Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to.
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
I had a fantastic experience at DevCon V. Ethereum developer conferences attract all the technical folks and almost none of "money" people.
I haven't gone to any Bitcoin conference, but I can't see it being the same. Bitcoin's aversion to change means mostly demagogues are left, and all the talk is money talk.
> Bitcoin's aversion to change means mostly demagogues are left, and all the talk is money talk.
That's true, but you say it as if that's a bad thing. Bitcoin is valuable because it does not change, its proven to work, and people know that. If the downside is that there isn't as much to talk about at a conference, then I don't give a shit.
You’re right that Bitcoin is still the most valuable because it’s resistant to frivolous changes, however there’s far more development happening in the space today than ever before!
Here’s links to 3 full days of talks from the Open Source Stage at the Bitcoin 2022 conference:
Bitcoin isn't averse to change, it's averse to changes that impede on its core attributes: decentalized, permissionless, global, censorship-resistance. Increasing the block size as a patch to keep fees down infringes on the core attributes, because you increase the minimum requirements for running a node.
There's a lot of innovation happening in and on Bitcoin. RSK for smart contracts, BetterHash for mining pool decentralization, the Lightning Network or Liquid Network as examples of layered scaling.
Bitcoin's dev meetups are great examples of the helpful, thoughtful, enterprising and conscientious community that exists, without the overly loud, overly shallow speculators.
Unfortunately at the the surface, it’s all cranks. The people you see trending on Twitter and such almost seem like an alien species. And then there’s all the advertising for exchanges and such being blatant “get in at the bottom of the pyramid scheme” nonsense.
I was also “into” crypto roughly early, never found a community (nor should I have to), that’s all I see, and that’s all I therefore assume exists.
I saw this happen with the early internet, and then later with crypto... It took a long time for the Internet to go from 1) only know to geeks to 2) grifters promising the world to 3) wider acceptance. Maybe this will happen too with crypto, but until it sorts out its grifter problem, it will be always be stuck at stage 2.
You're getting downvoted for that, but you aren't wrong.
There aren't fewer grifters on the internet. There are just more regular people. And also more grifters, but they can hide in the rest of the noise.
It's going to be the same with cryptocurrency if it sticks around. There will always be people trying to trick less-wise people into giving up their money for nothing.
The amount of time the internet took to show it is a solution to real problems, as well as the time it took for the internet to 'grow up' beyond the grifter stage (which was about the same time, and probably that is not a coincidence) is far shorter. Already - and bitcoin/crypto shows no sign of growing beyond the grifter phase. What, something like 1/3 of everybody who bought Bieber's NFT thing got it grifted? That's insane.
No, people distinctly remember that when the first wave of hype about the web came along, the public was being encouraged to buy books on Amazon.com, other stuff on eBay.com browse masses of content on Yahoo and AOL and of course post lots of messages on the social media of the day. Most of this interaction was free to the user not an "investment", and it was recognisable as a slower and lower resolution version of most of what we had today by the middle of the first decade of the Web.
The Internet existed before then in various forms, but never as an industry of rich people trying to convince poorer people to invest all their savings in email.
Largely crypto seems to fail at being distributed internet money. If a project is fast and cheap enough for it that correlates with being too niche to be viable.
We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
> Largely crypto seems to fail at being distributed internet money. If a project is fast and cheap enough for it that correlates with being too niche to be viable.
So is that why other 'crypto' like XRP, Stellar, USDC and Algorand are also compliant for the ISO 20022 standard since they are useful at being 'distributed internet money'? [0]
> We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
Both of them have completely failed in their original purposes.
Then you did not look (closely) enough at BTC. When transaction prices went up in 2017 [1] the second layer technology "Lightning" was invented and build-out.
Right now, Joe Average, can transact for fractions of pennies. [2]
Haven't you realised that 'the second layer technology "Lightning"' aka Lightning Network is not Bitcoin and is an off-chain system and is centralised by design which contradicts and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was built for? [0]
The Lightning Network is decentralised because it is trustless and permissionless. Anyone can send Bitcoins instantly and almost for free. Check out the code to convince yourself.
Bitcoin being a crypto asset (I know everyone will want to dig in on that moved goal post, but it doesn't matter) is still extremely valuable and a massive step towards its intended goal. As a settlement layer, which is by now clearly what it should be, it is very good, and layer-2 and centralized layer-3 solutions if and when adopted will bring it the rest of the way.
There is so much meta talk about crypto on the internet, but no one has the chops to actually talk about the ups and downs, challenges and successes of something like the lightning network, which is perhaps one of the most important developments in the space despite not being a speculative vehicle.
"Can" is doing a lot of work here. I finally got around to playing with Lightning recently, my sense was it's quite a ways away from being ready unless you've got a decent amount of frequent income + spending going through btc. The worst part is it seems poisoned by nodes that want to extract a %-amount fee rather than a flat or bytes-dependent fee. It was actually one US penny more expensive to send a ~$50 lightning transaction via ACINQ (a recommended node that would actually accept opening up a channel) than just sending a normal blockchain transaction, where recently you can pay the minimum 1 sat/byte and get confirmed in not too long.
Lightning has promise but the regular chain is still just fine for many use cases especially for normal people, barring those rare periods of exceptionally high transaction fees. A transaction will typically show up in the mempool "instantly" and for many vendors that's good enough; much like the classic written checks system they can trust the purchaser isn't going to try any funny business before the transaction is fully confirmed/settled and you can let them go on their way with their groceries or coffee or whatever. If they do try something (successfully), well, you're out a small amount (maybe, an intermediary like bitpay may tank those for you), and you ban them from your business. For many other types of transactions, even waiting for at least one transaction but not expecting that for 24 hours from now is fine and impacts nothing. My hope is the effective minimum of 1 sat/byte will be decreased because right now it's 9 cents to send the median sized 224 byte transaction and if btc doubles again to $80k USD then the minimum fee doubles to 18 cents without anything changing, that's like an extra pack of ramen. Well it's still not that bad, especially since it's not amount-dependent; my whole state recently mandated grocery stores start charging 8 cents per plastic bag when they used to be free, many people are just personally tanking it and still throwing them out, but everyone would rather pay no fees if they could.
> The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
Check out DeFI on Ethereum and your hope will resurrect. aave.com, pooltogether.com, goodghosting.com, polymarket.com, ens.domains, gitcoin. https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
It's not about the tech. IMO a payment should just work. You don't need to understand the technology. It's foolish to expect people to know the tech in and out, it is irrelevant for 90% of people.
There's no need to have cool applications of blockchains, there's only need for decentralisation.
> Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for.
If having a solid understanding of the tech underlying crypto is a prereq of any sort, it will never reach mass adoption. Personally idgaf what fiat we choose or tech underlying my debit transactions, so long as the value is reasonably stable, my account reasonably secure, and my form of payment is accepted by almost all merchants.
Unfortunately, the world tends to dish out black swan events that invalidate your assumptions of what is reasonable. Canadian truckers, Argentinian hyperinflation, Sri Lankan federal deficits, Turkish central banking mismanagement, Russian expansionist delusions... the list goes on and on.
Sure, the dollar is reasonably stable. The problem is that the global financial system is deeply flawed in its fundamental properties. Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation, financial meltdowns, geo-spatial catastrophy, and more.
> mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias
The whole movement came out of monetary crank-ism, those people were always there.
Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.
>Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism.
While using the per-design resource destroying, planet burning Proof-Of-Waste? Are you Kidding?
And no, deflation does not encourage more long term investments, it does simply encourage hoarding, not exactly a desirable thing, form any perspective. And of course it is the fatal (and likely never fixed) flaw in bitcoin-as-a-currency.
> Bitcoin being deflationary helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
No, it does not. How could it? It does nothing but encourage hoarding. Not only that, but also a economy where everything is more scare tomorrow than today, is a economy in perpetual decline.
>You can use the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as a currency. It's almost instant and free.
That does not side step the proof-of-waste on the main chain. This is a completely unrelated debate.
No it doesn't. And you are moving goalposts. But still, it's a obvious and transparent lie. It wastes electricity that could have been put to good use, like power2(gas|ammonia|syngas|heat|cooling) or just normal, dispatchable consumption in a Wide area synchronous grid, a thing that exists pretty much everywhere where electricity generation is a thing.
And bitcoin does not use electricity, it just flat out wastes it. And that's not because bitcoin in itself is useless (it is), but due to the design of the Proof-of-Waste. Electricity use implies that electricity is converted into something. Every iPhone uses X Wh. If you dail up the usage, the output increases. It's not perfectly linear, but that's a reasonable approximation. Bitcoin is different: More electricity will never produce a better service, more bitcoins or whatever. Bitcoin will not ever get better by using more. And yet it is designed to waste a amount of electricity proportional to it's price. Oh, and it is only profitable to mine if you use a below-average electricity price. E.g. use the laxes regulations, the most polluting or the most illegal sources of electricity.
I find the GP's comment tenuous but I also find the environment-damaging rhetoric you and a sibling (and thousands of others) give on proof of work even more so. If you want to bite the bullet and say people shouldn't be able to pay for energy and do with it what they want, fine, but otherwise, price out the actual energy costs, and realize the purpose of such costs: security. Bank of America alone spends $1bn/yr on cybersecurity, bitcoin mining costs the world about ten times that. It's not that unreasonable. Another comparison is it's about 1/8th the US spending on cigarettes.
Unless this is sarcasm, do you wanna talk about the environmental ramifications of so much work being duplicated and dumped in the bitcoin network? Like, the sheer number of machines and waste heat that comes from nodes who weren't quite fast enough to get the payout, and just had to put all those calculations into /dev/null?
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It makes renewables more profitable because it offers a base price for excess energy. Any place, 24/7.
Bitcoin continues to inflate until ~2140. The difference is that it inflates in a predictable curve and is not subject to the decisions of central bankers.
Inflationary policies also have a very tight link with speculation in the economy. You only need to look at the past 2 years.
Bitcoin supply does grow until 2140. It will inflate only if the backing economy and users does not grow until then. If this growth outpaces the supply of bitcoins, it deflates. And just every economist (and every piece of empirical data we have) will tell you deflation is about the worst thing that can happen to an economy, in terms of monetary events.
> it's going to be used as a speculation vehicle rather than money.
I see this claim time and time again, but it's hardly convincing. Deflationary assets don't exist in a vacuum, they compete with inflationary assets that create value over time (such as stocks), and it's not a binary decision as to which one is going to be the best investment/use of your money. Additionally, the value of pretty much anything (whether deflationary or inflationary) is hardly a factor of their availability in the future but rather their actual or perceived utility at a precise moment in time.
I think some inflation is good as it is an incentive to invest in capital projects. If you only have deflation, why shouldn't you hoard your wealth? I mean, since it's always going to be worth more tomorrow than today. Inflation is a shadow that people use to excuse their greed
It seems you assume investment is generally good. As you can see right now people invest in anything just to save their cash from rising inflation, but the investments often aren't sensible to put it mildly. Valuations of many companies based on realistic forward P/E ranges are outright silly. Nor is investing necessarily beneficial for society in general. In fact many of these corporations are outright destructive, but capital gets allocated to where it can multiply the best, not where it might have a positive influence on society.
It's the fiscal policy of many countries that's massively driven up asset prices including cryptocurrencies. Those who didn't invest saw their savings printed away.
Inflation (of IOUs) is good for those holding the actual wealth (resources, land, farms, factories, real estate, etc - often through public shares). It's good for those who have debt denominated in inflationary currency. It's definitely good for some people and their business. What many people simply don't understand is they're not part of that group.
This is something I’ve thought about and while I agree that a deflationary currency would be detrimental to our constant economic growth, I wonder if that’s actually a bad thing.
Do we really want constant growth and pointless consumerism knowing what it is doing to our environment? Maybe a deflationary currency would be good, as people wouldn’t want to spend it on frivolous things and only use it to buy things they really need.
I don’t really know where I stand, but I have come to doubt my initial concerns over deflationary money and I wonder what others think about such a radical shift.
While this is the most thoughtful comment, it seems like without the effective equivalent of population caps, price controls, and a large redistribution network, a deflationary system would involve people fighting over progressively smaller pieces of the pie, while those who have more than enough continue to take a smaller amount of their resources over time until the effective expenditures of the wealthy are effectively zero. This also would effectively bar new entrants to the system, so children, those with little access to tech and energy resources, and those in developing counties.
I assume by "Monetary crank-ism" you mean scepticism of the dominant economic playbooks. That is very different from investment bubbles which the parent is talking about.
You can call it crank-ism if you want, but the movement behind Bitcoin's properties were born out of very real concerns about current economic models and what their effects are.
The origin is the cypherpunk movement and coders looking into ways to exchange money peer-to-peer. If you think that's "crank-ism" I'm not sure I want to know what social and monetary policies you support. Certainly Bitcoin gained initial popularity fast because it enabled the people to take back some control.
> Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.
When do you think that happened? For me it was around 2012. Thats when I exited crypto and never looked back.
I actually built an app before that which would easily transfer money between countries, by finding matching local trades. Unfortunately to turn it into a service, it requires the currency to both be popular and stable.
> The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there
It is important to note that crypto currencies are distributed blockchains, a subset of blockchain methods. Blockchains for tamper detection purposes have been around for longer than bitcoin and its ilk, IIRC they date back to the mid 80s or before.
I love Git. It is a distributed cryptographic chain technology. Git is open source and free and used by many millions of people every day. You would think that proponents of decentralized cryptographic chain technology would talk about Git a lot.
But the crypto people don't talk about Git. They are focused on being early adopters and investors in something that will generate 1000x returns, even if those returns come from a pyramid scheme mechanism.
If I replace crypto with "web", your comment still feels the same, yet the WWW is more popular than ever. Maybe look under the rug a bit deeper, but at the same time I'm not saying that the abuses aren't there.
This doesn't make sense. The vast majority of people aren't interested in the slightest about the technology. Nobody needs or wants to know the intricacies of SEPA payments, I just want to touch the terminal with my watch and boom, payment completed.
I actually do still use it to pay for a SAAS side project from a retired startup founder who got kicked off paypal. It's super convenient for digital stuff like that.
Just here to say that besides the good points that the author makes in defense of Crypto, I also support wholeheartedly its right-libertarian roots, despite the negative connotation it receives in the article.
I think that the widespread implementation of crypto would immediately make the world more complex and thus less susceptible to centralizing forces. This means that in order to get things done, society will have to rely more on self-organizing small groups of individuals.
In my view, less centralization is the at the bottom what libertarianism strives for, so it makes sense crypto is seeing as supporting it.
I had trouble reading beyond that in the second sentences. You can’t just retroactively assign a political affiliation to the origin of an algorithm application.
And on my desk as I type, a slim volume entitled "The politics of bitcoin : Software as right-wing extremism". To be fair, it seems to be more about some bitcoiners rather than bitcoin itself.
I suspect but cannot prove that we could argue any political leanings we like.
For me it is rather hard to separate the Libetarians and Anarcho people... Other one might be right and other left, but there is some weird commonality when it comes to state and control of financial system...
It's really not that hard. Libertarians, minarchists and "anarcho-capitalists" take one of the things which inherently need a state to uphold it (private property) and use it as the conceptual foundation of their social order - while not liking "the state". All other anarchists don't and hence get labeled as "left". That's the main difference, and the reason why "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical.
There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state (creating public goods, giving weaker participants of a system protection, internalising externalities via regulation etc.) but keeping the bad parts (police and military with their massive potential for rent seeking and state capturing of money pots, not to speak about violence and abuse).
> Libertarians, minarchists and "anarcho-capitalists" take one of the things which inherently need a state to uphold it (private property) and use it as the conceptual foundation of their social order - while not liking "the state".
Very well said. As someone who was a "libertarian" in my high school days, I ultimately abandoned the philosophy after realizing that it was at its root far more about "property" than "liberty" and ought to have been termed "propertarianism". Furthermore, none of it's logico-moral justifications for property rights actually worked for the most fundamental forms of property (land and unproduced natural resources).
Hi, minarchist here. You are almost right in the distinction between right and left anarchism being about private property. But it's a little more profound. The main difference radicates in the conception of legitimate power. For a right anarchist, power is illegitimate only when it's carried out through violence. Meanwhile, for a left anarchist almost any power hierarchy is illegitimate in itself. To the extent that private property could give rise to power hierarchies, a left anarchist will reject it. But it's only a particular case derived from the core belief.
> "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical
Well, anarcho-capitalists believe that there are ways to provide property rights outside the state. As a minarchist, I'm skeptical about it, but if you believe it there's no paradox.
On the other hand, I do find deeply paradoxical the left anarchist stance on rejecting capitalism but also (AFAIK) reject any means to stop its emergence in society.
> There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state [...] but keeping the bad parts
As a minarchist, I strive for reducing the weight of the state as much as humanly possible. Justice, defense, and a minimal social security net are the only services I can't think how to provide without the state. If you think these are the bad parts I'd love to hear a viable alternative, maybe you can make me fully anarcho-capitalist ;).
I agree with you on the more nuanced distinction, I just didn't want to open the discussion of what legitimate power structures constitue.
Re your criticism of left-anarchism, one of the big unsolved challenges in my eye is exactly your point: how do you keep per from pooling? In a sense, you also need a "state" but one which has as it's explicit goal the self dissolution - which is of course the same paradox that ancaps face. The difference to me is that it seems to me more feasible to build societal systems and cultures that disperse power if we build our ideology around consent and cooperation than to build a society where the central building block is the by-necessity cooperation of small dictators who somehow are supposed to also respect their weaker neighbors private property rights. The former seems like positive feedback loops are possible (and we see spontaneous cooperation like this emerge throughout history, without any powerful person pushing it) while the latter...was the robber barons and cleptocrats of the 19th,20th and 21st century
Re your question, I don't like to quibble to much about this if it doesn't have a possible payoff, but do you believe in e.g. environmental regulations, provision of public goods via a regulated healthcare system, basic education etc? If yes then I think your position might be rare amongst self identified minarchists. If not, then do you see how e.g. natural monopolies like healthcare or highly influential realms like healthcare are open to power concentration and state hijacking?
Left anarchists are mostly pretty down on the concept of money full stop. Magic cypherpunk money is no different to state-backed fiat money in that respect.
I don't think it's retroactive at all, unless you believe that the message in the origin block "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" is coincidental.
Beyond that Bitcoin's design decisions (deflationary currency, trustless) embed a political ideal. Algorithms can very well be political, it's absurd to argue otherwise. For example taxes are, effectively, algorithmic in nature and I don't think anybody would argue that tax brackets are apolitical.
I don't know about what satoshi thought. I do however know that most of the folks talking about it in the spaces I was in were libertarian (in an american sense).
They were all about gold standards and hard money and auditing the fed as well.
I've never heard of a bitcoin or Ethereum deterministic wallet being canceled because someone found out its owner is from Iran or Venezuela. That's a huge improvement over the crap that is the current financial system.
I guess its time for a reality check: Putin oligarchs are still filthy rich, the ruble has come back to pre-war levels while average Russian citizens who have been excluded from the rest of the world.
The ruble's course doesn't matter because it's close to unusable. The Russian economy is cut off from vital supplies, and will soon have all sorts of shortages of all sorts of high tech/quality things - vehicles, phones, computer parts, sensors for their precious resource extractions. China and India cannot fill all the gaps, there's too many of them.
As for the oligarchs, they're still rich, but much less so, and they've lost many precious toys ( yachts, villas, football clubs).
Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen. I have zero sympathy for the average Russian whose inaction made them unable to purchase a new phone or car. They won't starve to death, and they won't be bombes to pieces, which are the prospects facing Ukrainian citizens suffering from the invasion which brought all of this on.
> Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen.
Speaking for a point of privilege right here aren't we?
> Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen. I have zero sympathy for the average Russian whose inaction made them unable to purchase a new phone or car.
What do you expect the average Russia to have done exactly? I’m curious what you would have done in their position.
Not vote for Putin and his party for decades? Go out in the streets when opposition leaders or dissidents were assasinated in broad daylight? Something? Anything? Because of them allowing Putin to get where he is, now innocent Ukrainians are suffering terrible atrocities. I know which population is more guilty and which deserving of compassion.
Something like the Belarusians who went to the streets to protest against a fraudulent election and got violently crushed by their police state? The same "evil complacent" Belarusians that are also being sanctioned now?
