My explanation: people on HN like to think of themselves as 'smart' and 'good with tech', but missed out on something they dismissed as pointless and now need ways to justify missing out that isn't "I may not be as smart as I thought I was"
Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
261–270 of 278 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#262Svennek said it well, there is not much of interest left to discuss, the remaining ambiguities are up to taste, not novelty. The only interesting things are talking about whether decentralisation is a value in and off itself without e.g. equity and whether people actually inherently care about it. But those are charged topics, also because people who are all in on crypto have a material interest in pushing the idea t…
This seems like such a bizarre take to me. It's like saying in 1960 that everything to discuss about computers is up to taste not novely. I see an entire world coming to life across thousands of different blockchains. So much of it is experimental, mistakes, catastrophically bad. But other parts will succeed and define the future. The recent push around DAOs is fascinating, a way to delegate voting and decision makin…
I'm down to discuss application of distributed technologies and various consensus mechanisms for concrete use cases. But cryptocurrency has been debated to death and now needs to prove itself. DAOs without currency would be interesting to talk about, DAOs with currency is just Feudalism redone - and feudalism isn't an interesting technology to me personally.
Edit: I'm also down to discuss interesting cryptocurrency project with clear and theses, not just "change the world". I'd be interested in a federated Cryptocurrency that is meant to be easily "self hosted" in small communities and has a mechanism to convert between these communities according to rules/exchange rate set by each community - with the final consensus mechanism rooted in the social sphere. I'd be interested in discussing cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate once received, to test the idea of inflation driving investment.
Thinking about it, there's lots of interesting discussions to have, but nobody is having them. I guess I need to modify my statement to saying that the discussions that people in the cryptocurrency community want to have are boring because they are all rooted in the "anarcho"-capitalist perspective and that angle has run out of interesting things (in my eyes)
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#263The technology behind crypto is interesting, the hype (and gambling) is not
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been following Alex Gladstein[1] on Twitter and there's been lots of interesting podcasts and other discussions worth checking out. [1] https://twitter.com/gladstein
Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like a great rec, I see he retweeted some kind of debate that looks interesting. I'm pretty dubious of Twitter as a platform though. There's so much other stuff, and Twitter injects its own crapola into the feeds too. I've bookmarked his profile instead, look forward to checking it out.
If you're interested, but want to skip the noise on Twitter, uou can read most of his work in regards to Bitcoin and its humanitarian impact here: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment. The…
Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish. Sorry I don't know how to phrase it so it doesn't come as a personal attack. Most of the crypto posts sound like it. > This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database I think it's crazy that you feel this way, I can only speak for myself and a few others, but we do in fact fully understand it and why it works this way. Satoshi is not some god tha…
> Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish
That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.
Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.
But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.
If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#266The issue isn’t that there’s nothing left to discuss, the issue is that there’s two „opposing“ sides that will downvote the comments they disagree with, causing a chilling effect where only inflammatory comments will end up being posted. It’s exactly the reason why Facebook et al. don’t have a dislike button.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#267I personally had a hope that we’ll build some new decentralized things, some real new web - more sustainable, reliable, less regulated, less censored. My heartbeat was increasing every time I was finding some project promising to build this new network. But every time, after lines of poetic, pure, brave, and romantic description of their mission, there was a line about their new token and why you should buy it. With…
Lokinet and Session is pretty interesting, onion routing and Signal fork respectively. And as a user you don't even notice any of the crypto except for your seed phrase.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#268To me, most of it is about the boring parts of cryptocurrency. The actual cryptography is still interesting, the financial aspects are (to me) utterly boring. And a lot of the interesting bits are only tangentially related to cryptocurrency. EG this paper[1] is interesting and potentially applicable to cryptocurrency development, but is far too specialized for most of HN to discuss (and well outside the understanding of most of the cryptocurrency enthusiasts).
The finance makes for poor discussions, and the interesting parts of the tech are too obscure for most HN readers to understand. And the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, doesn't use any of the interesting parts anyway. So of course the discussions here are crap.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh appreciate your thoughts here! I can certainly agree that it can sound dystopian. Let's talk about how to make sure it's net positive! How do we built things better, where do we improve, what are the weaknesses? To me the rise of cryptocurrencies is a given -- so the role of being curious is about shaping what it becomes, rather than deny their impending dominance. (Not putting words in your mouth, if anything thi…
> Let's talk about how to make sure it's net positive! How do we built things better, where do we improve, what are the weaknesses? I think what puts people at odds here is that the conversation on your side is "how can we improve the model we're creating" while the other side's conversation is "we don't want this model at all". Wrapping everything in a financial model is like giving us handcuffs to wear, then asking…
Appreciate the reply here! Your analogies are effective and point out an important difference.
It comes down to this question: "Is wrapping everything in a financial model inevitable?"
1. If yes, then let's seize the moment to figure out how to make it the best we can.
2. If no, let's create an alternative, or figure out something else that's inevitable, or perhaps at least resist #1.
I've landed on the side of #1. Therefore it becomes a matter of shaping it to be the best it can be. Same with solar power and electric cars. They are inevitable, let's make them the best they can be.
For those that land on #2, I can see the point of resisting. However, the best way to support #2 would be an alternative hypothesis "Inevitably some things will be financial and other things will not" and then building tools to support that.
Thanks for talking this through and creating this clarity about where the difference is.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm so curious about your posts, this seems like an endless thread of gotchas. What's important to you about this topic? I have read all your posts in this thread and am puzzled. Thanks for any insights.
Complaining about "gotchas" like this so much sounds a lot like admitting defeat but desperately trying to phrase it as a win.
HN is a place for curiosity. I'm genuinely interested to hear svennek's perspective, it's coming through in a bunch of fragments throughout this post.