Man the shillbots are going hard in this one. There have been some heated crypto discussions on HN for sure, but this is something else.
Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
361–370 of 377 posts
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
His claim... "it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society" ...is incorrect. The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes. Nvidia's stock dropped 68%. Is that because it didn't bring anything useful for society? No. It was trading at a premium because of low rates.
> The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes. It's constantly been peaking and collapsing since 2013, when there were no US interest rate increases. The 2017 peak happened in the middle of a US interest rate increase cycle. The 2021 peak happened 6 months before the most recent US interest rate increase cycle. I'm sure interest rates were varying in other countries on different schedules, bu…
In recent years, you can argue that bitcoin has acted as a canary in the coal mine. Bitcoins chart is pretty much the same as stocks (especially tech/growth stocks). It just moves slightly ahead of stocks sometimes.
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
His claim... "it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society" ...is incorrect. The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes. Nvidia's stock dropped 68%. Is that because it didn't bring anything useful for society? No. It was trading at a premium because of low rates.
> 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?
Market becomes less speculative.
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#364Earlier 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?
Interest rates in Argentina have been on an upward trend for the last decade [1], yet bitcoin is near its all time high relative to the Peso [2]. How do you explain the contradiction here? [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/btcars:cur
Because: Argentina.
Not sure if you truly grasp the global impact that the United States fed policy has.
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moving the goal posts a little but sure. Ethereum is eight years old. The Ethereum foundation alone has a billion dollars. Ethereum and the related ecosystem has had tens of billions of dollars thrown into it. I don’t know how that can be described as “infancy”. The web was opened by CERN in 1993. By 2001 it was being used by over 500 million people daily. Please look at an eth block explorer and tell me how many peo…
Facebook acquired Oculus 9 years ago, spent billions yet active users are similiar to crypto probably. So another tech like you said exist and Crytpo is being used for meaningful things too. But you are just too ignorant to even learn about it, sadly. There many like you here.
Well don't get me started on VR either (FOV, FPS, motion sickness, limited applications, etc). FYI billions on a proprietary commercial product from one vendor isn't even in the same universe as an order of magnitude more investment across an entire diverse ecosystem. What's your point here?
Too ignorant to learn about it? I built and ran a 25kW Ethereum mining operation with 200 Nvidia Pascal GPUs in 2017. I've been running my own nodes and writing and deploying smart contracts since then. I have every wallet you can think of. I own ENS names. I developed a solution[0] to index and search every NFT (260m representing 100tb of data) across multiple chains (from my own self-hosted geth/bor/heimdall/Solana nodes all the way to custom ERC parsers). I've been to multiple dev and industry conferences. I've had multiple high level meetings with just about everyone in the space from Alchemy, Consensys, and Coinbase to blue chip crypto VC firms like Multicoin Capital, Sequoia, and A16z for my various crypto projects.
I could go on and on. I'd argue there aren't many people out there that have my knowledge and experience this wide and deep across the ecosystem. Please do tell - what experience do you have?
But yes, keep dismissing me out of hand by calling me ignorant and providing nothing factual to support your narrative.
[0] - https://fnftf.io/
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society. Can you list examples of how it has helped society as a whole? Nothing you listed has anything to do with helping society. You've listed things you think are good things, but nothing is a society wide benefit. Building on top of Bitcoin or Etherium is great and all... But how does that help the average person? I've seen no trickle down…
Couldn't your same argument be applied to stocks? One idea of capitalism, is that there are indirect benefits to everyone, from the actions of private self-interested parties. If crypto somehow allows more people to work together (I don't have an opinion if this is true or not), then that alone should be enough for it to fit into the western ethic.
No, because employees can own a portion of the very company they work for and get paid interest to hold it in the form of dividends, investors can do the same and it goes into the company and its growth. How is that remotely like Crypto? People collaborating on random projects isn't at all the same, especially when so far...not a single one of these projects has had a net benefit on anyone's life. Meanwhile public companies do. If crypto projects were actually solving problems instead of constantly reinventing and complicating the wheel, maybe you could say otherwise...but so far that hasn't happened, and we're sneaking up on 20 years of this.
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#367Earlier 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.
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it" --Jean de La Fontaine. With sufficient tracking of non-cryptocurrencies and physical goods governments could largely kill dark net markets by making it too hard to buy anything physical with your cryptocurrency. Imagine KYC but applied to every transaction instead of just large ones. Making dark markets too easy isn't a win for personal liberty. Its a…
No need for dark markets. We will get there anyway. Government doesn't need people to demand it.
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love. That's what is missing from many crypto discussions on HN because too many people have hitched their assessment of crypto into their personality and can't try and be even the tiniest bit nuanced. I hate that some people blindly want to boost crypto…
>FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love. Thanks, I appreciate that. I don't have any financial or personal stake in crypto so I don't have any issue criticizing it and I am pretty pessimistic about it at this point. But the irrational hatred and dismissal of crypto sometimes bothers me mo…
> I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function.
I'm not sure about the necessity of political infrastructure, but crypto depending on physical infrastructure is relatively true because I have to assume that calculating Bitcoin transactions by hand without a power grid is more of an involved math problem than most humans are able to do. We all (or I think most of us) want and need a stable and functional society with the lights staying on to function.
And that stable society is what I'm concerned about with Fiat currencies. Without being backed up by anything, there is nothing that actually limits how much money printing can be done. We're already starting to reap some of the benefits of short-sighted policies in our current economies and have seen many historical examples of what happens to societies that ruin their own currencies.
In contrast, as one example, Bitcoin can only ever have 21 million units. This limitation alone is worth almost any negative, IMO. And let's examine those negatives. Are they actually a big deal? Slow transactions in a layer 1 crypto suck, but are a relatively minor and solvable problem in the grand-scheme of things with different settlement layers being possible. More electricity usage than is ideal is a cost to be sure, but to me seems like a relatively minor issue when the technology for cleanly producing large amounts of electricity has existed for decades through nuclear power. To me, Bitcoin's negatives are real, but are far closer to the category of "minor inconveniences" than "fundamental flaws".
But Fiat's negatives have the potential to be a civilization ender. A dead government currency can cause unbelievable chaos on the level of "bodies piling up in the streets".
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#369Earlier 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.
You live in a bubble if you think projects working on blockchains as Ethereum or Bitcoin are only used for crime. USD is still the #1 FIAT used for crime.
Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook acquired Oculus 9 years ago, spent billions yet active users are similiar to crypto probably. So another tech like you said exist and Crytpo is being used for meaningful things too. But you are just too ignorant to even learn about it, sadly. There many like you here.
Well don't get me started on VR either (FOV, FPS, motion sickness, limited applications, etc). FYI billions on a proprietary commercial product from one vendor isn't even in the same universe as an order of magnitude more investment across an entire diverse ecosystem. What's your point here? Too ignorant to learn about it? I built and ran a 25kW Ethereum mining operation with 200 Nvidia Pascal GPUs in 2017. I've been…
I have done a lot of those things too. And still do them. Check it out again in a year. Many apps are being written and will be deployed.