> Pretty sure you’re reading your own biases into this

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

> Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-work? Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of energy — every other decentralized system does not.

All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing. Bitcoin chews through massive amounts of power. Ethereum chews through GPUs and lowers expected lifetimes. CHIA chews through SSDs in weeks of massive amounts of writes. Even running IPFS client chews through CPU/RAM/network like there's no tomorrow. Filecoin is 10x worse.

> Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every other coin so your own diatribe is incoherent.

I include all of them. But how quaint that you invalidate me as some round-about defense of your own shitcoin.

> Most people on HN are techbros

Most != all. Some of us are actual socialists. You know, "know thy enemy" and all that.

> Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed systems architecture. But if you think you can do better, please do it!

Its already been made. Its called Hawala ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala ). And its an easy way to send money across areas and even currency changes. And its based on reputation, not some silly climate-destroying math, so you shitcoiners cant make money pre-mining the chain before opening it up to the public.

Again, thats really the problem with all this decentralized "currency". Its a terrible merge between money transmitter and money printer. And you posit "But if you think you can do better, please do it!"... and you refuse the counter-question of 'Do we even need this?'

> For instance, I am. I think we can do better than BlockChain. That’s why I designed InterCloud, and putting together a team to build it.

I repeat: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

Basically, I'm saying this for others who read this now, and not for you. This is a tacit admittance that you cannot look at other perspectives in this realm, and must see your path as the "only and true path", because otherwise you would be rejecting your own idea and business plan. (And I know very few who can dispassionately look at their own passions.)

> I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore. IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of them fit anything you’re bitching about....In every case, people like you prefer bitching while the frog is being boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any open, free, permissionless alternatives. You’d do better by doing nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation happen. You seem to have no solution.

And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible. And the other scam here is that all these with shitcoins attached have been heavily pre-mined to "pay the upfront investment cost". But again, with you being a shitcoin founder, you're well aware how this grift works.

I used to run the blockchain meetup here locally. Some of my contributions are still used by a lot of folks. But after a hard deep dive into dozens of blockchain systems, the only real benefit is to the ransomware industry. Well, that, and a whole bunch more decomissioned power plants being spun back up for shitcoin of various types. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

But again, I know what I'm arguing against. And frankly, you're wrong and deluded that anti-government hyper-capitalism money is the way to accomplish this. It aint.

I don’t refuse to counter-question “do we even need it?” I have written articles at length why we need smart contracts, and I linked to it in the original comment (answer to Moxie). You just ignored it in your rush to ascend your soapbox!

I know that Upton Sinclair quote. Who pays my salary?

I could say the same about you. I realize who pays the salary of many of the startups that go through YC. The venture CAPITALISTS do. The Web2 ecosystem that banks at the same bank (Silicon Valley) and had a bank run on that bank kicked off by Peter “build a monopoly” Thiel. You support that ecosystem, and therefore are against any decentralized alternatives. Do you support Palantir and precrime as well?

Perhaps the above doesn’t describe you, only a bunch of tech bros like you in the very shareholder-based ecosystem that has led to the Big Tech oligopoly and is the subject of “boiling the frog” we are talking about. But then again, you are doing the same to me, assuming things based on whatever “Web3” means to you.

First you trot out incoherent strawmen about proof of work and shitcoins. Then, when I point out the issues with what you say, you do an adhominem.

You continue to be deluded. I just got through criticizinf hyper-capitalism like Thiel’s that would make many capitalists blush. Then I proceeded to advocate alternatives that fit the dictionary definition of “libertarian socialism”. You turn around and call that hyper-capitalism.

Well, how about this… in your system, you have monopolies and hardly any competition. It’s digital Feudalism. You are like the slaves supporting the system because the slavemasters were kinda good to you. In the system I advocate, everyone is competing to provide better infrastructure (hosting, security, storage etc) and you are not locked in. There is redundancy, no single point of failure. And no one can usurp power easily.

>All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing.

Sigh. You sound like you’re in 2013. Are you talking about Bitcoin? Because I had the same criticisms of it since before you were in crypto. I made them publicly in ArsTechnica and was covered in the BBC, Newsweek, etc back in 2018. We actually experimented with allowing people to do Monero mining as a way to pay for our apps, and the whole thing went bad pretty quickly and we removed it for precisely this reason. I called out the incentives publicly 5 years ago:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there...

You seem to ignore that every other coin besides Bitcoin and Monero doesnt fit your description, let alone the other distributed systems…

> And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible.

Really? “The whole network” of Dat/Hypercore and Bittorrent and IPFS and safenet are run “by a quorum”? You should read up a bit more on what distributed hash tables are before spouting such nonsense.

Your response is to throw shade and FUD it without engaging in anything approaching substantive, intellectually honest discussion. I back up everything I say with myriad examples that illustrate general patterns. I have arrived at this position by battle-testing my ideas and being open to changing my mind. Are you?

Saying “you’re wrong and deluded” and declaring “it aint” unilaterally isn’t actual substantive argument. It’s just asserting bias.