|
| onelastjob wrote:
| If you're in rural India and don't have access to a bank account,
| but you do have internet access via a smartphone, then I could
| definitely see cryptocurrency being valuable to you. And that
| doesn't even take into account countries like Venezuela that are
| experiencing hyperinflation, where cryptocurrency would be much
| more useful. There are cryptocurrencies that are energy efficient
| and have low (or even zero) transaction fees. I doubt the author
| has looked into these coins.
|
| Beyond just currency uses, smart contracts open the door to
| phasing out escrow middlemen for purely digital transactions
| (like buying/selling domain names, etc.) Decentralized lending
| and borrowing is another major use of smart contract coins.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Banking penetration in India is at 80+% mainly due to DBT
| pushing straight to bank accounts.
|
| India's smartphone penetration is at 41%.
|
| All exchanges in India require a Savings Bank account for Fiat
| transfers. How are these unbanked people meant to use crypto
| really?
| onelastjob wrote:
| You don't have to use an exchange to acquire cryptocurrency.
| People can use sites like localbitcoins to exchange cash for
| crypto in person.
| seoaeu wrote:
| How exactly do you imagine that an unbanked person living in
| rural India would be able use cryptocurrency? It isn't like
| they can just enter their credit card into a website and buy
| some. Not to mention that even if they someone managed to
| acquire some, the $5+/transaction fees are going to make
| something like bitcoin or ethereum completely impractical.
| yannoninator wrote:
| there are other alternative cryptocurrencies working on this
| exact problem.
|
| you're talking as if bitcoin and ethereum is all of
| cryptocurrency.
| onelastjob wrote:
| Nano has free transactions. Other cryptos like Stellar and
| Solana have low cost transactions. People can use sites like
| localbitcoins to exchange cash for crypto.
| [deleted]
| cryptica wrote:
| Cryptocurrency will never go away. The more time passes, the more
| conviction people have.
|
| As someone who is a loser in both the fiat ecosystem and crypto
| ecosystem and having experienced some horrors both ecosystems, I
| prefer crypto ecosystem hands down because it's the most honest
| and transparent system.
|
| Once you understand how both systems work, it's impossible to
| pick the fiat system. The fiat system is a pyramid scheme of epic
| proportions. It's not possible for an ethical person to want to
| participate in the fiat system once they understand how it works.
| It is really that bad.
| shafyy wrote:
| The issue of the "promise" of cryptos (and blockchain in general)
| is that it tries to solve problems that are not tech problems.
|
| They are mostly political/governmental problems that are solved
| by a working democracy. In countries where there is no working
| democracy, the dictator won't give two shits if this NFT proves
| that you own this piece of land before taking it from you.
| Blockchain in itself is not something that brings political
| stability to a country.
| sneak wrote:
| The nice thing about Bitcoin is that it doesn't have a
| jurisdiction or location[1]; you can solve some problems in
| some places via a functioning government, but Bitcoin solves
| some problems in _all_ places simultaneously.
|
| [1]: this is not to claim, as some do, that it is
| unregulatable, although it may be.
| shafyy wrote:
| What problem does Bitcoin solve?
| sneak wrote:
| The threat of unwarranted civil asset forfeiture. The
| threat of arbitrary unbounded inflation.
|
| Perhaps you don't consider those risks to you to be very
| big, so you don't place much value on mitigating them.
| Other people do, however.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Far as I can tell bitcoin boosters are either people that
| can't trust people for some reason, like they are doing
| something grossly illegal. Or they hate having to trust
| people.
| coolspot wrote:
| How to get a ransom without being caught?
|
| How to pay a drug/malware/CP dealer?
|
| How to receive a bribe without physical exchange/trail?
|
| Cash doesn't work well for any of these use ases, while
| crypto (esp. Monero) is just perfect!
| judge2020 wrote:
| If everything is considered 'owned' based on NFTs, and other
| stuff relies on that to verify ownership and provide services,
| then the government talking the physical land only gives them
| the utility of the land itself, and not the other stuff (eg.
| The ability to sell the property) - plus, the government
| superseding a fictional blockchain-backed real estate market is
| likely to cause a market crash.
|
| Blockchains and NFTs make sense only when the blockchain
| becomes the source of truth, and it does solve real problems -
| it just doesn't work for cryptocurrency when someone's $1 could
| be worth 30 cent or 6 dollars in just a year. Nobody wants that
| amount of uncertainty.
| jameshart wrote:
| Claiming you have the ability to sell some property when all
| you actually have is an NFT that purports to represent
| ownership of the property, but the property itself is in the
| hands of a government that doesn't recognize that NFT is
| going to have a significant impact on the sale price you can
| get for that NFT.
|
| Property rights are always going to rest on the rule of law,
| and in places where the rule of law is strong, property title
| law is well established and doesn't need a distributed ledger
| to disrupt it. Disrupting it would generally be bad.
| 0x0 wrote:
| > "only gives them the utility of the land itself"
|
| "only"?
|
| I'd say the "utility of the land" IS the only value of
| "having" land.
| coolspot wrote:
| Obviously you're missing that most of any land's value
| comes from the fact that it can be wrapped as NFT.
|
| It is well known historic fact that Romans fought for new
| land knowing that the time will come when you could wrap it
| into NFT to make finally useful!
|
| Same story with Columbus and his ICO (Initial Columbus
| Odyssey).
| morelisp wrote:
| I gotta give you credit, "NFTs are important because you can
| otherwise only have the actual use of the land, not the
| financially-speculative value of the land" is a bold take
| given that usually the cryptocurrency pitch (that CCs are a
| good store of value because they won't inflate relative to
| real assets) is _exactly the opposite_.
| Bayart wrote:
| >working democracy
|
| That's a sizable assumption to begin with. Democracies are less
| and less, well, _working_ because the Internet itself has
| eroded trust significantly and is moving the parameters of
| epistemology around. That is a problem caused by tech, so how
| is it not a tech problem ? The work done in the blockchain
| space on _trust_ is IMO very important.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Actually, my understanding is that cryptocurrencies are having
| impact in developing countries. They can address
| hyperinflation, access to financial services, general friction
| in exchanging money etc.
| delaaxe wrote:
| But of course hyperinflation will never ever come to the
| first world
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| The people who have the capability to use and exchange
| cryptocurrencies in developing countries are those who
| already have local or foreign bank accounts denominated in
| USD or EUR.
|
| These same people then mine coins in those countries,
| utilising cheap or subsidised electricity, resulting in power
| shortages.
|
| As we have seen in Turkey, these exchanges can be easily shut
| down, or the founder can simply disappear with all the cash.
|
| These are not really long term solutions, and the existence
| of cyrptocoins is probably making the individual lives of
| people in the 3rd world worse.
|
| I think its more likely that if these grey-market coins
| didn't exist, the local tech bros in the 2nd/3rd world would
| actually be pushing Governments to improve general financial
| regulation and stability, and building a proper series of
| banking companies themselves.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| M-Pesa and SMS banking in general had an immense impact in
| African nations. Bitcoin - not so much.
| shafyy wrote:
| Do you have a source for this?
|
| For example, Erdogan flat out banned businesses from
| accepting cryptocurrency when he saw that people were putting
| their money in cryptos because of the inflation of the
| Turkish Lira.
|
| It's not like cryptos are a stable currency, either.
| Question: Wouldn't it make more sense for people in develping
| countries to buy more stable assets or currencies, or is it
| not possible to that because of a lack of access?
| Allezxandre wrote:
| One example from last month:
| https://decrypt.co/69205/cardano-developer-iohk-strikes-
| part...
| dadoge wrote:
| More people need to appreciate this
| icelancer wrote:
| They never transact with people in countries that have
| strict financial controls, so the problem does not exist
| for them. I pay people in Venezuela in cryptocurrency
| because nothing else is a viable option.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's an assumption that people should think evading
| currency controls and taxes is somehow heroic. I'm happy
| that crypto allows people to violate US sanctions, but
| that's because I'm specifically against US sanctions, not
| the rule of law.
| dadoge wrote:
| A lot fewer people use crypto for ill motives than you
| think.
|
| Paper USD is a lot easier to hide than a Bitcoin
| transaction on a public ledger
| dadoge wrote:
| Have you thought about what effect 40% inflation year
| over year does to you like in Argentina?
|
| Or over 1000% in Venezuela.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > Enough is enough
|
| What is he advocating then? To stop working, thinking, and
| writing about cryptocurrencies? When do we start burning books
| too
| neither_color wrote:
| _1. Promise a revolutionary technology ( "self-driving cars are
| coming"!) 2. Use that promise as a pretext to ignore all
| regulation 3. Make a fortune 4. Drop the tech story_
|
| The author lost me here. Completely subjective take on what Uber
| has done. They've completely improved ride-sharing and cab
| hailing within the whole industry, including non uber users.
| Depending on what country I travel to, Ill be using a different
| app like Grab or Didi or a local taxi app that were all made
| possible by Uber's initial disruption.
|
| _Some of those financial regulations are unjust. People can send
| remittances in crypto to relatives in repressive countries, and
| you hear their stories from boosters. But people also want to
| move billions in untraceable crime money around. Guess which
| traffic predominates_
|
| IMO the former outweighs the latter. Perhaps remittance doesnt
| sound like a big deal to the author because they may not know
| immigrants who use these crappy services. The thought of
| punishing some darknet users buying pills online is more alluring
| than focusing more on fixing the flaws with remittances. I'm
| talking new residents who pay income taxes on their biweekly
| paycheck(fair) and then pay western union(bad deal, less fair) to
| send 50-200 bucks to family in far off places with spotty
| infrastructure and electricity, in remote places where there are
| no ATMs and the relative has to travel 2 hours into town to pick
| up their western union transfer. Millions of people go through
| that every day and I'm much more interested in crypto solutions
| and dont mind if it takes some uber style disruption to fix that
| later on.
| dschooh wrote:
| > Depending on what country I travel to, Ill be using a
| different app like Grab or Didi or a local taxi app that were
| all made possible by Uber's initial disruption.
|
| Local Taxi hailing apps were first. Uber adopted this and their
| disruption of many local markets happened only after offering
| cheaper alternatives by burning money.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I worked on a short-lived idea for taxi hailing apps before
| the iPhone even existed. The target then was Palm Pilots and
| feature phones. Alas, before its time.
| blast wrote:
| Yeah that Uber thing struck me as false too. It was obviously a
| ride-hailing app and provided a superior service to what
| existed before. The self-driving thing came up later and was
| always a sideshow. I suppose it helped them raise money but it
| was hardly their "pretext to ignore all regulation".
|
| It's a side point to the thread though.
| idlewords wrote:
| I'm the author of the thread. For what it's worth, I grew up as
| a refugee whose mother had to find incredibly inventive ways to
| send USD to family back home, where it was illegal to possess.
|
| What I don't understand about the crypto remittances argument
| is how the people sending and receiving them are supposed to
| convert them into spendable currency. My hunch is that a lot of
| the value of cryptocurrency in those countries comes from the
| fact that it's been astronomically increasing in value, not
| that it's a great way to move money around remittance barriers.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> What I don't understand about the crypto remittances
| argument is how the people sending and receiving them are
| supposed to convert them into spendable currency.
|
| For all the harsh words you posted without evidence,
| thankfully you've at least admitted you don't understand
| much.
|
| Your premise is that cryptocurrency is not "spendable
| currency" which is simply false. I pay people in
| hyperinflationary environments in cryptocurrency variants
| with low transaction costs and fast speed, and they in turn
| _directly_ spend it on physical goods like food.
| qecez wrote:
| But you forgot, the emperor has no clothes!!!
| idlewords wrote:
| How does their direct purchase work? How do I buy a pizza
| on the blockchain in a hyperinflationary country?
| yownie wrote:
| maybe you should be talking to people in Nigeria, India and
| Venezuela then?
| delaaxe wrote:
| If you really are a refugee and suffered inflation then this
| should begin to change your mind: https://reddit.com/r/Crypto
| Currency/comments/nobj1h/real_mai...
|
| Otherwise I don't know what else to say
| idlewords wrote:
| If you look at that thread, people are relying on a company
| called Reserve, that essentially issues its own currency (a
| 'stablecoin'). This is the part that I don't get--how is it
| cryptocurrency when you are relying on trusted third
| parties?
| delaaxe wrote:
| Yeah that's a good point, even the DAI stable coin which
| is touted as the most decentralized is actually backed by
| a lot of USDC
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think their website answers your question:
| https://reserve.org/protocol
| simonw wrote:
| I've been trying to find coverage of Reserve from non-
| Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency publications - basically because I
| don't trust any of those publications - and I've not been
| able to find anything convincing yet.
|
| This is a general problem I have with crypto stories: every
| crypto coin has a built in incentive for people who hold it
| to hype it so it's really hard to tell if actual regular
| users are finding it useful yet.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| I think NFTs will transform the concept of ownership, and
| take power away from major corporations in the process. This
| is just one aspect of crypto that I think more than justifies
| its value. But there is a ton of hype and a ton of bad stuff
| going on yes, but that will be pushed to the background as it
| goes more mainstream. All people inside the industry think
| this is just the beginning and there is a lot of value to be
| extracted. Is it overvalued for what it delivers on today?
| 100%. But I believe it will catch up and surpass it soon.
| There are multiple singular companies that are more valued
| than the entire crypto market right now. It's a drop in the
| bucket.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _I think NFTs will transform the concept of ownership_
|
| The current concept of ownership appears to be that if I
| own something, broadly speaking, that means people
| generally agree (and the state, and ultimately their
| monopoly on force, will back up) that I get to say what
| gets done with it and who gets to make use of it, and that
| it's not OK for someone else to take it away from me
| without my consent.
|
| If NFTs are going to change that, I'm not sure I like it.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| I meant to say concept of ownership of digital content.
| My wording was ineloquent.
| ttepasse wrote:
| An NFT is ... a digital receipt that "money" flowed at one
| moment in time. The referenced digital artwork or something
| is only referenced by an URI. That is ownership? Seems a
| very transformed concept to me.
|
| My supermarket gives me an NFT in paper form every-time I
| buy something.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Except the NFT the supermarket gives you isn't
| cryptographically verified.
| idlewords wrote:
| I don't understand the belief that any of this takes power
| from corporations. If you look at NFTs right now, big
| participants include the NBA, Sotheby's, and a whole lot of
| venture capital. What's the dynamic that's going to shut
| them out as they become more lucrative?
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Creators of content controlling that content without the
| need for big corp involvement, which can be corporations
| yes, but also the little people. This could be
| access/distribution, royalties, licensing, and more.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The big corporations have binders full of techniques to
| take control of content from the little creators and
| claim it for themselves. A popular one right now goes: A
| one-person operation making and selling designs could
| find their online work subject to pointless DMCA
| complaints or even threats. They'd crumble at even the
| threat of a big corporation actually suing for
| infringement. Now the big company copies the individual's
| designs, and collects rent on something it didn't create.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Ownership is information, not the underlying asset
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Exactly, but it will be also about the underlying asset
| soon. This is what my company is working on: Darkblock.io
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't know anything but it's not hard to see how this might
| work somewhere like Venezuela. Cryptocurrency seems most
| useful for black marketers to get funds out of the country,
| which will create a demand for it. If ordinary people get
| cryptocurrency from relatives, they can trade locally to get
| local currency, then use it to buy black market goods. The
| local money recirculates and the cryptocurrency funds
| sanctions-evading imports.
|
| Whether this is a good thing or not probably depends on what
| you think of illegal markets in desperate situations.
| c01n wrote:
| > What I don't understand about the crypto remittances
| argument is how the people sending and receiving them are
| supposed to convert them into spendable currency.
|
| The final goal is not to be able to convert crypto to fiat,
| the goal is to keep everything in crypto. Do you think all
| this infrastructure is being build just to convert it back to
| fiat, what cypherpunks want is to destroy fiat.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| But how, you can't use Bitcoin for day to day transactions
| due to slow settling times and high transaction costs. You
| could use some of the alt-coins, but how do you coordinate
| which to use and why would you trust it?
| idlewords wrote:
| I understand the final goal, but if I want to send my
| relative in Venezuela half my paycheck this week, how does
| she spend it on groceries and at the pharmacy before the
| Crypto Revolution comes?
|
| Inevitably the answer is "some trusted third party" that
| turns it into a vanilla remittance.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > They've completely improved ride-sharing and cab hailing
| within the whole industry, including non uber users.
|
| They only did that in some places where there were poor Taxi
| markets (medallions etc). In places where you could hail a cab
| follow it and pay for it with your smartphone years before
| Uber, they did nothing. They didn't exactly invent that. They
| just said that because magic fairydust they could do that also
| in cities where the law said they couldn't. Which is kind of
| strange when you thinnk about it.
| pavlov wrote:
| "But it's like the early Internet!" shouted the Emperor's
| coinholders. "The Internet wasn't yet useful a mere, um, thirteen
| years after its invention either."
|
| I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this
| argument because they can't remember. The reality is that the
| internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or
| fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone
| were killer apps. A bit later came Usenet and IRC and MUD gaming.
| There were things to download, people to meet, flame wars to
| participate in. People would stay up until 4am to get a chance to
| go online in university shared facilities.
|
| With cryptocurrency there's nothing to do. You could pay $100 to
| buy a "cryptokitten" or whatever, but then you'd be stuck
| shilling it on somebody else somehow. The community is a mix of
| Scientology-like groupthink and multi-level marketing sales
| pitches. The early Internet was infinite times more fun.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Have you been looking at the Maetaverse at all?
|
| https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://decentraland.org/
|
| These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using
| crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property,
| buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs
| and meeting spaces, etc.
|
| You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-
| peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketplace, fund an idea
| you're interested in, whether that's a game
| (https://illuvium.io) or a commission for a comic book series
| (https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-
| cryp...) or start a DAO and raise money for charity or open
| source software (https://gitcoin.co/).
| morelisp wrote:
| > They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and
| creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc.
