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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

#831

Post by bduerst »

lottin wrote: post #293
joepie91_ wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're actually almost right. While Bitcoin was launched with lofty goals, it was pretty quickly overtaken by capitalist vultures who saw a low-regulation industry to extract money from people. Importantly though, it's not an either/or. Capitalism is problematic and cryptocurrency is problematic. Both can be true at the same time.

Bitcoin inventors were anarcho-capitalists, an ideology that promotes an extreme version of capitalism where there are no governments and corporations have unlimited power.

Anarcho-capitalists should not be surprised if a vacuum of power over Bitcoin is filled by those with the most means.

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

#832

Post by poundofshrimp »

I think ppl who dismiss crypto as having no social benefit don’t really get the decentralization benefit w.r.t. trust. Crypto is objectively inefficient and full of scam right now, but the fact that you can exchange value over the Internet, don’t have to trust any third-party and it’s really difficult for anyone to censor the exchange, is huge. If the inefficiencies are solved, then I don’t see how it is possible for fiat to keep up.

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

#833

Post by bduerst »

Sargos wrote: post #789
magila wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying this for over a decade now. Mainstream applications are just around the corner, wait and see! We have waited, and all we've seen is baseless speculation (which you call "wealth savings/growth") and scams. I see no reason to think this is going to change any time soon.

>People have been saying this for over a decade now. Mainstream applications are just around the corner, wait and see! We have waited, and all we've seen is baseless speculation DeFi isn't even 2 years old yet. This whole space really only started building applications in the last few years. Ethereum itself isn't even 6 years old yet.

DeFi is just a rebranding of smart contracts, which are still a hammer looking for a nail. If anything, it's just more baseless speculation like GP said.

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

#834

Post by arcticbull »

mikedilger wrote: post #667
Taniwha wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold also has a fatal flaw, there's only so much of it, building a currency based on gold (ie the US dollar on the gold standard) limits the size of the economy, it can't grow if you can't pay for stuff - it's why we left the gold standard. Bitcoin by design only has a fixed number of coins available, eventually the miners will have mined them all. It has the same limitation that gold has and basing an economy on it…

It doesn't limit the size of the economy. It incentivises saving over investing, since the value of the currency tends to increase as the economy grows. Modern fiat currency is designed to disincentivise savings and incentivise investing, in order to supercharge economic growth. A counter-position from the Austrian/Chicago school is that supercharging growth drives malinvestment, and they can't be entirely wrong abou…

It incentivizes holding currency instead of making productive investments with your capital. Currency only has value when it moves, not lives under your grandma's mattress.

Inflation incentivizes investment because you are going to lose 2% per annum if you don't.

Fiat offers you the maximum flexibility because you can back your personal economy any way you want - if you want to back it with gold, just buy some. If you want to back it with crypto, bless your heart, buy some.

This is a false narrative.

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

#835

Post by bduerst »

magila wrote: post #584
throwaway743 wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it is being adopted by pay processors like Square, PayPal, and Cash App, and is being accepted by some large retailers like Newegg and Overstock. Wouldn't discredit that as not being progress :/

This is another thing cryptocurrency enthusiasts have been doing for a long time: name dropping some companies who are supposedly embracing bitcoin but without any evidence of actual user adoption. Newegg and Overstock don't even take payment in bitcoin. They allow you to use a third party processor to exchange bitcoin for USD then immediately transfer the funds to the retailer. There's no evidence that these payment…

It's a form of survivor bias, because companies drop bitcoin support as fast as they get it. I remember when Wordpress dropped Bitcoin because it there was more fraud than actual legit transactions.

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

#836

Post by SnowProblem »

Invictus0 wrote: post #683
sowbug wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasonably private online payments. It's the closest to cash on the internet in terms of privacy. (HN is a very pro-privacy community, judging from Apple vs. Google discussions, so I take it for granted that a desire for privacy doesn't need further justification or elaboration.)

Not really. Your wallet address needs to be shared with others if you want to transfer money, and anyone that knows your wallet knows all of your transactions. If Google decided to build a crypto wallet into Chrome, I think you can agree it would trivial for them to see all of everyone's transactions.

