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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

#771

Post by logicchains »

ahallock wrote: post #310
john_alan wrote: post #13

Hacker news is holistically anti cryptocurrency. Which disappoints me. It has virtues. As someone who works in applied Cryptography and has also worked for the European Central Bank, we need “crypto”. 1) seigniorage is an abused privilege. Source: US debt ceiling at 27TRN. 2) permissionless money has value, I cannot send more than 5k a day using my bank. I can send any amount using crypto. I also don’t need two utili…

You're not wrong, and you have some good points here, especially about the banking limits. I'm not sure where the cynicism comes from, but HN seems very hostile to this space.

>I'm not sure where the cynicism comes from, but HN seems very hostile to this space.

Most of HN just follows MSM talking points, and the MSM hates crypto now because it's a threat to the powers that be.

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

#772

Post by Vanclief »

I really don't understand the mindless bashing of cryptocurrency by Hacker News. Normally discussion here is quite rational and level headed, but there is something regarding crypto that makes people get very polarized.

First of all, I am not a Bitcoin maximalist, nor I am "brainwashed by a multi-level marketing sale pitch".

Bitcoin is just a prototype for a P2P consensus algorithm that has stood the test of time. It has MANY flaws, and it failed its original goal of becoming electronic cash, and instead it became kind of a digital store of value. Is it worth more than it should? Sure, but you could argue the same of a lot of tech companies.

The problem is most people think they understand blockchain, but they don't. They just think its for creating a meme currency that is a speculative bubble.

What blockchain enables us to do, is to create a trustless P2P state machine, on top of which you can build any Turing complete project you can dream of.

Instead of focusing on Bitcoin and Dogecoin go and check out Ethereum and projects like Aave and Compound. Blockchain will completely change the way we do finance, from how stock are traded, to how we transfer money. I am sure that it will happen in our lifetimes.

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

#773

Post by roca »

kragen wrote: post #751
NamTaf wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the long date concept, promoted by the Long Now foundation [1] which promotes long-term thinking and gives a nod to this by writing years in 5-digit format. The irony with the GP’s post is that I can’t see using Bitcoin, with its current incredibly-high power usage and associated environmental destruction, as long-term thinking in any way, shape or form. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

Bitcoin doesn't have associated environmental destruction right now that I know of. I assume you're referring to its energy consumption, but at the moment it's a subsidy to renewable energy, because nuclear energy and fossil fuels (except for flare gas) are too expensive to compete with super-cheap wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and photovoltaic energy. https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall..…

It is simply not true that if governments removed all fossil-fuel subsidies today then electricity production would become 100% carbon-free overnight. There are massive issues around supplying base load (requiring cheap energy storage tech that doesn't exist yet), construction lead time, limited materials, workforce, and so on and so on. Then the non-fossil-fuel energy sources have their own environmental costs, e.g. we aren't able to recycle grid-scale batteries or turbine blades yet and those produced today may never be recycled.

For the forseeable future energy production cannot be carbon-free. All uses of energy, including Bitcoin mining, will continue to impose an environmental cost. For those of us who believe Bitcoin achieves nothing useful that can't be done better some other way, that cost translates into a pure negative.

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

#774

Post by ashtonkem »

chrisco255 wrote: post #668
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.

This is how cash and gold worked for thousands of years.

Which is why consumers enthusiastically abandoned them for credit the moment they could. Purposefully going backwards is both silly, and something you’ll never convince the average consumer to do.

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

#775

Post by logicchains »

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.

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

A rational solution would be a carbon tax, so pollution is no longer an externality. Focusing only on Bitcoin only makes sense if one's agenda is just to hurt Bitcoin.

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

#776

Post by ashtonkem »

darkerside wrote: post #692
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 use Ethereum to build contracts that look a lot like settlement execution, to my limited understanding

Oracle problem; the ETH blockchain can only speak authoritatively to things on its own chain, for anything else you need to trust a central authority to feed in information about the outside world, ruining the point. This is why a lot of what happens on that chain is just creating ICO tokens and placing bets on various on-chain things, rather than any meaningful off chain financial transactions.

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

#777

Post by ashtonkem »

arbol wrote: post #466
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.

Payments don't need to be final. You could use a contract that implements arbitration logic.

Yeah, but why would anyone want to do that when credit cards already exist?

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

#778

Post by roca »

chrisco255 wrote: post #659
curtisf wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using (VIRTUAL CURRENCY) to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. What you're describing here is Roblox (2006), which was launched 2 years before Bitcoin was conceived, and has attained a market cap of >$50 billion without any cryptocurrency nonsense. Or Secon…

No, I'm not describing Roblox. Roblox is a great game and has many great characteristics, but this is bigger and broader than that. Sybil attacks would be detected in an open network first of all. If you can pull it off, I invite you to try: there's hundreds of billions of dollars on the table protected by nothing but cryptography and game theory. Knock yourself out. I'm sure all the people in this space are idiots a…

> Now it's ubiquitous. But that ubiquity will make it all the more easier for merchants to adopt crypto.

The point is that no-one needs to adopt crypto for payments because the existing payment platforms work fine, better than crypto. Making transactions immutable, requiring users to maintain perfect IT security, currencies swinging in value by 20% every time Musk tweets about them, etc, are regressions.

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

#779

Post by ashtonkem »

heurist wrote: post #345
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.

I'm confused about why Bitcoin is being discussed in the past tense when both usage and price have both grown significantly over the last year. Is it already dead? Could have fooled me.

Please provide evidence for this assertion.

Note, not speculation in Bitcoin, usage of it as an actual currency.

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

#780

Post by tastyfreeze »

barrkel wrote: post #704
mixmastamyk wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying economies grow by inflating their currency?

Growth of the economy without growth of the money supply leads to deflation, which harms consumption and investment, because hanging on to your money becomes competitive with actively doing something with it. A small amount of inflation is an incentive to find productive uses for capital. Deflation rewards a kind of rentier class who own capital but don't do anything with it.

Perpetuating the fear of deflation is the greatest feat the Fed has ever pulled off.

Deflation is good. Every wage earner becomes more wealthy as their rate of pay buys more. Sticky wages arent a problem with deflationary money. Hell, at least half the complaints about the modern economy are the result of inflation. But, no, deflation would utterly destroy the economy.

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