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Does someone knows why this tweet was previously flagged on HN? see: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399094306221166592
This thread was previously [flagged] [dead], but is now back to normal. I assume via moderator action?
Does someone knows why this tweet was previously flagged on HN? see: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399094306221166592
I don't know why people would bother flagging something like this though, threads as content-less generally die on their own without much fanfare. OP and his friends get an ego boost from making front page and then it fades. NBD, no need to be contentious about it.
I am not sure why this is flagged - it seems a reasonable and timely opinion piece. Cryptocurrency is a subject that has to have a deep and public debate. What the OP is saying (which I take to be "the tech world has a duty to point out the flaws in cryptocurrency to avoid giving an impression of a clean bill of health to every ICO out there") - that is a valid socially useful debate. There are valid real world uses…
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I think the submitted title probably had something to do with it; As a title, "the emperor has no clothes" is generic and baity. It's also false in the sense that there's no consensus view, so to the extent that the analogy is meaningful, it doesn't apply. I've attempted to replace that with a more neutral and representative title now, drawn from the author's own words. Suggestions for a better title are welcome.
Beyond that, HN has had so many threads arguing the same points about cryptocurrency over and over, that it's not clear there can ever again be a new discussion about it. Repetition is a curiosity killer, and usually indignation takes its place as people resort to hammering each other over the head with the same dumbed-down clubs, back and forth.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
However, I think we can try turning the flags off on this one because Macjiej is at least trying to take a different and more specific angle on cryptocurrency critique.
Beyond just currency uses, smart contracts open the door to phasing out escrow middlemen for purely digital transactions (like buying/selling domain names, etc.) Decentralized lending and borrowing is another major use of smart contract coins.
The author lost me here. Completely subjective take on what Uber has done. They've completely improved ride-sharing and cab hailing within the whole industry, including non uber users. Depending on what country I travel to, Ill be using a different app like Grab or Didi or a local taxi app that were all made possible by Uber's initial disruption.
Some of those financial regulations are unjust. People can send remittances in crypto to relatives in repressive countries, and you hear their stories from boosters. But people also want to move billions in untraceable crime money around. Guess which traffic predominates
IMO the former outweighs the latter. Perhaps remittance doesnt sound like a big deal to the author because they may not know immigrants who use these crappy services. The thought of punishing some darknet users buying pills online is more alluring than focusing more on fixing the flaws with remittances. I'm talking new residents who pay income taxes on their biweekly paycheck(fair) and then pay western union(bad deal, less fair) to send 50-200 bucks to family in far off places with spotty infrastructure and electricity, in remote places where there are no ATMs and the relative has to travel 2 hours into town to pick up their western union transfer. Millions of people go through that every day and I'm much more interested in crypto solutions and dont mind if it takes some uber style disruption to fix that later on.
We give too much voice to all these people suffering from hysteria. I suspect the only reason these people are given a voice is because they usually call for more laws to "fix" more things which benefits those in power.
edit: Also speaking of things we should ban, I think if we are talking about things that are actually harmful to society (not that I actually give a damn), we should start with banning twitter so that we can stop hearing these "moral" rants
It just feels weird getting financial and social advice from Pinboard. I thought it was just a thing to collect my links.
> What we especially need to stress to regulators... Lol. Talking like that obviously shows that cryptocurrencies are not for you. This tech has cypherpunk and crypto-anarchy roots, regulators/governments are not the intended users for this tech, even if you like it or not. If you do not view cryptocurrencies from an cypherpunk perspective you will not see their social benefits, it is an entire way of life an alterna…
I think that cyberpunk dream died when billionaires and VC got involved and Bitcoin (and other) currencies skyrocketed in price from millions of people playing crypto-lottery. Strikes against it: - It's burning a massive amount of resources and that is just increasing - I don't have the stats but I imagine the exponential growth in Bitcoin/coin prices is mainly from people using it as a pyramid scheme/casino not simp…
- “bank accounts”
- a universal notary and authenticity service
These are building blocks for a number of applications.
Most order applications don’t make sense, but hey, everybody needs “bigdata” too
> A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out
> [non-tech people] don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us
It is on us. I never realized this before today. I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. After all, Elon is so cute when he's enthusiastic! But yeah he probably knows it's a scam too, what was I thinking.