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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

#501

Post by lobocinza »

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.

Dollar or any other strong fiat does this role better. Crypto is just not accessible in those countries and the opposite of friction-less.

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

#502

Post by shieVae4I »

tzumby wrote: post #162

What is surprising is how large the number of techies who don’t get this. It’s not about crypto currencies as much as it is about the game theory that allows it to run a distributed self replicating state machine that is Byzantine tolerant - this is the true innovation

It's not a particularly interesting Byzantine mechanism. Like every other such mechanism (in the absence of trusted computing and similar tricks) it has a n = 3f+1 limit. See the selfish mining paper for why it's not n=2f+1.

It's just the Byzantine mechanism that happened to win. If anything, its innovation is that its n is based on hash power, not on number of users or nodes.

And the cost? Having to drag an immutable database around that can't be simplified; and, obviously, the opportunity cost of all the energy that's being used to support the consensus.

The game theory part is likely to be inexorably intertwined with the cryptocurrency part. The incentive to defect is blunted by people's investments, either in terms of hash power machines (for PoW) or in coin holdings (PoS). It would be very difficult to construct something that would be self-replicating/hype-incentivizing but not reward early comers the same way.

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

#503

Post by rriepe »

lifty wrote: post #409
fleddr wrote: post #264

I could waste a huge amount of time refuting the author's points, but will make it more of a meta comment. Crypto is vast, complex, and inherently not suitable for binary thinking. I've studied the space for months and have come to the conclusion that crypto is two-sided in almost every aspect. Many/most coins are speculative, which you can associate with words like "greed" and "casino". Yet also provide wealth savin…

This is the most reasonable comment in this whole thread. It’s good to acknowledge the current mania and the type of unethical behavior it attracts, but it would be intellectually lazy to dismiss the whole field.

We prefer the term "intellectually efficient."

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

#504

Post by DennisP »

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…

"Bitcoin" is a subset of "blockchain." Some blockchains have a lot of stuff to do, even if Bitcoin doesn't.

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

#505

Post by acjohnson55 »

doomroot wrote: post #378
lottin wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We have non reversible payments already. It's called wiring money. People generally avoid using it unless absolutely necessary, because it's expensive (much like bitcoin) and most of the time, it's not what you want.

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

#506

Post by Keyframe »

wmf wrote: post #271
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…

I'm a tech guy. I've spent years experimenting with crypto and it isn't fit for any legitimate purpose.

Stablecoins like USDC, if everything around it is legit, can be viewed as a programmable dollar... circumventing everything and anything bank-related to do the same work. That's pretty legit IMO.

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

#507

Post by adambatkin »

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…

Blockchain as a technology is definitely innovative. The problem is that, in practice, the way that it solves certain problems come with tradeoffs. This isn't a technical problem per-se, just that it doesn't (IMHO) solve any real problems better (given the tradeoffs) than other, more "traditional" solutions. That's not to say that you can't make money with blockchain tech (just like you can make money playing blackjack).

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

#508

Post by [deleted] »

aeternum wrote: post #369
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…

"A lot of observers", "Many people say", "Everyone says". Let's stop using weasel words, if you consider yourself a techie, come up with some real evidence-based arguments.

[deleted]

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

#509

Post by jacquesm »

idlewords wrote: post #122
ashtonkem wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no reason to believe it would move laterally, for both technical and social reasons. First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted. Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possibl…

Yeah, but when you took away the money part and just looked at the technical idea of a distributed chained ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. At least, it was cool to me. It seemed like it might go in some interesting other direction.

There's one application that I always wondered why it didn't take off as a blockchain based element, a DNS replacement. It's one of the cornerstones of the internet and the web (which to many people is the internet) and the centralized control over it is definitely a drawback and a shortcoming.

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

#510

Post by bhouston »

ahallock wrote: post #423
Graffur wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pauli, what are you talking about? Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cryptokitties? What group are you talking about when you accuse them of "Scientology-like groupthink"? What comparisons can you draw? I think it's important you back up and explain what you're saying.

It's funny that these dismissive, trash-talk comments with zero value get upvoted on HN as long as it's against crypto. It really is a double-standard here. Ironically, that comment is also part of the groupthink.

I think the issue is that mostly these smart contracts and efficient coins are not the main attraction.

The main attraction is Bitcoin and recently Dogecoin. BTC is slow and costly and mostly a speculative play. Dogecoin is a joke, but also worth billions.

Also these coins are speculatively often first, and useful second. Not all but many. Thus instead of being useful for exchange, they become methods of speculation.

It is also used for fraud a lot -- both various types of pump-and-dumb, Ponzi and money laundering.

And on top of all that it is usually inefficient.

So what we need are digital currencies that are fast, stable, and that can implement smart contracts (but these tend to be buggy as hell with no roll back.)

But that isn't what cryptocurrency is all about these days. It has been overtaken with speculation.

If we could get the benefits I outlined, that would be amazing, but it seems that very few are actually interested in that.

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