Hacker News Reader

Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

There is way too much Ethereum and Bitcoin stuff on HN now. :/

If the voting for stories is fair, then "too much" means "the HN community is more interested in this than I am".

There's a lot of activity lately so it makes sense that there's more news on this lately. IMO it's relevant to HN. If I see stuff that I'm not interested in on HN (of which there is plenty) I just move on to the other stories.

From my reading, many comments are negative. I was interested in crypto currency, but after reading enough HN, it has made me very cautious. I especially enjoyed learning about the horrible design flaws of the Solidity language.

I think HN plays a vital role and these opinions by very intelligent people are very helpful to me.

Your comment also made me wonder about a sentiment analysis of HN comments. Something like:

"What does HN Think about It?" App

I would be wary about basing too many decisions based on HNs advice (or any other internet forum for that matter). Although you find some jewels sometimes, HN comment section is famous for typically having cynical comments, and you'll find that over the years a lots of tech that later became big were considered "hype" or plain bad here, from stuff like ruby on rails to VR to Deep Learning, to name just a few. With crypto currencies there is the additional aspect that for a lot of ppl this is a sort of religion with money involved, so comments and submissions can be very biased or downright nasty. By reading certain cryptocurrency forums or publications you even risk getting a very distorted version of the real story due to mountains of disinformation and an echo chamber effect.

Careful--there is a tendency for engineers to conflate superior technology with the success of a product.

FWIW, many of these negative comments that I read and most remembered as making powerful points happily admitted, as part of the criticism (not a hedge against it), that the security issues inherent in Ethereum are due to the very factors that might have made it successful (such as making web developers think they can now write smart contracts by offering a language that looks like JavaScript and is even as quirky as JavaScript, and sweeping verification under the rug).

I actually see lots of parallels to companies like StackMob, Parse, and Firebase, which launched incredibly insecure "serverless" database products that didn't even support any notion of security and even as they added security would almost encourage "anyone can read and even write all of your data" in the documentation as even mentioning security in a tutorial made the product look hard to use.

But the result, of course, was that there were even companies offering dating apps that even claimed in their marketing "we are actually secure, unlike others", which were listed as featured users on the StackMob website, where you could just dump their entire database--including both offline Facebook access tokens for all the supposedly-anonymous users as well as the entire database of what they were saying to each other in their supposedly-private messages--as it was all public.

The market is fundamentally incapable of optimizing for secure products in the same way it is incapable of optimizing for open products. Both of these properties of a product are too complex for users to analyze and the benefits often come in some difficult to measure effect that happens on some difficult to predict timescale. We need to work on this problem before the "Internet of things" becomes too popular and we hit truly dystopian levels of insecure centrally-controlled products.

A meta sentiment analysis of HN comments about <subject> would be fascinating to me. Quantify the opinion of the "hivemind".

Be careful with these negative HN comments, they have cost me millions.

I first heard about bitcoin right here, when it hit $3 per coin for the first time. That was a huge event.

I had my own reservations about investing in bitcoin, but reading the comments here prejudiced my view.

VC's say it's not the losses that get to you, it's the companies you miss out on that scar you.

Not investing in Bitcoin at $3-5 was the single worst strategic decision of my life.

It was something that could have saved me years of toil, it was an easy ticket into the Big Game. A massive influx of economic energy, a fantastic counterstrike to entropy was right there, and it was easy. So easy to buy, granted it would have been not easy to hold through the dark times, the dips, the panic.

Oh, but if one did!

None of the hard work of starting a company, finding product-market fit, hiring a team, raising funds, fighting off the inevitable bandits that will come for their extortion money in the form of frivolous patent lawsuits...

None of that. Just easy, huge, beautiful, juicy investment capital right at my fingertips.

Oh the land that could have been bought! The development deals that would have flowed and the opportunities that could have been pursued. Instant entrance to Ruling Class, a ticket to the best club on earth.

'The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They would ask me to advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise. "If you please, Reb Tevye..." "Pardon me, Reb Tevye..." Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes! And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong. When you're rich, they think you really know!"'

- If I Were A Rich Man, Fiddler on the Roof

And it's that emotion thats fueling crypto asset valuations right now, along with actual riches created by people who didn't give in to the negativity, the doubt, the fear.

The thing has value. People like this thing. They like it all over the world. There are infinite uses for something like money + code + global computer networks.

And a thing doesn't have to be perfect or solve every problem to have value.

The standard that commenters here hold crypto to is not the same standard they hold startup companies to.

