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

Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 377 posts

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#121

Post by codedokode »

Wrong. Cryptocurrency demonstrate what electronic payment system should look like: without ability to sell user data and spy on users. Cryptocurrency is the payment system which is designed only for payment without unnecessary features.

Today if you pay with card you basically consent to collecting your data by corporations and following you offline and online, creating a detailed history of your activity. Corporations exchange data with each other, so using card on only one site or in one app can make your identity known to hundreds of other sites even when using incognito mode. With face recognition surveillance can be extended even to places where you don't use the card. And there is no way to opt out from it.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#122

Post by themitigating »

andersentobias wrote: post #92

I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position. With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life. Apart from magic internet money, I cann…

Since when is anything having to do with the accumulation of wealth "punk"?

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#123

Post by ben_w »

jkepler wrote: post #91
ben_w wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Ponzi scheme pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. The US economy has problems, but I don't see how that's supposed to be one of them. I don't think it's even (in 2023) a good model for BTC, although the adverts I saw for it when I first heard about it around the $250 price absolutely were that, and there are plenty of clone-coins that still do today.

> A Ponzi scheme pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. You just described how Social Security in the USA is funded. Its billed as government-run social insurance, but funded as a ponzi.

1. "Profits" is a relevant keyword there.

2. If Social Security were to fail, the US government would be free to decide between canning it (or reducing it) or funding it from more taxes (or delaying retirement age, which is kinda both); in none of these cases is this itself going to threaten the USA economy or the USD currency.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#124

Post by EdwardDiego »

dheera wrote: post #105
andersentobias wrote: post #92

I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position. With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life. Apart from magic internet money, I cann…

> I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life. That, and I'd also like everyone to know that money, markets, and everything are a joke. The value of USD is just what people collectively agree on it to be, not some inherent fundamental value. The same is true for TSLA stock, GME stock, ethereum, or the shitcoin-of-the-week.

Pretending that there aren't fundamentals behind the USD is ridiculous.

How do those people collectively agree on the value of the USD? By looking at the fundamentals - the economy of the US, the stability of its government, the likelihood that it will make good on its bonds.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#125

Post by theLiminator »

labrador wrote: post #18

“I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff” - Michael Kagan, Nvidia CTO If I sold shovels and meth users liked to dig swimming pools in their back yards at 3:00 am I might say my shovels weren't doing anything good for humanity, but I'd be happy to sell them shovels.

I mean it's not really on them, they're in the business of selling cards that happen to be usable for crypto mining, they even had an effort to stop it with lhr models.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#126

Post by rvz »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #89
psychphysic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online dark net markets would not be possible without cryptos. They are a pretty big win for those who believe in personal liberty.

Yes, crypto's main use is crime. Its supporters have various arguments for why crime is actually good.

> Yes, crypto's main use is crime.

It is quite a very poor use with such "crime" happening all on a public and transparent blockchain, making it very easy to trace all of that (even if they use a tumbler / mixer) with the funds certainly seized and frozen as soon as it hits the exchange.

In fact criminals and scammers still use banks and Zelle to facilitate their criminal enterprise - [0] [1] in the trillions of dollars.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-fil...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#127

Post by danaris »

everfree wrote: post #116
tptacek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible that there is no idea in the history of mankind less punk rock than cryptocurrency.

To me, they both seem to be about deliberate and organized defiance of social behavioral norms.

The only social behavioral norms that cryptocurrency is about defying are "people shouldn't be scammed out of their money".

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#128

Post by mumblemumble »

enjoy-your-stay wrote: post #113
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes. Let's take a deeper cut, why does something collapse when interest rates rise?

Money flows out of equities and into bonds which yield a higher more dependable return when interest rates are high enough. The equities market was already running at artificially inflated values for some sectors (like technology), which means there isn't much growth potential (if everything is deemed to be already overpriced), and so the outflows were quite significant from those sectors, accentuating the inverse re…

I would argue that cryptos are typically not equities; they're usually either commodities (cryptocurrency) or some sort of non-current intangible asset (NFTs). The exception would be things like shares in the DAO, which, while interesting, is not typically what people have in mind when they say "crypto" these days.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#129

Post by PragmaticPulp »

andersentobias wrote: post #92

I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position. With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life. Apart from magic internet money, I cann…

> Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".

Your way of "making yourself heard" is to trade your real dollars for digital dollars?

The thing about cryptocurrencies is that you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed. Sure, you could argue that maybe at some future point the governments could possibly all band together and shut down every on-ramp to cryptocurrency, but that's extremely unlikely to happen universally across the globe. As long as some country, somewhere, allows cryptocurrency purchases then there will be a way to use them.

The narrative that you have to invest in cryptocurrency to stick it to the government is really just consumerism being applied liberally by people who want the price of their crypto to go up.

Post reply on HN