The religious wars within the cryptocurrency community are fascinating to watch and are the single biggest reason I doubt we'll ever see a meaningful use for cryptocurrency or blockchain other than speculation.
HEX is a lulzworthy new issuance stretching the imagination of the market by someone I’m not even sure could pass KYC with any bank
It’s like if WeWork actually did become publicly traded by issuing shares at different prices over 365 days. It would be a non-sequitur for an outside observer to dismiss the problems - and some actual religious affinity towards Adam Neumann - as why the US markets won’t go anywhere. Itd would be A) what are you talking about and B) nonsense drivel like that is just giving WeWork a pass by criticizing the whole market instead of a shitty offering and organization
Actual currency - crypto-"currency" which misappropriate the term - doesn't increase in value transferring wealth to the earlier adopters, that's why currencies don't mimic Ponzi-Pyramid schemes. Currency is tied to tangibles of a nation and the intangibles of trusting that society is stable, meaning the value of the currency will be relatively stable.
It's similiar in the programming world but the language wars don't prevent work from getting work done.
I feel like the cryto has a different story. There is a struggle to find utility because the structure of the system has too many holes.
For bitcoin electrical usage is the true currency + specialized gpus. Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all. The side effect is wasting resources for no reason.
For other coins each has there own story.
At the core we want people to do something valuable as side effect of obtaining prove. I'm not sure we're close.
> Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all
So, nobody can take all, then. Even putting aside power, nobody has unlimited boards. The supply of GPUs is very tightly limited by real-world factors, as anybody who tried to buy an AMD GPU a few years ago found out.
> It's similiar in the programming world but the language wars don't prevent work from getting work done.
I worked for a crypto startup in ~2017. Our product wrote a decent number of transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain, so when transaction fees went from a dime to $20 it caused a lot of headaches and I ended up dealing with it. When I asked questions online about managing transaction fees, I inadvertently wandered into a holy war and was thoroughly flamed for my trouble. It was the least pleasant experience I've had trying to get help as a dev. How can such a toxic community grow and achieve anything meaningful?
To me it seems mired in contradiction. The use case for cryptocurrencies is motivated by (though perhaps doesn't require) the assumption that accountable government is a lost cause; yet it also assumes that society provides enough stability for the protocol to operate, instead of devolving toward anarchy or totalitarianism.
I think that's the public ideology, but the reality is the largest percentage of those who own cryptocurrency are using as nothing more than a speculative investment, and therefore, a proxy for fiat.
The original arguments for BTC are long abandoned. Store of value, cheap transactions, etc. Once those were proven to be invalid, they couldn't talk out of both sides of their mouth anymore.
But it seems like the primary use cases are speculation, criminal and terrorist funding schemes, tax evasion, and money laundering.
What's bad about speculation? Or do you mean short term speculation? There are many bitcoins that did not move for many years. I do not get why speculation in ETFs, land/housing and other assets is accepted as normal, and with Bitcoin it is somehow bad.
Nothing is wrong at all with speculation. What feels wrong is the disingenuousness of claiming the anti-government, anti-bank ideology when that's not its primary pragmatic use case.
Actually I disagree speculation for the pure sake of speculation is bad. Otherwise it's no different than gambling that some random number will be worth more or less in the future. It's like roulette, only for the nerdy-set.
If I buy Apple stock, technically that's tied to a corporation named Apple that has assets and revenue (more or less, maybe less these days than you might assume). But bitcoins are just numbers, some more valuable than others.
But more to the point, hoarders were encouraging the use of bitcoin as a store of value, lying about their true use cases (speculation), hoping the big fish would start investing so the early people would cash out. It turned out to be one massive pump and dump scheme, but with cryptography, so that makes it okay.
I don't think it's a contradiction. You can rely on an accountable government to protect your bitcoins, and if you decide at some point they have become unaccountable then you can move your bitcoins to a different location without restrictions. It's just separation of concerns.
You can't move your bitcoins if your electricity is off or if a totalitarian system physically has you and your possessions.
