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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

This project is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to hilarity and schadenfreude. Custom hash function? Bizarre obsession with trinary? Complete centralization in a space where decentralization is the point? Constant big announcements with no substance?

I love watching these guys and their supporters. It's like watching an internet cult in real time.

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Reading the reddit is insane. It is one thing to see the creators and their bullshit and insane ideas and think "ok they are good at marketing, some people believed them, happens all the time". But it is reading the reddit that really puts you in contact with the chilling fear that comes from the sheer number of idiotic completely disconnected from reality people who flock around this project, who not only support the project itself but constantly contribute with various hairs-raising ideas one more insane than the next, and proudly show off their total disregard for objective technological landscape or any empirical logically sound reality in general.

That's very much like most of the crypto projects/subs work. Lot of people with no technical understanding, completely disconnected from reality, probably owning substantial amounts of coins.

Honourable mentions to subs like /r/lisk or /r/arkecosystem

Yeah, I was gonna say, this pretty standard /r/buttcoin fare. The main difference with BTC (pick your flavour...) is only that the pyramid hasn't toppled (yet?).

Not sure why you've been downvoted (usually HN isn't terribly pro-BTC). Perhaps it's referencing the buttcoin subreddit, which for those who don't know, is an actual subreddit that is very cynical towards cryptocurrency.

During a lunch the topic of cryptocurrencies came up and a co-worker of mine said he'd invested in IOTA and EOS (another nonsense coin).

The thing is I think he's smart and a programmer with the head in the right place and has made a ton of very good decisions at work. So if you think these projects only attract idiots and fools you're wrong. Smart people can also be fooled.

Gullibility and analytical intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

There's a fairly substantial overlap between the people who completely drank the cryptocurrency kool-aid and the people who got sucked into so-called "alt-right" and associated fellow-traveling stuff ("red pill," NRx, etc.) around the same time period. Seems like there were some incredibly virulent meme plagues that afflicted the high-IQ-but-gullible crowd in the middle part of this decade.

Cryptocurrency has done a lot of damage to the tech world due mostly to the sheer amount of brainpower it's sucked up that might otherwise have been used for more useful stuff. It's been kind of a tar pit where you have vast resources chasing things that have no actual real world value. It sort of reminds me of that Star Trek TNG episode where they try to kill off the Borg collective by giving them an impossible geometric shape to ponder endlessly.

there's also an ideological component to it tied into all the libertarian crypto fantasies that makes people believe they're sticking it to the man and so on.

A lot of these crypto companies frame themselves as liberators from the banks who don't want to give you a share of the pie and so on, targetting vulnerable people who seek opportunity. It's very cynical.

Another space where I have observed this is online education startups. Lots of "you don't need a degree", "the universities are just trying to keep you out", "we're bringing education to the masses" etc. Same sales pitch.

The worst thing about those online education startups is how they've actually made online education worse.

All those universities that donated lecture videos to places like edx and Coursera? Yeah, you can't access most of those lectures anymore. They're either paywalled or deemed not to fit in with their paywall platform of the day and are no longer accessible.

For a brief glorious moment it actually seemed like we'd have a great quantity of quality University material available over the internet for anyone who wanted it. But it's all gone now.

OK, I'll take the bait, why is EOS a nonsense coin?

It does exactly nothing better than anything that was done before it.

That's not an analysis or an answer to my question, but in response to your statement, EOS does do things differently than most POW chains as it is DPOS, does that make it better? Who can say.

I'm not looking for dogmatic crypto-tribalistic nonsense, simply an answer to why the GP felt necessary to lump EOS into his ad hominem attack. Too often these discussions resemble drunk bar patrons arguing over which cities sports team is better, I hoped HN would be better than that.

DPOS, with 21 nodes mostly located in China.

Yeah, it's "different", but not in a good way.

EOS has a bunch of big problems, and they're not likely to fix them, as there's no motivation to do so.

Don't bother, this comment section is a mirror image of the reddit echo chamber. It's either a shitcoiner or nocoiner mentality, no reasoning just emotional momentum from a keyboard.

Because the decentralization is highly questionable with only a small set of controlling nodes, who also receive a big payout which means their control over the network grows even more. (Due to proof-of-stake.)

We're also making fun of how IOTA stopped their network, but EOS had a similar situation in 2018. Granted they have more than a single fricking node, but that it was even possible should tell you something about the network.

As another example, doctors and dentists have traditionally been prime targets for investment scammers long before cryptocurrencies were invented. They're intelligent in a particular field and have money, but often lack business experience and common sense.

Dentacoin meanwhile continues its slide from a top market cap of nearly $2B (currently at around $15M). It's really worth watching the video which has gone through several iterations and still makes no sense.

https://dentacoin.com

In the earliest phases of my career, working the help desk for a small dial-up in the late 90's, the worst customers to deal with were doctors and lawyers, due to their overconfidence.

I had a similar experience when I used to work tech support for an ISP many years ago. Customers such as Lawyers or Doctors would get extremely irate over not being able to get a technician out to their home same day to fix whatever problem they were having, always making sure to mention their profession and how important they were to whatever organization they were a part of.

In my case it seemed they had a hard time accepting that a 22 year old knew more than they did about a subject.

I wonder if there's a single one of them who was legitimately interested in the protocol and technological aspects and "making the world a better place" and was not just looking to get rich quick.

Is there any real reason these exist except for the ultimate motive of making people believe they'll become richer, like 2012-era Bitcoin actually caused, and proceeding to profit off their ignorance?

If not then it makes a lot of sense that a sizeable amount of people would preach nonesense for months. They'd believe there's compensation for them waiting at the end of it all.

And it doesn't even need to end in having cryptocurrency-of-the-month being exposed as a scam or anything. People can just believe it didn't work out this time and continue searching for an IoT-enabled 2012-era Bitcoin that in the future will likely never exist.

I know it's cliche, but money corrupts. This is probably another manifestation of that with what improved technology now allows us to accomplish.

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