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

391–400 of 734 posts

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#391

Post by ulzeraj »

bluescrn wrote: post #325
ulzeraj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's our western perspective. Apparently NFTs and financialization are an ethereum and clones thing. Bitcoin has placed a ton of focus on cheap payments on the Lightning Network. Monero is focusing on privacy. Our media is hyper focused on tech bros getting rich on monkey pictures but out there people in Nigeria and Sudan are using Bitcoin and Tether as their life line. Ucranians did it too and that's the only option for Russian content creators who are mostly against Putin's regime. Yeah yeah scammy tether but for them its leagues better than the hyper inflated money they have available.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#392

Post by reedjosh »

HWR_14 wrote: post #374
sharperguy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny because the bitcoin community hates NFTs just as much as the anti-crypto community.

That's because NFTs are competing with BTC to lure in the newest money.

It's not about getting rich on Bitcoin, it's about taking back our choice of what money to use. Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#393

Post by obelos »

keskival wrote: post #175

"How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?" The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.

Bring back postal banking! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#394

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rglullis wrote: post #372
falcolas wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

> you haven't seen it, you were not interested in looking and I doubt that any "evangelist" is going to change your mind

This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.)

One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they presently can't. VR has that. Crypto, not so much.

Instead we have pitches of doing the same things one can currently do, but decentralised. (Again, see App.net.) That will be appealing for a certain political niche. But Truth Social for libertarians, while definitely worth something, isn't the narrative web3 wants.

[1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#395

Post by bobthechef »

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…

Broadly, no political order functions in the absence of a moral society.

We've become rather fixated on the notion of systems that can somehow produce good outcomes no matter how vicious its members are. The problem here is that any political and social order is only as good as its members and governing bodies. There isn't some disembodied "system, out there" that can strap us all into externally imposed restraints and put us all in cages to constrain our bad actions. The quality of a society is absolutely dependent on its members respecting the common good which includes respecting good laws. (That's another point. Leaders are not free to impose any old law and claim it is legitimate. Laws can only determine the general good as proscribed by natural law, i.e., human nature.) Indeed, I wouldn't want to live in a society of savages in which a tyrant exercises such control. This is precisely the lesson to be learned from Hobbes' Leviathan: the more immoral a society becomes, the most governments clamp down to try to maintain order and the viability of that society.

That doesn't mean we can't discuss better or worse political orders. Indeed, political orders are determined by law and law by objective moral principle.

And a word on equality. So far, crypto seems to be a place for wild speculation and the amassing of (real or imagined) wealth by a relatively small number. That's probably a large part of the appeal, like the lottery. But more to the point: equality is not a virtue. Justice is. But who said we are all due the same? We're not. No two people are economically equally valuable (nor is economic value all there is). The problem is poverty, or the excess influence of money in politics and culture, or usury and left, or unjust pay, but not inequality. How is crypto a solution to these social problems, and in ways that surpass traditional currencies?

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#396

Post by mr_spothawk »

isoprophlex wrote: post #194
trutannus wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, anyone can generate NFTs though. How does this differ from saying something like "the artist who called an empty room art is the jumping the shark moment, now I'm advocating against art at every turn"?

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

the fashion industry is incredibly wasteful... promotes all sorts of un-healthy lifestyle behaviors... relies on sweatshops.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#397

Post by duxup »

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…

The disconnect between the ethos of cryptcurency and reality seems immense.

There are some nice ideas there, but in practice everyone seems out to "get theirs".

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#398

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

dcolkitt wrote: post #379
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any fix for a failure in human organization(s) is going to come from ... humans. There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. When things are of a large enough scope, the way that humans tend to organize to get things done, or get things fixed, is called "a state". Just like all human efforts, the outcome will likely not be perfect. But there actually isn't another way. Sure, you can suggest the i…

> the way that humans tend to get things fixed, is called "a state"... But there actually isn't another way. Sure there is. It's called "entrepreneurship". In fact, far more of the improvement in the human condition has come from it than the state. It's astounding to me that we're on an Internet forum about startups, and people are saying that the only way to improve the world is through political activism.

Well, first of all "Hacker News" is not an internet forum about startups. You're thinking of the purpose of YCombinator, which hosts Hacker News but is not Hacker News.

Second, some of us have the experience of having been through, or been adjacent to, the social and political movements of the 1960s, which largely shunned actual political action in favor of personal change and the creation of new, non-state organizations. Despite the widespread availability of wholewheat bread in 2022, an honest retrospective analysis of this approach would have to conclude that it was largely a failure, at least in terms of the various goals involving widespread political and social change.

Thirdly, some of us have been a part of certain, ahem, startups that have gone on to be as much as part of "the problem" as anything that came before them, meaning that our expectation that entrepeneurial capitalism as the savior doesn't seem particularly promising either.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#399

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#400

Post by soco »

danaris wrote: post #250
mnw21cam wrote: post #67

I don't think I am ever going to get used to "crypto" meaning "cryptocurrency" and not "cryptography". Can't we just keep calling it "cryptocurrency"? I thought this article would be about the various misguided governments' attempts to outlaw cryptography.

Given the recent decline in interest in both NFTs and cryptocurrency in general, I'd say within the next 5 years or so we'll be able to go back to using "crypto" to mean "cryptography" without much fear of confusion.

Maybe we should call all those products "cryptids".
Post reply on HN