Why Zulip will not get on the blockchain bandwagon

https://blog.zulip.com/2021/11/12/why-not-blockchain/

by williamstein • 5 years ago

248 187 5 years ago

blog.zulip.com

I don’t think discord eth integration is the best idea but this article is Just a virtue signal. Why would you bet your project against a technology? It’s analogous to refusing to use AI/ML because somewhere somehow someone is getting screwed.

However, will this signal stand the test of time… my money is on, no.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

Why would you bet your project against a technology

strange question because obviously you should not shove every technology into every project. I think a lot of projects would be actually very well served by not jumping on the ML bandwagon and throwing significant resources at problems that can often be solved in simpler ways.

And not just for technical reasons but as Zulip has decided for ethical reasons. Just like crypto's mentioned impact on climate or lack of regulation ML often has negative impact on privacy, data ownership/collection, bias and so on.

I would very much be in favour of projects more strongly considering the negative impacts a technology choice can have.

madamelic3• 5 years ago

Just like crypto's mentioned impact on climate or lack of regulation ML often has negative impact on privacy, data ownership/collection, bias and so on.

Yeah, except you are specifically calling out why their "we refuse to do crypto" post is just a virtue signal and a stupid one at that.

Think of this way: If someone made a post saying their company refuses to use ML because Facebook has unethical machine-learning algorithms, they would get laughed to another planet.

It's a straw-man opinion. It would be a far more reasonable blog post if they had said: "We don't need a blockchain or crypto tie-in because that has nothing to do with the problem we are solving nor will it solve it better".

If they wanted to, they could do crypto and completely reject the current paradigm. They could easily create their own blockchain, create their own ecosystem in the hopes of changing the industry and status quo... or they could just not do anything because they aren't interested in crypto.

Instead they made a virtue signal post to get kudos and back pats from crypto FUDs for the fact of crypto FUD-ing rather than the fact it's a reasonable and sound technical decision.

roywiggins• 5 years ago

Signalling stuff about what sort of company you are is sort of a whole industry, no?

whymauri• 5 years ago

It's come to the point that any communication of opinion is 'virtue signaling', since opinions are virtues and communications are signaling. I struggle to find much meaning in the phrase these days other than implicit disagreement.

NoraCodes2• 5 years ago

I'm curious - do you genuinely not see any reason a Zulip user would want to ensure they could avoid having cryptocurrency features added to the product?

randomhodler846• 5 years ago

I genuinely think that when one find oneself adverse to a general technology (not implementation) , while not understanding any of its benefits, history or mechanism, and one uses this position of ignorance to argue against it, and cannot see how anyone else would find it useful, one has lost. Yes.

smoldesu4• 5 years ago

I don’t think discord eth integration is the best idea but this article is Just a virtue signal.

I agree, and it's pretty obvious from the tone of the article that they haven't quite done their research, either.

However, will this signal stand the test of time… my money is on, no.

This is where I disagree though. I find it wildly hard to believe that there is a future for cryptocurrency beyond it's current value. It's value right now is predicated almost entirely on hype, a resource that is quickly starting to die out now that NFTs and cryptocurrency aren't rallying half as hard as they were last year or the year before. Maybe this comment won't stand the test of time either, but it would take a hell of a revelation to push further adoption of crypto and somehow further inflate it's value.

randomhodler846• 5 years ago

Maybe that revelation will become more apparent in the next period from inflation. :-)

Many world currencies are pushing 20% (reported figures, so reality is much higher).

Btw Bitcoin was invented in 2008 with the explicit purpose of being an inflation hedge, cannot be debased.

gonehome4• 5 years ago

These chat SaaS companies are awful anyway, hopefully there will be some real Web3 alternative to them.

antifa2• 5 years ago

I can't wait for spending $100 to mint a lazy lion and selling it for $30,000 of ETH to be a cornerstone feature of the next IRC clone I use!

eftychis2• 5 years ago

Agreed. Companies are beholden to their customers and investors -- nothing to do with technology. Might not make sense now. Or ever. Who knows? History is filled with companies failing or succeeding depending on such pivoting choices. But you don't see netflix being big due to dvds. (And who knows maybe this comment will not age at all.) Use and improve technology.

acdha7• 5 years ago

I find it useful: it tells me that the project leaders have principles and are also capable of making good technical decisions. One of the main reasons why so many blockchain integrations get significant negative pushback is that blockchains aren't effective at accomplishing the purported goals. A project which is run by the whims of VCs or the owners' conflicts of interests (e.g. Reddit's decision to boost their co-founder's other holdings) are likely to make more than one decision which is contrary to the interests of their users.

baby5• 5 years ago

That article contains many false claims so I wouldn’t be so sure about the good technical decisions.

tshaddox• 5 years ago

I'm confused. If you're saying that betting your project against a technology could have significant impact on the success of your project, then isn't that very much the opposite of "virtue signaling"? Or do you use "virtue signaling" to mean "any public stance that I don't like"?

chickenpotpie• 5 years ago

I for one am glad to see a company push back on blockchain technologies and their horrendous environmental impact. As an environmentalist in the computing space, it makes me so depressed to see our industry regress so much in environmental impact.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

This is an assumption that all blockchains are a PoW, which isn't accurate.

basilgohar• 5 years ago

With all due respect, that is similar to someone saying we need to get off of fossil fuels for the benefit of the environment, and complaining that that assumes all fossil fuels contribute equally to climate change.

