Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 1001 posts

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

#371

Post by mandelken »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #347
titzer wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

The early internet was overrun with this stuff too. Remember Bonzai buddy? Or the ad serving tools that’d claim to pay you for every hour you’re connected to the internet?

Wow, blast from the past! I actually got a check from one of those pay per hour ad services more than 20 years ago, and to this day it's still the only check I've ever received :-)

(It was 15 USD so costed almost as much to cash in Europe as it was worth)

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

#372

Post by onelastjob »

captn3m0 wrote: post #203
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…

Banking penetration in India is at 80+% mainly due to DBT pushing straight to bank accounts. India’s smartphone penetration is at 41%. All exchanges in India require a Savings Bank account for Fiat transfers. How are these unbanked people meant to use crypto really?

You don't have to use an exchange to acquire cryptocurrency. People can use sites like localbitcoins to exchange cash for crypto in person.

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

#373

Post by eli »

amingilani wrote: post #286
forwardslash wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Please don't cherry pick the worst example and apply it for the whole population. Tether is one stablecoin, and arguably the worst example since it is literally the one coin every coiner will agree with you is a bad stablecoin. Do a deep dive on MakerDAO's DAI instead.

When tether implodes a lot is going down with it.

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

#375

Post by pessimizer »

alecbz wrote: post #118

Isn't all currency more or less a "pyramid scheme" in the sense that Bitcoin is? I wish we had more subtlety in our discourse. It feels like it's all either blind admiration or blind condemnation. Bitcoin is trying to be a new currency. Currencies more or less operate on "collective delusion". I think many people scratching their heads at why Bitcoin is worth anything _are_ missing something, which is why any currenc…

No. Currency is guaranteed to be accepted for the payment of taxes in a particular jurisdiction, and that jurisdiction's courts will enforce judgments in that currency. These are material differences.

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

#376

Post by mondoveneziano »

seibelj wrote: post #355
mondoveneziano wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the Internet, people were doing either new things, or existing things more efficiently (e.g. sending emails vs. postal mail and fax, or transferring files vs. swapping disk media or printouts). As the Internet progressed, efficiency increased. In the case of cryptocurrencies, people are doing existing things that can already be done quickly and efficiently vastly less efficiently, in a system that is p…

I can send unlimited amounts of money, anywhere on earth, for (at most) dollars in a few seconds. I don't need to rely on any government for any reason, and no government can stop me.

The Internet provided solutions to technical problems, regardless of any societal/political considerations. They may have resulted, but as a secondary effect.

When theorizing about societal/political benefits, take into account the societal/political problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine that allows converting resources directly into money of miners' digital wallets without regulation.

Your sending any amount of money, actual practicality and realizability aside, comes at the cost of a lottery, where miners perform literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win. This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes per hour.

By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is by design not possible to regulate where the energy for this lottery is coming from.

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

#377

Post by eli »

pa7x1 wrote: post #367
idlewords wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hash tree with a vape cloud around it, not quantum chromodynamics. I think most people on this technical forum understand it just fine.

The hard part is not the data structure behind it (Merkle tree) but the economics. An entirely new branch of economics has spun of it and it's far from trivial.

I think the hard part is convincing people that it’s a new branch of economics and therefore the old rules need not apply.

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

#378

Post by doomroot »

lottin wrote: post #325
Graffur wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? (I assume throughput but I'll wait for your reply). What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I assume you mean it's a scam but I will wait for your reply.

> What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the system unusable in the real world.

You can build a system of reversible transactions on bitcoin or any other currency (people already have). It’s impossible to do the inverse in a non reversible system.

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

#379

Post by StephenAmar »

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…

Not sure our opinion is that important.

Beyond answering questions from friends and family & reading r/Buttcoin for entertainment, I just don't want to spend time debating the issue with the occasional enthusiast.

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

#380

Post by ajkdhcb2 »

texaswhizzle wrote: post #221
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…

It’s not artificial scarcity, it’s outright fake scarcity. The total supply of Bitcoin is 21,000,000 coins. However, every single coin is 100,000,000 individual assets. 21,000,000 sounds pretty finite. But 21,000,000,000,000,000 sounds a tad less finite. The price of Bitcoin relies on the fundamental false premise that it’s scarce.

That's like saying pizza isnt scarce because you can cut one into 1000 tiny slices. Or gold isnt scarce because you can cut 1 bar into 1 tiny million pieces. Pretty hilarious misconception
Post reply on HN