When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
Of course now is too late, the police state is well too developed for such protests to not turn out very bloody. And yes, Belarus and Kazakhstan crushing their protestors is also partly the fault of the complacent apathetic Russians. Without Putin's support both would have probably succeeded.
> When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
Many times. Admittedly the risk of arbitrary incarceration or death has always been low in my case, but it's because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are.
Lukashenko has been belarus president since the fall of the USSR. Do you really think they ever had a chance at a fair election? What can be said of Russia then? Didn't they just used KGB strategies to poison the strongest opositor Navalny?
> because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are
Was it you or people who fought and died decades or centuries ago to achieve the presumably stable democracy you enjoy today? Please do not misunderstand I'm not saying your activism or causes are not important but trying to tell you that things are really tough outside the comfort zone of the first world.
I'm sorry but is just seems cruel, unfair and childish to expect that by starving people living in dictatorships they will just topple their corrupt government.
IMO we should do the opposite. We should bombard those countries with our shit. Our cheap services, our shows, our food, our way of life. Hire their engineers. Give them tech like Uber and crupto to create a nightmare for their control freak governors. Erode and drain their funds. Capture the hearts of their young. But instead Russians are listening to their government say "See I told you they hate us".
That's what has been done until now. Germany even had an explicit policy of economic interdependence to make a war unimaginable. You can see how well that worked, right?
And they don't have it anymore. Those people who _actually_ protested and got beaten and arrested by _real_ tyrannical governments are being told by their government "see I told you they hate us" while also being criticized for "not doing enough" by people like you who probably never experienced what is to live outside of the privileged 13% humans who are born in stable democracies.
Also have you thought about the novel idea of old school policing to catch criminals instead of collaterally damaging the lives every single human in the world other than the 13% privileged who happen to be citizens of stable democracies?
I was more positive about crypto before the big NFT grift came along.
But even then, hardly anybody seemed to care about making crypto work as a currency. It was all about the speculation/gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, and memecoin pump+dumps. Nobody bought their groceries or paid their rent with crypto, it was just the currency of darknet drugs and cybercrime. And multi-million-dollar exchange hacks seemed to be almost weekly headlines.
Crypto wasn't going well, even before NFTs came along, and before the environmental opposition to mining ramped up.
That's our western perspective. Apparently NFTs and financialization are an ethereum and clones thing. Bitcoin has placed a ton of focus on cheap payments on the Lightning Network. Monero is focusing on privacy. Our media is hyper focused on tech bros getting rich on monkey pictures but out there people in Nigeria and Sudan are using Bitcoin and Tether as their life line. Ucranians did it too and that's the only option for Russian content creators who are mostly against Putin's regime. Yeah yeah scammy tether but for them its leagues better than the hyper inflated money they have available.
Any state with sufficient laws can enforce exchanges, businesses, etc. to blacklist wallets which have been identified as foreign owned - if there are sanctions / embargos against said country/countries.
Of course, there are ways to obfuscate the money trail, but if they start handing out hard prison time and fines, that alone will probably deter most.
So while you still have a "bank", so to speak, you're still limited to whom you can do business with.
I really don't see how it could ever be a financial system. It would require regulation, control and identification. It requires a central and powerful supervisor per country. It would render the system at most equally accessible, possibly less.
If you want a bank with a publically accessible ledger, fine, build it, or have your government publish all banking transactions. But don't pretend bitcoin can be an alternative to the current banking system.
My point is: you won't be able to avoid "tradfi" regulation. It's there for a reason, and it will be implemented. It's one of the government's sources of income.
It's hard to have a charitable take on a huge majority of the cryptocurrency space when the web is drowning in all of the greedy bad actors that use the ideologies listed in this article as cover to push the grifts that inevitability harm my less technical friends and family.
Well put. The same may also be said about both social media and, especially in context of less technical friends and family, even the general internet.
Toxicity is the right term if we stick to its original, biological meaning. Energy generation leads to large toxic outputs. Wasting energy leads to more toxic outputs.
She said "toxic" because she's talking about poison. She basically said: "I myself am anti-crypto. But I don't think that we anti-crypto people should be poisonous in our interaction with pro-crypto people."
I'd like to say more, but HN has a clear "Anti-Didn't-RTFA Toxicity" policy.
There are ways of expressing disagreement which are toxic, and there are ways of expressing disagreement which are not toxic. She has observed is that many anti-crypto people have been expressing their disagreement in toxic ways, and feeling justified in doing so. She is discouraging the first while encouraging the second.
If you'd spent any effort trying to understand what she or I were saying, you'd know that. It seems rather that you'd rather fight against imaginary arguments from your own head, which is far more troubling.
The author does not state that people "disagreeing" with crypto are toxic, just that a subset of anti-crypto people are toxic. (Same applies to some pro-crypto people).
In my experience, the relative meaning, popularity, and aptness of words like "toxic" are generational and geographic.
When I hang out with people 10 years younger than me, "toxic" means things as mild as "buzzkill" or "wet blanket" and "gaslighting" is whenever someone says something you doubt.
Those word carried very weighty and serious connotations when they started becoming commonplace vocabulary years and years ago. These days they're meaningless, and we just have to adapt that new reality.
I don’t think there’s a bifurcation between “good” and “bad” people in crypto, the real world is a lot more grey, and how people behave doesn’t depend so much on their character, but on culture and incentives.
These days, we painfully observe the culture of crypto in every single online medium that isn’t very carefully moderated, for example Twitter.
And about incentives, I think it’s very hard not to become some kind of “evangelist” or “shill” when a significant fraction of your net worth is invested in a digital item whose sole value depends on enough other people also believing in the project. You need to spread the hype.
In my opinion, all of this would be fun and games if it weren’t for the massive negative externalities all of this cause in terms of environmental damage and accelerating the climate catastrophe. This is completely evident, which doesn’t stop some crypto holders from denying it with all kinds of illogical arguments. That’s understandable — see previous paragraph.
You have many cryptos with completely negligible environmental impact, thanks to smarter consensus mechanisms. It's a really new tech field, and as almost everything in tech, it improves over time.
> as almost everything in tech, it improves over time
This doesn't describe crypto over the past decade. It's become more pervasive, more corrupt, more destructive (from environmental impact to its role in facilitating hacking) and, with NFTs, more slot machinesque.
You seem pretty biased. You now have cryptos that allow you to transact with anyone in the world, instantly and without fees, while consuming barely any energy. And all of that, while remaining 100% in control of your money. You have others that let you lend or borrow assets in a permission-less fashion, without many intermediaries. More and more companies are using it as a backbone for their operations, for example in IoT settings or in financial situations. If you look a bit more, you will see many interesting development. But like everything in tech, there are good and bad things.
>I don’t think there’s a bifurcation between “good” and “bad” people in crypto
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart."
and
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
> In my opinion, all of this would be fun and games if it weren’t for the massive negative externalities all of this cause in terms of environmental damage and accelerating the climate catastrophe.
The climate externalities are significant, but they're not the only problem. If the whole cryptocurrencies space shifted to Proof of Stake tomorrow, cryptocurrencies would still have a tremendously bad effect by increasing wealth inequality (because just as with Proof of Work, it's baked in to the code).
The problem is that while these topics are interesting (and even crucial these days) they're often used in bad faith by people who are just in it because of the get-rich-quick scheme. You'll often see people push some cryptotoken using a thin veneer of political activism, saying that it's about taking control back or redistributing wealth etc... but it's rarely more than that.
In my experience if you attempt to push back and ask how exactly they propose to fix these problems they'll just resort to enumerating the failings of our current system (the 2008 crisis, wealth inequality, tax evasion by the wealthiest etc...) which is all fair, but how does cryptocurrency fix this? I'd argue that so far it's mostly demonstrated that it shares all these issues, only even more pronounced.
The pyramid scheme at the core of cryptocurrency poisons the well, that's the original issue with this entire thing. You can't have a good faith discussion when one side expects that they're going to be billionaires if things go their way. I acknowledge that there's definitely toxicity coming from us cryptoskeptics, but you have to acknowledge that these days easily 90% of any discussion involving cryptocurrencies is going to use shallow catchphrases pushed by people who don't understand the technology, don't understand basic economic principles and are just hoping that their $1000 in ShitCumShibaCoin is going to make them millionaires.
On top of that the cryptocurrency side has over a decade of unfulfilled promises to account for. As far as I'm concerned we've exhausted the discussion years ago. Any debate surrounding cryptocurrencies on HN from 2017 is equally as relevant today, there's no need to keep repeating the same arguments over and over again from both sides. So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.
90% of projects out there are scams and have a crypto-token attached to it with a pyramid scheme on it and there also exists a 10% of projects somewhere that it is not purely a 'get-rich-quick-scheme', or a 'web3' crypto project that doesn't require a crypto-token attached to the product that has utility?
Thus, it also must mean that it is not going away 100% guaranteed, despite the rampant scams?
> So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.
So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?
I really hope you try your best to avoid it and 'move on'. I should not expect you to continue to react to yet another HN post about crypto projects since you think all of them are a scam.
The issue is that with so many more scams than real projects, and so much focus on buzzwords, it’s more likely to fall for a scam than to actually find a real useful project.
And even the not-entirely-a-scam projects, be it NFTs, the entire ETH or BTC sphere, are so full of money laundering, trade front running, people using it as investment vehicle, etc. that you can’t trust these projects either.
That’s the issue, even Bitcoin can’t really be used as currency anymore. I used bitcoin when it was still new. In our friend circle, we paid each other with thousands of bitcoins for a single pizza back then. And yet it was still more usable as currency back then than it is nowadays.
True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. I can’t really use BTC to store money, as it fluctuates too much.
The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)
> True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed.
What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.
> being unable to run a full node anymore
Full node syncs & runs fine even on a raspi 3... it's slow... and you're not participating in mining... but it's running, and does what you would expect a node to do (validate, receive & broadcast transactions).
> What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.
Yes, but bitcoin is so volatile that you can’t keep money for daily usage in it. You can only use it as long-term investment or ultra-short-term wallet.
The regular usage – storing money for somewhere between one and 30 days – is really painful with bitcoin.
> Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ?
Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage. You get paid, you spend it over a month on wages and expenses.
Bitcoin originally promised to be usable for that. Some companies actually paid you in BTC, some stores actually allowed you to pay with BTC. The original goal was to use BTC like a checking account.
Lightning is great at replacing the BTC network itself for transactions, but it doesn’t help much at allowing BTC to accomplish this original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
This is (roughly speaking) the description of a currency, isn't it? I would point out that as a store of value, bitcoin's up
> [BTC's] original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
I don't think BTC was intended to serve in the way you're describing. I believe it was designed to neuter/obviate at-large Central Banks (e.g. money printers, debasers of currency, economic overlords). In this way, it's gone a long way towards the intended purpose. Furthermore, as a base-layer, it's been extended considerably to support day-to-day usability. Further, as a Store of Value, it's done a lot better than USD in almost every time-scale you can compare, and all the ones that matter.
>>>
The main properties:
Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.
No mint or other trusted parties.
Participants can be anonymous.
New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work.
The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the
network to prevent double-spending.
>>>
I would also like to add that the original point of money is not to support a month's worth of planning... the point of money is to support planning across planting seasons and lifetimes. Wages and wage-work came along long after money was invented.
Don't quote the old magic to me, I was there when it was written.
And Bitcoin was treated and hyped as a true replacement for Euro or US Dollar. And we hyped it as well. Online stores started accepting BTC, some companies started paying wages in BTC, the first BTC ATMs showed up.
Dogecoin started their tip bot with a tipping culture.
Neither Doge nor BTC absolutely were seen as investment vehicle or store of value, but instead as payment system and true currency.
I remember discussion about the volatility, and claims that with more and more people using it, its value would change less and less and it'd stabilize at about a BTC per Euro cent.
Even if you set aside the transaction costs and the staggering environmental toll of Bitcoin, it just doesn't function well as a currency because it has been used, and is being used, as a speculative investment vehicle by so many.
You absolutely do not want your currency to be rising and falling by double-digit percentages in value even over the course of a few years, let alone a few days the way Bitcoin frequently does. Furthermore, people accepting currency don't want that. This is one of the major reasons so few people do, in fact, accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. (Yes, I know some do. It's still very few, and always will be.)
Lightning is not Bitcoin. The implemented design of Lightning is a highly centralised off-chain layer 2 [0] which is a direct contradiction and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was designed and built for: ' a peer-to-peer electronic cash system'
Bitcoin has failed in being an efficient on-chain payments system and is somehow now an investment asset since that is its new narrative which is also a 'store of value' or 'digital gold'.
It seems that many supporters have admitted that it is not useful for its original purpose and that it is not instant, significantly slower than VISA and a extremely volatile to use as a currency.
I would argue that Bitcoin is already outdated tech so has the only benefit to be the first one. Now you have crypto doing what Bitcoin does, but with instant transactions, feeless, while barely using any energy (think a wind turbine would suffice to maintain the complete network)
Exactly. Hence my questions about regulations that haven't been answered since you seem to answer for that other person:
> Is it going away 100% guaranteed due to the rampant scams everywhere?
> So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?
From the other reply:
> Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam.
Buy Bitcoin and use it for what? Currency? Payments?
Bitcoin has failed at being useful at all and it's intended purpose which is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Not an 'investment', 'store of value' and 'digital gold'.
> a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency
As a sibling comment said, they move to a separate able currency like dollars or Euro.
No one in their right mind will move to a fantasy token whose value oscillates up and down every second, sometimes to within several orders of magnitude.
Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200%
Etherum's is ~300%
Monero, 330%
It's not as bad as Venezuela's or Zombabwe's hyperinflation, but no ine in their right mind would use a currency this volatile.
Hyperinflation is one-way volatility. In either case the value changes rapidly making the "currency" in question useless as a long-term store of value.
The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.
Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage?
People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?
There's plenty of bad actors anywhere, but it becomes toxic when you have an app with an optional crypto integration and people come out of left field preaching their climate doom, crypto will boil the oceans, capitalist greed will be the end of us all, and all crypto is a scam. Meanwhile I'm offering a free to play game?
There's a toxic confluence of engineer's anti-biz perspective combined with a larger ID politics theme. Some benefiting from crypto are outside of the traditional channels. Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
> Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage?
Criticizing over-engineered cloud solutions is done all the time. At the same time there are a ton of useful and pragmatic cloud solutions.
> People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?
This is being criticized all the time. At the same time there are useful financial products that are quite important for many.
> Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
There is no disruption taking place. That's the issue. It's all just pure hype that quite obviously creates more problems that it claims to solve. People are tired of hearing the same arguments and excuses since years.
This is not like the Internet (or anything similar that has been used as an analogy) that was not taken seriously at the beginning, typically by established players who then got surprised shortly after.
Quite the contrary. It has been taken seriously but it didn't turn out to be what was promised. Just yet another hype, and "this time it's not like the last time". The negativity surrounding these topics came from insiders and initial adopters who started to speak out.
There are maybe some useful things in here that get overshadowed, but to be taken seriously those parts need to very clearly distance themselves from the rest.
It’s hard to fully avoid it and move on while people are still being scammed. My position on cryptocurrency is identical to my position on home marketing businesses: I’ll happily concede that there could in principle be a good one, and that in the scheme of things it’s not the largest issue in the world, but when so many people are being sold false promises it’s hard for me to just brush that under the rug.
I read wun0ne point as how blockchain implementations has a disastrous environmental impact. The article doesn’t mention that at all, and openly advocate for blockchain.
It's not that easy. Renewable power plants could be setup in areas where it makes no sense due to the logistics of transporting that energy to normal society and that plant could be 100% used to mine crypto which in a way makes crypto a "wireless energy transport technology".
Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.
I strongly disagree with the points that you make. There are many ways to implement fair financial systems. Crypto activists chose to ignore them, refused to understand the sources of failures and just attact principles.
Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.
What's offensive about it? Today energy generation of any kind has to have a way to transport that energy to a consumer. Bitcoin is in a privileged position of being able to use energy to create value locally to the energy producer. You might argue a datacenter could do the same thing but a datacenter requires a lot of staff and infrastructure while a mining operation doesn't. There's also the problem of a high speed high bandwidth internet connection.
So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet.
How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument.
----------
> There are many ways to implement fair financial systems
Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways
But that's not what anyone's doing, or what anyone's going to do, with cryptocurrency.
Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already being produced and going to be deployed by someone does not reduce the overall carbon load of the planet)...
That requires the miners to sink all their profits into buying solar panels, rather than, y'know, making money for themselves, which is the reason they're mining cryptocurrency in the first place.
I never stated that miners are doing this, only that crypto mining could enable this new opportunity that never existed before it.
I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.
"Cryptocurrency miners could, in theory, buy massive amounts of solar panels with the money they make by mining" is not in any meaningful way a refutation of the criticism that cryptocurrency actually, right now, in the real world, uses an absurd amount of energy and contributes significantly to the greenhouse gases warming our planet.
By that logic, anything that makes money makes energy. Because money is fungible. I could use money from any source to buy solar panels and use them to create energy.
I could use money I earned from selling power generated by a coal plant to buy solar panels. That doesn't make the coal plant produce twice the energy.
There are new blockchains based on technology a million times more efficient than Bitcoin. Ethereum is trying to upgrade. Bitcoin is terrible, but this is fixable by using things other than bitcoin.
That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwakiutl.
You’re comparing database to a trust-less distributed fault tolerant system. Of course the db has a smaller energy footprint but it doesn’t provide the same features. It’s like saying a bicycle rolls down the road just as well as a car so we should not use the car.
There are blockchains now that are designed to be optimal for what they provide.
The bigger issue is that there are applications running on chains that clearly don’t need the features of the chain.
I’m saying that for 95% of journeys currently done with cars, bicycles would be perfectly fine. I mean that both litterally and figuratively. More importantly, both for transport and for digital services, if we don’t switch to bicyles, there won’t be a planet to run those services for.
You are advocating for the end of the world as we know it within ten years.
I wouldn’t say the energy use of non-proof of work chains is millions of times worse than existing traditional finance and web2 solutions. Probably comparable. There is much energy wasted in the products themselves and knock-on effects. Machine learning for ads and analytics, for example. Banks using thousands of warm bodies to push around excel spreadsheets.
Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
> I wouldn’t say the energy use of non-proof of work chains is millions of times worse than existing traditional finance and web2 solutions. Probably comparable.
Then you would not know what you are talking about.
> Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
No, they have dozens of data centers, on every continent, and all of them are in areas with cheap, carbon-neutral supply. You think that you are being smart by being dismissive about their effort, and the effort of dozens of companies who host their own infrastructure, but that condescension and lack of expertise is just one more example of why Crypto advocates are so unconvincing.
More centralization (AFAIR you need 32 ETH to get started, so ~$100000, not to mention possible issues where you loose full 32 ETH) vs a single GPU with only lose is your electricity cost.
Maybe 90% by count, but not 90% by volume of transactions, prominence, etc. Bitcoin seems to be entirely resistant to moving away from PoW and Ethereum have been in the process of moving to PoS for years.
Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?
Yes, 90% by number transactions. Binance chain, Solana, Luna, AVAX, ADA, DOT are doing around 15 million transactions a day altogether while Bitcoin and Ethereum are only doing 1.5 million altogether.
But that’s just an argument against any technology that will increase electricity demand, such as EVs.
When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised:
“The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.”
No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies.
You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of people.
Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.
Crypto avocates likes to say they _could_ do it with imaginary wealth, but that are very far from being able to afford it; if they could, it would break their business model. In the mean time, they are settled in the countries with the worst carbon footprint possible. They tried to hide it but you can’t really hide that amount of waste. They have distrupted the energy market of China, Kazakstan so much that thousands of people died in energy shortages. For now, all we have from those people is mountains of unrecycled electronic waste.
> Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.
This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.
Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time.
The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.
Every 10 minutes, a new coin is minted. That coin is given to the person who solved the correct hash. The chances of being the correct hash is 1/n where n is the number of miners active.
So if I fire up a miner and I'm the only one, I get a coin every 10 minutes. Life is good. Now, if you want bitcoins as well, you can fire up your own miner. Now we'll both get a coin every 20 minutes. But I was making 6 coins an hour, now I'm making 3. My production is halved. That sucks. But. I can spin up another miner. Now I have 2 to your 1. I get a coin roughly every 15 minutes, you get a coin roughly every 30.
You see where this is going, right? More miners, more coins. And the only way to get value out of these coins is to sell each coin for more than electricity used for all of your miners.
