Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
I remember reading about cryptocurrencies on HN around the time Bitcoin was first published. A lot of skepticism was already there, of course. But the discussions were mostly curious, and people trying to learn more, even when they didn't really understand any value of the thing, or when they thought it might be bad.
Contrast that with how the discussions on HN are today, where there are basically two camps that are just screaming at each other. Curious conversations about cryptocurrencies on HN are basically gone, and one group yells how great everything is while the other one is warning of the impeding doom and zero use cases.
Why did it get like this? Is the sentiment similar on other social media? Is there any particular reason cryptocurrencies are so divisive while other subjects are not?
277 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadOne camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster.
The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the environmental impact is just a temporary problem, that is solved when proof-of-stake is ready (which IMHO will never happen).
The tech itself is quite simple in concept with a few novel key insights in the old days (which by now are generally accepted).
So all in all, it is back to good old politics and do you believe in "it" nor not.
I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it - but I am not sure whether I just project my own skepticism ...
EDIT: typo proof-of-state -> proof-of-stake
The whole thing that makes cryptocurrencies work now is the un-cloneability of the amount of work done (which is why the 51% problem exists in the first place).
The only good way of doing it would be through a cartel with strict enforcement of hashrates etc.. And welcome to the financial banking system...
Can you elaborate more on what "uncloneability of digital assets" means exactly and why it's a pre-requisite of proof-of-stake? Happy to take some links if there are any that explains this well.
In the real world cloning money (historically precious metals) is really really hard (and btw. much easier with paper money that the metals that have a basket of physical attributes that cannot be emulated at once).
Digital bits on the other hand are indefenately cloneable (by design, that is one of the base properties of "digital").
Just for you to see my text here, along the way somewhere around 20 perfect copies were made by various routers (i.e. computers)..
IMHO cloneablitiy IS the problem, PoW is just a (very, very unfortunate) solution to that. PoS (stake as in possession, not pledging) is IMHO inherently impossible, so PoW is all we got, now and for ever...
If you look at the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, maybe bitcoin and 1 are 2 others are proof of stake. There are a bunch of 'tokens' cryptocurrencies which exist on top of another blockchain, but the remainder of the layer 1 blockchains and all of the layer 2s that use a consensus mechanism are using proof of stake now.
Arguing against crypto because of proof of work is like arguing that computers won't see mass adoption because vacuum tubes make them impractical to fit inside of a typical home.
When I say proof of stake, I mean it in the way of "proof of possession"
Most notably, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Avalanche, Terra, Algorand, Polygon, Elrond, and Fantom are all using permissionless networks where nodes which have some amount of the native token of those blockchains staked produce blocks and validate transactions
They still do not prove that they have something in possession, they stake their own coin on being honest... BIG difference.
Do they allow you to prove that you (and you alone) have possession/control of the coin itself, and if so, how? (That is the part that I consider impossible).
The whole problem is that proof-of-stake has been redefined by the new PoS networks and does have the original meaning of "stake" (i.e. sole possessor) anymore.
I can prove to you that I have access to a gold coin by taking it out of my purse and showing it to you. You can do three simple tests (weight, volume and ringing) that ensures that it cannot be any other material than pure gold (due to any material that is both cheaper and heavier than gold is tungsten and that does not ring). You can also be sure that it is not a clone of another coin so that it "just disappears" or gets double spent.
There is also no witness/validator that can break your trust and betray you.
Every POS network I have ever looked into (and I admit that it has been a while) relies on witnesses. And that removes my way of knowing whether the witnesses lie or not.
Is there any of the socalled PoS networks that actually allow you to prove that you have exclusive possession/control of the digital coin in question without any witnesses ('validators')?
If so, their founders can already book their ticket to the Nobel Gala next year, as that would AFAIK be a feat in the same scale as disproving gravity...
I believe I use it in the original meaning from around 2010, but I might be mistaken.
I do fail to see how the current use of the term PoS guarantees anything against a cartel of bad actors...
My understanding is "slashing" may be one such mechanism. This is where staked funds are taken away from bad actors. ie if you propose a block with bad transactions, the 32 ETH you have staked will be reduced by some fraction as punishment. When your stake is slashed down to 16 ETH you are booted from the system. So that us a clear punishment against a bad actor, though I'm not sure what a cartel means i this case. Perhaps you know about this already however.
As an example with bitcoin specifically, it would probably be cheaper to buy enough mining hardware to constitute 51% of the bitcoin network than it would be to buy 51% of all bitcoin.
Of course, both would be very expensive endeavors.
The only theory I'm aware of, which the "proof-of-stake" approach is based on, is some form of "game theory", my translation - "people won't do evil stuff since it's against their interest", which generally aligns with people being rational and basing economic theories on top of this thesis.
My understanding is every POS blockchain is centralized and not secure.
Can you name a POS blockchain that you think has achieved sufficient decentralization and security so we can test your claim?
PS: How about answering the question instead of preemptively downvoting and attempting to shutting down the conversation. If POS truly works, you should be happy to provide an example or even multiple examples. Any reluctance is a red flag...
ETH POS has many of the bad characteristics current central banks have...
If crypto was mined only on renewables there is no environmental argument. Ergo, not related to crypto technology itself.
Not to mention that even with renewables, energy usage would be still a concern. Renewables will still have issues around distribution, power peaks, energy storage, price, and crypto wouldn't be helping any of them. A discussion of how would crypto affect the rest of the people compared to the benefit it brings would still be relevant.
I don't want money to be separated from the state, and especially not at a cost.
