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The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

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Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://twitter.com/FatManTerra/status/1527153694218797058

And they’re a YCombinator company!!! https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stablegains “EARN HIGH AND STABLE INTEREST FROM DEFI LENDING MARKETS” Jesus…

And to complete the irony they made it to HN's front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431224

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might enjoy this: https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q

Summary for other people who might not know what this is: Nicholas Weaver, Lecturer at UC Berkeley after 9 years of research in cryptocurrency, lectures on Cryptocurrency as part of CS161: Computer Security. He explains the history of the data structures, some implementation choices, then a bunch of obvious lies from Bitcoin hucksters debunked, security problems, more history/lies debunked, the fraud and bs, computat…

There’s a reason HN largely misses the innovation behind crypto, and it’s fairly simple. Bitcoin is not a technical innovation; Bitcoin’s value does not come from being an interesting data structure. Bitcoins value and genius is almost entirely economic in nature and hand waiving the (very simple) cryptography and computer science involved to analyze the economics is where the sophistication and avenue for critiques would come in.

Technical knowledge gives you a menial job of auditing when it comes to Bitcoin. If you don’t have the economic sophistication and approach when discussing Bitcoin it only proves you are ignorant to what’s relevant.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#303

The issue here is actually pretty easy to grok. Crypto is a new market, so there is a historical amount of information asymmetry between consumers and producers. This brings a lot of scammers to the space. A lot of crypto is definitely bullshit, but there are some use-cases that I admire that aren’t just gambling on Shit coins.

Well said. This encapsulates a mature position most crypto skeptics will continue ignoring in favor of harping on tired arguments and cherry picked stories from centralized disasters which larp as open and decentralized.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#304
post #68

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.

Money is a creation of government, and frankly, the dollar ain’t so bad. If my bank goes under I’m protected by the FDIC. If Coinbase goes under they have the right to use my money to pay their creditors.

Wow you actually think Coinbase is the apt comparison here? You really believe that the peak use case of Bitcoin is leaving it on Coinbase? I think you should educate yourself.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#305

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 What's the difference? My employer doesn't create money, they just move it from clients to me. We're both still getting money out of it.

Employers other than banks don't create money, but they do create new value which never existed before. Most companies that extract natural resources or build things that people want increase the net wealth in our society. That wealth is denominated in currency, but in principle the wealth would still exist even if we eliminated money or switched to some other medium of exchange.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#306

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?

The “too many" part is obviously subjective, but cryptocurrencies are all just zero-sum trading vehicles similar to Ponzi schemes. Unlike real businesses which expect natural resources or build things, there is no new wealth being created in cryptocurrency. Mathematically, only a minority of participants can ever get rich. The majority of participants are suckers who will be left holding worthless coins when bubbles pop. Of course that could take many years, so in the meantime traders who are lucky enough to time the markets correctly can make huge profits.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#307
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is BTC not fundamentally sound. You can literally take 1 Billion dollars worth of BTC and cross the border without anyone questioning you. How does that not change how you see things ?

Fundamentally sound as what ? - As a currency, it's garbage. Currencies are inflationary to incentivize spending. A deflationary currency incentives hoarding, and harms the economy by dropping velocity. All the worst periods in history have been deflationary, not inflationary. Currencies benefit from being able to respond to changes in population, to shocks, to changing demographics. And they shouldn't cost a fully-r…

> Currencies are inflationary to incentivize spending

Really? Doesn't seem like getting off the gold standard was so miraculous in preventing recessions. Spending is great for consumerist societies, but people who are allowed to save are allowed to make far better economic votes on what is valuable past short term pleasure. Inflation doesn't encourage spending, it kills saving and makes storing wealth something only the sophisticated and wealthy can achieve.

> As a 'hedge against inflation,' it's garbage. In the most inflationary period in decades, it went from 69K to 28K. That's a drop of 60% in nominal terms. While the dollar dropped 9%. That means it dropped 69% in real dollar terms in a few months. RIP.

Pathetic cherry picking. How about I do the same thing and I start in 2013 and end anytime in the past 8 years? Price discovery is an obvious reason you as a laymen should be aware of. On chain security scaling with price is one you could be forgiven for being ignorant of. Price and security do not greatly separate and Bitcoin actually needs time for adoption for fundamental reasons (not just waiting for people to understand it).

> - As a 'store of value,' it's garbage. A store of value must be predictable. You should have a reasonable expectation that you can extract the same amount of value from it in the future. See above.

Redundant and addressed.

> It's an environmental catastrophe, wasting as much power as an entire nation (and yielding kilotons of e-waste per year) to achieve 6tps. Millions of times less efficient than Visa, or FedNow or RTP

Bitcoin is not comparable to Visa. Bitcoin is final settlement. Huge banks and financial institutions only do final settlement once a week for a reason - its slow and expensive. Bitcoin is actually faster cheaper and easier than a wire transfer and it uses far, far less energy to do so securely.

> Lightning

Lightning isn't the only layer-2, and it isn't killed by routing complexity, it simply requires more centralized routing hubs, users don't just connect to all their friends directly. This is fine for payments small enough to justify it.

Other layer 2 solutions are custodial and semi-custodial, which, just like financial systems now, settle large amounts of transactions at one time. Even a fully custodied Bitcoin bank (with insurance) fulfills the promise of secure and sound money. It also makes that bank highly auditable and accountable.

Fundamentally sound means what it says. It means the most basic function is the best in its class, and that once the market realizes it the world will build around it.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#308

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…

Cannot read your mind but I'll make a guess based on the fact that you are comparing it to a tech stock and the fact that most people on this website make this mistake: You are viewing Bitcoin as a technical project rather than an economic one.

Bitcoin is not technically interesting - it is economically genius. Undergrad cryptographers have learnt enough to re-implement the Bitcoin protocol, but understanding the genius of the composition of those simple primitives is a practice of game theory and economics. Historians of money who know not how to program have far more authority than a bitter techie when it comes to analyzing Bitcoin.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#309
post #62

Crypto crashes every couple years and of course it has grown immensely since the last crash so the scale and scope of these kinds of “analyses” grow with it. I’d imagine in 5 years in the next big crash it will be the top news around the global for many weeks.

No, I think there is a natural limit - eventually you have enough people burned by the scams, crashes, hacks etc. who will keep away, to the point that you don't have enough new entrants to put enough money in to have continuing growth. Unless there was an actual crypto economy, but at this point, there's not much more than speculation.

Thinking you can lump together the centralized scams and true crypto (of which Bitcoin is clearly the winner) forever will get you burned. The excited laymen will certainly be turned off as they make that same mistake in thinking, but the narrative will change and I can promise you nobody hates the scammers and grifters more than the 'crypto community' themselves.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#310
post #304
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is a creation of government, and frankly, the dollar ain’t so bad. If my bank goes under I’m protected by the FDIC. If Coinbase goes under they have the right to use my money to pay their creditors.

Wow you actually think Coinbase is the apt comparison here? You really believe that the peak use case of Bitcoin is leaving it on Coinbase ? I think you should educate yourself.

Coinbase claims to have 98 million accounts so yes I would consider them a considerable part of the ecosystem.
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