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

#841

Post by bduerst » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:55 AM UTC

poundofshrimp wrote: post #832

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…

Crypto has been scams for years, all the way back to Mt. Gox.

Social benefit comes from payment systems that provide safety and stability, not risk and volatility.

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

#842

Post by rkagerer » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:55 AM UTC

I'm tired of HN submissions that link to tweets. If the tweet is very interesting that's one thing, but in this case the submission should have linked straight to the Politico article.

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

#843

Post by rkagerer » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:58 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #101

idlewords wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the original idea could never fly (even in 2008 you didn't have to be a genius to see that evading financial controls would be the chief use of a working cryptocurrency). But likely someone would find a really neat twist on it and find the blockchain equivalent of V…

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…

You don't need centralization to do chargebacks and conflict mediation. What is lacking is a decentralized version of a justice system.

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

#844

Post by koonsolo » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:00 AM UTC

WTF! Who is this to represent "the tech world"?!?!?

Cryptocurrency was built BY tech people. I'm a 41 year old developer who started programming at 14, and love what is happening in the crypto space.

So go F yourself for putting you as the spokesperson of the tech world. Such arrogance!

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

#845

Post by captn3m0 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #391

rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #337

I have had banks stealing my funds for years -- be it financial providers eating up my first 401k contributions in excessive fees, be it the banks that charged me $2 every time I used an ATM, be it the random charges unauthorized charges that the bank pulled from my account... Then there is the watching all my adult life as assets grow more expensive and further out of reach, a debt treadmill emerges to ensure the co…

How are $2 ATM fees "stealing?" They provide a service, which you can pay for or easily avoid by planning ahead a bit. (And cryptocurrency charges even more.)

In India, RBI mandates 5 free ATM withdrawals on a issuing bank ATM.

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

#846

Post by poundofshrimp » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #841

poundofshrimp wrote: post #832

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…

Crypto has been scams for years, all the way back to Mt. Gox. Social benefit comes from payment systems that provide safety and stability, not risk and volatility.

This is clearly a chicken and an egg problem. You can’t have stability until crypto is used in the mainstream and has a much greater mass overall, so that short-term speculations don’t result in massive volatility.

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

#847

Post by doom » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:06 AM UTC

K0balt wrote: post #735

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…

Hmm. It’s interesting to note that skeptics seem much more invested in being right about crypto being a scam than proponents are in it being here to stay. The more time passes, the shriller the cries of skeptics become, leading me to believe that skeptics are emotionally invested to the extreme in the failure of crypto. I rarely see any carefully considered, informed opinions just tulips and drugs and money launderin…

I've evaluated Bitcoin probably 10 separate times. I regret not getting in at time #1 when it was $30, but I know I would've sold at $35 or $50 or $100 or $1000 based on where I was economically then.

I have no regrets investing in broad market index funds, because I know what they represent, how they work, and how even if Amazon drops to 1/10th of its value I still own a small slice of the company. If bitcoin drops I own a bitcoin, which no adherent can explain the purpose of.

There's no "there" there. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do, most of the adherents don't know what they're buying, the "store of value" argument just makes it a worse version of fine art, gold, or real estate. The economic case for bitcoin is anti-fiat. Fine, but that's a minority opinion. Hundreds of millions of Americans buzz along in a fiat system and don't seem much worse for the wear. The massive COVID bailout kept millions out of poverty, kept food on the table, kept businesses open, etc.

"Failed states print money and crash the economy so they need bitcoin". Why Bitcoin and not another crypto? I can never answer that. Hardly anything in tech is forever. BASIC was once cool, now it's Python. Would I bet $30,000 that Python is the language of choice 50 years from now? No. Bitcoin is a cool proof of concept that is eclipsed tech wise by dozens of other coins. I'm still skeptical of other coins, and hardcore skeptical of PoW when the W is useless (hashing). Bitcoin is the top of the skepticism pyramid. There's no point.