One man's crypto-anarchocapitalist utopia is another man's dystopian capitalist nightmare that we sacrificed our environment for.
The utopia would be post-money imo and moving money away from the state would make that harder to achieve.
It's not like those 56 are free either, we could use that energy to run more important things instead that crypto is taking away from.
Cobalt mining for batteries?
Energy consumption for processed metals?
Oil refining from rocketry (largely used by military in practice scenarios)
This list goes on. It seems crypto is the only technology evaluated in relation to the whole environment. For all the others we shrug and ignore externalities.
But that isn't the reality we live in.
The environmental aspect is manifestly a part of how crypto phenomenon, and attempts to separate the underlying technology from the manner in which it is (and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be) used, are disingenuous at best.
What about the non-recycable waste after "renewable" energy. Windmills have steel coated by epoxy wings, those cannot be recycled.
Solar panels is also ready for the trash-heap after 20 years, due to being a complex composite..
The only real energy source that would help would be nuclear, but even if we get that where have more efficient room-heaters and better use of the computing.. (protein folding could be one for example)
No matter how you cut it, that delta is waste if the additional functionality is useless.
Regardless, energy is a market and even if crypto used purely renewable energy, that’s energy that wasn’t used for replacing fossil fuels in some other use case. Literally any technology that massively boosts energy consumption has the same problem.
To continue human civilization we need to stop fossil burning as much as possible, crypto is unnecessary and should therefore be stopped.
How do you argue that something is unnecessary? Aluminum uses heaps of energy… we haven’t needed in for 1000s of years, is it neccersary?
Any other industry including financial one will try to minimise the waste if it becomes unreasonable. Not so with proof of work crypto.
Although the US has been as good a steward as can be hoped for no entity should have that much control over international finance.
I agree with the hope for a better stewardship, but as all people end up moving cryptocurrencies in and out of the "old" financial system (creditcards, swift etc). I fail to see how crypto would help me..
I for one cannot pay for my rent, food, heat, water, power, internet with crypto, can you?
Although, to be fair, I did pay a security deposit in bitcoin 6 years ago.
Actually, in El Salvador, Bitcoin is now the national currency, so I suspect a lot of people are paying their rent in bitcoin
1) this is amazing and will save humanity
2) this is dumb no one will ever use it
3) this is confusing
That ratio doesn’t seem that much different than recent posts.
I think you’re right that most people at least on HN have decided what they believe when it comes to bitcoin.
Ultimately money is a belief and not just any belief but one so central to our identities that we often organize our lives around how we can get enough money.
Strong beliefs get tied into our identities so that threats to those beliefs will be viewed as many as attacks on their identities.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
[1] https://twitter.com/gladstein
I'm pretty dubious of Twitter as a platform though. There's so much other stuff, and Twitter injects its own crapola into the feeds too. I've bookmarked his profile instead, look forward to checking it out.
The whole discussion basically mirrors real life politics. One camp want's more collective action to help the unfortunate, the other wants absolute freedom for the individual.
That might disprove my "nothing interesting to discus.
That is my point. If your country is "sufficiently bad" bitcoin will not (and cannot) help you in the long run.
Sadly there exists no sure way to secure you belongings if the other party is sufficiently motivated to strip you of them (or your life)..
You can also be killed/robbed outside of your country by intelligence officers of your country...
There are always edge cases, where nothing helps. Fortunately, most countries are not like North Korea and you have some freedom, often enough to use crypto.
It is much easier for the government to confiscate your money from your bank account than to go after your Bitcoin. And it is impossible for the government to stop you from accepting payments in Bitcoin and to cut you off from financial system.
I live in an old and free democracy in Scandinavia (in the EU) and actually believe in my government's mostly pure motives. Our laws are solid and confiscation is unheard of outside of criminal activity.
If that changes drastically, I am screwed either way...
And it might be impossible for my government to stop me taking bitcoin but they could surely hinder me in converting them back to regular currency. And in my country nothing can be bought by any cryptocurrency.
But would said unfortunate person have access to a passport and are they allowed to leave their authoritarian country?
Do they have anywhere to legally go, where they have the right to residence and can get into the new countries banking system? In the EU at least that is NOT easy unless you already have citizenship in another EU country....
I.e. say you are that person in that country, could you just decide to leave with your twelve word password, your passport and a backpack. And could you setup life in another country?
I do also see the value of storing your money in bitcoin due to inflation, if you believe bitcoin is here to stay (I don't believe that), and you can manage to buy it without too much suspicion from your state and convert it back at a later day if you decide to stay in your own country.
This is a genuine difference of ideology, authentically held. To insist on absolute freedom for the individual, including any penalty or consequence for any lack on any level (and any degree of reward for any superiority no matter how it's arrived at) means you do not care about the unfortunate any more than you'd care about the pile of chips produced whilst making a great sculpture. Not only is the sculpture the point, but it's actively harmful to insist on leaving the superfluous chips stuck on: some waste has to be disposed or you're just poisoning yourself/harming your sculpture.
This is a position often held by sculptures and people not often thought of as waste. People who get thought of as waste, frequently would like this assumption re-examined.
People who are garbage but occupy categories way beyond their inherent value really REALLY don't want that assumption re-examined…
I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance), in a purely theoretical sense - but they just kept making disgusted faces and saying bitcoin is a scam (?). I'm not sure there's any rational energy behind any of it, it seems to me like any other political "issue" since 2016, like the Rittenhouse trial.
There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues.
For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.
Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide.
Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.
Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.
You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code?
> Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority.
Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate.
> Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.
That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.
Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.
