Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

In what way is it useful? You say that like it's obvious, but it's not. It's on the challenger to explain why it's better than the status quo, not the other way around.

View on HN

Because there is no status quo? (And solutions that aren’t better than status quo should be automatically thrown in the trash?). Now if your question is why are markets useful, then that is obvious is it not?

Secondly, I find this viewpoint highly regressive, the asking of why is X useful question. We can go to the moon but why is it useful? These type of questions are ultimately backwards and short sighted. Why do we spend X to research Y and why is Y useful is not clear until $many_years. It may not be obvious to you if it is useful or not but it is not up to you to decide (the invisible hand of the market decides).

From your other comments, it is clear that you have already decided that “all cryptocurrency are scams” so I don’t think you are arguing this point in good faith.

> Because there is no status quo? (And solutions that aren’t better than status quo should be automatically thrown in the trash?).

I think in general, people are excited by technology that's innovative and promising. It doesn't have to solve problems better or more efficiently today but it should have some clear path to doing so, yeah.

> Now if your question is why are markets useful, then that is obvious is it not?

I guess what I'm asking is why are markets for crypto tokens useful? If I built great tech around markets but it only let you exchange week old chicken nuggets would that be valuable?

> From your other comments, it is clear that you have already decided that “all cryptocurrency are scams” so I don’t think you are arguing this point in good faith.

Substitute 'cryptocurrency' for 'entries in a MySQL store' and re-read everything that's been posted here.

Going to the moon yielded amazing technological advances, in engineering, in materials science, in physics, chemistry, national identity, etc and promises to do so again as we iterate. Capital and research expenditure isn't negative sum. Then who knows what we might find out there?

Crypto is not new technology in any way. It's a 10-year-old recombination of 20-year-old tooling. Merkle trees and hashcash. That's it. All the money being spent on it is paying miners in China to repeatedly hash numbers and pay their electric bills. There's no research, no innovation. Just people selling each other spreadsheet cells they're sure are going to be worth something one day because 'blockchain'. It's religious, not scientific. Combine that with the world of finance, zero regulation and irreversibility, there's no way to make it anything other than a scammer's paradise. Scamming people is a feature, not a bug. All based on what, the idea that 'inflation is theft' and 'the gubmint shouldn't tell me who to send money to'? Any ECON-101 class will set you straight.

It's actively anti-efficient, regressive in terms of user experience and negative-sum: the more the price goes up the more you have to pay miners, the more cash needs to come into the system to keep the price stable. PoW isn't decentralized (>51% of BTC hashpower is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC), it's not trustless (PRC), it's not fast (7tx/sec), it's not cheap, it's not a good store of value and it fails to solve human problems (deflationary in the face of an expanding population and economy).

It's abjectly failed at every one of it's stated goals, all that's left is 'number go up.' What's to like?

If crypto was a fad it would have died long ago. Yet here we are still talking about it with more money and development behind it than ever before. I really encourage you to read this newspaper column from 1995 predicting the end of the internet because just as you have put it, there are already way better options out there. https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-b...

> If crypto was a fad it would have died long ago.

That's appeal to authority. Let's focus on what it does and doesn't do, and how well. The internet wasn't built to literally become less efficient the more data was transferred over it, right?

Why are we judging it on it's capabilities of today? Scaling is a problem actively being worked on. Again, your comment draws a parallel to the aforementioned article. There are certainly problems, but some of us see the potential for a true digital cash and people will continue to work on it one way or another until it's achieved.

It was built on the crudest app tech stack vis a vis HTML, CSS and (not even sure JS was a thing yet in 1995) JS. Not many could predict the cloud becoming a multi trillion dollar industry in 1995.

I don’t see why crypto skeptics feel the need to regurgitate the same tried and debunked talking points into every single thread about crypto. This unhinged rant might as well be a copypasta at this point. None of this thread is even about bitcoin.

@dang can you do something about this.

You bring up an interesting point in that I can’t think of another technology out there quite as polarizing as crypto. It’s almost fanatical devotion from both sides. I disagree that the points are debunked, I think the current thinking from the pro side is that those are “today’s problems” and the future will be different. I think the anti camp like myself are frustrated by the religious devotion to something that in our opinion represents regression from the status quo as a north-star, driven in part by uninformed debaters assuring us crypto will solve problems they themselves don’t understand. I think it’s like how my dad used to hate medical shows because they were to him a parody of his profession but to the less informed of us, just kinda fun and cool.

I know bitcoin isn’t the only crypto, I also know proof of work isn’t the only algorithm out there. Bitcoin is the best known and most successful, and proof of work is the only algorithm so far proven to work as specified. I was giving more credibility to the space than I usually do with those simplifications, if I wanted to make fun I’d call on our boys Tether (a fraud [1] run by a fraud who tried to start a Ponzi scheme [2] and whose connection to Bitfinex eventually got revealed in the Paradise papers [3] - in which most crypto prices are denominated), IOTA (it’s ternary for no reason, isn’t decentralized, and tried to write their own hashing algorithm and when that failed they called it a DRM scheme [4]) and Dentacoin (your dental records on the blockchain for no discernible reason [5]). Even a team trying to start a BTC ETF concedes 95% of all volume is fraudulent [6]. That’s a bad place to start no matter how you slice it.

Apologies for offending you, though, that wasn’t the intent.

[1] https://amycastor.com/2019/04/26/new-york-attorney-general-b...

[2] https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@binyamin/bitfinex-s-founder-see...

[3] https://gizmodo.com/new-york-ags-report-untethers-bizarre-cr...

[4] https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1...

[5] https://www.dentacoin.com

[6] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitwise-tells-us-sec-that-95-...

Look at numeraire, nothing on the internet could achieve what numeraire has done, it puts skin in the game for financial predictions. The guys there were able to run a hedge fund out of it. If we go to computing primitive. The internet was formed to distribute information, not sensitive information. There is no protocol on the internet to store, share and process sensitive information like identity data, financial data or digital assets. An analogy to this absurdity is that in the real world, people distribute newspapers on bicycles and trucks whereas money/ gold is moved around in armoured trucks with gunmen. The internet doesn’t have a protocol that acts like the armoured truck with gunmen, bitcoin was potentially the first one to do so. Is a speculative asset like bitcoin a gamechanger, I don’t think so, but I do think there’s value in adding native layers on the internet that enable the exchange of sensitive information.

> but I do think there’s value in adding native layers on the internet that enable the exchange of sensitive information.

SSL.

I don’t think it is possible to offend me with your posts (for the record I didn’t read it, I am sorry if you spent any time writing it). Maybe you should start a blog or something instead of ranting about something entirely offtopic and trying to derail the thread.

> It's a 10-year-old recombination of 20-year-old tooling. Merkle trees and hashcash. That's it.

This is an unfair characterization. Every technology can be described as a recombination of what existed before. Bitcoin solved the distributed consensus problem in a completely new way. This was a long open problem.

> There's no research, no innovation.

There's a ton of blockchain motivated research going on in signature schemes, distributed consensus, formal verification, zero knowledge proofs, verifiable delay functions, game theory, governance, economics, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com