With companies if they do something some people like enough to use, they say wow what a success, look they are a real company with profits!

I mean even if the only use for crypto currency is regulatory/legal arbitrage, that's insanely valuable and would have merited an investment.

HN comments might have saved you a ton, too. If you focus only on the missed opportunities and not the things you've done right, you're just making yourself unhappy for no good reason.

Personal happiness doesn't factor in to it, missing very early bitcoin was a result of flawed thinking, which I intend to correct.

Was it flawed thinking, or was it correct thinking that doesn't give correct results 100% of the time because the world is complicated and nothing can give correct results 100% of the time?

I was going to post this! I've been in cryptocurrency-land since 2012 and initially the posts on HN were very occasional... now we have 2 or 3 on front-page at any time.

IMO this means that we are reaching peak interest among techies. It happened with node, with angular, with react and now with crypto... it'd be fun to see some data graphs with info from algolia or the HN dataset from GCloud...

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news

Regarding the post: I opposed the fork, but now I think it was the best way to go. When there are irreconcilable views/goals in a community, the best thing to do is to separate ways. It happened with linux distros, with dev frameworks, etc and cryptos are not different, it's just software.

I was kind of vaguely interested in this digital currency stuff, and even saw a few local stores tentatively start dipping their toes in last year. But now I have no idea what's going on with a thousand different currencies and now forks of the major ones and huge thefts and I don't even know. From a casual observer's perspective, they seem to be imploding and destroying any credibility they had built up over years.

I'll stick to real money, thanks.

They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles. Others... not so sure. Bitcoin is a huge driver for the hype cycle in cryotocurrencies in general.

If you want to watch anything, watch what happens with Bitcoin between now and August 1st. It's a make or break time for whether that trend of slowly increasing value keeps going or blows up horribly.

Eh, I'm not really interested in "watching" it, I just see what comes my way by chance. That mostly seems to be scary emails from CoinBase[1] and snippets of news of "the community" having major arguments about the fundamental nature of its value. This is not confidence inspiring for the casual user. Maybe it'll settle down sometime and I'll re-evaluate, but for now I've officially moved into the "not interested" camp.

[1] """The User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) is a proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size scheduled to activate on August 1. The UAHF is incompatible with the current Bitcoin ruleset and will create a separate blockchain. Should UAHF activate on August 1, Coinbase will not support the new blockchain or its associated coin.

The User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) is a proposal to adopt Segregated Witness on the Bitcoin blockchain and could result in network instability. It is scheduled to activate at the same time as the UAHF."""

>They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles

Have we even seen a single cycle yet? Bitcoin hit the mainstream, what, five years ago? The value certainly hasn't "crept up"; it's growing exponentially like every bubble in history.

> Have we even seen a single cycle yet?

I mean, just look at the data. Yes, there have been -- without any doubt! -- at least 3 cycles that I recall. And by cycle I mean Bitcoin losing at least 50% of its market capitalization suddenly (bust!) and then slowing crawling back up, then quickly shooting up (boom!). No one, not even Bitcoin's biggest detractors, doubts that it's been through numerous boom and bust cycles (and that's not even a good thing, for a store of value).

Definitely, we've seen several cycles - to name 2 I watched more closely, the $30 peak and the $1000 peak were both followed by extended months of much lower prices. After which the value tends to average out higher than it began, but remain quite distant from the peak for quite some time. This I call a cycle.

>I'll stick to real money, thanks.

By "real" money, you mean more established and widely used, correct?

yeah, none of that shit happens with real money

It does, sure, to a vague degree. (Fiat money is not exactly as easy to fork, so you don't get the scenario of economic system disputes leading to alternate currencies as much. The rest certainly apply, of course, even the huge amount of thefts -- see the 1MBD Malaysian scandal as an example..)

The main issue to be aware of with cryptocurrency at the moment is quite a bit more volatile than the most major currencies. For now, at least, I would classify cryptocurrency investment as "speculative". EG: I wouldn't recommend anyone put their life savings into a cryptocurrency, at the moment.

30 years ago: "guys you're writing way too much about internet stuff, I can't wait for this fad to be over"

strawman

There's drama, conflict, hacks, fuckups, civil wars, bugs, theft, more drama, bailouts and all of the growing pains that make a story worth telling.

So basically Eve Online.

Along with the same harsh attitude if you get burned

Said the person with one submission in a year.

what does that have to do with his observation?

That if you want less of 'x' on HN that you should at least do your best to submit more quality links on other subjects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com