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

#871

Post by tetherino » Mon, May 31, 2021, 9:36 AM UTC

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.

Bitcoin's price is being artificially manipulated through at least one stablecoin, Tether.

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

#872

Post by imtringued » Mon, May 31, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

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…

The current economic system is in trouble because people save too much damn money, that money has to go somewhere, anywhere, otherwise you get unemployment and underemployment.

Interest rates are low because everyone is saving, nobody is borrowing, nobody is investing.

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

#873

Post by imtringued » Mon, May 31, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

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.

Deflation is basically rent seeking with money. It's bad enough to have rent seeking with land, why make everything worse?

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

#874

Post by lhl » Mon, May 31, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #828

lhl wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you’re looking at a technological dead end (Bitcoin). There’s no innovation there, financial or otherwise, just momentum. However all you have to do is to turn your eye adjacent to the dapp space and see where developer and user adoption is definitely happening. There’s no shortage of “stuff to do” in DeFi and over the past few months the pattern is that it maxes out the transactional capacity every si…

Crypto only solves problems crypto itself created. DeFi is a perfect example of that. The reason is that blockchain can only offer its trustless, decentralized and permissionless guarantees to things that are wholly representable on-chain. As soon as you try and sync it with the real world, the real world is the source of truth and the chain representation is meaningless. Further, by boat anchoring solutions to the f…

I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds on this. What was the fundamental innovation of Bitcoin? It was a blockchain that functioned as a decentralized ledger that allowed un-trusted parties to verifiably exchange value without a trusted intermediary. Game theoretical mechanics were added to try to prevent collusion, resist censorship, and to make the network permissionless, to varying degrees of success. What is the cost of this? Obviously, massive inefficiency. Bitcoin's solution to the Byzantine Generals problem (which was previously unsolved) was to propose that everyone store a copy every single transaction that ever happened and have everyone verify that, and then to protect that network, to instigate a Red Queen's race incentivized by a self-reinforcing reward mechanism. Is this an optimal solution? No. Did design decisions lead to perverse consequences that the creator(s) didn't intend? Yes. Is this also extremely limited in functionality due to it's original design constraints (which have since ossified, perhaps intractably)? Sure. And do most things require the function that a blockchain (or decentralized ledger technology in general) provides? No. But, it does solve a very real problem, and all of this "waves hands" is part of the process of discovering where it's most appropriate.

I think what's being lost in this discussion, since almost no one posting here is either passingly familiar with the past decade of crypto-economic research, or with the current state of the art in "crypto" technology (almost none of which revolves around or even involves Bitcoin these days). Almost all of the promising new networks provide at least 1000X transaction throughput at 1000X+ transaction efficiency while retaining decent Nakamoto coefficients and allowing some level of computation ("smart contract") and composability. (Yes there is also plenty of useless stupid stuff that sadly is a huge waste of resources, but hey, we survived Dotcom Bubble. It's just part of the process.)

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't see the potential there, just as I don't worry about anyone who might have said that the Internet's impact would be no greater than the fax machine (in fact, a single Nobel laureate chimed in early on to both of these sentiments) - whether this turns out to be true will depend largely on the people who choose to build their vision and prove people wrong... or not.

Also, there's no question it's all a damn mess, but much more broadly than crypto.

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

#875

Post by yadaeno » Mon, May 31, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

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…

Oh no my hard drive failed/ my computer was hacked/ my house burned down. Now my entire life savings is physically inaccessible.

These things happen every day. I will happily pay a sub .1% fee for a centeralized bank account that's protected by regulations and federally insured.

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

#876

Post by tetherino » Mon, May 31, 2021, 10:00 AM UTC

jfrunyon wrote: post #388

kragen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point (programming work for overseas clients), and I haven't gotten scammed yet. I'm not engaged in money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, or gambling, and only the usual amount of delusion. And I don't even buy illegal drugs! And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982; not only couldn't you get so much as a weather report on…

> I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities? > And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982 The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969. Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet. TCP came about in 1974. IPv4 in 1982. > So why does Bitcoi…

January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet.

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

#877

Post by knorker » Mon, May 31, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #595

knorker wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have thing upside down. Crypto, its fast-moving technology and implications on the financial system, economics, politics and the media is so vast that it costs thousands of hours to study. Your strategy is to say "you're wrong, prove me right". No, I won't be writing book-length comments here to convince some internet stranger whom is categorically against it. I have no burden of proof. I'm not even a proponent o…

If this were in isolation then yes I'd agree. And twitter is not the best way to make points.

But I'm pointing out that this is ALWAYS the argument pro-cryptocurrency. It's not this instance, but a pattern.

Cryptocurrency people refute entire books and deep analysis (from actual experts) with "everything you just said is wrong, but I have to go now so can't say why".

It's not this in isolation, but the fact that it's a cliche that's the thing.

It's comical. I'm not sure, but it sounds like you're laying the ground work for waving your hand and saying "book? By the time it's published the technology has moved on, so it's not relevant, so let's just ignore the whole thing" when the main arguments against cryptocurrencies/smart contracts are not about the details of the tech.

The arguments are mainly about the premises and the goals. What technical means get invented then becomes irrelevant.

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

#878

Post by knorker » Mon, May 31, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

AlexCoventry wrote: post #560

knorker wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not like pinboard made any actual arguments in his tweet storm, either, unless you count "we all know that cryptocurrency is a scam" as an argument.

If this were in isolation then yes I'd agree. And twitter is not the best way to make points. But I'm pointing out that this is ALWAYS the argument pro-cryptocurrency. It's not this instance, but a pattern.

Cryptocurrency people refute entire books and deep analysis (from actual experts) with "everything you just said is wrong, but I have to go now so can't say why".

It's not this in isolation, but the fact that it's a cliche that's the thing.

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

#879

Post by knorker » Mon, May 31, 2021, 10:06 AM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #623

knorker wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not a good comparison. The internet was always state of the art and better at solving actual problems the worse solutions were tackling. Fidonet was always, on a technical level, a worse experience than the internet. BBSs have their charm, but were absolutely obviously worse at what they did that the internet. Cryptocurrencies are just awful at solving real problems, compared to existing solutions. Why are y…

It's a good comparison insofar as the tools were/are primitive and only usable by experts. A lot of domain knowledge was required. You can hate crypto and still agree with me on the above point. It's a pretty innocuous observation. I'm not going to engage the rest of your argument which has no bearing on the point being made.

> It's a good comparison insofar as the tools were/are primitive and only usable by experts. A lot of domain knowledge was required.

Is your argument "it's hard to use, and therefore it's useful"?

If not, then I really don't understand what your point is.

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

#880

Post by imtringued » Mon, May 31, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

Tarq0n wrote: post #322

kragen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point (programming work for overseas clients), and I haven't gotten scammed yet. I'm not engaged in money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, or gambling, and only the usual amount of delusion. And I don't even buy illegal drugs! And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982; not only couldn't you get so much as a weather report on…

Reminds me of the old adage about technical solutions to social problems. Cryptocurrency isn't going to un-fail these states, all it does is enable the wealthy to evade currency controls and reinforce the downward spiral. If someone lives in an oppressive regime it's governmental change they need, not worldwide abandonment of financial regulation just so the lucky few can escape.

The majority of the Venezuelan economy exists outside its borders, because that's the only place where it can exist.

Currency controls are actually preventing the recovery of the country. They are a short term fix for a short term problem but they create long term problems in the process and those long term problems are definitively the worse poison.