|
| This all happens in Second Life and doesn't need to burn the
| planet to do it.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| If you think these defi projects are hurting the
| environment then you have not been paying attention to the
| industry. Proof of Stake, what most smart contract tokens
| are moving to, is very energy efficient.
| curtisf wrote:
| > These are 3D virtual world environments and people are
| using (VIRTUAL CURRENCY) to build an online economy. They are
| trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating
| galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc.
|
| What you're describing here is Roblox (2006), which was
| launched 2 years before Bitcoin was conceived, and has
| attained a market cap of >$50 billion without any
| cryptocurrency nonsense. Or Second Life (2003). Or RuneScape
| (2001).
|
| Cryptocurrency doesn't enable online trading with virtual
| currency -- if anything, it's dramatically _more_ difficult
| to use than either real plastic, or virtual currency sitting
| in a SQL table.
|
| What it enables is theoretical trust in a shared ledger
| (handwaving that a Sybil attack isn't attempted by any of the
| massive mining pools); but this trust is assuming you're a
| computer scientist capable of auditing the clients and
| contracts. Yet, even professional programmers have lost
| hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto with
| programming mistakes and security flaws in their smart
| contracts and clients! If even professional crypto software
| developers can't take advantage of cryptocurrency's supposed
| benefits, how are the players of an online game supposed to?
|
| The answer is of course that they have to relegate trust, in
| the same way that online shoppers relegate trust to
| Visa/Mastercard. The important difference being that only
| Visa/Mastercard guarantee your funds are returned if you're
| defrauded.
| lreeves wrote:
| Second Life did this 3D virtual world stuff almost 20 years
| ago, and even managed to use real money with an exchange rate
| as well to do exactly the things you're saying are now new
| with crypto and blockchains.
|
| Also for your other points - the games in this space are
| universally unfun to play with hardly anyone actually playing
| them; I can pay normal money to commission artwork; and I can
| use a zillion platforms that already exist to raise money.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| They did, but they were an insular community as a result.
| NFTs allow for a common open standard to be interoperable
| between games. That helps create an economy where, for
| example, you can buy a digital artwork at a Christie's
| auction and display it in Decentraland and have it be
| verifiably authentic.
|
| Second Life was awesome! This Metaverse trend is pushing
| that concept much, much further and it's giving ownership
| and utility to the makers.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Look to the Steam Community Market & Trading if you want
| an example of a cross-game economy.
| lreeves wrote:
| I don't think any of that matters at all to people who
| enjoy the games or virtual worlds. I understand your
| point, I just disagree that it will matter in any way.
|
| >you can buy a digital artwork at a Christie's auction
| and display it in Decentraland and have it be verifiably
| authentic
|
| I can't imagine anyone would give a shit about someone's
| virtual art being "authentic" for whatever meaning of
| authentic NFTs pretend to claim. This is basically
| receipt porn at this point. Truly we're talking about
| bragging about wealth, one of the shittiest traits a
| person can have.
| Graffur wrote:
| Pauli, what are you talking about? Bitcoin, Ethereum or
| Cryptokitties?
|
| What group are you talking about when you accuse them of
| "Scientology-like groupthink"? What comparisons can you draw? I
| think it's important you back up and explain what you're
| saying.
| ahallock wrote:
| It's funny that these dismissive, trash-talk comments with
| zero value get upvoted on HN as long as it's against crypto.
| It really is a double-standard here. Ironically, that comment
| is also part of the groupthink.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| An interesting line of argument, and one which affords a number
| of potential avenues for enlargement:
|
| - The Internet emerged from a community in which it afforded
| real and tangible benefits, without any one single locus of
| control. (Research universities, along with a number of
| government departments and a few major tech and defence
| contractors, principally.) Perhaps an alternate payment
| mechanism might emerge similarly.
|
| - The Internet tools which _did_ emerge ... were well-suited to
| a small-world network in which local reputations could be
| assessed and acted on (loss of campus-based access with
| administrators overseeing populations of a few dozens to
| hundreds, rarely more than 1,000, through the early 1990s).
| Effectiveness at larger scales and in more hostile environments
| has proved ... problematic.
|
| - A clear statement of the problem(s) posed by present currency
| and payment systems is still lacking. Statements as do exist
| tend to be ... weakly grounded in emperical truth, strongly
| ideological (not _necessarily_ a fault, but often one), and
| strongly resistant to actual demonstrated superiority _after
| decades of effort_.
| titzer wrote:
| > The early Internet was infinite times more fun.
|
| Holy crapballs, yeah it was! I remember when I learned HTML in
| 1996 and put up one of those blinkety animated GIF homepages on
| the hosting space given (for free!) by my local dial-up ISP.
| They had a local chatroom and I spent hours and hours chatting
| with locals from the same city--even met some of them! I read
| the hacker's manifesto and about phreaking and all of that
| stuff, found Usenet, played Quake over 33.6kbps dialup with a
| 300ms ping and still wiped the floor with people. I remember
| when mp3's came out. It took me 5 mins to download my first
| one. C&C music factory--everybody dance now!
|
| But that's just nostalgia part. The reality is that nowadays
| the internet is ad-laden crapware/spyware that is scheming
| every second of every day to get you to do something--sign up
| for something, buy something, like something, rate something.
| Your eyeballs, your likes, your hates, your friends, your vices
| and quirks, are worth billions to multi-national corps who hope
| to never have to give you customer service, who keep you at AI-
| defended arms-length, but will happily sell your attention (won
| through their latest crack-like invention) to the highest
| bidder.
|
| It feels like the internet is infested with the worst of human
| carnival barkers and con-artists these days.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| The early internet was overrun with this stuff too. Remember
| Bonzai buddy? Or the ad serving tools that'd claim to pay you
| for every hour you're connected to the internet?
| mandelken wrote:
| Wow, blast from the past! I actually got a check from one
| of those pay per hour ad services more than 20 years ago,
| and to this day it's still the only check I've ever
| received :-)
|
| (It was 15 USD so costed almost as much to cash in Europe
| as it was worth)
| lamontcg wrote:
| I remember Usenet before Eternal September and before
| Canter and Siegel, when the backbone was NSFnet and before
| the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993.
|
| If someone was doing anything commercial over e-mail or
| usenet you could contact their "sysop" or their upstreams
| and have them removed.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| They did pay! I was how I was paying for the dial up cost
| to my parents!
| ahallock wrote:
| > With cryptocurrency there's nothing to do
|
| Then you haven't looked deep enough or maybe the subject matter
| doesn't interest you. Don't extrapolate your experience to
| everyone else. I find the DeFi space and the scaling issues and
| layer 2 projects being built pretty interesting. Web3 and the
| protocols being built around that are also worth a look. Sure,
| there are a lot of scams and vaporware, but that's also true of
| the early and today's internet.
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| I am essentially pasting an old comment of mine: The Internet
| was always something where demand--and desired applications--
| were vastly over capacity and capability. From the moment
| computers were networked, more people wanted to do more things
| over those networks, and both infrastructure and underlying
| technology had to grow to barely keep up (or, in fact, could
| not keep up--many long desired applications only became
| feasible in the 2000s or so). This does not resemble the
| history of Blockchains.
| seibelj wrote:
| Fees of blockchains are at times very high because the demand
| vastly exceeds their current transaction capabilities
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| In the case of the Internet, people were doing either new
| things, or existing things more efficiently (e.g. sending
| emails vs. postal mail and fax, or transferring files vs.
| swapping disk media or printouts). As the Internet
| progressed, efficiency increased.
|
| In the case of cryptocurrencies, people are doing existing
| things that can already be done quickly and efficiently
| vastly less efficiently, in a system that is purposely
| designed to be less efficient, where efficiency is in fact
| actively counteracted. Databases and online money
| transactions were possible before, at a fraction of the
| total cost inherent to the system and at vastly higher
| performance.
| seibelj wrote:
| I can send unlimited amounts of money, anywhere on earth,
| for (at most) dollars in a few seconds. I don't need to
| rely on any government for any reason, and no government
| can stop me.
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| The Internet provided solutions to technical problems,
| regardless of any societal/political considerations. They
| may have resulted, but as a secondary effect.
|
| Your sending unlimited amounts of money comes at the cost
| of a lottery, where miners perform literally
| 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose
| outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky
| enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win.
| This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash
| costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to
| require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes
| per hour.
|
| By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is
| by design not possible to regulate where the energy for
| this lottery is coming from.
|
| When you bring up the societal/political benefits you
| just stated, take into account the societal/political
| problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine
| that allows converting resources directly into money of
| miners' digital wallets without regulation.
| seibelj wrote:
| Proof of Stake coins eliminate the electrical cost of
| mining yet maintain decentralization. ETH2 is live now
| but not fully in control of the network
| https://beaconscan.com/
|
| Many other Proof of Stake blockchains like Cosmos have
| been live and working fine for years.
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| I have looked into proof-of-work in meticulous detail, I
| have not looked into proof-of-stake. If proof-of-stake
| exists and eschews the problems I have stated, then what
| I said here about the problems it creates does not apply
| anymore.
|
| I have many other doubts against the usefulness and
| sensibility of blockchains in general, e.g. I have doubts
| how smart contracts actually succeed to reach their goals
| in a reality where humans make mistakes and courts are
| used to settle disputes and ambiguities. But these
| concerns then only affect the viability of technologies
| that I and others are not forced to participate in.
|
| Proof-of-work on the other hand, as long as it continues
| to exist, affects everyone in that in incentivizes
| burning resources directly for money without regulation,
| no matter how dirty or wasteful.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| This is very true, and the down voting you are receiving
| for saying this is shameful.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I agree that proof of work seems to have outlived it's
| usefulness as a mean to prevent spam on the ledger.
|
| That being said, I still see proof of stake and proof of
| coverage as interesting way to maintain said ledger
| integrity in the like... 3 actually existing use case
| where a blockchain is superior to a SQLite instance with
| good security.
| hirsin wrote:
| Currently it's 8 dollars to clear in 6 hours. The cost to
| turn that back into money isn't included here.
| idlewords wrote:
| I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful
| nascent technologies all have this pattern--they grow
| incrementally more interesting and constantly gain
| applications.
|
| Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some
| point it started to _regress_ on that axis. You could no longer
| buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got
| too flooded by scammers to use safely. There 's nothing to
| really DO with blockchain unless you buy into the subculture.
| That's very different from early internet, early web, early
| radio, you name it.
| [deleted]
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| It's become gold. Preferred by criminals, untraceable (gold
| is a single stable isotope, basically untraceable). A store
| of wealth. And you can't buy a pizza with gold, either, and
| there are tons of scammers who love gold (I remember, about
| Thailand, the scammers would conspire to get people's gold, a
| few would talk loudly about how jewels were going up, then
| someone else in your trip would just happen to mention,
| despite not wanting to mention it, that there was a great new
| jewelry offering discounted jewels, whatever, the point was
| they wanted the tourist to go to buy gold, then trade that
| gold for fake jewels, because then he couldn't get a refund).
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Bitcoin didn't regress, what actually happened is that its
| fundamental flaws ended up eventually dominating whatever
| early enthusiasm allowed them to be ignored. It was _never_
| going to work, for a variety of reasons that were incredibly
| apparent at the time.
|
| "Why did it regress" is much less interesting than "why did
| anyone ever fall for this?"
| idlewords wrote:
| Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in
| some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect
| blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the original idea
| could never fly (even in 2008 you didn't have to be a
| genius to see that evading financial controls would be the
| chief use of a working cryptocurrency). But likely someone
| would find a really neat twist on it and find the
| blockchain equivalent of VisiCalc, and that would happen
| again and so on.
|
| What's interesting to me is that the original idea was
| clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral
| steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| There was no reason to believe it would move laterally,
| for both technical and social reasons.
|
| First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological,
| namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change
| that caused any inflation would be socially resisted.
|
| Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the
| lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks
| and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to
| solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central
| authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious
| reasons.
| idlewords wrote:
| Yeah, but when you took away the money part and just
| looked at the technical idea of a distributed chained
| ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. At
| least, it was cool to me. It seemed like it might go in
| some interesting other direction.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Bitcoin was a fascinating technical trick, but it's also
| been a worked example of the difference between
| "interesting", versus "feasible" or even "a good idea".
|
| As soon as it claimed to be money, then it was all about
| the money. If you look at early BitcoinTalk, you'll see a
| pile of scams that are _extremely_ similar to the jargon
| still used in crypto to this day - the scammers got in
| very early indeed.
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| I never quite understood how that might happen. I kept
| hearing how it was distributed when it isn't. How the
| blockchain was going to change the world, when not a
| single example beyond Bitcoin itself could be given.
| Healthcare was mentioned, but no application... It's
| right up there with all the other crazy ideas of the last
| decade or two (Mongo, agile, Google Glass...)
| Rerarom wrote:
| > string theory for programmers
|
| This is gold, I'm gonna steal it
| jjulius wrote:
| We could get really meta with it and have @idlewords sell
| that phrase/post to you as an NFT.
| Graffur wrote:
| What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? (I
| assume throughput but I'll wait for your reply).
|
| What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I assume
| you mean it's a scam but I will wait for your reply.
| lottin wrote:
| > What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about?
|
| For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are
| final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the
| system unusable in the real world.
| doomroot wrote:
| You can build a system of reversible transactions on
| bitcoin or any other currency (people already have). It's
| impossible to do the inverse in a non reversible system.
| arbol wrote:
| Payments don't need to be final. You could use a contract
| that implements arbitration logic.
| craftinator wrote:
| I get the feeling that the underpinnings of your argument
| points are based on not being very familiar or well read
| with the technology around Bitcoin and other
| cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum. Your coming at it
| from an end user or armchair quarterback point of view,
| not someone who actually does development in that space;
| if you did, you'd know that one of the reasons Ethereum
| was created was to provide a digital escrow mechanism,
| and has been around for over 5 years. So no, your example
| isn't based on reality.
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| I observe the exact opposite: people do not like
| accepting the risk of payments that can be reversed
| because the buyer does a chargeback scam, or used a
| hacked paypal account.
|
| Multisig escrow is also better in every way if people
| want to involve a third party in case of a dispute
| danboarder wrote:
| Except that transactions are not final, your scenario is
| exactly what crypto is great at, there are many ways you
| can set up an escrow for any transaction to protect
| multiple parties, for example by using a multisig wallet
| (1).
|
| (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisignature
| [deleted]
| heurist wrote:
| I'm confused about why Bitcoin is being discussed in the
| past tense when both usage and price have both grown
| significantly over the last year. Is it already dead?
| Could have fooled me.
| webgoat wrote:
| Fees high, world too stable, heavy speculation. Cryptos
| forced to trade on centralized exchanges to avoid fees,
| making it a much crappier version of something like PayPal.
| Doesn't help that there's an unending supply of people more
| than willing to participate in ponzi schemes creating
| massive volatility and turning the "currency" into the
| commodity.
| ahallock wrote:
| Dotcom bubble was the same way. We're in the early
| stages.
| eli wrote:
| The extremely messed up incentives make it impossible to
| even have an honest conversation about it's merits or
| issues. If there are any legitimate uses for blockchain
| (and that's an if) they're lost in the noise of 10,000 get
| rich quick schemes, outright frauds, and bad actors.
| throwaway384028 wrote:
| You can still buy drugs with bitcoin :-)
| kragen wrote:
| I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at
| this point (programming work for overseas clients), and I
| haven't gotten scammed yet. I'm not engaged in money
| laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, or gambling, and
| only the usual amount of delusion.
|
| And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982;
| not only couldn't you get so much as a weather report online,
| much less IRC, but many of the early interesting experiments
| like NLS at SRI had shut down, and more and more places were
| disabling guest access to their hosts -- you couldn't run so
| much as a game of ADVENT without getting a username. And a
| password. Things were seriously regressing. The only people
| you could talk to on the internet were other people who
| really bought into the subculture, of which there were a few
| tens of thousands.
|
| So why does Bitcoin have tens of millions of users 13 years
| after its inception, instead of only tens of thousands like
| the internet?
|
| If you live in a country with a highly functional banking
| system and no kleptocracy, Bitcoin is probably a bit puzzling
| unless you have family in Cuba. But it's not puzzling at all
| for those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the broad
| spectrum between Switzerland and Somalia, because most places
| have a _little_ kleptocracy. Argentina is a stable democracy,
| far from being "a failed state,"+ but if you want to send
| US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means it's basically
| impossible, and the only broadly available savings vehicle is
| real estate (" _ahorrar en ladrillos_ "), which of course
| grossly inflates real-estate prices, with a substantial part
| of the capital city occupied by empty apartments someone
| bought "as an investment". Historically, Argentines have
| saved by buying dollars, but that's limited to US$200 a month
| now, and then only if you have a non-under-the-table job
| (about a third of total employment is under the table):
|
| https://www.ambito.com/finanzas/dolares/cronologia-del-
| cepo-...
|
| You can see that in September 02019 when this measure was
| imposed the price of a dollar was AR$63.50; now it's AR$155.
| So whatever savings you had in pesos in 02019 have lost 59%
| of their value to peso devaluation.
|
| In 02001 a lot of Argentines had saved dollars in their
| dollar-denominated bank accounts. This did not preserve their
| savings through the financial crisis that year; the cash-
| strapped government limited withdrawals to a trickle, then
| converted dollar deposits to pesos at a one-to-one rate, then
| released the exchange-rate peg, at which point peso went
| overnight from being worth US$1 to being worth US$0.25 before
| settling at about US$0.31 for the next few years. The US did
| something similar in 01933.
|
| Some might suggest using "alternatives to banks like credit
| unions where customers--as owners--hold more power," but
| Credicoop depositors suffered the same two-thirds
| confiscation of savings as depositors in for-profit banks.
| And they pay the same 3% tax on bank transactions including
| checks. That's more than a fast Bitcoin transaction fee of
| US$15 for transactions over US$500.
