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

The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 704 posts

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#111

Post by bildung »

coralreef wrote: post #81
jrd259 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have one already: cash. As for protection against authoritarian actors. If your state has already gone full panopticon, crypto won't save you, indeed the state will mandate exclusive use of their chosen crypto, gaining even more visibility into your life. If your state has not yet done so, you should fight to preserve liberty and the rule of law. If your country turns into a full-out surveillance state, you are no…

> We have one already: cash. Cash is awful if you live in Turkey, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, etc. The USD has lost 90% of its purchasing power since the 1950's, meaning cash is toxic over longer time horizons. You cannot have a society where everyone seeks to get rid of the reserve asset over time. > If your country turns into a full-out surveillance state, you are not going to overthrow it by buying things with B…

> The USD has lost 90% of its purchasing power since the 1950's

That's a meaningless number without context: The median income gain was 2000% (i.e. double the purchasing power loss) during the same period (median yearly family income was $3300 in 1950 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demo/p60-00...)

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#112

Post by jakear »

tommek4077 wrote: post #68
rchowe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Bitcoin transactions have a quite high transaction cost, and I would argue that chargebacks are an important consumer protection.

Only if you do your transaction on the blockchain. Most are done internally. It's like your bank is not sending someone with a suitcase full of money just because you pay your phone bill.

It's strange to me how the only two options are "pay obscene transaction fees" or "just keep your crypto in a centralized exchange and hope they don't go MtGox". Is it impossible to achieve the stated benefit of being able to make quick and easy transactions and being decentralized?

I spent some time researching the best low transaction fee easily accessible crypto for making a sort of crypto Patreon, but the vast vast majority of all crypto information available was folks speculating what was going to go "up", nobody seems interested in what is actually a decent form of money (cheap&easy to exchange, cheap&easy to transfer, and stable).

I suppose it makes some sense from a game theoretic standpoint. If we consider the decision making entities in the game to be the massive crypto exchanges and miners, the best way they make money is by transaction fees and exchange fees, so they aren't likely to come up with a great micro-transaction and micro-exchange fee system. Oh well.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#113

Post by bhouston »

grlass wrote: post #86
bhouston wrote: post #71

Stephen is mostly likely right that the decentralized nature of Crypto is not really a benefit. That said digital cash and tokens and NFTs do have value and I expect them to get even more popular. I am reminded of the P2P/decentralized nature of Napster and how it was going to be a revolution. Napter's P2P infrastructure (and later Gnutelle and Bittorrent) allowed it to operate in a legal gray zone or at least have d…

Most of these systems are designed around pseudonymity, not anonymity. Only things like Zcash, and Monero set out with that explicit goal. I suppose much like with BitTorrent, the criminal needs will be both good and bad; allows routing around unjust laws (of which there are many), as well as routing around just laws (of which there are many).

> Most of these systems are designed around pseudonymity, not anonymity. Only things like Zcash, and Monero set out with that explicit goal.

I agree. There are regular +100M bitcoin transfers happening between pseudonymity accounts, which could easily be money laundering / tax avoidance by billionaires: https://twitter.com/whale_alert

I think in the fully legal system, all accounts would likely be tied to real identities.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#114

Post by horsawlarway »

voldacar wrote: post #84
horsawlarway wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that ledger isn't accurate. It's just distributed and difficult to change. I technically am the owner of (quite a few) bitcoin that were being processed by MtGox when they imploded. The wallet they were in at the time was emptied and no longer exists. I still receive the relevant court documents as the case continues still. As far as the ledger is concerned - they are no longer mine. --- So question to you: How d…

>Now it turns out I have to turn around and trust a central authority anyways! That authority being the government that is handling the prosecution of MtGox for fraud and theft. In theory, DeFi can solve this. In practice it is hampered by poor UX and high transaction/gas fees. I think in the far future, the idea of ever having "your" assets in a wallet whose key you don't control will be seen as a ludicrous archaism…

> Sorry for your loss btw, that really sucks

You and me both - 41 bitcoin at $4.17 a piece. Admittedly, if they hadn't been stolen I was planning on buying a 1/4 of weed with them, so I probably wouldn't be rich either way... shrug

Fun story though - I can honestly say I spent more than USD 10 million in bitcoin on weed in college. Only about $500 at the time.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#115

Post by dsco »

bob331 wrote: post #101
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #90

I wish I could have discussions about cryptocurrency as a technology rather than a "get rich quick" scheme. Back in 2017 I was really excited about Ethereum and the promises of scalability not just from Vitalik B. but from other developers too. I still think that cryptocurrency could do good for the world if the issues can be resolved but for now everybody's got their eyes on the price, not the technology's horizon.

