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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand people who constantly make fun of new technologies that we're only recently about to figure out how to make right. Like people obsessed with making fun of IoT (I don't own any IoT besides a smartphone) or cryptocurrencies (I own a bit). Isn't it normal for new techs to be failing at the beginning? Do we really need to ridicule these nascent techs just because they're not perfect for now?

It's like people making fun of first airplanes 150 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp7MHZY2ADI). First attempts to fly were full of huge failure, many leading to deaths. Many people ridiculed the very idea we would one day do mass travel by plane.

I thought of anyone, we should know better than making fun of new tech having some failures, this is how tech works. Because one day, one of these techs may take off like these planes eventually did and you will be the one looking like a fool then.

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It’s more making fun of the hype where people who don’t understand either the technology or economics make huge predictions based on what would be personally advantageous for themselves.

Air travel had immediate, obvious advantages. There were many technical challenges but getting somewhere fast no matter the terrain was an obvious win. In contrast, the first decade of crypto currency hype has basically been “you should use your money to make me rich and in return you’ll get to do what you could already do except it’ll cost more and won’t have fraud protection”. A hype cycle like that always gets mockery and the way to deal with it is to drop it, be honest about what went wrong, and do something which useful.

IoT is a good example of both outcomes: bad products get mocked but millions of useful devices are selling because they do something ordinary people want.

> Air travel had immediate, obvious advantages.

And yet, the amount of FUD and ridicule people got for trying to fly was enormous. In hindsight, the advantages of a successful technology are always obvious.

> In contrast, the first decade of crypto currency hype has basically been “you should use your money to make me rich and in return you’ll get to do what you could already do except it’ll cost more and won’t have fraud protection”.

That is not how it was introduced to the world, crypto currency was introduced as a trustless decentralized cash currency no tyrant could ever manipulate to the detriment of the people, the ability to send cash near instantly to anyone across the world without a central authority. If bitcoin becomes successful (not saying it will) at fighting currency manipulation and banking the poor, people like you will say "Crypto currency had immediate, obvious advantages. There were many technical challenges but sending money fast across the world with no intermediary and making currency manipulation by tyrants impossible was an obvious win.".

> And yet, the amount of FUD and ridicule people got for trying to fly was enormous

Sources? Almost immediately after the invention of flight, WWI started putting them to use [1]. (There was ridicule about the possibility of heavier-than-air flight prior to its invention. But that’s not comparable to the matter at hand.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_World_War_I

Non-mobile link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_World_War_I

> And yet, the amount of FUD and ridicule people got for trying to fly was enormous.

Was that for trying to fly or because the proposed mechanism was obviously unworkable? It’s not like people are saying there isn’t room to improve on the credit card system, only that you have to deliver something which is actually an improvement.

Similarly, your defense of bitcoin is a great example of that problem: nobody is arguing that the marketing points you repeated weren’t widely made, only that the system on offer falls far short.

(E.g. “send cash instantly” versus a substantial fee and time delay compared to a credit card. Similarly, talking about currency manipulation is reasonable but it’s laughable in the context of something which fluctuates so much more than almost all currencies)

Do you really think that giving control of your money to a bunch of Chinese crypto miners is better than having government protection on your account (up to a certain limit obviously)? Honestly the cryptovangelists are looking much more like a scam every day if even someone who has just “a bunch” of criptocurrencies per his admission is so vocal on guaranteeing the future of the entire ecosystem...

Bitcoin is like faster than air travel for money. Send money to whoever you want no matter the political terrain in between or time of day. Seems like an obvious win. It has fraud protection from the people who claim to give you fraud protection in the old system but then sometimes take your money against your intent.

I can send money using a credit card, Square/Venmo, Apple/Google Pay, etc. faster with smaller fees and fraud protection. What incentive to I have to switch?

Your last sentence doesn’t make any sense unless you live in a place with a tyrannical government, and they’ll take your bitcoin like anything else – in fact it’s easier since you have to leave a public history which cannot be repudiated.