|
| But we're not a failed state. There are no gangs of bandits
| roving the streets in Argentine cities (though there are some
| pretty bad slums where you'll get robbed if you wander in
| without knowing anybody). Courts, free public hospitals, and
| roads continue to function, though there are more potholes
| than a year ago. Argentine infant mortality is 10 per 1000
| live births, down from almost 20 in the late 01990s and the
| same as the late 01980s in the US; life expectancy at birth
| is 77 years, worse than Switzerland's 84, but the same as
| China and Hungary, and better than Saudi or Mexico. (Somalia
| is 54.)
|
| Most of the world is worse off than Argentina, although not
| necessarily in such a statistically transparent fashion.
| About one fourth of the people in the world are unbanked, 51%
| here in Argentina; even advanced countries like Russia,
| Hungary, and Uruguay have roughly a quarter of the population
| unbanked:
|
| https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-
| most-...
|
| And if your family lives in a country like Iran or Venezuela
| subject to US sanctions, and you live in the US? Good luck
| sending them an ACH, instant or otherwise!++ It's well known
| that Bitcoin is very popular in Venezuela, which kind of is a
| failed state, so one of the Venezuelan governments is trying
| to tax Bitcoin remittances at 15%.
|
| https://archive.fo/ZRXzS
|
| Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars per year in such
| remittances. This might seem like a trivial amount of money
| to someone in a rich country, but in poor countries, it's
| enough to keep several million people alive.
|
| Even in the US, it's common for the police to confiscate
| large amounts of paper currency just because they can ("civil
| forfeiture"); US bank accounts are probably fine for US$100K
| but probably somewhat risky for US$10M if the bank thinks you
| don't seem like the kind of person who ought to have it.
| US$10M in US$100 bills fits in a box you can wheel around on
| a dolly, but Bitcoin is a lot more practical. (And of course
| US$10M in dollar bills loses about US$200k per year to
| inflation.)
|
| Transaction fees are usually high enough that you wouldn't
| want to use Bitcoin to pay for a can of Red Bull or even a
| restaurant dinner. But it's extremely practical as an
| alternative to Western Union or US$100 bills or gold, even
| with the current very high transaction fees. At the moment,
| the Bitcoin transaction fee is very low--the median Bitcoin
| transaction fee in the last block was 0.00678 millibitcoins,
| which is US$0.25:
|
| https://btc.com/0000000000000000000778ef382c1697706e34634696.
| ..
|
| Three months ago it was at what I think of as a more normal
| rate of 0.31 millibitcoins, US$11, which is lower than the
| 3.4% spread you'd pay to a jeweler or black-market money
| changer for transactions over US$350:
|
| https://btc.com/00000000000000000000476ab57eea9be8ada36e2680.
| ..
|
| So, Bitcoin doesn't have to be a cypherpunk utopia to be a
| big improvement on the _status quo ante_. For those of you
| living in stable countries where your worries are things like
| "instant and extremely low-fee ACHs" and "decentralized
| utopia", this may be very confusing, but try to remember that
| most of the world lives in places with much more pressing
| concerns, concerns that Bitcoin helps a lot with. And you may
| live there too, soon--the loyal subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm in
| 01913 certainly didn't expect that in 15 years they'd be in
| the middle of a hyperinflation episode that remains legendary
| a century later.
|
| I think that, by providing workarounds to the people who need
| them, cryptocurrencies probably not only ameliorate the most
| immediate and pressing concerns of poor parts of the
| population like Venezuelan immigrants, but probably also
| adjust the power balance in a more liberal and democratic
| direction. This will improve the chance of those concerns
| being ameliorated by public policy over the next decades as
| well. But it's hard to tell what will really happen. The
| potential disaster scenario is that, by making most taxation
| impossible, cryptocurrencies destroy the modern welfare state
| without providing anything to replace it. So the public
| hospitals close, the enormous police force starts to support
| itself by extracting tribute, and the infrastructure decays.
| Pretty similar to what's happened in the US over the last 50
| years, in fact, only more so.
|
| However, at this point I think the modern welfare state is
| already doing a good enough job of destroying itself without
| any significant help from cryptocurrencies--as evidence, I
| can point to Maduro, Macri, Bolsonaro, Trump, and Brexit, and
| metonymically to the social changes they betoken. So at this
| point I'm more worried about cushioning the collapse than
| preventing it.
|
| (I posted an earlier version of this a couple of months ago
| at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654767.)
|
| ____
|
| + We've remained democratic since 01983, electing presidents
| from three different political parties (UCR, PJ, and PRO),
| and there's no serious insurgency. It's the _economy_ and
| _government policy_ that are ruinously unstable, to a point
| that seems satirical to anyone accustomed to the US, but is
| lamentably common worldwide. Rich people sometimes say they
| don 't know of legitimate uses of Bitcoin outside of "failed
| states".
|
| ++ Family remittances are specifically exempted from the US
| sanctions on Iran, but good luck finding a US bank that's
| willing and able to take that risk:
| https://www.wiggin.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/09/26580_advi...
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years
| at this point
|
| How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities,
| and other necessities?
|
| > And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was
| 01982
|
| The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982
| much less 1969. Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely
| similar to the Internet. TCP came about in 1974. IPv4 in
| 1982.
|
| > So why does Bitcoin have tens of millions of users
|
| It doesn't. It has a lot of speculators, and a handful of
| users. And no one knows or could possibly know how many
| there are.
|
| etc.
| kragen wrote:
| > How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing,
| utilities, and other necessities?
|
| I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the
| dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I
| can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it?
|
| > The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in
| 1982 much less 1969
|
| It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who
| had access, which is the same situation as Bitcoin.
| Precisely what Maciej is complaining about is that so
| little of the economy is hooked up to Bitcoin is that
| most of us can't buy a pizza with it without going
| through intermediaries.
|
| > Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to
| the Internet
|
| It was remotely similar; it provided telnet over a
| packet-switched network, with routing. You could argue
| that substantial technical changes happened in Bitcoin
| over the last 13 years, too. Maciej did, in fact, make
| that argument: he pointed out in particular the dramatic
| shift to centralized intermediaries like Coinbase (the
| ANS.NET of Bitcoin?) and from CPU mining to GPU, FPGA,
| and then ASIC mining, as well as the proliferation of
| alternative cryptocurrencies. We could also mention
| segwit, the BCH schism, Lightning, BIP39 and Electrum
| seed phrases, and lightweight clients like Electrum.
| Those changes are not over yet. So the situations are in
| fact quite closely parallel.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the
| dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I
| can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it?
|
| No, most people just spend their currency directly on the
| things they need to purchase, actually.
|
| > It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who
| had access
|
| That's not even remotely true, and is also a tiny number
| of people.
|
| > It was remotely similar
|
| But... it wasn't. As I already have shown.
|
| The ARPANET, then the Internet, have all gone through
| steady evolution. It has not spent 13 years stagnant or
| regressing in terms of _either_ design or use.
|
| Just because you read somewhere that "ARPANET was the
| predecessor of the Internet" does not mean that ARPANET
| _was_ the Internet.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| Reminds me of the old adage about technical solutions to
| social problems. Cryptocurrency isn't going to un-fail
| these states, all it does is enable the wealthy to evade
| currency controls and reinforce the downward spiral. If
| someone lives in an oppressive regime it's governmental
| change they need, not worldwide abandonment of financial
| regulation just so the lucky few can escape.
| kragen wrote:
| The wealthy can _already_ evade currency controls; that
| 's what it means to be wealthy, at least in a place that
| has them. Bitcoin and similar systems enable _the poor_
| to evade currency controls, as well as frankly
| confiscatory regulation like the bank-deposit-conversion
| episode I mentioned, precisely because it 's accessible
| to _everyone_ , not just the lucky few.
|
| I've already addressed your point about governmental
| change.
| cbzbc wrote:
| How does someone who is poor convert their local - non
| dollar denominated - currency to bitcoins?
|
| The reality is that it's just another means for the
| wealthy (and criminals) to evade currency controls.
| kragen wrote:
| In Argentina? Some of them use LocalBitcoins, while
| others walk into a storefront that advertises Bitcoin or
| remittances to Venezuela, and hand over their pesos to
| the guy behind the counter. There are also groups on
| WhatsApp and Facebook to find counterparties. That's the
| reality: Venezuelan refugees, who I guess are "criminals"
| to Maduro's regime and people like you, and illegal
| aliens like me, who I guess are "wealthy".
| pen2l wrote:
| You give convincing arguments in favor of BTC for folks
| living abroad in less-than-stable states. But these very
| arguments for which it is acclaimed have clear flip-sides
| that should be worrisome for those very same folks you
| claim it's good for.
|
| Safeguarding hard physical cash is something most everyone,
| old and young, poor or rich, intrinsically knows how to do.
| And when it is stolen or lost, there are viable approaches
| to pursue with favorable probabilities of a happy
| resolution: tell a police cop to see if they can catch the
| thief using detective work, you could try looking around if
| you think you might have misplaced it, etc.
|
| With BTC on the other hand, ensuring your wallet isn't had
| by committed and technically proficient bad-actors or that
| your wealth isn't all erased in the blink of an eye with a
| hdd crash or a distressed acquaintance wiping your data
| away, you can't expect normal people to be up to the task
| of combatting all of this. And retrieving stolen BTCs from
| bad-actors living a continent away is a task that police
| cops are not up to doing or even the slightest bit capable
| of. You are a really smart guy kragen, I'm sure you won't
| make forget your computer's password one day or have your
| wallet compromised, but someone like my grandma would, and
| the thought that simple mistakes and computer viruses like
| these could and probably would be the thing that leaves
| someone's wealth irretrievably erased without much avenue
| of recourse saddens me, and makes me wish that people in
| our profession who understand this would stop encouraging
| its usage.
|
| I come from a nation that ranks lower than .ar in
| stability. My family went through this very dance of
| receiving money and having to go to WU. The risk of a bad
| accident happening is infinitesimally small in that than
| with BTC.
| mandelken wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your point of view.
|
| What is unclear to me, is how these remittances work in
| practice. I get that in the US you can exchange USD to
| Bitcoin with a credit card and then send that to a person
| in, say, Venezuela (or share the wallet password). But how
| is it converted back to Venezuelan Bolivar? I can't imagine
| you buying a pizza with bitcoin in Caracas.
|
| Side question, why do you write your years with a leading
| zero? I've never seen that before and it has quite a
| cognitive strain for me.
| miles wrote:
| > why do you write your years with a leading zero? I've
| never seen that before and it has quite a cognitive
| strain for me.
|
| Not OP, but I had the same question and did a few seconds
| of cursory searching to no avail. But rather than
| cognitive strain, I found it opened up a much larger
| vista on the perception of time and our seeming place in
| it. While I am unlikely to adopt it, perhaps the
| experience would be even broader with a few more zeros
| tacked on! ;-)
| csande17 wrote:
| OP probably got the idea to place a leading zero before
| the year from the Long Now Foundation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
| miles wrote:
| Thank you very much for the pointer!
| kragen wrote:
| I haven't been in Venezuela since 02006 so I don't know
| how people there cash out of Bitcoin. I'm guessing nobody
| has a clear view of the whole system, since being
| transparent to Maduro's thugs is not in the interest of
| any of the participants. If I had to guess, I'd guess
| that Venezuelans who are fleeing the country sell their
| dollars for Bitcoin, and Venezuelans whose family is
| abroad buy them.
|
| One thing I do know is that a lot of overseas Venezuelans
| whose remittances are via Bitcoin don't know Bitcoin is
| involved. They know a storefront where people transmit
| money to Venezuela, and the guy there tells them where to
| instruct their family members in Venezuela to pick up the
| money. How the agent in Venezuela gets paid is no concern
| of the customers; they only care that the money they give
| the guy arrives safe and sound.
| shieVae4I wrote:
| > Side question, why do you write your years with a
| leading zero? I've never seen that before and it has
| quite a cognitive strain for me.
|
| That's likely a Long Now reference:
| https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-
| dig...
| CPLX wrote:
| You could book plane tickets.
|
| That, literally all by itself, would be enough for me to think
| building the internet was worth it.
|
| You kids have no idea how much fun it was to go downtown to a
| travel agent just to find out how much it would cost to fly
| home from college for Christmas.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > go downtown to a travel agent
|
| Phones were out, too?
|
| ("You kids" should realize that most of the stuff done on the
| web today was done by mail or phone during most of the XX
| century, especially in a country as spread out as the US.
| Ring up the merchant with the order, sing out the credit
| card, done, was the MO from the 70s to the late 90s.)
| mthoms wrote:
| The "early internet" comparison is usually presented when
| talking about how clumsy and slow the technology is in its
| current state. The argument is certainly not presented in the
| context of how "fun" it is. There's nothing "fun" about finance
| (and there never will be).
|
| In the context of technological state (how brittle and obtuse
| the tools are), the comparison between the two is right on the
| money IMHO.
|
| I once configured SOCKS on Windows 3.1 so I could connect to
| the internet over a 9600-baud modem. In those days, unless you
| were in Academia, you didn't know _anyone_ with an email
| address. Early Usenet and IRC had very little to offer someone
| who wasn 't a nerd. FTP? MUD gaming? Come on.
|
| You and I found the early internet interesting _precisely
| because_ we were nerds to begin with. Don 't mistake that
| sentiment for that of the general public. They mostly found it
| frustrating and boring.
| pavlov wrote:
| Nerds, early adopters -- whatever you want to call them, the
| online behaviors they pioneered became mainstream.
|
| In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or
| Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All
| proposed applications are self-referential shell games like
| NFTs, staking schemes, etc.
|
| If this is a superior platform for finance, where's the real
| economic activity? Handwaving about "probably they use it in
| Venezuela" doesn't cut it.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| There is accelerating adoption of blockchain to manage
| cargo shipments, bills of laden, and authentication of
| supply chains.
| Tomte wrote:
| > There were things to download, people to meet
|
| Same with LAN parties. I was thrilled to buy my first network
| card, and a tee connector.
|
| Even the fact that the first half of the day was mostly wasted
| with trying to get IPX and NetBEUI to work and TCP and UDP, and
| promising each other that we would not change _anything_ until
| the next LAN party, and of course next time nothing worked
| either at first try. But it was fun nonetheless.
|
| (The second half of the first day was obviously swapping all
| those music and video files)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Business, education, research, and defence users were finding
| 3 Mbps coax revolutionary for decades before LAN parties were
| a thing.
|
| Internet and Ethernet were useful _immediately_.
|
| https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-birth-and-
| ri...
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I remember lobbying my friends to pool money so we can buy a
| router and use RJ45.
|
| Living on the edge !
|
| My parents still have fond memory of seing skinny teenager
| bringing computers on well barrel in their basement to play
| video game.
|
| They were suspicious at first. But then they concluded they
| we were indeed playing video game.
| conradfr wrote:
| The joy of discovering hours later why not everybody could
| "see" everybody on the network: ipx frame type, and different
| default values, 802.2, 802.3, pick one.
|
| You couldn't Google that. Because there was no Google, and
| you were stuck in a basement.
|
| Fun and exciting times :)
| ahallock wrote:
| Why would I trust a source whose own outdated site looks terrible
| on mobile and is not even on a secure connection? "A bookmarking
| site for introverts" -- what amazing innovation! It sounds more
| like Pinboard is looking for engagement by shitposting on
| Twitter.
| friedman23 wrote:
| Cryptocurrency allows people to exchange money without dealing
| with financial institutions or governments. I don't own any as an
| investment, I use it for playing poker online. That's it.
|
| We give too much voice to all these people suffering from
| hysteria. I suspect the only reason these people are given a
| voice is because they usually call for more laws to "fix" more
| things which benefits those in power.
|
| edit: Also speaking of things we should ban, I think if we are
| talking about things that are actually harmful to society (not
| that I actually give a damn), we should start with banning
| twitter so that we can stop hearing these "moral" rants
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| That's not really accurate. For most people, they deal with
| financial institutions directly via the fiat onroads and
| offroads fror the exchanges.
|
| The fact that you can formally buy, exchange, and cash out of
| crypto with full banking support gives cryptocoins a veneer of
| Government support and legitimacy.
|
| The USA bans online gambling and ponzi schemes. Cyrptocoins are
| worse, because they include a side order of immense waste of
| electricity and advanced manufactured computer chips, and
| enable ransomware.
|
| I think this article is completely correct. We, as members of
| the tech community, have a duty to communicate with the public
| and democratic representatives that cryptocurrencies are a
| harmful technology, and the formal exchange of them for fiat
| should be banned.
| codehalo wrote:
| Can you (and your representative) _please_ just leave me
| alone so I can harm myself with this "harmful technology"?
| Whatever the outcome, I'll take my chances. Please leave me
| alone.
| MrRadar wrote:
| The environmental harms of cryptocurrencies hurt
| _everyone_. It 's a classic externality.
| codehalo wrote:
| Even worse than coal mining and ICE vehicles right? I
| don't see all this righteousness for those.
| MrRadar wrote:
| I want to see those things go away too, but we're going
| to need to significantly increase the energy efficiency
| of our entire society to be able to achieve that.
| Cryptocurrency mining is _anti_ -efficient, _by design_.
| How much coal generation could we retire just by
| eliminating the energy demand from cryptocurrency mining?
| I suspect the answer to that question is more than zero.
| friedman23 wrote:
| These people really can't help themselves.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| The harm is not limited to you.
|
| Electricity shortages:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/26/iran-bans-bitcoin-mining-
| as-...
|
| Chip shortages:
| https://www.fxempire.com/forecasts/article/bitcoin-mining-
| ad...
|
| Ransomware: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-
| extortion-how-cryp...
|
| In terms of overall negative impacts, crypto is _worse_
| than ponzi schemes and online gambling.
| codehalo wrote:
| Yeah, all the problems of the world are due to bitcoin
| and cryptocurrencies. Embarrassingly, more than a decade
| in, HN is _still_ struggling with it. I don 't consider
| harmful, I consider it a godsend. Ten years ago, I knew
| HN was wrong, it will still be wrong in a decade.
| friedman23 wrote:
| > The USA bans online gambling
|
| Does that make it right? Ignoring that, many private
| institutions go out of their way to ban transactions in
| things that the government doesn't even ban. Marijuana in
| states where it is legalized for example. All forms of sex
| work on the misguided belief that it somehow benefits the sex
| worker. Etc.
