David Gerard

CMU and other schools with blockchain courses should be teaching about the ethics and legal penalties and ecological consequences of running blockchain pyramid schemes and scams, instead of teaching students how to hype, evangelize, and retroactively contrive use cases for existing Ponzi schemes like CMU Coin. The world already has more than enough Bitcoin shills. Universities don't need to be pumping and dumping more of them out.

David Gerard's book "Attack of the 50 Foot BlockChain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts" would be an excellent down-to-earth textbook for a realistic course about blockchain.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/

>Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: The Book

>“A sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency” — New York Review of Books

>“A very convincing takedown of the whole phenomenon” — BBC News

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3165196

>An experimental new Internet-based form of money is created that anyone can generate at home; people build frightening firetrap computers full of video cards, putting out so much heat that one operator is hospitalised with heatstroke and brain damage. A young physics student starts a revolutionary new marketplace immune to State coercion; he ends up ordering hits on people because they might threaten his great experiment, and is jailed for life without parole. Fully automated contractual systems are proposed to make business and the law work better; the contracts people…

>
A lot of people are saying that crypto is a scam because there are malicious actors in the industry.

Perish the thought. It doesn't even take any malicious actors to be a scam. It's a new kind of scam: a Nakamoto Scheme.

To your https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/

> victim factories, which in the next crash will produce hundreds of thousands of howling investors with little formal legal recourse due to four years of inaction on the regulators’ part.

How did we get here? As https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet points out:

>
It’s been nine years. Nobody has a practical use case for blockchains proper.

It's now closer to ten. Same article:

> Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <s>blockchain</s> repository

Now, this leads to your second statement:

>
Don't let these small bumps distract from the greater picture and all the amazing work the developers at Ethereum, Bitcoin etc are doing.

Which is what?

This ties back to it being a scam: without a practical use case, it lacks any intrinsic value and the only reason people temporarily paid a lot for it were downright scams (Tether), hodl zealots, other hype. It won't take a few more years and it'll settle on its true value which is zero.

ps. The Washington Post already…

> The creation of new ideas being restricted to only experts, those who "actually know stuff" shrinks the pool of creators of new knowledge.

Abstractly, I agree with what you've said here, but I don't think the part of Gerard's post that you quoted is making the point that you're countering.

Broadly speaking, a lot of discovery work comes from domain experts precisely because of the work it takes to become such an expert. My read on the phrase "actually knowing stuff" is that it refers not just to a solid understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of your field, but also a more general grasp of the field's history. This kind of contextual knowledge is extremely helpful when attempting new or experimental research because it gives you an idea of which areas of knowledge might contain some novel insight while also cluing you in to which approaches might help you arrive at that insight. I interpreted Gerard's critique of Buterin here not as one of insufficient academic clout, but of arrogance, a reification of great man theory [1] through a techno-libertarian lens that positions himself among a host of other so-called "great men" and frames every societal problem as solvable through whatever lens the Great Man might think is particularly interesting.

Gerard's critique of Buterin's approach to sharding (which goes into further detail here [2]) seems to back this interpretation up:

> Buterin blogs extensive essays full of great thoughts on how to reorganise the world, and how…

I followed the blog post this article provides[1], which leads to another blog post[2]. It's another bullshit article

> Decentralisation was always a phantom. At most it’s a way to say “can’t sue me, bro.” Every process in Bitcoin tends to centralisation — because Bitcoin runs on economic incentives, and centralised systems are more economically efficient.

How exactly does anything specific about bitcoin imply anything about decentralization in general? And how do we know that centralized systems are more efficient?

These quotes sum up the author's thinking:

> Bitcoin is not about the technology. It’s never been about the technology. Bitcoin is about the psychology of getting rich for free

> The marketing pitch is that the actual-money economy will surely collapse any moment now! And if you get into Bitcoin, you can get rich from this.

This says all that needs to be said about the author. Cherry picking ridiculous examples, making broad generalizations about the interest behind bitcoin, this author has all this in common with the news media.

I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who thinks it's their "moral duty" to shill for the central banks. These folks can churn out all the shitty blog posts and editorials they want, at the end of the day, they'll never be able to freeze wallets like they've frozen bank accounts. This is what upsets them

[1]…

I also know of this description of Yudkowsky: "a crank AI scholar who thinks preventing his ideas for sci-fi novels from becoming reality is more important than preventing malaria, and who freaked out once when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him."

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41198053

Make of that what you will, and if you like, read the book or find the author Sandifer's talks on podcast or video.

But many people do make the case, in detail, that this "logical reasoning", "rationalists", "holistic view", "longtermism" etc has at best gone off the rails, and at worst was never on them in the first place. This is what grandparent poster means by "fringe viewpoints and problems with cults of personality"

I mean, who wouldn't agree with "effective altruism". It sounds great, what's the alternative, being ineffective at it?

Well, "if you do the numbers, you’ll understand that the most effective possible action is to fit out a really nice castle where movement leaders can sit and contemplate the future robot apocalypse"
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/06/ineffective-altruism-ftx-and-the-future-robot-apocalypse/

If one of the best use cases for blockchain is "data about name owners" and "DNS information", the future of blockchain is bleaker than I'd imagined.

Handshake isn't a super-persuasive example to cite, since it's backed by a minor altcoin that's primary use case (according to CoinDesk) is crypto day-trading.[1][2]

[1] "Update (May 28, 20:11 UTC): The headline and body of this article have been edited to clarify there were reportedly $10 million worth of HNS trades on Namebase since the token launched, but* only a fraction of those users bought domain names." https://www.coindesk.com/handshake-domains-bring-in-10m-as-race-for-censorship-resistant-websites-heats-up [2] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/05/31/news-not-craig-wrights-bitcoins-how-tether-flows-goldman-sachs-spurns-bitcoin-calibra-is-now-novi/