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The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#401

Post by wyager »

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…

> Bitcoin and friends are not operating in a rational market

Have you considered the possibility that your personal model (which you presumably describe as rational) is just insufficiently complete to accurately model bitcoin? I think bitcoin is perfectly rational. A lot of people confuse things like impredicativity (e.g. in the pricing of monetized goods) with irrationality, but this is just a limitation of their mental model.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#402

Post by louwrentius »

twelve40 wrote: post #329
louwrentius wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Come on, be better than this.

This isn't about companies being made obsolete, this is about regular people losing a lot of money because they didn't understand the risks. They trusted some acquaintance or some family member and now they are ffed.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#403

Post by bildung »

rvz wrote: post #216
bildung wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of Stellar, Hedera and Algorand have a big centralization problem, they have solved nothing. Stellar and Ripple aren't even proper cryptocurrencies unless you allow for a very lenient definition. > the know-it-all condescension really rubs me the wrong way - do they clone these people or what? Where do they all come from? In my experience the people being very optimistic about crypto real world use cases usually…

> All of Stellar, Hedera and Algorand have a big centralization problem, they have solved nothing. Such claims must be further substantiated with strong and sufficient evidence. Elaborate your claim further with each cryptocurrency with valid sources, otherwise your claim is baseless. > Stellar and Ripple aren't even proper cryptocurrencies unless you allow for a very lenient definition. So what is a 'proper' / 'real…

> Such claims must be further substantiated with strong and sufficient evidence.

No, it's the other way around. Bitcoin only employed approaches that were well-researched already, the innovation essentially was combining these together. The projects I mentioned claim that they can achieve better performance without the known costs of bitcoin (really slow, really energetically expensive). It is up to them to post proof how they achieve that.

> So what is a 'proper' / 'real' / 'true' cryptocurrency then? Are there any true Scotsmen here?

Projects with some form of blockchain, which Stellar and Ripple don't have. They are essentially just a horizontically scaled, classic database (running on the nodes), which the clients access. The nodes each have a full copy of the database. There's no blockchain, no mining or any substitute etc.

> Nano

I only replied with the projects named by posters before me. Nano has no blockchain, only a DAG (a proven, decades-old data structure used e.g. in spreadsheets). Nano invented their own consensus protocol. They have the usual suspicious claims (fast, no transfer fees, no/low energy costs) that are only really achievable with a centralized design (i.e. a conventional database). How can they achieve security without heavy costs for appending to the ledger?

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#404

Post by koonsolo »

the_gastropod wrote: post #93
rawtxapp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?

It seems like the people most upset by money printing learned to be upset by money printing from crypto propaganda.

Go talk to some Turkisch people and ask how they feel about the Lira.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#405

Post by pennaMan »

Crypto is all about decentralized proof of trust yet somehow this eludes people who should know better. Please show me how you solve decentralized proof of trust (double spend) with postgres.

Indeed, crime did have a need for anonymous proof of trust that crypto solved. Why did crime have a need for that? Because crime lies beyond the realm of the status quo.

Criminals are to the status quo as pioneers and revolutionaries are.

In the "normal world", centralization gives us the situation where the organization in charge of authentication is the same organization that has the monopoly on violence. Indeed within the rules of this story we built crypto seems to be "a solution looking for a problem", as another stereotype argument goes. The problem is all around you.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#406

Post by wyager »

ineptech wrote: post #342
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…

The anti-crypto case is not that it's "worse" than some other speculative investment asset (gold, comic books, etc), it's that crypto is a speculative asset, as opposed to the things it's sometimes claimed to be (e.g. currency, a new way to do finance, etc).

All monetized assets like USD or gold are "speculative". I speculate that my dollar probably won't lose more than 10-20% of its value in the next year.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#407

Post by Imnimo »

sjtindell wrote: post #354
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…

HN’s attitude is very surprising to me. I would think that they could get very excited about flash loans, decentralized exchanges (automated market makers), daos, and other concrete innovations coming out of crypto asset projects. I think it’s mostly jealousy and a feeling that they missed the boat, so they want to see it sink. I think that because I’ve had the feeling many times. They may not realize these are early…

>go read the UniswapV2 contract. If you don’t think that’s a cool innovation, please come back and let me know, I’m interested.

I feel like the coolness of Uniswap requires putting the cart before the horse. If I'm not convinced of the real utility of these tokens, why would I be impressed with the ability to move them around in various clever ways? I need to see a valuable external use case before I can see the value in what Uniswap enables.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#408

Post by throwawayffffas »

lima wrote: post #383
throwawayffffas wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all decentralization is not a property solely confined to cryptocurrencies. The traditional banking system is decentralized, there are thousands of banks that are all separate entities. There is no single central bank, even central banks are not unique, every country has one. Additionally the traditional banking system and cash have a huge advantage, no global consensus is required, Iran still has a banking…

> All these schemes while claiming to be immutable are really not, firstly the last block is always subject to being overridden by a longer chain with more blocks, thus everyone waits for multiple blocks(confirmations) before accepting a transaction as committed Not in chains with synchronous consensus and instant finality. No forking.

POLKADOT does that right? Does anybody else do that?

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#409

Post by weego »

andrewla wrote: post #103

If anything, I think stablecoins are way more dangerous than the author indicates. People talk about things like Bitcoin as a threat to sovereign currencies, and they are, as competitors, of sorts. But stablecoins are another matter entirely. One huge aspect of the value of sovereign currencies is that they are instruments of law -- courts will settle in them as a lowest common denominator, and it is safe to use them…

People talk about things like Bitcoin as a threat to sovereign currencies, and they are, as competitors, of sorts

No, they're competitors for the stores of sovereign wealth that are the backing of sovereign currencies.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#410

Post by mkeeter »

traeregan wrote: post #15
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.

> the author's undisclosed competing product Which is: http://adjoint.io "Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates."

It's even funnier than that – back in 2019, Adjoint was bragging about "delivering blockchain technology built specifically for the needs of the financial industry" [1]

No idea if they pivoted away from blockchain or just stopped saying it on their website, but it makes me take this with several grains of salt.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190502154457/https://www.adjoi...

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