You can only vote with your feet so many times, and if the choice is always to flee instead of demanding accountable government, eventually there will be no place to go. By providing a workaround for government non-accountability, Bitcoin encourages people to avoid the issue instead of engaging with it.
I read a recent opinion piece that sort of mellowed my feelings on the space, basically that crypto was never made to be mainstream (I'd argue many would view widespread use as 'meaningful').
Most of my thinking you can read crypto as bitcoin i.e. some general payment system, where in bitcoin's case its stated purpose is sort of this inexorable transaction system, it feels intuitive that the meaningful use space is intrinsically going to be fringe/taboo, because it's outside government, outside permission. I know its cliche that freedom isn't free, but what is the honest practical value of freedom unless it's scarce i.e. its impossible or someone it trying to stop you?
But the point is that crypto may be an inherently fringe construct, it may provide no benefit to society because its value add might solely live in activities outside the confines of society at large. Now you can argue whether that is a net positive or negative for humanity, but I think that if "that's it", you know, I think that is a meaningful use.
Headline is somewhat misleading: "Bitcoin fans" generally could not care less about Bitcoin.com, which is actually the home of the Bitcoin Cash altcoin. Bitcoin.com has been widely discredited for a long time now, largely due to its repeated attempts to conflate Bitcoin Cash with Bitcoin and thus trick unwitting consumers into using the former when they intended to use the latter; see e.g. https://bitcoinist.com/1000-people-join-crypto-industry-figu...
All monetary value is entirely socially constructed, very similar to religion. And as with religion it naturally feeds on evangilizing and convincing others to join. The more adherents you have the more powerful your network / adoption gets. It's a natural consequence that any adopter of a given monetary asset will try and convince others to join. That's how you have gold bugs, real estate bugs, art bugs, fiat bugs and yes ... now crypto bugs. Don't hate the player...
Not that I disagree with your premise, but real estate and, to a lesser extent, art and gold, have intrinsic value in that they can be used for a purpose outside of a store of value. For real estate, utility is a much larger share of the market value than the others.
I agree but that doesn't negate the point. Any economic asset with limited supply has two sources of value. The first is intrinsic as you've correctly pointed out which through intrinsic demand by people looking to use the asset for its actual properties will gain intrinsic value.
The second is monetary. Asset values inflate beyond intrinsic values as a result of monetary demand for them by users that acquire them not for their intrinsic properties but for their potential capacity to be redeemed for value in the future. This monetary demand lives on top of intrinsic demand and drives overal value of the asset up the supply / demand curve.
My comments applied specifically to the monetary user base of any asset. This base's choice of their monetary base is entirely elective, socially constructed and reinforced. And their particular choice will gain favor if they can convince people to get on same the band wagon. Under this specific use case, they will tend to exhibit the perfectly understandable behaviors I've described.
Why does one group deserve the “true bitcoin” moniker more than another? The bitcoin cash people can just as rightly claim they are the “true” bitcoin as the people squatting the “bitcoin” name.
The original title is “Bitcoin.com Lists Ponzi-like Token HEX to the Dismay of BCH Fans”.
BCH is Bitcoin Cash, a fork organized/promoted by Roger Ver, among others. It’s currently trading at $180.67, which is 2.3% of the current Bitcoin (BTC) price.
Ver owns and operates Bitcoin.com.
Confusingly, /r/btc is where BCH is discussed/promoted, while /r/bch was quickly taken over by BTC proponents after Ver failed to get exchanges to recognize BCC as the ticket symbol for Bitcoin Cash. (BCC was already in use by Bitcoin Connect, a ponzi/exit scam that imploded shortly after BCH forked).
Please note that using the otherwise innocuous “bcash” moniker will get you branded as a troll in the Bitcoin Cash community. I’ve forgotten the specific reason for this.
It's because they desperately want you to call it "Bitcoin" to further their ploy. Shortening "Bitcoin Cash" to a name that isn't "Bitcoin" exposes them.
Because they aren't. They hard-forked away from the Bitcoin protocol to a protocol that did not adhere to the Bitcoin consensus at the time, that >90% of the nodes, miners, and businesses did not accept.