Yep, and we have seen some government bodies using Github or other platforms to publish open data, or to be more transparent on procedures, and yet most of them still don't do it. Which is my point: the problem is not lack of technology, but lack of motivation/human capability/initiative to do it.
> Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates.
I'm sorry but this looks incredibly naive. I can tell you a very real example: in my country, Spain, we have papers proving that, among others, a certain M. Rajoy, of the PP party, received money that came from illegal donations. The prime minister at the time, Mariano Rajoy from the PP party, denied that it was him on the papers. He didn't face any legal consequence.
There have been so many times that a central authority has clearly gone against the protocols of the system without it disintegrating... You can't apply tech solutions to a problem that's not at all about tech.
That's why you get papers "proving" someone's guilt, but no action taken because the handling of such situations lies outside of the common understanding of the system. I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"
Obviously one major problem is how to build a system which handles all of the edge-cases that crop up? One possible answer is to use a DAO which can modify itself through whatever means (usually democratic).
Or people think to themselves "well, the papers are authentic but the meaning is open to interpretation" or "well, it's not such a bad thing" or "well, but the others are doing worse", or a myriad of things. All of those are real arguments I've seen made.
It is naive to think that you can codify everything into a system in a way where there's no open interpretation possible. It is naive to think that people will trust the system instead of what they heard the system says, or that people will trust the system over leaders, or the the people responsible for enforcing the system decisions and feeding the system information won't find a way to elude responsibility.
In general, it is naive to think that the problem of corruption, which is a problem about trust (if the person I like says he didn't do it or did it for a good reason, then I trust him above all else), enforcement (the ones responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones breaking them) and tolerance (people don't care that much about corruption if it doesn't harm them) will be fixed by a solution that at most will help a little bit in the enforcement part.
In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.
I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.
On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.
This is useless and unconstructive generalizaton. AFAIK many non-tech problems were solved with technical solutions.
Technology is not a field. Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives.
Not at all. I mean, to take your example:
> Not enough food? Invent agriculture.
Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.
Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives when they don't have a way to do something. Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues... Having the technology is far from enough in most cases.
The idea that "technology solves everything" permeates HN and you'll see it all over the place in threads about education, politics, corruption, music, math... Funnily enough, when the people who actually know about the topic show up in those threads, most of the time they end up explaining why the problem at hand is not at all technology related.
Perhaps we could invent a new thing to solve that too? Improvements to crop technology, breeding, farming methods continue to happen every year. Inventions like the Internet bring information to people in rural areas who might not otherwise have had access to it. Why can't we solve all these things with technology?
> Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues...
But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?
It seems anything humans invent is just one more tool we accumulate as a society. Once it was language, then writing, then mass communication, now perhaps it'll be a secure economy.
Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.
> But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?
No, I don't think you can. You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech (unless you want to create a slaving machine, and I don't think that's the idea), you can't make tech that magically eliminates energy requirements to transport or build things, or that eliminates costs. I think we need to be at least a little bit realistic when evaluating the problems.
I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. It's like someone saying that you only need a hammer for woodworking.
At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience.
> I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology.
Who said that all problems can be solved by technology?
> Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.
Technological progress often goes against the will of governments. See Twitter-triggered revolutions.
But that could also be done just by putting all law on somewhere public like github...
Or by having a block chain with a hard limit of 10 khashes/second per country (detecting cheaters is easy as far as I understand) and you can have a network of 200 raspberrypi zeros running it for around a single kilowatt..
For example Finland already have laws online accessible for free: https://finlex.fi/en/
And Finland probably isn't only country doing this.
Well, it is the same in my country (Denmark), we have retsinformation.dk (litterally "information of the law"), but that does not hinder a corrupt state from altering "history" as they see fit.
Also, my mother was a german teacher and her ex-DDR speakers (many who were quite some time in prison) told us that, that basically all of them where enprisoned with due process. Their problems were, that the laws where constructed so you were a criminal if you did X, but also (due to a different law) if you did not do X.
It is the basic catch-22, that you cannot escape.
You are intimately dependent on the benevolence of your state/society, and if your state/society is not benevolent you can only throw your life at trying to change it (for everybody else)... You will the most likely fail (and be dead) unless a lot of (by definition) uncoordinated action happens at once.
Even in my country that boast of being a free and civil society we have problems once in a while.
In the 1990 we had a police chief should (sadly for him on camera), "shoot at their legs" (police shooting at citizens is very uncommon in Denmark) at a somewhat violent demonstration.
And we have what is called the Tibetian case where our police mislead protesters so that the visiting Chinese gov people did not have to look at the (otherwise legal) demonstration...
Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins.
I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.
Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc.
These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.
> Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does
From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu:
> American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year
> Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year
> Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year
> Online advertising: 106 TWh per year
> American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year
As a north european techie spending power on quite a few always on things (respberry pis, a nas, a router, wifi, ps5 etc)- but also freezer, fridge, cooking - and lightning for half the year and a little extra heating, I have used around 2500 kWh year to date, which is roughly 320 watts in total (or half that stated figure for always on devices alone...)
EDIT: I remembered the american population size wrong, the right figure is 475 watts @330 Mln people, but my point stands..
I'd also say cruise ships are more egregious, which no one seems to care about despite them definitely not using clean energy or being remotely useful, using 2.5x the amount of energy as Bitcoin - or as much as Spain!
I did not question that Americans use a lot of power (my power budget is also just half of the average Dane as most of my heating is by steam made by the electricity plants (and paid on it's own) and all pumps regarding water (fresh and dirty) is paid by my building coop and not me personally.
