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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

Is there a crypto voting ring? I understand why most crypto articles reach the top 10 posts but this one has nothing going for it.

* Niche website linked / breaking the news

* Non-mainstream crypto-fork

* No novel interest / features

There's nothing to suggest why this would be upvoted, even among this crypto-friendly crowd.

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It's novel. Bitcoin hasn't had a persistent fork before. Exchanges are trading assets that represent coin futures. That's very new.

Look at all the other stuff on the front page of HN right now:

* Dell made a new monitor. Yay. * An article about salaries in Norway * Emacs compared to alternatives * A map of Ulysses’ journey * People in the UK must register their drones now.

Everyone has different interests but something new is happening with a large, expensive, distributed piece of software that allows anyone to hack on. That's HN's raison d'être.

I think that crypto news are still underrepresented on HN. The recent crypto topics (such as ICOs, Solidity, Tezos, EOS, ETH's Parity which is btw written in Rust) surge in word-wide traffic outperforming last year trends (AI, bots, VR) by far.

I hunt for respective news on other sites because HN just provides the most important crypto news. There's a lot more out there, it's new and complex. It's good to read stuff multiple times from different sources to get familiar with this new world order.

....Just to double-check, you're serious right?

Yes, I am. There's also a lot of scam out there, almost every ICO feels like scam, but still. The more serious stuff catches such a huge attention, just the ecosystem around ETH got so big and mature (despite some recent exploits) that it's hard to ignore this space.

Just compare: not just few projects raised funds within days a startup would take months. If this is the future? IDK. But I know it's 10x better than how fundraising was before. And this is just one part of the crypto space.

I'm not saying cryptocurrencies aren't interesting, I'm just saying you're overstating their case relative to other technologies and the novelty (eg, that it even is novel, as opposed to normal engineering on top of ideas that have been around decades) in saying that it's underrepresented.

(Also, AI and bots are the same topic, but that's a tangent.)

I would argue we should hear about them less than automated truck driving specifically, based on potential economic impact and current spending levels.

(Which, actually, seems to be about the trend -- we see small bursts of a few stories a day when a major event happens, but otherwise, it's mostly just a low murmur among other things.)

Have there been any recent developments with automated truck driving? Has anything actually happened? We all agree that automated transportation will have an Enormous effect on society. It's been talked about a lot before. But stuff is actually happening today in Bitcoinland.

Currently the #8 position on the HN front page is an article about Dell releasing a new monitor.

> feel like scam

More like people flock onto immature projects with large sum of money hoping for a quick 5x making the projects look far larger than they should be and when they fail to deliver, depression is as large as their investment leading to feel they got scammed.

I can't speak for this website in particular but I wouldn't call "Bitcoin Cash" not mainstream. It is a direct answer of the large portion of Bitcoin users and miners who have been clamoring for larger blocks. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin ABC, and UAHF, all the same thing, have been discussed for the past several weeks in cryto forums.

There's a huge marketing push at the moment for this fork as well on one of the Bitcoin subreddits. I suspect it's being pushed by ViaBTC, which just launched "futures trading" for it (as well as probably being the only miner), and has a lot of $ to gain by people trading on their service.

EDIT: yeah, totally organic growth I'm sure https://screenshots.firefox.com/1Jd3clym3pT37nAH/www.reddit....

I think it's because many people here have money in cryptocurrencies...

The group associated with Bitcoin Cash is well known to participate in the manipulation of social media and news aggregates, including vote manipulation and sockpuppet comments.

Are they? I ask, because they aren't the ones that are HEAVILY censoring /r/bitcoin

On /r/bitcoin there are shadow bans, outright bans, story deletion, selective enforcement of their cherry picked rules, different default comment reorganization when the conversation doesn't go the way they like and of course closed moderation logs.

/r/btc has none of this. So who is really doing the manipulation? Many of the posters who are lock step with the narratives /r/bitcoin pushes have post histories that are ONLY in /r/btc and /r/bitcoin and end up with -100 karma. Most the accounts that pop up like this are also only a few months old.

So who exactly is engaging in those practices? Because when real people meet up, or when votes are taken with signed bitcoin keys, or any sort of real verification is done there ends up being silence of the narratives /r/bitcoin pushes.

The comments on the articles are also generally very optimistic and uncritical of the marketplace. Lots of jargon usage without any significant substance.

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