> Confusingly, /r/btc is where BCH is discussed/promoted
Well before Bitcoin Cash ever came into existence, /r/btc was created as a response to alleged censorship in /r/bitcoin, mostly as part of the block-size debate. As a choice emerged to fork to a big-block version of Bitcoin, a principle /r/btc in generally already supported, it made sense to follow that coin.
r/btc was created long before Bitcoin Cash, as an uncensorable alternative to r/bitcoin, which is extremely censored.
Bitcoin Cash was created because Bitcoin didn't scale, not because of technical reasons. Instead they used a massive social engineering campaign (censorship, trolls and fake news) to block the development. Roger wasn't even involved in BCH back then.
This can be verified by anyone who cares to, and you'll see that the parent is still forwarding the same troll narrative.
They use newspeak with terms like "bcash" to try to distance Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin Cash is proof that their arguments against "big blocks" and the impossibility of hard forks were, and are, bullshit.
I actually don't have a bone in this fight. I am critical of Bitcoin and BCH in equal measure because I don't agree with their view on how money works.
I do respect people in both projects for being intellectually honest about their work and goals.
I have unmitigated contempt for Bitcoin SV and the shills who promote it (and am disappointed in those I used to respect who've hitched their wagons to it), but I do appreciate the entertainment value of following the drama.
Bitcoin cash is a scam, so it's not surprising to see them list other scams. I hope that bitcoin goes back to a few hundred dollars in order to purge the market of weak crypto-currencies.
Most informed people would say that the scam is that the original Bitcoin was taken over so that its throughout could be stifled and the people controlling it could sell an awkward and unnecessary second layer.
When one side says the other is a scam but goes to enormous lengths to stop technical discussions while saying that throughput below a 144p YouTube video is too much data, people should start to question whether they are being fed propaganda.
>[...] while saying that throughput below a 144p YouTube video is too much data [...]
That's a gross simplification of the issue. The problem with large block sizes isn't with bandwidth, it's with the storage requirements of running a full node, and the time it takes to bring up a full new node.
None of them are good arguments against a moderate blocksize increase, such as 2 MB or 4 MB. (Segwit is an extremely inefficient increase, which in practice only increases it from 1 MB to around 1.4 MB.)
And none of these limits have been tested or examined by those who oppose it. The claim is, it seems, that the current limit is perfect.
Or that hard forks are "too dangerous", despite coins like Ehereum, Monero and Bitcoin Cash proving that to be false again and again. And Bitcoin also had an emergency hard fork fix (which never split the chain) when they fixed the recent infinite inflation bug. Oh and they've had a hard fork once before too.
Also with storage being so cheap it's not a valid argument. Time to propagate blocks between miners is the biggest, with initial sync coming in at a distant second.
The 'problems' keep changing. Most people don't need or want to run a full node or even sync with the whole chain. Even so, anyone with $100 can buy 1 TB of SSD space and anyone who can stream netflix has an internet connection 600 times faster than the max throughput, so none of that is even close to being a problem either.
People say this stuff as some sort of FUD theoretical, but who out there is actually having problems with a reasonable computer or internet connection? A $35 raspberry pi is overkill, this is not a real problem.
Bitcoin cash is no more if a scam than “Bitcoin”. All crypto coins are scams. Or at least a transactional layer for higher level scams (which often have scams piled on top of those scams”)
One delightful thing about cryptocurrency is everybody thinks their coin is the good one and all the others are “shitcoins”. With slightly more introspection, they might realize that their chosen coin is just as scammy as the rest.
Pretty sure that Bitcoin is the one exception, simply by being first. Thus, it is the single most suited experiment to determine, whether a digital store of value is possible at all, (the argument being that if it cannot be a SoV or can easily be replaced, so can the next, thus none should be entrusted with significant savings).
Your recent comment, but with the examples switched to crypto-related things, is an amusingly apt description of your post.
>HN is getting full of people with some serious chips on their shoulder. Any article with the words "cryptocurrency", "Bitcoin", or "Ethereum" in it will be flooded with, to be blunt, a bunch of garbage posts. Not a good insightful, intellectual discussion. Just people with massive chips on their shoulders flooding the comments with noise.
