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Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#51
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who needs that? If "they" can track you down "they" can arrest you, kill you, torture you, extort you, ...

There are ways to avoid your transactions being tracked. Coinjoin transactions, purchasing a miner for non-kyc bitcoin, payments on the lightning network, etc Also, they can do all of those things, but you can setup your private keys in a way that your family will still have access to the bitcoin even if you are killed

"Lightning" protocol and other sidechains don't deliver on their promises as well as the base bitcoin protocol.

"Help" with privacy isn't enough, you need something that is bulletproof and either resistant to you screwing up the OPSEC or otherwise you have to get OPSEC right all the time.

Using the same mixer as terrorists could get you charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Before you use one I'd ask you to ask yourself if you want to be complicit in large-scale tax evasion, international sex trafficking and all sorts of awful things that make the mixer more than a game where you can imagine you're important because you're a spy or something.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#52
post #6

There are two major issues with Bitcoin for me. First, crypto is always broken eventually. We have seen the deprecation of crypto algorithms time and again. Why should we assume Bitcoin is immune to this phenomenon? It's a high-value target and it could literally become valueless in an instant. Second, the changing climate is one of the most pressing matters of our time. Bitcoin is absolutely not helping there.

If you were able to defeat the crypto algorithms used by crypto currencies wouldn't that also mean you could defeat the cryptography used by banks, governments, online commerce, etc.? It would essentially be a doomsday scenario for all cryptography.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whataboutism. Crypto is going on for over 12 years now. You can’t compare dotcom with crypto because 12 years after dotcom FAANG was up and running.

The scale is different because back then there were circa 100 000 000 +/- mln onboarded onto the hype. Now They expect 1BLN+ to be onboarded to crypto with internet access. More growth potential takes more time to play out. Most people were ignoring crypto in 2017 like internet was ignored in 1993 by most people. Period of 2009-2016 is like 1980-1992 for the internet. Almost no one was using it beside geeks and tech…

So you are saying we will see crypto crash in 2-3 years? We are living in times were onboarding is the fastest and is getting faster all the time. TikTok first to 100 Million users was 1000x faster than Facebook. I strongly believe you have it in reverse.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#54
post #12

Because HN readers skew more technologically literate, people here are on average (slightly) more capable of seeing though the techno-babble hype than on other social media sites. It's not that the financial status quo is held in high regard, rather that HN readers see crypto's empty promises to fix existing issues for what they are: bullshit designed to lure in ever more dumb money.

100%. I think I share a pretty common trait on HN that, if someone gives me marketing speak, I just want to ask "OK, but what does it do?" There are a lot of promises of the crypto community that are just fundamentally wrong, and when these issues are pointed out, you get lots of non-answers in the form of "OK Boomer". 2 simple examples:

1. Proof-of-work has inherent, fundamental, no-way-to-work-around-it issues regarding scale. The more value Bitcoin holds, the more Argentina's-worths-of-energy that is needed to keep it secure. That is by design when it comes to proof-of-work. It is a guaranteed dead end. Proof-of-stake does not have that same problem, but ironically I see so much antipathy towards proof-of-stake by large swaths of the crypto community.

2. The fundamental idea that crypto can "escape" government financial controls is false. Or, at least it's no different than the fact that selling meth is also capable of evading government controls, but at huge risk. Government can make anything it wants illegal if it so desires.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#55
post #16

The reason is because the real things that are happening in the cryptocurrency space are overwhelmingly negative. People are getting their wallets hacked, losing their savings by investing in pump-and-dump schemes, using "custodial" crypto wallets that defeat the whole purpose of crypto, raising "ICOs" that skirt securities laws, starting underground markets that sell heroin and guns, quitting their jobs to make a li…

The only time I hear positive, real-world crypto news is when a country's economy goes down the drain and people are desparate to transfer their assets so they can buy things or get out. Or when a totalitarian government is withholding its citizens from receiving USD from abroad. In those cases, the volatility of Bitcoin is less than that of their own currency, and you can transfer it with a droplet of internet.

I think the value of free money is lost on most people who live in highly functioning societies where the trade-off of centralised money doesn't show its backside, and the tradeoff of decentralised money at its infancy mostly just shows the backside.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#56
post #27
post #12

Because HN readers skew more technologically literate, people here are on average (slightly) more capable of seeing though the techno-babble hype than on other social media sites. It's not that the financial status quo is held in high regard, rather that HN readers see crypto's empty promises to fix existing issues for what they are: bullshit designed to lure in ever more dumb money.

similar empty promises were made in dot com era. Does it mean dot com period of 1995-2001 was wasted and meaningless?

Good worthwhile valuable things were actually created on the web in the late nineties. The bubble was that they just didn't live up to the speculative financial hype.

The problem with crypto is that all that it is is speculative financial hype. The entire worth of crypto is a bet on its future utility.

The difference between the dot com bubble and web3 is that there is no web3 craigslist or geocities or usenet or altavista or webmd or ebay or amazon or anything of utility or value other than as an investment asset.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#57

>I believe that Bitcoin will have an important (and positive) future in our lives. Can you elaborate how? From my point of view, the reason the general tech community despises crypto is precisely because of that; every now and then someone shows up saying that the tech is important and positive, yet none of them can come up with a single valid reason why. For people who are outside of it, the answer to why this is th…

I think the biggest 'positive' is that the government in control of the currency is unable to alter the value of it. It is clear that inflation is bad for the citizenry, yet that has been done throughout the ages by every dying civilization. I'm simply looking/hoping for a mechanism to stop it. It would be a 'positive' for you too! Is Bitcoin the ultimate answer? I can't say, but it is a good first step.