Technically right but distracting from the point that the most significant blockchain usage is PoW or some other methodology that massively wastes resources of some kind, such as Chia that wastes storage space for no good purpose.

ajkjk• 5 years ago

Nobody who is complaining about this is making that assumption. PoW continues to exist, and they know that as well as you do, and it's really bad.

floatboth9• 5 years ago

It does not matter that some don't. Most do, especially the biggest one, so the shitcoin economy as a whole does.

colesantiago2• 5 years ago

Cryptocurrencies isn't the only space to have a poor environmental footprint, Machine Learning as well has a horrible record and contributes to harming the environment.

hmrr• 5 years ago

Also rebuilding the same docker containers 500 times a day…

We could do a whole lot better with our energy usage across the whole industry.

LurkingPenguin2• 5 years ago

"[Something else] has a bad environmental footprint too" is the most tiresome refrain from crypto boosters. It's nothing more than pure whataboutism.

jnwatson• 5 years ago

Let’s ban CI. Imagine all the extra CPU cycles we spend testing our software.

bko2• 5 years ago

If there were only some way to allocate resources based on their most productive means.

Imagine if you could attach a number to a resource, like energy, that accounts for its various possible usages. If the resource becomes more available, this number will go down and if it becomes more scarce, the number would go up.

If you wanted to use the resource, you would have to pay this number. So naturally, you wouldn't pay to use the resource for something silly. Similarly, if it's important, you'd pay as much as you had to to use the resource. This would discourage people from using the resource foolishly.

The beautiful thing about this system is that you don't have to have moral judgements about what is or isn't worthy. It wouldn't be up to any one individual to say you should use resource for X and not Y. The number would be self adjusting as more or less resources become made available or more or less uses for the resources are discovered. And as the number went up, it would incentivize people to create more of that resource or create a resource to replace it.

If only such a number existed...

Ekaros7• 5 years ago

How much resources we spend on adds and tracking? What is the footprint of all the extra code that gets downloaded each time we load some website? Could we do better?

dagmx• 5 years ago

I assume you're talking about training? But inference in turn can save many CPU cycles by reducing computation to get results.

skratlo• 5 years ago

Ever heard of surplus energy? Do you think miners would ever pay for non-surplus energy?

toolz2• 5 years ago

There's really no excuse for this kind of strawman this late into the game. For one, Proof of work blockchains are migrating to first world countries which are moving to renewable/nuclear energy quickly, so even if proof of work was the only consensus mechanism in the blockchain space, this sentiment would be horribly outdated and uninformed.

Secondly, the vast majority of the market cap is in crypto that isn't proof of work. So the first point doesn't even matter. Even bitcoin is moving towards a layer2 solution with the lightening network that means the settlement layer won't continue to put more pressure on needing more and more wasted energy.

dnautics• 5 years ago

the way I see it, complaining about the environmental impact of blockchain is a bit like complaining that a early adopter's toyota prius' car has more of an environmental impact. Sure, that's strictly speaking true, but you are helping make a point - at expense to you - building investment in infrastructure that someday result in a vehicle that IS less of an impact. In the ideal case (which I am not necessarily optimistic will happen) we have a global currency that respects that there are finite resources on the planet, and doesn't require a belligerent military that goes around littering depleted uranium around the world to back its value.

(fwiw, I'm working towards getting solar on my house and mining with my excess electricity)

jimbob452• 5 years ago

Proof of work blockchains are migrating to first world countries

The whole point of blockchains is that everyone has a copy. I don't understand why you think they're migrating unless you don't want third-world countries using blockchains.

gitfan862• 5 years ago

This is my biggest problem with crypto. It is all about how in the future all these problems will be solved. I've been hearing about how it is the future 'of micro payments', or 'the future gold', or 'the future of legal contracts'. You are saying the energy usage problem will be solved by 'moving towards a layer2', in the future.

https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-tells-us-why...

paulgb• 5 years ago

Secondly, the vast majority of the market cap is in crypto that isn't proof of work.

Source? I haven’t added up the long tail but this seems dubious given the dominance of bitcoin/ethereum.

Even bitcoin is moving towards a layer2 solution with the lightening network that means the settlement layer won't continue to put more pressure on needing more and more wasted energy.

