Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On anti-crypto toxicity

blog.mollywhite.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 734 posts

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#341

Post by [deleted] »

S6eUL wrote: post #306
lukeramsden wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of interesting discussion, both on Twitter and in community-specific areas like blogs and Discords and such. It’s just drowned out by the nonsense, which is inevitable due to the association so many people have with getting rich quick with cryptocurrencies. It’s the same with retail traders buying options - there is some interesting discussions happening in some places, and interesting strategies bein…

Granted, but discussions on Twitter and Discord are quite a bit different in nature from long-form comment chains on HN or reddit.

[deleted]

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#342

Post by miohtama »

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…

Cryptocurrencies might not answer to all of these questions. However there is one question where it gives an answer. It is how to create more efficient financial system. And part of this answer might lead to rebalancing some of distribution of the wealth, mostly by reducing operating costs and profit margins of the current Wall St and other local oligopolic financial institutions.

Blockchains do create fundamental value, not just speculative value. Tech people often dismiss this claim and do not want to analyse further. To demostrate this, I wrote a post where I am comparing stock and cryptocurrency trading venues and showing that a decentralised system is the most cost efficient choice at least with some data points and why it is so:

https://tradingstrategy.ai/blog/most-efficient-market-is-on-...

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#343

Post by shkkmo »

trutannus wrote: post #312
shkkmo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And crypto isn't dominated by the wealthy and being used to serve their ends? Open your eyes my friend. There is far more corruption and disfunction in the average cryptocurrency org than the average government.

Did I say that? I explicitly say in multiple places that I'm not advocating for crypto, just asking people to not put the blind trust into their government "just passing a law". It always baffles me why someone can't say "I'm opposed to X" without another person coming along and saying "that means you're in favor of Y". Don't respond to what you think I said, respond to what I actually said.

You seem pretty focused on this idea of "blind trust" of the government which nobody is advocating. So perhaps you should take your own advice?

I didn't assume you supported crypto. I was pointing out that crypto has all the problems you specified as bad or worse.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#344

Post by falcolas »

rglullis wrote: post #307
perlgeek wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the 100th clone of the million dollar home page, I would have dismissed the web, if there hadn't been also been hundreds of good/useful/entertaining websites around at that point.

Just like that for some of us working with web3, the amount of useful applications that come up more than make up for all the stupidity going on with the "NFT art" space.

FWIW, I haven’t seen one “Web3” application. All I ever see is folks singing its potential from the rafters. Loudly.

Perhaps the “web 3” evangelists can switch to show more of these apps, and the real world value they provide.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#345

Post by ______-_-______ »

tablespoon wrote: post #323
c0mptonFP wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

Crypto has addressed real problems for Ukraine's military.

> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/bitcoin-ukrain...

Is this BS and marketing?

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#346

Post by pshc »

bertil wrote: post #80
brianolson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are new blockchains based on technology a million times more efficient than Bitcoin. Ethereum is trying to upgrade. Bitcoin is terrible, but this is fixable by using things other than bitcoin.

> a million times more efficient than Bitcoin That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwa…

I wouldn’t say the energy use of non-proof of work chains is millions of times worse than existing traditional finance and web2 solutions. Probably comparable. There is much energy wasted in the products themselves and knock-on effects. Machine learning for ads and analytics, for example. Banks using thousands of warm bodies to push around excel spreadsheets.

Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#347

Post by soco »

nikanj wrote: post #318
Traster wrote: post #46

I think toxicity from the anti-crypto crowd is basically inevitable at this point. It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. None of their claims have materially panned out. There's some promise in some places - mainly in the most nerdy corners of ETH, but it's still only promises. Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stup…

One of the claims has panned out: Plenty of people have gotten rich. To be fair, they've gotten rich from selling their early-adopter cryptos to the next fool. But many people have won the lottery.

The same argument can be made about Ponzi or MLM schemes...

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#348

Post by TomSwirly »

trutannus wrote: post #235
raspberry1337 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, and I personally find 'modern' art unappealing and a scam (banan on wall 30k plz), but this is because it is being used a commodity in a rotten, oligarchic financial system where we bail out corrupt bankers at the cost of the people. With crypto, the pollution is built into the system. It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on wa…

> It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls. So is the contemporary art world. The contemporary art world is vastly polluting as well. How much GHG do you think is generated to run a museum, or warehouse, transport aircraft, ect, filled with bad contemporary art?

This is a wild argument. You're comparing apples and anteaters.

No-one is proposing that contemporary art is some sort of technological breakthrough that will completely revamp society, make everyone rich and change finance for the rest of time.

(Also, I'm sorry, but I do NOT believe that contemporary art consume even a tiny fraction of the power that cryptocurrencies do when nearly all of it sits in a handful of warehouses and never moves, just changes ownership abstractly. You would really need to prove this claim.)

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#349

Post by lui8906 »

Traster wrote: post #292
sneak wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of their claims have materially panned out. Well, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of money across the planet, to any country with internet access, for tiny sums, safely, irreversibly, to anyone. Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example. Transnational, permissionless internet money is quite handy. That wasn't possible before, and that's pretty useful, so I think the basic claim (that cry…

Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen? What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a f…

> Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen?

Which part of the claim are you refuting here? It is a fact that one can send very large sums of value between two addresses for a trivial transaction fee. This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).

> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.

I spoke with someone yesterday who lives in Nigeria, they were moving to Rwanda and needed to pay a deposit in advance. They were unable to pay via MoneyGram, Western Union etc. - one provider offered to handle the payment and requested many documents for a few days and in the end rejected the transfer. This person then had to send money to a friend who lived in the US who then forwarded it to Rwanda. This experience made the person feel isolated and outside of the system. This is an anecdote however my guess is if you think PayPal is "good enough" you don't live in a country that is marginalized by the status quo payment system.

> So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.

So that's your take, global finance is a solved problem? No todos? No improvements needed we can pack it up? This is a stunning poverty of imagination in my estimation and a denial of the very real struggle many people face day to day in transacting.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#350

Post by seanw444 »

trutannus wrote: post #208
throwaway4aday wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like that's how democracies fail. Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation. We do nothing to address the root causes of those failures because that would mean closing a lot of the loop holes that allow politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions aka corruption. Why else would we need b…

> Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation. The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.

But hey, at least they banned knives. They really know how to destroy crime there.
Post reply on HN