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

#711

Post by baby » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

jfrunyon wrote: post #431

toyg wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp. The thing is, regular money is, from a certain perspective, also a "scam". A lot of the financial system is effectively make-believe, with massive conflicts of interest at every corner and dynamics that keep working because everyone believes they should - until, for one reason or another, they stop believing, and then you have 20…

Fiat money has value because it is widely, almost universally, accepted in exchange for things of intrinsic value (food, shelter, toys, tools). I'm not aware of any non-government-backed fiat currency which has gained widespread use in the history of humanity. And in fact all of the fiat currencies I know of originated as representative money. Bitcoin is not widely accepted in exchange for things of values, and I see…

What about derivatives?

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

#712

Post by barrkel » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

earnesti wrote: post #594

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…

> You could no longer buy a pizza with it I have bought a lot of pizzas with BTC (and other cryptocurrencies), as the local food ordering platform accepts it. Worked grear, but at some point the crypto payment processor started requiring KYC. I'm not gonna upload my passport to pay for pizza. I dont know if this problem is because of crypto or excessive regulation.

It's because of money laundering, which Bitcoin makes easier - and the more people buying pizza, the better for laundering.

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

#713

Post by baby » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

djmashko2 wrote: post #304

fleddr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be interested in seeing this exam!

What is the maximum throughput (tx/s) that some systems can achieve?

Do you really need to go through all the history of the system in order to be convinced of the latest state?

What are the different ways to decide who should be the next person that gets to choose the next block of transactions?

Can you hide the amount you’re sending? What about the recipient? Or your own identity?

Can you transfer bitcoin into ethereum or more generally one cryptocurrency into another?

Is it possible to send funds to a recognizable shortname instead of an hexadecimal string?

Are there ways to protect your funds with several keys instead of a single one?

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

#714

Post by baby » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

mondoveneziano wrote: post #270

mettamage wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not on tech people to evaluate business impact or societal impact or economic impact. Sure, tech people could do that but most of our time is spent on designing or implementing software. Let other people (non-tech or hybrid) comment on the idea. They have time to think about this. Tech people can only help by explaining in understandable ways how blockchain/cryptocurrencies work. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on…

Understanding proof-of-work down to the very details, I can make some evaluations based on simple technical properties. For example, Bitcoin can never become "more efficient": If efficiency of computing hashes goes up, difficulty goes up to counteract this, and the energy usage remains the same. This is different from almost everything else, where advances in technology that increase efficiency are usually a direct b…

You’d be surprised to learn that there are other cryptocurrencies that aren’t based on proof of work.

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

#715

Post by baby » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

knorker wrote: post #530

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…

It's always so convenient that cryptocurrency/smart contract proponents "can't be bothered" to give actual arguments. Your comment here is a poster child of "I don't have time to explain, so please take these baseless assertions that you are wrong. Sorry I have to go now, for unrelated reasons". It's a cliche at this point.

What are your arguments? I’ll be happy to argue in this thread.

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

#716

Post by barrkel » Mon, May 31, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

The bit that is a scam is a social phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon. It's tulips, Beanie Babies, housing market bubbles; not technical. Assets rising in price are chased by people who want to surf the rise.

What is interesting about distributed ledger consensus via proof of work only remains interesting when there's a disconnect between the economy and good government. If your government is corrupt, or your economy is corrupt, you want the two to be disconnected. The problem is that the latter - corrupt economies - dominate over the former.

If you have a functioning government, you can use the legal system to enforce contracts, and then ledgers don't need to use proof of work. If you don't have a functioning government, or you can't let the legal system look at your contracts, then blockchain starts to look interesting.

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

#717

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 31, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#718

Post by baby » Mon, May 31, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

shieVae4I wrote: post #502

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 immutabl…

You’re talking about bitcoin which is not bft. And there’s no n=3f+1 limit, see algorand.

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

#719

Post by lhl » Mon, May 31, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

daniel-cussen wrote: post #397

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…

It's become gold. Preferred by criminals, untraceable (gold is a single stable isotope, basically untraceable). A store of wealth. And you can't buy a pizza with gold, either, and there are tons of scammers who love gold (I remember, about Thailand, the scammers would conspire to get people's gold, a few would talk loudly about how jewels were going up, then someone else in your trip would just happen to mention, des…

Companies like Chainalysis have unwound and track the large majority (probably 80%) of Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin’s lack of fungibility and any semblance of transactional privacy is actually one of the arguments against its suitability as a currency.

You can read some of their public reports here: https://blog.chainalysis.com/?tab=articles-tab

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

#720

Post by baby » Mon, May 31, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #514

tzumby wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t believe that there is value in a distributed self replicating Byzantine tolerant state machine, that’s fair, everybody is entitled to their opinion.

Considering that it hasn't produced any value of note in 13 years, I'm gonna go out a limb here and say I don't think it's worth 2% of the entire world's wealth - and certainly not 3% of the world's energy.

You’re barking at the wrong tree. Bitcoin is not bft