Layer 2 doesn’t solve this. Only ~2% of the rewards that compensate miners come from transaction fees. At best, layer 2 could cut out that 2% of incentives.

Karrot_Kream3• 5 years ago

Look can we stop this idiotic greenwashing? I get it, you don't like crypto. But stop trying to act like it's an environmental imperative to stop using crypto. When mining crypto becomes an environmental imperative, that's when we'd have both removed emissions from our automobile usage _and_ switched to hydrogen based factory processes and _then some_. We're not even close to those goals.

Stop it. Hijack some other cause for your anti-crypto views. You don't get to make people feel good about emissions by writing anti crypto blog posts; you do it by actually advocating for lower emissions in activities that are in regular use that are _actually polluting_.

Someone is going to say something about incremental emissions reduction and to that I say, be my guest. The world is full of people selling magical products and ideas that claim to be green. The truth is, decreasing emissions is hard. Stop distracting people from the hard work needed to actually decrease emissions. If you want to help emissions out, go advocate for more buses and fewer automobiles in your community. Advocate for hydrogen subsidies for factories. Advocate for raising the gas tax. Advocate for tax rebates on weatherproofing houses. Advocate for heat pump installation. PoW cryptocurrencies are table stakes.

EDIT: The score on my post is fluctuating wildly and I'm flagged now lol. I've obviously touched a nerve here.

baby5• 5 years ago

I don’t understand though, most if not all modern blockchain technologies are pretty green.

floatboth9• 5 years ago

Who cares?

The shitcoin economy can only be viewed as a whole.

Your new "green" shitcoin will be exchanged with Bitcoin and other dominant coins that use PoW mining. Your shitcoin's value will be based on that.

mtchtrnr2• 5 years ago

I agree that it's bad for the planet.

Can we make a list of all the sectors that are consuming energy and determine which are providing the most benefit? Then we can focus on making reductions in the most harmful and the least important energy consumers.

Crypto is a big energy consumer, but I would prefer not to attack it just because it's new. It can provide some awesome things for humanity. I'd rather live in a world with crypto than one with massive military spending, for example.

macinjosh• 5 years ago

I agree the petrodollar is much better for the environment.

paxys• 5 years ago

Whether or not you agree with their views on crypto in general, all that they really should need to say is – we are a chat product and have nothing to do with the crypto and NFT space. Period.

baby5• 5 years ago

No but see, they really need to take a stand.

cateye• 5 years ago

After reading this, the reputation of the project improved in my mind tremendously.

Not only because they take a clear standpoint from the core principles that they have chosen. But especially that this proofs that the whole project shows to be resilient even when a lot of money is involved.

eminence32• 5 years ago

My experiences so far with Zulip are exclusively with technical groups or programming language groups looking for a place to collaborate. My experiences with Discord have almost exclusively been related to gaming communities or twitch communities.

I'm not sure if others have observed something similar. The anti-blockchain reasoning in this post seems well principled, but I also wonder if it's easier to get away with this position because not many zulip communities are asking for blockchain integration.

pseudalopex• 5 years ago

It sounds like not many Discord users asked for blockchain integration either.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

"With many popular social and chat apps already on the blockchain bandwagon (including Facebook, Telegram, Signal, Twitter and Reddit), some are wondering whether Zulip might be next. The answer is no"

I wasn't going to jump on the blockchain bandwagon until I heard from Zulip. Glad they could clear up their position.

splitstud• 5 years ago

I wasn't going to jump on the blockchain bandwagon and what is a zulip?

nfw2• 5 years ago

He wasn't suggesting Zulip is comparable to those companies or that the world is holding its breath on the issue. But it's reasonable that some people who use and/or develop Zulip (ie the typical readership of the blog) may be wondering the leadership's stance on crypto.

smoldesu4• 5 years ago

This looks like the right decision, given the nature of their product, but they seem to be doing it for all the wrong reasons:

Cryptocurrencies have a significant negative impact on the environment

They go on to describe Proof Of Work systems, which are indeed detrimental, but don't even mention the push away from that platform. Fair enough, but it doesn't really make a solid argument when alternatives are available.

Today’s reality is that cryptocurrencies are enabling massive amounts of criminal behavior

That could be said for 99% of computer software ever made. Criminals are going to use computers the same way we do, so using dumb words like 'enabling' completely miss the point. If anything, cryptocurrency has shown how arbitrary money really is in crime: as long as you exchange something of value, most criminals will be perfectly happy to continue their line of work.

The lack of effective regulation of crypto assets puts people at high risk of being manipulated by scammers

This one I really don't get. Yes, cryptocurrency is a volatile market. It's mostly ruled by people who have no idea what they're buying in to, contributing to a massive bubble that's eventually going to pop. However, if you have a legitimate product that can actually be enhanced by the blockchain, why would that stop you? You don't need to follow in the exact footsteps of everyone else, that's the beauty of such an open-ended system.