So you're incentivized to not only use every available unit of electricity to mine, you are also incentivized to sell at exorbitant prices. Bitcoin will not switch us over to renewables. It will also use renewables if and when they become available. Bitcoin has also caused long dormant fossil fuel generators to come online again.
> This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.
No: both types of organisation are looking at areas with cheap electricity and free cooling, but large internet companies are looking at area with stable polical regime and low carbon footprint. Bitcoin miners _could_ value that; they certainly loudly claim that they do. In reality, they don’t. They set-up shops in countries with cheap coal like China and Kazakstan. It sounds like areas known for their corrupt officials and no rules around dumping electronic waste have some appeal.
They don’t go where electricity is carbon neutral. You know how I know that? Because I live near a lot of hydro power, Arctic cold, where all the big players have their European data centers——and there’s no crypto operation here.
Bitcoin advocates are delusional and loves confusing their claims (like they could operate a trust-less financial network) with reality. But reality is still easy to see: crypto a collection of wasteful, polluting, short-term scams.
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It accelerates our transition to renewable energies. Bitcoin makes renewable energy sources more profitable because it offers a base price for excess electricity. Any time, any place.
And Bitcoin incentivises having a low time preference. This leads to a much more sustainable consumer behaviour. Bitcoin helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
Environmental impact is only an issue if the energy source is dirty (which is becoming less of an issue as cost for renewables goes down and green energy mix in the grid increases) and or if you see no value in it. I agree with the former but at the same time I think the issue is not crypto in specific but ANYTHING whose energy source is dirty. The latter is obvi subjective and at the end of the day irrelevant as, like it or not, there are plenty of people that see value in it (2 trillion total market cap in cryptos right now).
Well of course there is plenty of speculative investment going on in this field (also not unique to cryptos, just look at what's has been going on with tech stocks and the Nasdaq), there is no doubt about that. But at the same time all adoption metrics have been increasing like crazy. Two things can be true at once here. There are plenty of people gambling (no bueno) and there is also plenty of other people using the tech/network/etc with other intentions as well. You have governments (at regional and country level) adopting the tech (like it or not), you have people in South America using it inflation hedging (yes it works for this when you country's currency devalues like crazy on a weekly basis) and for remittances, etc. The speculation part fuels the volatility, but it is also obvious that it has proven to withstand many bubbles while at the same time increasing its reach an adoption as this (like it or not) fills a need. A need for an alternative that while not the most efficient, is inclusive, fair, and open by design.
The key thing is, of course people are getting vocal - and vocally annoyed! - at crypto-bros, given what cryptocoins have brought upon us over the last years:
- a shortage of all components used in building PCs, starting with CPUs, then GPUs, then RAM, then HDDs, and back to GPUs. Simply because scalpers and shitcoin miners could outbid everyone else.
- People getting hacked left and right (particularly blue-checkmark accounts) on Twitter, Youtube or Facebook to rename them to Elon Musk and promise crypto airdrops
- the amount of corruption that has been necessary to enable said hacks. "SIM swapping" attacks used to be something nation states did against top-of-wanted-list criminals, not something that could be bought on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars
- the loot of said hacks ending up to fund Iranian or North Korean nuclear terrorism programs
- the amount of large scale hacks made only possible by Bitcoin and friends providing a relatively easy way to launder money, in particular ransomware
- an awful lot of "stars" peddled NFTs, ICOs and the likes and let their fans hang out to dry when the hype collapsed
- an awful corresponding lot of friends and sometimes family that got lured in by shitcoins, actually made money and now peddles shitcoins instead of crap MLM products to everyone whose ears haven't fallen off since long
- all the "rug pulls", "hacks" and other instances where serious amounts of money got stolen or vanished into thin air
- artists getting their works minted as NFTs without authorization
- people buying up coal power plants of all things to mine shitcoins
- instead of delivering the promised "there are no banks and taxes!" world, all shitcoins (obviously... as everyone predicted) ended up depending on centralized institutions like exchanges, large mining pools, auditors and the likes, especially once governments around the world caught up with developments. And to make it worse, many of these institutions end up with lesser consumer protection than banks! Hooray!
The only positive contribution that cryptocurrencies brought to the world was that people had a safe way to pay for and order illicit drugs, as taking out shady dealers and cutters reduced the amount of contaminations. Oh and maybe kick some arses at Western Union into reducing their rip-off rates for international currency transfers.
I think toxicity from the anti-crypto crowd is basically inevitable at this point. It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. None of their claims have materially panned out. There's some promise in some places - mainly in the most nerdy corners of ETH, but it's still only promises.
Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour in the crypto community. Even if you're curious about hearing how the latest project is justifying itself, you can't have a conversation about it because the entire conversation is dominated by memes and spam about other scam projects. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to say "No, actually this whole thing is just bad, and shouldn't be treated seriously". There's only so many times that you can humor the same lie. Web3, NFTs, DAOs, Altcoins, Smart Contracts, Stable coins. It's just the same grift repeated every 6 months. For every claim of how this tech could help someone there are thousands of people who have been harmed by scams using this tech.
>It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd.
Agreed. For me it was the NFT'ing of a fart that was the jumping the shark moment that drove me from being merely a crypto skeptic to being vociferously anti-crypto and advocating against it at every turn.
It's not about getting rich on Bitcoin, it's about taking back our choice of what money to use. Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap.
I fail to see the difference between what I said and "Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap."
Anyway, you have your choice of what money to use. I prefer USD and Euro myself. And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto.
I grant that 3rd world countries without banking systems may, may need it, but I don't know why we just wouldn't start banks there.
> And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto.
Hi. Here is a use case you can carry on to future discussions. There is a flourishing scene of dark net markets where people can purchase drugs using cryptocurrency. Merchants have reviews, products have reviews, and the whole process is much safer, secure, and convenient than meeting a drug dealer in real life with cash.
Except (at least in the case of BTC) that transaction will be permanently recorded on an indelible blockchain for everyone to see. Such security and privacy.
1. Bitcoin Lightning is not Bitcoin and is in fact a centralized by design layer 2 system which the transactions are off-chain [0][1], a direct contradiction to what Bitcoin was designed for. A peer-to-peer on-chain electronic cash system.
2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations. [2][3][4]
You can still use Monero, but the on-ramps, exchanges will have banned the privacy coins under these regulations, cutting a way to easily exchange it for fiat.
> 1. Bitcoin Lightning is not Bitcoin and is in fact a centralized by design layer 2 system
Yes, but I personally have node equipment sitting in my closet waiting to be setup. (time constraints) It's not so centralized that it's obviously destined to be controlled by Governments and Corporations. I would put proof of stake down as being much more controllable by monied interest.
> 2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations.
That's sad, but it leads me to two thoughts. One, I'm glad I don't live in the UK or EU, and I think it's gross that something like that happens without the input of the people. Not that I'd put it entirely past the US to do this either (sigh). Two, hopefully Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges will allow for people to swap into privacy coins without a regulated exchange, but I agree there are probably numerous ways to penalize or track the entrance and exit thereof.
I think really this comes down to getting off exchanges asap and trying to actually use the currency. My local community has a group that actively uses the currencies for exchange, but who knows how strongly that would survive if the currencies couldn't off ramp to fiat.
Right, anyone can generate NFTs though. How does this differ from saying something like "the artist who called an empty room art is the jumping the shark moment, now I'm advocating against art at every turn"?
Because artists haven't generally backed themselves by weaponized ASICs and a very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception (not to mention pollution)
> Because artists haven't generally backed themselves [into a] very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception
Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolutely an unhealthy social scene of greed and deception.
You're absolutely right, and I personally find 'modern' art unappealing and a scam (banan on wall 30k plz), but this is because it is being used a commodity in a rotten, oligarchic financial system where we bail out corrupt bankers at the cost of the people.
With crypto, the pollution is built into the system. It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.
> It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.
So is the contemporary art world. The contemporary art world is vastly polluting as well. How much GHG do you think is generated to run a museum, or warehouse, transport aircraft, ect, filled with bad contemporary art?
This is a wild argument. You're comparing apples and anteaters.
No-one is proposing that contemporary art is some sort of technological breakthrough that will completely revamp society, make everyone rich and change finance for the rest of time.
(Also, I'm sorry, but I do NOT believe that contemporary art consume even a tiny fraction of the power that cryptocurrencies do when nearly all of it sits in a handful of warehouses and never moves, just changes ownership abstractly. You would really need to prove this claim.)
I'd agree that a rotten shark in a tank has more substance to it than an NFT. Shame it's in embalming fluid. You could eat it if you fall on hard times otherwise.
>The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe.
Yes, there are strong parallels between the art market and the NFT market. The main one being that money laundering seems to be the primary purpose of both. But at least art does provide people with some level of subjective enjoyment beyond that.
You dilute the meaning of the word at that point. Weapons are specific tools that are used with intent to cause harm. If something happens to cause harm without intent, and you define it as a weapon, the word becomes useless.
I suppose in the sense that concentration of mining power makes a cryptocurrency vulnerable to 51% attacks or that concentration of mining power centralizes influence and cryptocurrency in a way philosophically antithetical to the principle of decentralized cryptocurrencies.
Lots of art is pretty dumb, I don't advocate against it because who has time to go advocate against dumb, pointless things? Just avoid it. I'm not into art, not into NFTs, but while bumbling around in the world I've encountered enough genuinely beautiful art that I don't think the field as a whole is a joke. This isn't the case for NFTs.
On the other hand, NFTs are pretty new. Maybe someone will make a museum of NFTs that don't suck in a couple years and I'll be proven foolish.
You literally can't make a museum of NFTs because the jpeg they point to is actually distinct from the NFT itself. A museum of NFTs would just be a giant list of hashes
I dunno. My main point was that I haven't stumbled across many interesting NFTs, but I wanted to at least leave the possibility that the medium just hasn't matured enough to create art that us non-NFT-hobbyist people would find interesting.
I'm not sure how one would curate an NFT museum, I imagine you'd want to display the jpeg and then select for pieces that play with the uniqueness guarantee somehow.
I haven't the foggiest clue how that would work, it if it is even possible, or what it would look like. But people have only been doing them for a couple years. If we made a museum that sampled the NFT population as selectively as an art museum samples the overall art population, that NFT museum would have approximately zero entries, right?
After the 100th clone of the million dollar home page, I would have dismissed the web, if there hadn't been also been hundreds of good/useful/entertaining websites around at that point.
Just like that for some of us working with web3, the amount of useful applications that come up more than make up for all the stupidity going on with the "NFT art" space.
> you haven't seen it, you were not interested in looking and I doubt that any "evangelist" is going to change your mind
This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.)
One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they presently can't. VR has that. Crypto, not so much.
Instead we have pitches of doing the same things one can currently do, but decentralised. (Again, see App.net.) That will be appealing for a certain political niche. But Truth Social for libertarians, while definitely worth something, isn't the narrative web3 wants.
Respectfully, pointing at the Unlock protocol and justifying it with "poor people dealing with hyperinflation" is a bit disingenuous. The unlock protocol (and, to a lesser degree, ENS) is not about or for poor people. It's for socialites in first world countries with money to burn.
Yes. To this day if you work with marijuana dispensary you will be denied of any payment processor. Sex workers are denied credit card applications, even where prostitution is legal.
There is also "not exactly blocked but so many hoops to jump that is practically as it doesn't exist" markets: try being a consultant working from South America without getting ripped off in transfer/exchange fees and ask them how many would wish that their customers paid them in crypto instead.
So, those South America consultants, why are they not using crypto right now? The tech to transfer money via crypto has been around for a long time.
Could it be that crypto has a number of practical problems, so unless you are a crypto enthusiast or wanting to ~~steal~~ raise some money, traditional methods are more available?
> So, those South America consultants, why are they not using crypto right now?
Because the people on the other side of the transaction are saying "why can't I just PayPal you? Oh, it costs 8% more? Not a problem, I'd rather pay more than having to learn how to deal with crypto or worry about the tax implications from it."
> ENS is "only" a domain registrar. It has absolutely nothing to do with app.net.
App.net was Facebook, but decentralized, also you pay for it. ENS is a domain registrar, but decentralized, and you still pay for it.
In response to "a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling [one] presently can't [do]" we got a thing we can already do. But decentralized. Sort of.
> hyperinflation that leaves poor people with no perspective to save
What does web3 do in solving this that crypto doesn't?
> corruption that shuts the citizens of any quality service
Like domain registration?
I'm honestly trying to understand this, including from managers of funds I'm in that have invested in it. At best, the end market is poor people in unstable countries. The same people Bitcoin is allegedly saving. In reality, it appears to be a (granted, wealthy) ideological set.
> It's much easier to "sell" web3 to someone that has lived with dysfunctional institutions and has faced one of its many problems, whether it is hyperinflation that leaves poor people with no perspective to save, or systemic corruption that shuts the citizens of any quality service
I have lived in such countries (Moldova, in the 90s; Turkey, early 2000s). I wouldn't touch this web3 shit with a 1000-ft pole. All this narrative about "poor people" and "dysfunctional institutions" usually comes from relatively wealthy people in stable countries whose idea about "poor people" comes from watching a Netflix overproduced dramatic documentary.
web3 is more unstable and volatile than the absolute vast majority of existing countries (including most of the "dysfunctional" countries), and its only modus operandi is "pay to play" which surely makes wonders for the "poor people".
> usually comes from relatively wealthy people in stable countries whose idea about "poor people" comes from watching a Netflix overproduced dramatic documentary.
Ok, I was born in Brazil and I experienced 40% per month inflation in the 80s and I saw a government confiscating everyone's saving accounts as part of a "economic plan". I also saw another government putting a tax of 0.38% on every financial transfer (does not seem like much until you think of all the cascading effects) and I can tell you how little of all those taxes came back to the people in the form of public services.
Are you satisfied with my credentials or are you going to continue with the gatekeeping?
> web3 is more unstable and volatile
If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you. But web3 does not need Bitcoin to exist.
> government putting a tax of 0.38% on every financial transfer (does not seem like much until you think of all the cascading effects)
Unlike crypto/web3 which checks notes puts a tax on everything
> If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you.
Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200%
This is a prime example of what others were saying!
We asked for an example of "good/useful/entertaining websites", and you are giving us technology demos, something that is only interesting to Web3 people.
How about some real-life useful stuff? Don't give me youtube, show me Kurzgesagt channel. Don't talk about Javascript, DOM and browser optimization, show me Google Maps.
Right now, all the stuff Web3 people produce is only interesting if you are into Web3 as well.
You are basically saying "these GNU people only produce things that are interesting for people into software stuff. Don't give me a C compiler, give me Visicalc."
It's not because this is not "real-life" enough for you that it means that it is not worthy of being done.
> You are basically saying "these GNU people only produce things that are interesting for people into software stuff. Don't give me a C compiler, give me Visicalc."
Yes we are. Yes, we re saying that. Because Unix was announced outside Bell Labs in 1973, and VisiCalc's first release was in 1979. It wasn't released on Unix, but that's really beside the point. Two years later it was available for basically any consumer system in existence.
And on top of that there was a wealth of other software available on those systems. For example, vi and emacs are both from 1976.
What you are saying is that "well, bitcoin paper is from 2008 (14 years ago), smart contracts are from 2014 (7 years ago), and we still have nothing even resembling VisiCalc, scratch that, we don't even have an equivalent of emacs or vi, `it's still early boohoo`"
> Visicalc was not free software... but Linux 1.0 is from 1994.
Goalposts: shifted.
The shift itself is also extremely funny because web3's entire premise is: "you pay for everything"
> The point is not just in having an application, the point is in having an application created under the new paradigm.
So, where are they? Where's web3's VisiCalc (1979), emacs (1976), vi (1976)? Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos was in 1968 [1].
Oh, I know the answer. "Bitcoin paper was 14 years ago, smart contracts first proposed over 30 years ago, appeared on Ethereum 7 years ago, but it's still early for this new paradigm because Visicalc, Unix erm Linux, muble mumble"
Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3 as a way to justify its existence. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.
Not only is absurd, it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.
"Oh, but BTC is volatile!". Yes, but I could in 2011 send money from the US to Brazil instantly without going through any international bank (buy in US exchange with USD, sell it in Brazilian exchanges in BRL, wire from the exchange to my brazilian bank) with minimal exposure to BTC volatility and at a lower cost than the fees charged by the banks.
But I am sure you want to ignore that, or find a reason to say that "it doesn't count". I can not fight your own prejudices.
> Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.
No. Your response is literally "you wouldn't ask Unix people to create VisiCalc instead of compilers", but they did, to which you responded "but it isn't free".
> it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.
You mean, the thing that people have been doing since the invention of borders is the killer app?
> But I am sure you want to ignore that
No, I'm not ignoring that. And the reason it doesn't count because original question was about web3, and if all web3 has to offer is sending money across borders, it's not web3, it's Western Union 2.0.
So not only you are misinterpreting every thing I said, you also are resorting to call me a shill?
My work is on making it easier to have crypto for e-commerce, focused on stable currencies. If you go look at all my writings and discussions, you will find me telling people to avoid speculation on token price and to not look at crypto for a quick buck.
You are completely lost in your hate, dude. Quite fitting for a "anti-crypto toxicity" thread. Go find something better to do with your life.
Perpetuating flamewars on HN and breaking the site guidelines yourself is not cool, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and regardless of how badly they've been behaving.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. That's seriously not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of HN from now on.
Um, no -- the goal of GNU was to provide free software, so the analogy would be: "These GNU people only produce things for their weird philosophy. I don't care about freedom, give me software I can use."
And guess what? In just 4 years since GNU started, they had "assembler, an almost finished portable optimizing C compiler (GCC), an editor (GNU Emacs), and various Unix utilities (such as ls, grep, awk, make and ld)" [0]. Something that could be used even if you don't care about Stallman or software freedom.
If the goal of Web3 was to create blockchain libraries, no one would complain. But people, like you, say that Web3 has "useful applications" -- so what are those? Web3 is around for way long than 4 years, and it has much more people working too.
I am pretty sure that Ethereum got their VM, Solidity and plenty of libraries to support the development of smart contracts in (much) less than 4 years.
> so what are those?
Make up your damn mind! What counts as "useful" for you, GCC or Google Maps?
My guess is that you don't really care. You just want to take whatever answer you get and spin it in a way that pleases your biases and can score you some internet points.
So please quit wasting my time and go find something better to do with your life. Come back when you have done something that actually matters to people.
You are defining the GNU project as something for "programmers", which is simply wrong. The point of GNU is to have a Free/Libre Operating system (beyond the kernel) for everyone.
> What is the target audience of crypto websites?
People that care about self-sovereignty. Anyone that can not /does not/wants not to rely on central authority as their only means to interact with others around the world.
> ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata.
So, for $5 (as of right now) a year, I can create a DNS-ish entry that points at a static piece of data (though not an IP?)? There are plenty of companies who sell DNS addresses (which can do the same things, plus IP), and while they do report to a single authority, that's to keep them in line, not to keep me in line.
Unlock Protocol:
> Create memberships and sell access NFTs in minutes
How is this not possible without a "central authority"? Exclusive community membership and cryptographically signed tokens have been around longer than you or I, likely even on the internet.
Being honest, neither of these are compelling technologies. At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend. This isn't a bad thing, but neither is it very exciting.
> How is this not possible without a "central authority"?
Ask that to the people that got shut out of Patreon, OnlyFans, business in Russia that have nothing to do with the war and yet got blocked from transacting with the rest of the world, a freelancer in Venezuela who does not want to have their funds confiscated by Maduro's thugs...
> At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend.
The big thing that you are missing out is that this backend is permissionless and that it can not be captured by any single entity. It's not so much about what it can do, but what it prevents from being done.
Basically, web3 can be the place where we can build the next search engine that is as revolutionary as early-day Google, without worrying that it will become a Goliath that controls every aspect of our lives. And that to me is very exciting.
No one is "defending their tech". It's not even about the tech.
It's about how much of a strawman this is. People are literally using the worst possible example of a new class of applications
to dismiss all of it. It's usually indicative they don't understand it or were fortunate enough to never having the need for anything like it.
To make an analogy with evolutionary theory: every single technological breakthrough results in mutation pressure and consequently a massive explosion of new species (products). Some of these products are good, fit well with the environment and thrive. Some of them are ill-conceived or mal-adaptive and do not last long.