It has no use case. Zero

What if you’re stuck in Turkey with its current inflation and want to hedge against it? Or what if you’re someone who would like to in a permissionless way buy Bitcoin options?

What the Hacker News crowd generally misses about crypto is that it’s technology, ideology and finance in one package. They keep on arguing against the storage model itself (centralized vs decentralized) and miss the bigger picture.

So many of these anti blockchain comments remind me of the initial HN reaction to Dropbox and people saying that “hey, you can just set this up yourself on a Linux machine”.

You’re missing the point. A 3 trillion dollar industry doesn’t give a shit about your database takes and how it’s all a bubble - we’re way beyond that.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#116

Post by briantakita »

bhouston wrote: post #98
anonymoushn wrote: post #11

This particular source is extremely low quality and is motivated by the author's undisclosed competing product. I would like to see higher quality sources on the front page of hacker news one day.

Can you point out what is low quality about it? Right now it seems that you are just making that claim because you disagree with the thesis of the article. e.g. https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...

Using the phrase "woo woo" along with various strawmen & many omissions of why crypto is being adopted was the extent of his criticism, hence low quality. He does not understand crypto & is trying to sell his competing product.

If he were to talk about decentralization/distribution vs centralization along with who controls the fiat money supply & who benefits & who does not benefit from the fiat central bank policies, then he would at least begin to broach the subject of why crypto currencies are being adopted.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#117

Post by 1970-01-01 »

>Until proven otherwise it seems like the goal of the crypto ecosystem is to build an enormous unregulated casino with a crazy party scene.

The goal of crypto was to move blockchains from theory to reality. Upsetting traditional FinTech and its regulation was a side-effect of the experiment.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#118

Post by Robotbeat »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #70
Scarblac wrote: post #38

I wonder how much of the Crypto hype is because the US banking system still lives in the 1980s or thereabouts. If everybody in the US had access to bank accounts with easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU, would people still be excited about Bitcoin?

I’m unsure what you mean by “no chargebacks” - chargebacks are provide the consumer recourse in the event of a dispute.

Yeah, that whole no chargebacks concept as a “feature” of cryptocurrency has always been a head scratcher to me. I mean, yes, businesses may like that, but crooks like that even more, and it’s almost purely a negative to the vast majority of people, i.e. consumers.

And it’s a core motivation for cryptocurrency, in the original Satoshi paper.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#119

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

padobson wrote: post #17
IronIvan wrote: post #8

> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.

Yeah, this is what I don't understand from the naysayers. Anyone who says blockchain-driven assets don't have intrinsic value seems to ignore the value of trust - the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable. The author of the article skips over the question entirely, maybe he's addressed it elsewhere, but if the crypto skeptics continue to ignore one of its primary value propositions, I…

In some context I would agree, there is theoretical value to a decentralized trustless ledger[0]. What I can't agree with, however, is that entries in a decentralized trustless ledger are inherently valuable as cryptocurrency proponents would like us to believe. The entries in the ledger have no inherent meaning, they're just a number associated with another number and the only reason anyone equates that with a monetary value is that, for the moment, they can find someone else[1] to give them money to shuffle those numbers around. I think that, at best, one could say that BTC is backed by hype and speculation. I am not convinced that is a useful basis for a currency[2].

This is in contrast to fiat currencies which their various governments offer guarantees that they will honor.

NFTs, on the other hand, make even less sense to me. They seem like they are just cryptocurrency in disguise trying to fool people who otherwise question the concept of inherent value by claiming (falsely) that they are equivalent to ownership of digital goods[3].

[0] I have yet to hear a use case for which they are actually better than traditional alternatives, but I can imagine that one might exists.

[1] read: greater fool.

[2] Leaving aside all the energy wasted on PoW.

[3] And that's before we get into my conviction that attempts to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space are backward and perverted.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#120

Post by mechanical_bear »

ninjanomnom wrote: post #44
maneesh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain. Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the va…

Voting is intentionally designed for it to be impossible to verify what your final vote is so that it's impossible for someone to use that to hold you to a particular vote. A classic example being a household all being forced to vote one way by the head of that household. With no verification possible you can freely vote without influence from others who would use that verification for their own ends. This is also wh…

> This is also why taking a picture of your ballot will nullify it

In what jurisdiction is this the case? I have never heard of it.

Post reply on HN