Cryptocurrency, NFTs and all digital stores of value are a fad by design, but it sounds like the author of this article got sucked in by headlines and buzzwords. If the CEO can't put together a decent argument against the technology, it probably would have sufficed to just Tweet it or not offer any justification at all. I reckon the majority of people just outright don't care, and this only really serves to virtue signal into the "tech-bro" hate that has been spreading like wildfire across social media.

another_story• 5 years ago

I think most of their points are valid, especially the last one. Crypto is not consumer friendly. You can't dispute charges and your money is not backed anywhere along the line by insurance. If my crypto wallet is compromised and money stolen there is nothing I can do. If my credit card info is stolen and someone maxes it out, I'm covered by the company.

That sort of experience on any platform will leave a bad taste, and avoiding crypto for that reason make sense from a business perspective.

Ekaros7• 5 years ago

If I lose my crypto keys I lose my money. If I lose my credit card, or even forget my account number I can just walk to bank or use some other strong online ID system and sort it out.

And online wallets/exchanges, I trust those even less than paypal... At least banks are regulated.

Animats3• 5 years ago

However, if you have a legitimate product that can actually be enhanced by the blockchain, why would that stop you?

I'd like to see a few. We're not even seeing code signing of major software or Docker containers on a blockchain, which would actually be useful.

flakiness2• 5 years ago

It's fascinating to see a chat app company is kind of forced to make a comment on not accepting cryptocurrency. I'm also out of the bandwagon, but this rather adds a smoke to the bigger picture. (Not saying this is a bad move for Tulip. Just fascinating by this as a cultural phenomena.)

Tenoke• 5 years ago

They are not in any way forced to. There are a lot of bigger companies that have never made such a statement either way. They just chose to for idealogical reasons, PR or something else.

jspaetzel2• 5 years ago

Heh. Tulip, what a surprisingly relevant typo when talking about crypto.

flakiness2• 5 years ago

Heh, too late to edit :-/

ccamrobertson2• 5 years ago

This piece is fantastically calculated marketing material given the recent Discord news.

- "Blockchain" != cryptocurrency (and using Bitcoin as the primary bogeyman is silly given no one is using Bitcoin assets to authenticate into Discord groups; Ethereum is quite public about their ultimate desire to move to PoS)

- Why note the "idealism" of folks in the space and then going on to completely ignoring the promise of web3?

- The fact that an open source communication tool by its nature is ripe for usage by "scammers" seems hypocritical. Will Zulip abandon the Apache license if crypto "scammers" start using it?

pavlov• 5 years ago

Why note the "fanaticism" of Scientologists and then go on to completely ignore the promise of eliminating thetan alien souls polluting your mind and body?

ccamrobertson2• 5 years ago

Then the writer should have used “fanaticism”, a negative term, not “idealism”.

paulryanrogers• 5 years ago

Wait, is blockchain now web3?

floatboth9• 5 years ago

"web3" is Ethereum's term for the API that lets web pages do things with your Ethereum client. It's also a vague marketing idea for some kind of a future web that also involves hosting pages on IPFS and registering domains with Ethereum, and still letting these pages do Ethereum things.

It's all pretty stupid.

floatboth9• 5 years ago

"Blockchain" != cryptocurrency

Public blockchain basically means cryptocurrency-like things. It's all about transfers of value: whether it's coins, domain names or stupid cryptokitties — it's all about tradeable things, so it's all the same shit.

Ethereum is quite public about their ultimate desire to move to PoS

Promises and desires do not matter. It could end up with them endlessly finding security issues with PoS and postponing the switch. And… surprise, the miners probably won't just stop mining! They'll switch to Ethereum Classic or fork again!

Most importantly, the shitcoin economy must be viewed as a whole. You cannot just view one coin in isolation and say "it's green because non-PoW". The value of that coin is all tied up in exchange with other coins!

ilamont• 5 years ago

Today’s reality is that cryptocurrencies are enabling massive amounts of criminal behavior. ... The lack of effective regulation of crypto assets puts people at high risk of being manipulated by scammers.

We've only gotten the first bitter taste of cryptocurrency-enabled scams like ransomware. The next wave of scams, enabled by apps like Venmo, Robinhood, and others that make it super easy for mainstream populations to hold crypto and transfer real money to random people, will be devastating.

Nextgrid2• 5 years ago

Is this sarcasm? Scams via Venmo and even old school wire transfers are common and law enforcement doesn't particularly care despite transfers being easily traceable.

pcwalton3• 5 years ago

Law enforcement absolutely does care about scams via wire transfers, as a search for mail and wire fraud on justice.gov will confirm.

rednerrus• 5 years ago

Criminal behaviour is the only value add worth anything in cryptocurrency.