Yeah, "NFT-as-art" is bullshit, and I would bet that it will go away sooner or later. But that does not discredit NFTs as whole, much less blockchain/crypto/web3/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
well, same could be said for Facebook. Only now, less than 20y later, we're all scrolling through endless feeds and digging comment section trenches of the latest culture wars
I wouldn’t say 20 years later. Facebook was the way of connecting with people you just met even after 10 years after its inception. I would even say, pretty much everyone I knew had a Facebook account in 2010, and it delivered on the claims it made. Whether we agree with their mission is a different topic, but it certainly had an impact on the real world.
there are forks of bitcoin, to be sure... but the majority of "cryptos" out there are GPU mineable coins, because there's hardware that can be exploited to mine "profitably". not to mention the need to pre-mine shitcoins so they can be given to grifters and shills who pump & dump.
Yes it is -- its blockchain is longer. The blockchain with the longest proof-of-work is always the real blockchain, when given multiple competing blockchains to select from.
This is the essence of the Nakamoto Consensus Algorithm, which underpins the entirety of blockchain economics.
> None of their claims have materially panned out.
Well, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of money across the planet, to any country with internet access, for tiny sums, safely, irreversibly, to anyone.
Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example. Transnational, permissionless internet money is quite handy.
That wasn't possible before, and that's pretty useful, so I think the basic claim (that cryptocurrency is useful) is holding up fine.
It turns out there are actually things that lawmakers don't really have the power to effectively ban, drugs and prostitution and gambling and cash transactions principally among them.
A lot of people don't seem to integrate this fact. The practical power of a lawmaking body is not unlimited. There are certain things they simply cannot stop, no matter how many laws are passed.
It won't "end" for either group, really. The latter will pass some laws, and the former will mostly ignore them, same as happened with hookers and blow.
The people who inhabit both groups (the subset of lawmakers that like being able to pay for their hookers and blow with unreported bitcoin) will laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."
--Malcolm Turnbull, Australia Prime Minister (2015-2018)
There are some people who see attitudes like that in the government and think how can [things backed by math] survive a coordinated government onslaught that'll happen any year now? And then those that just look at such statements as the unlettered nonsense they are. Bitcoin lets you "be your own bank", independent of any KYC laws that may or may not apply to other banks in your jurisdiction.
They're not obligated to, just as I'm not obligated to accept a check from your bank and can demand cash or some other form of payment. Your question is like asking what if no one wants to talk to me with PGP or some other secure message protocol.
What if selling things to US citizens via any means is criminal, and enforced?
I definitely think a huge part of the business of government generally is enforcing society's suspension of disbelief, it's a lot cheaper to merely convince everyone that you're all-powerful and resistance is futile than to actually become all-powerful.
You're saying that the use case for cryptocurrencies is crime, which I agree with, and the world's police won't touch you because they can't, which I think is ridiculous.
If the EU and the US alone said, "In a month, we'll consider every crypto transaction to be criminal in nature, and we're going to enforce it," the market would collapse as everyone stampeded for the door at the same time.
> If the EU and the US alone said, "In a month, we'll consider every crypto transaction to be criminal in nature, and we're going to enforce it," the market would collapse as everyone stampeded for the door at the same time.
True. And yet, cryptocurrencies would still remain useful! A market collapse is not the same as it not having utility. Bitcoin was useful even when it was only pennies, and it will remain so.
This thread is about whether or not cryptocurrencies are useful. They are. Could governments crash their markets? Yes. Could they stop people from using them? No.
>> If the EU and the US alone said, "In a month, we'll consider every crypto transaction to be criminal in nature, and we're going to enforce it," the market would collapse
> True. And yet, cryptocurrencies would still remain useful! A market collapse is not the same as it not having utility.
(Genuine) Q: How many market participants are interested in "the utility" vs the (potential for) "getting rich"?
Theres one big weakness in the use of cryptocurrencies: swapping back and forth with the local fiat currency at scale. All a government has to do is shut those commercial ventures down, and the value of the $coin will disappear for those residents.
Plus, unlike drugs and prostitution, the ledger is public and permanent… simplifying enforcement against the remaining fringes dramatically.
> All a government has to do is shut those commercial ventures down, and the value of the $coin will disappear for those residents.
So long as any of those residents can travel to another place where they can exchange it for hard money, that's not true. Countries do not exist in isolation.
Carrying large quantities of cash across a border is usually investigated by the border guards. If you don't declare it, you're breaking the law.
This is compounded by how some countries are big enough that traveling across a border is a fairly significant undertaking (Brazil, for example). Not something most folks can or will do on a whim. Plus, you'd have to transfer a fairly significant amount of money to be worth it, making it more likely you'd run afoul of the border patrol.
It doesn't matter. As long as some members of society are willing to cross the border with cash, the availability of liquidity will be preserved (albeit with a slightly higher cost). "Most folks" won't need to deal with it any more than most folks know how to drive a semi full of groceries.
If they shut down, they will just push even more of their economy to the black markets.
Also, anonymity is not yet something that people care enough. But it already exists - monero, zcash, or the Aztec Network on top of Ethereum. I can bet that any serious attempt from the government at chasing regular people based on their Blockchain activity would lead to a lot to adopt the "truly private" networks.
This would be one way to do this, yes, and I think it would be overall good for society if there was a clear association of cryptocurrencies and crime.
There would still be shady cryptocurrency things (just like we still have illegal drugs and gambling and prostitution), but at least we won't have smart people proudly announcing that they made new crypto system (just like we don't have people proudly announcing they made a new kind of illegal drug today).
Because for each person who genuinely believes into monetary anarchy and/or does not trust the government, there are lots more (thousands? tens of thousands?) people who read about it in New York Times and want to earn their money. It is the second group which is fueling the first, and so getting rid of it will make crypto harmless again.
Except Bitcoin transactions (or any other blockchain transaction) is forever public and forever traceable. It's the complete opposite of a cash transaction.
Once your wallet is in some way connected to you, all your transactions since the beginning of time are now known. This is a wet dream for government enforcement.
> Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example
Far more has been sent over traditional rails [1]. Once you consider state aid, e.g. the billions the Congress has authorized, crypto's contribution is irrelevant.
Given Ukraine had to convert 80% of its crypto into hard currency before it could use it, crypto was also the most expensive donation vector. If we consider crypto’s likely role in softening Russian sanctions (also almost negligible, but we’re comparing two small things), the net contribution could be a wash.
>Far more has been sent over traditional rails [1]. Once you consider state aid, e.g. the billions the Congress has authorized, crypto's contribution is irrelevant.
When you put it that way, your or my life is just a point of irrelevance in the sea of humanity. While that has a ring of truth to it, it's an odd way to dismiss each piece from making its contribution. A house is built of many bricks.
The amount doesn't matter as much as the latency and resources* used to send it.
*not going to address the green energy mining debate here but yes I know it is a thing.
Given funds sent by congress that went through how many approval gates, delays, and intermediaries, vs. millions sent almost over night to the UKR address...
What are the pros/cons of the the two approaches?
- billions were sent via congress, and the last time this occurred at a similar scale and sense of urgency was covid relief. The [0] fraud [1] involved [2] and what scale was somewhat substantial and is now a focused DoJ investigation. Scale of $2bil seizures, for instance. Sending direct to a crypto address also has issues and fraud certainly exists, but wouldn't say irrelevant in the alternative controls it offers. $100 mil almost overnight with no strings attached vs. billions from Congress that has strings and will take some time presumably.
- Zelensky has consistently been upfront about the need is both resources, and speed of receiving resources [3]. What's more in line with that need - overnight donations, or Congressional authorizations that eventually lead into donations.
- Conversion: per Zelensky, biggest need is armaments, and he's been able to buy armaments directly in crypto, so that neutralizes your last criticism a bit, or at least more accurately fills out the picture [4]
Do you have any information the aid issued by Congress - has it actually reached UKR, how much of it, strings attached, etc?
Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen?
What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
> Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen?
Which part of the claim are you refuting here? It is a fact that one can send very large sums of value between two addresses for a trivial transaction fee. This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
I spoke with someone yesterday who lives in Nigeria, they were moving to Rwanda and needed to pay a deposit in advance. They were unable to pay via MoneyGram, Western Union etc. - one provider offered to handle the payment and requested many documents for a few days and in the end rejected the transfer. This person then had to send money to a friend who lived in the US who then forwarded it to Rwanda. This experience made the person feel isolated and outside of the system. This is an anecdote however my guess is if you think PayPal is "good enough" you don't live in a country that is marginalized by the status quo payment system.
> So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
So that's your take, global finance is a solved problem? No todos? No improvements needed we can pack it up? This is a stunning poverty of imagination in my estimation and a denial of the very real struggle many people face day to day in transacting.
For most trade questions, and that's what Ukraine is using the funds for, international finance is a solved problem. When it comes to tax evasion, large scale fraud, money laundering and so on it is definitely not. Unfortunately, crypto is only making the unsolved problems worse.
And regarding the case with the guy in Nigeria: How much access do people in the developing world have to crypto? And don't start with the crap scam Sam Altman came up with.
>one can send very large sums of value between two addresses
This is not the same thing as sending money to Ukraine. If I send money between two addresses, I've just sent money between 2 addresses.
> This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
But not to actually buy anything in Ukraine. To do that you have to find someone with Fiat. As you see with all the other examples I gave you, what you've done is used the modern banking system to buy crypto currency - some bank transfer to a crypto exchange, send it from one address to another, and then left yourself with the problem of getting the money back out of crypto in Ukraine. Which as you'll see with almost all of the charitable giving in crypto to Ukraine, happens via the modern banking system, often with the direct involvement of the Ukrainian government.
So it seems to me, that this entire thing about using Crypto for Ukraine is rubbish. And it seems like that to you too - because when I start interrogating the idea, the Crypto to Ukraine story morphs into a Rwandan sending money to Nigeria.
My take is that Crypto in your example, was a worthless layer of complexity that doesn't solve the difficult problems of international banking, it solves the trivial bit in the middle.
> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer?
My cards don't work on PayPal and I don't keep money in banks (because they've robbed me without cause before). I can, however, donate with cryptocurrency without friction.
What has crypto provided: If paypal/bank transfers decide to exit that space, no more donations. Not the case with crypto. Also, weapons are getting bought directly with crypto in UKR, so your last point is not not necessarily true[0].
Question of course is has such exiting happened. Have payment processors threatened or actually left a space over somewhat subjective judgements? Answer in this case in recent years is yes: Assange, OnlyFans, Canadian Truckers, etc.
Stating the above doesn't imply I support the above 3/etc., but it does show to me that based on which way the wind is blowing, payment censorship can and does happen. Assuming a payment processor/corporation will always be on your side ideologically isn't a great call. Popular German firms today were popular German firms under National Socialism. Or, are you going to tell me there isn't a single successful and well-regarded corporation today that wasn't enforcing segregation happily 60 years ago?
I'm also not implying necessarily an equivalence in present day payment censorship to segregation. But I certainly standby that hedging your bets on your ideological views always aligning to corporate/govt entities and as such you don't have to consider payment censorship is a bad call. Crypto isn't perfect, and 999/1000 times I'll use a credit card, but its an important alternative.
What happens when Climate Action groups get fed up, really start turning the screws on Exxon, and also rely on corporate infra (GSuite, Slack, Paypal) for running everything internally? Who does a payment processor side with - climate action groups perhaps doing not nice activism, or their ~largest client (ignore details here for a second) Exxon who is fed up with the activism and starts turning screws back? This has already happened with communications platforms via warehouse unionization, and QED Signal is pretty widely used. Are you saying it won't happen with payments, or there is at least a risk worth acknowledging?
As I understand it, somewhere around 20MM was sent to Ukraine via crypto. The National bank of Japan sent 100MM the first day with lower transaction costs (fees, electricity, complexity). And the Ukrainians still have to convert the crypto to money to use it.
Meanwhile, everyone could just send money to Ukraine via the standard banking system if they wanted to.
> they've gotten rich from selling their early-adopter cryptos to the next fool.
And that's where it all falls apart. Crypto-fanatics assume that "good for me" translates to "good for us." As we know, the crypto-rich only exist because others (usually many others) became crypto-broke and/or fiat-broke.
At least, in general, people have no realistic expectation of winning the lottery. You also don't usually have people betting their entire life savings on the lottery. The analogy is only very loosely true.
Of all the comments here, yours triggered one capital "R" Realization, probably repeated here in other words a dozen:
Lots and lots of people want to succeed like the early adopters of crypto by (nearly) any means.
Their biggest "means" is denial of the capital "R" Reality: Its already too late to repeat the rise, like wanting netflix stock price to grow after it already rose high, because you just bought some and deserve another 500% gain.
And so, since you need that rise badly, you dismiss each argument and everyone against your wish for repetition. Instead you hope for more "suckers" to buy after you so you can have the monyey and with it the break you think you deserve.
And the thing is: I would want that too, damn - I would not mind 100.000 suckers to go broke for me to be rich. I'm just sane enough to see that this gamble is not worth to enrich the ones who are already "in". sigh
> None of their claims have materially panned out.
* Starknet is running a Turing complete VM using nothing but zero knowledge proofs. It's now possible and practical to trustlessly prove general purpose computation with O(logN) proof sizes.
* Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner.
* The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network.
> * Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner.
An overwhelming majority of these are bot trades.
> * The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network.
Visa does 597 million consumer transactions per day. Not only is that magnitudes more, I would wage to guess that >75% of Solana's transactions aren't consumer purchases.[0][1]
They meant 65,000 transactions per second (they left that crucial word out). And that's the max that the Solana network can handle, not what it's currently doing all the time. So at it's maximum, the Solana network could handle 5.6 billion transactions per day. Visa only claims to handle 24,000 transactions per second, btw. [1]
Actual approximate volume of transactions per month was around 500 million as of Nov 2021[2], so around 16.5 million transactions per day, or only about 5,800 transactions per second on average, so it can handle a lot more.
It's handled just under 70 billion transactions to date[3] since it debuted in early 2020, so roughly 35 billion transactions each year for the two years it's been out.
> An overwhelming majority of these are bot trades.
Likely the same is true on the Australian stock exchange. Not that this is a bad thing. There is a person behind every bot - and in the case of Uniswap, the arbitrage is what makes it work in the first place.
BTC was the only way I was able to pay for hosting/domain for my non-commercial pet-project (~1,5 years of almost daily after hours development) after sanctions raised against the country I live in.
This is my anecdotal experience (and no, I don't invest in crypto), but that's enough for me to not consider cryptocurrencies "just scum".
P.S. Also I pay for VPN with it, because this is also the only way at the moment, and without it I cannot even read news I prefer.
I'd be interested to hear who you bought the hosting from, I'm sure the US government would also like to hear who has been helping you evade sanctions. Sanctions are there for a reason.
Yeah, "crypto is great because it allowed me and my co conspirators to do illegal things" isn't gonna be the most persuasive to governments or above-board businesses -- love the rebellious spirit though.
It's doubtful seeking these hosting services were illegal in his own country. It's also doubtful the host has performed a crime if they had no idea the purchaser was sanctioned. It's questionable a law was even broken, as in many jurisdiction there is an element of 'mens rea' necessary.
I dont know what you mean by "co conspirators" and "illegal things", but my project is site for cardboard game and 99+% of userbase is from EU/NA/SA.
P.S. There are no sanctions prohibiting companies to sell hosting to me (by me I mean ordinary citizen with "toxic" passport), it is just VISA/Mastercard decision not to serve us so I dont have other means to pay.
Have you seen the companies funding the pro-crypto crowd? The 3 people and a discord server projects get the most attention and generally act toxic, agreed.
For the rest of the space, plenty of Fortune 500's investing in it for the long haul/"humoring the same lie."
>Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour
are you talking about the internet or crypto? or maybe you were referring to finance. wall st? i get hundreds of scam emails a day, shall we get rid of email too? seriously, just because there are scams, doesn't mean that the internet, or wall st, or crypto are all worthless. that's just lazy and ignoring that scams are from people, and not from the tech. some people will use whatever means they have available to scam other people out of money. that doesn't remotely mean that all of crypto is a scam.
You cannot solve contract/legal problems and wrong transactions through decentralization. You can't also make a democratic system act on every conflict. You assign a central authority to act on them and you select that authority through a democratic process, which is what we already have.
- I want to have a beer!
- ok, scan this QR, and accept the transaction
- there you go!
- thank you, here are your 5 beers
- oh, did I just pay for 5? I wanted 1! can you refund me and take these back?
- no can do! pretty sure you said 5!
You can convince the 51% to cancel the transaction or you can call the police. What would you do?
Bitcoin may fix some friction issues if it's integrated into the current financial system, but it'd then just be a very small cog in a giant machine.
You may not agree, it may also be that you do not want to agree, and it's ok.
Now if you start calling people toxic because they state what's obvious for them, you can never get a proper discussion. It's also a little red flag that should make you question if you are in a cult.
I wasn't specifically giving a btc example, qr code can also be apple pay or anything like that.
It's just that in the case of btc, there's no central authority to cancel the transaction. You need a court order to force the bar to manually send the money back to you. The bank cannot freeze the funds. Enforcement is crippled. If this is not a reputable business (unlikely for a bar and very unlikely for a small sum like that but bear with me), it's way more likely to lose your money.
This is one of the reasons why money transactions are hard and costly. You cannot pretend that a blockchain fixes all that.
If I lose 50 € to some unscrupulous merchant, that's worth it to not have to ask the bank for permission for and tell them about every transaction.
in other words, you aren't poor enough for the loss of 50 € to mean that you are going to have less food this month and won't be late on your rent because of it.
It isn't that banks are looking out for poor people. That should be obvious.
But poor people do use banking services and in both countries I've lived in (US and Norway), there are built in consumer protections. They aren't perfect, but they are stronger than you get with crypto. You can often resolve a payment issue, for example. FDIC protection in the US covers most folks (most folks don't save more than whatever the limit is now).
And this protection, even if imperfect, helps folks have a little more stability in their lives.
But cryptocurrency is the same as with cash. Yes, we need to teach people that they shouldn't send cryptocurrency to some shady "investment" company, just as they shouldn't give cash to a guy in a van promising them returns, but the risk profile is exactly the same as with cash, which people have been using successfully for centuries.
The risk profile is, currently, not the same as with cash, for the reasons some people further up the thread mentioned (no or nebulous ability to freeze/seize assets of bad actors).
To the extent that the risk profile is or will become (with expanding regulations) the same as with cash, cryptocurrencies provide no meaningful improvement over cash, but have significant drawbacks.
So why should we take all this effort to get to "just like cash, but with extra steps"?
Because it's cash you can easily carry with you, even if you have millions, you can send to anyone anywhere in the world instantly, they're much more difficult to steal if you have a cheap hardware wallet, etc etc. They have many more advantages.
These are all features as long as you live in a world where there is no bad faith, no misunderstandings, no drama of any sorts.
In this world however, disputed transactions may even be more than half, depending on the industry. You can't approach something that ignores this as a serious financial tool.
I don't use cryptocurrency as a replacement for a credit card, I use it as a replacement for cash. Banks aren't risk-free either, it's a lower probability of problems for a much more devastating impact.
Compare a frozen bank account to a fraudulent transaction you can't revert. Sure, the latter is more frequent, but the former is devastating.
No crypto software I know makes a transaction based on a QR code scan. It always shows you the address, and then you have to enter the total in the check and then complete the transaction. If you paid 5x more than was asked, have your 5 beers.
Same could be said about paying in cash. Order a beer, hand over a 20 expecting change, bartender gives you 5 beers and no change. In that case you can convince the bartender (who allready said no can do) or call the police (though it might be a civil issue rather than criminal, so calling the cops won't produce any results and you will have to take it up with them via the civil court system).
BUt I get your point, I used some automated "pay by crypto" checkout system a few months ago, their automated system never picked up the transaction even though the coins where in their wallet, they first blamed me and said they would refund if I paid the fee's which were not in a coin I had on hand so had to do some giggling about to get this small amount (was like < $1 of coins so it was easier to just pay this fee than it was to complain), then after they recieved this fee they said they would return the funds minus 8% as that 8% was their "handling fee".
NOW they did return all the funds I transfered so maybe that 2nd email was just a canned message but it was still a jab to the gut them saying "yeah, our system messed up and we want you to pay to fix it".
My bank handles card disputes very well imo. Basically I can start the dispute via my banking app and based on your past history the bank will front you the refund while they wait out the dispute.
