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It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

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Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#91

Post by lifeisstillgood »

dang wrote: post #43
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #24

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…

Edit: oh, the much simpler answer is that it was posted twice and both posts were on the front page. People flagged the dupe. That's fair. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336405 . --- 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 me…

>>> 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.

Fair point. Sad, but fair :-)

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#93

Post by chrisco255 »

pavlov wrote: post #21

“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…

Have you been looking at the Maetaverse at all?

https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://decentraland.org/

These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc.

You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketplace, fund an idea you're interested in, whether that's a game (https://illuvium.io) or a commission for a comic book series (https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-cryp...) or start a DAO and raise money for charity or open source software (https://gitcoin.co/).

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#94

Post by kelp »

scotty79 wrote: post #17
one2three4 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> without needing the consent of any private corporation or monopoly I'd say we all subsidize bitcoin and the likes indirectly and unwillingly through the price hikes in HW directly or indirectly attributed to something of dubious (to put it mildly) tangible value.

Bitcoin mining on anything other than ASICs is fools errand for many years now.

It still competes for fab space and raw materials.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#95

Post by idlewords »

ashtonkem wrote: post #63
idlewords wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to real…

Bitcoin didn’t regress, what actually happened is that its fundamental flaws ended up eventually dominating whatever early enthusiasm allowed them to be ignored. It was never going to work, for a variety of reasons that were incredibly apparent at the time. “Why did it regress” is much less interesting than “why did anyone ever fall for this?”

Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the original idea could never fly (even in 2008 you didn't have to be a genius to see that evading financial controls would be the chief use of a working cryptocurrency). But likely someone would find a really neat twist on it and find the blockchain equivalent of VisiCalc, and that would happen again and so on.

What's interesting to me is that the original idea was clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#96

Post by shafyy »

The issue of the "promise" of cryptos (and blockchain in general) is that it tries to solve problems that are not tech problems.

They are mostly political/governmental problems that are solved by a working democracy. In countries where there is no working democracy, the dictator won't give two shits if this NFT proves that you own this piece of land before taking it from you. Blockchain in itself is not something that brings political stability to a country.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#97

Post by chx »

dadoge wrote: post #86

Bitcoin is giving people in hyperinflation environments like Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey an out to their oppressive and corrupt govt banking system. If one looks at gold and asks themselves “why is gold worth 11 trillion dollars today?” How did it, over centuries and centuries obtain such a status? Bitcoin has better properties than gold does. It’s more scarce, scarcity means predictability, and predictability gives r…

> predictability

have you reviewed what you are writing or is it just a Markov chain generating text?

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#98

Post by skrebbel »

meowkit wrote: post #64
skrebbel wrote: post #50

These two resonated with me: > 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 o…

> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens. I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded s…

Why can't the tech be neat/super cool and primarily be used to run a scam?

I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property.

All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat stuff.

(sidenote, I actually think piracy is pretty neat, but it was too good an analogy to pass up)

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#99

Post by meowkit »

forwardslash wrote: post #83
meowkit wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens. I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded s…

How have you done a deep dive on Tether and not seen it as deeply troubling?

Did I say I did not find it deeply troubling?

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#100

Post by morelisp »

> They don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us

Serious question: What does "not silence" looks like?

Anyone who asks me gets my viewpoint on cryptocurrency and blockchains generally (which is more or less the same as Maciej's). My relatives all know it, but they also know another relative (who also thinks it is a scam!) made a couple K back in the first bubble because he was just playing around with the software. My coworkers all know it. Repeating it only causes strife, not education. People don't want to hear they've made bad financial decisions no matter the time, place, or tone. They instantly get defensive. I mentioned it in passing to a new hire in their trial period recently and got a really nervous look like "is this guy going to not give me a permanent contract because I liked bitcoin?"

There's no forum in our society for us to say "this is a scam" that isn't run by people with millions or billions of dollars invested in that scam - unless you're famous enough to get on cable news as a minor tech entrepreneur - and no social maneuvering that makes it effective on a personal level.

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