Ekaros7• 5 years ago

I suppose in some cases it is slightly cheaper way to do international money transfers. And that would be relatively simple problem to solve if world wished to do so.

sergiotapia• 5 years ago

Admirable - I wish them the very best. I wish I could use Zulip but a lot of the platforms I use do not integrate with them. For example render.com deploys wouldn't be able to trigger a message on our engineering Zulip. I hope they continue to grow.

aborsy• 5 years ago

Warning people of environmental damage and criminal activities won’t stop the gold rush.

Igelau2• 5 years ago

Look at mother nature on the run in the 21st century

floatboth9• 5 years ago

Stablecoins like Tether imploding will destroy the whole shitcoin economy though. We just don't know when, but someday it will happen. They're all clearly criminal fraudulent operations printing fake dollars not backed by anything. You can't do that endlessly.

_2d30• 5 years ago

Great answer to a question no one was asking. Solid PR bump, coupled with a partially absurd reasoning for why they aren’t working with cryptocurrencies. I wonder if they are aware that the internet itself is associated with the enablement of criminal activity and if, as such, they are going to remove all internet presence.

kyleee• 5 years ago

Hah. They do make a nice chat solution though. I would have enjoyed all the time and effort used for this to have been redirected to a good old tech stack blog, or a feature showcase of why some of their features standout

65• 5 years ago

I'm a software engineer, I understand the blockchain and crypto. I've been around Bitcoin since 2010.

And yet I still don't know a single high utility use case for the blockchain. People keep saying it's the future but I can't really figure out how regular banking, accounting, or general software applications can't do the same basic task as one on the blockchain - but quicker and at a lower cost.

For a moment, forget about the "so we can track things forever" and "not based on trust" - those are more ideological than anything. Why should I use the blockchain right now?

xixixao• 5 years ago

The only good use case I found is a distributed primary key DB. If you don’t trust the party that would normally hold the DB, this could be useful. Mostly some contract stuff. People are getting hyped about selling in-game NFTs. I still don’t get this because the value of an item is determined by the game, not by the NFT “record”. If I can make a game where your “expensive” NFT item has no value, then what’s the point. But people have build out virtual value systems before. Art is a good example. Nothing of “utility”, but people value it nevertheless.

So reality is it’s mostly hype, but hype could turn into a long term value assignment. Or not.

Ekaros7• 5 years ago

Only things I see are underserved markets. Which are either illegal or probably not big enough or there isn't enough pressure to make them work on global scale. Then again world is complex place and financial transactions between different regulatory environments are especially so.

madamelic3• 5 years ago

People keep saying it's the future but I can't really figure out how regular banking, accounting, or general software applications can't do the same basic task as one on the blockchain - but quicker and at a lower cost.

There isn't.

I think a lot of people falsely think that Web3 is going to consume Web2 and everything will go on the blockchain and be decentralized.

It just won't... we will still have centralized products, much like we still have "read-only websites" but, we are going to see a large increase in decentralization.

I feel that we are the "early 1990's internet" stage of decentralization. There were (apparently) article after article, denouncing the internet as a fad, that it will be dead any day, just for <x>, just for <y>, "The internet is tearing apart the fabric of society"...

Decentralization, in my opinion, is an inevitability. If the human race becomes multi-planetary and space-faring, we will need to be able to run independent nodes of services while keeping individual nodes honest and accurate.

Do I believe BTC or ETH will be the winner? Probably not. But the huge explosion in decentralized tech and allowing technical individuals to sharpen their sticks for it will definitely lead the way for a better, healthier world. I believe the same for Hyperloop; it might fail but ultimately we will win because we have excited a huge number of people about high-speed travel along with having knowledge about what worked.

And the multi-planetary argument is just one argument. We are on the cusp of a huge upheaval in government and society imo. We are at all-time peak of distrust among individuals, corporations and the gov't. The only way forward is going to be trust-less systems where everyone can inspect why and how things are working.

I don't think that 2031 will look anything like 2021, just like 2011 didn't look like 2001.

Ekaros7• 5 years ago

I really wonder about this decentralization. If you really think of it all of the big players are already decentralized. The whole cloud is about decentralization. Hot swapping to new location when some datacenter goes down... Routing your traffic to nearest one to save fractions of cents on data transfer. I see no reason why this wouldn't work with multi-planetary system too?

The whole blockchain just seems so inefficient way of doing it. And with NFTs we aren't even putting data itself on the chain. Shouldn't whole point is that the data is there and will live forever on the chain, just latest node telling who owns it is updated as needed?

jimkleiber6• 5 years ago

We are at all-time peak of distrust among individuals, corporations and the gov't. The only way forward is going to be trust-less systems where everyone can inspect why and how things are working.

I agree there's a lot of distrust in society but maybe not all-time peak because to interact with so many moving parts in our complex environment today, I think we may be trusting of more things. But perhaps that's for another conversation.