I agree that BTC has terrible privacy. But this is a BTC problem, not a Bitcoin problem. A smart Bitcoin wallet would not reuse addresses across transactions, and would split your coins into many fragments, making them virtually impossible to trace. But to do this you need low fees and therefore big blocks - what BSV and BCH are doing. Several wallets on BSV already do this today, like HandCash (https://handcash.io), and the user experience is fantastic.

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

#837

Post by kalado »

People always talk about the simple monetary aspect and I don't see much benefit in just bitcoin without a well working lightning network either.

I'm still semi young and not a senior developer yet, so can someone explain to me how the following blockchain projects "have no clothes" as in "would be much easier without blockchain"

- Helium Is building wifi coverage, incentivized by rewards based on coverage provided (that the users don't have to pay)

- Several projects providing decentralized cloud storage.

- SingularityNET is an AI marketplace that allows easy access to different ML apps with the goal of making those work with each other.

I also find the ethereum infrastructure really cool (except the huge fee problem right now which is getting fixed with proof of staking/2.0 soon).

You have a whole "new" internet that you can access via ether nodes and you can just consume other smart contracts on the network with no hassle. No need to create an account for a service or purchase some monthly traffic etc. You just interact with other apps because payment is decentralized and everything is public.

I've made a small demo project for myself in .NET to see how it works and it really isn't too difficult.

It seems to me that people who say that all "cryptocurrency" is a scam barely investigated more than bitcoin.

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

#838

Post by bduerst »

nadahalli wrote: post #550
mandelken wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your background and experience, I guess. In many European countries ATMs are free, even outside your own country. It is considered an elementary part of the banking service that you don't have to pay to withdraw your own money.

Many European countries also charge negative interest rates. In Switzerland, where I live, bank balances above CHF 100K gets a flat -0.75% interest rate. Just saying.

Supply and demand.

Money supply is up and demand to put it in safe places (like Swiss bank accounts) is very high. German bonds went negative for this reason as well.

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

#839

Post by doom »

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..…

Patently false. Bitcoin put a dollar value on under-utlized energy. That can be coal, hydro, whatever. If you believe that Bitcoin is just a more wasteful version of Paypal or ACH, then it matters a lot that this subsidized energy is being converted into waste heat by a bunch of special-purpose ASICs that have no use outside of *coins, and take a lot of metals and energy to create and ship, on limited-capacity fabs.

I ctrl-F "subsid" in your link and don't see any source for your claim. Bitcoin puts a dollar value on (subsidizes) -ALL- energy. If there's a dirty coal plant you can run in your backyard without the government shutting you down, Bitcoin wants to know about it.

Your claim is (1) bitcoin takes energy (2) renewable is cheaper than nonrenewable (3) bitcoin is causing tons of new renewable capacity.

If that were true, why isn't every power plant in the US renewable? How on earth did Bitcoin manage to get this capacity that nobody else has? Money talks, right? Why aren't the mayors of San Francisco, New York, Chicago etc. trumpeting their new 100% renewable grids?

Then you might say that Bitcoin is tech-enabled and decentralized, you can run a mining rig near any energy+internet source. But that's equally true of a cloud compute farm. The fact that bitcoin is pointless hashes and not cloud compute is a historical quirk. Any Bitcoin node/farm could be replaced with an identical-power-usage server farm and do more good for society.

I'd like a source on your Bitcoin only uses renewable claim. I think if I run a miner on my home PC, which I believe has some natural gas in the energy mix, that argument fails.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...

> But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.

I wrote this whole comment without getting to the end of your inane post. We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy). But your wordsmithing here is bad faith. Your argument is basically "governments thought people wouldn't be complete jerks, and Bitcoin sure proved them wrong!" Yeah it's human nature and perhaps inevitable, but 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.

Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe. Get back to me when China and the US ban all forms of carbon-emitting energy production. Until then, those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find. I suggest cloud computing as a baseline. "environmental destruction right now" is exactly the current state of things.

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

#840

Post by baby »

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…

What are your arguments though? I see no clear argument in this thread besides “bitcoin is bad” which makes it look like most people here haven’t investigated past bitcoin.
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