I'm unsure if the issue is with Stephenson or the writer of this piece (I'd guess the latter), but in Jack and the Beanstalk the magic beans are actually magic and lead to wealth. That analogy seems like one that would be used by a proponent of crypto, not an opponent.
Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
151–160 of 178 posts
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view. Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop. That being said, I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible eno…
> Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop. It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is. > I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency. In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones. I know we all love United States Dollars,…
> In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones.
Nobody is supposed to save fiat except as a liquidity cushion against personal tail risk for which you pay the spread between interest rates and inflation. Nobody has ever advised people to save fiat anywhere. They advice is to keep an emergency savings account and invest the rest.
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#153We 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).
> 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.
I mean, plenty of people were pointing out that trying to rewind finance to the era of privately-issued money without controls would lead to a recurrence of all the problems that that has historically produced and is the reason why that’s no longer a norm, while the entusiasts were just chanting “zero-trust” and “outside of government control”. We weren’t all enthused, or surprised with “the Wolf of Wall Street types”. (And I doubt very much the pioneers in the field were historically ignorant enough to not know exactly what they were creating.)
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#154We 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).
Criminal Underworld was its best value add. It should have been the selling point all along. The idea that it's a store of value, and argument I've heard my smartest friends make, is testament to the adage "Greed makes man blind and foolish, and makes him an easy prey for death."
> Criminal Underworld was its best value add. It should have been the selling point all along.
Hasn’t it been? I mean, aren’t the other stories largely just the things you say in polite company because “we are engaging in the business deliberately to enable and profit from the criminal underworld” has…potentially adverse social consequences.
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, agree that I don't imagine this world being likely. Just imagining that there is no reason these points have to be backed by US dollars. And if you gave people a way to transfer value from one game to another, they may take you up on it. Incentive would be to give a reason to jump worlds, as it were.
> I don't imagine this world being likely. Just imagining that there is no reason these points have to be backed by US dollars There are so many hypotheticals and logical leaps here... This is not a useful argument anymore ... it's just you fantasizing. I am out.
Apologies if I wasted time? I wasn't trying to push a useful argument for crypto in any way here. Just wanted to understand the argument of Stephenson.
If there is something there I should treat more seriously, I'm game.
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for succinctly saying what takes me multiple paragraphs. One nitpick - it’s easily $10s of billions of in investment, more than likely approaching or surpassing $100s of billions. A16Z alone has raised roughly $10b. Throw in other big VCs, a bunch of coin/crypto specific funds, likely thousands or tens of thousands of angel/seed rounds we’ve never heard of capitalizing on the hype (or just outright frauds),…
You are both going around my very simple argument that these mind-blowingly huge piles of money poured into crypto scams, don't undermine the undeniable reality of crypto that is not a scam. Yes, people pouring their savings in tulips, fake railroad companies, and beanie babies is absurd. Does it follow that tulips, railroad companies, and baby plushies are scams and criminal in nature? The grifters and their victims…
In attempting to calculate a total for "investment" in the ecosystem my criteria is whether or not the investor considered it an investment.
Consider Theranos as a non-crypto example. Fraud, yes, with two people convicted under those charges. Holmes was charged with defrauding investors and not convicted on those counts (IIRC). Balwani was.
I think it's relatively safe to say the parallel between people investing in what ended up being a bubble, fraud, etc (from tulips on) was considered as investment from the source of funds - the investors. It's why they call it "speculative investment". Speculative but investment nonetheless. Any early money on moonshot tech companies could be characterized the same way. Just turns out for Facebook, Google, etc it worked out because the founders and team weren't defrauding from the start, executed well, etc. It helps that the fundamental premise of these companies didn't go against human nature and demonstrated tremendous value and therefore significant user adoption from day 1.
Where it gets more complicated is going back to the original argument - money poured into the space for what ostensibly should have been work to legitimately further the ecosystem. Frankly I'm not entirely sure how to characterize it but the other issue here are situations like FTX (which I didn't include or mention). They did a lot of legitimate work for a while. How would this be accounted for in this distinction? What about companies like Coinbase that have had wildly swinging valuations? The other scary thing - what about companies/projects/etc that have taken investment but just haven't collapsed yet (due to outright fraud or otherwise)?
So... Very complex scenario but I think it's safe to say the core point remains - there's been a ton of money, effort, and time (over the course of 14 years) committed to this space with essentially nothing to show in the real world. I've spent a lot of time analyzing on chain data and at best there are MAYBE 100m crypto "users" worldwide. If we say $100b of investment that's a user acquisition cost of $1000 - and investors can't even fully capitalize on those users due to the decentralized nature of crypto. Hell, let's call if $50b of non-fraud "legit" investment. That's still $500/user which is at least one order of magnitude beyond anything you see in the non-crypto space.