The main thing I'm curious about is your statement that the only way forward is thru trust-less systems. I personally believe we could also try to increase trust in other people and institutions.

Why do you think the only way forward is thru trust-less systems?

bryans• 5 years ago

Decentralization, in my opinion, is an inevitability. If the human race becomes multi-planetary and space-faring, we will need to be able to run independent nodes of services while keeping individual nodes honest and accurate.

I think this is the most overlooked aspect of decentralization efforts. The conversation we've been having since the dawn of BTC quickly devolved into applying the legitimate criticisms of BTC specifically, to the concept of decentralization as a whole, instead of accepting that it was an experiment which proved "good enough" to scale without too much friction or technical failure.

The concept has already evolved substantially in the past decade, and these experiments will continue to inform how we handle decentralization when it finally becomes critical to societal function, which is inevitable for the reasons you mentioned and more.

acdha7• 5 years ago

I feel that we are the "early 1990's internet" stage of decentralization. There were (apparently) article after article, denouncing the internet as a fad, that it will be dead any day, just for <x>, just for <y>, "The internet is tearing apart the fabric of society"...

It's true that those articles existed but I think there were two key differences: they were written by [generally] old people who weren't at all conversant with the technology and were recognized as such by many people at the time. It was widely recognized that the dotcom stocks were overheated and some of the companies had no chance but at the same time most people were buying PCs and internet connectivity because there were tons of things they _did_ want to do.

That situation is generally reversed today: the people who understand technology are highly skeptical and the people most bullish about cryptocurrency do not show much sign of understanding either the technology or the markets where they're looking for buyers.

The strongest parallel I see now are the cryptocurrency bulls sound exactly like this sales guy I knew 1999-2000 who was convinced that the primary reason to buy a stock was how much the share price was increasing. Sadly, he neglected to cash out before the crash and ended up substantially in the red.

Regarding decentralization, I think it's important to consider how the internet has become less decentralized over time. The situation in the 90s was far more distributed but the centralized solutions have won out in many spaces, and it's not just well-funded rent-seekers but also factors like cost, reliability, support, and often even performance. I'm philosophically inclined towards open standards and distributed protocols but I have to say the experience has generally not lived up to the dream.

rp12• 5 years ago

You should try writing a smart contract. I didn’t believe in the utility until I did that. You can think of a blockchain like Ethereum as a really shitty global computer. It’s so weak that all it can do is transactionally change a few bytes of data associated with a key. Using this shitty computer, you can implement a currency or some type of token system. The important bit is that it’s a shitty computer _now_, but maybe it won’t be so bad in the future. When you implement a smart contract, you realize it’d be pretty nice if you could run complicated programs on a global computer and not need to worry about running your own infra like a DB or hosting.

evergrande3• 5 years ago

Try deploying the same contract on a different chain, like Polygon. It's a lot more fun. Super cheap, almost instant and is a preview of the future. If ETH 2.0 is like that it'll be a game changer.

threeseed• 5 years ago

could run complicated programs on a global computer and not need to worry about running your own infra like a DB or hosting

You mean like serverless ?

Ekaros7• 5 years ago

Single or even handful of global computers running everything sounds extremely scary... Something goes wrong or there is some issue and whole thing comes to halt with decent chunk of economy... Then fights start how to fix it. How to roll things back. What to reinstate. How that effects further things. What if at this point some physical transactions have happened?

Are we going back to 40s and world needing 4 computers?

kmarc• 5 years ago

This is what a couple of my former colleagues worked on under the name of "internet computer". No affiliation, but I find it interesting.

https://dfinity.org/

mtchtrnr2• 5 years ago

Choice.

viksit• 5 years ago

I wrote about exactly this - why you should care about the blockchain - here (1) and here (2). Curious what you think?

(1) https://mobile.twitter.com/viksit/status/1450518759387582472

(2) https://mobile.twitter.com/viksit/status/1452687368511655936

floatboth9• 5 years ago

It's all explained in https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4 — the ONE and ONLY thing a public blockchain is useful for is censorship-resistant payments.

Which might include good things (donation to your favorite whistleblower or buying weed or whatever) but definitely WILL include bad things — for example it is uniquely well-suited for paying ransoms, hence the ransomware explosion!

Again, this is the ONLY thing. It is horrendously bad in every way, there's just no other choice for this kind of usage.

dorgo• 5 years ago

Aren't "censorship-resistant payments" part of "not based on trust" thing - which gp excluded as legitim explanation?

PaulDavisThe1st2• 5 years ago

censorship-resistant payments

... that are useless unless you can also buy something you need with the contents of your cryptowallet. Which is a big if, although clearly the answer is sometimes "yes".

bko2• 5 years ago

What about the ability to hold your savings in a currency that's prohibited by your government?

