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

Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

wired.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 326 posts

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#111

Post by lern_too_spel »

leashless wrote: post #9

I've crossed swords with Molly a couple of times. I was the release coordinator for Ethereum, and I've been active in the space a long long time. Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy. The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.o…

What the crypto promoters continue to fail to understand is that ownership ultimately is enforced by the state and its laws, not by code. This will never change. Given that reality, centralized ledgers will always be cheaper for every use case than decentralized trustless ledgers.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#112

Post by bhaak »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #61
vvpan wrote: post #56

I send money across borders to friends an organizations via blockchain. And millions of other people do, especially in countries with volatile financial systems. I much prefer crypto to anything else in this case. Hearing "no legitimate use case" arguments is awfully annoying when you get objective use from the thing being criticized.

> Hearing "no legitimate use case" arguments is awfully annoying when you get objective use from the thing being criticized Better phrasing would be niche legitimate use cases not worth supporting, at least not domestically, if you’re America, the EU, China, India or Japan.

> Better phrasing would be niche legitimate use cases not worth supporting, at least not domestically, if you’re America, the EU, China, India or Japan.

Strong emphasis on "domestically". If you want to send money from one of those entities to another one, it gets hairy quite fast. I remember a time before SEPA and it was horrifying.

You can still have horrifying experiences with SEPA today. A German company once required that I send them CHF to their German IBAN. Which breaks several of the conditions for smooth SEPA transactions. IIRC for something like 30 Euro in value I had to pay 10 Euro in fees.

Wordwide is also problematic. If you can PayPal helps, but PayPal is its own hell, as many shop owners know. Credit Cards work but I can't send money via CC to a friend on the other side of the world, or can I?

I don't think Bitcoin or crypto is it but it would really be beneficial if we had some kind of money that is a first class citizen of the internet.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#113

Post by shagie »

winkywooster wrote: post #90
shagie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite bit about Fucked Company is there are archived captures of it from 2002 in the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/

what's interesting is at the library of congress it looks like it's using the wayback machine (similar ui), but the internet archive has excluded it from their results. also, the library of congress version is not very complete. it only goes back a few pages, and most of the specific announcement pages (all?) don't work.

The LOC instance was trying to capture the idea / atmosphere of the post 2001-09-11 environment (it is in the September 11, 2001 Web Archive collection). It wasn't trying for a deep capture of the content but rather a "this is what it was like."

Wayback machine appears to have been removed as part of the publication of the book (guessing). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4021548

The LOC has a different charter - its not trying to be "this is a copy of the full site at the time" but rather a historical documents around specific events ( https://www.loc.gov/web-archives/collections/ ) and has a different charter than the internet archive. https://www.loc.gov/programs/web-archiving/about-this-progra...

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#114

Post by mattdesl »

shagymoe wrote: post #85
iLoveOncall wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I send money across borders without blockchain. Without fees. Without having to wait 2 weeks for the transaction to be confirmed.

Really? How? I needed to transfer money from the sale of a property in Europe and the fees + currency conversion was over $1000.

Depends on the sending and receiving country, and what the relationship is between the two banks, and what the amount is being transferred.

A lot of people have a limited set of experiences, such as sending wires or Wise payments to/from a specific country, and it works well for them, without realizing there is an entire world of other scenarios outside of this scope where it is not as well suited.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#115

Post by j0hnyl »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #89
vvpan wrote: post #56

I send money across borders to friends an organizations via blockchain. And millions of other people do, especially in countries with volatile financial systems. I much prefer crypto to anything else in this case. Hearing "no legitimate use case" arguments is awfully annoying when you get objective use from the thing being criticized.

Your use-case is breaking money transfer laws. Just like every other use-case, it is far less expensive to break money transfer laws with a centralized ledger. When you make blockchain money transfer comply with regulations, it becomes more expensive than legal money transfer using centralized ledger. When regulation kicks in (and it will — no government wants its citizens to be fleeced by rogue nations like DPRK and…

You're assuming it breaks laws, but it doesn't have to, it just makes it easier to do something that's painful to do either by design or due to shitty economic circumstances. In some countries banks pop-up and fold a dime a dozen week to week. Does that mean someone shouldn't be able to send funds to their relatives in a fucked up country?

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#116

Post by this_user »

wustangdan wrote: post #28
ceejayoz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 98% of countries in the last 120 years that had a debt to gdp of 130% has either defaulted or had massive inflation Sounds impressive, but this stat relies heavily on a) developed world nations and b) nations back when we had the inflexible gold standard. The US also benefits dramatically from being able to issue debt in USD, which it controls.

