Yes, I understand why blockchains are bad, have no benefits, terrible performance and are a privacy nightmare. Thanks for explaining it in more detail. And binance understands it too, that's why they're not using it (not even a private one!) despite all of their talk about how it's a revolutionary technology.

And then, even when faced with implementing a huge, audit critical, distributed append-only store, the thing they tell us blockchains are so useful for, they just use normal database tech like the rest if us. With one centralized infrastructure where most of the transactions in the network actually take place. Who's tech stack looks suspiciously like every other financial institution.

I'm so glad we're ignoring 100 years of securities law to let all of this incredible innovation happen.

But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waking up every morning to discover that someone has very deliberately, specifically decided to make my life worse, not out of personal conviction, but because it makes a line go up somewhere in a board room on the other side of the world. That I can not deal with.

Or in terms of a tired metaphor: If you refuse to weed out your bad apples, you can't really complain when people stop taking your fruit shipments because they keep spoiling their bunches :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267992

Points: 13

# Comments: 2

It feels worth noting that this book, as well as the wider idea of an abstract idea of crowd-induced mania in general it reinforces, is pseudoscientific with little credible evidence to support it.

It's origins lie much more in the political motivations and historical context of the authors: It is no coincidence that this book was written by a wealthy scotsman against the backdrop of the idea was first floated by an aristocrat during the upheavals and riots surrounding the introduction of capitalism, and that the idea was initially proposed by an aristocrat during the french revolution. They were both times where it was extraordinarily convenient to be able to dismiss engaging with the things the crowd was being driven by.

I'd urge against making the same mistake today. To me, it is impossible to separate the web3 mania from the historical context it happened in: Like 2008, it is a time of job insecurity, financial anxiety and distrust in systems with governments doing little to help. They are prime times for wishful thinking and people who want to take advantage of it.

Using it for user analytics, which is neither required to run the service, nor in the users interest, nor reasonably expected by the user, is almost definitly illegitimate use.

That doesn't mean you can't use it at all. It just places strong restrictions on what purpodes you can use it for. The important point is just that those restrictions are the same under GDPR for all of these technologies. It doesn't matter how you uniquely identify users, what matters is what you do with that information.

So my point is not that he doesn't want it to succeed, it would obviously be a great personal embarrassment. It's that the risk of destroying a community of millions of people was clearly lower on his mind than the power trip of how cool it would be to own Twitter. He can afford to not care, and that's a deeply depressing situation.

Then he realized it was not in fact a good idea and backed out of it.

The deals seem to be rather secretive, but from what I can tell bonuses can be anything from a straightforward discount, to a guaranteed amount of impressions for some campaign, to things like guaranteeing that the client will win a certain percentage of auctions above some price.

It means you can get a book cover and a business card printed, some plastic injection molded, have your car painted and be assured they are all going to be exactly the same color when they arrive. It's the mapping between pantone names and the real world that's valuable, and this doesn't seem to help with that.

Seeing that someone who is quite succesful and to me admirable got terminated multiple times was very reassuring there.

Of course, many companies would prefer desperate employees who are afraid to hit the bricks instead. But is that really who you want to be working for, given a choice?

China is huge too. Russia is gigantic. The US was huge before the 1950s too.

The terrible city sprawl of the US is not a law of nature, but specific post WW2 city design policies that could easily be reversed at any time.

> I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation.

It's the same policies. Take the minimum parking requirements: you can't have multiple shops accessible from one station because every shop needs to be surrounded by a walking distance worth of parking. You need to duplicate your entire network because things like corner stores don't exist, meaning there are basically no trips within residential areas. Allocating almost all budget to cars for the last half century has lead to severe loss of experience with designing transit. The Buy America clause says that foreign companies must set up temporary factories in the US whenever someone orders a trainset from them.

There's lots and lots of things, but they all originate with car-centric post-ww2 policies.