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Comment by ordinaryradical | Hacker News Reader

This utopian streak running through the crypto community is what convinces me most that it’s going to be a heartbreaker.

> But Hayek used the notion of distributed knowledge. Well, it looks like we do not even need that thing called knowledge for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure.

Irrational exuberance is a good thing!

And while these ideologues are busy demonizing the central banks a handful of individuals manipulate bitcoin to levels a central bank could never even attempt...

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I honestly hope the utopian dream is smashed in the cryptocurrency community. It's not the kind of "utopia" I want to be a part of. I like the technical ideas behind cryptocurrency, but the terrible political views are off-putting.

I'm legitimately interested in cryptocurrency; I think it's a really cool idea. So what I'm hoping for is that everything goes as horribly wrong as possible, the price tanks, everyone's dreams are smashed, and all the bullshit takes disappear.

At that point, the people who are interested in building something worthwhile will be the only ones who remain, and we can work in peace.

When did you find out about cryptocurrency?

Because this has already happened in 2014-2016. It happened before that too. Each time the speculative bubble rises, it is being driven at first by improvements to the tech and/or ecosystem. Then it gets a life of its own, goes crazy, and runs out of gas. But along the way, more people learn about it and decide they care enough to continue the project.

Even if you are only in it for the money, the tech matters. Because the closer you are to the tech, the better you understand where the long term value will be, and when the price has outrun that value.

I really got into it in a little over a year ago. I first heard about it about 4 years ago though. I'm sure there are ebbs and flows, but this time around does seem different, given that my tech-illiterate family members were asking me about it over the holidays.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it seems inescapable.

Is there an altcoin which is indefinitely and exponentionally inflationary? Such a coin would not have the gold-rush/ponzi characteristics which bitcoin has, and there wouldn't be a such huge incentive to mine new coins so hopefully it would avoid the incredibly wasteful mining arms race.

But no one would get rich quick, so it would probably never take off in the first place.

I think the concept you're looking for is "value stable".

Right now we're seeing the tip of the iceberg of potential cryptocurrencies. Pretty much only token-based (ie. non-ledger) based currencies, where we need global BFT consensus to track the current position of every single coin. This is crazy. And, as it turns out, unnecessary (see: Holochain).

When the iceberg capsizes (as Git capsized the CASE industry), globally consistent ledger-based value-stable currencies based on peer-to-peer co-signed personal blockchains will supplant these unnecessary globally consistent token based ... things. (Do I really care that you just slid a nickel across the table to someone? Nope). Same with crazy Turing-complete globally consistent VMs implementing Smart Contract languages. Not necessary.

You are correct -- value-stable currencies won't have anyone getting rich quick. But, when every sub-saharan goat herder and neighbourhood kid with a collection of trading cards can independently monetize his/her wealth into a value-stable currency, we'll see the face ripped off of the global Fiat monetary systems...

I know of only two: Tether and Dai

https://tether.to/

https://makerdao.com

Because thats how we got such perfectly tuned markets like housing, stocks, international trade, debt. They never break down after one big crisis that takes lots of people down with them.

I'm sure that there will be some kind of reckoning at some point. Who knows though, maybe prices will just stabilize to the point that it becomes another boring equity.

> I like the technical ideas behind cryptocurrency, but the terrible political views are off-putting.

Which political views? I read the article and only saw a view on money, not politics.

What’s being criticized is the very idea that money should involve politics.

The argument is that we should be as free to choose which kind of money we use as we are to choose which kind of car we use. There should be no law giving competitive advantage — in the form of legal tender law, and the absence of choosing which numeraire to use as the basis for calculating capital gains tax — to currencies issued by central banks with whom the government has an account.

It’s entirely possible to deliver an argument for the separation of government and money without criticizing either in and of itself. It’s very much like arguing for the separation of church and state without saying anything negative about either of the two in isolation.

I wasn't referencing the article. There are a lot of people in the cryptocurrency community (spend some time in telegram rooms, reading blog posts, etc) that push a very libertarian/anarcho-capitalist agenda.

I obviously don't think anything is wrong with using alternative currencies, but I'm not sure that separation of currency and state can happen the same way separation of church and state has. Even if the government doesn't control the issuance of currency they will undoubtedly have an outsized influence on whatever currency they choose to support.

> I obviously don't think anything is wrong with using alternative currencies, but I'm not sure that separation of currency and state can happen the same way separation of church and state has. Even if the government doesn't control the issuance of currency they will undoubtedly have an outsized influence on whatever currency they choose to support.

I honestly don’t see the big difference: the people, by voting on representatives, choose both which religions and means of payment the government accepts (assuming a democracy, of course).

are you talking about rotten bank bailouts? yes terrible policies

While claiming the principles of Liberty for yourself (deciding what kind of "utopia" you want to be part of), would you deny that choice to others?

This is perhaps what separates libertarians from liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc.: we simply do not deny others the liberty we claim for ourselves.

If a monetary system that cannot be debased/controlled by government is available, does that not allow you to elect to create and/or join a community of similar beliefs? Or, would you prefer that I (or someone else) be able to gain control of your government, and then choose to make it (financially) impossible for you to choose your associations and/or behaviors?

Or, perhaps: does your "utopia" require others to fund it, in order for it to work? This is, unfortunately, the case with most people's personal beliefs. They require the non-consensual forced effort of others to succeed...

Please don't use HN for generic ideological arguments, even when—especially when—other commenters are already tilting in that direction. It inevitably takes HN threads into black holes that are always the same, and therefore always off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I hope one day we'll perfect space travel and be able to colonize the galaxy. Then for quite a while we'll have so many planets and resources that every human being could destroy a planet every day and we'll still have no fear of running out.

