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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

#311

Post by yannoninator »

seoaeu wrote: post #269
onelastjob wrote: post #44

If you're in rural India and don't have access to a bank account, but you do have internet access via a smartphone, then I could definitely see cryptocurrency being valuable to you. And that doesn't even take into account countries like Venezuela that are experiencing hyperinflation, where cryptocurrency would be much more useful. There are cryptocurrencies that are energy efficient and have low (or even zero) transa…

How exactly do you imagine that an unbanked person living in rural India would be able use cryptocurrency? It isn't like they can just enter their credit card into a website and buy some. Not to mention that even if they someone managed to acquire some, the $5+/transaction fees are going to make something like bitcoin or ethereum completely impractical.

there are other alternative cryptocurrencies working on this exact problem.

you're talking as if bitcoin and ethereum is all of cryptocurrency.

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

#312

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

CPLX wrote: post #256
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…

You could book plane tickets. That, literally all by itself, would be enough for me to think building the internet was worth it. You kids have no idea how much fun it was to go downtown to a travel agent just to find out how much it would cost to fly home from college for Christmas.

> go downtown to a travel agent

Phones were out, too?

("You kids" should realize that most of the stuff done on the web today was done by mail or phone during most of the XX century, especially in a country as spread out as the US. Ring up the merchant with the order, sing out the credit card, done, was the MO from the 70s to the late 90s.)

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

#313

Post by rossjudson »

dadoge wrote: post #198
zx2391 wrote: post #183

I read a Blockchain book from O'Reilly in 2015, when it came out and it left me with the distinct impression that this "technology" is vaporous. It could do anything, yet, almost no examples to try out, let alone real-world successes. Over time I witnessed many "new" things, and the ones which stick typically have a specific aura to them, like a 10x simplification, or speedup or reduction in "noise". These things are…

Tell that to people in Nigeria, Venezuela and Argentina that have no control over their money. In Venezuela there is absolutely absurd inflation number there: like over 1,000%. Argentina it’s over 30% each year for several years. Bitcoin is a tool against oppressive governments

Sure, fantastic. Why should it be legal to exchange bitcoin for US$? Or euros?

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

#314

Post by csande17 »

fleddr wrote: post #279
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…

This huge silent majority that know it is a scam doesn't exist. Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp. If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions. Because they don't know crypto. At all.

Count me as one of the people in the silent majority. (Well, not exactly "silent" because I'm talking about it now in Hacker News, but the things I write don't usually reach the general public.)

You're right that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are always generating new work and coming up with new ideas. Actually, they do this a lot more easily than other domains, because the fact that their entire field is a scam means there are a lot fewer of those pesky roadblocks like "the idea not actually accomplishing the thing you think it does" to contend with.

The fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency projects rest on one of a few obviously-false premises. Like "systems that require every participant to store the entire history of transactions forever scale well", or "people in the real world want every transaction they make to be completely irreversible", or "digital legers are guaranteed to accurately track the state of real-world objects". If you dismiss these, you can dismiss all the projects that depend on them without needing to know the difference between a MerkleCat and a SatoshKitty.

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

#316

Post by titzer »

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…

> The early Internet was infinite times more fun.

Holy crapballs, yeah it was! I remember when I learned HTML in 1996 and put up one of those blinkety animated GIF homepages on the hosting space given (for free!) by my local dial-up ISP. They had a local chatroom and I spent hours and hours chatting with locals from the same city--even met some of them! I read the hacker's manifesto and about phreaking and all of that stuff, found Usenet, played Quake over 33.6kbps dialup with a 300ms ping and still wiped the floor with people. I remember when mp3's came out. It took me 5 mins to download my first one. C&C music factory--everybody dance now!

But that's just nostalgia part. The reality is that nowadays the internet is ad-laden crapware/spyware that is scheming every second of every day to get you to do something--sign up for something, buy something, like something, rate something. Your eyeballs, your likes, your hates, your friends, your vices and quirks, are worth billions to multi-national corps who hope to never have to give you customer service, who keep you at AI-defended arms-length, but will happily sell your attention (won through their latest crack-like invention) to the highest bidder.

It feels like the internet is infested with the worst of human carnival barkers and con-artists these days.

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

#317

Post by HarryHirsch »

bo1024 wrote: post #175
shafyy wrote: post #96

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 tha…

Actually, my understanding is that cryptocurrencies are having impact in developing countries. They can address hyperinflation, access to financial services, general friction in exchanging money etc.

M-Pesa and SMS banking in general had an immense impact in African nations. Bitcoin - not so much.

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

#318

Post by amingilani »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #235
amingilani wrote: post #8

> Cryptocurrency is sustained by a mix of money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast > What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the technical claims of cryptocurrency and our now over 13 years of experience. It's not decentralized, it's not a currency, it's not a store of value, and…

Where is the "indisputable evidence" to dispute the claims of the article?

You mean the thread? The onus is on them to prove their claims. See burden of proof: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

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

#319

Post by [deleted] »

idlewords wrote: post #30
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#320

Post by jjulius »

Rerarom wrote: post #157
idlewords wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We could get really meta with it and have @idlewords sell that phrase/post to you as an NFT.
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