This article is a total misleading piece of information.
The code of the HEX token smart contract is publicly accessible and one can clearly see it implements the logic of a CD (certificate of deposit), you only need javascript knowledge to verify that.
The initial airdrop amounts are totally arbitrary though, with a founder getting more than everyone else. But that doesn't make something a ponzi scheme.
To qualify as a ponzi scheme you need to directly use newcomers investment money as return for old investors. There is absolutely no line of code in the contract that does this.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadHEX is a lulzworthy new issuance stretching the imagination of the market by someone I’m not even sure could pass KYC with any bank
It’s like if WeWork actually did become publicly traded by issuing shares at different prices over 365 days. It would be a non-sequitur for an outside observer to dismiss the problems - and some actual religious affinity towards Adam Neumann - as why the US markets won’t go anywhere. Itd would be A) what are you talking about and B) nonsense drivel like that is just giving WeWork a pass by criticizing the whole market instead of a shitty offering and organization
I feel like the cryto has a different story. There is a struggle to find utility because the structure of the system has too many holes.
For bitcoin electrical usage is the true currency + specialized gpus. Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all. The side effect is wasting resources for no reason.
For other coins each has there own story.
At the core we want people to do something valuable as side effect of obtaining prove. I'm not sure we're close.
So, nobody can take all, then. Even putting aside power, nobody has unlimited boards. The supply of GPUs is very tightly limited by real-world factors, as anybody who tried to buy an AMD GPU a few years ago found out.
I worked for a crypto startup in ~2017. Our product wrote a decent number of transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain, so when transaction fees went from a dime to $20 it caused a lot of headaches and I ended up dealing with it. When I asked questions online about managing transaction fees, I inadvertently wandered into a holy war and was thoroughly flamed for my trouble. It was the least pleasant experience I've had trying to get help as a dev. How can such a toxic community grow and achieve anything meaningful?
But it seems like the primary use cases are speculation, criminal and terrorist funding schemes, tax evasion, and money laundering.
If I buy Apple stock, technically that's tied to a corporation named Apple that has assets and revenue (more or less, maybe less these days than you might assume). But bitcoins are just numbers, some more valuable than others.
But more to the point, hoarders were encouraging the use of bitcoin as a store of value, lying about their true use cases (speculation), hoping the big fish would start investing so the early people would cash out. It turned out to be one massive pump and dump scheme, but with cryptography, so that makes it okay.
You can only vote with your feet so many times, and if the choice is always to flee instead of demanding accountable government, eventually there will be no place to go. By providing a workaround for government non-accountability, Bitcoin encourages people to avoid the issue instead of engaging with it.
You could say that about every defense-in-depth based approach to a problem. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're a net negative.
It's not perfect, but you have higher odds of moving 10k+ in Bitcoin out of an oppressive system than you do any other asset.
Most of my thinking you can read crypto as bitcoin i.e. some general payment system, where in bitcoin's case its stated purpose is sort of this inexorable transaction system, it feels intuitive that the meaningful use space is intrinsically going to be fringe/taboo, because it's outside government, outside permission. I know its cliche that freedom isn't free, but what is the honest practical value of freedom unless it's scarce i.e. its impossible or someone it trying to stop you?
But the point is that crypto may be an inherently fringe construct, it may provide no benefit to society because its value add might solely live in activities outside the confines of society at large. Now you can argue whether that is a net positive or negative for humanity, but I think that if "that's it", you know, I think that is a meaningful use.
Rabid fanaticism goes back to the early cryptocurrency days.
If anything, it's why us skeptics have a hard time taking ANYTHING the coiners say seriously.
The second is monetary. Asset values inflate beyond intrinsic values as a result of monetary demand for them by users that acquire them not for their intrinsic properties but for their potential capacity to be redeemed for value in the future. This monetary demand lives on top of intrinsic demand and drives overal value of the asset up the supply / demand curve.
