This. It's not like all innovation that has occurred in the crypto-currency space is useless, there are some real valuable innovations there. Blockchain as a whole is just too tainted to see the forest for the trees in all the greed, specifically the word "blockchain" has become magical and deceptive.
"Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing."
Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing. And it's not a magic bullet statement either.
> Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing.
I'm not saying Tim's wrong, but one of the problems that Ive seen a lot - to the point of being tempted to use the word "constantly" - with blockchain is this sort of gushing rhetoric that actually does a really poor job of explaining why it's amazing, and especially of explaining why it's amazing in a few short paragraphs of jargon-free plain English that anyone with technical background can understand.
Again, Tim's post may be right, but it really falls short here and that's a big problem for the perception of blockchain. Until you can get people to understand why it's valuable, without the answer being to go and spend hours reading when there's perhaps no certainty of what you learn being valuable, it's always going to face this scepticism.
It's not helped by the fact that the scammers and the non-scammers talk about it in the same kind of way, so you end up unable to distinguish the real information from the "blockchain doublespeak" - again, certainly without a lot of research. If you're busy you end up developing a heuristic where you file all of this in the mental waste basket.
You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.
I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.
Then again, a lot of people didn't understand the internet or it's jargon in the 90's, so we'll see how it plays out.
> I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.
The people I've talked to in finance are really excited about Blockchain/DeFi because it's an opportunity for arbitrage in a completely unregulated market.
> You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.
It sounds good, but ALL the money needs to be taken out of the ecosystem.
They need to go back to the drawing board and work in silence and fix their core problems: scalability, respecting core financial laws such as AML and KYC, and then they need to present their platform.
The problem with that is that it's fundamental research, making no money, possibly for decades.
Steve Jobs in a university lecture in 1991 (iirc) articulated the vision among him and his industry contemporaries of consumers using thin clients accessing data from the cloud, a reality that took two decades to really come to fruition and that had to wait for infrastructure to catch up - the point being that while some people didn’t see the value of the internet, people in the know were able to simply and quickly articulate beneficial use cases.
> The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
> Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing
It is unquestionably amazing. But it's not the reality.
Most data is not stored on the blockchain but instead in proprietary databases due to the prohibitive cost. And even if it was free the VCs are pushing hard for a defensible moat i.e. lock your users in with proprietary data and features.
We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.
The data that matters is all on-chain: the smart contracts and the balances. This is why what Tim talks about has actually played out, and we have seen incredible composability between different protocols.
> We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.
If anything, the NFT ecosystem proofs this point. It consists of a dizzying array of aggregators, lending platforms, fractionalization platforms, alternative marketplaces, curation tools, API providers, all interacting with another. The fact that OpenSea retains a large marketshare among marketplaces is true (though now down to 60% - https://dune.com/sealaunch/NFT), but hasn't stopped this interoperability at all. Because in fact, what matters is on-chain, not what OpenSea exposes.
Sounds like burnout, he had mentioned that being something in his history when he did some work with my team a few years back. Burnout is real, it's also probably not glucose depletion triggered seizures, but I think his internal diagnosis says enough.
In general people need to be better aware that you do have real limits to what kind of stress levels you can handle effectively and you need to back off when you start feeling overwhelmed and not try to "push through".
Agreed. The displays, speakers, touch pads on Apple products are amazingly good. But the pro laptops have been in steady decline as Apple gears them to the average user more and more over the years, instead of the power user like they were originally built for. I think System76 has the right direction for power users, shiny screens and crisp sound doesn't help me hunt through gigabytes of data and millions of lines of code.
It is kind of an amalgamation of tools. Install it, sign up for the dozens and dozens of different external services it queries, configure those API's in SpiderFoot. Then fire away. It is really good, but some of the better visualizations, sorting options, reporting and diffing come with the premium SAAS version SpiderFootHX.
It would seem if you make money on YouTube you should also be formally copyrighting your work, so you can easily go after people who perform these monetization attacks and maximize compensation.
In some countries (including the US) you can additionally "register copyright", and it makes enforcement easier or allows higher compensation, maybe that's what they're referring to.
That advice wouldn't help the british creator in this case though.
Correct, in the US there is implicit copyright by default if you include a copyright mark and date and formal copyright through registration. Implicit US copyright doesn't offer much protection, just an ability to tell people to stop using your works. Formal US copyright gives you rapid retort and default judement compensation that's just insane (something like up to $150,000 per infringement).
You don't have to be a US citizen to register for a US copyright.
"Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing."
Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing. And it's not a magic bullet statement either.