Because small dick energy just doesn’t work for me. Some 95% of commentary on the topic is off the rails. The 5% rarely gets a mention here.
Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
91–100 of 278 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#92It's because we're all a bunch of salty nocoiners that spend our days wishing we had got in on the ground floor. As the famous saying goes: "It's hard to make a man understand something when he could have been a millionaire if he'd only understood it sooner." /s
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#93I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus. One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster. The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the envi…
I basically agree; but this oversimplifies the diversity of opinion in both camps. For example, it might well be worth the environmental damage to shift control of international monetary flows from the US government to a true free market. Although the US has been as good a steward as can be hoped for no entity should have that much control over international finance.
Sure it oversimplified (most opinions that are somewhat transferable are).
I agree with the hope for a better stewardship, but as all people end up moving cryptocurrencies in and out of the "old" financial system (creditcards, swift etc). I fail to see how crypto would help me..
I for one cannot pay for my rent, food, heat, water, power, internet with crypto, can you?
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#94There is no consensus on this topic because a lot of people just want to "get rich quick" ignoring the question of the source of richness.
The community generally doesn't have a problem when the source of richness is harvesting the personal information of a few million victims and getting bought out by Google.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#95I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus. One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster. The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the envi…
Interesting comments! Do you mind sharing your thoughts on why proof of stake won’t happen?
Proof of stake is already happening. It's on Ethereum (though they haven't switched over to the beacon chain from proof-of-work yet), and it's on many others.
If you look at the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, maybe bitcoin and 1 are 2 others are proof of stake. There are a bunch of 'tokens' cryptocurrencies which exist on top of another blockchain, but the remainder of the layer 1 blockchains and all of the layer 2s that use a consensus mechanism are using proof of stake now.
Arguing against crypto because of proof of work is like arguing that computers won't see mass adoption because vacuum tubes make them impractical to fit inside of a typical home.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#96My main criticism comes from the fact that Bitcoin (and other crypto-coins) had a good several years to find a purpose, to this day, I am not aware of a single use-case where they are used to solve a real world problem.
If I had to sum up how I feel about Bitcoin (/ crypto / block chain..) - magic buzz word for the non-tech-savvy ,draw for gamblers & ego driven individuals, theme of quasi-fake money-grab startups..
I think one of the things that ruined Bitcoin is it becoming this "asset" instead of a tool to get something done, maybe proving something about a truly "free" market, maybe there's a lesson here.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting comments! Do you mind sharing your thoughts on why proof of stake won’t happen?
IMHO because it depends on uncloneability of digital assets.. Which I believe is not possible. The whole thing that makes cryptocurrencies work now is the un-cloneability of the amount of work done (which is why the 51% problem exists in the first place). The only good way of doing it would be through a cartel with strict enforcement of hashrates etc.. And welcome to the financial banking system...
You're confusing concepts and blockchain fundamentals. "Uncloneability" is the double-spending problem solved by proof-of-work/hashcash scheme. The 51% attack is not the problem, it's just a requirement for a PoW based blockchain to work. Just like how you have 1/3 honest node requirements in traditional BFT distributed database designs.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#98I think some of your premises are wrong. I don't think cryptocurrencies are especially divisive on HN. It's like a lot of other topics - a lot of different people with a lot of different feelings, some of them more strongly than others. It's not surprising that when something is new, there is a lot of curiosity around it that is different 12 years later, when it's just part of our world, and many of the "questions" h…
I think it's especially divisive because the only way to further it is with increasingly ingenious, sophisticated argument. This doesn't come down to simple concepts: it's hypotheticals, projections, a call to imagine what COULD be, and a great deal of pressure to buy into one or another predicted outcome.
This becomes like a game. It's a logic puzzle. How do you construct an unanswerable argument that produces your desired result? It's much less interesting to go 'well, wait and see, things will doubtless become more obvious as this progresses'.
Under some circumstances, the ONLY way to establish a currency that actively supplants and destroys all fiat currency, displacing governments and replacing their control with only market pressures enacted through completely liquid and untrammeled flow of capital… is to ram it through with such desperate haste that it's too big to fail by the time it's recognized as a threat by those controlling governments. To topple governments and replace all their control with anarchy governed by only market pressures, the ungovernable replacement currency has to be so huge that the pressure of committed capital ITSELF is more powerful than any government.
This is a big, dramatic 'ask'. Whether it's wrecking the world and ruining the environment is a whole separate question. Arguably the bigger question is, 'SHOULD there be a currency that allows the pressure of purely capital to overthrow this or any government?' Especially since by design it is NOT a hierarchical power structure, but distributed and impossible for anyone to control… does that produce desirable results?
Mind you, if you get that and THEN find out it's possible for the system to be controlled anyway, you're pretty thoroughly hosed… you have to trust very much that the system put in place to overthrow all governments, truly represents a distributed and ungovernable system. Otherwise, you just overthrew all governments in order to hand all power over to somebody that you don't know who it is.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'd say your entire approach is antithetical to healthy discussion: insinuating anyone who is interested in crypto is technically inept, and turning the discussion into a 2-sides polarization. There's no use in talking about crypto in a sincere way now because of the way its been politicized. I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of…
> I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance) There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be d…
You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: As a response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.
Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide.
Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.
Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.
Re: Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?
#100I would say it's because people on Hacker News are pretty intelligent. Either they are intelligent and manipulative and are looking to maximize their investments whatever the cost to others, the externalities, whatever… or they are intelligent and accurately perceiving the first type of intelligent person. By now, if you're a techie nerd, to be naive about this topic would mean there's something seriously wrong with…
I think that is disingenuous. Because there remain interesting things to discus and consider in the world of 'crypto', even if you acknowledge there are issues and its not perfect yet.
There certainly are some loud 'shills' out there. But there are also actual interesting technical developments. It seems to me that between the shills and the people shouting down who they perceive to be shills, the interesting discussion gets drowned out.