Hacker News Reader

"pls buy litecoin"

... there's always a vested interest!

Maybe at some point people will do some thinking about how their own conflicts of interest affect the hype and FUD they spread in crypto communities.

pls buy iota

I have been trying to keep track of some of the cryptocurrency idiocy on HN, but no one seems to care/get it: reddit.com/r/BoHN/

Wow. There is a twist at the end

Yeah, Litecoin is no better than Bitcoin in any fundamental way. It doesn't solve volatility, scalability, reversibility, etc.

Yes, it seems that human attention has become the ultimate luxury commodity. I think that a cryptocurrency derives a significant portion of its value from the mere fact that that a lot of people know about its existence.

A lot of celebrities these days make huge sums of money in spite of being untalented. Being famous is valuable in itself.

People (especially rich people) want to be loved and/or respected. The "why" doesn't actually matter. If you own a lot of something which a lot of people know about, then you will be respected.

The blockchain is public. Everybody can see it. It's the ultimate instrument of vanity. In the future you'll be able to show off your wealth without the stigma associated with actually showing it off. People will be able to look you up on a popular blockchain and know that you are an influential individual.

It solves a big problem that rich people have. They want to appear humble but at the same time they want other people to know that they are rich.

Yes, and we can see the Oligarchical squatters who acquired large stakes in Bitcoin.

  In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure 
  of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to 
  determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in 
  the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and 
  many addresses have been used only once or a few times. 
  (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small 
  exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from 
  early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, 
  another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 
  25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution 
  "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea 
  and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution 
  look like that of a workers' paradise

  Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 
  22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, 
  there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with 
  any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a 
  quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner 
  was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in 
  thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the 
  most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in 
  "RSA encryption")"

[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard

If only humans always chose the best solutions to a problem. That's not how things work though. Many sup-par solutions have been chosen because they gained adoption more than because they were the best solution.

Bitcoin will never be the most interesting w.r.t technology, but it has the potential for having the highest market cap. It has a huge network effect, and currently stands as the major conduit for fiat to any other cryptocurrency.