But for any reasonable comparison it needs to be "non-critical 24/7 devices" such as routers, nas'es, computers etc and not infrastructure needed for survival..
Also there is a lot of regulation in the EU about standby power (and also in California, if I am not mistaken)? Didn't I see some tech news about that 2 months ago or so?
Comparing electric heating with bitcoin is a bit weird - heating is a necessity in a lot of the world (including where I live) for most of the year.
Bitcoin is not and will never be a survival necessity in the original sense of the word..
Also, there is a lot of focus on ship emissions as people all around the world have noticed the problem, the latest regulation change was in 2020 - not for cruise ships but for all ships...
Even if you completely agree with the political aims of crypto, if there are technical flaws it catastrophically ruins everything crypto hopes to achieve.
Even if you completely agree with the technical side of crypto, if the intended end-game horrifies you, you're not gonna want to see it proliferate.
Would 51% attacks spoil the party with that? The incentives would be enormous to do such a thing, it might even become a polarized political imperative to try to do these attacks.
It might also be like replacing the one citizen, one vote system with a one gpu (or future hardware item), one vote system. Would that remove political power from citizens?
Vitalik Buterin is involved in a lot of the theory in handicapping plutocrats, and enabling fair representation/voting in the blockchain space. Check out his blog.
As I regularly post whenever it comes up, SPL USDC is a dramatically better payment experience than wire transfers or debit cards or whatever, and I wish I could accept all payments this way and pay all bills this way.
These interesting things are about how to do privacy, build second layers, make other smart functionality, etc. In general there are actual cryptographic innovations coming out of these systems. Zcash was truly positive to research into Zero Knowledge Proofs.
At the same time, discussions often get muddied by a few vocal people who are trying to hype up their investments. I imagine some of these people are just hyping, and others have bought into the believe, and cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of 'maybe there is something wrong with this'.
I just fail to see how it is better than so many other alternatives on a case-by-case basis... mostly on efficiency...
And just because I don't believe in the idea itself, I acknowledge that some good can come of it..
See for example wars, where most cutting edge innovation happens. I think wars are bad (but sometimes necessary), but we are reaping the benefits of generals wanting to throw more cannonballs further (If you are unsure I mean our computers where developed mostly because of that), also microwaves, the internet (a cold war though) and lots and lots of other stuff...
This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment.
The other aspect is that they just look at Bitcoin through a technological lens and judge it inferior to other networking & data storage technologies. They don't have a deep grasp of the concept of money and what properties makes for a sound form of money. Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job explaining it from that perspective [1].
It's a shame that so many, otherwise smart, people are sleeping on such a revolutionary change in the world. The idea of Bitcoin has been thought about and predicted for many years by people held in high-regard among HN readers, such as Buckminster Fuller [2], Henry Ford [3], and Friedrich Hayek [4], and they'll still dismiss it out of hand.
Such a massive lost opportunity for great skills, knowledge, and talent to be applied to what I think is one of the most important innovations of our civilisation.
[1] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...
[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/look-at-how-buckminster-fuller-pred...
[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-henry-ford-envisaged-bitcoin-10...
[4] https://twitter.com/janpaul_f/status/1461596623038038017?s=2...
> This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database
I think it's crazy that you feel this way, I can only speak for myself and a few others, but we do in fact fully understand it and why it works this way.
Satoshi is not some god that has come to save us. He saw something that fraction of people in society consider to be a problem and attempted to solve it. He did not consider complex ways that his solution would interact with the society. A lot of us think that crypto causes more problems than it solves.
That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.
Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.
But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.
If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.
Some kind of novel things could be done with it, like that distributed storage thing is sort of interesting. There's a peer to peer betting thing based on (somewhow the outcomes are available to the program?) it I saw on HN a while ago which is sort of interesting.
I'm confident there's lifetimes worth of signal, even in crypto developments in the last year. But there is an ungodly amount of noise over price, outrage, etc.
I asked in a new thread about where to go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611
For anyone else who reads that thread -- the good links and suggestions are near the bottom of the thread.
your network seem to be opposite of general population, where less technically apt less believe (economists, news people, etc.)
i suspect it has more to do with political leaning, i.e. more center-conformist less believe, outside center more believe
HN is largely for founders who want to build things. That's certainly how it started, and there's still traces of that vibe around in the Show HN and startup-y threads. There's a lot more going on here now, like more code topics, AI, electric vehicles, environmental things, a little futurism, etc, but the core is and always has been startups. In itself that doesn't rule out having a reasonable conversation about cryptocurrency. There are a lot of opportunities around crypto. There are startups to found, and pain points to solve. The problem is that crypto has three significant problems for HN readers:
Firstly, a lot of people trying to make a living in crypto are purely speculating. They're not building anything. They're simply trying to "buy low, sell high". Entrepreneurs, in general, don't really have much respect for that. Founders admire and respect people who go out, found a business, and build something real that solves a real problem, even if it's a problem we don't have ourselves. Leeching off the system isn't a skill.
Secondly, a lot of crypto isn't solving a real problem. It's essentially trying to be "digital gold", but without the usefulness of gold. It's only a store of value. There absolutely are good uses for crypto, and even for things like NFTs, but most of the speculation isn't about those things. It's only the "buy low, sell high" side of things. HN is not a forex or trading forum. Again, we respect people who make things.
Lastly, no matter how you cut it, and even with the latest lightning and taproot and proof-of-stake tech considered, crypto has a massive set of problems to still to solve with its environmental, regulatory, and money-laundering issues. To be honest, to me, they look pretty unsolvable. I have a decent understanding of the tech and I can't see how you can build an anonymous system for transferring wealth around that requires significant bandwidth and CPU and not screw the planet by providing a service for drug dealers and terrorists. The fact people are trying is awesome, but I suspect they'll fail. All of the upsides of crypto are also upsides for people who want to use it for bad reasons.
