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

Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

defector.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 411 posts

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#51

Post by wpietri »

tiborsaas wrote: post #22
marban wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I found it to be a decent solution to support actual artists (esp. Photographers or folks like eBoy fame) who were already selling their digital art in genuine and honest capacity. But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.

I don't get this. The concept hasn't changed since and those genuine artists are still there you supported. Or things are only cool until they are not mainstream?

I think the NFT thing is kinda ridiculous. But then so are plenty of other marketing shenanigans. Maybe it could have worked?

But once it was picked up by the grift/hype/fincrime machine that has eaten cryptocurrencies, it lost all semblance of plausibility to me. It has gone from something like "I bought a small piece of a creator whose work I treasure" to "ZOMG MAKE MONEY FAST".

As an example, take the guy who was big on what he calls investing and I call gambling, who proposed to his girlfriend with an NFT:

https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1432396694608662536?l...

For me it's the same deal with cryptocurrencies in general. Interesting idea, and I want to visit the alternate reality where it was developed gradually and sanely by the sort of curious, well-meaning person that got into it early on. But the sort of value-based innovation I care about got stomped long ago.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#52

Post by zaphar »

sneak wrote: post #34

We are currently transitioning from the part where they laugh at you, to the part where they fight you.

Nah, I'm still in the bemused stage. They may actually succeed in making crypto a normal thing adopted by society. At which point I'll transition to my usual next stage. Being resigned to yet another bad technology solution to what is fundamentally a people problem.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#53

Post by kureikain »

One thing funny about cryptocurrency is that it's built for highly technical group of audience. But in my peers, a majority of people who get benefit from it are non-tech user.

Think of wallet concept. The wallet literally hold nothing. The fund isn't a file or something that the wallet keep. The wallet is simply server as an interface. The transaction can generate off chain. You can signed the transactionor any message to prove who you are. Read is essentially free but write contract cost gas. How can we explain these to a normal user? Why Solana is so fast and Ethereum is slow?

Now, the highly technical user understand those concept and feel something shady about a certain thing. Then they don't buy it. Meanwhile, othergroup get rich so quick and it makes the world feel like crypto is a ripoff.

Add in the controversal stuff such as Sushi fork Uni, then founder run off with $14m(and later return)...

all of that made crypto looks really bad.

But now let's see what blockchaing give us from a technical perspective. It's a distributed database where you can store data into it, like git, and can prove and trust it's what you write into it.

Example, DNS. DNS is very decentralize but what if your DNS server decided to return something different from the name server. What if we store DNS into blockchain? Write to it cost money but read is essentially free as long as you have a node.

But due to the highly cost of mining, and the craziness of its price, develop on blockchain is costly and it push people away because the people who want to build something on it doesn't have the fun. I, for one, want to do the above DNS idea with Ethereum but choose to go with Solana because Ethereum cost is just so damn high...

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#54

Post by ttyprintk »

roenxi wrote: post #10

Someone sees cryptocurrency as exactly what it is, and at some point in the future we will know who. But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who: 1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people. 2) Advocate that governments can spend…

I wish the downvotes would explain how they plan to solve these problems, or otherwise concede the argument of the linked article.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#55

Post by ahoy »

voidray wrote: post #49

If you take every long-refuted criticism of Bitcoin along with cherrypicked examples of cringe celebrities endorsing it, and you combine that with misinformed neo-Marxism and an unquestioning acceptance of government officials, you get this article. If your average sports writer actually wanted to understand the space, they could read something with real data: https://nydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NYDIG-Bitcoi…

This is the exact kind of utopian fantasizing that the article talks about. Charming!

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#56

Post by ahoy »

superkuh wrote: post #24

> Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person would really need to know or care about unless that normal person is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the internet... Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists. Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is…

Normal people do not have, use, or understand cryptocurrencies. If you think they do all that means is you live in a very specific bubble.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#57

Post by wpietri »

endisneigh wrote: post #27

ICANN isn't perfect (not even close, lol) - but I wish a consortium of countries would just create their own crypto. Unfortunately this would probably devolve to what we currently have with individual fiat. Would anyone even use a not-for-profit backed "crypto"? I don't mean in the blockchain-backed sense, more in the ICANN/gift-cards/points globally distributed sense.

If you look at ICANN's .org fiasco, it's pretty clear that they couldn't handle even the relatively small amount of money flowing through that. The corruption opportunities of an entire currency are way too much for them.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#58

Post by whywhywhywhy »

oefrha wrote: post #11
marban wrote: post #5

The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.

I'm on board if charities* could somehow get in on the action and convince the bored rich to part with their money. * Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.

> Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.

No such thing.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#59

Post by roenxi »

ttyprintk wrote: post #54
roenxi wrote: post #10

Someone sees cryptocurrency as exactly what it is, and at some point in the future we will know who. But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who: 1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people. 2) Advocate that governments can spend…

I wish the downvotes would explain how they plan to solve these problems, or otherwise concede the argument of the linked article.

I wouldn't normally comment on downvotes, but the torrent on this post caught me by surprise. Probably they just disagree.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#60

Post by EliRivers »

superkuh wrote: post #24

> Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person would really need to know or care about unless that normal person is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the internet... Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists. Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is…

Normal people do all that with money and credit cards and debit cards and bank transfers, which works faster and better and are much easier to use and much more convenient. The existing framework is a much better way to do all the things you mentioned. What do you have for which the existing framework isn't better, and how often do "normal" people do that?
Post reply on HN