It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by jakelazaroff » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #116

jakelazaroff wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure Bitcoin suffers from high fees, but it serves well as a savings account. Does it? Your Bitcoin "savings account" would have lost over 45% of its value over the past month and a half.

A friend of mine paid another friend of mine $80 in BTC for a trip we did about 5 years ago. That BTC, never touched, is now worth $5000. At any rate, it's definitely volatile, because the asset class is still a small (but growing) potato in the grand scheme of commodities markets. One thing we can be sure of, it will never go negative in price, unlike oil.

I'd be pretty alarmed if my untouched savings account grew by 6250% over five years.

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

#152

Post by codehalo » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

MrRadar wrote: post #135

codehalo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you (and your representative) please just leave me alone so I can harm myself with this "harmful technology"? Whatever the outcome, I'll take my chances. Please leave me alone.

The environmental harms of cryptocurrencies hurt everyone . It's a classic externality.

Even worse than coal mining and ICE vehicles right? I don't see all this righteousness for those.

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

#153

Post by dadoge » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

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…

Haters in this thread, do you think you know more about monetary assets than Ray Dalio: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2021/05/24/bitcoin-...

And Carl Icahn: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2021...

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

#154

Post by blintz » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

I think this actually overstates the value of cryptocurrencies. The value of say, Bitcoin, isn't even connected to its value as a method of money laundering or extortion through ransomware. However morally objectionable these are, they do have economic value - it's just that value is not connected to the price of any cryptocurrency.

Rather, the whole thing is an extended, worldwide pump-and-dump; speculation is driving all movement.

To me, it's really sad, because Bitcoin (and some of its descendants) are intellectually fascinating. With simple building blocks that had been around for decades (hashing + public keys) someone made something profoundly new. It's in some ways inspiring, since it makes me feel there must be so much more out there to discover and build. It's also sad, because it shows how things you build can 'grow up' and become a little unrecognizable.

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

#155

Post by sedatk » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

blurbleblurble wrote: post #60

I can understand peoples' frustration with the artificial scarcity, but would like to see this same energy over the artificial scarcity of housing and free time. The oligopoly of national money systems is currently failing to provide people with basic access to capital. There's nothing intrinsic about cryptocurrency that will necessarily help this or exacerbate it, but the fact that I can get better interest on US do…

That's just an overly simplistic summary of the whole thread. Pinboard isn't angry about artificial scarcity, but how cryptocurrency fails to fulfill its promises: it fails to decentralize, it fails to reach performance levels of existing financial institutions, it wastes huge amounts of energy, and it provides zero value other than being a ransomware enabler. (Disclaimer: I own cryptocurrency)

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

#156

Post by delaaxe » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #57

neither_color wrote: post #45

1. Promise a revolutionary technology ("self-driving cars are coming"!) 2. Use that promise as a pretext to ignore all regulation 3. Make a fortune 4. Drop the tech story 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…

I'm the author of the thread. For what it's worth, I grew up as a refugee whose mother had to find incredibly inventive ways to send USD to family back home, where it was illegal to possess. What I don't understand about the crypto remittances argument is how the people sending and receiving them are supposed to convert them into spendable currency. My hunch is that a lot of the value of cryptocurrency in those count…

If you really are a refugee and suffered inflation then this should begin to change your mind: https://reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/nobj1h/real_mai...

Otherwise I don’t know what else to say

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

#157

Post by Rerarom » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #95

ashtonkem wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 V…

> string theory for programmers

This is gold, I'm gonna steal it

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

#158

Post by idlewords » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

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…

Thanks for your honest broker moderation, here and in all the other places you do it.

I do find it interesting that there's this putatively 100% tech topic that has the same dynamic as political threads.

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

#159

Post by LanceH » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

xXx_uwu_xXx wrote: post #146

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…

[flagged]

Go try something else.

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

#160

Post by mike-the-mikado » Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

As a thought experiment, I imagined a Government/Central bank auctioning (for $) bitcoin denominated bonds. These bonds would be repayable (in bitcoin) on demand.

Presumably each bond would fetch a value (in $) corresponding approximately to the current exchange rate. While the bond holder could cash them in at any point, why would they? Wouldn't many investors consider a bond backed by a major government at least as secure as a crypto coin?

In this way, the government could effectively increase the supply of bitcoins (and presumably thereby reduce their cost/value).

Of course, the Government runs the risk of bitcoin appreciating and then having all the bond holders cashing in, but with exceptionally deep pockets the only real reason to cash in would be if they feared a Government default.

By selling enough bonds, presumably the price could be driven arbitrarily low, extinguishing the risk entirely.