All in all, cryptocurrencies are an interesting idea, and the tech seems like it could have some valid applications, but the downsides are huge. A lot of the pro-crypto people involved don't want to acknowledge that. A lot of the anti-crypto people can't see that the tech could be useful. There's no middle-ground. That makes talking about it pretty boring.
What do you think are the good uses for crypto and NFTs?
(This is a genuine question; I've never been sure what to think about crypto.)
NFTs could enable people to transfer digital assets between platforms without needing the platforms to talk to one another. I could buy an NFT of a 3D model of some Yeezy sneakers, and then bring that NFT to Fortnite for my avatar to wear there, and to the Metaverse to show off there, and to a sneakers forum to verify my ownership in the community there as well. That could be quite useful. 3D cosmetic assets for games and stuff is a massive market, and using NFTs would enable people to transfer goods between those markets. It'd only really work if the asset itself is stored in some sort of distributed architecture though (IPFS for example.)
This ignores the actual implementation. You still need the platforms to talk to one another in the design stage at least (the most difficult one) in order to be able to create an asset that can actually be used in different applications. If right now you cannot upload a 3D model to Fortnite straight away, why do you think it would be easy to do with NFTs?
And already seen with NFTs, that are much simpler thing. Where does the data live? If it is not on blockchain how do you ensure it stays alive and is accessible. Is it somehow streamed when you load the game and object? Let's say there is dozen character each with multiple pieces of unique one of the kind objects. Maybe from dozens different servers? That will likely cause issues.
Or maybe everyone must include in download every other products stuff too? Seems unfeasible really.
And in the end why? Wouldn't it be better to try to sell a same kind of object in your own product and then make more money from that? Instead allowing use of objects from other places...
Every business loves a walled garden because they can pretend that all the customers will spend all their money inside it, but it's anti-consumer, anti-choice, and if the business fails then everyone loses all the things they own there.
Plus, if people could bring their own assets to a game then the number and variety of things in the game grows significantly. It's no longer limited by what the producers can build themselves. For a lot of games, especially ones made by smaller companies, that could be a considerable boon.
I didn't say it would be. NFTs are about access control and ownership, not 3D models. That was only the example I've used. The (huge, but largely unrelated) issue there is about standardizing assets which would also need to be solved (gltf does go some way to doing that though ... it is "the gif of 3D models" according to Kronos). If it's easier to think about, try applying the same solution to unique avatars or something, where the display mechanism is solved.
You said it would enable it. But the stopper about that implementation is not ownership tracking, it's integration. So it's an use case that's not enabled by NFTs, just an use case where you could use NFTs but also any other ownership tracking technology.
> If it's easier to think about, try applying the same solution to unique avatars or something, where the display mechanism is solved.
I can move my avatar image between games without requiring NFTs. Now, if you want "uniqueness", then again the problem is not solved by NFTs, but by some kind of DRM tech. What stops me from copying the image and using it? Or from minting my own NFT with the same image? Do you think that game platforms going to implement complex DRM solutions to avoid people from using avatars they don't own?
The overall point is a trend that I wrote in another comment [1]: just because X has not been done and crypto/NFTs can be used for X, that doesn't mean that crypto enables X. You might find that there are other issues that explain why X hasn't been done.
To this day, 99% of the times I see someone propose crypto/NFTs applications they haven't asked themselves the questions of whether you can do that (or a 90% similar thing) without crypto and why hasn't that been done yet. Possibly because when you ask those questions most of crypto use cases are not "use cases enabled by crypto" but "use cases where I can use crypto or other storage technology".
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295514
Games would need to implement a mechanism so users could only use an NFT as an avatar. Or it'd attach a little tick to show you're the verified owner. Or something.
I've thought about this for about five minutes. I don't have a full working solution.
You might find that there are other issues that explain why X hasn't been done.
"It hasn't been done so it probably can't be done" is a really dumb attitude. It's utterly defeatist. It could simply be that no one has tried yet. Or the wrong people tried. Or people are trying right now and you haven't heard about it yet. Not seeing something is not evidence it can't be done. That's beyond ridiculous.
No, that's not what I am saying. What I am saying is that if something has not been done yet, you should think why that is. And if it turns out that someone could have already done it with existing technology, one should really consider why is that. Yes, maybe it's one of your reasons, or maybe is that it isn't worth it, or that there are implementation issues that are independent of the storage technology, or whatever. It's a basic step before evaluating any solution and it is missing constantly in crypto discussions. And the worst thing is that, when we point out that there are other issues apart from crypto/nocrypto, the only response we get is "but it could work" and "don't be defeatist".
That basic question could be applied to your avatar example. A game developer could implement a similar system where the only allowed avatars are the "official" ones, and you need to buy them. You don't need NFTs for that, and yet you don't see it a lot. I think PlayStation had only official avatars, but they discontinued them in the latest PS5. Could it be that it isn't a feature users want? That the development costs are greater than the possible profits?
I've heard about this supposed use for blockchain before and I genuinely don't get it. So what if you have a tamper-proof blockchain containing information about a supply chain? How does this prove anything about the particular diamond you're selling me?
Again, this is a genuine question. Can someone please walk me through this? What information do I need to verify about the supply chain and how does blockchain help? How were people solving this problem before blockchain?
It's a bit of shame by association, and irrational, but i've put all crypto related-stuff in a box called "scams until proven they're not".