|
| Also I don't have a duty to follow your misguided morals.
| msoad wrote:
| Most Bitcoin enthusiast that yell at me "HAVE YOU READ THE WHITE-
| PAPER??!" and "DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY??!" have never
| actually downloaded the source code and ran the damn thing! At
| least back in 2011 I was mining on my computer to see what this
| thing is!
|
| Everyone is using some sort of hosted wallet that defeats the
| entire propose of it!
| 1023bytes wrote:
| Unfortunately the global economy is a pyramid scheme as well,
| based on the unsustainable promise of infinite growth
| rami-khalil wrote:
| real gatekeepy title you got there
| morelisp wrote:
| > They don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know
| it's a scam. That's on us
|
| Serious question: What does "not silence" looks like?
|
| Anyone who asks me gets my viewpoint on cryptocurrency and
| blockchains generally (which is more or less the same as
| Maciej's). My relatives all know it, but they also know another
| relative (who also thinks it is a scam!) made a couple K back in
| the first bubble because he was just playing around with the
| software. My coworkers all know it. Repeating it only causes
| strife, not education. People don't want to hear they've made bad
| financial decisions _no matter the time, place, or tone._ They
| instantly get defensive. I mentioned it in passing to a new hire
| in their trial period recently and got a really nervous look like
| "is this guy going to not give me a permanent contract because I
| liked bitcoin?"
|
| There's no forum in our society for us to say "this is a scam"
| that isn't run by people with millions or billions of dollars
| invested in that scam - unless you're famous enough to get on
| cable news as a minor tech entrepreneur - and no social
| maneuvering that makes it effective on a personal level.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| How sustainable do you think this is:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
|
| That's a chart showing the M1 money supply increase by the Fed.
| It has more than quintupled in the past two years. That chart
| looks like a true scam to me. And it shows in the US household
| net worth data:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/13987339019132641...
| morelisp wrote:
| See! Look! This is exactly my point! Nobody is ever going to
| convince the guy who sealioned into a random subthread with
| some random charts to make an unclear point. Nothing a human
| can say will stop this army of even-more-nerdy Ross Perots.
|
| The only thing that speaking up ever does is generate more
| noise, which frustratingly then generates more interest. This
| probably even applies to Pinboard's appearances - anything,
| pro or con, to keep cryptocurrency on the air.
| hmrtn wrote:
| I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make
| it clear the emperor has no clothes here. _Gold_ is sustained by
| a mix of money laundering, human slavery, fraud, ransom,
| gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping
| end first dates fast.
|
| What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's
| no relationship between the claims of _gold_ and our now
| thousands of years of experience. It's not decentralized, it's
| not a currency, it's not a store of value, and it's not a
| promising element.
|
| _Gold_ solves no problems that it didn't first create, and most
| of those it doesn't solve. Banks are neither of those things--at
| worst they're an API for fraud, or as I put it, self-funding
| institutional greed.
|
| I think most of us in the industry gave gold a long leash because
| it's full of cleverness and seemed innovative just on those
| terms. But it's time we recognize that cleverness is being used
| as bait to defraud more people and perpetuate a con. Enough is
| enough.
|
| The two things people need to know about gold are completely non-
| technical:
|
| 1. If it isn't backed by self-perpetuating value, it isn't worth
| anything outside of industry process (electronics, etc.)
|
| 2. If it works, it creates an end run around all financial
| regulation, and will be dominated by uses those regulations try
| to stop
|
| And the list goes on. I am not equating cryptocurrency to gold, I
| am just trying to point out the absurdity of the authors
| statements.
| 000000000000010 wrote:
| Is it that different than a fiat currency with an equally opaque
| issuance method? At least crypto has whitepapers and the promise
| of transparency.
| ggreer wrote:
| Tweets like those are why Pinboard is one of the few Twitter
| accounts I've blocked. On certain issues, the author loves to
| righteously sneer. It annoys the hell out of me because when he's
| not sneering, he can be a knowledgeable and clear thinker. He's
| like a glass of wine with a single fly in it.
|
| This behavior isn't just annoying to others; it's harmful to his
| own goals. If Maciej had hedged his bets and accepted Bitcoin
| payments for Pinboard in 2013[1], it would most have been the
| most cost-effective action of his entire life. He would be worth
| millions more today. He could have used that money to further
| causes he cares about, such as climate change and social issues.
|
| Instead, he's trying to ban cryptocurrency. We had this same
| debate with cryptography in the 1990s and DRM removal software in
| the 2000s. Back then, technically-inclined people agreed that you
| can't ban math. But now many are trying to do just that. What
| exactly would a cryptocurrency ban look like? Would calculating
| lots of SHA-256 hashes cause men with guns to come to your home
| and put you in a cage? It sounds more absurd than what happened
| to DVD Jon.[2]
|
| 1. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/376953671655100416
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen
| rospaya wrote:
| > If Maciej had hedged his bets and accepted Bitcoin payments
| for Pinboard in 2013[1], it would most have been the most cost-
| effective action of his entire life. He would be worth millions
| more today.
|
| This argument makes me hate cryptobros even more - people who
| have an interest in cryptocurrencies have direct financial
| benefit from talking about how good they are.
|
| > He could have used that money to further causes he cares
| about, such as climate change and social issues.
|
| Financial benefit from something doesn't make it right or
| morally acceptable, it only makes you rich.
| idlewords wrote:
| Let's be clear that if I had accepted Bitcoin payments in 2013,
| I would have then lost them all a year or two later when my
| exchange got hacked. That would make me an even more bitter
| person now.
|
| I can't remember ever calling for a ban on cryptocurrency. If
| you're remembering something I'm not, then please correct me.
| jeofken wrote:
| Let me know if you want a hand in setting up a private key on
| a normal computer
| [deleted]
| mthoms wrote:
| You seem like a very smart and highly technical person so I
| find it incredibly hard to believe you would have left vast
| sums of crypto on an unregulated exchange.
|
| You're either being dishonest here or you consider yourself
| extremely naive.
| ggreer wrote:
| You want the tech world to tell regulators that,
| "Cryptocurrency is sustained by a mix of money laundering,
| vaporware, fraud, ransomware, gambling, and delusion. It has
| no social benefit except helping end first dates fast.", and
| that cryptocurrency solves no problems and creates new ones.
|
| If regulators agreed with these statements, what do you think
| they would do? And if you don't want cryptocurrencies banned,
| how do you want them treated differently from today?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| There are a few things that it offers:
|
| - "bank accounts"
|
| - a universal notary and authenticity service
|
| These are building blocks for a number of applications.
|
| Most order applications don't make sense, but hey, everybody
| needs "bigdata" too
| ben_w wrote:
| > a universal notary and authenticity service
|
| Cryptocurrencies do not add anything to either beyond what was
| already done by cryptography.
|
| > "bank accounts"
|
| We already have bank accounts. In banks, hence the name. What's
| the average transaction fee for the most popular
| cryptocurrency? By one of many metrics by which cryptocurrency
| fails even against the status quo.
| msoad wrote:
| This is a great write up on how Tether is super scammy
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/nfv8vg/the_te...
| skrebbel wrote:
| These two resonated with me:
|
| > _A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see
| that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be
| missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture
| has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to
| break it here and speak out_
|
| > _[non-tech people] don 't see the huge silent majority of tech
| people who know it's a scam. That's on us_
|
| It _is_ on us. I never realized this before today. I 'm pretty
| sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the
| enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. After all, Elon is so cute
| when he's enthusiastic! But yeah he probably knows it's a scam
| too, what was I thinking.
| StephenAmar wrote:
| Not sure our opinion is that important.
|
| Beyond answering questions from friends and family & reading
| r/Buttcoin for entertainment, I just don't want to spend time
| debating the issue with the occasional enthusiast.
| mettamage wrote:
| It's not on tech people to evaluate business impact or societal
| impact or economic impact. Sure, tech people could do that but
| most of our time is spent on designing or implementing
| software.
|
| Let other people (non-tech or hybrid) comment on the idea. They
| have time to think about this.
|
| Tech people can only help by explaining in understandable ways
| how blockchain/cryptocurrencies work. 3Blue1Brown has a good
| video on it.
|
| Let's keep the culture of not deriding ideas. We can't predict
| human behavior or the future of it. Maybe something beautiful
| comes out of it, or maybe it accelerates global warming. I
| trust other disciplines to comment on that.
| zzzeek wrote:
| are you seriously advocating for a complete lack of ethical
| awareness on the part of engineers? Pretty sure Volkswagen
| engineers went to prison for interfering with emissions
| software so precedent is kind of not with you here.
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| Understanding proof-of-work down to the very details, I can
| make some evaluations based on simple technical properties.
| For example, Bitcoin can never become "more efficient": If
| efficiency of computing hashes goes up, difficulty goes up to
| counteract this, and the energy usage remains the same.
|
| This is different from almost everything else, where advances
| in technology that increase efficiency are usually a direct
| benefit.
|
| All this energy goes into what is essentially a lottery for
| miners. Except for 6 hashes per hour, all of the literally
| 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes _per second_ get thrown
| away entirely, not even advancing the same miner, the same
| ASIC, towards one of the qualifying 6 hashes per hour.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > But yeah he probably knows it's a scam too, what was I
| thinking.
|
| Doubt it. He's another Libertarian and certainly hates the
| existing system.
| sneak wrote:
| This all falls apart if bitcoin isn't a scam. The burden of
| proof lies with those accusing it.
|
| Additionally, there is no "silent majority" in tech that think
| it is a scam; the author has invented this.
| [deleted]
| e9 wrote:
| It's both. It's not a scam in a sense that it is a store of
| value(digital property) to a small degree. But a scam in a
| sense that it can't power every day transactions or day to
| day needs etc
| ertian wrote:
| There are a dozen different approaches to solving the
| bandwidth problems. IMHO, it's safe to say one or more will
| succeed.
| tuesdayrain wrote:
| >But a scam in a sense that it can't power every day
| transactions or day to day needs etc
|
| It's not supposed to. No need for a permanent ledger to
| store cheap day-to-day transactions.
| synesso wrote:
| The early narrative around paying for coffee didn't pan
| out. But right now it is it's an extremely valuable global
| settlement system.
| hahahasure wrote:
| Bitcoin is not a scam. Government currency is a scam.
|
| Every other coin is basically a scam. Privacy coins may have a
| purpose
| manfredz wrote:
| It's the transaction fees that get distributed to all the other
| coin holders that makes it a pyramid or MLM scheme.
|
| In the case of Bitcoin, originally, every Bitcoin holder would
| also be able to mine with their own computer and receive
| transaction fees. This has since changed, so now it's only the
| miners with specific equipment that benefit from the
| transaction fees.
| meowkit wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I
| always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt.
|
| So go find out? I'm quoting you here for the "pretty sure"
| part. Do a deep dive. I'be done deep dives on Bitcoin,
| Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC,
| Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of
| other coins/tokens.
|
| I'm a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded systems.
| Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam
| to me. The author saying the "silent majority tech people" know
| its a scam is such nonsense to my experience. Every tech person
| I know thinks either A) its neat/super cool, or B) they don't
| know anything about it besides memes.
|
| Sure there are tons of misinformation, scams, and bullshit
| going on. That's everywhere and is not special to crypto.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Why can't the tech be neat/super cool _and_ primarily be used
| to run a scam?
|
| I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still
| primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how
| bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9%
| of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual
| property.
|
| All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there
| that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat stuff.
|
| (sidenote, I actually think piracy is pretty neat, but it was
| too good an analogy to pass up)
| meowkit wrote:
| I disagree with the characterization that the primary use
| is a scam. That's like saying the primary use of email is
| to receive ads and phishing mail.
| harwoodleon wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| And of course new sectors that are not established can
| seem like snake oil, simply because they are new
| industries.
|
| The internet has steamrollered many industries and
| fundamentally changed the way they work.
|
| Manufacturing, Music, Politics and now The final big
| boss, money.
|
| It will take another ten years for this industry to
| mature. But in amongst the sham and drudgery we have the
| first non-violent system of currencies.
| zzzeek wrote:
| lighting the earth's natural resources literally on fire
| to create currency is pretty violent towards human life.
| shieVae4I wrote:
| > Manufacturing, Music, Politics and now The final big
| boss, money.
|
| Isn't that a "they laughed at Galileo" argument?
|
| They though the Internet was snake oil. They thought
| Napster was snake oil. They thought BitTorrent was snake
| oil. ... but they also thought Pixelon was snake oil.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| Considering that almost all legitimate users have been
| priced out of the market due to ever-increasing
| transaction fees and increasingly draconian regulations
| (often stricter than for non-cryptocurrency) and the
| resulting interoperability issues...
|
| Yeah, I think it's safe to say that the primary use of
| cryptocurrency nowadays is as either casino chips or a
| money laundering mechanism. The economics no longer make
| any sense for anyone else.
| seibelj wrote:
| Is it so worthless that no one uses it, or so useful that
| only the highest-value transactors are willing to pay the
| fee?
|
| It's like arguing the most popular restaurant is so
| crowded, no one goes there anymore.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Plenty of crypto has low transaction fees these days.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Because email has no value except as a means of
| communication. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are
| massive speculation scams. It's popular because everyone
| wants to hold one in the hopes it goes up in value.
| There's no reason for it to go up in value except that
| other people think it will go up in value and want to buy
| one too.
|
| You're buying a number on a blockchain somewhere in the
| hope someone else will want it for more money, that's it.
| zzzeek wrote:
| it depends on how you count. if you measure "primary use
| of email" by number of emails, then yes spam wins out,
| but that's only because a tiny fraction of human users
| are sending out tens of millions of spams. if you measure
| "primary use of email" in terms of users, the vast
| majority of people who use email use it for useful, non
| spammy purposes. The same can't necessarily be said for
| cryptocurrencies, as far as trying to prove that
| cryptocurency has a large userbase that is not there just
| for speculation/inflation and/or illicit use cases.
| crummy wrote:
| Are there numbers on what the primary uses of
| cryptocurrency are? I would guess remittances, purchasing
| illegal things, purchasing legal things, and ransomware -
| but I'm not sure in what order.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I have a lot of digital artist friends who used to rely
| on live performances and installations for their money,
| now they're seriously killing it selling NFTs
|
| Some of them opt out of more environmentally unfriendly
| stuff like Ethereum for sure
|
| Personally I've developed systems for paying for everyday
| things like your bus fare or phone bill using crypto in a
| country where there's a hell of a lot less confidence in
| fiat (Brazil) -- hell check out the history of the
| Brazilian Real if you want an idea of what real candycorn
| money looks like
|
| Personally I just feel a hell of a lot of privileged
| bullshit out of people arguing that crypto is some good
| for nothing shit. Yeah sure great try living in a country
| where your government is fucked. We truly don't live in
| some francis fukuyama neoliberal fantasy world where we
| can trust stuff like traditional financial markets which
| have gone and failed us in the non english speaking world
| time and time again. I welcome any and all alternatives
| mandelken wrote:
| TL;DR [CITATION NEEDED] ;-)
|
| Wow, you can actually pay your bus fare and phone bills
| in Brazil with crypto? That sounds either very impressive
| or totally unbelievable.
|
| I could not find anything on Google, so if someone could
| you link/cite to some actually used examples (I guess
| apps or utility website?) that would be very helpful.
| Sincere thanks.
| idlewords wrote:
| I think it also depends on what you count as "use". The
| #1 function of Bitcoin is as a speculative asset.
| morelisp wrote:
| I am not sure remittance counts as a "use", especially if
| it is only useful for remitting money _because_ it is
| also actually "used" for settling ransomware payouts or
| buying cocaine.
| Jarwain wrote:
| I think the interesting use is more in the blockchain
| than the currency. Public, verifiable, tied to an
| identity, decentralized statements that can be used as
| public records or provide an audit trail.
| Cryptographically & blockchain secured bodycams is an
| example that I've been looking into recently
| yannoninator wrote:
| basically piracy bad, bittorrent bad, ok lets ban
| bittorrent.
|
| edit: downvoters, look, you're supposed to swap 'piracy'
| with [insert bad thing about cryptocurrency] and
| 'bittorrent' with your favourite cryptocurrency of choice.
|
| capeesh?
| Zababa wrote:
| I wouldn't agree that piracy is the same thing as a scam,
| so the analogy doesn't really works. When people download a
| bittorrent client, most of the time they know exactly what
| they're doing and that's what they're going to get. No scam
| here. The thing is that bittorrent moves information, and
| crypto moves money, and there's a bigger chance of things
| being a scam when it's about money. Maybe something like
| religions and sects would be a good analogy? Religions will
| bring you lots of information you may not care about, and
| sects will try to scam you of your money. But some
| religions have mandatory donations so the analogy isn't
| perfect.
| SamBam wrote:
| > Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a
| scam to me.
|
| I think everyone is talking past each other, because no one's
| exactly defining what the "scam" is, so you're talking about
| different things.
|
| I don't think anyone's suggesting that, say, deep in the
| BitCoin code there is some algorithm giving Satoshi Nakamoto
| a dollar for evert transaction.
|
| On the other hand, I believe that the vast majority of buyers
| are buying simply because they hope that someone _else_ will
| buy at a higher price tomorrow, or next year.
|
| This causes everyone to cheer-lead about how everyone else
| needs to buy or HODL, because they simply want to drive the
| price up.
|
| For me, personally, I'd say this is what I'd call a "scam,"
| in the sense that a MLM company is a "scam": that the
| motivation of the majority of people extolling the virtues of
| buying crypto tends to be simply personal enrichment.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Yeah. And I think some people see that and think, "okay I
| can get in on that too!" while others think, "this whole
| thing smells and can't be sustainable."
|
| I fall into the latter camp. I don't begrudge the former. I
| just don't think it'll last and have little taste for
| speculating.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah, U.S. household net worth is near all-time lows in Fed
| balance sheet terms and people think crypto is the scam: http
| s://mobile.twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/13987339019132641...
| chrisbolt wrote:
| What does "in Fed balance sheet terms" mean?