Things like that happen when you have an intermediate handling the transaction, and personally for my day to day transactions I'm happy with using the existing banking system
BUT the existing system does have flaws in my opinion. For one example, sex workers, banks do not like touching that subject. Crypto removes the gatekeepers to electronic payment transfers, well it does until you want to convert it back to fiat and your crypto gets blacklisted by the exchanges. But me personally, I don't think crypto is the answer, but kicking banks into understanding that adults are adults and don't need banks holding the reins.
(Granted payments in the adult industry are some of the most charged back which becomes a pain for payment providers).
US experiences come to me like from an alien world, most of the time. Zoning laws messing with cafes, banks kicking sex workers, and this is only from the last 5 minutes HN reads...
And back to the topic: yes banks deserve some stronger kicks and that can be achieved only through politics (aka, getting involved). Cryptids only shuffle the burden around a bit.
I'm grumpy about Visa/MC taking 3% of every transaction. I want a technofix for that. There are new blockchains that cost less than a penny per transaction use about a millionth of the wattage of bitcoin and I hope they turn out to be non-BS. I just want an efficient low-cost barrierless payment network.
Where are you located that visa and MasterCard are charging 3%?
In the EU the fees are limited to 0.3%, and in other areas (e.g. the UK) it's 1%. As a card holder I'm pretty happy to pay a ~0.3% service fee to know that I have recourse with a merchant, for example.
> I just want an efficient low-cost barrierless payment network.
Note that the 0.3% cap is on the interchange, i.e. the fee that goes back to the card issuer, it doesn't affect Visa and Mastercard directly.
PSPs in the EU/EEA charge around 1% overall, a bit more to small businesses (for instance SumUp), and a bit less to the really big retailers that have more bargaining power.
There, banks and credit card companies offer huge perks and cash-back to card holders. That money must come from somewhere, and that's from the transaction fees paid by merchants (and transitively customers, as merchants still need to make a profit). AMEX has even higher transaction fees, which is why some businesses don't accept it.
The situation is now at an idiotic local maximum: if I don't use one of these cashbacks cards, I am losing money paying for my neighbor's air miles, as I don't get a discount anyway. You don't need a "technofix" for that, you need regulations that cap interchange fees like the EU.
I don't know who ValuePenguin are, but those rates are definitely misleading. The interchange setup in the US is nuts, but only the highest tier of rewards cards are 3%, when used to purchase travel (see mastercard [0]). The vast majority are 1-1.5% ish. I will admit that this is higher than I expected, but MasterCardaren't taking a 3% cut of every card transaction.
> AMEX has even higher transaction fees, which is why some businesses don't accept it.
Given the opacity of the fees (or "discounts") as amex calls them, I don't know how to believe this. Lots of retailers in the EU don't accept them, yet amex are bound by the same interchange limits as Visa and Mastercard. How much of this is actually true and how much is "well it was true 30 years ago and I've not questioned it"
> You don't need a "technofix" for that, you need regulations that cap interchange fees like the EU.
Agreed. And using crypto to limit network fees is a terrible idea. I just had a quick look and the current gas fee for ethereum is $20!
> Moving money between bank accounts in an immutable way is extremely cheap already.
Only true in certain countries, between certain banks/processors, and within certain thresholds.
My last last transaction fee on Tezos was a fixed cost of 0.000544 xtz ($0.00177 USD), had no threshold limitations, required zero privacy invasion, settled in ~30 seconds, and was not limited to a particular bank or regional currency. This is essentially the 'technofix' that crypto users want to see adopted by the rest of the financial sector.
In the most abstract sense, with a blockchain you’re paying for the _consensus_, not the _computation_ to handle transactions - and there are projects (such as Starkware) aimed at taking that to its logical conclusion, using computation proofs to reduce the cost of transactions by orders of magnitude.
What level of economic activity in crypto is unrelated to speculative gain.
If you want to stop angry responses to claims for the value to economic process you need to be honest about the extent to which crypto is a game for massive speculative gain, pump and dump, washing and money laundering.
Use of public signed ledger to audit value flow and provide certainty to low doc activity like cash in Africa, payments to farmers worldwide, ending the game of 90 day credit and discounting for prompt payment, reducing rent seeking. All laudible.
But please instead of just listing them, give us some numbers.
A smaller amount of speculation is informing of belief on future value. When it dominates, it tends to be gambling, ponzi, or both, as in ponzi to enrich a few, fuelled by gambling by many.
I don't think I am ever going to get used to "crypto" meaning "cryptocurrency" and not "cryptography". Can't we just keep calling it "cryptocurrency"? I thought this article would be about the various misguided governments' attempts to outlaw cryptography.
HN probably could return to "crypto" and "cryptocurrency"; the rest of the world will keep on being "crypto" and "cryptography". Orders of magnitude more people care about cryptocurrencies than cryptography.
Given the recent decline in interest in both NFTs and cryptocurrency in general, I'd say within the next 5 years or so we'll be able to go back to using "crypto" to mean "cryptography" without much fear of confusion.
It's hard for me to be sympathtic to cryptocoin maximalists when there are so many in their camp that push "shit" coins and coin-drop scams. Then there's power usage. It's use in aiding fraud and crime (something cash does as well and money laundering with fiat is not new...) as well as it's inability to scale compared to existing solutions to be used as a clearing house (yes, there are other blockchains that seek to speed this up but it's not at parity from what I can tell).
So all of this allows me to not feel bad about reveling in the latest crash, or scam, or exchange hack, or when the price falls or what not because I have no skin in this game and can't care any less than I do. I think the whole thing is a speculative farce that has hit a critical mass of adoption and intertia (at least for bitcoin) that will continue to be a puzzle (at best and a scam at worse) for years to come.
It took me quite a while to understand what Bitcoin is about. Of course, decentralised systems are exciting tech, but what's really interesting is that Bitcoin focuses attention onto fundamental questions of society:
- How can we transport value through space at the speed of light?
- How can we transport value through time?
- How can we protect our life savings from inflation?
- How can we develop a free market of currencies which solves the issues of centrally controlled currencies?
- How can we align incentives such that we stop consuming low quality products that produce lots of waste and start valuing high quality products that last for decades?
- In general: How can we, as a society, enjoy the benefits of a low time preference?
Such questions are the reason why I believe Bitcoin is one of the most disruptive technologies of our century.
I started as a hater and skeptic but the more curious I got about the technical details of it and the more I learned, the more it started to grow on me.
IMHO the problem with crypto is the very thing that its proponents cite as one of its key benefits, its decentralised nature.
We are told that crypto is supposedly a way to "stick it to the man", to fight those "evil banks/governments".
The trouble is that unlike fiat currency, there is no fundamental means of valuation. Crypto is worth what its worth on the day based largely or exclusively on entirely non-economic valuation, which is why its so incredibly volatile.
The trouble is that you cannot escape the truth that the world is based on trade. People make goods, people supply services and other people buy goods and buy services. People also buy and sell essential commodities. This happens both domestically and cross-border.
The value of fiat currency is ultimately tied to the economics of global, and therefore provides an objective means to value said currencies, both themselves and relative to other currencies.
You don't get that with crypto.
Well, you could argue that you do to a limited extent, but that limited extent would only make crypto comparible to emerging world fiat currency of some tiny country.... high-frequency boom and bust cycles, high volatility, potential for episodes of illiquidity etc.
> We are told that crypto is supposedly a way to "stick it to the man", to fight those "evil banks/governments".
The supposed “decentralized” revolution sounds about as likely as some kid who just read Marx leading a revolution. I think there’s a fine line between decentralized and deorganized.
> make crypto comparible to emerging world fiat currency of some tiny country
This is my basic viewpoint regarding bitcoin et al. The significance difference is that bitcoin and similar are not territorial countries but free associations of people under particular conditions. This is where it gets interesting.
Can you expound on the fundamental means of valuation for Fiat currency? It's my understanding that there is no fiat currency with any fundamental backing. I was pretty sure Khadaffi was killed for promoting an African currency backed by gold, in lieu of the USD hegemony.
> The value of fiat currency is ultimately tied to the economics of global, and therefore provides an objective means to value said currencies, both themselves and relative to other currencies.
The fundamental value of fiat currency is that it is effectively a share of the productivity of a particular economy. The underlying driver of that value is that debts are denominated in and payable with the currency, and the underlying driver of that is that the government levies taxes.
No amount of crypto scams outweighs the good crypto has and will done for us. Technology is empowering, there is no comparison on the effect crypto has on the poor. There is no other way I would be ever able to participate in trading, speculation or investment, no other way I'd ever be able to afford a home.
Regarding the list of questions that are presented here EG - "How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?"
Can anyone explain to me how crypto is uniquely suited to solve this problem? I'm not in principal against crypto currencies existing, but more and more I just see people trying to apply it to problems that they think exist because "the financial system is over regulated" - without providing any argument for why regulation is causing the unfairness in the first place?
I have yet to see anyone define a single problem in the financial system that crypto is uniquely placed to solve (besides funding criminal activity and bypassing sanctions), that wouldn't be better solved from better competition between banks.
Not every country in the world has a banking sector that serves it's customers as badly as in the US.
I'm 100% onboard with the enabling underbanked people argument for crypto. There's countless people all over the world who can't get a bank account, or if they could, can't get one that is reliable or useful enough for their needs. Eg, maybe the currency is too unstable, or maybe there's too many restrictions on international transfers and commerce etc etc. These people are left with cash and predatory "businesses" like Western Union as their only options. It's not fair and can and should change, but sadly, crypto has spectacularly failed to deliver on its potential here.
I agree here, it would be nice if this was the case. Like you I also worry that in it's current form a crypto banking implementation for the underbanked people of the world would be a worse solution for everyone.
- No human being that's able to reverse fraudulent or mistaken transactions
- Currency that's hardly more stable (probably less so) than the world's the least stable currencies
- A digital environment that's rife with fraud and a completely fresh and unknown attack surface due to the nature of smart contracts
There are several properties of blockchains that could improve upon our current financial structures.
1) Custody: with fiat, the concept of self-custody is "store your cash under your bed," and as we continue to move away from cash into digital money, this option is being eroded. In crypto, the concept of self-custody may be an EOA (account based on a private key) smart contract (such as a multi-signatory account), or some combination. This is not to say that all users should be choosing non-custodial wallets, but the ability to choose and diversify your assets across a range of these technologies is, in my opinion, better than having no choice at all.
2) Mitigating the need for intermediaries in certain situations. Currently to handle escrow of digital assets in fiat systems, you typically need to hire or use a third-party agency. In some cases escrow could instead be managed by a (cryptographically-verified) program execution, e.g. "transfer X domain name record for Y amount of stablecoin assets".
3) Privacy-preserving attestations via zero-knowledge proofs, which could use a public (decentralized) ledger so that all parties can verify the validity of the proof.
4) The immutable and public nature of smart contracts gives them certain properties we do not have with our traditional financial systems. For example Libor manipulation went unnoticed for several years; partly because the systems were closed and difficult to analyze. The public ledger is comparatively easy to analyze and difficult to manipulate. (The most common manipulations rely on social engineering; e.g. convincing somebody to sign a transaction, or buy ShitCoin2000.)
5) General security and operational improvements. Much of our traditional system is upheld by FORTRAN and questionable security methods (PINs, passwords, cell phone 2FA). Crypto currencies are extremely adversarial environments that are forcing new security models and cryptographic primitives: zk-proofs and zk-VMs, multi-party computation, new methods of private key storage and management, post-quantum cryptography. Hopefully some of these advancements (being funded by crypto currencies) will eventually spill over to other sectors.
While I agree with some of your points here, (Mitigating the need for intermediaries in certain situations)
- Crypto inherently holds no security benifits over traditional banking. Fortran has been used for decades because it has worked, and there has been little need for change.Fortran isn't a security hole in itself. In fact it has all of the same problems with private PIN access and MFA, PLUS all the downsides that come with malicious smart contracts. As far as personal security goes, crypto is much much worse.
- The immutable and public nature of smart contracts. Why should anything be immutable? What if something is done by mistake, or by fraud? The benefits of traditional banking is that at the end of the day, there is a human on the other side that can reverse things if stuff goes wrong.
- I see no benefit of the entire chain being public, just because I give someone my public key, because I spend money with them, or my employer needs to pay me, why should they be able to see EVERY transaction I have ever made?
- Banks and financial systems use COBOL/FORTRAN not because they want to, but because the systems are decades old, the knowledge of how it works often lost, and making small changes or adding new features could lead to catastrophic failure[1][2][3]. Crypto on the other hand tends to be on the cutting edge of cryptography and heavily reliant on open source. Despite crypto systems having a better bedrock than a bank trying to maintain their multimillion lines of COBOL spaghetti, I can agree that many end-user applications in crypto do not provide better security than today's banks (e.g. MetaMask hot wallet storing user private keys in the cloud).
- The ledger is generally considered immutable; but the platforms and protocols built on top of it need not be. Social consensus can pivot to a new contract address. An analogy would be a git commit; you can update the head of your codebase, but your past changes are still present and analyzable.
- Better support for zero-knowledge proofs would be the eventual end goal for many of these systems, allowing users to shield data and maintain their privacy. I agree that not every transaction should be public, and it's a limitation of current crypto currencies that will likely take several years to solve.
In my view it is quite difficult to find insightful and civilized long-form discussion on the topic of crypto, compared to most other "controversial" topics I'm personally intersted in (e.g. geopolitics or economics). I might be mistaken – but it is my impression that the blockchain-space is fast growing and attracts a ton of intelligent people. Surely there must be a lot to talk about?
On reddit, the crypto-themed subreddits (that I know of) are almost entirely comprised of doom-and-gloom-sentiment and astroturfing, while subreddits outside of this bubble are reminiscent of HN, where specific crypto projects almost never reach the frontpage and if they do, the discussion is seldomly about specifics.
I've found that all the smart crypto people congregate on twitter and discord, which is sort of a shame because it results in a lot of the conversation being ephemeral.
There is plenty of interesting discussion, both on Twitter and in community-specific areas like blogs and Discords and such. It’s just drowned out by the nonsense, which is inevitable due to the association so many people have with getting rich quick with cryptocurrencies. It’s the same with retail traders buying options - there is some interesting discussions happening in some places, and interesting strategies being run, but it’s hard to find over the masses of spam.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadSadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
I'm currently at devconnect in Amsterdam and it's full of people who care about tech.
Really nice a crowd and even a bit more diverse than the rest of IT.
I haven't gone to any Bitcoin conference, but I can't see it being the same. Bitcoin's aversion to change means mostly demagogues are left, and all the talk is money talk.
That's true, but you say it as if that's a bad thing. Bitcoin is valuable because it does not change, its proven to work, and people know that. If the downside is that there isn't as much to talk about at a conference, then I don't give a shit.
Here’s links to 3 full days of talks from the Open Source Stage at the Bitcoin 2022 conference:
https://twitter.com/ODELL/status/1513487641538269188
Each YouTube video is about 5 hours long and broken into chapters per talk.
If BTC fell, ETH fell too.
There's a lot of innovation happening in and on Bitcoin. RSK for smart contracts, BetterHash for mining pool decentralization, the Lightning Network or Liquid Network as examples of layered scaling.
Bitcoin's dev meetups are great examples of the helpful, thoughtful, enterprising and conscientious community that exists, without the overly loud, overly shallow speculators.
I was also “into” crypto roughly early, never found a community (nor should I have to), that’s all I see, and that’s all I therefore assume exists.
I found my crowd, but many people don't.
I saw this happen with the early internet, and then later with crypto... It took a long time for the Internet to go from 1) only know to geeks to 2) grifters promising the world to 3) wider acceptance. Maybe this will happen too with crypto, but until it sorts out its grifter problem, it will be always be stuck at stage 2.
There aren't fewer grifters on the internet. There are just more regular people. And also more grifters, but they can hide in the rest of the noise.
It's going to be the same with cryptocurrency if it sticks around. There will always be people trying to trick less-wise people into giving up their money for nothing.
Bitcoin is over 10 years old.
The Internet existed before then in various forms, but never as an industry of rich people trying to convince poorer people to invest all their savings in email.
We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
So is that why other 'crypto' like XRP, Stellar, USDC and Algorand are also compliant for the ISO 20022 standard since they are useful at being 'distributed internet money'? [0]
> We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
Both of them have completely failed in their original purposes.
[0] https://www.prlog.org/12911340-cryptocurrencies-that-are-iso...
Right now, Joe Average, can transact for fractions of pennies. [2]
[1] http://melaurent.github.io/spamattack/
[2] https://bitcoinist.com/lightning-cnbc-sent-btc-to-a-ukranian...
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning
I think I have a different definition ...
There is so much meta talk about crypto on the internet, but no one has the chops to actually talk about the ups and downs, challenges and successes of something like the lightning network, which is perhaps one of the most important developments in the space despite not being a speculative vehicle.
Lightning has promise but the regular chain is still just fine for many use cases especially for normal people, barring those rare periods of exceptionally high transaction fees. A transaction will typically show up in the mempool "instantly" and for many vendors that's good enough; much like the classic written checks system they can trust the purchaser isn't going to try any funny business before the transaction is fully confirmed/settled and you can let them go on their way with their groceries or coffee or whatever. If they do try something (successfully), well, you're out a small amount (maybe, an intermediary like bitpay may tank those for you), and you ban them from your business. For many other types of transactions, even waiting for at least one transaction but not expecting that for 24 hours from now is fine and impacts nothing. My hope is the effective minimum of 1 sat/byte will be decreased because right now it's 9 cents to send the median sized 224 byte transaction and if btc doubles again to $80k USD then the minimum fee doubles to 18 cents without anything changing, that's like an extra pack of ramen. Well it's still not that bad, especially since it's not amount-dependent; my whole state recently mandated grocery stores start charging 8 cents per plastic bag when they used to be free, many people are just personally tanking it and still throwing them out, but everyone would rather pay no fees if they could.
Check out DeFI on Ethereum and your hope will resurrect. aave.com, pooltogether.com, goodghosting.com, polymarket.com, ens.domains, gitcoin. https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
https://gitcoin.co/grants/1112/goodghosting-a-defi-savings-g... : so this is a weird sort of mutual society / tontine kind of thing? Which has been gamified to encourage you to make regular deposits? However, it's missing three things:
- what are the actual interest rates?
- some sort of explanation of to what extent the principal is at risk to e.g. defi hacks or rugpulls or the collapse of the counterparty
- registration with the UK FCA if you're marketing to UK customers https://register.fca.org.uk/s/
There's no need to have cool applications of blockchains, there's only need for decentralisation.
If having a solid understanding of the tech underlying crypto is a prereq of any sort, it will never reach mass adoption. Personally idgaf what fiat we choose or tech underlying my debit transactions, so long as the value is reasonably stable, my account reasonably secure, and my form of payment is accepted by almost all merchants.
Sure, the dollar is reasonably stable. The problem is that the global financial system is deeply flawed in its fundamental properties. Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation, financial meltdowns, geo-spatial catastrophy, and more.
The whole movement came out of monetary crank-ism, those people were always there.
Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.
So you believe inflation is a good thing?
While using the per-design resource destroying, planet burning Proof-Of-Waste? Are you Kidding?
And no, deflation does not encourage more long term investments, it does simply encourage hoarding, not exactly a desirable thing, form any perspective. And of course it is the fatal (and likely never fixed) flaw in bitcoin-as-a-currency.
You can use the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as a currency. It's almost instant and free.
No, it does not. How could it? It does nothing but encourage hoarding. Not only that, but also a economy where everything is more scare tomorrow than today, is a economy in perpetual decline.
>You can use the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as a currency. It's almost instant and free.
That does not side step the proof-of-waste on the main chain. This is a completely unrelated debate.
Bitcoin mining accelerates the transition to renewables. https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/can-bitcoin-mining-sa...
And bitcoin does not use electricity, it just flat out wastes it. And that's not because bitcoin in itself is useless (it is), but due to the design of the Proof-of-Waste. Electricity use implies that electricity is converted into something. Every iPhone uses X Wh. If you dail up the usage, the output increases. It's not perfectly linear, but that's a reasonable approximation. Bitcoin is different: More electricity will never produce a better service, more bitcoins or whatever. Bitcoin will not ever get better by using more. And yet it is designed to waste a amount of electricity proportional to it's price. Oh, and it is only profitable to mine if you use a below-average electricity price. E.g. use the laxes regulations, the most polluting or the most illegal sources of electricity.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/05/19/the-last-word-o...
