Ask HN: Why are so many HN readers anti-crypto ?
You would think that the HN population would be a subset of the crypto community, but I have found a lot of anti-crypto sentiment here.
I am studying the space and welcome all shades of view.
I am studying the space and welcome all shades of view.
If you're talking Cryptography, there's quite a few buffs of it here.
If you're talking cryptocurrency on the other hand...
My objections to it tend to be based around the mechanics of it. Particularly anything based on Proof-of-work. Computation isn't free, and anything that predicates being a store of value based on computational work being done misses the point. We burn resources in order to facilitate that currency exchange. When compared to say, printing off monopoly moneu, and getting a bunch of buy in from other people to respect it (the basis of fiat currency), your fiat currency wins out in that cash doesn't require anything but people's faith they can trade it to be valuable.
Other than that, and the tendency for the technology to lead to pump and dump schemes, I just find the tendency to think that making digital financial transactions easier/more pervasive repugnant.
Digital payments may enable expansion into previously untappable markets, but it hasn't in the years I've worked in the field, done much but create more middlemen to extract fees without creating anything more than a negligible convenience value for being in a position to process the transaction.
Disagree. Fiat money requires an enormous expenditure to maintain its economy. You literally need an army and authorities to protect its use, prevent stealing, prevent counterfeits, track it and tax it. This "fiat" is huge in man-hours and time. With blockchain you have that for basically free. It takes an enormous amount of effort and preparation to roll out a fiat (like the Euro) while a kid in a basement can roll out her own ICO and (even though the coins are useless) people can still trust that they wont lose them.
Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature. Me paying Joe 5 bucks should not be causing bit flips to have to happen in Japan. That feels free nowadays, given, but there is real and tangible cost there, even if it isn't necessarily physical.
Furthermore, what about your failure modes? How do you reconcile partitions in the network leading to divergent branches over time? Throwing out 24 hours worth of transactions by half your users isn't a terribly good model.
How about manual reversion? Care to do a blockchain transaction on paper? No processor mind!
Something I've learned about evaluating technological impacts is that the "Loop on! Shiny! Cool!" aspects start to give way more and more as you scale up to get replaced with "Well, crap, we really painted ourselves into a corner here."
I can see the applicability of blockchain to niche applications; however, I'm simply not sold at all as to it's desirability as an overarching means of common economic exchange (e.g. currency).
It's a ledger, and a token. It's great for assigning some value to the token, equating it to the national currency, and then tracking your economic exchanges with the population of users who use your stuff.
In fact, I'm not so sure the big obsession with blockchain and crypto hasn't been subverted from it's anti-establishment/anti-regulation roots because tech companies have started to realize how valuable the giant chunks of financial transaction data will become given enough other information to reason from.
I mean hell, this is just off the top of the head kinda stuff.
You can deploy a TCP/IP network on a moon base powered by solar cells. Infrastructure wise cryptos are way easier to deploy and maintain than having to print paper, create banks, ATMs, safes etc etc.
> what have you really gained except that now everyone else is maintaining a copy
No what you have gained is that instead of needing an entire army so people can trust your currency, you have an algorithm. Cryptos are the google of money: people trust the algorithmn because they can't trust each other.
> How about manual reversion?
Of course ideal cryptocurrencies are immutable. It should be impossible to reverse anything. But, markets usually build insurance services on top of it, which cover for all the things that the blockchain does not - at a cost of course. Still better than fiat.
> Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature.
And yet most of europe has either moved into the Euro, or pegged to it. And global central banks are more in sync than ever before. Localization is impossible and incompatible with globalized market.
Look at the Euro crisis, it was really caused by the lack of "local" central banking, where none of the countries had the option to devalue their currency. There was a lot of talk and pressure about getting out of it , yet it did not happen and people still overwhelmingly support the euro , despite the austerity. I think this shows the resilience of a deflationary currency (the euro is close to it). IMHO, the euro proved to be a slightly better option than devalued currencies , the devaluation of which would cause much more severe problems in today's globalized, self-insufficient economies than it would in the past.
I, for one, think that Crypto is still in its development stage so I still think that eventually there will be a use for it but it needs to evolve and stop being a drain on the world's energy resources too.
Not a fan at all of resource wasting speculation schemes for no good reason whatsoever, that I wish would stop being called 'crypto'...