How is crypto different from a Big bag of cash? Both are anonymous/trustless transactions.
Cat memes and mindless YouTube videos use more bandwidth and cpu cycles than crypto ever will…
You cannot win an argument that something is bad by pointing to something that's worse. You're just reinforcing the idea that we need to do better in both things.
I think you can accept that with any new technology there will always be bad actors using it, so this argument makes no sense to me.
There are also cryptocurrencies out there that are more efficient than others and solve the environmental issue, I just hope that you're not conflating Bitcoin, Ethereum with all cryptocurrencies.
It's not possible to have serious, informative, and insightful discussions on a topic like crypto while turning a blind eye to the elephants in the room.
I’m actively involved in the space, I explored my curiosity through designing a few DApps, building some coins, the usual. The tech is interesting, the approach is worthwhile, the whole FOMO pyramid on top of it is just noise and I wish it would stop. I’ve never seen so much nonsense discussions about GSM, GPS or other widely used and useful systems.
When I talk to a crypto peddler, I never have to reach out for my know how as it’s never the case that the discussion progresses past THIS IS THE FUTURE NOW YOU GOTTA JUMP ON BOARD OR ELSE YOU MISS THE MOON TRAIN.
When I go work for a company that does SCRUM, they inform me and I accept or not. I don’t expect to battle on ideas and wits regarding the subject and then one of us to declare defeated that there’s no longer curiosity regarding scrum mastering.
It’s called N.I.M-ble and it has some sort or people making sure the project moves along, managing expectations of both stakeholder and employees in the process.
The employees themselves do the work and also document it, maybe using some sort of cards, and push it forward in a shared view where everyone can get a good idea of there the project is.
It’s similar to traditional approaches, but we haven’t really had the technology to implement it yet as all tasks are encrypted as JSON files on the IPFS and have pointers to it on a custom made blockchain, which we call N.I.M.-chain.
Whenever a task gets pushed, a random person in India or Africa needs to shake their phone to acknowledge work has been done and the managers have to write slam-poetry on a public blockchain that is used as a decryption key for the task details as required by key shareholders. It doesn’t work on traditional companies, you need a DAO for it.
We also minted a NFT with the guidelines, it helped us secure about 20 mil in financing to further develop the tech but now we’re looking to launch an ICO to reach 100 mil because really, we are getting slower down by the slow progress in the management-tech space.
I can really see how the constant hype and downplaying of downsides has fatigued a lot of technically minded people. If most of the discussions about a topic are over-hyped and on shaky ground, it makes sense to be skeptical about any new discussion. Especially if that new discussion is actually quite technical, and needs either niche mathematics or deep knowledge of existing blockchain.
I’ve found a lot of interesting conversations in the distributed channels and IPFS channels, less so on company-focused or specific-blockchain-focused channels.
And finally: > without the need to rely to the "system" of banks, governments etc I consider this a severe bug. When hackers empty out your wallet, you'll wish there was a system of banks and governments that provide some sort of insurance - like most western banks and governments do.
The sole case that can be made for cryptos is that alongside enabling money laundering and tax dodging, their unregulated nature allows people in oppressive regimes to funnel out money. I'd say that may be a valuable tradeoff, but somehow it's not the one being discussed usually.
My experience with international wire transfers so far is that KYC/AML performed at the time of the transaction is cursory. They're just slow because I have to wait for business hours at the sending bank, then wait for the bank to call me (if it's my personal bank rather than my business bank which just sends them automatically), then wait for the funds to make their way to the recipient through intermediary banks who will skim off an unknowable-up-front amount of money.
But it's not like a bank, I agree - a bank gives some protection to your money, because they have responsibilities.
Since they provide what should be considered essential infrastructure, they should be required to provide service to anything legal, IMHO.
And let's see how that story pans out actually. I don't agree with the taxi mafia, but uber are not exactly knights in shining armor either, and are only really viable because of a Venture Capital subsidized attempt to create a monopoly.
Is your argument that bitcoin circumvents established institutions, particularly the unjust ones? I see the appeal, but those should be attacked directly; legally, and politically, IMHO. Not with tech hacks, the ultimate consequences of which are quite unpredictable, but also quite likely to just shift the concentration of power to a different set of people.
It seems like if we ought to be waiting for the state to fix payment processors, we should also be waiting for them to fix taxis, instead of operating illegal "ride share" apps.
My argument isn't about Bitcoin because Bitcoin isn't a technology that provides cheap settlement of dollars. Other technologies do though, and they additionally avoid the need to pay e.g. 3.6% (!!) to Stripe, which seems like it makes them worthwhile on its own.
Private enterprise quite legitimately alters the playing field by introducing new products, services and business models. LEGALLY. When it does so illegally, it should be stopped.
That is exactly my argument, bad institutions should be disrupted by legal competition, or (better), legal or political pressure. Not by illegal circumventions.
Bitcoin is still the biggest crypto currency, and compared to Euro, dollars and other currencies, it’s practically useless. The network can’t compete on scale, compared to VISA, MasterCard or AMEX. The crypto currencies try to solve problems much of the western simply don’t have.
The tech will live on an small pocket, such as money transfer between banks and large organisations, but it won’t be useful to the public at large.
The internet took roughly 20-30 years to reach mass adoption. Cryptocurrency is about 10 years in, and while there are many active users, there user experience is still behind that of most payment options, and smart contracts which enable a host of other decentralized financial primitives are really only a few years old.
So I will be more specific and say that it is a revolution for the people that use crypto. I don't know if it will be a revolution for the general population but my belief is that it won't be. The "system" will find ways to crush crypto then it starts to become more popular. Right now it doesn't care that much ...
