will win in this game. My guess is the banks behind the winner (MasterCard and Visa are backing FB's Libre venture). Given the actions against people with unpopular views (even if they are wrong thinking assholes), it terrifies me. Freedom to exchange property, and currency is a stand in for property, is a big deal and at least as big a deal as speech.

HN tends to shun Blockchain because it has a non trivial amount of fraud and amature hour to it... IMHO. Too much focus on the marginally useful tech, and not enough on the outcomes (i.e. CO2 from mining) and solving real problems. Too much neolib. Forgetting no one really wants their finances made public to the world.

Besides, I don't think it's particularly more negative on cryptocurrencies - go to any other internet forum (that are not specialized in cryptocurrencies) and I think you'll find a similar mixture of opinions.

Finally, "Google also invested in X" isn't a very good counter-argument here. Have you seen some HN comments when Google is being discussed?

That's where a lot of negative opinion comes from.

Or it's psychological and many feel better believing that is a scam because they missed the run up despite likely being knowledgeable about bitcoin years ago and decided to ignore it.

I can't speak for all of HN but I seriously doubt there was ever a need for the technology to begin with.

I've read numerous investigative articles on Bitcoin, in particular, that document the environmental impact and harm it does to workers who live in remote data centers. The situation is poor. And few, if any, bitcoin enthusiasts see these as problems. From what I understand the consensus among bitcoin enthusiasts is that we'll technology our way out of this and somehow we'll live in their techno-libertarian-utopia once they figure these things out.

Frankly I don't share their ideology.

Bitcoin decentralizes currency and leaves no one entity in control. Hurrah, the government can't stop you from moving money as you see fit. Except that most of the time, the government is stopping people from doing things that were made illegal for very good reasons. Money laundering of proceeds of crime, terrorist financing, tax evasion. You can debate all day about whether taxes are inherently evil, but right now the law says they are legal and you've gotta pay them. Saying "No worries man, I've got a NEW currency that the government can't stop" doesn't make it not a crime.

All the while, it's not actually free. We're burning huge amounts of energy to do mining, and the costs have to be passed on to someone. Miners get free BTC for mining, but that's a closed system- someone eventually must pay real currency for that energy being used. And it's getting expensive given the number of miners. (Plus, a lot of them are China which is using coal as it's primary energy source, which is killing people from pollution!)

And finally, there's no inflation/deflation controls. A currency's utility is increased by it's stability. Not knowing if my BTC will double in price or drop by half in the next 2 weeks means every day is a gamble. If this were my only currency, I'd be terrified about buying groceries.

Oh, and let's not forget that the huge spike in BTC prices in the last few years were found likely to have been caused by manipulation.

I love crypto and think bitcoin/blockchains are a really neat technology. But I just wish they weren't here, in the real world, because they seem to be a net-loss for the world, and a Ponzi scheme.

Edit after getting a coffee: ... okay, that was a bit of a rant...

As for blockchain I think we've seen a number of "solutions" to problems that are adequately solved by a database.

Firstly its a panopticon, not anonymous

Secondly, it has a transaction rate of <10 a second Globally.

Thirdly, its chowing down huge amounts of power for no real gain

Fourthly, its snake oil. Its value comes from its mystique. As a store of wealth its horrifically expensive, as a trading currency, its too slow, you might as well buy gold.

Yes, its has a neat idea behind it, but blockchains are inherently niche. They have very few applications outside exceptionally high value, low transaction, zero trust systems.

Etherium and its smart contracts are inherently flawed, because they are not smart, or contracts. Unless your "contract" has a binary outcome, that is faultlessly measurable, then they aren't for you. The entire point of a contract is that there is a third party capable of issuing binding resolutions, using all available evidence. Etherium gives you none of that, despite the hype.

The only thing that might be worthy of a blockchain is something like the changelog of wikipedia, but then its not worth the spectacular cost. Just keep a couple of mirrors.

Ethereum, for providing smart contracts, that enabled many ICOs.

Monero/ZCash for being private.

All other currencies are mostly just clones of the 3 (meaning they can suffer from 50%+1 attacks), or remove the main feature: trustless transactions.

In general, unless a currency provides a novel consensus algorithm, that brings something new to the table, it would actually be better off as a token on one of the above. If it is not, likely it is a scam/money grab.

All other projects do not really need blockchain, with a rare exception.

Disclosure: I own ETH and BTC.