Furthermore, it can reduce the hidden costs of the petrodollar. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-...
Inflationary policies also have a very tight link with speculation in the economy. You only need to look at the past 2 years.
I see this claim time and time again, but it's hardly convincing. Deflationary assets don't exist in a vacuum, they compete with inflationary assets that create value over time (such as stocks), and it's not a binary decision as to which one is going to be the best investment/use of your money. Additionally, the value of pretty much anything (whether deflationary or inflationary) is hardly a factor of their availability in the future but rather their actual or perceived utility at a precise moment in time.
It's the fiscal policy of many countries that's massively driven up asset prices including cryptocurrencies. Those who didn't invest saw their savings printed away.
Inflation (of IOUs) is good for those holding the actual wealth (resources, land, farms, factories, real estate, etc - often through public shares). It's good for those who have debt denominated in inflationary currency. It's definitely good for some people and their business. What many people simply don't understand is they're not part of that group.
You can call it crank-ism if you want, but the movement behind Bitcoin's properties were born out of very real concerns about current economic models and what their effects are.
Freicoin is the closest I can think of
I actually built an app before that which would easily transfer money between countries, by finding matching local trades. Unfortunately to turn it into a service, it requires the currency to both be popular and stable.
Is this the same idea as Wise (aka TransferWise)/hawala?
It is important to note that crypto currencies are distributed blockchains, a subset of blockchain methods. Blockchains for tamper detection purposes have been around for longer than bitcoin and its ilk, IIRC they date back to the mid 80s or before.
But the crypto people don't talk about Git. They are focused on being early adopters and investors in something that will generate 1000x returns, even if those returns come from a pyramid scheme mechanism.
People don't speculate with "web", they don't "pay" with web.
Right, risky startup ideas/investments are not a thing, understood
> they don't "pay" with web
Online payments doesn't exists, TIL
I don’t know why one can try to assign a left/right political affiliation to a technology that is on neither side and can be used by anyone.
Everyone knows she is hilariously incorrect on that one.
In my view, less centralization is the at the bottom what libertarianism strives for, so it makes sense crypto is seeing as supporting it.
I had trouble reading beyond that in the second sentences. You can’t just retroactively assign a political affiliation to the origin of an algorithm application.
I suspect but cannot prove that we could argue any political leanings we like.
To be honest, I don't know much about BTC. I'm coming from the Ethereum side of things.
It's just tech. If people like it, it belongs to their political side. If they resent it, it belongs to a political side they also resent.
I think, the main difference is that anarchism is about people can do what they want.
Some interpret it as capital can do what it wants. I don't subscribe to that interpretation, but many crypto people do, sadly.
There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state (creating public goods, giving weaker participants of a system protection, internalising externalities via regulation etc.) but keeping the bad parts (police and military with their massive potential for rent seeking and state capturing of money pots, not to speak about violence and abuse).
Very well said. As someone who was a "libertarian" in my high school days, I ultimately abandoned the philosophy after realizing that it was at its root far more about "property" than "liberty" and ought to have been termed "propertarianism". Furthermore, none of it's logico-moral justifications for property rights actually worked for the most fundamental forms of property (land and unproduced natural resources).
> "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical
Well, anarcho-capitalists believe that there are ways to provide property rights outside the state. As a minarchist, I'm skeptical about it, but if you believe it there's no paradox.
On the other hand, I do find deeply paradoxical the left anarchist stance on rejecting capitalism but also (AFAIK) reject any means to stop its emergence in society.
> There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state [...] but keeping the bad parts
As a minarchist, I strive for reducing the weight of the state as much as humanly possible. Justice, defense, and a minimal social security net are the only services I can't think how to provide without the state. If you think these are the bad parts I'd love to hear a viable alternative, maybe you can make me fully anarcho-capitalist ;).
Re your criticism of left-anarchism, one of the big unsolved challenges in my eye is exactly your point: how do you keep per from pooling? In a sense, you also need a "state" but one which has as it's explicit goal the self dissolution - which is of course the same paradox that ancaps face. The difference to me is that it seems to me more feasible to build societal systems and cultures that disperse power if we build our ideology around consent and cooperation than to build a society where the central building block is the by-necessity cooperation of small dictators who somehow are supposed to also respect their weaker neighbors private property rights. The former seems like positive feedback loops are possible (and we see spontaneous cooperation like this emerge throughout history, without any powerful person pushing it) while the latter...was the robber barons and cleptocrats of the 19th,20th and 21st century
Re your question, I don't like to quibble to much about this if it doesn't have a possible payoff, but do you believe in e.g. environmental regulations, provision of public goods via a regulated healthcare system, basic education etc? If yes then I think your position might be rare amongst self identified minarchists. If not, then do you see how e.g. natural monopolies like healthcare or highly influential realms like healthcare are open to power concentration and state hijacking?
Beyond that Bitcoin's design decisions (deflationary currency, trustless) embed a political ideal. Algorithms can very well be political, it's absurd to argue otherwise. For example taxes are, effectively, algorithmic in nature and I don't think anybody would argue that tax brackets are apolitical.
> “It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.” - Satoshi Nakamoto
The impression you get from Satoshi's writing and the people he associated with (e.g. Hal Finney) is that he seemed more left-leaning if anything.
There's a strong right-wing bent to the community NOW, I don't think there's any doubt of that, but to call its ROOTS "right" is unfounded
They were all about gold standards and hard money and auditing the fed as well.
Basically they were the Ron Paul folks.
I don't think Crypto is a "more equitable financial system" but it is a more equal one.
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/04/18/016252/is-git...
As for the oligarchs, they're still rich, but much less so, and they've lost many precious toys ( yachts, villas, football clubs).
Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen. I have zero sympathy for the average Russian whose inaction made them unable to purchase a new phone or car. They won't starve to death, and they won't be bombes to pieces, which are the prospects facing Ukrainian citizens suffering from the invasion which brought all of this on.
Speaking for a point of privilege right here aren't we?
What do you expect the average Russia to have done exactly? I’m curious what you would have done in their position.
When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
> When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
Many times. Admittedly the risk of arbitrary incarceration or death has always been low in my case, but it's because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are.
> because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are
Was it you or people who fought and died decades or centuries ago to achieve the presumably stable democracy you enjoy today? Please do not misunderstand I'm not saying your activism or causes are not important but trying to tell you that things are really tough outside the comfort zone of the first world.
I'm sorry but is just seems cruel, unfair and childish to expect that by starving people living in dictatorships they will just topple their corrupt government.
Also have you thought about the novel idea of old school policing to catch criminals instead of collaterally damaging the lives every single human in the world other than the 13% privileged who happen to be citizens of stable democracies?
But even then, hardly anybody seemed to care about making crypto work as a currency. It was all about the speculation/gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, and memecoin pump+dumps. Nobody bought their groceries or paid their rent with crypto, it was just the currency of darknet drugs and cybercrime. And multi-million-dollar exchange hacks seemed to be almost weekly headlines.
Crypto wasn't going well, even before NFTs came along, and before the environmental opposition to mining ramped up.
Of course, there are ways to obfuscate the money trail, but if they start handing out hard prison time and fines, that alone will probably deter most.
So while you still have a "bank", so to speak, you're still limited to whom you can do business with.
If you want a bank with a publically accessible ledger, fine, build it, or have your government publish all banking transactions. But don't pretend bitcoin can be an alternative to the current banking system.
They have all this tradfi regulation, and it's shit.
I think, some people are just a bit blinded by living in the handful of countries that have systems which actually work.
Where do we go from here?
It starts your argument with: "Those who disagree with me are poison".
I'd like to say more, but HN has a clear "Anti-Didn't-RTFA Toxicity" policy.
There are ways of expressing disagreement which are toxic, and there are ways of expressing disagreement which are not toxic. She has observed is that many anti-crypto people have been expressing their disagreement in toxic ways, and feeling justified in doing so. She is discouraging the first while encouraging the second.
If you'd spent any effort trying to understand what she or I were saying, you'd know that. It seems rather that you'd rather fight against imaginary arguments from your own head, which is far more troubling.
When I hang out with people 10 years younger than me, "toxic" means things as mild as "buzzkill" or "wet blanket" and "gaslighting" is whenever someone says something you doubt.
Those word carried very weighty and serious connotations when they started becoming commonplace vocabulary years and years ago. These days they're meaningless, and we just have to adapt that new reality.
These days, we painfully observe the culture of crypto in every single online medium that isn’t very carefully moderated, for example Twitter.
And about incentives, I think it’s very hard not to become some kind of “evangelist” or “shill” when a significant fraction of your net worth is invested in a digital item whose sole value depends on enough other people also believing in the project. You need to spread the hype.
In my opinion, all of this would be fun and games if it weren’t for the massive negative externalities all of this cause in terms of environmental damage and accelerating the climate catastrophe. This is completely evident, which doesn’t stop some crypto holders from denying it with all kinds of illogical arguments. That’s understandable — see previous paragraph.
This doesn't describe crypto over the past decade. It's become more pervasive, more corrupt, more destructive (from environmental impact to its role in facilitating hacking) and, with NFTs, more slot machinesque.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart."
and
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The climate externalities are significant, but they're not the only problem. If the whole cryptocurrencies space shifted to Proof of Stake tomorrow, cryptocurrencies would still have a tremendously bad effect by increasing wealth inequality (because just as with Proof of Work, it's baked in to the code).
Right, there's only bad people.
The bifurcation is between money laundering people and Ponzi scheme people.
In my experience if you attempt to push back and ask how exactly they propose to fix these problems they'll just resort to enumerating the failings of our current system (the 2008 crisis, wealth inequality, tax evasion by the wealthiest etc...) which is all fair, but how does cryptocurrency fix this? I'd argue that so far it's mostly demonstrated that it shares all these issues, only even more pronounced.
The pyramid scheme at the core of cryptocurrency poisons the well, that's the original issue with this entire thing. You can't have a good faith discussion when one side expects that they're going to be billionaires if things go their way. I acknowledge that there's definitely toxicity coming from us cryptoskeptics, but you have to acknowledge that these days easily 90% of any discussion involving cryptocurrencies is going to use shallow catchphrases pushed by people who don't understand the technology, don't understand basic economic principles and are just hoping that their $1000 in ShitCumShibaCoin is going to make them millionaires.
On top of that the cryptocurrency side has over a decade of unfulfilled promises to account for. As far as I'm concerned we've exhausted the discussion years ago. Any debate surrounding cryptocurrencies on HN from 2017 is equally as relevant today, there's no need to keep repeating the same arguments over and over again from both sides. So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.
90% of projects out there are scams and have a crypto-token attached to it with a pyramid scheme on it and there also exists a 10% of projects somewhere that it is not purely a 'get-rich-quick-scheme', or a 'web3' crypto project that doesn't require a crypto-token attached to the product that has utility?
Thus, it also must mean that it is not going away 100% guaranteed, despite the rampant scams?
> So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.
So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?
I really hope you try your best to avoid it and 'move on'. I should not expect you to continue to react to yet another HN post about crypto projects since you think all of them are a scam.
And even the not-entirely-a-scam projects, be it NFTs, the entire ETH or BTC sphere, are so full of money laundering, trade front running, people using it as investment vehicle, etc. that you can’t trust these projects either.
The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)
What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.
> being unable to run a full node anymore
Full node syncs & runs fine even on a raspi 3... it's slow... and you're not participating in mining... but it's running, and does what you would expect a node to do (validate, receive & broadcast transactions).
Yes, but bitcoin is so volatile that you can’t keep money for daily usage in it. You can only use it as long-term investment or ultra-short-term wallet.
The regular usage – storing money for somewhere between one and 30 days – is really painful with bitcoin.
Are you saying that keeping some amount of bitcoin tied up in a LN channel is painful?
Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ?
Also, you completely ignored the point about running a node.
Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage. You get paid, you spend it over a month on wages and expenses.
Bitcoin originally promised to be usable for that. Some companies actually paid you in BTC, some stores actually allowed you to pay with BTC. The original goal was to use BTC like a checking account.
Lightning is great at replacing the BTC network itself for transactions, but it doesn’t help much at allowing BTC to accomplish this original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
This is (roughly speaking) the description of a currency, isn't it? I would point out that as a store of value, bitcoin's up
> [BTC's] original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
I don't think BTC was intended to serve in the way you're describing. I believe it was designed to neuter/obviate at-large Central Banks (e.g. money printers, debasers of currency, economic overlords). In this way, it's gone a long way towards the intended purpose. Furthermore, as a base-layer, it's been extended considerably to support day-to-day usability. Further, as a Store of Value, it's done a lot better than USD in almost every time-scale you can compare, and all the ones that matter.
Here's the quote from the release (via: http://satoshinakamoto.me/2008/11/01/bitcoin-p2p-e-cash-pape...)
>>> The main properties: Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network. No mint or other trusted parties. Participants can be anonymous. New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work. The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the network to prevent double-spending. >>>
I would also like to add that the original point of money is not to support a month's worth of planning... the point of money is to support planning across planting seasons and lifetimes. Wages and wage-work came along long after money was invented.
And Bitcoin was treated and hyped as a true replacement for Euro or US Dollar. And we hyped it as well. Online stores started accepting BTC, some companies started paying wages in BTC, the first BTC ATMs showed up.
Dogecoin started their tip bot with a tipping culture.
Neither Doge nor BTC absolutely were seen as investment vehicle or store of value, but instead as payment system and true currency.
I remember discussion about the volatility, and claims that with more and more people using it, its value would change less and less and it'd stabilize at about a BTC per Euro cent.
Even if you set aside the transaction costs and the staggering environmental toll of Bitcoin, it just doesn't function well as a currency because it has been used, and is being used, as a speculative investment vehicle by so many.
You absolutely do not want your currency to be rising and falling by double-digit percentages in value even over the course of a few years, let alone a few days the way Bitcoin frequently does. Furthermore, people accepting currency don't want that. This is one of the major reasons so few people do, in fact, accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. (Yes, I know some do. It's still very few, and always will be.)
Bitcoin has failed in being an efficient on-chain payments system and is somehow now an investment asset since that is its new narrative which is also a 'store of value' or 'digital gold'.
It seems that many supporters have admitted that it is not useful for its original purpose and that it is not instant, significantly slower than VISA and a extremely volatile to use as a currency.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
> Is it going away 100% guaranteed due to the rampant scams everywhere?
> So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?
From the other reply:
> Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam.
Buy Bitcoin and use it for what? Currency? Payments?
Bitcoin has failed at being useful at all and it's intended purpose which is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Not an 'investment', 'store of value' and 'digital gold'.
We often praise projects that morph from their intended purpose in to something else (e.g. a good % of tech out there).
As a sibling comment said, they move to a separate able currency like dollars or Euro.
No one in their right mind will move to a fantasy token whose value oscillates up and down every second, sometimes to within several orders of magnitude.
Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200%
Etherum's is ~300%
Monero, 330%
It's not as bad as Venezuela's or Zombabwe's hyperinflation, but no ine in their right mind would use a currency this volatile.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/326707/bitcoin-price-ind...
What part of "300% value swing over the year" do you not understand?
The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.
People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?
There's plenty of bad actors anywhere, but it becomes toxic when you have an app with an optional crypto integration and people come out of left field preaching their climate doom, crypto will boil the oceans, capitalist greed will be the end of us all, and all crypto is a scam. Meanwhile I'm offering a free to play game?
There's a toxic confluence of engineer's anti-biz perspective combined with a larger ID politics theme. Some benefiting from crypto are outside of the traditional channels. Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
Criticizing over-engineered cloud solutions is done all the time. At the same time there are a ton of useful and pragmatic cloud solutions.
> People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?
This is being criticized all the time. At the same time there are useful financial products that are quite important for many.
> Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
There is no disruption taking place. That's the issue. It's all just pure hype that quite obviously creates more problems that it claims to solve. People are tired of hearing the same arguments and excuses since years.
This is not like the Internet (or anything similar that has been used as an analogy) that was not taken seriously at the beginning, typically by established players who then got surprised shortly after.
Quite the contrary. It has been taken seriously but it didn't turn out to be what was promised. Just yet another hype, and "this time it's not like the last time". The negativity surrounding these topics came from insiders and initial adopters who started to speak out.
There are maybe some useful things in here that get overshadowed, but to be taken seriously those parts need to very clearly distance themselves from the rest.
He said 90% of discussions about crypto descend into shouting shallow catchphrases. And it's been that way since at least 2017.
He seems to believe that 100% of the projects are scams.
Isn't that like, failing to admit that nothing's changed, just the names of the wealth holders (and sometimes not even that)?
It looks like we as a species very much tend to form Pareto (or more accurately, power-law) distributions of wealth just by being ourselves.
Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.
Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.
So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet.
How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument.
----------
> There are many ways to implement fair financial systems
Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways
Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already being produced and going to be deployed by someone does not reduce the overall carbon load of the planet)...
That requires the miners to sink all their profits into buying solar panels, rather than, y'know, making money for themselves, which is the reason they're mining cryptocurrency in the first place.
I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.
I could use money I earned from selling power generated by a coal plant to buy solar panels. That doesn't make the coal plant produce twice the energy.
That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwakiutl.
There are blockchains now that are designed to be optimal for what they provide.
The bigger issue is that there are applications running on chains that clearly don’t need the features of the chain.
You are advocating for the end of the world as we know it within ten years.
Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
Then you would not know what you are talking about.
> Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
No, they have dozens of data centers, on every continent, and all of them are in areas with cheap, carbon-neutral supply. You think that you are being smart by being dismissive about their effort, and the effort of dozens of companies who host their own infrastructure, but that condescension and lack of expertise is just one more example of why Crypto advocates are so unconvincing.
Unsure about the former point.
More centralization (AFAIR you need 32 ETH to get started, so ~$100000, not to mention possible issues where you loose full 32 ETH) vs a single GPU with only lose is your electricity cost.
Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?
I’m willing to bet any amount you want up to $30,000 that Ethereum main net is running PoS by Dec 31 of this year.
Like, if we are using the second metric we could even create 1000s of irrelevant PoS coins to pump that baby up.
When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised:
“The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.”
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=5db...
You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of people.
Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.
Crypto avocates likes to say they _could_ do it with imaginary wealth, but that are very far from being able to afford it; if they could, it would break their business model. In the mean time, they are settled in the countries with the worst carbon footprint possible. They tried to hide it but you can’t really hide that amount of waste. They have distrupted the energy market of China, Kazakstan so much that thousands of people died in energy shortages. For now, all we have from those people is mountains of unrecycled electronic waste.
So, no, those two are not the same thing.
This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.
Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time.
The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.
Every 10 minutes, a new coin is minted. That coin is given to the person who solved the correct hash. The chances of being the correct hash is 1/n where n is the number of miners active.
So if I fire up a miner and I'm the only one, I get a coin every 10 minutes. Life is good. Now, if you want bitcoins as well, you can fire up your own miner. Now we'll both get a coin every 20 minutes. But I was making 6 coins an hour, now I'm making 3. My production is halved. That sucks. But. I can spin up another miner. Now I have 2 to your 1. I get a coin roughly every 15 minutes, you get a coin roughly every 30.
You see where this is going, right? More miners, more coins. And the only way to get value out of these coins is to sell each coin for more than electricity used for all of your miners.
So you're incentivized to not only use every available unit of electricity to mine, you are also incentivized to sell at exorbitant prices. Bitcoin will not switch us over to renewables. It will also use renewables if and when they become available. Bitcoin has also caused long dormant fossil fuel generators to come online again.
No: both types of organisation are looking at areas with cheap electricity and free cooling, but large internet companies are looking at area with stable polical regime and low carbon footprint. Bitcoin miners _could_ value that; they certainly loudly claim that they do. In reality, they don’t. They set-up shops in countries with cheap coal like China and Kazakstan. It sounds like areas known for their corrupt officials and no rules around dumping electronic waste have some appeal.
They don’t go where electricity is carbon neutral. You know how I know that? Because I live near a lot of hydro power, Arctic cold, where all the big players have their European data centers——and there’s no crypto operation here.
Bitcoin advocates are delusional and loves confusing their claims (like they could operate a trust-less financial network) with reality. But reality is still easy to see: crypto a collection of wasteful, polluting, short-term scams.
Furthermore, Bitcoin can lower the hidden costs of the petrodollar. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-...