Places with high inflation often have capital controls that make it illegal to hold foreign currency. You see your savings get cut in half every year and there's nothing you can do about it.

It would be great if there was a political solution where governments don't impose capital controls on their people. But in the mean time, crypto allows you options to hold a more stable currency (e.g. stable coin), or at least one that doesn't only go in one direction.

evergrande3• 5 years ago

Here's a way to look at it:

Web 1.0 - Permissioned Read-only

Web 2.0 - Permissioned Read & write

Web 3.0 - Permissionless Read, write & own

krainboltgreene• 5 years ago

Not only is that not what Web 2.0 was about, the idea that web 3.0 does "permissionless" versions of read & write, and also somehow "own", is hilarious.

eegg7• 5 years ago

Speculation? You believe you can get more fiat money out than you put in.

jimkleiber6• 5 years ago

One of the most practical things seems to be to skirt around existing financial law.

Seems one could (more easily) run unregulated lotteries, raffles, gambling, Ponzi schemes, money laundering, public securities, etc.

I don't mean to imply this is all because people want to do heavy criminal activity, some may just be trying to avoid the bureaucracy.

Regardless, I see it skirting laws just as Uber and AirBnB kinda did the same thing for taxi medallions and hotel regulation, respectively.

BTCOG• 5 years ago

You shouldn't. Don't use it.

TrevorAustin• 5 years ago

I’ve been in the same boat for a long time, and still haven’t seen an application that’s compelling. But I think I’m starting to warm to the ecosystem, despite all the obvious silliness, so let me run my thinking by you to see if it’s crazy:

Blockchains don’t really let you do anything useful that you couldn’t do before. But they make some things much easier and more accessible, by a big enough margin that they unlock some kinds of broad experimentation that weren’t really feasible before.

Take what I assume will eventually be a category-defining use case, “Facebook, but owned and governed by its users.” With some imaginative lawyering, you could build that in a durable way today. But it would take capital and know-how most kids in dorm rooms don’t have access to. It’s like how the launch of AWS didn’t let you do anything that was _impossible_ to build with on-premise hardware, but it unlocked a lot of innovation anyway.

Right now Ethereum is a very shitty version of Lambda plus DynamoDB, but with some interesting primitives around payment, ownership, and governance baked in. I actually have very little faith in the Ethereum roadmap given some dabbling I did in it a few years ago, but there are competing protocols with much much better performance and developer ergonomics, so they’ll either catch up or get replaced like a bad operating system.

yashg2• 5 years ago

"Facebook, but owned and governed by its users" Only good in theory, not in practice. A Facebook or Twitter built on blockchain will be too expensive. The PoW requirement will make it expensive to add new posts to the chain. Over time, as more and more people join the network, the cost will only increase. Yes, noone will be able to ban the President of the US from this network but only select few who can afford to pay the huge gas fees will be able to post.

gaganyaan3• 5 years ago

This isn't why you should use the blockchain, but I do see one concrete useful scenario for it: keeping track of things like shipments between companies that don't trust each other.

As goods move around, if you receive a damaged or bad item, you have an immutable, easily accessible paper trail of claims that people have made about the good.

It solves the oracle problem by sidestepping it: what is on the blockchain isn't truth, but verifiable claims various people have made about the truth. Easily accessible for lawyers in resulting lawsuits.

It is also something that's actually very hard to solve with a traditional database in a centralized manner, because then you have to trust whoever runs the database to not falsify records.

It also doesn't suffer from a lot of issues that public blockchains like cryptocurrencies face, like limited transaction volume or warming the earth for mining.

There might be other reasons why it wouldn't work out, but it seems like an actual useful tool there.

acdha7• 5 years ago

What does a blockchain add over simple PKI? The latter is far more efficient and it can run offline so you’d have the possibility of, say, a factory or farm giving something to a truck driver with limited or even no network connectivity — something like a Yubikey could do the crypto more securely with the power budget of a solar cell.

yencabulator2• 5 years ago

You don't need the wastefulness of a blockchain just to record a company's claims and hold them to previous claims.

https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/

tim333• 5 years ago

You could launch a token with a picture of a dog on and become a billionaire?

mro_name• 5 years ago

track things forever

indeed, is that another word for "idle (unused and useless) all thinkable time"?

Or 'I can't think a usecase, but eternity may bring one along.'

yashg2• 5 years ago

Thanks for saying this. I started exploring the technology and the ideology of crypto and blockchain few months back and came to the same conclusion. A public, permissionless, PoW blockchain is inefficient by design and a private blockchain is pointless. Much better and cheaper solutions already exist.

Blockchain is solution to a problem that doesn't exist. It's more ideological than practical.

TruthWillHurt• 5 years ago

But what's Zulip going to do about global warming?