If the entire crypto space was a tech startup funded by VCs they would have cut their loses, exited years ago, and crypto would essentially be back at the "investment" model of early Bitcoin (which IMO is perfectly fine and even preferred by many). Even the early web investment period (with the 2000 bubble burst) saw enough successes and returns within the span of a decade (1995-2005) to keep the money pouring in (and returning) to this day.
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Real Newton worked at the mint too, it may not necessarily represent Stephenson's views. Doesn't Snow Crash have hyperinflation followed by a plethora of private fiat currencies?
It does, yes. I think a lot of people haven't read the book or have forgotten that the world of Snow Crash is an extreme dystopia -- certainly not the sort of world most people want to live in. That's why I was so baffled as to why Facebook glommed on to the term "metaverse" with such fervor. The "metaverse" comes from that book, and is a major aspect of the dystopia. The term does not have positive connotations.
Actually I think the metaverse in snow crash has a pretty positive connotation. The real world is the dystopian hell hole but the metaverse is somewhere where individuals can succeed based on the merits of their ability.
The real world is dominated by corporate domination, Regulatory capture, and stagnation. In the metaverse, it doesn't matter if you are a pizza delivery boy. You have power and agency if you have skills and determination, at least in comparison to the default world
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been 14 years, billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That's just fact. Time to move on.
If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation. Here are some stats for…
> https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-data/
Triple A is a crypto payments company with much more self-interest than those of us who are skeptical towards crypto. The base methodology for all of their statistics is ridiculous: "Let's take a cherry-picked dubious survey of crypto adoption done by the Bank of Canada and extrapolate those numbers to the entire world POPULATION". Bonus points for their "creativity" with this methodology - worldwide population is roughly 8 billion while internet users (the real TAM for crypto) is closer to 5 billion. So already you need to shave at least 35% off their numbers.
Their baseline "420m crypto users worldwide" estimate (which is already bad considering TAM is > 5 billion internet users) can be easily debunked to at least 1/3 of that number (100m - which is still incredibly optimistic) by spending an hour looking at block explorers across the top 10 chains (evaluating daily/monthly transaction counts, tx/rx address pairs actually used for daily/monthly transactions, etc). When I last did it to get to the 100m number I was VERY fair to crypto - round up everywhere, assume address = user (it doesn't), count each address as a unique user per chain, etc. If crypto had anything resembling the legit DAU/MAU metrics you see from publicly traded companies the total for the entire crypto space would likely be closer to 50m (or less).
I'm always fascinated by this - crypto advocates constantly talk about the transparency, openness, etc provided by blockchain while simultaneously touting those absurd Triple-A statistics. You will never see them do a real (yet still easy) analysis like I have because the real numbers look terrible.
If there was any real interest in the crypto ecosystem succeeding crypto enthusiasts would take a real hard look at the real stats, acknowledge they have a problem with adoption, and try to fix it. They're just too personally invested financially and thus spend their time "pumping their bags".
I doubt a FAANG or other non-crypto employee is worried in the slightest by the "threat" of an entire ecosystem that has acquired a whopping 50m-100m users over 14 years.
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does, yes. I think a lot of people haven't read the book or have forgotten that the world of Snow Crash is an extreme dystopia -- certainly not the sort of world most people want to live in. That's why I was so baffled as to why Facebook glommed on to the term "metaverse" with such fervor. The "metaverse" comes from that book, and is a major aspect of the dystopia. The term does not have positive connotations.
Actually I think the metaverse in snow crash has a pretty positive connotation. The real world is the dystopian hell hole but the metaverse is somewhere where individuals can succeed based on the merits of their ability. The real world is dominated by corporate domination, Regulatory capture, and stagnation. In the metaverse, it doesn't matter if you are a pizza delivery boy. You have power and agency if you have ski…
I guess it's a mix. The metaverse isn't without its positives, but it also exists to strengthen the dystopia and allow it to continue. Look at the "bugs", and the whole premise of the book -- that a computer virus infected the metaverse and then jumped to infect the real world.
I read the metaverse as a mechanism of control. People will put up with the dystopian hell of their everyday life because they can have the fantasy of power and control in the metaverse -- but in the end, it's the real world that is the only thing that actually matters and that's why it's fought over. Even the fights in the metaverse are just to further the fights in the real world.
Nobody with actual power /really/ cares about the metaverse except insofar as it can affect the real world.
Re: Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
#160Crypto solves no problems for ordinary users. Literally and actually, with no exceptions, no consumer cares about a public ledger or any of its other features. They do care about being able to dispute a transaction if they are scammed or unhappy. Crypto solves tons of problems for paranoiac techbros and get-rich-quick schemers.
Please explain why I need to provide my real name, email and home address to purchase an online service (say a NYT subscription).