Comment by kadendogthing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kadendogthing | Hacker News Reader

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Tech enthusiasts always seem to lack education around general civics and law. But it's especially bad in the area of tech-beanie-baby fanboys who pontificate around subjects by acting totally disingenuous or just willfully ignorant. Their cult-like excitement over a merkle tree with a distributed consensus/integrity algorithm is truly insane.

* What REALLY gives currency it's value, LOL? As long as other people just blindly accept the currency it's totally fine!

* My currency is increasing in value dramatically so it's Working (TM) right, haha take that bootlickers.

* We demolished a power grid but you know cryptocurrency is totally going to help the poor and disenfranchised!

* Why do governments need to track how I spend MY money? I should be able to give it to whoever I want without question and totally don't have to pay taxes!

* We don't need banks, but we do need these private entities with no oversight to manage and store our currency and facilitate trading. Definitely different and Free (TM) 1984.

* Those same "banks" can easily fake trading volume but no one would do that, right? I don't understand why we have laws against that with real banks?

Please don't post any more flamewar comments to HN.

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

Satire and sarcasm are allowed here, yes?

It's a fine line. The guidelines ask you to eschew snark.

We don't have any problem with satire and sarcasm as such, but on a large public forum like HN, with everything a mile wide and an inch deep, they are nearly always associated with really low-quality discussion.

> What REALLY gives currency it's value, LOL? As long as other people just blindly accept the currency it's totally fine!

Confidence. If enough people think rice bags or pressed and aged tea is money, then it is. At least you can eat rice and drink tea, bank notes or crypto hashes not so much.

>If enough people think rice bags or pressed and aged tea is money, then it is.

No, commodity money typically has a variety of practical functions and its function in an exchange system is born out of necessity. Not arbitrarily because people want to start doing accounting that way. I don't understand why people repeat this. It's not clever or insightful, and worse it's definitely not correct. It's gravely concerning that presumably basically educated people tout this line without a second thought when it comes to cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency finds its value purely out of someone hoping someone else will be left holding the bag, not because it's useful.

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