Come on - you didn't "simply list facts" you stated wildly confident and extreme opinions and then you labeled them facts. That you can't or won't recognize this is what I'm talking about.
"Literally no new thing", "I look at reality" (implying I only make stuff up), "wishful thinking", "precisely zero knowledge", "Without fail in 100% of cases this is the case", etc. etc.
There are interesting conversations to have on this topic, but it's hard to have them with someone only willing to engage in this way. It requires some amount of willingness to be uncertain of what you currently believe and you're not. The more you reply, the more you confirm my initial suspicion of bad faith.
I'm not some blind crypto nut (at best I'm cautiously optimistic), but I find it hard to engage with the baseline anti-crypto hostility on HN which makes interesting conversation hard.
> Come on - you didn't "simply list facts" you stated wildly confident and extreme opinions and then you labeled them facts
They are facts:
1. "Gated community is centralized by default" is a fact.
2. "Literally no new thing has come out of this" is a fact.
3. "Not to mention use cases where you wouldn't want to advertise your membership in a gated community" is a statment that has a fact in it: "use cases where you wouldn't want to advertise your membership in a gated community"
And in the comment you're replying to I've also stated some facts besides just opinion.
> There are interesting conversations to have on this topic, but it's hard to have them with someone only willing to engage in this way.
Please show me a single "interesting conversation" where anyone from the crypto community has anything to say beyond "there are new interesting new things you just have to believe in possibility that someday maybe this will happen".
> It requires some amount of willingness to be uncertain of what you currently believe and you're not.
I'm definitely uncertain about many things. Once again, there's a difference between being uncertain and blindly believing in snake oil. It's on the sellers of snake oil to prove their wild claims, not on me.
> The more you reply, the more you confirm my initial suspicion of bad faith.
Yup. More comments without zero substance on the "interesting new capabilites" and "interesting discussions".
> I'm not some blind crypto nut (at best I'm cautiously optimistic), but I find it hard to engage with the baseline anti-crypto hostility on HN which makes interesting conversation hard.
If there was any such interesting conversation, "not blind crypto nuts" would have already had it and had, for example, links to such discussions. In over a decade no such discussion has materialised for very obvious reasons.
1. I'm not sure I get this point - the ability to verify membership is decentralized and anyone can build things leveraging that. In the urbit case this works well for auth/ID. Ownership can also be transferred without a central authority (this is new).
2. This isn't true (Urbit IDs are another easy example), but decentralized state consensus is something you get from blockchain that didn't exist before. That's a new thing (and lots of other new things come from that idea).
3. Anonymity is a different feature sure, not a guarantee in any of this.
The reason I mostly avoided engaging on the specifics is because the rest of your comment and the way you engage suggests it won't be worthwhile.
Half of those are basically marketing links, including the ridiculous things like "NFTs make the internet ownable".
The other half is literally "why the hell anyone would want this?" like "Ethereum is a dark forest".
None of them address any of the issues in the crypto space. Literally none of them connect the dots between "it's a dark forest, and it will get worse" and the puppy-eyed "omg this is so good for creators and consumers".
But sure. This is what passes for "good discourse" in crypto circles.
> The reason I mostly avoided engaging on the specifics is because the rest of your comment and the way you engage suggests it won't be worthwhile.
The reason is simple: 99.9999999% of all discussions with crypto people follow the same pattern. After a decade of snake oil, you don't expect snake oil salesmen to engage in anything productive.
> Previous threads that go into details/have interesting conversation about specific capabilities so we don't have to rehash all of it here
These reiterate a few false dichotomies and false equivalences as in "Banks don't won’t protect you from wire fraud" === "same in crypto". Not the same.
There is some value in "having your money with you always", but fails to account for two things: the need for immediate and continuous internet access, and security (https://xkcd.com/538/)
> if I had to pick one general one, probably this:
which is void of any interesting discussion, doesn't address any problems, and reiterates that "bitcoin is a speculative asset"
> This list is good
I may skim through it, but I won't hold my breath.
> For your specifics
How it started: "The interesting bit is gated community access/easily verifiable ownership of membership"
How it's going: "we build this OS with blockchain built in, we verify identities there". Also: "nonymity is a different feature sure"
Authentication, authorisation and memberships have overlapping concerns but are not the same thing. And this is the thing I absolutely loathe in these "productive conversations":
- when faced with facts or reality, the narrative is always shifted. We were talking about memberships? "Well, let me talk about something else"
- complex issues are just brushed aside as being non-important, non-essential, trivial, or that they will be magically solved. Anonymity? "oh, it's a different feature set"
- literally no one is pausing to stop for even a second beyond the absolutely obvious use cases. Because the next set of use cases is merely immediately obvious.
In a world where everyone is tracking everyone anonymity is essential.
"Ownership can be transferred without central authority"? What recourse is there when that happens without the owner's consent (even people developing "smart contracts" currently fall prey to errors in their code logic)?
What happens when gated communities (which are centralised by default) ban you based on something completely unrelated because all of your membership info is easily available and verifiable (your church group outs you as gay, your teacher's union fires you because you're a furry, you can't find a job because of a felony offence)?