No idea who Zulip are, nor why should I care what they won't do.

norswap• 5 years ago

So I guess they're getting on the anti-bandwagon instead? Really transparent way to try to drive attention to themselves.

baby5• 5 years ago

This is an incredible PR piece. #1 on hackernews, with an empty statement they’re making everyone talk about them at a time where probably not many people knew about them. I’m wondering how many users they’re going to attract. I predict that they can get x100 if they then announce they’ll support cryptocurrency in a month.

Igelau2• 5 years ago

I think the author left out the most crucial argument:

There's no good reason why Zulip should have block chain integration.

pezzana• 5 years ago

The article cites three extremely common criticisms of Bitcoin. In this sense, they add nothing to the conversation.

All Zulip has to do is consult their own home page. There at the top in large font is this:

Zulip combines the immediacy of real-time chat with an email threading model. With Zulip, you can catch up on important conversations while ignoring irrelevant ones.

https://zulip.com

Where in that statement does something like "crypto assets" management fit in? Exactly nowhere. Crypto assets are not conversations. Nor can they help anyone catch up on important conversations. The Zulip team will not degrade its efforts to focus teams on communication by distracting them with useless fluff they can get elsewhere. End of story.

jakobnissen• 5 years ago

I, for one, am looking forward to reading their upcoming blog post on why Zulip won't invest in horse racing, Herbalife or "foolproof" subprime mortgages.

version_five• 5 years ago

Good decision but the reasons are not, imo. Current implementations are a scam, period. That's a reason not to get involved. Other concerns, they can be dismissed as growing pains, "this will end with proof of stake", and just because criminals use something does not make it bad, see torrents or the internet generally. Bottom line, why be an early adopter of a ponzi scheme. That is why they shouldn't get "on the bandwagon"

hbbio3• 5 years ago

To start, I didn't know Zulip and it looks like a clickbait headline. Then, you read the article and you stumble upon a few well-known anti-blockchain arguments, that are designed to appeal to anti-something crowds.

"We believe that doing so would inevitably compromise the integrity of our 100% free and open-source project." Most blockchains projects are fully 100% free and open-source projects, even more so than other domains in software. But uniquely, the data is 100% free and available too!

"Cryptocurrencies have a significant negative impact on the environment." That is a PoW-only concern, which is well-known and is being technically addressed by PoS. Also, mining for PoW currently uses excess electricity which is *wasted anyway*. At that rate, Google and Facebook use a lot of energy too: Who needs to see videos and chat online with friends when we should all read books instead?

"Today’s reality is that cryptocurrencies are enabling massive amounts of criminal behavior". Probably no more than regular dollars: Everything is visible on blockchains (except some specialized chains) and it is poor judgement from criminals to use them. They will get caught, more quickly. Bad state and financial actors can much more easily hide things in the current financial world... look at all the Panama Papers and other ICIJ leaks!

"The lack of effective regulation of crypto assets puts people at high risk". The current financial regulations are a joke: You can use leverage on RobinHood and lose money at this casino pretty quickly. They will also cheat on you: restricting you to sell or instead selling stock you own without your consent, selling your order flow so financial giants can make the best of you! If you naively believe regulations are here, we're protected, think again. Most fines set by the US administration are used as a political tool (for instance against the French bank BNP Paribas for doing business in Iran). That said, blockchains regulations will come as the sector matures, you can just hope that they will be written by people who understand the technology.

Edit: Since I'm being downvoted, please state why in a comment!

jspaetzel2• 5 years ago

This isn't click bait, it's what happens when a maintainer gets the same question 100 times and feels the need to publish something publicly so they don't have to keep repeating themselves.

hbbio3• 5 years ago

They could get that question 100 times per week, but I doubt it.

They have more than 6k issues on GitHub and not a single one mentions blockchain.

It seems more probable that they just wanted to piggy back on the Discord news.

gog• 5 years ago

Speaking of regulation, I've opened an account on chat.zulip.org a while ago to check out what Zulip looks like. After playing with it for a while I've deleted my account.

This blog post prompted me to check it out again, but to my surprise, although my account is disabled they still kept my email in their database and they won't let me signup with the same email again.

Using the password reset option informs me that my account has been deactivated.

When I delete my private information I expect it to really get deleted.

hbbio3• 5 years ago

You mean they're 100% open source and all that but they keep their data hidden?

fionic• 5 years ago

I love this

ftwynn• 5 years ago

I'm surprised to see a lot of people here skipping over why Zulip needs to write this article.

Building a chat app brings you pretty quickly into the digital identity and presence space. Regardless of getting involved with NFTs and ICOs and such, a wallet is a pretty adjacent concept to this domain. There's a reason a ton of chat apps currently offer some form of payments or payments integration. Venmo shows how hard it is to build "social" from payments, while the other direction is much easier to do because of network effects.

Why Zulip will not get on the blockchain bandwagon

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