221–230 of 294 posts
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All true, but I can't get from there to people shouldn't be allowed to make their own choices about what they buy.
I'm not sure what you mean here. are you saying there shouldn't be any regulation? or something else?
The quality of discourse at this stage of the thread (2 hours, 20 comments) is incredibly disappointing. Hn usually has high quality discussions. What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?
I remember fondly participating in the hype around crypto in 2017 and going in on btc/eth and also building a mining rig etc. The discourse on HN back then is quite different from today. These days we've seen scam after scam, fraud after fraud, failure after failure. From a technology perspective it's neat, but the kinds of individuals it tends to attract make it seemingly not actually all that useful in wider societ…
HackerNews was weirdly credulous about this stuff for a weirdly long time, but it does seem to have shifted in the last few years.
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I thought I understood the technology after reading the Bitcoin paper, but later realized that there's a lot more to it. See the ZeroCash/Zexe papers, ZK rollups, optimistic rollups, BFT literature like HotStuff, or scaling research like Block-STM. Some HNers just aren't that interested in the use cases, which is fine. But others tend to critique decades-old technology, and don't seem interested in learning about mod…
Yea, I'm not sure what proportion of the negative camp is negative because of issues in early iterations like power consumption used by bitcoin which is solved with newer tech and what proportion is negative due to the use cases themselves. I do think that a lot of the tech itself is pretty elegant but I'm less certain on whether it's the right solution. I also think the fact that many in the pro camp have investment…
To be clear, that is absolutely not solved for Bitcoin, which still wastes energy at a disgusting rate. Some crypto things have shifted to non-proof-of-work approaches, usually proof of stake, but Bitcoin is still pumping out more CO2 than many countries.
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You can't waste energy. It can't be destroyed!
Of course you can. Waste != destroy. The First Law tells you can't create or destroy energy, but you can transform it. The Second Law tells you that this transformation always reduces the amount of useful work you can extract from it. This is how energy is "used up" - it's transformed from a high-grade form (e.g. electricity) to a lower-grade form (e.g. waste heat). Per the Second Law, you can't then go back the oppo…
Waste as a rationale depends on the assumption that the Earth's atmosphere heats up as a result of any excess power generation beyond equilibrium solar radiation, and so there is a limited power budget available to humanity for "useful" work.
Asking the question of whether someone finds it acceptable for PoW to be performed in space or on the Moon is a useful way to discuss crypto when someone just wants to make the climate change argument because it separates the concerns.
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That was an "ok" argument maybe 5-8 years ago, now there's too much evidence that no legitimate use case exists, and every alleged one turns out to be a fraud or a get-rich-quick scheme.
BTC has been around since 2008. Today in 2023 BTC is like $27k. Does the longevity, ubiquity, price and liquidity of BTC fit the pattern of a useless get rich quick scheme? Has any such scheme existed this long, despite so much scrutiny and hostility, based on hype and confidence alone? If no useless speculation scheme has ever thrived as long and as much as BTC, and it keeps on going, at what point do you have to as…
Yes, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme famously ran for decades, with everyone invested calling doubters idiots and pessimists.
Until it all fell apart.
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That sounds like it was made for money laundering and making ransoms hard to trace.
Yeah, and cryptography was made for pedophiles and terrorists. Am I right?
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everyone goes through a disillusionment phase with crypto from my perspective, there is simply a lack of coverage of things that function without incident, which are very numerous and solve frictions for a lot of people, whether you’re in the market for that or not like construction sites that showed “how many days since an incident”, because people only heard about the incidents
Where are these mystical things that function because of crypto that wouldn't function with regular money, and which also are not fraud?
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The government created a special guarantee for all depositors precisely to prevent runs on banks. JP Morgan was granted a special waiver to buy FRB. It’s pretty obvious that what happened was that SVB and FRB management teams were set up as scapegoats to save face while the government worked in the background to halt the sector from unwinding. I happen to agree that this was the right thing to do.
I don't see how you can call them scapegoats and that someone else is "saving face". That implies someone else did something wrong, and they're taking the blame for it, so someone else doesn't look bad. What is that and who is that someone? The management of SVB and FRB gambled and lost. They have no one to blame but themselves. Events that followed seemed like reasonable steps to take to clean up their mess.
The Biden administration claims that this was not a bailout because taxpayers didn't pay to cover these deposits. Technically, he's right. Instead, bank customers ultimately performed the bailout. It's just the case that 99% of American taxpayers are also Federal Reserve bank customers.
So, let's go back to your "gambled and lost" argument. SVB and FRB gambled, but I lost. You lost. Your neighbor lost. That person that doesn't have a bank account and the folks that had $400M USD in their SVB accounts didn't lose.
The solution to force you and I to pay higher fees to fund a not-a-bailout for SVB depositors to prevent broader contagion was the right call, but to explain it away as merely affecting a small number of executives and shareholders is a lie.
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That's like saying effective cryptography is destruction of evidence. "Laundering" is a bullshit concept invented to legitimize total surveillance of financial transactions. This KYC/AML stuff is just the financial arm of global mass surveillance. We must resist it vigorously for the exact same reasons we resist warrantless dragnet data collection.
I see the misunderstanding: I used "laundering" to describe a method of obscuring a trail of exchanges, not a crime. I can exchange gold, or textiles or something, and not expect surveillance of those transactions. I do live in a country that requires some reporting of those for tax purposes, but not tracking of the assets the way crypto does. The moment I pick up a monetized piece of paper that the government printe…
>Where are these mystical things that function because of crypto that wouldn't function with regular money, and which also are not fraud?
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Of course you can. Waste != destroy. The First Law tells you can't create or destroy energy, but you can transform it. The Second Law tells you that this transformation always reduces the amount of useful work you can extract from it. This is how energy is "used up" - it's transformed from a high-grade form (e.g. electricity) to a lower-grade form (e.g. waste heat). Per the Second Law, you can't then go back the oppo…
The trouble with describing PoW as "wasting energy" is that it's relative. There's only a sliver of the Sun's light that reaches the orbital plane, and the rest is wasted blasting off in other directions. Then there's all those trillions of stars in galaxies far far away wasting their hydrogen. Waste as a rationale depends on the assumption that the Earth's atmosphere heats up as a result of any excess power generati…
Today, this may be increasing fraction of energy generation on the planet. In 50 years, this may be dedicated space satellites beaming energy from the sun. 500 years later, a Dyson swarm constructed for the sole purpose of keeping the blockchain going.
Nah.