Live data from Hacker News

The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

newyorker.com

221–230 of 332 posts

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#221
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my stated use-cases are already in use. Society will evolve towards being trustless as the moneyed-class pursue sovereign citizenship and shop for preferential territory on a global scale. They will need a secure way to trustlessly store and exchange funds. Cryptocurrency literally exists nearly entirely for this reason. Ignore the stupid coins.

> Society will evolve towards being trustless as the moneyed-class pursue sovereign citizenship and shop for preferential territory on a global scale. Then I believe it is up to the rest of us to put a stop to this, rather than facilitate it.

Hmmmm sure I can maybe agree with this, maybe? I don’t think you can stop it though… any ideas?

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not without a middlemen that we trust (cert authority in this case).

That's certainly not true. P2P file transfer systems have long provided cryptographic guarantees that the file you receive hasn't been modified by anyone, even though you're fetching it from multiple untrusted sources simultaneously. Merkle trees have made this more efficient and offered maybe more guarantees, but being able to have files be transferred in a distributed fashion but impervious to corruption is not a n…

That is different use case. How would I prove that a file existed without a middlemen?

I would gladly switch since the method I am currently using isn't exactly cheap.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am. I'm not aware of a threat model in which you can't trust the frequencies GPS is on but you can trust the frequencies that the FCC allows personal radio transmissions to be on. Seems like a lot of added complexity (and, notably, no legal recourse) for essentially the same failure mode.

https://www.wired.com/story/spoof-jam-destroy-why-we-need-a-...

Yes, GPS is not particularly secure. But I don't think that addresses the threat model above.

(In general, jamming is always a possibility with anything wireless. That is just not going to change. What might change is spoof resistance, which can be accomplished with schemes that are a lot simpler than anything DeFi can conjure. There's a decent amount of work on related schemes in the vehicle-to-vehicle communication space.)

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the cool parts of crypto is that it enables new forms of social coordination that take place entirely within an online context. We haven't even scratched the surface of what could be possible with DAOs; the UIs and educational materials don't exist yet. But given how online people are in general (and they're only likely to become more online in the future), it's natural they'll want digitally-native ways to or…

To be completely honest--and I don't mean to sound mean--that doesn't seem very cool at all to me. That's a lot of words to say that with crypto you can own a token that signifies you're a part of a community. And that's the coolest thing you can think of. The iPhone is much cooler than that, I use it all day. And Steve Jobs didn't talk about it nearly as much before it started being used widely.

The potential is way beyond just "proof of membership", but that's the only tool that's currently out there and in active usage, as far as I know.

When I say coordination, I mean all sorts of collective decision-making and agency can take place using crypto as a medium, if someone has a vision and enough people are invested in making it happen, see: https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/. Basically, if you need to get groups of people to align themselves and act in concert, and it's happening over the internet, crypto has the potential to make that happen. The technology is fundamentally social in nature, whereas an iPhone is fundamentally a personal object that happens to include some social tooling.

I don't know how it's going to look. Maybe groups will work together to purchase and maintain land. Maybe you'll see digital guilds or unions forming around creative niches. Regen (https://www.regen.network/) is working on communities for landowners who want to get carbon credits. It's really early. Maybe nothing will happen at all, and I'll look back on these posts with embarrassment. But it's exciting to work on projects building stuff that really doesn't exist yet, if only to see what happens.

(oh, and, people really aren't talking about this side of crypto at all. this is an entirely separate thing from bitcoin and defi)

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#225
post #111
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you’d be an idiot to ignore the realistic and adopted use-cases Ignoring the hostility, what would you list as the realistic and adopted use-cases for crypto?

Buying drugs, laundering money, ransomware, there are literally dozens. Oh, did you want legal ones?

Yep that is it. It’s certainly not massively easier to do cross country transactions with it and much cheaper…

Its massively telling how much this and other forums completely neglect that a world outside the west exists.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#226
post #177
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying drugs, laundering money, ransomware, there are literally dozens. Oh, did you want legal ones?

More specifically, it is > Buying drugs, laundering money, ransomware over the internet. And I’m only being slightly facetious, these are serious industries. Bringing the coordination and scale of the internet to these activities is big business.

Yeah a lot of weird morality policing— these are massive industries being served by the crypto space rn

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#227
post #200

I think cryptocurrencies/nfts are crap and have no value, but to play devil’s advocate here; for all the people saying this is all doomed, the top cryptocurrency assets seem to more or less look like the tech market and BTC is doing better than, say Netflix. Netflix actually makes things and is 76% down from ath, while btc only 66%. So why is it so resilient? When will it die if it indeed has no value? Are we just gr…

Bitcoin will (mostly) die when wealthy Chinese no longer need a way to evade capital control laws.

Which is to say, never? I mean, sure there is a chance after Xi some open market president will appear, however, it is more likely, as all opposition is no longer in play, that it will get more closed and there will be more use for cryptocurrencies from that perspective.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#229
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Society will evolve towards being trustless as the moneyed-class pursue sovereign citizenship and shop for preferential territory on a global scale. Then I believe it is up to the rest of us to put a stop to this, rather than facilitate it.

Hmmmm sure I can maybe agree with this, maybe? I don’t think you can stop it though… any ideas?

Regulation of the cryptocurrency space, for example, such that huge amounts of funds can't be kept and moved anonymously and without consideration of (for instance) local taxes in these countries the rich shop between.

Those who do so must be held to the same standards as those already resident.

In the UK recently we have seen (yet another) backlash against this in the form of the outcry against the wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was using "non-Domiciled" status to avoid masses of tax, despite having been resident in the country for multiple years.

I've no issue with people moving around, but moving around specifically to avoid contributing to the country you're actually residing in needs to be ended, and regulating cryptocurrency may have to be part of that.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you keep all your cash in the bank? Frankly I feel terrified if I don't have enough cash on hand to last at least a month. For instance the IRS has been known to freeze bank accounts of completely innocent business owners on wild goose chase accusations that small deposits are structured, for instance. It's also worth noting there are certain unique risks to exchanges that aren't really applicable to most bank…

Not sure if it’s my circle, but you seem an exception. I live in a tiny village and haven’t touched cash for years (somewhere 2018), nor has anyone I know. Personally I hear what you are saying as I had my accounts frozen (in my country, you can basically sue a company and start by freezing the assets of the company and their owners without any proof) a long time ago, so I always have a lot of accounts no one knows a…

Gold isn't really for when the entire system collapses. It's for when your own country collapses but some other place where gold is valuable doesn't. It's easier to shove a few grams of gold up your ass and make it to somewhere stable than to shove a roll of hundreds up your ass. This is actually what happened in Vietnam, as I understand, as some individuals bribed their way out with fisherman's boats using what gold they had.
Post reply on HN