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

#848

Post by doom » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:11 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #210

lreeves wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second Life did this 3D virtual world stuff almost 20 years ago, and even managed to use real money with an exchange rate as well to do exactly the things you're saying are now new with crypto and blockchains. Also for your other points - the games in this space are universally unfun to play with hardly anyone actually playing them; I can pay normal money to commission artwork; and I can use a zillion platforms that…

They did, but they were an insular community as a result. NFTs allow for a common open standard to be interoperable between games. That helps create an economy where, for example, you can buy a digital artwork at a Christie's auction and display it in Decentraland and have it be verifiably authentic. Second Life was awesome! This Metaverse trend is pushing that concept much, much further and it's giving ownership and…

There is no reason whatsoever for Activision to join forces with Epic and let your Call of Duty gun skins cross over to Fortnite. Even if they do, both titans will never in a million years allow an indie shooter to be cross-compatible. It'd be free advertising for the smaller game.

From a competitive standpoint, why would I want Activision's digital locks (you can only import NFT'd content) instead of something like Second Life which is more open?

If Activision really wanted purchases to carry over, they could've made it happen. No NFT needed. An open standard does not imply NFT, and vice versa. The 360 era was probably the peak of the 'gaming interoperability' trend, and it went almost nowhere. Your Xbox gamer picture would show up in some games. Everyone knew it was authentic because MS uses cryptography and doesn't let you sideload third party images. No NFT needed.

Same reason my company doesn't like me displaying awards from my last company. The obstacle is entirely social rather than technical.

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

#849

Post by jude- » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:14 AM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #788

jude- wrote: post #783

No one said you have to use the technology for illegal things, or even as money. Even Bitcoin-the-blockchain is only a timestamping system (seriously, even the Bitcoin whitepaper explicitly states that this is the purpose of the blockchain -- a peer-to-peer timestamper), which uses a token to prioritize transactions for consideration when the network is congested. I can think of non-financial uses for that!

It's very interesting. But it's also noteworthy that there are very few gamechanging use cases for the consumer or business worlds, despite an enormous amount of attention and investment.

The problem is that most of the money (and developer interest) flowing into this space is driven by speculation on the rate-limiting token. This is clearly unfortunate.

If you look past that, what you have is a highly resilient, replicated, totally-ordered log of data you can use to build other p2p services. For example, you could use Bitcoin transactions to implement an open registry of all Mastodon servers by binding their IPs and public keys to server names in a first-come first-serve basis. This would provide a one-stop-shop for discovering all Mastodon nodes and their public keys.

As another example, you could build a p2p Docker image deployment system by binding a public key to a sequence of transactions that contain the hashes of fixed-sized chunks of the image, as well as a seed IP address. From there, peers with the public key could scan the hash sequence and seed IP address, discover one another, and self-organize into a random flood network to replicate the chunks and reassemble the image. The image author would publish a new series of hashes (or perhaps the Merkle root of a series of hashes if space is a concern) when a new image is published.

Point is, you can do so much more with the tech than what is being hyped.

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

#850

Post by doom » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:17 AM UTC

lhl wrote: post #764

pavlov wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerds, early adopters — whatever you want to call them, the online behaviors they pioneered became mainstream. In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All proposed applications are self-referential shell games like NFTs, staking schemes, etc. If this is a superior platform for finance, where’s the real economic activity? Handwaving about “prob…

To answer your last question first, crypto clearly is a superior platform for finance, exactly because of the explosion in "self-referential shell games" - it's in fact an extreme democratizer of "finance" - anyone can create their own liquidity pools, it's trivial to create not just CDOs, but CDO2s, 3s 4s, and they all run 24/7 forever. (no, this does not have much relevance to "real" economic activity, but this is…

Can you explain why I need a crypto(tm) Gitcoin and not just a cyber chuck e cheese token? I give cyber-chuck $1 and he gives me 1 cyber token. I can subdivide it 10,000 times and micro-tip any site I want. Why do I need cryptocurrency?

If your argument is that crypto would decentralize it, and guarantee a cap on coin totals, I don't buy it. That's not the reason a site owner wouldn't join a coin plan. "I would love to get paid, but I hate inflation too much to consider your proposal". Fantasy land.