My comments applied specifically to the monetary user base of any asset. This base's choice of their monetary base is entirely elective, socially constructed and reinforced. And their particular choice will gain favor if they can convince people to get on same the band wagon. Under this specific use case, they will tend to exhibit the perfectly understandable behaviors I've described.
BCH is Bitcoin Cash, a fork organized/promoted by Roger Ver, among others. It’s currently trading at $180.67, which is 2.3% of the current Bitcoin (BTC) price.
Ver owns and operates Bitcoin.com.
Confusingly, /r/btc is where BCH is discussed/promoted, while /r/bch was quickly taken over by BTC proponents after Ver failed to get exchanges to recognize BCC as the ticket symbol for Bitcoin Cash. (BCC was already in use by Bitcoin Connect, a ponzi/exit scam that imploded shortly after BCH forked).
Please note that using the otherwise innocuous “bcash” moniker will get you branded as a troll in the Bitcoin Cash community. I’ve forgotten the specific reason for this.
It's because they desperately want you to call it "Bitcoin" to further their ploy. Shortening "Bitcoin Cash" to a name that isn't "Bitcoin" exposes them.
Well before Bitcoin Cash ever came into existence, /r/btc was created as a response to alleged censorship in /r/bitcoin, mostly as part of the block-size debate. As a choice emerged to fork to a big-block version of Bitcoin, a principle /r/btc in generally already supported, it made sense to follow that coin.
When BCH launched, there was some confusion around the ticker, /r/bch was quickly colonized by trolls, and the community continued to use /r/btc.
Bitcoin Cash was created because Bitcoin didn't scale, not because of technical reasons. Instead they used a massive social engineering campaign (censorship, trolls and fake news) to block the development. Roger wasn't even involved in BCH back then.
This can be verified by anyone who cares to, and you'll see that the parent is still forwarding the same troll narrative.
They use newspeak with terms like "bcash" to try to distance Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin Cash is proof that their arguments against "big blocks" and the impossibility of hard forks were, and are, bullshit.
I do respect people in both projects for being intellectually honest about their work and goals.
I have unmitigated contempt for Bitcoin SV and the shills who promote it (and am disappointed in those I used to respect who've hitched their wagons to it), but I do appreciate the entertainment value of following the drama.
Being critical to Bitcoin as money is of course fine.
I can join in on your contempt for BSV though.
When one side says the other is a scam but goes to enormous lengths to stop technical discussions while saying that throughput below a 144p YouTube video is too much data, people should start to question whether they are being fed propaganda.
That's a gross simplification of the issue. The problem with large block sizes isn't with bandwidth, it's with the storage requirements of running a full node, and the time it takes to bring up a full new node.
And none of these limits have been tested or examined by those who oppose it. The claim is, it seems, that the current limit is perfect.
Or that hard forks are "too dangerous", despite coins like Ehereum, Monero and Bitcoin Cash proving that to be false again and again. And Bitcoin also had an emergency hard fork fix (which never split the chain) when they fixed the recent infinite inflation bug. Oh and they've had a hard fork once before too.
Also with storage being so cheap it's not a valid argument. Time to propagate blocks between miners is the biggest, with initial sync coming in at a distant second.
People say this stuff as some sort of FUD theoretical, but who out there is actually having problems with a reasonable computer or internet connection? A $35 raspberry pi is overkill, this is not a real problem.
One delightful thing about cryptocurrency is everybody thinks their coin is the good one and all the others are “shitcoins”. With slightly more introspection, they might realize that their chosen coin is just as scammy as the rest.
>HN is getting full of people with some serious chips on their shoulder. Any article with the words "cryptocurrency", "Bitcoin", or "Ethereum" in it will be flooded with, to be blunt, a bunch of garbage posts. Not a good insightful, intellectual discussion. Just people with massive chips on their shoulders flooding the comments with noise.
https://etherscan.io/address/0x2b591e99afe9f32eaa6214f7b7629...
The initial airdrop amounts are totally arbitrary though, with a founder getting more than everyone else. But that doesn't make something a ponzi scheme.
To qualify as a ponzi scheme you need to directly use newcomers investment money as return for old investors. There is absolutely no line of code in the contract that does this.