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

Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 260 posts

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#201

Post by jareklupinski »

tjk_ wrote: post #82

I work for a large provider in the VCS/CI space. While I appreciate the varied opinions in the comments here on the perceived usefulness of Crypto, I think folks outside of the space simply do not understand how much time is being spent combating the issue. If we, for example, had a team of 20 working on our CI offering, we would have re-allocated at least 50% of them to work full-time on combating the miners. And th…

I wouldn't mind paying the dollar a month for the CPU-seconds I consume across all my 'free-tier' personal project CI pipelines, if that were an option.

There just doesn't seem to be a vendor offering something in-between "enterprise CI/CD solution" and "free"; it probably costs more to track that kind of usage than it would be worth to bill?

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#203

Post by doggosphere »

knorker wrote: post #141
rubyn00bie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From my reading it looks like the "developing world" use case is pure propaganda. From my perspective, it is not propaganda but it is my opinion. I didn’t come to the conclusion through any scientific rigor, but rather through observation. I have seen a spike in crypto discussion over the past year or two by, my obviously small sample, of thought leaders and entrepreneurs in primarily in Africa. The talk isn’t ever…

Oh yeah, I saw some documentary about bitcoin in Africa. It was so sad. This woman standing in basically a muddy hut, stirring some soup, and saying how she put everything into bitcoin because they say it always goes up. She had no idea what it is. Someone basically tricked her into buying lottery tickets. (who knows, maybe it'll work out just fine) That's not even close to "using bitcoin". To a rounding error nobody…

Yeah, she should kept her savings in Zimbabwe Dollars. Those are only inflating at 500%+ per year.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#204

Post by kcbigring »

some fair arguments here... but this is exactly the same kind of vibe most people emitted when i went to CS grad school in the early 90s. everyone was like, 'oh msft is so evil. they suck.' and i just didn't understand. in reality msft put compute in front of everyone and created an insane amount of opportunity. this sounds like a 'get off my lawn' broad attitude and maybe a better approach is to be open to some of the innovation that is getting put down here.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#205

Post by NoGravitas »

eric_cc wrote: post #50

> For my part, I held LOL ouch. Selling prior to 2016 must sting. It makes sense that somebody who made this mistake would be bitter. This guys take of: > It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to…

> This reminds me of people who would shit on the Internet in the 90's because of porn and scams and this and that.

In retrospect, those people were ahead of their time.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#207

Post by shkkmo »

doggosphere wrote: post #187
shkkmo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the current use case of cryptocurrency is breaking or avoiding the law, it has yet to find a use case outside that. People who dump money into gold are idiots or speculators (or hedging larger positions.) I have lived with the ups and downs of the gold industry and it is very much not stable. The US dollar has far more infrastructure and institutional support preventing it's collapse than bitcoin. Currently the…

Yes, the current use case of cryptocurrency is breaking or avoiding the law, it has yet to find a use case outside that. If the law is your baseline standard for what is moral, then you should probably try a little harder and put some thought into whether or not cryptocurrencies deserve to actually be illegal. For the most part, it is not illegal to own or trade in cryptocurrencies in the developed world. The US doll…

Bitcoin is useful for illegal things because they are illegal, morality does not enter in to it. If those things became legal, bitcoin wouldn't be needed for them anymore.

If the US dollar fails in the near future, your bit coin will be mostly useless because the global system that generates wealth and handles logistics will have broken. People will be starving, bartering and looting. nobody will want to give you anything of value for some stupid worthless ones and zeros.

Bitcoin as a hedge against the collapse of the dollar is a ridiculous investment.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#208

Post by spir »

spir wrote: post #19

Cryptocurrency is not an abject disaster. Drew is right that proof of work mining is expensive and has serious negative externalities. Drew is also right that cryptocurrency, via its growth, hype, and decentralized and self-sovereign nature, is often an ideal vehicle for certain kinds of criminal activity, including pump-and-dump fraud or ransomware. Drew is right (perhaps indirectly) that many or most well-meaning c…

Here's some info on Ethereum's apps:

Today, two of the most promising app ecosystems are

- Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Here's a community favorite 3rd party leaderboard for DeFi apps https://defipulse.com/

- Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are popularly known as digital collectibles, but may represent any kind of non-fungible property. We can see some of the top digital collectibles here https://dappradar.com/nft . But, there is a lot more to NFTs than just collectibles or art. For example, the Ethereum Name System (ENS) uses NFTs to represent domain name ownership https://ens.domains

Another interesting Ethereum use case is https://www.eco.com/ . Eco is a mobile app that's a cash wallet and payment method. Eco is a competitor of Venmo, Cash App, Visa, and Apple Pay. Eco is not a crypto app, there's no tokens or anything like that. Instead, Eco is like if you took Venmo, added Apple Pay to it, and then completely cut out the banks by using the USDC stablecoin backboned onto ethereum to connect to an industry group of financial services that have also cut out banks, and in return Eco is able to offer their customers 5% APR and 5% cash back, because of the savings from cutting out the banks and other middlemen.

If you are interested to dip your toe into the ethereum pond, here's a great weekly newsletter that's aimed at developers

https://weekinethereumnews.com/

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#209

Post by yellowyacht »

> The industry has been setting up informal working groups to pool knowledge of mitigations, communicate when our platforms are being leveraged against one another, and cumulatively wasting thousands of hours of engineering time implementing measures to deal with this abuse, and responding as attackers find new ways to circumvent them.

Does anyone know how to get in contact with these informal working groups?

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#210

Post by vivab0rg »

knorker wrote: post #70
rubyn00bie wrote: post #48

I think there is a place for crypto, and I say that begrudgingly, ‘cuz ego, since I’ve been calling it all Tulips since a Bitcoin was $8. The biggest reason why Bitcoin works, and other established coins work, is because of demand from the developing world. If you don’t have reliable banks or governments then Cryptos are at least as good or better than your local banks because even if it collapses you can still acces…

From my reading it looks like the "developing world" use case is pure propaganda. E.g. someone investigated the "bitcoin in venezuela!" claim. Actually going there and tracking down use. Turns out it was a bitcoin investor who went to venezuela to do a transaction for the sole purpose of screaming "bitcoin in venezuela" to pump up the price.

Hello. I'm from Argentina. I retired before turning 50 thanks to crytpo. Now I'm really thinking to leave this place after my daughter turns 18. It's not proganda.
Post reply on HN