Paying 50$ to send 1£ after a couple of hours doesn’t honestly seem “an obvious win” to me.. In uk it arrives instantly and it’s free.

One person dying in a aircraft that is being used as a science/engineering trial for a new technology is absolutely not the same thing as a hundred startups bursting on to the scene and amateurishly slapping together some code to try and gain market share, at the cost to the general consumer who has been swindled into getting into the “hot new thing” via YouTube ads.

There is a huge gap between “we genuinely don’t understand the full mechanics of heavier-than-air flight” and “we got an intern to write the front-end and there were no server side checks to verify your balance”. I won’t feel foolish because I do believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain can work, but I’ll happily ridicule those doing it poorly for a quick buck off the nonethewiser general consumer.

Securing and validating transactions is not a new concept, and JavaScript is not a new technology.

What's new here is people with little experience handling billions of dollars in transactions, and their cavalier attitude towards other people's money.

What's also new is the absolutely incredible acceptance of these "hacks"... 150M here 500M there, who cares - the perps will never be found. Nobody is going to jail.

The technology is not being ridiculed. the exchanges are the ones messing up by making really careless coding errors.

I don't know, @patio11 who's quoted on the link keeps attacking bitcoin all the time. Equally annoying are people who keep praising bitcoin all the time by the way. Bitcoin may or may not succeed but people who keep predicting it will fail are just as tiring as people who keep saying it will save humanity and get rid of all the ills.

> The technology is not being ridiculed

I could find you plenty of people ridiculing cryptocurrencies on twitter everyday. This site is just another example.

In your opinion I’m probably one of the people attacking bitcoin. And yes, I would like them to completely disappear. People are just wasting an enormous quantity of energy in an unregulated lottery in which they are almost always guaranteed to lose. Can you please tell me a good reason why I should not oppose crypto currencies and all the similar “scams”? Plese don’t answer with Proof of stake or other shenanigans if we want to be evaluating this phenomenon in an honest way. Unless I missed something proof of stake is translated to “who has more money can print the biggest percentage of new money”, but I didn’t really follow all the variations of this philosophy.

Not sure what you're talking about, Bitcoin is way more energy efficient than any fiat currency:

"Still, it’s important to put things in perspective. A recent report suggests that at current prices, Bitcoin miners will consume an estimated 8.27 terawatt-hours per year. That might sound like a lot, but it’s actually less than an eighth of what U.S. data centers use, and only about 0.21 percent of total U.S. consumption. It also compares favorably to the currencies and commodities that bitcoin could help replace: Global production of cash and coins consumes an estimated 11 terawatt-hours per year, while gold mining burns the equivalent of 132 terawatt-hours. And that doesn’t include armored trucks, bank vaults, security systems and such. So in the right context, bitcoin is positively green."

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitco...

Bitcoin is only a microscopic fraction of the whole fiat currency that is around, processes an even more abysmal fraction of the total transactions per day and it uses basically the same amount of energy as the whole global currency production as per your post. Ah, and this energy cost will only go up because of the increase in difficulty. It’s like saying that 10000 people that for a living are destroying the Amazonian forest are positively green because they do less harm than the whole coal burning that happens in the world. Honestly I can’t wait for the day when this cancer for the whole humanity will disappear.

> Honestly I can’t wait for the day when this cancer for the whole humanity will disappear.

I have bad news for you, we will probably all end up using cryptocurrencies eventually. Even banks are starting to see the writing on the wall. It is just a superior technology to fiat https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/bank-of-america-worried-abou...

I cannot recall people making fun of new tech, mostly complaining about either ignorance, bad business ethics, risky behaviour or flaws that needs to be addressed.

The current state of crypto businesses is quite horrible, too many sell "Get 10000% returns in 1y" crap to naive people. Will be interesting how the this crypto craze will look when looking back at it after it has cooled down.

What other technology has let so many companies embezzle and/or lose $100 million or more within a single year? Crypto currency has a lot of potential; some of that potential is clearly the efficiency with which it can eat investment money.

$100 million/year is a reasonable "burn rate" for a multitude of startups these days...

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