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The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

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Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#231

Post by woodruffw »

razemio wrote: post #222
vlovich123 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How would I prove that a file existed without a middlemen?

How are you defining "middleman"? You can do this with any basic commitment scheme: take a cryptographically secure hash of your file and publish it somewhere that's either (1) trivially copyable, or (2) difficult to tamper with. Alternatively, you could do an online scheme where someone asks you for your proof and you present them with your hash after being challenged. That's a gross oversimplification, but it's the general idea.

(In general, "prove that a file existed" is not something that you often want to do in the real world. What is it you're actually trying to accomplish?)

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#232

Post by WFHRenaissance »

bogota wrote: post #225
patmcc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shouts out to bogota

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#233

Post by gingkoguy »

DeRock wrote: post #177
patmcc wrote: 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.

Absolutely! These are also industries. Maybe our morals are not aligned with it but it is one of the biggest industry.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#234

Post by alexb_ »

There is absolutely zero legal usecase for cryptocurrencies. None. "oh but it might be useful for doing-" you are wrong. Full stop.

"but what about censorship" Circumventing government censorship is, by definition, illegal.

"but what about trustless" We do not live in a world where there is nobody that can be trusted. And if we did, why the hell would you want a currency where nothing can ever be reversed?

"but what about NFTs/smart contracts/DAO" All of these are useless and have resulted in nothing but blatant scams and illegal activity (because that's all cryptocurrency is useful for)

Cryptocurrencies have many great uses. You can gamble with them, you can buy drugs with them, you can pay ransom on software that just locked down your entire business for a day, as well as many other illegal activities. EVERY SINGLE OTHER USE, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, is something that centralized systems already do well. And if someone is trying to convince you otherwise, they are either trying to pass the bag to you or make you a part of their scam.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#235

Post by WFHRenaissance »

Nursie wrote: post #229
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Chanc…

You have a good heart, and I’m not saying I entirely disagree with you, but think of it this way:

If I’m paying taxes, I want it to go to something I care about. “Non-dom” status is blatant fraud for sure and I can’t entirely support that. But, shopping around for preferential territories is kind of what everyone is already doing, right? Imagine if your town made it illegal or expensive for you to move to a neighboring town? That’s the problem cryptocurrency is solving for the rich

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#236

Post by woodruffw »

mwcremer wrote: post #185
_vdpp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason you don’t keep all your savings under the mattress. There have been a number of stories about people losing or corrupting their crypto wallets. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Which raises an interesting question: what fraction of Bitcoin, for example, is effectively lost forever? I assume minuscule, but like entropy it never decreases?

You assume wrong! Approximately one in five BTC minted so far has been lost.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/business/tens-of-billions...

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#237

Post by datadata »

alexb_ wrote: post #159
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart contracts, DAOs, payments, self-sovereign identity, tokenization of real world assets, a few security use-cases, operating markets for prediction and asset-trade outside the control of external authorities (libertarian wet dream stuff), insurance and legal arbitration outside of the control of external authorities (more wet dreaming, but it’s happening), supply chain / provenance of assets… All of these could p…

>Crypto will succeed because the rich...corrupt...liberarians want it to Just because you want something to happen doesn't mean it will. Especially when you have to assume that we live in some fantasy world where nobody can be trusted and everything has to be done outside the influence of government (i.e. illegally) so we have to use a decentralized append-only database where nothing can be reversed because while you…

> Especially when you have to assume that we live in some fantasy world where nobody can be trusted

I think the value of crypto is that trust is not required to participate in the system and transact. You don't need to be second guessing every single person to benefit from this. It doesn't hurt to have a system that minimizes the consequences when trust is abused. It is a bit like the adage of wanting privacy even if you have nothing to hide. I might not want someone to have the option of stealing my money in a transaction, even if I don't think that they actually will.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#238

Post by [deleted] »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #121
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #23

Crypto cannot create wealth, only move it around. If too many people become crypto-rich and try to spend it on real-world assets, the assets will just inflate in price. What can happen is that crypto could replace other forms of money. Governments will likely fight this tooth and nail however, because crypto is currently an anti-government technology.

> Crypto cannot create wealth, only move it around. If too many people become crypto-rich... Not really understanding this. If crypto is just moving wealth around, then how can "too many" people become crypto-rich?

[deleted]

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#239

Post by dang »

patmcc wrote: post #111
sk0g wrote: 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?

Please don't be snarky on HN or take threads into predictable flamewars.

There are ways to make substantive points about this topic, but this way just leads to yet another tedious conflagration.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#240

Post by WFHRenaissance »

woodruffw wrote: post #167
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, but PKI still relies on cert authorities which have been compromised before

DeFi is, after all, notably devoid of serious compromises :-) More seriously: there are cryptographically sound schemes (like CT) that address CA compromise.

CT is cool, but who is writing/submitting those logs?
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