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| I think they're referring to the ratio of household
| wealth to total value of the fed balance sheet. Which is
| a number easy to calculate and his claim is factually
| true (mostly because the fed balance sheet has never been
| bigger).
|
| But while his claim is true, in a Boolean sense, I don't
| know what exactly we're supposed to conclude about the
| world based on it. This isn't a ratio I've ever seen
| talked about before.
|
| I'm guessing they're insinuating that the size of the
| feds balance sheet is somehow related to inflation, which
| it is only in a fairly loose sense.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Some analysts joke that the first thing you're shown when
| you arrive in hell in a chart of the S&P divided by the
| Fed balance sheet
| TchoBeer wrote:
| What's the joke I don't get it
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That US household net worth is falling despite the fact
| that real estate prices and stock prices are near all
| time highs.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Something being wrong with the economy doesn't preclude
| Bitcoin from being a scam. That's a false dilemma you're
| proposing.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This, this is a scam:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL Notice the 5x
| supply increase without a corresponding 5x in economic
| efficiency. Bitcoin is what it is. It's worth what people
| think it's worth. Just like gold. Gold has minimal
| practical use in real life but it was used as a type of
| money off and on for 5000 years.
| lottin wrote:
| All money is worth what people think it's worth. Next
| question.
| CalChris wrote:
| It's actually a whataboutism but otherwise I agree.
| wmf wrote:
| I'm a tech guy. I've spent years experimenting with crypto
| and it isn't fit for any legitimate purpose.
| tuesdayrain wrote:
| You're not very good at experimenting then. I first bought
| BTC in 2013 because of a legitimate purpose: to pay for
| online goods (legal software) to a seller who wanted to
| completely eliminate any risk of chargebacks.
| eli wrote:
| And 8 years later the fees no longer make it viable for
| even that niche use case.
| tuesdayrain wrote:
| Surely you recognize that this is a bad faith argument?
| The average transaction fee today is around $8 USD.
| That's a small price to pay for knowing that a
| transaction is set in stone.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> The author saying the "silent majority tech people" know
| its a scam is such nonsense to my experience. Every tech
| person I know thinks either A) its neat /super cool, or B)
| they don't know anything about it besides memes._
|
| Counterpoint: most "tech people" I know -- including people
| who have worked in crypto -- both know about it and also
| think it's a scam.
| meowkit wrote:
| That's the real point. For the author, me, or you to claim
| what most tech people think is ridiculous.
| forwardslash wrote:
| How have you done a deep dive on Tether and not seen it as
| deeply troubling?
| meowkit wrote:
| Did I say I did not find it deeply troubling?
| forwardslash wrote:
| You said
|
| > Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is
| a scam to me
|
| Which I took as an implication that you didn't see Tether
| as a deeply troubling or a scam
| meowkit wrote:
| Tether is an application, not a core technology.
| Stablecoins would fit that quote.
|
| Tethers management is the problem - obfuscation and using
| other crypto as collateral instead of just USD.
| [deleted]
| amingilani wrote:
| Please don't cherry pick the worst example and apply it for
| the whole population.
|
| Tether is one stablecoin, and arguably the worst example
| since it is literally the one coin every coiner will agree
| with you is a bad stablecoin. Do a deep dive on MakerDAO's
| DAI instead.
| eli wrote:
| When tether implodes a lot is going down with it.
| xXx_uwu_xXx wrote:
| Capitalism is the scam. Cryptocurrency is just an extension of
| it.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| You're actually _almost_ right. While Bitcoin was launched
| with lofty goals, it was pretty quickly overtaken by
| capitalist vultures who saw a low-regulation industry to
| extract money from people.
|
| Importantly though, it's not an either/or. Capitalism is
| problematic _and_ cryptocurrency is problematic. Both can be
| true at the same time.
| lottin wrote:
| Bitcoin inventors were anarcho-capitalists, an ideology
| that promotes an extreme version of capitalism where there
| are no governments and corporations have unlimited power.
| mandelken wrote:
| Could you provide some background (or links) to your
| claim (I thought the inventor(s) of Bitcoin were
| anonymous)? Thank you.
| LanceH wrote:
| Go try something else.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's not. It's an economy. If you haven't engaged with the
| technology or even have a surface level understanding of
| traditional financial tooling like derivatives, options,
| futures, precious metals trading, etc. then you shouldn't
| parrot what someone on Twitter says. Take the time to
| understand the existing system and how smart contracts work and
| some of the blue chip protocols like https://aave.com/ or
| https://chain.link/ and then make an informed opinion.
| [deleted]
| msoad wrote:
| some of us were here and read it a while ago[1]. it is clever
| indeed but we have seen it can't be a currency as it
| originally claimed
|
| [1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1251519]
| fleddr wrote:
| This huge silent majority that know it is a scam doesn't exist.
|
| Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes
| thousands of hours to grasp.
|
| If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam
| so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority
| can't even answer 5% of the questions.
|
| Because they don't know crypto. At all.
| idlewords wrote:
| It's a hash tree with a vape cloud around it, not quantum
| chromodynamics. I think most people on this technical forum
| understand it just fine.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| The hard part is not the data structure behind it (Merkle
| tree) but the economics. An entirely new branch of
| economics has spun of it and it's far from trivial.
| eli wrote:
| I think the hard part is convincing people that it's a
| new branch of economics.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I can understand mapping out a new branch of a field is
| nontrivial. But I'd also hope that domain experts could
| explain it well enough to bring others to a basic level
| of understanding without saying, "it's too hard."
| jfrunyon wrote:
| "People had to invent entirely new ways to explain it
| because our existing models didn't work" isn't a very
| good argument for it being real.
| rsync wrote:
| Unnecessary.
|
| There are non-technical heuristics that we can all employ,
| through our knowledge of history and sociology, that allow us
| to identify late stage bubbles (and the pyramids and ponzis
| that accompany them).
|
| I don't have a taxi driver but I _do_ have taxi driver
| equivalents in my life that are currently giving me all the
| signals I need.
| paulgb wrote:
| > If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an
| exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent
| majority can't even answer 5% of the questions.
|
| I'd reckon that the average HN cryptocurrency skeptic would
| do better than the average person who's actually invested in
| crypto.
| djmashko2 wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing this exam!
| csande17 wrote:
| Count me as one of the people in the silent majority. (Well,
| not exactly "silent" because I'm talking about it now in
| Hacker News, but the things I write don't usually reach the
| general public.)
|
| You're right that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are always
| generating new work and coming up with new ideas. Actually,
| they do this a lot more easily than other domains, because
| the fact that their entire field is a scam means there are a
| lot fewer of those pesky roadblocks like "the idea not
| actually accomplishing the thing you think it does" to
| contend with.
|
| The fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency projects rest on
| one of a few obviously-false premises. Like "systems that
| require every participant to store the entire history of
| transactions forever scale well", or "people in the real
| world want every transaction they make to be completely
| irreversible", or "digital legers are guaranteed to
| accurately track the state of real-world objects". If you
| dismiss these, you can dismiss all the projects that depend
| on them without needing to know the difference between a
| MerkleCat and a SatoshKitty.
| ertian wrote:
| It does not rest on any of those assumptions. Those are
| just characteristics of the very first implementation.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes
| thousands of hours to grasp._
|
| The thing is, regular money is, from a certain perspective,
| also a "scam". A lot of the financial system is effectively
| make-believe, with massive conflicts of interest at every
| corner and dynamics that keep working because everyone
| believes they should - until, for one reason or another, they
| stop believing, and then you have 2008.
|
| Crypto is just another big mountain of make-believe systems
| (and getting bigger with every new contraption), but it is so
| young that the games of pretend are still very visible; and
| the key actors in crypto are different from the key actors in
| regular finance, which means it gets a bad rap from the
| latter. But if it can survive long enough (say, 30 or 40
| years), people will just stop pointing out the "scam" and
| will go along with it, because "why not? If it works, it
| works".
| jfrunyon wrote:
| Fiat money has value because it is widely, almost
| universally, accepted in exchange for things of intrinsic
| value (food, shelter, toys, tools).
|
| I'm not aware of any non-government-backed fiat currency
| which has gained widespread use in the history of humanity.
| And in fact all of the fiat currencies I know of originated
| as representative money.
|
| Bitcoin is _not_ widely accepted in exchange for things of
| values, and I see no reason to believe that will ever
| change. Being able to spend it is the "killer app" of
| cryptocurrencies, and none of them have actually
| implemented it, despite many, many attempts.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > it takes thousands of hours to grasp.
|
| It really doesn't. But that is a convenient way to dismiss
| criticism from everyone who isn't a crypto insider (which is
| a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the people who spend that much
| time on it will necessarily be bought into it, the people who
| are critical will have given up caring about it at some point
| so will never have the necessary "credentials" to talk about
| it).
| megameter wrote:
| Twitter crypto-haters essentially act as the "anti" to the
| crypto-bro "pro".
|
| Both repeat the same memes to each other in a self-
| reenforcing echo chamber. The underlying link is to political
| consensus. Leftist-socialist Twitter is eager to say that
| socialism is good because Bitcoin is bad. Trumpist-
| conservativist Twitter loves to say that Bitcoin is good
| because Joe Biden is bad. Nihilistic crypto permabulls are so
| hyped up that they jump into every thread to defend their
| favorites and their negativity is usually limited to the
| dismissive "sorry you want to be poor".
|
| It never really goes anywhere. Someone comes up with a new
| crypto narrative - adoption, value, environmental impacts,
| human interest - and it's all you hear about for the next
| month. If you try to find good information you are presented
| with an opaque wall of obvious scams, not as obvious scams,
| and people who believe or do not believe in them.
|
| There is interesting stuff going on, but the people studying
| it carefully are so hard to find through all the noise now.
|
| It's easier when there's a bear market.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Yet one would hope that if the discussion is on HN, then
| we'd rise above flamewars, and talk specifics, specific
| limitations, specific advantages, etc.
| aeternum wrote:
| "A lot of observers", "Many people say", "Everyone says". Let's
| stop using weasel words, if you consider yourself a techie,
| come up with some real evidence-based arguments.
| knolan wrote:
| When I first heard of cryptocurrency I was reminded of when
| people started idling in Team Fortress 2 to get content drops. It
| was such a daft cart before the horse approach, but of course
| those dropped items could be sold for fractions of a penny and
| people can be dumb.
|
| It also reminded me of Folding at Home. Here people completed by
| virtue of their personal compute resources.
|
| Of course crypto serves as neither a form of entertainment or
| scientific discovery and is just a massive waste of resources to
| create artificial wealth. If only all that computation did
| something useful.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| I've come to the conclusion that Bitcoin was a perfect
| "isolated" P2P currency system. If it was just considered
| Monopoly money, that is. The moment you try to find its worth
| by buying/selling it against Fiat - you get the exact same
| thing you get when you allow real world trading on any game
| currency - scams.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Isn't there some way to combine proof of work and actually
| useful work?
| ctchocula wrote:
| No, there's not. It's a fundamental principle among PoS
| cryptocurrencies that the work needs to have no additional
| utility or else it will help the attacker "subsidize" 51%
| attacks against the cryptocurrency you've built, because now
| they can both launch 51% attacks which cost $X abut subsidize
| it by selling the useful compute for $Y they've gotten by
| launching the attack, which ends up costing $X - $Y.
|
| Compared with a PoS cryptocurrency yielding no useful compute
| as a side effect, it costs $Y cheaper for someone to 51%
| attack.
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| I am a PhD student at a university in Roma3. Tomorrow I'll have
| to explain a student that, no, I won't give access to AI lab's
| Teslas to let them research a Deep Learning algorithm to forecast
| bitcoin price. Groan.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Twitter is a bad blogging platform.
| jarbus wrote:
| Curious to see how the author would suggest we donate to
| organizations like WikiLeaks without Bitcoin
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am not sure why this is flagged - it seems a reasonable and
| timely opinion piece.
|
| Cryptocurrency is a subject that has to have a deep and public
| debate. What the OP is saying (which I take to be "the tech world
| has a duty to point out the flaws in cryptocurrency to avoid
| giving an impression of a clean bill of health to every ICO out
| there") - that is a valid socially useful debate.
|
| There are valid real world uses of bitcoin (see Turkey shutting
| down payment apps recently). but yeah it is also a volatile wild
| west that is miles away from anyone's expectation of normal
| regulated currency behaviour.
|
| Yes there is a crying need for an "internet native" currency.
| What will that be - I don't know. But it is not here yet, and it
| is reasonable to make that clear and loud.
| Graffur wrote:
| It's flagged because it's flame baiting. It's posting opinions
| and acting like it's representing the "tech world". This is
| just some unknown twitter account
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I mean he is not _famous_ but not quite unknown.
|
| Here for example is The Economist on his bookmarking site:
|
| >>> Mr Ceglowski runs Pinboard, a paid social-bookmarking
| service which allows subscribers to store web links with
| annotations and share them with others. In broad terms, it is
| similar to Delicious, which Yahoo! acquired in 2005.
|
| https://www.economist.com/babbage/2011/04/04/stick-a-pin-
| in-...
|
| But yes, this is a controversial subject. It shouldn't be. It
| should be an easy yes / no. But something is wrong. We should
| not be afraid of the discussion about what is wrong.
| dang wrote:
| Edit: oh, the much simpler answer is that it was posted twice
| and both posts were on the front page. People flagged the dupe.
| That's fair. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336405.
|
| ---
|
| I think the submitted title probably had something to do with
| it; As a title, "the emperor has no clothes" is generic and
| baity. It's also false in the sense that there's no consensus
| view, so to the extent that the analogy is meaningful, it
| doesn't apply. I've attempted to replace that with a more
| neutral and representative title now, drawn from the author's
| own words. Suggestions for a better title are welcome.
|
| Beyond that, HN has had so many threads arguing the same points
| about cryptocurrency over and over, that it's not clear there
| can ever again be a new discussion about it. Repetition is a
| curiosity killer, and usually indignation takes its place as
| people resort to hammering each other over the head with the
| same dumbed-down clubs, back and forth.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| However, I think we can try turning the flags off on this one
| because Macjiej is at least trying to take a different and more
| specific angle on cryptocurrency critique.
| idlewords wrote:
| Thanks for your honest broker moderation, here and in all the
| other places you do it.
|
| I do find it interesting that there's this putatively 100%
| tech topic that has the same dynamic as political threads.
| dang wrote:
| It's certainly not a 100% tech topic? there aren't any (or
| hardly any) of those anyhow, no? but the main thing I want
| to say is thanks for that "putatively". Post HN I want to
| work on a society for endangered words.
|
| Edit: IMO the dynamic that the explicitly-political threads
| and this sort of thread have in common is that people's
| identities become strongly vested in their position. The
| more we do that the more it feels like our existence is
| being threatened, rather than just our view.
|
| That happens with the strongest tech themes sometimes, for
| example when people (god help us) identify strongly for or
| against some $BigCo or $celebrity. Large sums of money
| being involved are a 10x multiplier of that dynamic too.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> Beyond that, HN has had so many threads arguing the same
| points about cryptocurrency over and over, that it's not
| clear there can ever again be a new discussion about it.
|
| Fair point. Sad, but fair :-)
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| Plus, cryptos are responsible of 1% of world elecrticity
| consumption. Holy cow.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| The difference between Bitcoin and a pyramid scheme is that most
| pyramids are basically zero sum games... for every dollar one
| player makes, another player loses a dollar.
|
| Bitcoin, due to its mining costs, is a massively negative sum
| game. So much worse.
| alecbz wrote:
| Isn't all currency more or less a "pyramid scheme" in the sense
| that Bitcoin is?
|
| I wish we had more subtlety in our discourse. It feels like it's
| all either blind admiration or blind condemnation.
|
| Bitcoin is trying to be a new currency. Currencies more or less
| operate on "collective delusion". I think many people scratching
| their heads at why Bitcoin is worth anything _are_ missing
| something, which is why any currency has any value at all, which
| is itself kind of surprising and unintuitive.
|
| At the same time, I think it's fair to be a little more skeptical
| about what the value of a currency like Bitcoin is, precisely,
| and how much effort ought to be put into building it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No. Currency is guaranteed to be accepted for the payment of
| taxes in a particular jurisdiction, and that jurisdiction's
| courts will enforce judgments in that currency. These are
| material differences.
| jedberg wrote:
| Fiat currency is backed by courts and regulation, which is
| backed by a literal army, and the threats of violence that army
| brings. If someone steals your fiat USD, there will eventually
| be someone with guns removing you from society if you don't
| return them.
|
| Cryptocurrency has no such backing.
| idlewords wrote:
| When I say pyramid scheme, I don't mean it in the sort of
| philosophical way that you could apply to all fiat currency,
| but in the "OMG look at Tether" way.
| alecbz wrote:
| Ah, I might be out of the loop. tl;dr?
| kemonocode wrote:
| Tether, which is the most used so-called "stablecoin" (As
| its value is pegged to the USD) is extremely seedy at
| _best_ and has had brushes with the law already [0] or is
| outright a Ponzi scheme [1] and plenty of people arguing
| for /against crypto know and have said so already.
|
| Personally, even though I'm a proponent of cryptocurrency
| in general, I wish it'd disappear in spite of any short and
| middle-term calamitous consequences on perceived value if
| that means one less "dumbed-down club" (Using dang's words)
| when it comes to discussing crypto.
|
| [0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-
| james-...
|
| [1] https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-
| ponzi-sche...
| kemonocode wrote:
| A not so insignificant part of me wishes Tether would crash
| already so it'd kill that argument dead for crypto
| detractors. It'd be interesting to see how Bitcoin's value
| would look after. I _really_ doubt it 'd be zero.
| willhslade wrote:
| This is and is not true. The implicit value of a currency is
| backed by being able to tax the citizens. This is why there are
| federal but not state / province level currencies as the
| friction of conversion is a dead weight loss.
| sentrysapper wrote:
| "Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are
| minted".
|
| You make a valid point, I do trust that our government will
| come to collect what's due from the citizens, but what about
| the corporations?
|
| Worth noting there are quite a number of what are known as
| Community currencies still active in the US & Canada:
|
| USA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_curren
| cies...
|
| Canada: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_cur
| rencies...
| alecbz wrote:
| > The implicit value of a currency is backed by being able to
| tax the citizens.
|
| Elaborate? Not sure why this would be true.
|
| I'm pretty sure there are plenty of "commodity currencies"
| (shells, salt, even gold) that achieved value without some
| central agency controlling the currency that could also levy
| taxes.
| segmondy wrote:
| Just gonna sound like a hater, folks worship success. They will
| listen to anyone who made millions betting on cryptocurrency over
| any smart person who didn't and is "jealous" for missing out.
|
| One mistake us "smart" folks make is thinking that investing is
| about understanding a system that's complete and smart. Most
| investments are not like black jack but more like poker where it
| all comes down to behavioral economics and psychology. Doesn't
| matter how stupid the actually game is, it's about the meta game
| with the crowd.
|
| Plenty of tech folks making money in crypto know this, wallstreet
| going into crypto knows this. Most of us in tech are too autistic
| to play on that level. So focused on the correctness of the tech.
|
| For the players it's a big casino and they know it. The lucky
| winners will be rewarded for having heart and playing
| npteljes wrote:
| FOMO is real when I hear people talking about crypto. I feel
| the hype and I notice it in others too. Cool names flying
| around, there's a new type of coin for every coffee break we're
| having, the graphs go high, memes churned out every second.
| Colleague makes tenth of his salary with his GPU. Hard to
| remain neutral.
| paul_f wrote:
| Brilliant point. I agree. Cryptocurrencies are fueled almost
| exclusively by FOMO. Tether is a joke and probably a scam,
| yet somehow has a $60B market value. SMH.
| Grim-444 wrote:
| This is similar to my recent realization - as much as I believe
| it's a complete ponzi scheme, a near complete scam, as long as
| there's enough people who don't know better who can be conned
| to buy into it, it will keep getting propped up. In this age of
| mass media and the internet where everyone is so infinitely,
| immediately connected, there's no shortage of more suckers to
| buy in, there's no shortage of propaganda techniques to sucker
| more people in. As long as there's more suckers, it can keep
| getting propped up, no matter how unsound it actually is, no
| matter how much of a scam it actually is. It reminds me of the
| quote "the markets can remain irrational longer than you can
| remain solvent".