Yes exactly, on gold standard they would default, now they inflate. The US can issue debt in USD and even print 1 trillion USD coins. But what happens to the value of the currency when they repeatedly do that? Crypto (and other assets obviously) can act as a hedge against such bad government behavior.

And how has that alleged inflation hedge performed last year when inflation was at its highest? It went down about 80% YoY. Crypto is not a hedge against inflation. It's not a currency, and it barely works as a shitty payment system. It truly is one of the worst technologies ever invented, and nothing would be lost if it just ceased to exist.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#117

Post by wheelie_boy »

majormajor wrote: post #82
miracle2k wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc. GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.

> GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online. They said: > And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made. Which is an amazingly uncharitable interpretation of "the whole tech industry" in the 90s when the inter…

> "create a new currency"

Ah yes, Flooz and Beenz. So silly, but at least they didn't use a small country's worth of electricity.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#118

Post by drewbeck »

EGreg wrote: post #92
drewbeck wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what you're trying to get at here, and your intent for posting this. Can you elaborate?

Sure, of course. I wanted to show that Molly White doesn’t seem to be open to a discussion about the broader issues, and her blog is certainly very one-sided, which I actually appreciate (I love one sided stuff, because it tends to go out of its way to find the best arguments for its side, as long as you balance it with the other side). We are in a unique position to share our experience with her. We spent years quie…

The issue I have here is that someone turning down a request to be on your podcast does not, actually, mean that "she refuses to engage on these topics"; it may seem like a major litmus test for you, but in fact people are busy and we have to make choices about how to spend our time all the time. I'm sure that if she said yes to every crypto-enthusiast who messaged her "debate me!" she'd have no time for her own projects and would be spending all her life on crypto-enthusiast podcasts with people who are just trying to get her to see the light.

Your implication that Molly is uninterested in "real conversations about real issues" because she turned down your podcast is, ultimately, a projection that confirms your priors.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#119

Post by bscphil »

jandrese wrote: post #105
bscphil wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually sort of an example of what I'm talking about. Yeah, part of the strength of cryptocurrency is that it allows bad people to do bad things. Sort of how part of the strength of encrypted messages is that they allow bad people to do bad things. Same with file transfers. The defenses people give of file transfers, chat encryption, etc etc are pretty straightforward: certain things should be equally usable…

Signal gets away with it because money doesn't change hands. Law Enforcement is mostly about protecting money. If Signal became a platform for scamming people out of their retirement savings they would get in trouble.

I'm not totally sure about the relevance of this to my argument, but it is funny that Signal literally does have a money transfer feature in-app with a cryptocurrency called MobileCoin: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#120

Post by saurik »

bertil wrote: post #70
colesantiago wrote: post #5

And too right the critics like Molly are about crypto. There is no need to kid ourselves here anymore to even entertain crypto. Crypto is a complete scam, with no legitimate or legal use case and nothing else to offer anybody. I only wish crypto died sooner and that nobody uses it. We have other systems that are more robust than crypto that is used in the order of hundreds of millions such as UPI, PIX, Wise, Mpesa, S…

“Crypto” was started by a paper that suggested solving the two-general problem, a question of coordination without trust, with a very expensive solution and sensitive to a Sybil attack. For every technology, if you ask “What problem does it solve?” and take into account what limits it has, you can backtrack where it’s useful. Something autonomous, expensive, rugged? Talk to the Army. Something that allows no recourse…

> Something that allows no recourse? Probably people outside of the court system.

Craigslist--when you go to like, sell your old TV--actively tells people not to accept online payments from people because they can be reversed. Why? Because the risk to someone who has a single TV to sell is very different from the risk to someone selling hundreds of TVs, and so the person you need to protect is the seller, not the buyer.

Also, you can totally build a system on top of crypto platforms that supports reversing transactions: it is, at the end of the day, fully programmable money. It's main claim to fame is that it is decentralized and transparent in implementation, and I'd have thought those would be universally good things, right?

But like, frankly, your position here just sounds like some naive form of how we should refuse to give anyone autonomy (which almost all of these systems provide) or privacy (which the better systems provide) because good people have nothing to hide :(.

Everyone deserves end-to-end encrypted permissionless communication, and the same everyone deserves zero-knowledge protocol permissionless payments.

Post reply on HN