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It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

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Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#701

Post by rainjackets »

colesantiago wrote: post #601
magila wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another thing cryptocurrency enthusiasts have been doing for a long time: name dropping some companies who are supposedly embracing bitcoin but without any evidence of actual user adoption. Newegg and Overstock don't even take payment in bitcoin. They allow you to use a third party processor to exchange bitcoin for USD then immediately transfer the funds to the retailer. There's no evidence that these payment…

> ...without any evidence of actual user adoption. For example of Square: > Its mobile payment service Cash App has been its flagship product. However, in recent times, while Square reported that cash transactions at its U.S. merchants as a percentage of overall transactions fell from more than 50% in 2015 to around 30% today, the bulk of the company’s revenue this past year – around 56% – came from Bitcoin transacti…

It's an illusion of accounting [0]. Due to the accounting standards, they book the total dollar value of the bitcoin they sell as revenue, not just the fees they get.

[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/beneath-the-surface-of-squar...

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#702

Post by baby »

csande17 wrote: post #314
fleddr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This huge silent majority that know it is a scam doesn't exist. Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp. If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions. Because they don't know crypto. At all.

Count me as one of the people in the silent majority. (Well, not exactly "silent" because I'm talking about it now in Hacker News, but the things I write don't usually reach the general public.) You're right that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are always generating new work and coming up with new ideas. Actually, they do this a lot more easily than other domains, because the fact that their entire field is a scam means t…

> systems that require every participant to store the entire history of transactions forever scale well

Have you heard of mina?

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#703

Post by cratermoon »

lamontcg wrote: post #389
skrebbel wrote: post #50

These two resonated with me: > A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out > [non-tech people] don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us It is o…

> But yeah he probably knows it's a scam too, what was I thinking. Doubt it. He's another Libertarian and certainly hates the existing system.

He's a Libertarian yes, but he's an old-fashioned capitalist billionaire first.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#704

Post by barrkel »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #569
Taniwha wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold also has a fatal flaw, there's only so much of it, building a currency based on gold (ie the US dollar on the gold standard) limits the size of the economy, it can't grow if you can't pay for stuff - it's why we left the gold standard. Bitcoin by design only has a fixed number of coins available, eventually the miners will have mined them all. It has the same limitation that gold has and basing an economy on it…

Are you saying economies grow by inflating their currency?

Growth of the economy without growth of the money supply leads to deflation, which harms consumption and investment, because hanging on to your money becomes competitive with actively doing something with it.

A small amount of inflation is an incentive to find productive uses for capital. Deflation rewards a kind of rentier class who own capital but don't do anything with it.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#705

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

xpe wrote: post #653
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that it hasn't produced any value of note in 13 years, I'm gonna go out a limb here and say I don't think it's worth 2% of the entire world's wealth - and certainly not 3% of the world's energy.

In this comment, I'm assuming you are talking about Bitcoin. > I don't think it's worth 2% of the entire world's wealth Taken literally, if 2% of the world's wealth is in Bitcoin, so isn't that its value, by definition? I'm not trying to nitpick. I'm trying to push back on what seems to be a glossing over of the fundamentals. I wonder if what you mean is that you don't think it is _wise_ for people to put so much of…

People paid a lot of money for Enron stock before it exploded. Did that mean it was worth $70B the day before it exploded and suddenly it was worth nothing when people found out it was actually all a fraud?

Enron wasn't actually producing any value. Neither are self-replicating Byzantine fault tolerant systems.

Anything they can do can be done hundreds of orders of magnitude more efficiently. And nothing they are doing /requires/ the inefficiencies.

I mean, obviously people at Enron were doing /something/ in the same way Bitcoin is. And obviously investors were paying a lot of money for that at one point and then stopped paying for it when it became clear that /something/ was mostly fraud.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#706

Post by pedalpete »

skrebbel wrote: post #98
meowkit wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens. I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded s…

Why can't the tech be neat/super cool and primarily be used to run a scam? I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property. All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat s…

That's actually the best analogy I've heard, and I'm a crypto believer!!!

But it doesn't negate the value of the technology. Yes, piracy is neat and useful, but illegal. But was the benefit of piracy that you got free stuff? Or was it that it was an easier system than any other at the time?

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#707

Post by bryanwb »

bryanwb wrote: post #480
pavlov wrote: post #21

“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…

It is like the early Internet and you are like one of the old telco guys I worked w/ in 2000 who said people would never make phone calls on the Internet.

I see I am downvoted by the newest generation of "old telco guys." HN is a retirement home.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#708

Post by rohitb91 »

mandelken wrote: post #536
skybrian wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are $2 ATM fees "stealing?" They provide a service, which you can pay for or easily avoid by planning ahead a bit. (And cryptocurrency charges even more.)

Depends on your background and experience, I guess. In many European countries ATMs are free, even outside your own country. It is considered an elementary part of the banking service that you don't have to pay to withdraw your own money.

Someone somewhere is paying for the fees. I imagine it’s the collective of all people paying for it rather than the people actually using the machines. A bit unfair.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#709

Post by rohitb91 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #500
skybrian wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are $2 ATM fees "stealing?" They provide a service, which you can pay for or easily avoid by planning ahead a bit. (And cryptocurrency charges even more.)

LOL - and Vanguard is apparently stealing all our money, providing zero value, and charging 0.1% on their index funds. Better go transfer my life savings into Bitcoin, I suppose.

0.03%

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#710

Post by baby »

paulgb wrote: post #303
fleddr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This huge silent majority that know it is a scam doesn't exist. Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp. If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions. Because they don't know crypto. At all.

> If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions. I'd reckon that the average HN cryptocurrency skeptic would do better than the average person who's actually invested in crypto.

Reading the comments here, most of the criticism seems to imply that the technology has stopped at Bitcoin and that no other breakthrough has come after. “It consumes too much energy”, “it’s too slow”, “it takes too much space”, “the fees are too high”.
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