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| this used to be called the "greater fool theory" of investing.
| i think the funniest thing about crypto is that its touted as
| the ultra complex, high tech mathy panacea, but in its actual
| function and utility to people, its most similar to beanie
| babies or baseball cards.
| chedine wrote:
| One thing is for sure. HN community has never gotten any trends
| correct. That must say something. FAANG, crypto, AI, javascript
| etc gets hate. Post about lisp, shell, emacs and if will be
| hailed :- Bring the downvotes now.
| tuesdayrain wrote:
| A lot of people underestimate the value provided by a payment
| system that makes chargebacks impossible. Yes, it's a double-
| edged sword that needs to be used carefully. But it makes perfect
| sense for markets where one side has an established reputation,
| while the other doesn't.
| yoloyoloyoloa wrote:
| I see more and more tweets and articles like this posted here on
| hackernews that echo the sentiments of the world economic forum
| on how they feel about cryptocurrency. Remember they are the very
| people that say you should:"Own nothing and be happy".
|
| If you think cryptocurrency is a scam then you havnt looked into
| the technology behind it and the economies that have been built
| using these technologies.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| There's real technology and products and economics behind MLMs
| like Herbalife and Young Living too. Doesn't make them any less
| of a scam.
| [deleted]
| crgi wrote:
| Fully agree. The current/legacy financial infrastructure is
| actually 10 times more decentralized than any DLT: DLT is the
| same software run on multiple nodes. SWIFT in contrast is a
| protocol, that anyone can implement. So its hundreds of software
| teams, building and operating their part of the infrastructure
| and integrating with each other. The SWIFT protocol itself is
| maintained by the member organizations, anyone can bring in
| proposals. The complexity of it does not come from technology,
| but the regulatory requirements which differ vastly across the
| world.
| yaa_minu wrote:
| Bitcoin is also a protocol and there are several
| implementations. The same applies to the lightening protocol
| which has about 7 different client implementations and growing.
| khazhoux wrote:
| In the same 7-day span a couple of weeks ago, I saw headlines
| about crypto's legitimization in the market, and a $1 BILLION
| crypto donation to COVID efforts in India. I can't believe both
| simultaneously.
| Swizec wrote:
| Git is the most wildly successful and broadly useful application
| of the ~blockchain~ merkle tree data structure. It's fantastic
| and here to stay.
|
| The digital money angle? Eh it's okay. Everyone loves a gullible
| population that _prefers_ to be paid in not-money.
|
| Eventually crypto will have to invent all the overhead and
| governance it was trying to escape. You know, so things like
| Musk's little pump-and-dump the other week stop being possible.
|
| For the downvoters: The original bitcoin paper explicitly says
| it's using a merkle tree data structure under the hood. Same as
| that used by git.
| Hamuko wrote:
| How is git an application of blockchain when it predates
| Bitcoin by several years?
| Swizec wrote:
| It's the same data structure. Bitcoin just added the proof-
| of-work idea to extending the chain and attached the concept
| of "value" as a social construct.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
| Hamuko wrote:
| How does consensus work in git?
| Swizec wrote:
| Multiple peer reviewers look at a pull request and when
| it passes muster, it gets merged to the longest chain.
| You can always make a fork and keep going with a new
| chain.
|
| Same as bitcoin. You can always split off a new chain.
| You might not convince everyone that your new chain is
| _the_ chain, but you're welcome to try.
| Hamuko wrote:
| a) Where is there a requirement for "multiple peer
| reviews" on git?
|
| b) What is the longest chain? How do I determine if the
| longest chain is in Gitlab, on my computer or my
| coworker's computer? Where does the pull request go?
|
| c) How do I indicate that I have approved a pull request
| in git?
| Swizec wrote:
| I don't have these answers for you, it depends on the
| project.
|
| How do you know that the exchange you're using buys
| bitcoin on the same blockchain as the exchange I use?
| Because they said so?
|
| When's the last time you downloaded the whole blockchain
| for any coin and verified the whole sequence of blocks
| from the very first one? I certainly never have. But I
| regularly have the whole chain for git projects on my
| machine.
|
| Point is it's the same data structure. Bitcoin's
| innovation is in how blocks get added, but it's not as
| revolutionary as it looks from the hype. Read the
| original paper if you don't believe me, it's very well
| written and incredibly approachable
| macawfish wrote:
| I can understand peoples' frustration with the artificial
| scarcity, but would like to see this same energy over the
| artificial scarcity of housing and free time. The oligopoly of
| national money systems is currently failing to provide people
| with basic access to capital. There's nothing intrinsic about
| cryptocurrency that will necessarily help this or exacerbate it,
| but the fact that I can get better interest on US dollars by
| depositing stablecoins on some defi platform, with no
| gatekeeping, is an indictment of conventional financial
| institutions more than it is of blockchain tech.
| gregable wrote:
| Tons of other risky assets have high "interest rates". Sell
| puts on high volatility stocks for example.
| texaswhizzle wrote:
| It's not artificial scarcity, it's outright fake scarcity.
|
| The total supply of Bitcoin is 21,000,000 coins. However, every
| single coin is 100,000,000 individual assets.
|
| 21,000,000 sounds pretty finite. But 21,000,000,000,000,000
| sounds a tad less finite. The price of Bitcoin relies on the
| fundamental false premise that it's scarce.
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| That's like saying pizza isnt scarce because you can cut one
| into 1000 tiny slices. Or gold isnt scarce because you can
| cut 1 bar into 1 tiny million pieces. Pretty hilarious
| misconception
| Graffur wrote:
| 1 = x
|
| 1/100,000,000 = x/100,000,000
|
| "stacking sats" is a common phrase so it's not really a
| secret that a bitcoin can be subdivided. In fact, a lot of
| bitcoin supports would support people learning this fact.
| texaswhizzle wrote:
| There is nothing special or important about a single entire
| Bitcoin. It's completely arbitrary. The question is whether
| Bitcoin is scarce. If there are millions of trillions of
| tradeable assets, it's not scarce.
| charlesarthur wrote:
| "the fact that I can get better interest on US dollars by
| depositing stablecoins on some defi platform"..
|
| There was this guy called Madoff. He was able to get better
| interest than the markets for quite a while too. Those
| stablecoins are not contributing to the productive economy.
| They're not being invested in machines that make new cars,
| clear carbon from the air, produce cheaper food. Nothing about
| cryptocurrency will solve housing or free time, because those
| are _political_ problems which require humans to come together
| with a common aim - not, in the complete opposite example,
| people just wanting more for themselves by "depositing
| stablecoins on some defi platform".
| sedatk wrote:
| That's just an overly simplistic summary of the whole thread.
| Pinboard isn't angry about artificial scarcity, but how
| cryptocurrency fails to fulfill its promises: it fails to
| decentralize, it fails to reach performance levels of existing
| financial institutions, it wastes huge amounts of energy, and
| it provides zero value other than being a ransomware enabler.
| (Disclaimer: I own cryptocurrency)
| lefrenchy wrote:
| If i'm correct you can get upwards of like 5-10% interest on
| those platforms?
|
| Can you simply explain to me where that money comes from? That
| just seems like an absurd amount of interest. Considering the
| crypto/inflation hawk intersection, i'd presume people would be
| skeptical of all this "free" money?
| Bayart wrote:
| If I'm not wrong, the average yearly ROI of something like
| S&P 500 has been around 7-8% over the last 70 years.
|
| Since you're French as well, I can tell you that here it
| gives about 4-5% in yearly returns.
|
| So it's not unheard of returns with traditional asset
| classes. As far as I'm aware, the money in that specific case
| comes from interests paid by those taking loans (from the
| funds that's you're putting out) or from staking rewards (in
| the case of staking cryptocurrencies using proof of stake).
| c01n wrote:
| > What we especially need to stress to regulators...
|
| Lol. Talking like that obviously shows that cryptocurrencies are
| not for you. This tech has cypherpunk and crypto-anarchy roots,
| regulators/governments are not the intended users for this tech,
| even if you like it or not. If you do not view cryptocurrencies
| from an cypherpunk perspective you will not see their social
| benefits, it is an entire way of life an alternative view from
| the centralized shit show we have now. Yes the tech has flaws,
| just like how digicash, hashcash, b-money etc had flaws, this is
| an evolutionary process and nothing you or your government says
| can stop it.
| bambax wrote:
| > _nothing you or your government says can stop it_
|
| Oh yeah? Let's find out.
| marricks wrote:
| I think that cyberpunk dream died when billionaires and VC got
| involved and Bitcoin (and other) currencies skyrocketed in
| price from millions of people playing crypto-lottery.
|
| Strikes against it:
|
| - It's burning a massive amount of resources and that is just
| increasing
|
| - I don't have the stats but I imagine the exponential growth
| in Bitcoin/coin prices is mainly from people using it as a
| pyramid scheme/casino not simple an upticl in usage
|
| - A transaction is still pretty trackable (we know where the mt
| gox money is, yeah?)
|
| - Over 60% of bitcoin mining takes place in one country on
| specialized hardware, not terribly decentralized anymore
| [deleted]
| c01n wrote:
| > It's burning a massive amount of resources and that is just
| increasing
|
| Do you own a car? Have you ever used plastic? How much
| resources are burned by banks?
|
| > I don't have the stats but I imagine the exponential growth
| in Bitcoin/coin prices is mainly from people using it as a
| pyramid scheme/casino not simple an upticl in usage
|
| Yea lets also ban computers because they allow
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| > A transaction is still pretty trackable (we know where the
| mt gox money is, yeah?)
|
| Ever heard about Zcash or Monero
|
| > Over 60% of bitcoin mining takes place in one country on
| specialized hardware, not terribly decentralized anymore
|
| Yes the tech is not perfect but tons of research (Proof of
| Stake etc) is happening to make it perfect.
| [deleted]
| char8 wrote:
| Seems lobsided. Sure Bitcoin suffers from high fees, but it
| serves well as a savings account. We've also started accepting
| litecoin payments on our site: I set it up once, and forgot about
| it. With Paypal it's a never-ending rigamarole.
|
| I've recently closed my bank account, and started using something
| a bit more up-to-date (Revolut). I believe Bitcoin is the single
| biggest innovation driver in the tech sector right now.. but
| sure.. it's a scam.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > I believe Bitcoin is the single biggest innovation driver in
| the tech sector right now
|
| Not gonna lie, I laughed at this.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please make your substantive points without swipes?
| It's hard for conversations like this to stay interesting and
| this sort of exchange tends to push them over a cliff.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| char8 wrote:
| Yes sorry it was a typo. I meant to write:
|
| > I believe Bitcoin is the single biggest innovation driver
| in the *fin*tech sector right now.
|
| Obviously not the biggest driver in tech; i don't blame you
| fr laughing at this statement.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I needed that too.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| Bitcoin is more like a security, with characteristics more akin
| to rare metals than a savings account. It's entirely unfit for
| that purpose.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That makes it a commodity, not a security. Securities are
| very specific things described by the SEC Act and the Howey
| test.
|
| But if you don't like Bitcoin you can use USD based cryptos
| like DAI or USDC to transact and conduct peer-to-peer
| lending, purchase art work, save with higher yield, provide
| liquidity in a peer to peer marketplace, etc. By no means do
| you have to choose Bitcoin.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> Sure Bitcoin suffers from high fees, but it serves well as a
| savings account._
|
| Does it? Your Bitcoin "savings account" would have lost over
| 45% of its value over the past month and a half.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| A friend of mine paid another friend of mine $80 in BTC for a
| trip we did about 5 years ago. That BTC, never touched, is
| now worth $5000. At any rate, it's definitely volatile,
| because the asset class is still a small (but growing) potato
| in the grand scheme of commodities markets. One thing we can
| be sure of, it will never go negative in price, unlike oil.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I'd be pretty alarmed if my untouched savings account grew
| by 6250% over five years.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Would you be alarmed if your untouched savings account
| debased by 50% or so in purchasing power since then?
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Yes. That's the point. Bitcoin serves _incredibly poorly_
| as a savings account, along every conceivable axis.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| When you save money, do you save for the long term or for
| 1.5 months from now? If you save for the long term, and
| you're earning 0.5% interest on your $10K, how much less
| can you buy with it now, in terms of real estate, rent,
| stocks, commodities, etc?
|
| Also, note it is entirely possible to invest on what's
| called a risk curve. You can allocate some portion of
| your savings, maybe 5-10% as a hedge. No need to go all
| in. Maybe 0.5%. at any rate, your savings account has
| cost you 50% or more in purchasing power for meaningful
| assets in the past 5 years. While you've gained a great
| deal of purchasing power if you held crypto.
| idlewords wrote:
| Oil prices didn't go negative, the price of a financial
| derivative did.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| True, but people often just use oil as shorthand for oil
| futures.
| char8 wrote:
| Depends on your timeframe.
|
| Yes i've lost a lot of my net worth compared to last month.
|
| Compared to last year, i'm up 3.5x.
|
| That's one of the things i like about using Bitcoin as a
| savings account, it makes me think more longterm about my
| finances.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I have had banks stealing my funds for years -- be it financial
| providers eating up my first 401k contributions in excessive
| fees, be it the banks that charged me $2 every time I used an
| ATM, be it the random charges unauthorized charges that the bank
| pulled from my account...
|
| Then there is the watching all my adult life as assets grow more
| expensive and further out of reach, a debt treadmill emerges to
| ensure the continued struggle of the middle class lest they try
| to escape their position.
|
| This is in the west. I can't imagine the shenanigans banks play
| on folks in less regulated jurisdictions. Maciej, I'm sorry that
| you refuse to get it. We need hard money to prevent the value
| loss of the time-store fruits of our labor. We need an explicit
| spend model to prevent unauthorized charges. We need a way to
| prevent the custodian of funds from helping themselves to your
| pocket. Better yet, we need a digital store of value that does
| not require a trusted third party. And we need to make sure
| special interests can't dictate who is able to spend their money.
|
| For this, it is the most valuable thing on the planet.
| skybrian wrote:
| How are $2 ATM fees "stealing?" They provide a service, which
| you can pay for or easily avoid by planning ahead a bit.
|
| (And cryptocurrency charges even more.)
| digianarchist wrote:
| Wait until you see the fees for buying, selling and
| transferring crypto.
| gfodor wrote:
| Oddly enough I'm the diametric opposite: skeptical of crypto's
| long term value up until recently (but before the last big run
| up) - I now see it is a a fundamental hedge against
| totalitarianism among other things. Westerners can fail to grasp
| the potential benefits due to the privilege of the time and place
| they were born. At least for now.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| You do realize Maciej comes from a reasonably unprivileged time
| and place, right?
| Gatsky wrote:
| I still find the moralising about cryptocurrency curious and
| difficult to understand. It always takes the tone of 'We the
| nerds should...'. Never seen it applied to any other
| (dramatically more important) issues.
| blast wrote:
| I recently watched this video of Macjiej making the same points
| on CNBC. Not bad for TV.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igOmWeHMunw
| Uptrenda wrote:
| The problem I see is that everyone in tech seems to think they're
| an expert on cryptocurrencies while simultaneously being at the
| ignorant end of the Dunning-Kruger effect (and failing basic
| statistics.)
|
| Cryptocurrency makes it easy to enhance ones own confirmation
| bias because the industry has had such a bumpy ride towards
| progress. If you want to take an overly harsh perspective about
| the technology then by all means just Google 'a list of hacks and
| scams.' You'll be entertained for days with what you find, and at
| the end of your research you will have more than enough material
| to make yourself look smart on twitter.
|
| That's also another point. If you can talk about basic flaws in a
| technology by playing 'Dr Doom' then you can score free points
| from the audience without having to know much about the subject.
