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Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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221–230 of 318 posts

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#221

I don't understand how any take on crypto can not mention that it is now the de-facto currency of online black markets, from pornhub to silk road 9.0 or whatever version we're up to. This is crypto's utility and the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation. Cryptocurrency is disrupting the black markets the same way amazon/ebay/online shopping disrupted the retail markets. Crypto is…

> the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation When paying for domain names or VPS (or anything online, but those are the cases where it's easy), I prefer paying with crypto because I don't want to give my credit card information to some stranger so they can misuse or lose it. This is not illegal and a legitimate use case.

This is already a solved problem everywhere in the world except for places that overly rely on credit cards. Has nothing to do with crypto or credit cards by itself.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I see you saying there’s no “real value” here. I get where you’re coming from, there’s no clear output of value the way we think about it sometimes. For years, even owning tokens, I was torn by this dichotomy. There’s no real value being produced…yet they’re transacting millions of dollars, and now billions, and now trillions. It was hard for me to reconcile that. What gives? I would ask you to consider your de…

> If you also advocate for the shuttering of high frequency trading firms... yes, that is what I mean by "metastasis of the old system" but there is much more nuance: the overfinancialization of the economy is a recent phenomenon and while it is not black-and-white to separate from actual underlying intermediation needs I seem to recall somebody claiming that 5% of the current financial sector is actually useful. The…

Alright, I get where you’re coming from. I am a believer in the vampire squid as a mascot for investment banks. And I do think that the brain drain from more positive endeavors into these ones simply because they pay spectacularly more is not necessarily positive. A nuanced counter to the argument, I appreciate it and will ponder.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#223
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slinging double SHA256 til the heat death of the universe is my long term vision. POW as a bootstrap phase is ethereum pos wishful nonsense. Many see the long term future of PoW. Many believe it is the only way.

In your view, what's the long term solution between environmental efficiency vs attack resistance? The two seem mutually-exclusive in PoW.

Solar, geothermal, wind and nuclear power? Using energy doesn’t destroy the environment. Producing energy uncleanly does. Shouting at children using PlayStations or miners producing hashes doesn’t make the environment any better. Shouting at the coal lobby might.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#224
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto offers zero protection from fraud, as transactions are non reversible however if you pay by credit card goods are not delivered or if your card is used fraudulently, the credit card issuer can and will reverse the transactions. Also due to PCI standards almost all online transactions are done via a third party, PCI compliant payment processor. I don't see the value crypto is adding here. If you did have mispla…

With credit cards, you have to give out your details to whoever you are paying. That party will save them somewhere and then there is a possibility that someone else will gain access to your details and abuse them. You won't ultimaltely lose money here, because your credit card company will reverse the transactions, as you said. Being the victim of credit card fraud is still a hassle, however. With crypto, the only t…

True, but that anonymity could trivially (for some definition of trivial) be implemented by the CC issuer.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#225
post #203
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin and PoW is our only shot at decentralized monetary system. PoS has many problems, and it can't provide the same level of confidence in the system as PoW. There's no way to reach objective consensus in a PoS system.[0] From this angle, I see PoS as an adversarial attack against decentralization. Failing to understand this is dangerous. Bitcoin mining uses increasingly clean or otherwise wasted energy, which so…

Bitcoin adds a whole new country to an international power economy that already cannot provide enough green power. In some places (notably the US) fossil power is being brought back online to service it. These assertions that it is clean are not based on anything more than wishful thinking.

Greenwashing and people defending their bags against what they see as attacks. I suspect a number of people are aware that it's bullshit but handwave anyway, and then a lot of people buy the bullshit because they're emotionally invested.

I like(d) everything else about bitcoin even though it's dated technology now, but proof of work is unjustifiable, the incentives create an extremely negative externality that aren't offset by its potential as borderless, uncensorable money. Especially when other blockchains avoid this issue entirely.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#226
post #218
post #172

I don’t know. This hype-crypto-machine is not catching up with my “feelings” about the future of the Web. Maybe I am getting old, but aside from some communication protocol usage and some form of authenticity (which is questionable), I don’t see web3. I would go out on a limb and say that if this is web3, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. This is an outrageous waste of resources and energy with awful envir…

OK. I am convinced. The entire cryptocurrency industry is a scam. So rather than saying the same thing over and over on every HN thread about it being a 'scam', let's do something about it then? How do we ban it all to save the planet and stop the scams everywhere then? Or are we going to complain on the next HN thread about cryptocurrencies and web3 once again?

How do you wanna ban it? Break my fingers so I can’t run some open source software? Break my hardware so It can’t Hash, cut my power? Arrest me for doing math?

The battle is between the libertarians and the authoritarians. The authoritarians want to ban things they don’t understand. They want to bully others with their choice of how they use energy. They want the state boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.

Banning is always an act of violence. Don’t give in to violence.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I think the risk is overrated. Almost all online shops outsource payment processing to a third party payment gateway, which you can validate pretty easily. They never get access to your details in order to abuse them. Third party payment processor breaches where CC data is lost are quite rare I don't think I've read about one in a very long time. Sure, I guess you can't get phished out of secrets with crypt…

The last time my cc was compromised is when the bad guys injected js into a large e-commerce site and stole the card data. This is a real threat. I’d rather not use any pull based payment mechanism if possible. Push only.

I understand the potential security issues. But the only affect this would have had on you is you would have had to contact your bank to reissue the card and chargeback any fraudulent transaction.

Consider a similar hack on a site that accepted Bitcoin instead of credit cards. The fraudulent JS replaces the payment address with the hacker's address and you send your coin to it. There's no getting your money back now.

