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The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#321

Post by wsc981 »

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?

> 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?

As someone born in the EU (now living in South-East Asia) I am still excited about Bitcoin. Because I feel it's the only safe haven for my honestly earned money out of reach of governments and banks. I feel Bitcoin is a too important technology to fail, especially as the world will slowly move towards Central Bank Digital Currencies that will have the same problems as fiat right now.

I view inflation as something bad for society (a hidden tax and form of theft) and CBDCs will be inflationary currencies. I also don't like that governments and central banks will get even more control over people's lives once physical currencies are gone. If you behave bad through the eyes of governments or banks (e.g. using too much electricity, eat too much meat, work as a prostitute, etc...) they might be able to take restrict your earning potential or spending. That is not a world that I'd like to live in.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#322

Post by roughly »

ravenstine wrote: post #132
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 think that's certainly a part of it, but it's not the whole story, and I suspect it's perhaps responsible for 1/3 of the story. A bigger motivation, and perhaps the most quixotic one, is financial security . No, I don't mean that cryptocurrencies haven't been highly unstable in value. But the more that the cabal chooses to truly enter the 21st century, the greater the danger of that technology being used as a means…

This is a genuinely important point - there’s a strain of Puritanism baked into American (& more broadly western) culture that’s getting exported and enforced via our corporate dominance. Apple doesn’t allow porn on the App Store, Tumblr killed porn because of advertiser squeamishness, Onlyfans nearly killed itself because of bank pressure. Say what you will about porn, but 30 years ago gay rights would’ve fallen afoul of the same corporate conservatism - I’m broadly liberal and generally don’t believe a corporation lacks social responsibility, but I’m extremely uncomfortable with the degree to which our cultural values are encoded in especially our financial system.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#323

Post by dvdcxn »

moolcool wrote: post #272
rtb wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would crypto force gaming companies to keep servers for old games online?

Instead of hitting the publisher's endpoints, they'd hit a web3 endpoint to get the list of digital assets owned by the player

What use is that if the servers running the rest of the game are turned off?

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#324

Post by koonsolo »

__alexs wrote: post #74
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…

> That said digital cash and tokens and NFTs do have value and I expect them to get even more popular. Literally all my cash is already digital.

That is impossible: the numbers on your bankaccount are multiplied, thanks to fractional reserve. The cash in your hand is not. Maybe not a big deal now, but at some point it might be. And then it's "surprise! The numbers on your account != cash in your hand"

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#325

Post by Jerrrry »

gbolcer wrote: post #317

Putting aside cryptoeconomics for a second, a centralized database can be manipulated in a criminal activity. A decentralized, omni-inspected one with no clear owner and no ability to take an axe to it provides a cryptographically sound public ledger (unless it's a private blockchain of course). It'd be very difficult to--independent of the activities that the technology is being used for now--criminally tamper with…

>Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#326

Post by anon9001 »

chuckcode wrote: post #286
can16358p wrote: post #121

Not being pegged to a centralized, state-controlled currency is a dealbreaker for me. It's still in infancy and it's true that 99% of the projects are get-rich-quick schemes with no intrinsic value. Though, I think the author lives in a country with a trustworthy government because that's not the case for many people including me. In the last two days my country's currency has shaken much more than crypto and I don't…

I'm a little surprised that the author is missing the critical innovation of crypto which is digital trust and observability. Sure it is easy to make an argument that one cryptocurrency or another is a bubble, but don't underestimate the importance of being able to distribute work and verify trust at scale. Just look at how git has transformed software development by mapping code to a hash. Or how DNS + SSL has trans…

You're exactly right.

Reading this article and the other HN comments, it makes me think our community is aging and becoming stuck in old ways of thinking.

It's surprising and disappointing to see it happen to this group, but I guess it's inevitable.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#327

Post by notpachet »

> There is a somewhat coherent proposition that crypto assets are effectively unregistered securities contracts, basically like stock in an empty company that doesn’t do anything except promote the sale of its own stock.

I sometimes think that when anthropologists from the future look back at today, the primary lessons they'll draw from us won't have to do with our technological cleverness, but rather our financial imagination. Greed is at work in the world, and it is a strong force of propulsion in terms of how the world we are living in is changing. Perhaps dramatically more so than technology, in a given period of time.

The willingness to speculate in a manner that is completely unhinged from reality: that is the dark heart of cryptocurrencies. It is rent-seeking behavior taken to its brutally logical conclusion. And it is not unique to crypto. Look at people's behavior in the stock market, or the housing market. It isn't that these assets are actually appreciating that much in the real world, so much as investors are simply trying to find a place to put their money and get a return.

In that sense, the speculative utility that provide, as a store of financial value, has become orthogonal to reality. In some markets, I'd argue that we're even seeing a weird parasitic effect, where the host is kept alive simply to serve as a form of blue sky contract by the force of our collective willingness to play Russian Roulette speculative games with each other. GameStop is a good example.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#328

Post by jgalt212 »

llimos wrote: post #301

Most people on HN are rational people who look at the world in a rational way. Bitcoin and friends are not operating in a rational market, therefore we don't understand them, and most of us would probably be pretty lousy investors since we would try to make decisions rationally instead of memeing and YOLOing. But, and this is a key point, that doesn't make us right and them wrong . It's just a different kind of marke…

> most of us would probably be pretty lousy investors since we would try to make decisions rationally instead of memeing and YOLOing

I think those are the makings of an effective bond investor. But as far as stocks, or stonks, go you're pretty correct here.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#329

Post by twelve40 »

louwrentius wrote: post #312
llimos wrote: post #301

Most people on HN are rational people who look at the world in a rational way. Bitcoin and friends are not operating in a rational market, therefore we don't understand them, and most of us would probably be pretty lousy investors since we would try to make decisions rationally instead of memeing and YOLOing. But, and this is a key point, that doesn't make us right and them wrong . It's just a different kind of marke…

We are perfectly capable to decide what is better because it isn't magic. For every gain, somebody literally has to lose. All crypto money is just other people's money. The people who win are vocal. The people who lose, stay silent, often in shame And even if you disagree, those gains are not worth the destruction of our planet.

To play devil's advocate, the fact that it's someone's money and people are losing it doesn't automatically mean better or worse. For example, Netflix bankrupted Blockbuster and people lost money but it is clearly "better". I guess we're just still waiting for a popular use case, outside of crime, speculation and money transfers to places with no infrastructure.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#330

Post by NoGravitas »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #165

I'm afraid that the war against crypto was lost once Wall Street decided to join the game. Crypto will not go away regardless of utility or externalities.

Yep. We're getting Economics 2.0, complete with the Vile Offspring and making the earth uninhabitable.
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