I'm pretty poorly educated on the nuances of crypto/web3 but it seems every time it comes up in conversation only the benefits are discussed. Thanks for posting this and helping me educate myself a bit more on this
Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
21–30 of 94 posts
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#22Quoted post unavailable.
Every single one of those dollars came out of the pockets of somebody who lost money because they invested. You got lucky. The majority of people did not.
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#23I follow r/Buttcoin on Reddit to stay sane.
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#24Yeah, no thank you, I don't come to Hacker News for crypto talk, the bias is comical and the talking points are recycled as a new article every week (scams!, speculation!, hype!, wasted electricity!, tether!)
All of those have rebuttals, but I don't want to get into the politics of it, there's plenty of that already. Can we please talk about the fucking tech here? I'm talking about what's made with it, not some sort of philosophical debate about how authoritarian we should be to protect people we deem gullible, or who can spend electricity on what, or who is allowed to speculate.
For those who actually are interested in the tech and not some faux moral crusade, here's better "awesome" lists, that are actually awesome, not toxic.
https://github.com/OffcierCia/DeFi-Developer-Road-Map
https://github.com/bkrem/awesome-solidity
https://github.com/btomashvili/awesome-ethereum
https://github.com/bkrem/awesome-solidity
https://github.com/vinsgo/awesome-ethereum
https://github.com/toadkicker/awesome-ethereum
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#25Web3 has many reasons it could fail. I choose to be optimistic. > The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
The optimistic view is that it will all crash and burn tomorrow. The pessimistic view is that it will survive, and cause even more harm than it has already.
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#26From here: https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-absurd.html
> There are no fundamentals to any crypto token and it’s discounted future cashflows are all strictly zero and thus its present value must be strictly zero.
This is demonstrably false.
Cash has no future cash flow, yet its value is clearly not zero.
The way I see it, the value of an asset depends on how desirable it is to market participants (demand), as well as on its supply.
If Bitcoin has a believable enough story ("there will only ever be 21M units"), and it draws people in, while national currencies inflate ceaselessly as economic growth stalls, the relative value of Bitcoin grows.
Other assets are far from better.
Current public companies' Shiller PE ratios are in the "ridiculous" area - it takes 35 years to recoup costs of an investment. https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
Current inflation is much higher than government bond yields. This is one definition of financial repression - the government sponsors itself with its own currency, in spite of the real negative return.
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#27Even as a cryptocurrency developer myself, I concur with most of the criticism. I detest all the cash grabbing, speculation, hype, and scams. Where I diverge from most criticism is in PoW. In its early years, when Bitcoin was used as currency rather than for speculation, mining only consumed moderate amounts of energy, in line with the lower prices of a few dozen dollar per bitcoin at most. My hope is for Tether to c…
There is no safe way to wind down mining. As mining becomes unprofitable, mining equipment will be shut down. But it will still exist, and it will be in the hands of people desperate for cash. This means that the price of 51% attack will drop massively, and that completely undermines the safety that PoW provides. A large drop in price followed by a large drop in mining completely destroys the security of bitcoin.
The price of a 51% relative to the total marketcap won't change drastically (only moderately due to wider availability of hardware), and that's what security is based on, not the absolute cost of a 51% attack.
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#28Web3 has many reasons it could fail. I choose to be optimistic. > The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
The optimistic view is that it will all crash and burn tomorrow. The pessimistic view is that it will survive, and cause even more harm than it has already.
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Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
With settlement time of 60 minutes Bitcoin was never designed as true currency, but more as a holdable asset. While some of the critiques are valid, as system matures, there will be less and less of it. Crypto is here to stay.
The first line of the Bitcoin white paper: > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Now, if you want to say that it was badly designed for its purpose, that is a different matter.
It will allow it — just not fast, and if you want that, it still allows it, via Layer 2 solutions,
many of which guarantee the same security as their Layer 1.
Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
#30Even as a cryptocurrency developer myself, I concur with most of the criticism. I detest all the cash grabbing, speculation, hype, and scams. Where I diverge from most criticism is in PoW. In its early years, when Bitcoin was used as currency rather than for speculation, mining only consumed moderate amounts of energy, in line with the lower prices of a few dozen dollar per bitcoin at most. My hope is for Tether to c…
PoW already brought us to huge wealth concentration so it is not the solution either. This is one of the hard-not-so-talked problems of cryptos at the moment, and I can't see how to solve it.
PoW tries to minimizes wealth concentration by imposing a competitive cost on obtaining coins. Of course it cannot reduce the wealth concentration already present in fiat. It can at best not make it much worse (as PoS does).
PoW still suffers from wealth concentration due to varying block subsidies over time, which is why I'm a strong supporter of uncapped emissions like 1 coin per second forever, which gives no advantage to early miners.