Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 1001 posts

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

#861

Post by jbverschoor »

ben_w wrote: post #59
jbverschoor wrote: post #49

There are a few things that it offers: - “bank accounts” - a universal notary and authenticity service These are building blocks for a number of applications. Most order applications don’t make sense, but hey, everybody needs “bigdata” too

> a universal notary and authenticity service Cryptocurrencies do not add anything to either beyond what was already done by cryptography. > “bank accounts” We already have bank accounts. In banks, hence the name. What’s the average transaction fee for the most popular cryptocurrency? By one of many metrics by which cryptocurrency fails even against the status quo.

Not everybody has. And even in the 'normal' world, banks refuse quite a lot of people and businesses.

So no, we don't have bank accounts.

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

#862

Post by sobani »

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.

When I look at the IT industry, I see deflation that has been going on for at least 50 years. Every year you can buy more computer for less money.

Yet, people keep buying computers. Why?

I would argue deflation has been the most significant driver of the IT industry in the last 30 years and in turn has been one of the greatest drivers of prosperity in that same period. As computers become cheaper, more people can afford more them and more value is added to society.

On the other side you have inflation that kills savings. And since most people save with a goal in mind, not because it's fun and exciting, the higher the inflation, the longer they will have to save before they reach that goal.

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

#863

Post by scorpion032 »

To judge it like this you need to compare.

To compare, you need to measure the attributes of the this and the compared entity.

The alternative entity compared in this case is the Existing Financial System that is handled by the Fed, Wall Street and the Bankers.

Now, there are innumerable number of comparisons and metrics that have already done this job for their preferred metrics and statistics. They all unequivocally side on the side of Bitcoin. (one example: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/)

You are free to ignore these comparisons; but you have to compare and contrast that how cryptocurrencies, if ponzi compare to the modern financial system of all it's warts and what is the net effect of Cryptocurrencies and the Financial system as it exists today; rather than simply stating Cryptocurrencies are in and of themselves Ponzi.

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

#864

Post by shieVae4I »

baby wrote: post #718
shieVae4I wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Allow me to quote the Algorand paper, https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/gilad-algorand-...:

> Weighted users.To prevent Sybil attacks, Algorand assigns a weight to each user. BA⋆is designed to guarantee consensus as long as a weighted fraction (a constant greater than 2/3) of the users are honest. In Algorand, we weigh users based on the money in their account.

That 2/3 is your n=3f+1 right there. It's just that, as I said of PoS in general, the n is based on coin holdings.

This is not controversial, as the authors of Algorand are completely aware of the limitation:

> Most Byzantine consensus protocols require more than 2/3 of servers to be honest, and Algorand’s BA⋆ inherits this limitation (in the form of 2/3 of the money being held by honest users). BFT2F [35] shows that it is possible to achieve “fork∗-consensus” with just over half of the servers being honest, but fork∗-consensus would allow an adversary to double-spend on the two forked blockchains, which Algorand avoids.

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

#865

Post by lhl »

doom wrote: post #850
lhl wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's easy and has nothing to do with what you're thinking (although you could hard-code/guarantee emission schedules if you built a smart contract on a decentralized platform) but let's ask, how and where do you redeem your $1 cyber-chuck? Presumably only with the issuer? With a crypto-token, particularly an ERC20 you have the ability to take it to any DEX and use (or create) a liquidity pool that you can then swap for high any number of high-liquidity tokens that you can use or cash out anywhere. (You can also perform price discovery and see if your $1 cyber tokens really are worth $1 on the open market, or utilize your newly acquired cyber-chucks to generate yield by providing liquidity, collateralizing it, etc).

Note that in Gitcoin's case, GTC serves as a governance token which gives voting rights for their DAO. While it may have a market value (it certainly has some value for those who want to participate), but there is a different purpose to this type of token (the same for utility tokens).

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

#867

Post by sneak »

shafyy wrote: post #856
sneak wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The threat of unwarranted civil asset forfeiture. The threat of arbitrary unbounded inflation. Perhaps you don't consider those risks to you to be very big, so you don't place much value on mitigating them. Other people do, however.

> The threat of unwarranted civil asset forfeiture. That's exactly what I'm saying in my original comment, though. Do you think a government that wants to disown your assets cares if you have an entry in a database that proves that it's yours by law? THEY are the law, fuck your blockchain. > The threat of arbitrary unbounded inflation. Again. People who are affected by this usually don't have the means to just log in…

> Do you think a government that wants to disown your assets cares if you have an entry in a database that proves that it's yours by law? THEY are the law, fuck your blockchain.

If they cannot deprive you of the key, they cannot deprive you of use of the assets.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet

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

#868

Post by shieVae4I »

xpe wrote: post #553
shieVae4I wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It would be very difficult to construct something that would be self-replicating/hype-incentivizing but not reward early comers the same way. Can you clarify what you mean by "the same way"? I wonder if you meant "reward the early-comers in _some_ way." Yes, early miners of a cryptocurrency have an advantage, in the sense that there is less competition in computing resources. However, when you factor in risk (i.e.…

I suppose I was implicitly assuming "in an economic manner". You're very right that humans do things that narrow, economic game theory can't account for (e.g. the RAND secretaries playing Nash's "So Long Sucker").

To put my argument in context: consider IRC. An economically motivated BFT system would give the IRCops and channel ops some kind of quantified share of power that they stand to lose if they defect. But doing that, I think, would not just be a difficult programming exercise; it would also undermine the ops' intrinsic motivation and lead to a worse environment.

So the likes of Bitcoin work well if the protocol is designed for (game-theoretically) selfish participants whose interests lie mainly in the number going up. But that's a very narrow niche. Your genealogy site would probably suffer if it had a "number of family names added" counter and the users' status was measured entirely by such a number.

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

#869

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

The comparison to Scientology seems apt in one sense. The CoS is known for silencing any unscripted commentary on the CoS that CoS does not control. They keep very aggressive legal counsel on retainer specifically for this purpose. Similarly, "crypto" seems to have a team of advocates present 24/7 online who actively try to suppress or counter any negative discussion of "crypto". It is like a Yahoo chat room devotd to the stock of some company. The company has a compelling interest to squelch that chat room.

People donate to CoS as well as "invest" in crypto; this practice has tangible benefit to the recpients of the funds. These beneficiaries do not want the benefit to end. They wnat it to grow. The suppression of "negative" commentary about crypto online is frightening to watch because it honestly seems to work. It is some sort of community-based censorship.

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

#870

Post by ben_w »

jbverschoor wrote: post #861
ben_w wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a universal notary and authenticity service Cryptocurrencies do not add anything to either beyond what was already done by cryptography. > “bank accounts” We already have bank accounts. In banks, hence the name. What’s the average transaction fee for the most popular cryptocurrency? By one of many metrics by which cryptocurrency fails even against the status quo.

Not everybody has. And even in the 'normal' world, banks refuse quite a lot of people and businesses. So no, we don't have bank accounts.

“Not everyone” has a computer of any kind, not even a cellphone, not even of the not-smartphone variety.

Underbanked people more so than the general population.

And this group is also the most harmed by current cryptocurrency transaction fees — I’ve met someone (friend of a friend in Nairobi) for whom, assuming rent is paid monthly, current fees would raise their rental cost by 10%, and they’re already struggling.

Post reply on HN