Government action around the world has had a definite impact on cryptocurrency pricing, both positive and negative. The idea that a government cannot control cryptocurrencies is ludicrous, because they can simply ban them if they feel the need to.

If any real cryptocurrency actually manages to catch on for normal payments, I'd expect the government to force businesses accepting it to only accept transactions from "validated" wallets to ensure that the proper amount of tax is being paid. Any "unvalidated" wallets would risk a visit from the local tax agency for attempted tax fraud or whatever. Technology won't stop legislation.

Also, if anything is inflated right now, it's the price of cryptocurrencies. They're volatile to a comical level and the ones that are reasonably stable have such high processing fees that they're utterly useless for actual payment. The solution proposed by enthusiasts seems to be centralization (Lightning network etc.) which ruins most of the theoretical benefits of cryptocurrencies. Nobody with the intention to buy groceries buys any cryptocurrencies, except for the one country where cryptocurrency companies have managed to convince the government that their system is a good solution (and even there the actual currency gets converted to US dollar in the end).

Inflation, artificial or otherwise, is simply something that can happen in a free economy. So is deflation, of course, but deflation tends to be bad for trade, so the world's current attempts to keep everyone rich revolve around artificial infinite inflation. Inflation, as a concept, isn't necessarily a problem; every currency on earth has suffered through it at some point. It's more of a consequence and a goal of economic policy than a disease to civilization. It's true, many collapses of civilizations have coincided with inflation events, but the economy is bound to collapse when a civilization collapses.

Turkey actually willingly let its currency deflate, with terrible results for the general population as prices for common items skyrocketed. Risking arbitrary spikes and dips in value isn't much better than the current system, in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#58
post #16

The reason is because the real things that are happening in the cryptocurrency space are overwhelmingly negative. People are getting their wallets hacked, losing their savings by investing in pump-and-dump schemes, using "custodial" crypto wallets that defeat the whole purpose of crypto, raising "ICOs" that skirt securities laws, starting underground markets that sell heroin and guns, quitting their jobs to make a li…

Another issue is that the actual, theoretical benefits of blockchain are very narrow.

Right now global financial system is much more stable than cryptocurrencies, and even if society collapses, Bitcoin is unlikely to take over or buy you anything. In practice, centralization is fine for most tasks, and even if something is decentralized it doesn’t always need blockchain.

Most problems can be solved with encryption, asymmetric encryption, torrenting, and consensus protocols. I honestly can’t think of any real situation where those aren’t enough and you need blockchain. (although i’m pretty sure blockchain is a combination of those…I should say, i can’t think of any real situation where things like BitTorrent aren’t enough)

And then that leads to all of blockchain’s drawbacks, mainly incredible space and computation redundancy. There are proposed and implemented ways to reduce this redundancy, but most of them actually end up redoing centralization. Even if we can somehow completely eliminate the redundancy and make blockchain almost as fast as centralization, like I mentioned, there’s still just not much benefit.

I’m not at the point where, whenever i hear blockchain, i throw my hands up and claim “useless”. Honestly, whenever I see something blockchain or web3, i usually read about it and try to see how it works. But surprisingly often I just find confusing filler text and buzzwords. And moreover, so far i’ve never found any technology where I actually thought both “this is useful” and “this needs blockchain”.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest 'positive' is that the government in control of the currency is unable to alter the value of it. It is clear that inflation is bad for the citizenry, yet that has been done throughout the ages by every dying civilization. I'm simply looking/hoping for a mechanism to stop it. It would be a 'positive' for you too! Is Bitcoin the ultimate answer? I can't say, but it is a good first step.

"It is clear that inflation is bad for the citizenry." No. It is clear that both hyper-inflation and deflation are bad for the citizenry. However, modest inflation is generally a net positive. "yet [inflation] has been done throughout the ages by every dying civilization." Do you have any real data for this? Sounds like bullshit to me. Also, it seems preferable that government be in control of the currency rather tha…

Roman Empire is a biggie. The Weimar Republic is the most obvious.

I guess we are now arguing 'Austrian Economics' vs. 'Keynesian Economics'... This is a fair simplification. As long as you hold real assets to protect your wealth, the government's debasement of the currency (modest inflation) is of no concern.

Clearly, when a person lives from paycheck to paycheck the only concern is "Can I buy food next week?" and "Can I pay the rent on the 1st?". Wealth preservation and modest inflation is not on the radar. However, it is still hurting the man that earns $12/hr, no matter the modesty of the inflation.

Just look around right now. Is the current inflation rate modest? Did everyone get a raise to account for the CPI going up? Will everyone get an 8.5% raise next year?

In my opinion decoupling the currency from anyone's "control" is the key idea behind Bitcoin.

Re: Ask HN: Why do negative crypto articles dominate on HN?

#60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, this sounds like the Old West. Look at it now. I think these hardships are the exact indicators of a dynamic new frontier. Apply caution, yes, but ignoring it might not be a good strategy either.

Great analogy.

Yes!

Especially considering Bitcoin is built with the property of scarcity to mimic gold. :-)

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