And Bitcoin incentivises having a low time preference. This leads to a much more sustainable consumer behaviour. Bitcoin helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
- a shortage of all components used in building PCs, starting with CPUs, then GPUs, then RAM, then HDDs, and back to GPUs. Simply because scalpers and shitcoin miners could outbid everyone else.
- People getting hacked left and right (particularly blue-checkmark accounts) on Twitter, Youtube or Facebook to rename them to Elon Musk and promise crypto airdrops
- the amount of corruption that has been necessary to enable said hacks. "SIM swapping" attacks used to be something nation states did against top-of-wanted-list criminals, not something that could be bought on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars
- the loot of said hacks ending up to fund Iranian or North Korean nuclear terrorism programs
- the amount of large scale hacks made only possible by Bitcoin and friends providing a relatively easy way to launder money, in particular ransomware
- an awful lot of "stars" peddled NFTs, ICOs and the likes and let their fans hang out to dry when the hype collapsed
- an awful corresponding lot of friends and sometimes family that got lured in by shitcoins, actually made money and now peddles shitcoins instead of crap MLM products to everyone whose ears haven't fallen off since long
- all the "rug pulls", "hacks" and other instances where serious amounts of money got stolen or vanished into thin air
- artists getting their works minted as NFTs without authorization
- people buying up coal power plants of all things to mine shitcoins
- instead of delivering the promised "there are no banks and taxes!" world, all shitcoins (obviously... as everyone predicted) ended up depending on centralized institutions like exchanges, large mining pools, auditors and the likes, especially once governments around the world caught up with developments. And to make it worse, many of these institutions end up with lesser consumer protection than banks! Hooray!
The only positive contribution that cryptocurrencies brought to the world was that people had a safe way to pay for and order illicit drugs, as taking out shady dealers and cutters reduced the amount of contaminations. Oh and maybe kick some arses at Western Union into reducing their rip-off rates for international currency transfers.
Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour in the crypto community. Even if you're curious about hearing how the latest project is justifying itself, you can't have a conversation about it because the entire conversation is dominated by memes and spam about other scam projects. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to say "No, actually this whole thing is just bad, and shouldn't be treated seriously". There's only so many times that you can humor the same lie. Web3, NFTs, DAOs, Altcoins, Smart Contracts, Stable coins. It's just the same grift repeated every 6 months. For every claim of how this tech could help someone there are thousands of people who have been harmed by scams using this tech.
Agreed. For me it was the NFT'ing of a fart that was the jumping the shark moment that drove me from being merely a crypto skeptic to being vociferously anti-crypto and advocating against it at every turn.
I'm basically an anti-crypto bitcoiner.
Anyway, you have your choice of what money to use. I prefer USD and Euro myself. And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto.
I grant that 3rd world countries without banking systems may, may need it, but I don't know why we just wouldn't start banks there.
Hi. Here is a use case you can carry on to future discussions. There is a flourishing scene of dark net markets where people can purchase drugs using cryptocurrency. Merchants have reviews, products have reviews, and the whole process is much safer, secure, and convenient than meeting a drug dealer in real life with cash.
Bitcoin is not yet perfect. Hopefully someday. Monero however is pretty great privacy wise.
Two things:
1. Bitcoin Lightning is not Bitcoin and is in fact a centralized by design layer 2 system which the transactions are off-chain [0][1], a direct contradiction to what Bitcoin was designed for. A peer-to-peer on-chain electronic cash system.
2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations. [2][3][4]
You can still use Monero, but the on-ramps, exchanges will have banned the privacy coins under these regulations, cutting a way to easily exchange it for fiat.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.07746.pdf
[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/monero-k...
[3] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021...
[4] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
Yes, but I personally have node equipment sitting in my closet waiting to be setup. (time constraints) It's not so centralized that it's obviously destined to be controlled by Governments and Corporations. I would put proof of stake down as being much more controllable by monied interest.
> 2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations.
That's sad, but it leads me to two thoughts. One, I'm glad I don't live in the UK or EU, and I think it's gross that something like that happens without the input of the people. Not that I'd put it entirely past the US to do this either (sigh). Two, hopefully Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges will allow for people to swap into privacy coins without a regulated exchange, but I agree there are probably numerous ways to penalize or track the entrance and exit thereof.
I think really this comes down to getting off exchanges asap and trying to actually use the currency. My local community has a group that actively uses the currencies for exchange, but who knows how strongly that would survive if the currencies couldn't off ramp to fiat.
Clearly crypto is valuable to break the law. After all, look at the number of crypto scams. Or ransomware attacks.
Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolutely an unhealthy social scene of greed and deception.
With crypto, the pollution is built into the system. It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.
So is the contemporary art world. The contemporary art world is vastly polluting as well. How much GHG do you think is generated to run a museum, or warehouse, transport aircraft, ect, filled with bad contemporary art?
No-one is proposing that contemporary art is some sort of technological breakthrough that will completely revamp society, make everyone rich and change finance for the rest of time.
(Also, I'm sorry, but I do NOT believe that contemporary art consume even a tiny fraction of the power that cryptocurrencies do when nearly all of it sits in a handful of warehouses and never moves, just changes ownership abstractly. You would really need to prove this claim.)
Yes, there are strong parallels between the art market and the NFT market. The main one being that money laundering seems to be the primary purpose of both. But at least art does provide people with some level of subjective enjoyment beyond that.
On the other hand, NFTs are pretty new. Maybe someone will make a museum of NFTs that don't suck in a couple years and I'll be proven foolish.
I'm not sure how one would curate an NFT museum, I imagine you'd want to display the jpeg and then select for pieces that play with the uniqueness guarantee somehow.
I haven't the foggiest clue how that would work, it if it is even possible, or what it would look like. But people have only been doing them for a couple years. If we made a museum that sampled the NFT population as selectively as an art museum samples the overall art population, that NFT museum would have approximately zero entries, right?
Perhaps the “web 3” evangelists can switch to show more of these apps, and the real world value they provide.
This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.)
One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they presently can't. VR has that. Crypto, not so much.
Instead we have pitches of doing the same things one can currently do, but decentralised. (Again, see App.net.) That will be appealing for a certain political niche. But Truth Social for libertarians, while definitely worth something, isn't the narrative web3 wants.
[1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it
You talk about socialites, but your kind of comment is the most "let them have cake" type of mentality.
So far most crypto-related websites seem to be run by people from rich countries with full access to banking system.
There is also "not exactly blocked but so many hoops to jump that is practically as it doesn't exist" markets: try being a consultant working from South America without getting ripped off in transfer/exchange fees and ask them how many would wish that their customers paid them in crypto instead.
Could it be that crypto has a number of practical problems, so unless you are a crypto enthusiast or wanting to ~~steal~~ raise some money, traditional methods are more available?
Because the people on the other side of the transaction are saying "why can't I just PayPal you? Oh, it costs 8% more? Not a problem, I'd rather pay more than having to learn how to deal with crypto or worry about the tax implications from it."
App.net was Facebook, but decentralized, also you pay for it. ENS is a domain registrar, but decentralized, and you still pay for it.
In response to "a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling [one] presently can't [do]" we got a thing we can already do. But decentralized. Sort of.
> hyperinflation that leaves poor people with no perspective to save
What does web3 do in solving this that crypto doesn't?
> corruption that shuts the citizens of any quality service
Like domain registration?
I'm honestly trying to understand this, including from managers of funds I'm in that have invested in it. At best, the end market is poor people in unstable countries. The same people Bitcoin is allegedly saving. In reality, it appears to be a (granted, wealthy) ideological set.
I have lived in such countries (Moldova, in the 90s; Turkey, early 2000s). I wouldn't touch this web3 shit with a 1000-ft pole. All this narrative about "poor people" and "dysfunctional institutions" usually comes from relatively wealthy people in stable countries whose idea about "poor people" comes from watching a Netflix overproduced dramatic documentary.
web3 is more unstable and volatile than the absolute vast majority of existing countries (including most of the "dysfunctional" countries), and its only modus operandi is "pay to play" which surely makes wonders for the "poor people".
Ok, I was born in Brazil and I experienced 40% per month inflation in the 80s and I saw a government confiscating everyone's saving accounts as part of a "economic plan". I also saw another government putting a tax of 0.38% on every financial transfer (does not seem like much until you think of all the cascading effects) and I can tell you how little of all those taxes came back to the people in the form of public services.
Are you satisfied with my credentials or are you going to continue with the gatekeeping?
> web3 is more unstable and volatile
If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you. But web3 does not need Bitcoin to exist.
Unlike crypto/web3 which checks notes puts a tax on everything
> If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you.
Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200%
Etherum's is ~300%
Monero, 330%
...
You pay for almost any interaction with it. Except, perhaps, reading.
We asked for an example of "good/useful/entertaining websites", and you are giving us technology demos, something that is only interesting to Web3 people.
How about some real-life useful stuff? Don't give me youtube, show me Kurzgesagt channel. Don't talk about Javascript, DOM and browser optimization, show me Google Maps.
Right now, all the stuff Web3 people produce is only interesting if you are into Web3 as well.
It's not because this is not "real-life" enough for you that it means that it is not worthy of being done.
Yes we are. Yes, we re saying that. Because Unix was announced outside Bell Labs in 1973, and VisiCalc's first release was in 1979. It wasn't released on Unix, but that's really beside the point. Two years later it was available for basically any consumer system in existence.
And on top of that there was a wealth of other software available on those systems. For example, vi and emacs are both from 1976.
What you are saying is that "well, bitcoin paper is from 2008 (14 years ago), smart contracts are from 2014 (7 years ago), and we still have nothing even resembling VisiCalc, scratch that, we don't even have an equivalent of emacs or vi, `it's still early boohoo`"
The point is not just in having an application, the point is in having an application created under the new paradigm.
Goalposts: shifted.
The shift itself is also extremely funny because web3's entire premise is: "you pay for everything"
> The point is not just in having an application, the point is in having an application created under the new paradigm.
So, where are they? Where's web3's VisiCalc (1979), emacs (1976), vi (1976)? Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos was in 1968 [1].
Oh, I know the answer. "Bitcoin paper was 14 years ago, smart contracts first proposed over 30 years ago, appeared on Ethereum 7 years ago, but it's still early for this new paradigm because Visicalc, Unix erm Linux, muble mumble"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3 as a way to justify its existence. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.
Not only is absurd, it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.
"Oh, but BTC is volatile!". Yes, but I could in 2011 send money from the US to Brazil instantly without going through any international bank (buy in US exchange with USD, sell it in Brazilian exchanges in BRL, wire from the exchange to my brazilian bank) with minimal exposure to BTC volatility and at a lower cost than the fees charged by the banks.
But I am sure you want to ignore that, or find a reason to say that "it doesn't count". I can not fight your own prejudices.
No. Your response is literally "you wouldn't ask Unix people to create VisiCalc instead of compilers", but they did, to which you responded "but it isn't free".
> it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.
You mean, the thing that people have been doing since the invention of borders is the killer app?
> But I am sure you want to ignore that
No, I'm not ignoring that. And the reason it doesn't count because original question was about web3, and if all web3 has to offer is sending money across borders, it's not web3, it's Western Union 2.0.
"Visicalc isn't free, also Linux"
"Killer app is sending money"
"You're an idiot"
See these and other useful quotes in our New York Times bestseller, "A Crypto Shill's Guide to a Productive Conversation".
My work is on making it easier to have crypto for e-commerce, focused on stable currencies. If you go look at all my writings and discussions, you will find me telling people to avoid speculation on token price and to not look at crypto for a quick buck.
You are completely lost in your hate, dude. Quite fitting for a "anti-crypto toxicity" thread. Go find something better to do with your life.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of the site from now on. This doesn't depend on what other people do.
And guess what? In just 4 years since GNU started, they had "assembler, an almost finished portable optimizing C compiler (GCC), an editor (GNU Emacs), and various Unix utilities (such as ls, grep, awk, make and ld)" [0]. Something that could be used even if you don't care about Stallman or software freedom.
If the goal of Web3 was to create blockchain libraries, no one would complain. But people, like you, say that Web3 has "useful applications" -- so what are those? Web3 is around for way long than 4 years, and it has much more people working too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project
> so what are those?
Make up your damn mind! What counts as "useful" for you, GCC or Google Maps?
My guess is that you don't really care. You just want to take whatever answer you get and spin it in a way that pleases your biases and can score you some internet points.
So please quit wasting my time and go find something better to do with your life. Come back when you have done something that actually matters to people.
For a project whose target audience is "regular people", like the Web, the goal is the things which matter to people. Example: google maps.
For a project whose target audience is "programmers", like the GNU, the goal is the things which matter to programmers. Example: emacs, GNU make.
What is the target audience of crypto websites?
> What is the target audience of crypto websites?
People that care about self-sovereignty. Anyone that can not /does not/wants not to rely on central authority as their only means to interact with others around the world.
> ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata.
So, for $5 (as of right now) a year, I can create a DNS-ish entry that points at a static piece of data (though not an IP?)? There are plenty of companies who sell DNS addresses (which can do the same things, plus IP), and while they do report to a single authority, that's to keep them in line, not to keep me in line.
Unlock Protocol:
> Create memberships and sell access NFTs in minutes
How is this not possible without a "central authority"? Exclusive community membership and cryptographically signed tokens have been around longer than you or I, likely even on the internet.
Being honest, neither of these are compelling technologies. At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend. This isn't a bad thing, but neither is it very exciting.
You can point to anything.
> How is this not possible without a "central authority"?
Ask that to the people that got shut out of Patreon, OnlyFans, business in Russia that have nothing to do with the war and yet got blocked from transacting with the rest of the world, a freelancer in Venezuela who does not want to have their funds confiscated by Maduro's thugs...
> At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend.
The big thing that you are missing out is that this backend is permissionless and that it can not be captured by any single entity. It's not so much about what it can do, but what it prevents from being done.
Basically, web3 can be the place where we can build the next search engine that is as revolutionary as early-day Google, without worrying that it will become a Goliath that controls every aspect of our lives. And that to me is very exciting.
if someone has to defend their tech by using analogy to the early web, it's probably bullshit
It's about how much of a strawman this is. People are literally using the worst possible example of a new class of applications to dismiss all of it. It's usually indicative they don't understand it or were fortunate enough to never having the need for anything like it.
To make an analogy with evolutionary theory: every single technological breakthrough results in mutation pressure and consequently a massive explosion of new species (products). Some of these products are good, fit well with the environment and thrive. Some of them are ill-conceived or mal-adaptive and do not last long.
Yeah, "NFT-as-art" is bullshit, and I would bet that it will go away sooner or later. But that does not discredit NFTs as whole, much less blockchain/crypto/web3/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
Most of them are literally forks of it.
there are forks of bitcoin, to be sure... but the majority of "cryptos" out there are GPU mineable coins, because there's hardware that can be exploited to mine "profitably". not to mention the need to pre-mine shitcoins so they can be given to grifters and shills who pump & dump.
This is the essence of the Nakamoto Consensus Algorithm, which underpins the entirety of blockchain economics.
Well, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of money across the planet, to any country with internet access, for tiny sums, safely, irreversibly, to anyone.
Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example. Transnational, permissionless internet money is quite handy.
That wasn't possible before, and that's pretty useful, so I think the basic claim (that cryptocurrency is useful) is holding up fine.
> arbitrarily large amounts of money
and in the other corner we have the types who know about and enforce AML and KYC legislation.
How is this possibly going to end well for the first group?
A lot of people don't seem to integrate this fact. The practical power of a lawmaking body is not unlimited. There are certain things they simply cannot stop, no matter how many laws are passed.
It won't "end" for either group, really. The latter will pass some laws, and the former will mostly ignore them, same as happened with hookers and blow.
The people who inhabit both groups (the subset of lawmakers that like being able to pay for their hookers and blow with unreported bitcoin) will laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.
There are some people who see attitudes like that in the government and think how can [things backed by math] survive a coordinated government onslaught that'll happen any year now? And then those that just look at such statements as the unlettered nonsense they are. Bitcoin lets you "be your own bank", independent of any KYC laws that may or may not apply to other banks in your jurisdiction.
If selling things to US citizens for cryptocurrency is criminal, and enforced?
What if selling things to US citizens via any means is criminal, and enforced?
If the EU and the US alone said, "In a month, we'll consider every crypto transaction to be criminal in nature, and we're going to enforce it," the market would collapse as everyone stampeded for the door at the same time.
True. And yet, cryptocurrencies would still remain useful! A market collapse is not the same as it not having utility. Bitcoin was useful even when it was only pennies, and it will remain so.
This thread is about whether or not cryptocurrencies are useful. They are. Could governments crash their markets? Yes. Could they stop people from using them? No.
> True. And yet, cryptocurrencies would still remain useful! A market collapse is not the same as it not having utility.
(Genuine) Q: How many market participants are interested in "the utility" vs the (potential for) "getting rich"?
Plus, unlike drugs and prostitution, the ledger is public and permanent… simplifying enforcement against the remaining fringes dramatically.
So long as any of those residents can travel to another place where they can exchange it for hard money, that's not true. Countries do not exist in isolation.
This is compounded by how some countries are big enough that traveling across a border is a fairly significant undertaking (Brazil, for example). Not something most folks can or will do on a whim. Plus, you'd have to transfer a fairly significant amount of money to be worth it, making it more likely you'd run afoul of the border patrol.
Also, anonymity is not yet something that people care enough. But it already exists - monero, zcash, or the Aztec Network on top of Ethereum. I can bet that any serious attempt from the government at chasing regular people based on their Blockchain activity would lead to a lot to adopt the "truly private" networks.
There would still be shady cryptocurrency things (just like we still have illegal drugs and gambling and prostitution), but at least we won't have smart people proudly announcing that they made new crypto system (just like we don't have people proudly announcing they made a new kind of illegal drug today).
Because for each person who genuinely believes into monetary anarchy and/or does not trust the government, there are lots more (thousands? tens of thousands?) people who read about it in New York Times and want to earn their money. It is the second group which is fueling the first, and so getting rid of it will make crypto harmless again.
Once your wallet is in some way connected to you, all your transactions since the beginning of time are now known. This is a wet dream for government enforcement.
AML is Anti Money Laundering
KYC is Know Your Customer
Far more has been sent over traditional rails [1]. Once you consider state aid, e.g. the billions the Congress has authorized, crypto's contribution is irrelevant.
Given Ukraine had to convert 80% of its crypto into hard currency before it could use it, crypto was also the most expensive donation vector. If we consider crypto’s likely role in softening Russian sanctions (also almost negligible, but we’re comparing two small things), the net contribution could be a wash.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/crypto-aid-ukraine...
When you put it that way, your or my life is just a point of irrelevance in the sea of humanity. While that has a ring of truth to it, it's an odd way to dismiss each piece from making its contribution. A house is built of many bricks.
*not going to address the green energy mining debate here but yes I know it is a thing.
Given funds sent by congress that went through how many approval gates, delays, and intermediaries, vs. millions sent almost over night to the UKR address...
What are the pros/cons of the the two approaches? - billions were sent via congress, and the last time this occurred at a similar scale and sense of urgency was covid relief. The [0] fraud [1] involved [2] and what scale was somewhat substantial and is now a focused DoJ investigation. Scale of $2bil seizures, for instance. Sending direct to a crypto address also has issues and fraud certainly exists, but wouldn't say irrelevant in the alternative controls it offers. $100 mil almost overnight with no strings attached vs. billions from Congress that has strings and will take some time presumably.
- Zelensky has consistently been upfront about the need is both resources, and speed of receiving resources [3]. What's more in line with that need - overnight donations, or Congressional authorizations that eventually lead into donations.
- Conversion: per Zelensky, biggest need is armaments, and he's been able to buy armaments directly in crypto, so that neutralizes your last criticism a bit, or at least more accurately fills out the picture [4]
Do you have any information the aid issued by Congress - has it actually reached UKR, how much of it, strings attached, etc?
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-... [1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/12/politics/secret-service-covid... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/course-rel... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/04/ze... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/04/ze...
What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
Which part of the claim are you refuting here? It is a fact that one can send very large sums of value between two addresses for a trivial transaction fee. This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
I spoke with someone yesterday who lives in Nigeria, they were moving to Rwanda and needed to pay a deposit in advance. They were unable to pay via MoneyGram, Western Union etc. - one provider offered to handle the payment and requested many documents for a few days and in the end rejected the transfer. This person then had to send money to a friend who lived in the US who then forwarded it to Rwanda. This experience made the person feel isolated and outside of the system. This is an anecdote however my guess is if you think PayPal is "good enough" you don't live in a country that is marginalized by the status quo payment system.
