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Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

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Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#31

Post by m-watson »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #21

Never heard of this guy before, but why would a writer with a career that has no relationship whatsoever with tech (beside fictional writing) reach #1 post on HN for a tech-related topic? And I'm not saying that to defend crypto, I hate that shit. I'd rather buy a pet rock.

He has written a lot of sci-fi that has to do with technology including cryptocurrencies and the metaverse(he was potentially the first use of the term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse). That would be why it can get attention, he is a writer who has explored these topics a lot so you can say his relationship to it is thinking and organizing his thoughts about tech / tech-dystopia.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#32

Post by giraffe_lady »

arethuza wrote: post #6
giraffe_lady wrote: post #3

Maybe it'll cause him to reflect on some of his other techno-optimism too. I like stephenson fine but he has a huge blind spot about the role of tech companies in positive transformations. I read seveneves a couple years ago and it was so intensely offputting to see obvious neil degrasse tyson and elon musk standins in straightforwardly heroic roles. For someone with such a sophisticated eye for power and change it j…

I know a few people seem to think that Sean Probst was modelled on Musk - but I didn't see him like that at all.... Edit: Wasn't Probst supposed to be from New Jersey?

Eh I think he's a composite representing just a general "tech visionary world changing genius guy." Based on when the book was written and some of the concrete details (space mining company) I read him as pretty significantly based on musk and bezos though.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#34

Post by rco8786 »

legrande wrote: post #19

We all started off enthused about cryptocurrency and then the Wolf of Wall Street types co-opted it and ruined it for everyone pulling off the most sophisticated Ponzi schemes in history. The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld (who have to somehow convert to fiat privately using novel techniques, and that gets harder with regulation and sanctions and outright banning of tumbler systems).

> The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld

Perhaps that was the only use case for it all along

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#35

Post by tlb »

taeric wrote: post #22

This reads oddly to me. In particular, I don't see what makes any of this narrative different to anything else you can make or sell. Indeed, most folks that are making money are doing it by selling their labor or thought work. That is, any discussion of "intrinsic value" is doomed to be axiomatic. Things have value largely because we agree for them to have value. And indeed, a ton of "wealth" is built up on the value…

I think the problem is the scale of the money. No one is worried when people pay $10 for some intangible thing like in-game bling. But NFTs sell for amounts of money people associate with cars or houses, and it gives them icky feelings when other people can throw around money like that.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#37

Post by herculity275 »

badcppdev wrote: post #9

Anyone who has read Cryptonomicon should remember that the hero protagonists went to a lot of effort to secure a large mass of gold to 'back' the currency they wanted to create. The Baroque Trilogy is less clear as Isaac Newton mints new currency. Does that mean that perhaps Stephenson's opinions were always that currency needs to be backed by something whether it is gold or national borders.

And yet his best approximation of cryptocurrency actually comes from REAMDE, in which it's an in-game currency for an MMO backed by virtualized geology (which doesn't sound too different from Bitcoin hash rate).

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#38

Post by danschuller »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #3

Maybe it'll cause him to reflect on some of his other techno-optimism too. I like stephenson fine but he has a huge blind spot about the role of tech companies in positive transformations. I read seveneves a couple years ago and it was so intensely offputting to see obvious neil degrasse tyson and elon musk standins in straightforwardly heroic roles. For someone with such a sophisticated eye for power and change it j…

Maybe you already know but it was purposely written to be optimistic.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120319135605/http://www.worldp...

The idea being sci-fi feeds scientific discovery, but recent sci-fi had stopped doing this, so it was an attempt to address this.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#39

Post by hoherd »

badcppdev wrote: post #9

Anyone who has read Cryptonomicon should remember that the hero protagonists went to a lot of effort to secure a large mass of gold to 'back' the currency they wanted to create. The Baroque Trilogy is less clear as Isaac Newton mints new currency. Does that mean that perhaps Stephenson's opinions were always that currency needs to be backed by something whether it is gold or national borders.

Don't forget Reamde:

> It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold (or silver, or diamonds, or various other mythical and magical elements and gems that the Creatives would later add to the game world).

> Other online games did this by fiat. Gold pieces were reposited in dungeons guarded by monsters. The more powerful the monster, the more gold it was squatting on. To get the gold, you had to kill the monster, and building a character powerful enough to do so required a certain amount of time and effort. The system functioned okay, but in the end, the decision as to where the gold was located and how much effort was needed to win it was just an arbitrary choice made by a geek in a cubicle somewhere.

> Richard’s crazy idea was to eliminate the possibility of such fudging by having the availability of virtual gold stem from the same basic geological processes as in the real world. The same, that is, except that they’d be numerically simulated instead of actually happening.

Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore

#40

Post by rco8786 »

deweller wrote: post #29
legrande wrote: post #19

We all started off enthused about cryptocurrency and then the Wolf of Wall Street types co-opted it and ruined it for everyone pulling off the most sophisticated Ponzi schemes in history. The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld (who have to somehow convert to fiat privately using novel techniques, and that gets harder with regulation and sanctions and outright banning of tumbler systems).

The illicit share of all cryptocurrency transaction volume in 2022 was 0.24%. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2023-crypto-crime-repor...

Sorry but how on earth is this data supposed to be reliable when the underlying transactions are explicitly anonymous
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