Yes it can. Bitcoin Lightning solves this. They're using it in El Salvador right now.
That is I have money in one country and I want person to receive it in their own currency in other one.
At this day, end 2021, for what concerns the daily life of billion people worldwide, they are still a very small niche for first-world, trading-like unauthorised gambling? From a technical point of view, sufficient progress has been made… it is politics now, geopolitics and environment, if you like, preventing wider, global deployment, maybe?
The ancient greeks used to think that they have reached the pinnacle of human progress and that there is no use for further developments because of how comfy life has gotten.
In addition, cryptocurrencies just happen to also have an incredible amount of real-world impact in way other technologies don't. E.g. debates on AI - not even AGI, just plain old AI, and have there been any real new breakthroughs lately, etc, also have a lot of disagreements. But while that impacts grant money and investment in some technologies, it doesn't also directly translate into billion-dollar markets and potential fraud, etc.
You also have to separate "cryptocurrencies" to a few underlying actual topics that people disagree about:
1. Whether actual cryptocurrencies, e.g. bitcoin, are a good investment.
2. Whether actual cryptocurrencies are good for the world, or whether they enable fraud/scams/etc.
3. Whether actual cryptocurrencies can achieve, are achieving, or should achieve their original goals or any newer goals (e.g. replace fiat completely).
4. Whether the blockchain technology itself is interesting at all, or is it only interesting for cryptocurrencies. (This point is especially relevant in a forum of founders, given the massive amounts of creating and investment in blockchain-related startups.)
This becomes like a game. It's a logic puzzle. How do you construct an unanswerable argument that produces your desired result? It's much less interesting to go 'well, wait and see, things will doubtless become more obvious as this progresses'.
Under some circumstances, the ONLY way to establish a currency that actively supplants and destroys all fiat currency, displacing governments and replacing their control with only market pressures enacted through completely liquid and untrammeled flow of capital… is to ram it through with such desperate haste that it's too big to fail by the time it's recognized as a threat by those controlling governments. To topple governments and replace all their control with anarchy governed by only market pressures, the ungovernable replacement currency has to be so huge that the pressure of committed capital ITSELF is more powerful than any government.
This is a big, dramatic 'ask'. Whether it's wrecking the world and ruining the environment is a whole separate question. Arguably the bigger question is, 'SHOULD there be a currency that allows the pressure of purely capital to overthrow this or any government?' Especially since by design it is NOT a hierarchical power structure, but distributed and impossible for anyone to control… does that produce desirable results?
Mind you, if you get that and THEN find out it's possible for the system to be controlled anyway, you're pretty thoroughly hosed… you have to trust very much that the system put in place to overthrow all governments, truly represents a distributed and ungovernable system. Otherwise, you just overthrew all governments in order to hand all power over to somebody that you don't know who it is.
I was so close. I had the cards in a shopping car. I thought about it too many nights. I didn't want to blow $800 with nothing to show though. I didn't have a lot of disposable funds then, or now.
I never thougt it would get this big. I thought the government would shut it down--for reasons of hiding money.
I thought the same about Uber too.
The above could be mostly because the community on here, doesn't necessarily need/want to survive on pure speculation. Sure you can do forecasting and projections, but when compared to traditional investment methods, e.g. compounding, load averaging and buying "blue" chip stocks - it seems high risk, low reward.
--
Now if the conversation was more on blockchain, and what problem it solves, I can see it gain traction on here, especially when Visa wanted to hire "blockchain engineers" and when they even purchased other companies in that similar space. Also, startups, well, when they were "startups" like coinbase adding a new coin, and such, etc.
As the famous saying goes: "It's hard to make a man understand something when he could have been a millionaire if he'd only understood it sooner."
/s
Either they are intelligent and manipulative and are looking to maximize their investments whatever the cost to others, the externalities, whatever… or they are intelligent and accurately perceiving the first type of intelligent person.
By now, if you're a techie nerd, to be naive about this topic would mean there's something seriously wrong with you. You should have picked a side by now as this is not complicated or ambiguous. There is only furthering crypto by any means necessary, or opposing it (increasingly, by any means necessary). It's not going to get any blurrier. If you feign naivete and curiosity at this stage you are probably being manipulative and actually in the 'furthering by any means necessary' camp…
There certainly are some loud 'shills' out there. But there are also actual interesting technical developments. It seems to me that between the shills and the people shouting down who they perceive to be shills, the interesting discussion gets drowned out.
If you're a sufficiently intelligent person, you can recognize arguments like "you oppose X, but you do not acknowledge Y. And Y exists. Therefore, you are disingenuous: you are not candid or sincere, you're pretending that you don't know Y. Therefore nobody should listen to you about X.'
Um… I oppose X. At this stage, not interested in Y. And I keep running into arguments that are trying to shut me up about X… by any means necessary, including flat-out sophistry of every possible description.
And this becomes an intellectual game. How can this NOT be fascinating to Hacker News readers? :)
I think crypto coins are as worthless as subprime mortgages, Pets.com type dot com stocks, or any other bubble going back to tulip bulbs. However as I am mostly uninvolved (aside from getting a free cryptocoin drop my friend wanted me to get), it has little effect on me. I find it annoying to see scams discussed, in the same way I don't want to hear an MLM pitch. I want to warn people it is a scam if I see a discussion, out of obligation. Also they say it hurts the environment, which I have not looked at much but suppose it makes sense.
