On anti-crypto toxicity • Hacker News Board

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#321

Post by tablespoon » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #234

malthaus wrote: post #183

Unfortunately, given: "How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services? How can we reduce the power that a small few currently hold over the web? How can we improve data privacy and ensure that people have control over their personal information? How can we create reasonable privacy in the financial system? How can we make information more available to everyone? How…

> society won't be worse off in the end. That is most definitely a political question. I think the article has a strange reasoning about crypto trying to "save the world". For me it's pretty clear: individuals can now store and transfer value on the internet using a consensus algorithm. Plenty of you claim that it's enough to have a democracy that controls a central bank. That way you also have some kind of consensus…

> Problem is that this democracy/central bank is not stable in every country. So crypto provides real "internet money", with all benefits and drawbacks.

Except that, from a practical perspective, if you live in a country without a stable "democracy/central bank," using fiat from a stable country (e.g. dollars or euros) is a better solution than cryptocurrency in pretty much all cases. AFAIK, cryptocurrency isn't in proper circulation anywhere, so you're likely going to have to do the same kind of forex transactions to get it, plus you're going to need a computer and internet to use it. Also stable-country fiat also doesn't come with weird ideological monetary policy ideas baked in (e.g. "money should be deflationary!").

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#322

Post by CSSer » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

Quindecillion wrote: post #122

It's unfortunate that Bitcoin has become so mired in partisan politics. For me its purpose is simple. If my money is a representation of my time and effort, why should I accept the central banks' inflation "target" of even 2%, due to money printing? I don't see why anyone should be okay with that, particularly given that central banks rarely meet that target for long and more often than not overshoot by a significant…

People don't "accept" the reduction of their purchasing power. They live with it due to lack of better alternatives. Bitcoin doesn't adequately meet the criteria most people have for something to be considered money, namely portability and stability. All of the existing solutions that could help it meet the requisite criteria involve some kind of centralization, therefore it is not a better alternative.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#323

Post by tablespoon » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

c0mptonFP wrote: post #241

malthaus wrote: post #183

Unfortunately, given: "How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services? How can we reduce the power that a small few currently hold over the web? How can we improve data privacy and ensure that people have control over their personal information? How can we create reasonable privacy in the financial system? How can we make information more available to everyone? How…

Quoted post unavailable.

> People shitting on crypto, while sitting on their ass without addressing the problems in other ways are doing society a disservice.

But cryptocurrency doesn't address any real problems. The claims that it does are mostly BS and marketing.

The problems cryptocurrency solves are ones that are created by holding to peculiar ideologies and/or speculating about problems that haven't happened and may never happen.

The one thing cryptocurrency has succeeded at is being something for financial speculation, which has given a lot of people strong incentive to hype it relentlessly.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#324

Post by mattdesl » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

greybox wrote: post #219

mattdesl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several properties of blockchains that could improve upon our current financial structures. 1) Custody: with fiat, the concept of self-custody is "store your cash under your bed," and as we continue to move away from cash into digital money, this option is being eroded. In crypto, the concept of self-custody may be an EOA (account based on a private key) smart contract (such as a multi-signatory account), o…

While I agree with some of your points here, (Mitigating the need for intermediaries in certain situations) - Crypto inherently holds no security benifits over traditional banking. Fortran has been used for decades because it has worked, and there has been little need for change.Fortran isn't a security hole in itself. In fact it has all of the same problems with private PIN access and MFA, PLUS all the downsides tha…

- Banks and financial systems use COBOL/FORTRAN not because they want to, but because the systems are decades old, the knowledge of how it works often lost, and making small changes or adding new features could lead to catastrophic failure[1][2][3]. Crypto on the other hand tends to be on the cutting edge of cryptography and heavily reliant on open source. Despite crypto systems having a better bedrock than a bank trying to maintain their multimillion lines of COBOL spaghetti, I can agree that many end-user applications in crypto do not provide better security than today's banks (e.g. MetaMask hot wallet storing user private keys in the cloud).

- The ledger is generally considered immutable; but the platforms and protocols built on top of it need not be. Social consensus can pivot to a new contract address. An analogy would be a git commit; you can update the head of your codebase, but your past changes are still present and analyzable.

