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

Why I’m Cryptophobic

bvp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 455 posts

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#121

Post by [deleted] »

dcolkitt wrote: post #58
mjburgess wrote: post #4

There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…

The continued existence of gold as a store of value (and to a lesser extent silver) contradicts this model. Very few economic transactions are denominated in gold, either as a medium of exchange or a unit of account. There is a small amount of industrial demand, but this is far too tiny to justify gold's gigantic market capitalization. Valued on industrial demand alone gold would maybe worth $100/oz, yet today it tra…

[deleted]

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#122

Post by cowtools »

ludston wrote: post #97
cowtools wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point, but consider the following: 1: Cryptocurrencies can still operate over distributed mesh networks or sneaker-nets in a semi-doomsday scenario. 2: With gold, it is difficult to verify its authenticity vs some impostor alloy without the necessary tech/knowledge. Edit: the bottom line is that in a doomsday scenario, people have little use for bitcoins or shiny yellow rocks.

You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the famous quote "Eureka I found it!"

Interesting point. I don't have any comment, but it looks like this guy disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#123

Post by jjoonathan »

syzygyhack wrote: post #98
avivo wrote: post #18

There is also a rebuttal article by the same fund: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/the-antidote-to-cryptophobia/ That said, I think Adam (the original article) is closer to being right. He doesn't even get into the thing that originally made me incredibly excited about the potential of blockchain tech—the way it lets one create a new sort of custom and irrevocable 'physics' for information and incentives. But the same irre…

> But the same irrevocability is now what makes me deeply concerned. Strange hang-up to have. Irrevocability is not a trait that is fundamental to blockchain applications. If the application is smart-contract based, irrevocability is a choice at the source code level. Just because one transaction in a block is irrevocable doesn't mean that another transaction in a future block can't undo whatever arbitrary state chan…

But that's just it: bad choices in the social layer become nearly irrevocable once a self-interested, powerful elite emerges. The bad choices put them on top and they will do anything to stay there.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#124

Post by hans1729 »

hackernudes wrote: post #117
hans1729 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? You're mixing up things. I can draw a one-off picture, that doesn't make the drawing valuable (sadly. If you want to buy my paintings, hmu). The value needs to be attributed by a shared denominator, which for the example of Mona Lisa is cultural prestige. Crypto has zero inherent cultural prestige, it's only value lies in social attribution. Wallets o…

OK, maybe the Mona Lisa was not a good example. But if somehow Da Vinci had produced a billion copies of the Mona Lisa it would not be nearly as valuable! My other point in that paragraph was that if a country prints more units of currency the value goes down, so scarcity is important to value.

Scarcity isn't 100% important for value - leverage is. Leverage can be tied to scarcity, but doesn't have to, it all depends on the goods which are being exchanged. Artworks exist just once, coupled with the attributed prestige the value increases. Guns exist a bunch, their price doesn't scale relative to their scarcity. Food is not priced relative to the amount on the market, but to the demand of the consumer. If the demand is high and so is scarcity, the price rises, but if demand is low but scarcity is high, the price stays low. [...]

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#125

Post by someo1ne »

mjburgess wrote: post #30
ntoskrnl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says BTC isn't used for payments? Many porn sites ONLY allow you to pay with crypto, including PornHub[1], and they're keeping the lights on somehow. It's being used by the Ukrainian military to pay their suppliers while the banking system is offline[2]. It's being used for remittances. I had to pay my rent with it once. Also VPNs, etc. There's far more global economic activity conducted in BTC than in gold. It a…

You're right that BTC has a floor because there's some economy behind it. I'd say in the 100USD-1000USD/coin range.

Happy to buy btc for $1000 of you!!

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#126

Post by xhkkffbf »

IncRnd wrote: post #87

> The world has never seen an economic phenomenon like crypto. There is no historical analogous technology trend or investment craze that comes close to capturing the sustained and frenzied momentum of crypto that has engulfed so many and that will continue to do. Never say never. Greed and speculation have a long and robust history. This crypto speculation and greed reminds of of the price of tulips. [1] During that…

There are other more practical examples too. For a time, the banks in the United States would issue their own paper currency that could be redeemed at the bank. The paper money traded up or down based upon the reputation of the bank and, to some extent, the distance to the nearest branch. It's pretty much an exact analogy to the world of alt coins, except the physical details like the location of the bank made a difference.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#127

Post by ETH_start »

aabhay wrote: post #109
welshwelsh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a future where the vast majority of work is automated. Most of this is computationally expensive work, such as training large neural networks, and the average program takes a substantial amount of resources to run, comparable to paying a human worker. In this scenario, labor power has been replaced by GPU power, which can be measured in terms of electricity. Everything from ordering a meal at a restaurant to…

Why not? What's to prevent two parties from creating a digital smart contract denominated in dollars? Don't we already do this with things like credit card pre-auth? And the best part is that the transaction is backed by a predictable rule of law as long as the transaction takes place within a country.

The traditional financial system and the political system it rests on are too unstable.

Witness Moscow commuters not being able to enter their metro as Apple Pay cuts them off.

Witness the AML surveillance regime shutting out entire countries:

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/10/23/money-reimagined-...

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#128

Post by lvass »

All these grandiose words for the pecuniary value of a market whose entire capitalization is considerably lower than Google, a company that can't even prevent it's main product from becoming absolute crap. A market that's also remarkably absent of utility. Cryptocurrencies are a drop (that's the closest to evaporating) in the ocean of money, this article reads as if Baader–Meinhof phenomenom discovered how to write by itself.

>10 accounts own 88% of Binance Coin

Correlating addresses to people like this is such a rookie mistake in a world with CEXes and smart contracts, why the hell is this person being taken seriously?

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#129

Post by cowtools »

hans1729 wrote: post #108
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs = attempted cultural prestige for crypto?

Ha, nice. Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins. (Unless the cultural prestige lies in the underlaying technology itself, in which case the piece of art is the blockchain-implementation, not embedded content)

Sure, but it is a suitable canvas, is it not?

If an artist signs an NFT or Colored Coin with a keypair that is associated with their public identity, shouldn't that be analogous to an autograph? If a physical, signed artistic work has more value than an unsigned work, does that mean that if you take the physical artistic work out of the equation you're left with the value of the signature? It's a funny question I guess. Like imagine people collecting PGP autographs.

Maybe art has some intrinsic value, but I think a large part of the "value" of an art piece is associated with the cultural relevance of the piece. It would follow that if you can associate a transaction output with some cultural relevance in the same sense that traditional artwork does, then it could have value, albeit not much.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#130

Post by yellowapple »

maury91 wrote: post #77
welshwelsh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a future where the vast majority of work is automated. Most of this is computationally expensive work, such as training large neural networks, and the average program takes a substantial amount of resources to run, comparable to paying a human worker. In this scenario, labor power has been replaced by GPU power, which can be measured in terms of electricity. Everything from ordering a meal at a restaurant to…

People being paid by the hour is just a result of simplifying work, in the very past everyone was a merchant and they sold their goods/services. The same old behaviour should be applied to machines, it doesn't matter how much resource a machine takes to do the job, what is important is the output. The pay should not be X*Watts, but X agreed in advance for training that specific neural network, this type of market inc…

> in the very past everyone was a merchant and they sold their goods/services

In the past nearly everyone was a serf and they provided their goods/services to their lieges in exchange for basic needs like having someplace to live.

In the present it's pretty much the same thing, except with us serfs being paid wages (which we then end up spending most of as rent and taxes) and serving multiple lieges.

Post reply on HN