On the other hand, people with large crypto positions or who are invested in mining rigs and who have invested their time and have made large "capital" expenses and whose life is cryptocoins are much more apt to further crypto coins.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Bitcoin market cap in the next market correction where credit is tightened, stocks go down, margin calls go out etc. This is a game of musical chairs where the music has yet to ever stop.
In a nutshell, I'm all for cheaper money transfer, but I've never seen convincing arguments that it follows that bitcoin should be worth X. If I write a cheque for $60,000, that piece of paper is still worth $0.50. Just because it can be used for a transaction, it doesn't follow that it's worth as much as the amount being transferred.
Fundamentally on the one hand bitcoin has loads of negatives and very very few positives. On the other hand I can never find anyone addressing my objections in a manner that I find convincing. After much trying, I just ran out of curiousity.
So homework question: what does define the value of a Bitcoin?
Then you also get into the government's implication (see Biden's plans), which more or less rots it.
Saying it's useless or entirely a scam is not accurate and we've seen that, but depending on how much of the hype you ate up, it either stagnated or only now some develop upon their promises(and there are a few).
Assuming we fix the complexity,effiency and speed problems, you still have a lot of work about implementing the technology from start to finish.So far we've only seen the vast majority of the development being top->down.Crypto networks that rely upon centralized services are a joke, to put it mildly.
When one side is yelling and the other side is giving warnings I think it’s fair to say that this is not really a situation where one would describe as ‘divisive.’
Edit: However, that doesn't mean this conversation should be forced on the HN community over and over again. That's not right, and that's not the nature of curiosity.
Edit: I'm also down to discuss interesting cryptocurrency project with clear and theses, not just "change the world". I'd be interested in a federated Cryptocurrency that is meant to be easily "self hosted" in small communities and has a mechanism to convert between these communities according to rules/exchange rate set by each community - with the final consensus mechanism rooted in the social sphere. I'd be interested in discussing cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate once received, to test the idea of inflation driving investment.
Thinking about it, there's lots of interesting discussions to have, but nobody is having them. I guess I need to modify my statement to saying that the discussions that people in the cryptocurrency community want to have are boring because they are all rooted in the "anarcho"-capitalist perspective and that angle has run out of interesting things (in my eyes)
Re: "DAOs with currency is just feudalism redone" - I like the way you put this. There does seem to be this kind of land grab where giving ownership somehow changes everything.
Re: Self-hosted currencies in small communities - this one I'm less curious about so am wondering what you see in it. Would the 15,000 cryptocurrencies in existence today start to meet this criteria of different currencies across many different communities?
Re: Cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate - also interesting to think about. Kind of like having a digital tomato or something, it must be used before it molds. I've heard Dogecoin has a high issuance rate, I wonder if that would apply. My sense is it's hard to disconnect from everything else though, and if I had a bunch of rotting tomatoes I would convert them to something more stable (tomato sauce, or trade them for money) unless I had immediate utility for tomatoes.
Re: your above point about nocoiners having more of a disconnected view, agreed. Curious what you think of my comment here on this, speculating that as more of the world becomes a financial instrument, it gets harder and harder to be a nocoiner. In that case we must figure out how to be curious while having/talking our book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297148
Like I said, would love to find a place for more discussions like this with you, more distance than the "to the moon", but less technical than an https://ethresear.ch.
communitycoins: these are interesting because they'd be small-people-fiat, giving tiny communities the possibility to bootstrap mini-economies and then linking into some federated system according to some rules and based on people vouching for them. notably, they'd be the inverse of todays crypto- nonanonymous, consensus based on trust.
re decaying currencies: yeah, but then you'd need to buy an explicit store of value, and especially if money decays fast, whoever sells that to you will need to get rid of it again. but i think this one would be an experiment in money the same way gopher and gemini are experiments in hypertext
Re your comment: I think it doesn't quite hold, because I can buy shares in the VT index and can then talk about it without needing to hype it - the underlying value is highly independent of people's opinions because everyone eats,shits and dies and so needs the commodities and services provided by the underlying companies (in the long run). I think it is only the most hype-dependent securities like cryptocurrency and Tesla where the underlying is questionable and so bag holders feel the need to defend their investment quite literally (note to all the true believers in either:relax, I said questionable, not nonexistent, if I'm wrong with my opinion you can pay someone to laugh at me later)
Honestly, I think it needs to be specialises forums or side threads like this, any crypto community will be overrun by the moonboys and libertarians too quickly.
It's likely that the people that question the source of bitcoin's wealth are also questioning google's ethics, and that the bitcoin get rich quick people are happy working for google too.
Taking a community to be homogeneous is a common fallacy.
At the same time, nuanced discussion / curious discussion requires talking about downsides. Any mention of downsides also draws in the people who think its a bad idea. Moreover, it is my sense that a lot of discussions are filled with people trying to hype up their investment. These people will try to play down any downsides mentioned. The people who dislike cryptocurrency notice the people trying to downplay the downsides, and that overpowers any other discussion.
Edit: A point made by ThalesX also seems quite on point to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295405 In summary, people are tired of the over-hype that existed. Making them suspicious of any new discussion.
My heartbeat was increasing every time I was finding some project promising to build this new network.
But every time, after lines of poetic, pure, brave, and romantic description of their mission, there was a line about their new token and why you should buy it.
With the time I’ve got the immunity to such promises and prejudice - they all are just scam projects.
I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to banks and governments launching their own digital currency. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. If it means it's highly traceable so it can't be used for illegal things, then so be it. That's where we're heading now.
It’s top of mind because some people are getting rich quickly in it. What’s interesting about that?
Should we also still be talking about people making tendies on GME?