| It's an easy way to look credible because most people are
| followers on social media and won't have the time or interest to
| look more deeply.
|
| So lets look at the claim that cryptocurrency 'has no use and
| only causes problems.' To disprove this we only need to find a
| few examples of use-cases that are very hard if not impossible to
| do under traditional finance.
|
| 1. Trusts -- escrow -- jointly controlled accounts with arbitrary
| leverage over assets. You can't do this under the traditional
| financial system because the legal system can be used to dispute
| ownership which commonly happens when a will is attested.
|
| 2. Confidential transactions. Anonymous money and accounts.
| Traditional finance views this as a disadvantage, whereas FinTech
| views privacy as a right.
|
| 3. Flash loans. Flash loans are a way to finance a smart contract
| that borrows money and repays it atomically in a single
| transaction. Flash loans have radically changed capital markets
| but their power is still being understood. Potentially this is a
| new form of funding for automated companies.
|
| 4. Price stability. It's possible to design cryptocurrencies in
| such a way that their price trends towards some function. This
| property is highly desirable when people are going to be storing
| their wealth long-term. If we can build more stable currencies we
| can protect against flash crashes and even economic depression.
|
| 5. Smart contracts. Programmable agreements for wealth exchange
| make it possible to provide unique financial instruments that are
| engineered to be less risky than anything traditional markets can
| accomplish. This is due to increased transparency, collateral
| requirements, and protocols that help enforce fairness.
|
| There are too many examples to list in how cryptocurrencies are
| shaking up not just finance but many other industries. To claim
| that it all amounts to fraud, gambling, and ponzi schemes just
| tells me the author has no understanding of the transformations
| taking place right in front of them. They'll probably be left
| crying 'its a scam' long after society has silently replaced most
| aging FinTech with platforms that provide enforceable safe-
| guards... because in the end it is more transparent, flexible,
| and when done right -- safer than alternatives.
| losvedir wrote:
| I have a question: are there any "crypto-like" currencies?
|
| I do see value in being able to instantly exchange tokens which
| are generally liquid and convertible to local currency, with low
| fees, internationally, and in denominations that make sense to,
| e.g., tip a blogger for a post you like. The US could regulate
| the heck out of it, and the Venezuelan or Tanzanian farmer could
| use it more laissez faire.
|
| But none of that comes from the crypto aspect and PoW and
| untrusted decentralization. It could just be a non-profit with a
| DB and a public API.
|
| Are there any coins out there trying this?
| LegitShady wrote:
| "Come buy my non-profit's company scrip" doesn't sound as
| appealing as "this could go waaaaay up in value, buy my
| speculation scam"
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| It's hyperbole to say Bitcoin has no social benefit. It, at
| least, allows individuals to exchange payments between each other
| online without needing the consent of any private corporation or
| monopoly. Maybe it's not the most efficient way of doing it but
| decentralization has a cost. I think we are all patiently waiting
| for better alternatives.
| one2three4 wrote:
| >> without needing the consent of any private corporation or
| monopoly
|
| I'd say we all subsidize bitcoin and the likes indirectly and
| unwillingly through the price hikes in HW directly or
| indirectly attributed to something of dubious (to put it
| mildly) tangible value.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Bitcoin mining on anything other than ASICs is fools errand
| for many years now.
| kelp wrote:
| It still competes for fab space and raw materials.
| someguydave wrote:
| weekend commie nocoiners gotta upvote their hot takes
| idlewords wrote:
| Those individuals need the consent of at least two private
| corporations (whatever entity converts spendable money to
| Bitcoin and back on either end). Compare that to sending an
| envelope full of dollars.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > Those individuals need the consent of at least two private
| corporations
|
| Not true, you can exchange Bitcoin locally with other
| individuals. Mailing paper money or checks over postal
| service is not comparable to making payments using Bitcoin
| online. Especially when considering international payments.
| darepublic wrote:
| Yeah it's an end run around financial regulation. Run crypto run!
| satisfice wrote:
| It just feels weird getting financial and social advice from
| Pinboard. I thought it was just a thing to collect my links.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Pinboard is a one-man shop, he tweets all kinds of personal
| non-business related things on his twitter account.
| idlewords wrote:
| Content marketing, bro
| draw_down wrote:
| Without getting into the specific issue of Bitcoin, I'm
| absolutely uninterested in calls to "speak out about" something
| because I work with computers. No.
|
| We do not share a politics because we both know python or
| whatever. Leave me alone.
| sleeper_service wrote:
| Cryptocurrency is like some sort of economic viral weapon.
|
| It presents itself as a techno-utopian vision of freedom, takes
| advantage of greed to replicate itself throughout the financial
| system, and mutates to use as much energy and as many resources
| as possible.
|
| If it were designed for that purpose, it would be the most
| cynical indictment of capitalism conceived.
| tomgp wrote:
| for me the key tweet here is:
|
| > The two things people need to know about cryptocurrency are
| completely non-technical:
|
| > 1. If it doesn't work, it's just an easy to lose casino chip
|
| >2. If it works, it creates an end run around all financial
| regulation, and will be dominated by uses those regulations try
| to stop
|
| (edited for formatting)
| dehrmann wrote:
| The thing people also overlook on point 2 is that if
| cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech take over the traditional
| financial system, that doesn't mean bitcoin, or even etherium,
| did. In no way is bitcoin a bet on blockchain tech; people just
| tell themselves that story because it feels better than
| gambling on crypto trading cards. Nothing wrong with gambling
| on them, either; just don't say you're "investing."
| fleddr wrote:
| I could waste a huge amount of time refuting the author's points,
| but will make it more of a meta comment.
|
| Crypto is vast, complex, and inherently not suitable for binary
| thinking. I've studied the space for months and have come to the
| conclusion that crypto is two-sided in almost every aspect.
|
| Many/most coins are speculative, which you can associate with
| words like "greed" and "casino". Yet also provide wealth
| savings/growth to people locked out of it in our traditional
| system.
|
| NFTs are a cruel joke right now, yet ridiculous as they are, may
| be a precursor to various groundbreaking uses having real
| utility, in an exponential way.
|
| Smart contracts are largely dysfunctional, yet there's early
| success in replacing financial products like staking, lending,
| leverage. When it works, it's permission-less, which has
| interesting social benefits (access not defined by your
| identity/social class).
|
| And so on.
|
| I'm not here to debate any of these points, my only point is to
| not dismiss crypto as a whole (binary thinking) and to not
| underestimate it. The topic is too complex for it.
| cbzbc wrote:
| > Crypto is vast, complex, and inherently not suitable for
| binary thinking. I've studied the space for months and have
| come to the conclusion that crypto is two-sided in almost every
| aspect
|
| Is this a bit?
| lifty wrote:
| This is the most reasonable comment in this whole thread. It's
| good to acknowledge the current mania and the type of unethical
| behavior it attracts, but it would be intellectually lazy to
| dismiss the whole field.
| Popegaf wrote:
| The link is to a twitter (aka the cesspool of the internet). I
| do not expect anything non-binary to come out of there.
|
| The most sensationalist tweets get posted here all the time.
| It's not worth anybody's time taking them seriously.
| msoad wrote:
| Crypto == Cryptography over here. Just FYI
| ertian wrote:
| Huh? Not in the original article, or in OPs reply, unless I'm
| seriously misunderstanding him. He's talking about the
| pros/cons of cryptocurrency.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The twitter thread mostly uses the full term
| "cryptocurrency", which is not ambigous. Using the term
| "crypto" to refer to cryptocurrency is amigous and
| misleading.
| itisit wrote:
| > Using the term "crypto" to refer to cryptocurrency is
| amigous and misleading.
|
| To whom? "Crypto" is _the_ colloquial shorthand for
| "cryptocurrency". And I believe those thinking otherwise
| are reacting to the new usage encroaching on the old.
| Petty hill to die on...
| davesque wrote:
| What an original and thoughtful take on a topic that really
| hasn't gotten enough attention on HN up until now.
| friedman23 wrote:
| Would love to get a real time look at the dopamine rush the
| author got when writing this long winded diatribe. I can smell
| the self righteousness through my speakers.
| blintz wrote:
| I think this actually overstates the value of cryptocurrencies.
| The value of say, Bitcoin, isn't even connected to its value as a
| method of money laundering or extortion through ransomware.
| However morally objectionable these are, they do have economic
| value - it's just that value is not connected to the price of any
| cryptocurrency.
|
| Rather, the whole thing is an extended, worldwide pump-and-dump;
| speculation is driving all movement.
|
| To me, it's really sad, because Bitcoin (and some of its
| descendants) are intellectually fascinating. With simple building
| blocks that had been around for decades (hashing + public keys)
| someone made something profoundly new. It's in some ways
| inspiring, since it makes me feel there must be so much more out
| there to discover and build. It's also sad, because it shows how
| things you build can 'grow up' and become a little
| unrecognizable.
| DSingularity wrote:
| It's the combination of strong network effects and artificial
| scarcity driving the price action. You buy Bitcoin cause
| something about it really resonated with you. Price goes up and
| you feel validated. You go and naturally -- out of benevolent
| intentions -- tell your closes people so they don't miss out.
|
| The mistake of cryptocurrency is discounting the potential for
| price manipulation. Earl adopters understood cornered these
| markets immediately. Now we are in never ending cycles of hype,
| markup, dump, accumulate, hype, markup, distribute, and
| accumulate over years. These cycles are continuously producing
| winners and losers and the losers are generally those who have
| more to lose and are thus enable to withstand the intense
| pressure of bear markets.
|
| I love Bitcoin and Ethereum and all the potential freedom that
| they represent. At the same time - enough. These markets need
| regulation. We need to know who owns these coins. We need to
| see their selling patterns so we can see their manipulation.
|
| Unfortunately, the cynic in me knows that too many people are
| making too much money and are probably going to block
| regulation for a very long time.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > These cycles are continuously producing winners and losers
| and the losers are generally those who have more to lose and
| are thus enable to withstand the intense pressure of bear
| markets.
|
| This is the opposite of what I think is true so I'd love to
| see a citation for this claim.
| xpe wrote:
| > The value of say, Bitcoin, isn't even connected to its value
| as a method of money laundering or extortion through
| ransomware.
|
| No. Money launderers and extorters drive demand for
| cryptocurrencies. This affects its price.
|
| See: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
| tech/ne...
| nathias wrote:
| I'm so happy we have these enlightened people that can intuit the
| truth we, the delusional can not.
| mapgrep wrote:
| It's "not decentralized" and also it's used to move "billions in
| crime money around."
|
| Hmm.
|
| It's a fraudulent "con" and also very dangerous because it
| subverts regulations.
|
| Hmm.
|
| Seems pretty contradictory, no?
|
| You can either criticize bitcoin for not working or for working
| too well but Maciej seems to be trying to do both at once.
|
| I'm not a Bitcoin user or particularly a fan but these self
| contradicting attack lines don't seem likely to be politically
| effective. Just choose one. I'd go with "mostly used for crime."
| And then add "environmentally ruinous" for good measure.
| ketzo wrote:
| What makes you think that criminals are not capable of
| centralization?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| As a thought experiment, I imagined a Government/Central bank
| auctioning (for $) bitcoin denominated bonds. These bonds would
| be repayable (in bitcoin) on demand.
|
| Presumably each bond would fetch a value (in $) corresponding
| approximately to the current exchange rate. While the bond holder
| could cash them in at any point, why would they? Wouldn't many
| investors consider a bond backed by a major government at least
| as secure as a crypto coin?
|
| In this way, the government could effectively increase the supply
| of bitcoins (and presumably thereby reduce their cost/value).
|
| Of course, the Government runs the risk of bitcoin appreciating
| and then having all the bond holders cashing in, but with
| exceptionally deep pockets the only real reason to cash in would
| be if they feared a Government default.
|
| By selling enough bonds, presumably the price could be driven
| arbitrarily low, extinguishing the risk entirely.
| Geee wrote:
| The author clearly doesn't understand Bitcoin at all and Bitcoin
| has been already discussed for ten years by everyone in the tech
| world. His opinion is his own, not 'us in the tech world'.
| xpe wrote:
| > The author clearly doesn't understand Bitcoin at all
|
| Putting aside softer claims, writing "at all" is an
| exaggeration. Would you care to moderate your opinion or at
| least elaborate? Please point out area(s) where you think the
| author is mistaken?
| Geee wrote:
| His claims are false.
|
| Bitcoin has more social benefit than any other technology.
| Money is technology that runs our society by allowing us to
| trade our time between each other. Sound money that can't be
| diluted or stolen away by a few benefits everyone. It's not
| only more fair money, but it also allows perfectly efficient
| markets and saves the environment by not incentivizing
| overconsuming.
|
| Bitcoin is not used for money laundering, gambling, vaporware
| etc. and is not particularly well suited for those. His
| claims are not based on actual data.
|
| Bitcoin is decentralized. Bitcoin nodes which protect the
| monetary policy are run by users. It's not possible for
| anyone to weaken the currency by forcing users to run a
| weaker version of the software.
|
| Bitcoin actually solves the problem of central bank
| monopolies. It is money, it is a currency, it is a store of
| value. His claims are simply false.
|
| He just doesn't understand that it takes time for Bitcoin to
| stabilize at a certain value. It takes time for people to
| switch to a better money.
| lreeves wrote:
| One of the most tiring retorts is that if someone is negative
| about cryptocurrency then that means they don't understand
| cryptocurrency. I assure you many of us do understand it and
| still think it's an absolute scam and pure wealth distribution
| from the naive, to the slightly less naive, to the scammers.
| tzumby wrote:
| What is surprising is how large the number of techies who don't
| get this. It's not about crypto currencies as much as it is about
| the game theory that allows it to run a distributed self
| replicating state machine that is Byzantine tolerant - this is
| the true innovation
| [deleted]
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Right. The hilarious volatility and scams are imo much less
| interesting than this.
| xpe wrote:
| Your comment is unclear.
|
| > What is surprising is how large the number of techies who
| don't get this.
|
| What do you mean by "this"? Do you mean all of the points made
| by the author in the tweets?
|
| Or do you mean "the following" instead of "this", referring to
| what you think is most innovative about Bitcoin?
| tzumby wrote:
| this = blockchain + proof of work / proof of stake , in my
| comment. The crypto currencies are a requirement to fulfill
| the Byzantine tolerance. They need to have value in order for
| the incentives to make sense
| Graffur wrote:
| I've been asking for similar clarification on other comments.
| I think this whole thread has become useless.
| tzumby wrote:
| If you don't believe that there is value in a distributed
| self replicating Byzantine tolerant state machine, that's
| fair, everybody is entitled to their opinion.
| yannoninator wrote:
| what? english please?
|
| edit: why the flagging? do I seriously need to go get a PhD
| from MIT to understand this and why this is important?
| dang wrote:
| If you genuinely want to understand something, you need
| to ask about it in a way that expresses that intent. A
| snarky putdown in the form of a question does the
| opposite.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &so...
| beaner wrote:
| This doesn't read as a particularly intelligent thread. There are
| no interesting insights here, at least not anything that's new
| and hasn't already been debated/debunked/pushed back on, before.
|
| Seems like one of those tweetstorms where people perceive it to
| be saying something worthwhile because it's long and is said with
| adamancy.
| amingilani wrote:
| > Cryptocurrency is sustained by a mix of money laundering,
| vaporware, fraud, ransomware, gambling, and delusion. It has no
| social benefit except helping end first dates fast
|
| > What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's
| no relationship between the technical claims of cryptocurrency
| and our now over 13 years of experience. It's not decentralized,
| it's not a currency, it's not a store of value, and it's not a
| promising technology
|
| > Cryptocurrency solves no problems that it didn't first create,
| and most of those it doesn't solve. Smart contracts are neither
| of those things--at worst they're an API for fraud, or as @qrs
| put it, self-funding bug bounties at best
|
| Those are a lot of hasty statements made without indisputable
| evidence.
|
| Edit: I'll take any evidence if indisputable evidence is too high
| a bar.
| icelancer wrote:
| Ironically enough the Pinboard account is engaging in the same
| nonsense and rhetoric it accuses cryptocurrency supporters of,
| hoping no one will notice.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Where is the "indisputable evidence" to dispute the claims of
| the article?
| amingilani wrote:
| You mean the thread? The onus is on them to prove their
| claims. See burden of proof:
| https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof
| sedatk wrote:
| > Those are a lot of hasty statements made without indisputable
| evidence.
|
| That reminds me of that guy who didn't receive his package and
| filed a complaint to the store he bought it from. They asked
| for a proof that the package didn't arrive, and he replied with
| the photo of his empty hands.
| Bayart wrote:
| People keep being blindsided by the _financial_ aspects of the
| space, whether it is those who love it or those who hate it. It
| just rings off-beat and it 's frankly a bit vacuous.
| vimy wrote:
| Written from the perspective of someone in a first world country.
| Edit: https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-
| adoptio...
| hilbertseries wrote:
| What's the advantage of cryptocurrency over mpesa?
| kemonocode wrote:
| I can use cryptocurrencies from anywhere in the world, I
| can't use M-Pesa unless I'm in one of the few countries it
| operates, and even then I'd be at Vodafone's whims. Truly it
| may serve similar needs (money for the under/unbanked) but
| the scope is not nearly the same.
| idlewords wrote:
| How do you move cryptocurrency back and forth to local
| currency you can spend?
| kemonocode wrote:
| LocalBitcoins works just fine for me.
| c01n wrote:
| - Decentralized (Not controlled by a single company)
|
| - Phone number not required
|
| - Crypto-coins work in more countries countries then mpesa
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For the unclear: M-Pesa.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
| vimy wrote:
| It's worldwide.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What fraction of all commerce is worldwide as opposed to
| local?
|
| What degree of that difference, if any, is a consequence of
| payment frictions rather than other factors (say: most
| activity and interactions are local).
|
| What preferences are exhibited by major international
| buyers and sellers for payment or credit systems?
| friedman23 wrote:
| Why don't you go answer these questions yourself? All you
| are doing is stifling discussion.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Asking questions is stifling conversation?