> So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
So that's your take, global finance is a solved problem? No todos? No improvements needed we can pack it up? This is a stunning poverty of imagination in my estimation and a denial of the very real struggle many people face day to day in transacting.
And regarding the case with the guy in Nigeria: How much access do people in the developing world have to crypto? And don't start with the crap scam Sam Altman came up with.
what are you talking about crypto-related fraud without even a nod to these enormous organizations that have been convicted (multiple times) of fraud?
This is not the same thing as sending money to Ukraine. If I send money between two addresses, I've just sent money between 2 addresses.
> This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
But not to actually buy anything in Ukraine. To do that you have to find someone with Fiat. As you see with all the other examples I gave you, what you've done is used the modern banking system to buy crypto currency - some bank transfer to a crypto exchange, send it from one address to another, and then left yourself with the problem of getting the money back out of crypto in Ukraine. Which as you'll see with almost all of the charitable giving in crypto to Ukraine, happens via the modern banking system, often with the direct involvement of the Ukrainian government.
So it seems to me, that this entire thing about using Crypto for Ukraine is rubbish. And it seems like that to you too - because when I start interrogating the idea, the Crypto to Ukraine story morphs into a Rwandan sending money to Nigeria.
My take is that Crypto in your example, was a worthless layer of complexity that doesn't solve the difficult problems of international banking, it solves the trivial bit in the middle.
No, weapons are getting purchased in crypto in Ukraine.
My cards don't work on PayPal and I don't keep money in banks (because they've robbed me without cause before). I can, however, donate with cryptocurrency without friction.
Question of course is has such exiting happened. Have payment processors threatened or actually left a space over somewhat subjective judgements? Answer in this case in recent years is yes: Assange, OnlyFans, Canadian Truckers, etc.
Stating the above doesn't imply I support the above 3/etc., but it does show to me that based on which way the wind is blowing, payment censorship can and does happen. Assuming a payment processor/corporation will always be on your side ideologically isn't a great call. Popular German firms today were popular German firms under National Socialism. Or, are you going to tell me there isn't a single successful and well-regarded corporation today that wasn't enforcing segregation happily 60 years ago?
I'm also not implying necessarily an equivalence in present day payment censorship to segregation. But I certainly standby that hedging your bets on your ideological views always aligning to corporate/govt entities and as such you don't have to consider payment censorship is a bad call. Crypto isn't perfect, and 999/1000 times I'll use a credit card, but its an important alternative.
What happens when Climate Action groups get fed up, really start turning the screws on Exxon, and also rely on corporate infra (GSuite, Slack, Paypal) for running everything internally? Who does a payment processor side with - climate action groups perhaps doing not nice activism, or their ~largest client (ignore details here for a second) Exxon who is fed up with the activism and starts turning screws back? This has already happened with communications platforms via warehouse unionization, and QED Signal is pretty widely used. Are you saying it won't happen with payments, or there is at least a risk worth acknowledging?
[0] https://time.com/6155209/ukraine-crypto/#:~:text=Ukraine%20h....
As I understand it, somewhere around 20MM was sent to Ukraine via crypto. The National bank of Japan sent 100MM the first day with lower transaction costs (fees, electricity, complexity). And the Ukrainians still have to convert the crypto to money to use it.
Meanwhile, everyone could just send money to Ukraine via the standard banking system if they wanted to.
To be fair, they've gotten rich from selling their early-adopter cryptos to the next fool. But many people have won the lottery.
And that's where it all falls apart. Crypto-fanatics assume that "good for me" translates to "good for us." As we know, the crypto-rich only exist because others (usually many others) became crypto-broke and/or fiat-broke.
At least, in general, people have no realistic expectation of winning the lottery. You also don't usually have people betting their entire life savings on the lottery. The analogy is only very loosely true.
Separate Money from the State
Lots and lots of people want to succeed like the early adopters of crypto by (nearly) any means.
Their biggest "means" is denial of the capital "R" Reality: Its already too late to repeat the rise, like wanting netflix stock price to grow after it already rose high, because you just bought some and deserve another 500% gain.
And so, since you need that rise badly, you dismiss each argument and everyone against your wish for repetition. Instead you hope for more "suckers" to buy after you so you can have the monyey and with it the break you think you deserve.
And the thing is: I would want that too, damn - I would not mind 100.000 suckers to go broke for me to be rich. I'm just sane enough to see that this gamble is not worth to enrich the ones who are already "in". sigh
* Starknet is running a Turing complete VM using nothing but zero knowledge proofs. It's now possible and practical to trustlessly prove general purpose computation with O(logN) proof sizes.
* Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner.
* The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network.
An overwhelming majority of these are bot trades.
> * The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network.
Visa does 597 million consumer transactions per day. Not only is that magnitudes more, I would wage to guess that >75% of Solana's transactions aren't consumer purchases.[0][1]
[0]: https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/bitcoin-volume-maste... [1]: https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/...
Actual approximate volume of transactions per month was around 500 million as of Nov 2021[2], so around 16.5 million transactions per day, or only about 5,800 transactions per second on average, so it can handle a lot more.
It's handled just under 70 billion transactions to date[3] since it debuted in early 2020, so roughly 35 billion transactions each year for the two years it's been out.
[1]: https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1280088/average-number-o...
[3]: https://explorer.solana.com/
EDIT: had to recheck and revise my math a bit, when working with that many zeros it gets easy to mistype something.
Likely the same is true on the Australian stock exchange. Not that this is a bad thing. There is a person behind every bot - and in the case of Uniswap, the arbitrage is what makes it work in the first place.
This is my anecdotal experience (and no, I don't invest in crypto), but that's enough for me to not consider cryptocurrencies "just scum".
P.S. Also I pay for VPN with it, because this is also the only way at the moment, and without it I cannot even read news I prefer.
P.S. There are no sanctions prohibiting companies to sell hosting to me (by me I mean ordinary citizen with "toxic" passport), it is just VISA/Mastercard decision not to serve us so I dont have other means to pay.
> [] are there for a reason
Slaves are there for a reason. Firing squads are there for a reason. MS-13 is collecting a 'tax' on the local business persons for a reason.
There for a reason.
Also, poor argument.
Have you seen the companies funding the pro-crypto crowd? The 3 people and a discord server projects get the most attention and generally act toxic, agreed.
For the rest of the space, plenty of Fortune 500's investing in it for the long haul/"humoring the same lie."
are you talking about the internet or crypto? or maybe you were referring to finance. wall st? i get hundreds of scam emails a day, shall we get rid of email too? seriously, just because there are scams, doesn't mean that the internet, or wall st, or crypto are all worthless. that's just lazy and ignoring that scams are from people, and not from the tech. some people will use whatever means they have available to scam other people out of money. that doesn't remotely mean that all of crypto is a scam.
- I want to have a beer!
- ok, scan this QR, and accept the transaction
- there you go!
- thank you, here are your 5 beers
- oh, did I just pay for 5? I wanted 1! can you refund me and take these back?
- no can do! pretty sure you said 5!
You can convince the 51% to cancel the transaction or you can call the police. What would you do?
Bitcoin may fix some friction issues if it's integrated into the current financial system, but it'd then just be a very small cog in a giant machine.
You may not agree, it may also be that you do not want to agree, and it's ok.
Now if you start calling people toxic because they state what's obvious for them, you can never get a proper discussion. It's also a little red flag that should make you question if you are in a cult.
Try that with a credit card transaction and you'll get kicked out for ordering 5 beers and only trying to pay 1. :D
It's just that in the case of btc, there's no central authority to cancel the transaction. You need a court order to force the bar to manually send the money back to you. The bank cannot freeze the funds. Enforcement is crippled. If this is not a reputable business (unlikely for a bar and very unlikely for a small sum like that but bear with me), it's way more likely to lose your money.
This is one of the reasons why money transactions are hard and costly. You cannot pretend that a blockchain fixes all that.
If I lose 50 € to some unscrupulous merchant, that's worth it to not have to ask the bank for permission for and tell them about every transaction.
in other words, you aren't poor enough for the loss of 50 € to mean that you are going to have less food this month and won't be late on your rent because of it.
But poor people do use banking services and in both countries I've lived in (US and Norway), there are built in consumer protections. They aren't perfect, but they are stronger than you get with crypto. You can often resolve a payment issue, for example. FDIC protection in the US covers most folks (most folks don't save more than whatever the limit is now).
And this protection, even if imperfect, helps folks have a little more stability in their lives.
To the extent that the risk profile is or will become (with expanding regulations) the same as with cash, cryptocurrencies provide no meaningful improvement over cash, but have significant drawbacks.
So why should we take all this effort to get to "just like cash, but with extra steps"?
In this world however, disputed transactions may even be more than half, depending on the industry. You can't approach something that ignores this as a serious financial tool.
Compare a frozen bank account to a fraudulent transaction you can't revert. Sure, the latter is more frequent, but the former is devastating.
That's a feature, not a bug.
BUt I get your point, I used some automated "pay by crypto" checkout system a few months ago, their automated system never picked up the transaction even though the coins where in their wallet, they first blamed me and said they would refund if I paid the fee's which were not in a coin I had on hand so had to do some giggling about to get this small amount (was like < $1 of coins so it was easier to just pay this fee than it was to complain), then after they recieved this fee they said they would return the funds minus 8% as that 8% was their "handling fee".
NOW they did return all the funds I transfered so maybe that 2nd email was just a canned message but it was still a jab to the gut them saying "yeah, our system messed up and we want you to pay to fix it".
Things like that happen when you have an intermediate handling the transaction, and personally for my day to day transactions I'm happy with using the existing banking system
BUT the existing system does have flaws in my opinion. For one example, sex workers, banks do not like touching that subject. Crypto removes the gatekeepers to electronic payment transfers, well it does until you want to convert it back to fiat and your crypto gets blacklisted by the exchanges. But me personally, I don't think crypto is the answer, but kicking banks into understanding that adults are adults and don't need banks holding the reins.
(Granted payments in the adult industry are some of the most charged back which becomes a pain for payment providers).
And back to the topic: yes banks deserve some stronger kicks and that can be achieved only through politics (aka, getting involved). Cryptids only shuffle the burden around a bit.
- I want to have a beer!
- ok, scan this QR, and accept the transaction
- there you go!
- thank you, here are your 5 beers
- oh, did I just pay for 5? I wanted 1! can you refund me and take these back?
- sure! can I see your QR code?
- there you go!
- thank you, here is your 1 beer and refund
Note that I'm totally burnt on bitcoin for practical reasons, but your example is just silly.
It's just a conflict to make the point stand, we are not discussing my creative writing here, so don't hurt my feelings for no reason please! :)
In the EU the fees are limited to 0.3%, and in other areas (e.g. the UK) it's 1%. As a card holder I'm pretty happy to pay a ~0.3% service fee to know that I have recourse with a merchant, for example.
> I just want an efficient low-cost barrierless payment network.
Whats low cost to you then?
PSPs in the EU/EEA charge around 1% overall, a bit more to small businesses (for instance SumUp), and a bit less to the really big retailers that have more bargaining power.
I am guessing the good old unregulated free market of the US of A: https://www.valuepenguin.com/what-credit-card-processing-fee...
There, banks and credit card companies offer huge perks and cash-back to card holders. That money must come from somewhere, and that's from the transaction fees paid by merchants (and transitively customers, as merchants still need to make a profit). AMEX has even higher transaction fees, which is why some businesses don't accept it.
The situation is now at an idiotic local maximum: if I don't use one of these cashbacks cards, I am losing money paying for my neighbor's air miles, as I don't get a discount anyway. You don't need a "technofix" for that, you need regulations that cap interchange fees like the EU.
> AMEX has even higher transaction fees, which is why some businesses don't accept it.
Given the opacity of the fees (or "discounts") as amex calls them, I don't know how to believe this. Lots of retailers in the EU don't accept them, yet amex are bound by the same interchange limits as Visa and Mastercard. How much of this is actually true and how much is "well it was true 30 years ago and I've not questioned it"
> You don't need a "technofix" for that, you need regulations that cap interchange fees like the EU.
Agreed. And using crypto to limit network fees is a terrible idea. I just had a quick look and the current gas fee for ethereum is $20!
[0] https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...
They don't. Scheme fees in a 4-party payment network are the smallest part of the net fee, around 0.1-0.2%.
> I want a technofix for that.
And you'll never get one. Moving money between bank accounts in an immutable way is extremely cheap already. But that isn't what people want.
If you want to lower card payment fees you need to introduce regulations that cap the interchange and prevent fraud, it's purely a political fix.
Only true in certain countries, between certain banks/processors, and within certain thresholds.
My last last transaction fee on Tezos was a fixed cost of 0.000544 xtz ($0.00177 USD), had no threshold limitations, required zero privacy invasion, settled in ~30 seconds, and was not limited to a particular bank or regional currency. This is essentially the 'technofix' that crypto users want to see adopted by the rest of the financial sector.
How does a global network of peers can have transactions verified by majorities while being cheap?
Basically you could say crypto fees are the price you pay for not trusting anyone.
Using crypto is only a good alternative if you live in a society so fucked up citizens can't trust any bit of the contingent financial system.
If you want to stop angry responses to claims for the value to economic process you need to be honest about the extent to which crypto is a game for massive speculative gain, pump and dump, washing and money laundering.
Use of public signed ledger to audit value flow and provide certainty to low doc activity like cash in Africa, payments to farmers worldwide, ending the game of 90 day credit and discounting for prompt payment, reducing rent seeking. All laudible.
But please instead of just listing them, give us some numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptosporidiosis
https://dune.com/rchen8/opensea
looks like up and to the right
So all of this allows me to not feel bad about reveling in the latest crash, or scam, or exchange hack, or when the price falls or what not because I have no skin in this game and can't care any less than I do. I think the whole thing is a speculative farce that has hit a critical mass of adoption and intertia (at least for bitcoin) that will continue to be a puzzle (at best and a scam at worse) for years to come.
- How can we transport value through space at the speed of light?
- How can we transport value through time?
- How can we protect our life savings from inflation?
- How can we develop a free market of currencies which solves the issues of centrally controlled currencies?
- How can we align incentives such that we stop consuming low quality products that produce lots of waste and start valuing high quality products that last for decades?
- In general: How can we, as a society, enjoy the benefits of a low time preference?
Such questions are the reason why I believe Bitcoin is one of the most disruptive technologies of our century.
We are told that crypto is supposedly a way to "stick it to the man", to fight those "evil banks/governments".
The trouble is that unlike fiat currency, there is no fundamental means of valuation. Crypto is worth what its worth on the day based largely or exclusively on entirely non-economic valuation, which is why its so incredibly volatile.
The trouble is that you cannot escape the truth that the world is based on trade. People make goods, people supply services and other people buy goods and buy services. People also buy and sell essential commodities. This happens both domestically and cross-border.
The value of fiat currency is ultimately tied to the economics of global, and therefore provides an objective means to value said currencies, both themselves and relative to other currencies.
You don't get that with crypto.
Well, you could argue that you do to a limited extent, but that limited extent would only make crypto comparible to emerging world fiat currency of some tiny country.... high-frequency boom and bust cycles, high volatility, potential for episodes of illiquidity etc.
People have been crying for more than 10 years that Bitcoin is bad because "volatility".
You can't help people not wanting to spend a few hours learning the basics
The supposed “decentralized” revolution sounds about as likely as some kid who just read Marx leading a revolution. I think there’s a fine line between decentralized and deorganized.
i guess that line is the communication protocol?
This is my basic viewpoint regarding bitcoin et al. The significance difference is that bitcoin and similar are not territorial countries but free associations of people under particular conditions. This is where it gets interesting.
Can you expound on the fundamental means of valuation for Fiat currency? It's my understanding that there is no fiat currency with any fundamental backing. I was pretty sure Khadaffi was killed for promoting an African currency backed by gold, in lieu of the USD hegemony.
> The value of fiat currency is ultimately tied to the economics of global, and therefore provides an objective means to value said currencies, both themselves and relative to other currencies.
This ^^ is not fundamental... this is relative.
"The fundamental value of fiat currency is its capacity to pay taxes to a regional entity?"
just one take, but there are many ways to approach a fundamental valuation of a currency.
Can anyone explain to me how crypto is uniquely suited to solve this problem? I'm not in principal against crypto currencies existing, but more and more I just see people trying to apply it to problems that they think exist because "the financial system is over regulated" - without providing any argument for why regulation is causing the unfairness in the first place?
I have yet to see anyone define a single problem in the financial system that crypto is uniquely placed to solve (besides funding criminal activity and bypassing sanctions), that wouldn't be better solved from better competition between banks.
Not every country in the world has a banking sector that serves it's customers as badly as in the US.
- No human being that's able to reverse fraudulent or mistaken transactions
- Currency that's hardly more stable (probably less so) than the world's the least stable currencies
- A digital environment that's rife with fraud and a completely fresh and unknown attack surface due to the nature of smart contracts
- Sky high transaction costs. Meaning the poor (the unbanked) will may more for banking than the rich do. (like they do for furniture https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/10/16/...)
1) Custody: with fiat, the concept of self-custody is "store your cash under your bed," and as we continue to move away from cash into digital money, this option is being eroded. In crypto, the concept of self-custody may be an EOA (account based on a private key) smart contract (such as a multi-signatory account), or some combination. This is not to say that all users should be choosing non-custodial wallets, but the ability to choose and diversify your assets across a range of these technologies is, in my opinion, better than having no choice at all.
2) Mitigating the need for intermediaries in certain situations. Currently to handle escrow of digital assets in fiat systems, you typically need to hire or use a third-party agency. In some cases escrow could instead be managed by a (cryptographically-verified) program execution, e.g. "transfer X domain name record for Y amount of stablecoin assets".
3) Privacy-preserving attestations via zero-knowledge proofs, which could use a public (decentralized) ledger so that all parties can verify the validity of the proof.
4) The immutable and public nature of smart contracts gives them certain properties we do not have with our traditional financial systems. For example Libor manipulation went unnoticed for several years; partly because the systems were closed and difficult to analyze. The public ledger is comparatively easy to analyze and difficult to manipulate. (The most common manipulations rely on social engineering; e.g. convincing somebody to sign a transaction, or buy ShitCoin2000.)
5) General security and operational improvements. Much of our traditional system is upheld by FORTRAN and questionable security methods (PINs, passwords, cell phone 2FA). Crypto currencies are extremely adversarial environments that are forcing new security models and cryptographic primitives: zk-proofs and zk-VMs, multi-party computation, new methods of private key storage and management, post-quantum cryptography. Hopefully some of these advancements (being funded by crypto currencies) will eventually spill over to other sectors.
- Crypto inherently holds no security benifits over traditional banking. Fortran has been used for decades because it has worked, and there has been little need for change.Fortran isn't a security hole in itself. In fact it has all of the same problems with private PIN access and MFA, PLUS all the downsides that come with malicious smart contracts. As far as personal security goes, crypto is much much worse.
- The immutable and public nature of smart contracts. Why should anything be immutable? What if something is done by mistake, or by fraud? The benefits of traditional banking is that at the end of the day, there is a human on the other side that can reverse things if stuff goes wrong.
- I see no benefit of the entire chain being public, just because I give someone my public key, because I spend money with them, or my employer needs to pay me, why should they be able to see EVERY transaction I have ever made?
- The ledger is generally considered immutable; but the platforms and protocols built on top of it need not be. Social consensus can pivot to a new contract address. An analogy would be a git commit; you can update the head of your codebase, but your past changes are still present and analyzable.
- Better support for zero-knowledge proofs would be the eventual end goal for many of these systems, allowing users to shield data and maintain their privacy. I agree that not every transaction should be public, and it's a limitation of current crypto currencies that will likely take several years to solve.
[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/01/...
[2] https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-wa...
[2] https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-y...
On reddit, the crypto-themed subreddits (that I know of) are almost entirely comprised of doom-and-gloom-sentiment and astroturfing, while subreddits outside of this bubble are reminiscent of HN, where specific crypto projects almost never reach the frontpage and if they do, the discussion is seldomly about specifics.
because it consumes too much power?
because it created wealth out of farts
because it promotes money laundering
because it promotes toxicity (pump and dump)
because it is backed by the USD
because USA owns the majority of it
because it is centralized (exchanges)
because it is CIA's testbed for the digital USD