In the unlikely situation where this happens and I'm alive to experience it, I'll be the most extremist libertarian you've ever seen. "You don't like this? Just create your own community on some planet a few light years from there and do your thing." Communists colonize their own little solar system, anarchists cohabitate in an other, fascists create the Germania consortium.

But that's not the world we live in currently. We're all stuck on the same speck of dust in the middle of an absurdly large ocean of empty space. So yeah, for now unfortunately it means we have to play nice with each other and compromise. Whether you like it or not you're part of a society.

What libertarians deny is reality itself. Government is defined as a monopoly on violence. Non-coercive government is a contradiction in terms.

> What libertarians deny is reality itself.

Please keep generic ideological bickering off HN. It's always the same, therefore never interesting in the local sense of the word.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What straw-man libertarians deny... what real libertarians do is agree with bounds on government power that respect the liberty of all,to as great an extent as possible while protecting the community from attack.

So slavery? cool? You're cool with slavery? Just want to be sure we're using the same definition of liberty here.

Could you please not use HN for ideological battle? That's destructive of what the site is for, so we eventually have to moderate accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes definitely. If you replace "Bitcoin" in this essay with "blockchain based assets", Taleb would have a fairly good point. But "Bitcoin" has been manipulated so much that I think most people recognize that a crash is inevitable. There is nothing special about Bitcoin-anyone can start their own blockchain. Bitcoin is just an overpriced version of the infinite possible blockchains.

But he indeed is mostly talking about the idea/concept behind Bitcoin (that could be translated as "blockchain based assets") rather than necessarily Bitcoin itself. He doesn't discard Bitcoin as not having these qualities, but he also doesn't state that only Bitcoin is capable of it.

I think you have it backwards here for the most part.

What problems do you see infinite blockchains solving?

No comment on whether or not a crash is inevitable, who knows where the price is going. That's not really too important to me. But the fact that Bitcoin is for now the most secure and technologically sound blockchain is what makes it interesting. And actually having those unique characteristics is what makes it special. I definitely don't see much special with 'blockchain the data structure' on its own.

Yes there’s definitely value in Bitcoins hash power and underlying technology. But the code is open source and easy to copy. There’s a team behind it that is definitely worth something for Bitcoin but they could certainly work on any blockchain (especially if it’s a Bitcoin fork).

I think forks are definitely the biggest concern for Bitcoin. I think most longterm holders arent realizing how big of a threat it is.

Bitcoin Cash is still around and can probably stay around for a long time reusing Cores work. Other forks will be less friendly and won’t preserve Bitcoins transaction history.

For what it's worth, I think Hayek's vision of competitive money is often misrepresented by crypto folks. I wrote about it here: https://paulbutler.org/archives/stop-dragging-hayek-into-bit...

> And while these ideologues are busy demonizing the central banks a handful of individuals manipulate bitcoin to levels a central bank could never even attempt...

Thank you for putting words to an idea I've had for a while.

I agree that central banks are imperfect and that they sometimes abuse or just misuse their power. When they abuse the trust we place in them it creates real, specific problems. Cryptocurrencies have no trust, but they have even worse versions of the same specific problems.

This shouldn't be surprising. The entire reason we created central banks in the first place was precisely to attempt to manage these specific problems. The implicit argument is that centrally managing a currency isn't just imperfect and corrupt, but that it's so incredibly imperfect and corrupt as to be worse than nothing.

If there is a fatal flaw in Bitcoin somewhere, there are hundreds of other attempts to improve upon this idea by forking the code. We will surely see dramatic changes in valuation amongst these different coins as the crypto community develops, but to think that ALL the coins will fail in their game-changer level ambition.. this does not logically follow.

In all possible worlds, individuals will fork Bitcoin and the competition for economically and technically sound digital monies will only increase. And in all possible worlds, individuals will manipulate markets with very low volume, ie. Bitcoin for most/all of its existence.

This is all deterministic. It could not be otherwise.

>but to think that ALL the coins will fail in their game-changer level ambition.. this does not logically follow.

Good thing no one suggested that.

> And while these ideologues are busy demonizing the central banks a handful of individuals manipulate bitcoin to levels a central bank could never even attempt...

What baffles me is the obsession over price. Nobody obsesses over USD/JPY, unless you’re a forex trader.

Rather than focusing on price, the focus should be on building new ideas with blockchain technology. Dapps are easier than ever to deploy with Truffle/web3.js[0] for example. You can come up with cool alternative governance models like Dash[1] has.

I’ve been following Bitcoin since 2010. It’s never been about price for me. It’s been about what cool things you can build with the technology.

[0] http://truffleframework.com

[1] https://dashvotetracker.com

How is this baffling? 99% of people who buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies don't care about freedom, disrupting the financial system or any of that other ideological issues. They simply want to make money (USD, EUR, JPY, what have you).

There is a distinct difference between some pump and dump strategy and a central bank printing a ton of currency. One has a temporary effect on supply and demand for the instrument in question, the other has a permanent effect.

>the other has a permanent effect

This is not really accurate. There are of course many ways both fiscal and monetary for policymakers to "tighten the screws", as it were. They just haven't chosen to do so in recent years.

* Permanent until the central bank chooses to contract their balance sheet at some point in the future.

Perhaps a better way to describe it is that a pump and dump strategy has a transient effect on the value of the asset in question, whereas a central bank increasing the money supply has a persistent effect on the value of the currency in question.

I feel like you could say the exact same thing about democracy

You can!

Also relevant, there are no functioning democracies in the world today. There are a bunch of republics and parliaments and representative democracies and such, but without exception they empower some relatively small central institution to make broad, sweeping decisions on behalf of the nation.

you can manipulate any market when it's small. that doesn't mean anything actually

I hope the price goes close to 0 so I can buy it all up.

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