|
| And making blind assertions and veiled insults is not?
|
| The claim was made. Its relevance should be determinable.
|
| That aside:
|
| - Gravity model of trade.
|
| - "Research: How Far Will Consumers Travel to Make
| Routine Purchases?"
| https://blog.accessdevelopment.com/research-how-far-will-
| con...
| yannoninator wrote:
| These questions have no effect on crypto's adoption,
| perhaps these questions are an exercise to the reader.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If the questions have no effect on crypto's adoption, why
| should the claim that "crypto is worldwide" have any
| relevance?
|
| If it _does_ have relevance, then the questions do in
| fact matter.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Not (necessarily) centrally managed by a large corporation.
| yannoninator wrote:
| this.
|
| The tone deaf tech elite have done it again and thought that
| the US is the entire world.
|
| Please leave your americentrism at the door.
|
| edit: flagged for the truth now? pathetic.
| synesso wrote:
| The Bitcoin whitepaper brought together a few existing
| technologies into something that had never before existed in the
| world - decentralised digital scarcity. This lead to a Cambrian
| explosion of new developments, most of which are pyramid schemes.
| But at its core, the invention is world-changing.
| cryptica wrote:
| I'm OK to ban crypto if we also ban all big tech corporations
| because they're all part of the same fiat pyramid scheme. Why
| don't we just end capitalism and switch to communism... Then at
| least we will be able to communicate honestly about what's going
| on in the economy.
|
| To say that one scheme is a scam but the other is not is
| extremely subjective.
|
| A corporation like Facebook probably does more harm to society
| than Bitcoin. Why ban Bitcoin but not ban Facebook? Why not ban
| Snapchat or Twitter? Ban Uber, they burn a lot of fossil fuels!
| This kind of thinking necessarily leads to communism. You can't
| ban crypto and keep capitalism... What's left of it.
| john_alan wrote:
| Hacker news is holistically anti cryptocurrency. Which
| disappoints me.
|
| It has virtues.
|
| As someone who works in applied Cryptography and has also worked
| for the European Central Bank, we need "crypto".
|
| 1) seigniorage is an abused privilege. Source: US debt ceiling at
| 27TRN.
|
| 2) permissionless money has value, I cannot send more than 5k a
| day using my bank. I can send any amount using crypto. I also
| don't need two utility bills and an address to open an "account"
|
| 3) it's censorship resistant. Govt's can't just stop payments or
| shutdown the network.
|
| Use Monero.
|
| EDIT: downvoted again. I'm not contributing here anymore.
| ahallock wrote:
| You're not wrong, and you have some good points here,
| especially about the banking limits. I'm not sure where the
| cynicism comes from, but HN seems very hostile to this space.
| xpe wrote:
| > Hacker news is holistically anti cryptocurrency.
|
| First, your use of "holistically" doesn't make sense to me.
|
| > ho*lis*ti*cal*ly | ,ho'listik(@)le/ | > adverb
|
| > mainly Philosophy in a way that is characterized by
| comprehension of the parts of something as intimately
| interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole:
| the damage caused by unethical behavior needs to be examined
| holistically.
|
| > * Medicine in a way that treats the whole person, taking into
| account mental and social factors, rather than just the
| symptoms of a disease: he has been treated holistically for a
| heart murmur.
|
| Second, are you characterizing the people on HN as being mostly
| or completely against cryptocurrency? This sounds like
| anecdotage. Remember, not everyone with an opinion broadcasts
| it.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Thanks -- I have used that word wrong too. I guess 'entirely'
| or 'completely' would be better
| Geee wrote:
| Yeah. I think these HN threads are either manipulated, or HN is
| full of idiots. Not sure which is more likely.
|
| Cryptocurrency is maybe the most important innovation is human
| history.
| xpe wrote:
| > Yeah. I think these HN threads are either manipulated, or
| HN is full of idiots. Not sure which is more likely.
|
| Or perhaps neither.
|
| Some other simple explanations include:
|
| 1. People see it differently than you do.
|
| 2. People are not engaging in conversation as a way to learn
| from each other; rather they are talking past each other.
|
| I'm inclined to think it is a mix of both.
|
| Like I mentioned in a comment nearby, people on HN seem to
| vote based on different criteria. The lack of clarity can
| make it hard to extract clear meaning from votes.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _Cryptocurrency is maybe the most important innovation is
| human history_
|
| Electricity? The wheel? Money? Sulfa drugs? Spoken language?
| Counting? Agriculture? Written language? There's a long, long
| list and to put cryptocurrency on it seems awfully hubristic.
| Geee wrote:
| Money that can't be monopolized is more important than
| those. The whole human history is about money and how
| someone monopolized it and started extracting value from
| it, to get more powerful, to fund wars and destruction.
| Bitcoin can't be monopolized and enables humanity to rise
| on a completely new level.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Crypto is a touchy subject, right up there with religion and
| politics. I wouldn't worry too much about the downvotes.
| xpe wrote:
| > EDIT: downvoted again. I'm not contributing here anymore.
|
| Have you reviewed the HN Guidelines at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ?
|
| > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never
| does any good, and it makes boring reading.
|
| I'll offer my two cents in case it gives another perspective
| you haven't considered. The meaning of voting on HN is far from
| obvious. Various people downvote for different reasons.
|
| Maybe they are unimpressed by your comment, maybe they disagree
| with it, maybe they think it is inappropriate somehow, maybe
| they don't like that you plugged a particular cryptocurrency,
| or something else.
|
| In any case, I recommend not worry about the votes, up or down.
| At times, it can be helpful to see if what you are writing is
| perceived as useful, if you can take the feedback in that
| manner without taking it personally.
| neonological wrote:
| I hate this voting thing. People are quick to judge and It
| leaves no room for respectful disagreement and drives people
| away.
|
| How do I tell someone that I value his input even though I
| respectfully disagree? It's pretty much impossible on HN
| without writing a post.
| Graffur wrote:
| xpe, have _you_ reviewed the HN Guidelines at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html?
|
| > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never
| does any good, and it makes boring reading.
| xpe wrote:
| Graffur, yes, I've read them. But I'd bet you know that; I
| think probably you are making another point. I'll write it
| out, and you can tell me if you agree. You are pointing out
| an inconsistency in what I wrote: you think it is unfair of
| me to suggest that someone else read the guidelines while
| at the same time not following them.
|
| Am I accurately stating your concern?
| sp332 wrote:
| That limit sounds low, e.g. Chase Bank allows wire transfers
| out of $100,000 per day for individuals.
| MrMan wrote:
| I have sent large amounts all over the place. As for
| pretending to be anonymous and outside of society, I have no
| use for that. The issue of crypto currency, besides the
| resource impact, is the evil that comes from trying to
| destroy democratic government.
| hilbertseries wrote:
| > it's censorship resistant. Govt's can't just stop payments or
| shutdown the network.
|
| If they have a firewall, they could block the majority of
| exchanges, wallet apps, and even ips of some of the largest
| mining groups.
| aex wrote:
| The tweet storm doesn't even have arguments to refute.
| achenatx wrote:
| people are using crypto to bypass country based currency
| controls. The original big bump I think was related to chinese
| getting their money out of china.
| coliveira wrote:
| This is not even touching the fact that bitcoin and similar
| currencies are a danger for the environment. They spend huge
| amounts of energy that are helping destroy the planet. The longer
| this scam goes on, the more damage will happen to the world.
| yannoninator wrote:
| so what are going to do about this?
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I don't understand the constant criticism crypto gets. It isn't
| the sort of thing that can be stopped at this point.
|
| If you don't like it, support better alternatives or create your
| own. That's really the only solution here.
|
| I don't say this to be sarcastic. The train has already left the
| station.
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without name-calling.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Edited
| sp332 wrote:
| Just because something is growing doesn't mean it's above
| criticism, or regulation.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| But this link isn't criticism. It's a quasi-religious two
| minutes hate, as every single topic on crypto inevitably
| turns into.
|
| I guess it's just a reaction to the constant hype being
| pushed by the crypto world. As a mostly neutral observer, I
| really don't get it.
|
| Regardless, this isn't the point I was making. Crypto cannot
| be stopped. At best, you'll have regulations against PoW
| mining.
| paulgdp wrote:
| Does someone knows why this tweet was previously flagged on HN?
|
| see: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399094306221166592
| greyface- wrote:
| The screenshot is of
| , which is a
| duplicate of this thread.
|
| This thread was previously [flagged] [dead], but is now back to
| normal. I assume via moderator action?
| dang wrote:
| Yes, but I missed that it was being flagged because it was a
| dupe. Merging the threads now. Thanks!
| idlewords wrote:
| Appreciate the unflagging. Sending 0.2 BTC now as agreed
| beaner wrote:
| Probably because it mostly contains rehashed opinion and
| conjecture and almost nothing of substance.
|
| I don't know why people would bother flagging something like
| this though, threads as content-less generally die on their own
| without much fanfare. OP and his friends get an ego boost from
| making front page and then it fades. NBD, no need to be
| contentious about it.
| mudlus wrote:
| Here's how you defeat Bitcoin: code a client that a majority of
| the network uses that changes the consensus protocol to what you
| think is a good idea.
|
| If you don't want to do that, and you want to wax poetic about
| shitcoins being evil, ffs, please keep in in the drafts, salty
| nocoiner. Especially during a bull cycle where people who already
| don't trust "tech nerds" are going to read this and want to buy
| the shittiest of shitcoins.
| dadoge wrote:
| Bitcoin is giving people in hyperinflation environments like
| Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey an out to their oppressive and corrupt
| govt banking system.
|
| If one looks at gold and asks themselves "why is gold worth 11
| trillion dollars today?" How did it, over centuries and centuries
| obtain such a status?
|
| Bitcoin has better properties than gold does. It's more scarce,
| scarcity means predictability, and predictability gives rise to
| trust.
|
| You don't have to be a hardcore libertarian- I'm sure not- to
| appreciate a better version of gold, and what benefits that can
| have.
|
| Also - the USD is used more for malicious purposes, paper money
| is actually harder to track than Bitcoin transactions.
| chx wrote:
| > predictability
|
| have you reviewed what you are writing or is it just a Markov
| chain generating text?
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Just because you don't understand the sentence, doesn't mean
| you have to insult the guy. Other replies have explained it
| for you.
| greyface- wrote:
| I took this to mean that bitcoin's issuance rate is more
| predictable than the rate that physical gold is discovered
| and mined at. There are unknown unmined gold deposits out
| there, both on-planet and off-planet. There are no unknown
| unmined bitcoin deposits.
|
| Also,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
| dadoge wrote:
| Generation of new coins is transparent, the total number of
| coins capped.
|
| That's predictability. Name one other asset on earth that is
| easily transferable and more predictable in that sense?
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Yeah sure, every time there's a crisis bitcoin loses 50% of its
| value. That's indeed such a great protection from inflation...
| dadoge wrote:
| 50% dip is a hell of a lot better than 40% inflation each
| year in Argentina year over year.
|
| In Venezuela is disgusting, over 1,000% inflation each year.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Bitcoin is giving people in Turkey an opportunity to be scammed
| $2billion: https://www.afr.com/markets/currencies/trader-flees-
| turkey-w...
|
| From my experience living in a 2nd world country, the people
| involved with buying Cryptocurrencies are typically young males
| working in IT, who proceed to waste their time, money and
| energy.
| dadoge wrote:
| Haters in this thread, do you think you know more about
| monetary assets than Ray Dalio:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2021/05/24/bitcoin-...
|
| And Carl Icahn:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2021...
| dadoge wrote:
| Or the CSO of the Human Rights Org?
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/bitcoinmagazine.com/.amp/cultur...
| timdaub wrote:
| flagged
| ChrisClark wrote:
| I don't understand how tech people can't be excited about
| decentralized programmable money. Bitcoin, maybe, it's so
| limited, but the sky's the limit on programmable money on
| Ethereum and chains like it.
| zx2391 wrote:
| I read a Blockchain book from O'Reilly in 2015, when it came out
| and it left me with the distinct impression that this
| "technology" is vaporous. It could do anything, yet, almost no
| examples to try out, let alone real-world successes.
|
| Over time I witnessed many "new" things, and the ones which stick
| typically have a specific aura to them, like a 10x
| simplification, or speedup or reduction in "noise". These things
| are really rare; most things are incremental and that's good,
| too.
|
| Blockchain did not seemed to have any of that.
|
| PS. Merkle trees are super interesting and I use them daily (in
| git) - so all the tech ideas are certainly worth considering,
| it's just that they are not fit for the advertised purpose plus
| it has gotten an enormous drag on resources, for nothing.
|
| PPS. I typically have an "tech instinct" to see new things, but I
| currently cannot really see anything that looks like a major tech
| shifts from the past. ML is incremental and despite its grande
| successes is mostly applied by the surveillance industry, which
| makes it much less attractive. Cloud seems much more profound and
| the whole apification of the world transformation - although I do
| not like the centralization, even if it is more economical. In
| general, the real revolutionary tool or technology does not need
| to sell itself, it is picked up by the weird and intelligent
| first, then trickles down to the masses (also: tech can be great
| w/o mainstream adoption, too - it just not a revolution then).
|
| PPPS: Wild speculation: With 5G, everyone with a phone could host
| their business directly on their device, instead on other peoples
| servers. When phones hit a TB in storage, you can run your socnet
| with your friends - and you probably will, because mainstream
| money will have moved to something much more immersive,
| addictive, profitable like glasses, vr, ar.
| dadoge wrote:
| Tell that to people in Nigeria, Venezuela and Argentina that
| have no control over their money.
|
| In Venezuela there is absolutely absurd inflation number there:
| like over 1,000%.
|
| Argentina it's over 30% each year for several years.
|
| Bitcoin is a tool against oppressive governments
| zx2391 wrote:
| True, and people can use it today, that's for sure.
| rossjudson wrote:
| Sure, fantastic. Why should it be legal to exchange bitcoin
| for US$? Or euros?
| qualudeheart wrote:
| That sounds like a burden of proof shift. Why should that
| be illegal in the first place?
| hervature wrote:
| You should actually talk to people from those countries. The
| minority of them are doing anything substantial in crypto.
| Only those fortunate enough to transact with a foreign
| entity. The others use the much more robust system of
| bartering.
| jedberg wrote:
| Or just using black market USD or EUR.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Do you happen to have a source on the ML claim? I`d be
| interested in reading more about that issue.
| sombremesa wrote:
| I don't really give a crap about any crypto, and I agree that
| much of it is a pyramid scheme.
|
| However, I think people don't understand that Bitcoin is first
| and foremost a brand. A brand doesn't have to be "useful" to have
| value, it just has to be recognizable to enough people. A lot of
| altcoins have appeared, but not a single one of them has the
| brand strength of Bitcoin - not even the "tech fave" ethereum.
|
| On the flip side, one doesn't have to participate in any kind of
| crypto, including Bitcoin, to leverage the brand - since the
| brand doesn't rest on the value of the currency itself.
| [deleted]
| kgraves wrote:
| Absolutely, I have seriously thought long and hard about
| cryptocurrencies and have also come to the conclusion that it is
| a definitive scam.
|
| Now is the time we must shut it down. Bitcoin, Ethereum, all of
| it.
|
| Even ponzi schemes have it's limits and this one has been reached
| and been illegally allowed to run rampant.
|
| It was nice when it started, not while it lasted. It didn't work
| and now it's time for it to go.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| In what ways is the technology itself, rather than how it may
| often be used, a scam?
| qualudeheart wrote:
| What are your arguments for this proposition?
|
| How are Bitcoin and Ethereum ponzi schemes?
| brianolson wrote:
| Bitcoin is terrible technology and stupidly wasteful, but there
| are new blockchain networks coming along that are about a million
| times more efficient, so use those instead.
| yaa_minu wrote:
| How's bitcoin stupidly wasteful?
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's a race towards spending ever greater amounts of energy
| to mine blocks.
| crummy wrote:
| How does that affect the whole ransomware, regulation etc side
| of things?
| DennisP wrote:
| I don't see any _technical_ criticisms in the thread, which means
| "us in the tech world" is just an appeal to meaningless
| authority.
|
| It's also a bogus attempt to imply a broad consensus where there
| is none. As someone in tech myself, my personal opinion is that
| most of the twitter thread is nonsense.
| bo1024 wrote:
| I don't agree with this. It's fine to have an opinion, but I
| don't think it should be represented as a consensus when it's
| not.
|
| (edited to add) There is an important difference between having
| downsides and being a scam. Downsides of the U.S. dollar or
| "petrodollar" system include global warming, international wars,
| and regulatory capture. The U.S. financial system has all the
| kinds of fraud, blackmail, and crime mentioned here and more.
| Doesn't mean the dollar is a scam.
| lefrenchy wrote:
| One thing that I find so confusing in the crypto maximalist
| sphere is the obsession with decentralization of everything but
| also with mainstream adoption.
|
| Coinbase is centralization, bank adoption is centralization,
| etc...
|
| Also if "fear of regulation" causes massive sell-offs, doesn't it
| totally fail at being the "anti-government" centralized currency?
|
| I'm also just not convinced total decentralization is good? I
| mean sure markets are a decentralized way of pricing things and
| allow distributed decision making blah blah blah, but they have
| limits. I feel like far too many people are drawn in by the
| answer to the wrong question "what does crypto solve?" Instead of
| the more interesting one "what problems does it create"
| sneak wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies love discussing their decentralization plans
| in their Telegram and Discord chats, deploying on AWS/GCE.
| seibelj wrote:
| Decentralization is a spectrum. Bitcoin cannot be shutdown
| because it is decentralized. There can be centralized actors
| within a decentralized system. The major benefit is you can
| choose between various service providers and switch when you
| please. With government monopolies you use their service at
| gunpoint.
| jdally987 wrote:
| Wow. Seriously?
|
| There are some good arguments against it but this is still
| elementary-level crypto-bashing. I'll just leave this here
|
| https://twitter.com/PeterDiamandis/status/139837433261162906...
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