HN Explorer

Tell HN: Anyone else happy that crypto and Bitcoin spam is over?

24 points by moomoo11 ↗ HN
So glad it’s behind us. I was checking out the new posts and I’m so happy there’s nothing about the largest grift ever executed in history.

I am glad that AI posts are at least about something useful and novel.

26 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] thread
TheAlchemist
Pretty happy yes ! Will be even better once all those Tether and Binance folks get prosecuted.

I'm not really excited about the latest AI hype though... It looks very similar to crypto promises to me.

brucethemoose2
Its different but also exactly the same.

There is senseless hype and tons of straight up fraud, but at the same time some of the underlying developments are legitimately ground shaking. And there is no "if everyone adopts this it will work" catch... AI needs no public hype to keep any momentum because the economic advantages it provides are already big, and rapidly getting bigger.

Every time I check github and huggingface, I have to overhaul my LLM/diffusion setups because they are suddenly obsolete. And no one is inviting me into any pyramid scheme.

superkuh
People could not understand the concepts behind cryptocurrency. People cannot understand the idea behind generative algorithms or large language models. The same type of scams will work and get the lions share of the public attention while the actual users of the technology go unnoticed.
RestlessMind
>Will be even better once all those Tether and Binance folks get prosecuted.

Don't hold your breath for that. From Tether exec: https://twitter.com/paoloardoino/status/1658809623535669250

Stablecoins have profited immensely from rising interest rates. See Coinbase' latest earnings report for another instance.

TheAlchemist
I agree for rising interest rates, however I don't believe anything Tether exec - btw, come on, he's the 'IT guy' - real execs are hiding for like 10 years already.

Their books and what they pretend to be invested in, have been proven false several times. Remember first time they published their attestation ?

Numbers didn't add up at all - according to their numbers they were like top 10 US commercial paper holders - almost Berkshire Hathaway size. Except, you can't be anonymous trading that, so traders know who they trade with. And guess what ? It turned out that no commercial paper trading desk in the US heard of Tether.

FTX numbers were bullshit. Tether is 10x worse.

1970-01-01
Very much so. I'm eager for someone to put together a book or series explaining the biggest coin flops.
PaulHoule
I heard Ethereum switched away from proof of work successfully. Last week the Bitcoin blockchain got overwhelmed by demand for shitcoins published on the Bitcoin platform. Coindesk sent reporters to Dresden, NY which is home to a notorious Bitcoin mine to talk to the mayor and the mayor said in years of the story being all over the New York Times and Buzzfield, Wired, etc. nobody had ever contacted him to ask what he thought about it. Some shitcoin trader fucked up and lost $400,000.

There has been no utter rout to disillusion the true believers, Bitcoin and Ethereum prices stay pretty high, those Bored Apes have held up well. Hacker News could give a fuck, but many blockheads are doing their blockhead things even though the truly ignorant and indolent have moved on to “Great! I can get ChatGPT to write my pitch deck!”

Shosty123
I'm happy the spam and investment FOMO has died down, but crypto has been insanely useful for making payments for me. It's hard to beat nearly instantaneous international payments with tiny fees.
superchroma
I'm not happy until the people behind it are impoverished and imprisoned. The negative externalities of this shitshow are incalculable.
bcrl
I truly wonder what the world would be like if businesses and people were liable for the cost of externalities discovered after an initial transaction. It downright saddens me that we're able to punt these massive costs onto future generations with impunity.
ftxbro
yes we pivoted to AI never been happier
Havoc
Yes, though the specific flavour of hustle bros seems to be here to stay. Now they're just slinging VR / meta / AI / whatever is this weeks flavour.
gersg
I am tired, in general, of single topics taking over the entire internet. In that regard crypto and AI are not that different. For a few weeks it was amusing, now I'm simply tired. And the next thing will tire me too.
sshine
With crypto, at least the jargon is more interesting; a mixture of cryptography, game theory and economics.

With AI, the story is “a bunch of monkeys found a mirror.”

But I am also tired of hype trains.

karaterobot
I pretty much just pressed "hide" on every crypto post on HN. The issue was not that I am militantly for or against crypto, it's that I am militantly against hearing the exact same arguments for and against crypto on every single thread.

Other topics I press "hide" on include:

* Nuclear power / renewables

* Gun control

* U.S. health care system

* Bikes

* Trump

Not that these issues aren't important, not that I don't have an opinion on them, but it's so rare to see anything new being said in these threads. I use that hide button aggressively to keep from accidentally wading into the fray, which is always a mistake.

hirvi74
What's wrong with bikes? I never seen anything about them on here, but are people just obnoxious about brands and types of bikes or something else?
rvz
> So glad it’s behind us. I was checking out the new posts and I’m so happy there’s nothing about the largest grift ever executed in history.

It isn't 'over'. It has just been overtaken by the AI grifters here, who are celebrating in destroying the planet with hallucinating AI models and realizing that their snake-oil is deteriorating in front of them. [0]

To believe that crypto 'is over' is just as naive as believing that one can completely shut it down and ban the entire cryptocurrency industry. You cannot.

Why do you think the CEO of OpenAI is still using crypto quietly in the background with their Worldcoin, UBI grift? [1]. Just like the current hype in AI, it takes another narrative for crypto to have another hype cycle.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36134249

[1] https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...

autokad
Not sure if we are talking about news in general or just HN.

AI dominated HN back in 2018ish? I forget the exact dates, but AI and ML was like every other post, so this is not 'new'.

kayamon
Why do you say it's behind us? I can talk about Bitcoin all day long if you like.
cirrus3
- Because it is a flop

- I'm sure you could, but we're all tired of hearing it and not seeing it

kayamon
The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that it clears transactions every ten minutes and continues to do so until the end of time, and at no point does it care what you think about that.

Tick tock next block.

andirk
But what about when people say it's a tulip or a beanie baby?
gaudat
You know people are trying to get their hands off BTC right? The hottest scam/spam not here but on freaking WhatsApp and Telegram are high-paying work from home jobs that actually does money laundering for crypto to fiat.
Daeraxa
Yes but now its all AI and LLM spam instead.