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Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#41

Post by svennek »

delusional wrote: post #28
svennek wrote: post #3

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus. One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster. The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the envi…

I think it goes a little deeper. The whole discussion basically mirrors real life politics. One camp want's more collective action to help the unfortunate, the other wants absolute freedom for the individual.

How do you see bitcoin fit into that axis, i.e. how does bitcoin help the unfortunate (that is VERY late to the "game") ?

That might disprove my "nothing interesting to discus.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#42

Post by prohobo »

svennek wrote: post #3

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus. One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster. The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the envi…

Yeah, I'd say your entire approach is antithetical to healthy discussion: insinuating anyone who is interested in crypto is technically inept, and turning the discussion into a 2-sides polarization. There's no use in talking about crypto in a sincere way now because of the way its been politicized.

I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance), in a purely theoretical sense - but they just kept making disgusted faces and saying bitcoin is a scam (?). I'm not sure there's any rational energy behind any of it, it seems to me like any other political "issue" since 2016, like the Rittenhouse trial.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#43

Post by kortilla »

onethought wrote: post #15
svennek wrote: post #3

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus. One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster. The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the envi…

The environmental argument is a straw man, and not really related to crypto, but actually related to our energy mix. If crypto was mined only on renewables there is no environmental argument. Ergo, not related to crypto technology itself.

That’s not a straw man. It’s literally how huge portions of crypto are mined right now. Were you trying to say “red herring”?

Regardless, energy is a market and even if crypto used purely renewable energy, that’s energy that wasn’t used for replacing fossil fuels in some other use case. Literally any technology that massively boosts energy consumption has the same problem.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#44

Post by [deleted] »

onethought wrote: post #15
svennek wrote: post #3

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus. One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster. The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the envi…

The environmental argument is a straw man, and not really related to crypto, but actually related to our energy mix. If crypto was mined only on renewables there is no environmental argument. Ergo, not related to crypto technology itself.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#45

Post by a_square_peg »

> one group yells how great everything is while the other one is warning of the impeding doom and zero use cases.

When one side is yelling and the other side is giving warnings I think it’s fair to say that this is not really a situation where one would describe as ‘divisive.’

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#46

Post by onethought »

onion2k wrote: post #4

I'm going to attempt an answer, but as with all things this is only my perspective and I obviously don't speak for all HN readers. HN is largely for founders who want to build things. That's certainly how it started, and there's still traces of that vibe around in the Show HN and startup-y threads. There's a lot more going on here now, like more code topics, AI, electric vehicles, environmental things, a little futur…

Do you mean that without crypto the bad guys are unable to perform exchanges of value?

How is crypto different from a Big bag of cash? Both are anonymous/trustless transactions.

Cat memes and mindless YouTube videos use more bandwidth and cpu cycles than crypto ever will…

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#47

Post by Scarblac »

onethought wrote: post #15
svennek wrote: post #3

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus. One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster. The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the envi…

The environmental argument is a straw man, and not really related to crypto, but actually related to our energy mix. If crypto was mined only on renewables there is no environmental argument. Ergo, not related to crypto technology itself.

Energy is fungible, we don't have 100% green energy and won't for a very long time, we make up the difference with fossil. Even if crypto used green energy only, it means more fossil burned.

To continue human civilization we need to stop fossil burning as much as possible, crypto is unnecessary and should therefore be stopped.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#48

Post by orwin »

pennaMan wrote: post #11
onion2k wrote: post #4

I'm going to attempt an answer, but as with all things this is only my perspective and I obviously don't speak for all HN readers. HN is largely for founders who want to build things. That's certainly how it started, and there's still traces of that vibe around in the Show HN and startup-y threads. There's a lot more going on here now, like more code topics, AI, electric vehicles, environmental things, a little futur…

The community doing things around the ethereum / smart contracts world are certainly on the building things side of things yet they are met with the same cynical skepticism around these parts.

Because there is mainly two kinds of eth smart contracts: identification/verification (there was still lobbying for crypto ID being recognized by law courts last time i checked), and "new" crypto, which is 75% scams (maybe a bit less lately, but still). Sadly the ID/verification part was dying last time i checked.

It's a bit of shame by association, and irrational, but i've put all crypto related-stuff in a box called "scams until proven they're not".

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#49

Post by svennek »

dom96 wrote: post #39
svennek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO because it depends on uncloneability of digital assets.. Which I believe is not possible. The whole thing that makes cryptocurrencies work now is the un-cloneability of the amount of work done (which is why the 51% problem exists in the first place). The only good way of doing it would be through a cartel with strict enforcement of hashrates etc.. And welcome to the financial banking system...

I'm also curious about this but don't really understand this explanation. Can you elaborate more on what "uncloneability of digital assets" means exactly and why it's a pre-requisite of proof-of-stake? Happy to take some links if there are any that explains this well.

All kind of trade depends on value and value depends (mostly) on scarcity.

In the real world cloning money (historically precious metals) is really really hard (and btw. much easier with paper money that the metals that have a basket of physical attributes that cannot be emulated at once).

Digital bits on the other hand are indefenately cloneable (by design, that is one of the base properties of "digital").

Just for you to see my text here, along the way somewhere around 20 perfect copies were made by various routers (i.e. computers)..

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#50

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway554 wrote: post #24
DrNuke wrote: post #10

> Is there any particular reason cryptocurrencies are so divisive while other subjects are not? At this day, end 2021, for what concerns the daily life of billion people worldwide, they are still a very small niche for first-world, trading-like unauthorised gambling? From a technical point of view, sufficient progress has been made… it is politics now, geopolitics and environment, if you like, preventing wider, globa…

I have a hard time processing this comment. Is it because I'm ESL or is it legitimately incomprehensible?

[deleted]
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