I know which outcome I would prefer. However based on your username there is probably some bias in your argument.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#228
post #209

Crypto needs to solve a problem. I think cryptocurrencies should focus on making a cheap currency that people can actually use. requirements: - low transaction costs - low volatility - many places where you can pay with it - secure - privacy - no tax problems - fast transactions - handle fraud - scalable If a crypto currency can solve above points by cutting out the middle man and making transactions virtually free i…

With the possible exception of "privacy", that use case is already solved by bank transfers all over the world - in particular, check out India's UPI: https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/bank-transfers-as-a-paymen...

Interesting blog! Bank transfers using the same bank are free here. Even the most used payment method used here in the Netherlands is pretty cheap (Ideal). But the question is if this can be scaled to a global scale. A lot of parties have to come to an agreement for that to happen.

It can also come in the form of something like paypal. Paypal could reduce their rates to almost zero. If everybody then uses paypal we achieved our goal. But for that to happen paypal needs to become a monopoly, and once it is it has no incentive for low prices.

Note: I meant privacy as in private for consumers. With bitcoin everybody can see all transactions. I (and most people) don't really care that the government can see your transactions for tax and anti-fraud purposes.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#229
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have a slightly different take, recent changes in asset prices and the speculative frenzy are due to changes in monetary and fiscal policy since 2008. I'd include the popularity of cryptocurrencies as speculative assets in that (they don't seem to have any other use-value). Asset prices have seen massive inflation in the last decade due to ZIRP, asset purchases by central banks on an unprecedented scale. The risk…

That's very interesting, could you answer a few questions, or point me to some resource which explains in more detail? 1. How does this story end? 2. Which Fed announcement are you referring to? That rates will be raised? What do you mean the party's over, that speculation will decrease and prices will drop? 3. "This impacts tech stocks which are not making money and not likely to make money" You mean that this will…

So the key relation you need to pay attention to is in growth of the money supply compared to growth in the real economy. If they are growing at the same rate, prices will be stable forever. If one is growing at a slower rate, you will see a bubble in that side.

And the secondary thing you need to keep in mind, when the money supply is growing at a rate faster than the real economy, and the value of that money is pushed into either consumption(CPI) or investments. But because the Fed explicitly outlaws more than 2% inflation, it must therefore be in investments. Those investments can be anything, from houses to stocks to tulips to receipts of monkey jpegs.

The third thing you need to realize is that once an asset is above their 'true' value, there is no rule that better assets will grow more. What actually happens is those which have the least supply and largest marketing raise the most. So you see houses go up, you see buyback stocks go up, you see collectables go up.

So next you need to look at, how is the money supply going up? The money supply goes up when interest rates fall. Wealthy people who have good credit take out more and more money to buy more and more assets. As the wealthy don't use this new wealth to consume, as they already consume as much as they want, inflation doesn't occur. This is the savings glut of the rich[0]. When this happens, because we don't get inflation, this pushes the Fed to allow even more money printing to occur to allow inflation to hit their 2% target. It becomes a vicious cycle of more wealth inequality begets more interest rate reductions.

But with interest rates at 0%, the Fed is no longer able to move the money supply anymore. Now they need to do it directly. When they were doing it indirectly, they had that indirect buffer, "that's just how the way the world works", but when they do it directly, suddenly they have accountability. So instead of 90% of new money going to the wealthy, maybe only 50% goes to the wealthy and 50% is spread around to the non-wealthy.

So once the Fed starts Monetary Policy 2, now we see inflation. And once inflation kicks in, the Congress and others will see the hurt that is occurring to normal people, and they will push for even more policies that trigger inflation even more. This is what happened in the 70's.

So the Fed needs to put a stop to the bubble, just as they did in the 70s, so they will raise rates. Those raised rates will push the balance to currency, and money managers will work out that fact, and more a bigger and bigger percentage of their investments into this area. This will crush all of that extra value, and boom will go the inevitable cyclical money velocity bubble. Houses will drop down to their fundamentals, stocks will correct, monkey jpegs will crash to 0.

The big thing we need to watch as this occurs is what happens to things that we thought were not correlated, but ended up correlated based on everyone buying into the bubble. What happens when people pull their broad index funds? When the index funds are net negative, how low can the market go? Can the Fed have the precision to crash the Bitcoin market, to slow down the housing market, and not allow the stock market to fall 90%? I guess we'll see.

[0]: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/straub/files/mss_richsavin...

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#230
I'm always surprised by the negativity towards crypto in tech focused forums. I understand the costs; disruptive technologies always come with enormous costs. The value proposition is much larger still.

* Popular payment processors like visa and mastercard have become moral arbiters. Shutting down one's ability to donate to Wikileaks was a huge wake up call to the world. They've only ramped up efforts since then, blocking the purchase of marijuana, pornography, and donations to many organisations. It is clear that the centralisation of power in this space is not in the best interests of us.

* Banking infrastructure is stuck in the 90s. It should never take a business day to settle payments. It should never take several business days to settle cross-boarder money transfers. It should never cost [$x|3%|whatever exorbitant exchange rate the bank is offering]. Payments should never be tracked by government agencies as a matter of course. Payments and transfers should be instant, virtually free, and private.

* Confidence is low in government management of currency. Modern Monetary Theory appears to be winding its way into policy decisions which is basically the financial equivalent of formulating a nation-wide strategy based on moon crystals and horoscopes. Predictably, inflation is creeping up, and the desire for a stable store of wealth is increasing; or at least a hedge against inflation which isn't already inflated stocks.

NONE of these drivers above can be completely satisfied with crypto yet, but I am amazed with the progress it has made to date, and I have no doubt these will all be solved in time - far ahead of the conventional banking industry.

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