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Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

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51–60 of 94 posts

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#51
post #26

From here: https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-absurd.html > There are no fundamentals to any crypto token and it’s discounted future cashflows are all strictly zero and thus its present value must be strictly zero. This is demonstrably false. Cash has no future cash flow, yet its value is clearly not zero. The way I see it, the value of an asset depends on how desirable it is to market participants (demand), as…

Well of course it will when enough people (globally) decide to have a literal revolution (including the crime and punishment that entails) after realizing that neo-libertarian ideals are _obviously_ the only plausible way to maintain a society. /s I see an argument like this in every crypto thread. Come on. You should know that this is a political argument and that, in the US at least, we're pretty damn divided. Talk…

Diehl's argument is that the PV is zero, and the post to which you are replying is a response to that. So while you are quite correct that the arguments introduced are political, they are still convincing arguments to some degree, and that is publicly observable, so people will value these assets in the knowledge that there are a hardcore of 'strong hands'. You seem to be saying that these political arguments are more true in 'regimes' than in 'the western world'. This is even better. If the political thesis is true in some countries then the connected assets will be valued based on that, and even those of us who are blessed to live in managerial states will be able to hold assets with those prices – all thanks to Erdoğan, al-Sisi et al.

But this is not Diehl's argument. He's saying that crypto isn't worth anything no matter how many journalists MBS cuts into little pieces. His line (which appears to be a dumbed-down, unattributed version of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb says) is that an asset with no cash flow has zero present value. NNT's version is that an asset with no cash flow must be valued based on the price "at infinity". Diehl wants this to mean that any self-licking ice-cream cone has zero PV, but that is simply false, in that a self-sustaining process which never ceases really does have that "price at infinity". Most of gold's value comes from this, i.e. from the reasonable expectation that humans will value gold for as long as there are humans. There's a respectable theory of money which says that moneys arise in this way – a feedback loop of belief about others' beliefs about value, that ends up creating the common knowledge that something is valuable. To this extent Diehl is simply begging the question, by assuming that something isn't a potential money and valuing it as if it can never be one.

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first line of the Bitcoin white paper: > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Now, if you want to say that it was badly designed for its purpose, that is a different matter.

"would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution" And it successfully achieved this specific goal, however it never claimed it is a good solution for micro/small payments, which is a requirement for "normal currency". Payments of small amounts require small fees and quick settlement time, neither of which Bitcoin has by design .

Well this is where, as any good developer, you have to look at the requirement and ask "why?"

> ... without going through a financial institution.

Why? Why don't we want to go through a financial institution?

Well, honestly, the only REAL reasons are fees on large transactions, and the desire/preference to be able to conduct activities that are illegal by regulated financial institutions.

And that, if we all remember, was the only usecase for bitcoin before speculation - buying drugs and even more illegal things on TOR marketplaces.

Well, that and money laundering.

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#53
post #11
post #5

Even as a cryptocurrency developer myself, I concur with most of the criticism. I detest all the cash grabbing, speculation, hype, and scams. Where I diverge from most criticism is in PoW. In its early years, when Bitcoin was used as currency rather than for speculation, mining only consumed moderate amounts of energy, in line with the lower prices of a few dozen dollar per bitcoin at most. My hope is for Tether to c…

PoW already brought us to huge wealth concentration so it is not the solution either. This is one of the hard-not-so-talked problems of cryptos at the moment, and I can't see how to solve it.

The problem is capitalism, but at least with Bitcoin there is no central authority to unilaterally alter monetary policy to benefit one specific group (those closest to supply of new money i.e. Gresham's Law).

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#54
post #43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know, lol

Maybe they don’t trust themselves?

Maybe crypto companies don't trust their employees, because there's a strong correlation between employees who have no qualms about working for a company that perpetrates scammy cryptocurrency get-rick-quick pyramid schemes, and employees who have no qualms about stealing from their employer either.

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of those dollars came out of the pockets of somebody who lost money because they invested. You got lucky. The majority of people did not.

Markets are not zero sum in aggregate. Every trade is zero sum-- a buyer has to be matched with a seller at a price. However, the price of an asset can move without any trades. Your perspective would seem to imply that overall economic growth of all markets could not happen without an equivalent amount of loss somewhere else. Clearly this is not the case.

Cryptocurrency trading is not the same as a regular market. None of the things that make a regular stock market not a zero-sum game do not apply to cryptocurrency markets. And cryptocurrencies are actually negative sum, due to miners and fees.

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#57
My Web goes to 11.

Did I miss something, or hasn't the rest of the World Wide Web moved on to Web11 or so by now?

I seem to remember a little while after the Web2 craze, the Web was incrementing several times a year.

Am I misunderstanding it, or is "Web3" meant to sound charmingly retro?

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#58

Yeah, no thank you, I don't come to Hacker News for crypto talk, the bias is comical and the talking points are recycled as a new article every week (scams!, speculation!, hype!, wasted electricity!, tether!) All of those have rebuttals, but I don't want to get into the politics of it, there's plenty of that already. Can we please talk about the fucking tech here? I'm talking about what's made with it, not some sort…

> the bias is comical and the talking points are recycled as a new article every week (scams!, speculation!, hype!, wasted electricity!, tether!)

There is a very strong bias towards the truth, yes.

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#59
post #50

Yeah, no thank you, I don't come to Hacker News for crypto talk, the bias is comical and the talking points are recycled as a new article every week (scams!, speculation!, hype!, wasted electricity!, tether!) All of those have rebuttals, but I don't want to get into the politics of it, there's plenty of that already. Can we please talk about the fucking tech here? I'm talking about what's made with it, not some sort…

I am genuinely curious on useful applications for a decentralized ledger, so I skimmed this linkdump. > https://github.com/OffcierCia/DeFi-Developer-Road-Map Background and development information, no applications. This link, by itself, has a massive number of links. > https://github.com/bkrem/awesome-solidity This links is later duplicated, but is also mostly background and developer information. There is one sectio…

> That's kind of cool, if unlikely to be monetizable.

That's not a bad thing, but it isn't true anyway, you literally login with your wallet.

Virtual currencies are banned on Stripe, PayPal etc. MMOs are how I got into crypto in the first place.

> I am genuinely curious on useful applications.

I was sharing "awesome" lists related to "web3", not a list of apps to support some argument you want to have about "energy use" or "51% attacks". Since this is a forum that has developers on it, a list of resources and roadmap for developers interested in getting started in web3 is useful, is it not? And yes, awesome lists are "link dumps", nice connotation twist.

Here's more geared towards your "genuine curiosity" of web3 apps:

https://github.com/gdamdam/awesome-decentralized-web

https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet

https://github.com/jasonwalsh/awesome-dapps

Re: Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3

#60
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first line of the Bitcoin white paper: > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Now, if you want to say that it was badly designed for its purpose, that is a different matter.

"would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution" And it successfully achieved this specific goal, however it never claimed it is a good solution for micro/small payments, which is a requirement for "normal currency". Payments of small amounts require small fees and quick settlement time, neither of which Bitcoin has by design .

Here are the words of Satoshi himself:

> Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.

This claim that Bitcoin was never meant to be a payment system for small payments is 100% historical revisionism.

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