91–100 of 112 posts
I hate to be the one, but the reason I can't embrace crypto? The wealth distribution is even worse than fiat currency. It's horrible. it's no long about the 1% it's more about the .0001%. How many women have crypto? How many colored folks have crypto? How many people in all of Africa have crypto? I've had conversations where some don't believe this is a problem. I'm not convinced. You can come up with a new XYZ crypt…
> it is hard to identify a specific economic problem which they currently solve It is hard to identify such a problem till you believe you can withdraw your money from a bank anytime. Visiting a bank and getting an answer "please come tomorrow" for several weeks changes a person's view on cryptocurrencies and problems they could solve, imo.
Let's imagine a scenario where you're not able to withdraw from a bank due to insolvency. If you're in the US your deposits (principal + interest) are insured up to $250,000 by the federal government. [0] If the federal government is insolvent your cryptocurrency will be useless because you won't have reliable Internet access and thus you won't have access to the resources needed to make or verify transactions on you…
There will be crypto lending banks and multi-sig custodial services to fill that use case.
The code and math is open source and has been available for a decade.
Unbelievable how HN has tech dinosaurs that can't be bothered to check all the open source implementations available for the particular problem/use csse they are seeking to solve. That is so 2009.
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Bitcoin for us mere mortals who are not drugdealers seems unlikely. It simply doesn't solve a problem that people have. I can pay for my groceries waving a plastic card around and it costs me nothing. Traditional payment systems are safer, cheaper and more efficient than crypto.
If the Bitcoin community gets lightning network off the ground (it's very close), it solves the problem of micropayments. This is a problem many people likely have that they are not aware of. Ability to pay a fraction of a cent for each article you read online could eliminate the need for both annoying paywalls & ads. Traditional payment systems are actually quite expensive, you just don't see it since the merchant p…
Well, no - the problem of micropayments is that users consistently hate them. Users only put up with micropayments when there's literally no other option.
Vendors keep bringing up the idea of micropayments entirely on the basis of "it would be cool for us if they worked." This is not enough - because the problem is social, not technical.
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But remember, with fiat, the government just prints money [1] whenever it likes and gives it directly to its banker friends. With bitcoin that’s impossible (well unless 51% of the minors agree) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
You're simply trading one government for another more nebulous and less accountable one; the schism over block-size is a perfect example of this and that's peanuts compared to the types of issues that are to come. There is absolutely zero guarantee that the mining cartels won't print more bitcoin; the final decision on whether or not to do so rests with them and it is in their direct financial interest to do so even…
The fact that there is 10,000 public bitcoin nodes (and probably x10 private ones) keeps the system honest.
I hate to be the one, but the reason I can't embrace crypto? The wealth distribution is even worse than fiat currency. It's horrible. it's no long about the 1% it's more about the .0001%. How many women have crypto? How many colored folks have crypto? How many people in all of Africa have crypto? I've had conversations where some don't believe this is a problem. I'm not convinced. You can come up with a new XYZ crypt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is stopping a state actor from using their backdoors in internet infrastructure to destroy the Bitcoin network Laws. In the Western world, something is legal unless explicitly forbidden by laws. Countries which don't care very much about freedom explicitly banned Bitcoin more or less (China, Russia, India, Indonesia, Venezuela, ...)
I'm really surprised you including India in the list. India is as democratic as the USA. The laws were put in place in India at least around Crypto to save people from being scammed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's imagine a scenario where you're not able to withdraw from a bank due to insolvency. If you're in the US your deposits (principal + interest) are insured up to $250,000 by the federal government. [0] If the federal government is insolvent your cryptocurrency will be useless because you won't have reliable Internet access and thus you won't have access to the resources needed to make or verify transactions on you…
> If you're in the US This is a quite rare use case, talking worldwide scale. > If the federal government is insolvent your cryptocurrency will be useless because you won't have reliable Internet access There is an option you missed - when a bank is insolvent and the government doesn't care. > people will revert to cash or tangible assets if the federal government fails Why not get abroad and spend there dark ages, c…
It's not rare:
"as of 31 January 2014, 113 countries have instituted some form of explicit deposit insurance up from 12 in 1974."
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I find that most extreme ideologies simply boil down to people not wanting someone to have any control over them. They don't care for certain aspects of the social contract and want to be able to flaunt it at will with no repercussions. Or they don't want to pay taxes or some other thing. Whatever, they feel that society at large is what's holding them back, not simply a lack of ability or drive. At least with religi…
I wonder whether some substantial portion of cryptoanarchism isn't really meant to be anarchism in the fullest sense, but more anarchism-but-only-within-a-particular-domain? Like, less "make the government not exist", and more "make it so goverments are unable to control things like communication, and some sorts of commerce"? I don't know that self-described cryptoanarchists almost always have much opposition to the…
It varies from person to person. I happen to like the message in A Cipherpunk's Manifesto, but I also happen to dislike blockchain mania.
Pretty much the most active users of cryptocurrencies so far are different kinds of investors who use it to avoid taxes and exposure of their assets to government and such?
This might not be particularly relevant to the article, but I'm still genuinely shocked that the HN crowd is so anti-cryptocurreny. Most of the arguments against it are akin to someone in 1995 saying the internet isn't viable because it's insecure, there's no real business use-case for it, no major corporations are investing in it, it's super slow, no one is ever going to use it for real-world business transactions,…
We mined some, we bought some, we dealt with technological issues, we were ecstatic for a while.
Yet the big crypto promise is to be fulfilled and we are now on 3rd or 4th big hype/decline cycle.
We see the big negatives of various cryptocurrencies(energy usage, affecting various hardware markets, supporting fraud on massive scale, insecurity for normal folks, etc. etc.) but do not see any big positive developments.
Sure, if you are able to be paid in crypto in some country with a lousy banking system that's great but you are in a tiny minority then.
All those tales of normal non-tech people using crypto for every day tasks are closer to fairy tales.
The worst is the tendency for various cryptosolutions to tend back to centralized PRIVATE control. Tether is the worst offender in this regard. The cognitive dissonance is fantastic here.
I have no doubts that there will be another hype cycle attracting new followers with blinders.
For a brief moment in 2013 crypto(Bitcoin especially) actually seemed useful as a currency.
To conclude, maybe in 2023 someone will come up with a killer app for crypto but crypto kitties is not the answer.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."