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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?

#81

Post by Ekaros »

spapas82 wrote: post #23
rapsey wrote: post #8

Because after ~13 years, mind boggling amount of money and development time, it is still just as useless in the real world as it ever was.

Actually no it is not useless in the real world! Using crypto makes it very easy to send and receive money very quickly, without the need to rely to the "system" of banks, governments etc. I can't think of a more useful application, for me it's more of a revolution!

It doesn't seem very fast or simple or possibly even cheap if I consider only fiat as money.

That is I have money in one country and I want person to receive it in their own currency in other one.

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

#82

Post by bradleyjg »

If we look at the current moment there’s not much in the way of new, interesting things going on with cryptocoins tech wise or use case wise.

It’s top of mind because some people are getting rich quickly in it. What’s interesting about that?

Should we also still be talking about people making tendies on GME?

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

#83

Post by gjulianm »

throwaway554 wrote: post #69
gjulianm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a straw man. Yes, if the energy mix was only reliant of renewables, energy usage wouldn't be as much as a problem. But it is not, and won't be in years, decades, so we can't just brush off the energy usage of crypto as "well it's the energy mix fault". You cannot evaluate a technology in isolation of its real world, practical context. Not to mention that even with renewables, energy usage would be still a co…

56% of energy used for Bitcoin mining is coming from renewable sources of energy.

Is there a source for that? Last time I checked there weren't reliable reports even on total energy usage, much less energy sources.

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

#84

Post by rocqua »

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 disagree. There is a lot of interesting things to discuss. But all of them start from the premise "blockchain works as a distributed ledger". People in the camp you are in are not that interested in those discussions, because you disagree with the premise.

These interesting things are about how to do privacy, build second layers, make other smart functionality, etc. In general there are actual cryptographic innovations coming out of these systems. Zcash was truly positive to research into Zero Knowledge Proofs.

At the same time, discussions often get muddied by a few vocal people who are trying to hype up their investments. I imagine some of these people are just hyping, and others have bought into the believe, and cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of 'maybe there is something wrong with this'.

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

#85

Post by anonymoushn »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #53
spapas82 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no it is not useless in the real world! Using crypto makes it very easy to send and receive money very quickly, without the need to rely to the "system" of banks, governments etc. I can't think of a more useful application, for me it's more of a revolution!

I'd argue that's not a problem that cryptocurrencies somehow uniquely solve, and in fact even this is solved inefficiently by them. Enormous amounts of energy have to be expended to facilitate a fairly low number of transactions. There are zero technical reasons why non-crypto/non-blockchain technologies wouldn't allow instantaneous money transfer. And in many places of the world, they do. I can instantly transfer mo…

In Europe, you cannot send wire transfers to Japan on weekends in a couple seconds. So the problem is not solved in Europe. Posting "there's no technical reason why every bank cant coordinate to provide a non-terrible experience eventually in a hundred years" is not helpful. We have working international settlements for any origin to any destination for any amount of money in seconds today.

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

#86

Post by glenvdb »

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 that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it

This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment.

The other aspect is that they just look at Bitcoin through a technological lens and judge it inferior to other networking & data storage technologies. They don't have a deep grasp of the concept of money and what properties makes for a sound form of money. Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job explaining it from that perspective [1].

It's a shame that so many, otherwise smart, people are sleeping on such a revolutionary change in the world. The idea of Bitcoin has been thought about and predicted for many years by people held in high-regard among HN readers, such as Buckminster Fuller [2], Henry Ford [3], and Friedrich Hayek [4], and they'll still dismiss it out of hand.

Such a massive lost opportunity for great skills, knowledge, and talent to be applied to what I think is one of the most important innovations of our civilisation.

[1] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/look-at-how-buckminster-fuller-pred...

[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-henry-ford-envisaged-bitcoin-10...

[4] https://twitter.com/janpaul_f/status/1461596623038038017?s=2...

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

#88

Post by throwaway554 »

svennek wrote: post #75
throwaway554 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is an unconfiscable, permissionless inflation hedge. It's a big deal for people that live in authoritarian countries that coincidentally always have huge inflation numbers.

Until you end up in jail... sadly. That is my point. If your country is "sufficiently bad" bitcoin will not (and cannot) help you in the long run.

Until you cross the borders and move all your wealth with you by memorizing 12 words.

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

#89

Post by diegocg »

Cryptocurrencies are a problem. From the environmental disaster they cause (and social problems caused by higher electricity prices due to increased demand), to tax evasion, illegal porn, or the fact that an important share of an entire generation became addicted to gambling under the guise of "technology".

The real world has problems, and crypto currencies have made some of them possible. Far from making the world any better and bringing the current financial and political system down (lol), they made the world worse. As these problems become more evident and widespread, cryptocurrencies become a political problem. The world needs to deal with the problems they cause and the political solutions will differ. That's why people argues.

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

#90

Post by Ekaros »

mrweasel wrote: post #70
spapas82 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no it is not useless in the real world! Using crypto makes it very easy to send and receive money very quickly, without the need to rely to the "system" of banks, governments etc. I can't think of a more useful application, for me it's more of a revolution!

Given the very limited scale of cryto currency, and limited usability in the real world isn’t it pretty much a failed revolution? Bitcoin is still the biggest crypto currency, and compared to Euro, dollars and other currencies, it’s practically useless. The network can’t compete on scale, compared to VISA, MasterCard or AMEX. The crypto currencies try to solve problems much of the western simply don’t have. The tech…

And really banks or large organisations don't need crypto for money transfers. They are already doing it in vey well established systems, with well defined contracts and so on. Blockchain adds nothing, when piece of paper or electronic record saying "hey we owe you this much" or "this loan is debt obligation is now yours"...
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