Live data from Hacker News

Is this the end of crypto?

economist.com

161–170 of 448 posts

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#161

If I had a nickel for every time the MSM called the death of crypto I'd probably be able to buy one bitcoin by now.

Seriously. This has been asked and called time and time again, but has been proven wrong each time

It has that in common with everything that has ever failed, in that none of those things had ever failed before they failed.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#162

I'm not a crypto user so I may not understand the ramifications, but while I can see why "imminent death of crypto" headlines seem like clickbait, is it fair to say that this is the end of the crypto exchanges? This is the end of the your average Joe investing in crypto because they saw a cool ad during the Super Bowl? I could understand how that would translate to "gone" in the practical sense. There will still be t…

[deleted]

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#163
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any crossover in a Venn diagram of "government is so bad you need crypto" and "government is good enough that they won't shut off the internet to control the people"? If there isn't then crypto isn't very useful in those places.

It is hard to shut off the Internet (or at least should be, if it is properly decentralized). Point in case: Russia. Government has been trying to block everything they don't like for some ten years now I think. Controlling all the uplinks from the country is just not feasible (although they're working on buying everything out I believe), so it was in fact easier for them to make all the ISPs install some blocking eq…

If you shut down Internet, your economy suffers.

Even China cannot block Github, because it would harm their economy too much. Chinese developers need to access Github (PyPi, NPM), or they are not productive. The global software industry is built on the top of Western science that relies of on freedom of information. Thus, they need to let free information to flow against the authorianship will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for software engineering work done in Africa and sometimes South-East Asia.

You do realise this is nothing new and you can use TransferWise, MPesa or PayTM for this right? Bitcoin is slower than all this and violently fluctuates which loses people's money quickly. People also need to pay their bills in fiat anyway so whoever is receiving the Bitcoin needs to cash out to fiat anyway. At that point you might as well just use fiat instead.

All of these options you listed are significantly more expensive, and some of the contractors I work with don't even have that option due to KYC requirements - these people don't have access to functioning governments, they don't have passports. Also, most of my contractors don't use/have bank accounts (because where they live it costs money to have one) - so no way to take out the money if they used these services.

I did this dance at least 100 times and never ever had a problem with price fluctuation. Bitcoin is pretty stable on a 3-day timeframe.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#165
I hope it is but I suspect it won't be.

The bottom line is that the benefits of crypto have been exaggerated by people who, in may cases, don't have everyone's best interest at heart while the downsides have been vastly understated. It's particularly frustrating to hear people tout the ability to bypass the government when it fact that the most popular cryptocurrencies make it trivial for governments to track every transaction.

The reality that crypto evangelists never want to talk about is that to the average person, crypto is a MUCH worse experience than what they have today. Why would I buy something with crypto when my credit card offers me a ton of consumer protections? Especially if I'm buying something from an entity on the internet who may or may not be trustworthy.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know acceptance is growing, but 10+ years later, crypto still has extremely limited acceptance for daily goods and services. It is almost exclusively held as an investment. Which makes sense considering its volatility. Why would I make transactions with a unit of currency that sees hundreds of percentage change over just a few years? And as others say, there is no real value to it other than speculation. This gets…

> Why would I make transactions with a unit of currency that sees hundreds of percentage change over just a few years? Why wouldn't I? If I'm going to hold bitcoin for five minutes, what do I care how its price changes over years? The problem with bitcoin is that the technology is shit, and sucks for transactions, unless the world is prepared to only do like 50 transactions a minute.

That's only considering the scenario of end-user purchasing and also not considering resale.

Goods go through supply chains. Multiple transactions occur over a period of time in order to create a final good.

Service industries need to supply themselves with various goods in order to provide their services. The cost of those goods are used to price their services. When there is huge volatility through these processes, things fall apart.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#167
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC, A deflationary currency that lost 75% in value in a year, despite all the problems coming from projects that aren't even BTC.

> A deflationary currency that lost 75% in value in a year I don't know, my BTC is still worth one BTC.

That is sure to comfort you if it buys the equivalent of a candy bar.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#168

When Crypto was young it was this cool new technology that mostly interesting because of the underlying tech. But even back then it was mostly valuable for buying drugs online and other illegal stuff. Now it's that and a way to scam people of their life savings. I do hope it dies out, it should have been heavily regulated from the get go. Way too many people saw these high production commercials with their favorite c…

So bad people did bad things to stupid people using made up numbers, so people with guns should take other made up numbers and give them to people with guns, and tell the people with guns to make sure the bad people don’t do bad things to the stupid people, because they know what’s best for them because they’re too stupid and incapable of becoming strong enough for the big scary world?

> so people with guns should take other made up numbers and give them to people with guns, and tell the people with guns to make sure the bad people don’t do bad things to the stupid people

I think people who are doing the telling actually don't have guns; but are sitting atop a made-up hierarchy.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#169
I love the tech but I keep looking at crypto as a financial system build on nothing and backed by nothing. Financial system is a luxury that has to be a functional layer build on top of some economy but crypto is so standalone it is basically only supported by peoples interest in it. They forgot to build the economy and went straight to money and finance

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#170
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good government is a luxury many lack.

And that's a fair point. But the problem is Crypto is an investment playground by people from rich countries and legitimate uses of it in countries like say Venezuela is an extremely small part of total transactions.

I'm from Argentina but live in the UK: in 2020 my mom needed an urgent oncological treatment and the only method I had to transfer the money was using a cryptocurrency. I really don't like to talk about this stuff but when people here in HN keep making arguments like "oh who needs this stuff, I can send money to my friends with the Monzo app" it really makes me feel like my problems as someone from the third world don't matter at all
Post reply on HN