Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#271

Post by reginold » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

igorkraw wrote: post #262

reginold wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

[Oh shoot, did you edit your parent reply later on? Wondering if my above reply was meant for another message.]

Re: "DAOs with currency is just feudalism redone" - I like the way you put this. There does seem to be this kind of land grab where giving ownership somehow changes everything.

Re: Self-hosted currencies in small communities - this one I'm less curious about so am wondering what you see in it. Would the 15,000 cryptocurrencies in existence today start to meet this criteria of different currencies across many different communities?

Re: Cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate - also interesting to think about. Kind of like having a digital tomato or something, it must be used before it molds. I've heard Dogecoin has a high issuance rate, I wonder if that would apply. My sense is it's hard to disconnect from everything else though, and if I had a bunch of rotting tomatoes I would convert them to something more stable (tomato sauce, or trade them for money) unless I had immediate utility for tomatoes.

Re: your above point about nocoiners having more of a disconnected view, agreed. Curious what you think of my comment here on this, speculating that as more of the world becomes a financial instrument, it gets harder and harder to be a nocoiner. In that case we must figure out how to be curious while having/talking our book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297148

Like I said, would love to find a place for more discussions like this with you, more distance than the "to the moon", but less technical than an https://ethresear.ch.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#272

Post by reginold » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

glenvdb wrote: post #264

reginold wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks! I had not realized bitcoinmagazine could be a good source. I had grouped it in with other crypto media junk like cointelgraph.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#273

Post by soco » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #247

gjulianm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't we solve all these things with technology? Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can. > But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that? No, I don't think y…

> You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience. > I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. Who said that all problems can be solved by technology? > Unless you invent a way…

The commenter above just said "But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?"

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#274

Post by pcthrowaway » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

svennek wrote: post #235

reginold wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With "Proof of Stake" to mean a consensus system, are you saying the Ethereum Proof of Stake implementation doesn't do anything to guarantee against a cartel of bad actors? My understanding is "slashing" may be one such mechanism. This is where staked funds are taken away from bad actors. ie if you propose a block with bad transactions, the 32 ETH you have staked will be reduced by some fraction as punishment. When y…

A cartel is a group of bad actors working together with full, but hidden coordination....

Proof of Work is not resilient to a sufficiently large 'cartel' either in this case. If your cartel is 51% of bitcoin miners by hashrate, they can agree to let each other spend their bitcoin twice. Of course, this is sufficiently hard to do with proof of work, as with proof of stake, as to make it infeasable, perhaps even moreso with proof of stake.

As an example with bitcoin specifically, it would probably be cheaper to buy enough mining hardware to constitute 51% of the bitcoin network than it would be to buy 51% of all bitcoin.

Of course, both would be very expensive endeavors.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#275

Post by fsflover » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

soco wrote: post #273

fsflover wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience. > I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. Who said that all problems can be solved by technology? > Unless you invent a way…

The commenter above just said "But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?"

This looks like another useless generalizaton to me.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#276

Post by igorkraw » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

reginold wrote: post #271

igorkraw wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

[Oh shoot, did you edit your parent reply later on? Wondering if my above reply was meant for another message.] Re: "DAOs with currency is just feudalism redone" - I like the way you put this. There does seem to be this kind of land grab where giving ownership somehow changes everything. Re: Self-hosted currencies in small communities - this one I'm less curious about so am wondering what you see in it. Would the 15,…

no, i didn't edit the first one, maybe you meant to reply to svennek.

communitycoins: these are interesting because they'd be small-people-fiat, giving tiny communities the possibility to bootstrap mini-economies and then linking into some federated system according to some rules and based on people vouching for them. notably, they'd be the inverse of todays crypto- nonanonymous, consensus based on trust.

re decaying currencies: yeah, but then you'd need to buy an explicit store of value, and especially if money decays fast, whoever sells that to you will need to get rid of it again. but i think this one would be an experiment in money the same way gopher and gemini are experiments in hypertext

Re your comment: I think it doesn't quite hold, because I can buy shares in the VT index and can then talk about it without needing to hype it - the underlying value is highly independent of people's opinions because everyone eats,shits and dies and so needs the commodities and services provided by the underlying companies (in the long run). I think it is only the most hype-dependent securities like cryptocurrency and Tesla where the underlying is questionable and so bag holders feel the need to defend their investment quite literally (note to all the true believers in either:relax, I said questionable, not nonexistent, if I'm wrong with my opinion you can pay someone to laugh at me later)

Honestly, I think it needs to be specialises forums or side threads like this, any crypto community will be overrun by the moonboys and libertarians too quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#277

Post by EugeneOZ » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

1ark wrote: post #267

EugeneOZ wrote: post #76

I 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.

You just need to buy 15000 $OXEN to run a node (USD 10800 at the moment of writing). And without nodes, it can not be decentralized. Ponzi scheme.

Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

#278

Post by ryan_lane » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

reginold wrote: post #269

ryan_lane wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. T…

Things are currently wrapped in a financial model of sorts. You pay for network resources, the provider does too. They pay for hosting costs and decide whether or not to pass those through. I, for instance, publish everything for free, with an open content license. Wikipedia does as well. We're happy to pay the hosting costs to make our content accessible. The web archive handles long-term archiving, in case we stop hosting.

In this new "everything is wrapped in crypto" model, nothing is free. You still have to pay for the network and hosting costs, but now you also need to pay middlemen to access the content, even if the author wishes to provide their content for free.

Also, everything becomes more brittle. Since content isn't centralized, it can (and will) disappear when folks stop hosting it. They can be incentivized to host content by being paid to do so, but that really means it makes the most sense to host the most popular content, and to ditch everything else.

The whole concept, technically, is worse than the system we currently have. If you want to see numerous reasons why this is a bad idea, look through Wikimedia's various email lists to see this idea being shot down over and over again for nearly 20 years. It's simply an inferior approach to the problem.