---
So, after more than a decade of snake oil, I will call snake oil for what it is until proven otherwise. No amount of "you just have to believe", erm, sorry, "you have to be curious" will convince me otherwise.
There is nothing that would ever convince you which is why I didn't want to try in the first place. You're starting from a position of thinking you're unshakably correct (and constantly write wildly over-confident condescending things like "99.9999999% of all discussions with crypto people follow the same pattern" which make it unpleasant to interact at all). Maybe if that number is true for you it's because you are the cause of the pattern in your conversations?
The nice thing about economic bets is it doesn't matter. You'll still be complaining about this no matter what happens in the future, just like people still argue EVs can't work. Your opinion on this just won't be important.
> "We were talking about memberships? "Well, let me talk about something else"
You made extreme claims about "nothing new, it's all snake oil" etc. - it's easier to point at stuff that more explicitly shows this is false before talking about more nuanced/uncertain cases. Everything else you write fails to compare stuff to the status quo, ignores the new capabilities, etc. This is what I meant about not being curious or arguing in-good-faith, you've made up your mind and you look at everything in pursuit of why you're already right - no surprise you always will find that you are.
The OS doesn't have blockchain built in btw - it only uses NFTs as IDs for access, nothing else in the OS is blockchain because blockchain is bad for stuff that doesn't require decentralized state. Farcaster uses a similar idea: https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent... - naturally you didn't read any of this or think about it beyond how it proves your confirmation bias is correct.
> There is nothing that would ever convince you which is why I didn't want to try in the first place.
There's a lot that would convince me, and you (andd all of crypto space) never tried.
> You're starting from a position of thinking you're unshakably correct, and constantly write wildly over-confident condescending things like "99.9999999% of all discussions with crypto people follow the same pattern"
Because they inveitably do, and this discussion is no different. There are nebulous claims, "just believe", shifting of discussions and "oh if only there was some discussion to be had".
You've had over a decade to have this discussion. Where is it?
> You'll still be complaining about this no matter what happens in the future, just like people still argue EVs can't work.
Ah yes. The inevtable comparison to something grandiose like EVs or the Internet. Try this for size: this is the next Juicero.
> it's easier to point at stuff that more explicitly shows this is false before talking about more nuanced/uncertain cases.
Once again, just because you dismiss these cases, doesn't mean they don't exist, that they are unimportant, or that they can be magically olved by your "new thing". To quote myself, "Blockchains make even the simplest act of membership unnecessarily complicated, and makes more complex interactions nearly impossible."
> Everything else you write fails to compare stuff to the status quo, ignores the new capabilities, etc.
I've literally written about status quo several times. From the fact that masons managed to create a global secret society before computers, and to requirements for anonymity, unnecessary tracking etc. Just because you don't recognize this, says much more about you than it says about me.
> This is what I meant about not being curious or arguing in-good-faith
Once again, I am curious, that's why I've come up with multiple examples off the top of my head. Let's see how your "curious" self responded to this: "a different feature", links to non-discussions and marketing materials, etc.
Goofd faith? You don't know the definition of the word.
> The OS doesn't have blockchain built in btw - it only uses NFTs as IDs for access
1. Semantics.
2. Requiring an always-on internet connection for user id verification... As I said, you didn't even stop to think for a single second whether this is good, or wanted, or even needed.
> naturally you didn't read any of this or think about it
Naturally I didn't read any random blog post on any random website. The list of things that you didn't read or think about is as long as the equator, and a lot of it is showing in this discussion.
"Decentralized social network"? Scuttlebutt is already doing that, doesn't require blockchain, and can work ithout the internet. Federation (e.g. XMPP) existed long before that. The rest is literally describing everything we've already had but since it has a magical word "blockchain" in it, I must be drooling over it, "be curious", believe etc. In that entire article blockchain literally only adds complexity while everything else like centralized servers stays the same.
Also funny how he mentions email in a world where running your own mail server is nearly impossible because GMail, which controls most of the email market, will just immediately mark your outgoing traffic as spam. See, I said world. Because this is reality and facts that you a) know nothing about, b) don't care about and c) wave away because "just believe in blockchain"
Literal pay to play: "Being an early user, token holder, or voter confers status on people. Social networks for blockchain users can make it easy for people to generate proofs of such activity." This is a good novel new thing now?
So, the entire article is vapid "social networks are bad, we're building something never before seen though we don't know yet, just believe, also it's pay to play" drivel on par with most of what comes out of crypto space.
"Literally no new thing", "I look at reality" (implying I only make stuff up), "wishful thinking", "precisely zero knowledge", "Without fail in 100% of cases this is the case", etc. etc.
There are interesting conversations to have on this topic, but it's hard to have them with someone only willing to engage in this way. It requires some amount of willingness to be uncertain of what you currently believe and you're not. The more you reply, the more you confirm my initial suspicion of bad faith.
I'm not some blind crypto nut (at best I'm cautiously optimistic), but I find it hard to engage with the baseline anti-crypto hostility on HN which makes interesting conversation hard.