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I wasted years of my life in crypto

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681 points Anon84 | 7 comments | 07 Dec 25 12:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.796s | source | bottom
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spicyusername ◴[07 Dec 25 13:28 UTC] No.46181533[source]▶
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.

Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

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serial_dev ◴[07 Dec 25 13:46 UTC] No.46181650[source]▶
Blockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority.

Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are (kind of how the last two years everybody became an AI company).

It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin using blockchain is stupid.

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dreamcompiler ◴[08 Dec 25 04:57 UTC] No.46188526[source]▶
It's stupid because blockchains don't scale. In most other respects they're quite clever.
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Seattle3503 ◴[08 Dec 25 05:33 UTC] No.46188744[source]▶
In theory a L2 network coukd solve the scaling problem, but every time I've looked at L2 solutions theve had terrible UX.
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1. sroerick ◴[08 Dec 25 06:38 UTC] No.46189134[source]▶
I thought it was interesting that BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos.

This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol.

You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and have the SPA read the app.

Unfortunately, the ecosystem was completely greed focused, and nobody is interested in technological advancement in the slightest.

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2. aeternum ◴[08 Dec 25 07:14 UTC] No.46189327[source]▶
>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos

This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't scale.

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3. KaiserPro ◴[08 Dec 25 08:59 UTC] No.46190007[source]▶
how many transactions a second could/can it manage though?
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4. FabHK ◴[08 Dec 25 16:47 UTC] No.46194506[source]▶
Indeed. Bitcoin's blockchain grows with a laughable 3kB/s, yet is an unwieldy 700 GB.

A blockchain that allowed you store one song per second would be hundreds of TB before long. There are other architectures for that sort of thing for a reason.

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5. sroerick ◴[09 Dec 25 05:32 UTC] No.46201578[source]▶
I should note, the scaling I was referring to was transaction processing. Data storage is a little different.

The architecture which I heard described or hypothesized was more akin to Amazon deep storage. More frequently accessed data would be more accessible on "hot" nodes.

Full nodes would effectively, under this paradigm, become cloud storage providers. As a bonus, the problem of how to charge for access is basically already solved, and does not require a complex corporate payment scheme.

6. sroerick ◴[09 Dec 25 05:37 UTC] No.46201614{3}[source]▶
Looks like BSV is about 7TB and grows at about 4GB a day. I have no clue what those guys are up to these days. This may be unweildy for a home PC but really is still pretty trivial for a data center.

500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube per minute which is... If my napkin math is right, about a petabyte a day.

7. sroerick ◴[09 Dec 25 05:42 UTC] No.46201640[source]▶
Looks like the max they've done is something like 22k TPS. No idea how accurate this is, I don't follow the ecosystem. There's a lot of different numbers like "maximum theoretical potential" that probably ly mean nothing.