- Better support for zero-knowledge proofs would be the eventual end goal for many of these systems, allowing users to shield data and maintain their privacy. I agree that not every transaction should be public, and it's a limitation of current crypto currencies that will likely take several years to solve.

[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/01/...

[2] https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-wa...

[2] https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-y...

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#325

Post by bluescrn » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

ulzeraj wrote: post #110

bluescrn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is also a reason for warmongers and organised criminals to love crypto

Do they? https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59689581 Also have you thought about the novel idea of old school policing to catch criminals instead of collaterally damaging the lives every single human in the world other than the 13% privileged who happen to be citizens of stable democracies?

I was more positive about crypto before the big NFT grift came along.

But even then, hardly anybody seemed to care about making crypto work as a currency. It was all about the speculation/gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, and memecoin pump+dumps. Nobody bought their groceries or paid their rent with crypto, it was just the currency of darknet drugs and cybercrime. And multi-million-dollar exchange hacks seemed to be almost weekly headlines.

Crypto wasn't going well, even before NFTs came along, and before the environmental opposition to mining ramped up.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#326

Post by bena » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

floss_silicate wrote: post #204

bertil wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies. You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of…

> Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs. This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners. Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time. The in…

The problem is that bitcoin is greedy.

Every 10 minutes, a new coin is minted. That coin is given to the person who solved the correct hash. The chances of being the correct hash is 1/n where n is the number of miners active.

So if I fire up a miner and I'm the only one, I get a coin every 10 minutes. Life is good. Now, if you want bitcoins as well, you can fire up your own miner. Now we'll both get a coin every 20 minutes. But I was making 6 coins an hour, now I'm making 3. My production is halved. That sucks. But. I can spin up another miner. Now I have 2 to your 1. I get a coin roughly every 15 minutes, you get a coin roughly every 30.

You see where this is going, right? More miners, more coins. And the only way to get value out of these coins is to sell each coin for more than electricity used for all of your miners.

So you're incentivized to not only use every available unit of electricity to mine, you are also incentivized to sell at exorbitant prices. Bitcoin will not switch us over to renewables. It will also use renewables if and when they become available. Bitcoin has also caused long dormant fossil fuel generators to come online again.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#327

Post by shkkmo » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

janandonly wrote: post #126

Nowadays, I don't really discuss Bitcoin anymore with anyone. The people who need it the most will ask questions like: "How can I send money from the EU to the Dominican Republic without paying 25% 'banking commissions'?" or "How can I help my mother in Jakarta to get money quickly?" and totally organically, we come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is the answer... We in the West tend to be blind from the problems and…

Funny, because when I lived in the Dominican Republic, not a single one of the people I knew used Bitcoin to transfer money from the EU to the DR (and that wasn't for lacking of knowing people doing that.)

Meanwhile, overall computer literacy and even access to a computer was a massive challenge for many people in that country.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#328

Post by falcolas » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

trutannus wrote: post #199

isoprophlex wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because artists haven't generally backed themselves by weaponized ASICs and a very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception (not to mention pollution)

> Because artists haven't generally backed themselves [into a] very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolu…

At least they have the shark, and can just lock it away if they wish. Something no NFT buyer can claim.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#329

Post by bertil » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

floss_silicate wrote: post #204

bertil wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies. You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of…

> Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs. This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners. Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time. The in…

> This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.

No: both types of organisation are looking at areas with cheap electricity and free cooling, but large internet companies are looking at area with stable polical regime and low carbon footprint. Bitcoin miners _could_ value that; they certainly loudly claim that they do. In reality, they don’t. They set-up shops in countries with cheap coal like China and Kazakstan. It sounds like areas known for their corrupt officials and no rules around dumping electronic waste have some appeal.

They don’t go where electricity is carbon neutral. You know how I know that? Because I live near a lot of hydro power, Arctic cold, where all the big players have their European data centers——and there’s no crypto operation here.

Bitcoin advocates are delusional and loves confusing their claims (like they could operate a trust-less financial network) with reality. But reality is still easy to see: crypto a collection of wasteful, polluting, short-term scams.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#330

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

trutannus wrote: post #199

isoprophlex wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because artists haven't generally backed themselves by weaponized ASICs and a very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception (not to mention pollution)

> Because artists haven't generally backed themselves [into a] very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolu…

[deleted]