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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason for the fervent crypto bashing on HN?

Posting an article from 2018 with many rehashed arguments is fine, I guess, but there are many interesting (if not useful) things coming out of the cryptocurrency space. Of these, the standardization and development of cryptographic standards and libraries is perhaps the most applicable for the rest of the computing world.

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For me, the crypto scene is almost irreparably damaged by its vibe of greed, the rampant scams, the ridiculous inefficiency and complexity of doing transactions, and the environmental disaster that is "proof of work".

Not uniquely useful, not very interesting, full of hot air: primo bashing material.

Exactly. I still find the „proof of work“ a total waste of computational energy. I mean I believe I understand why it’s required, but it just seems like such a waste. Someone please correct me if I talk jiberish.

"... I mean I believe I understand why it’s required". if you do understand why it is required, then you must understand the game theory incentives underpinning modern economics and the disaster in wasted productivity, wasted savings, livelihoods bought on by centralised monetary systems. You can think proof of work as the cost paid to eliminate all that and save money. If you think you can solve that problem (Decentralised trust) non-trivially without proof-of-work you are welcome to try.

The only thing I learned from your comment is that wishful thinking justifies wasteful technologies. Not cool.

it is more than wishful, it is pragmatic, as all attempts before it were shut down by very powerful forces. The purpose of PoW is to create anti-fragile, unstoppable signals using opportunity costs. How society decides to dictate those costs is up to them. Very cool.

What were those attempts and powerful forces? I’d be interested to learn about it.

Crypto enthusiasts have been trying to create alternative to fiat currencies. Search for “digital gold”. But they all suffer from having to trust an entity which eventually leads them to be shutdown by the governments . Building a decentralised trust mechanism which can be used over the internet has been a hard problem till POW.

PoW is not like leaving the tap on. It's a deliberate use of energy with incentives that attempt to provide a benefit. That is a censorship resistant monetary base and payment network.

When you say you find it a waste, you are either saying:

a) There is a less resource intensive way of doing bitcoin

b) That the claimed benefits are not true or you don't value it

(a) has had plenty of tries without success.

In case of (b), you don't have to participate, it's an entirely voluntary system. There are plenty of energy use cases around the world which don't benefit everyone.

Thanks, this is quite well written. I agree about a) and b). You’re right.

c) That the environmental impact is too high. We need to stimulate people to not use Bitcoin if we want to lower the environmental impact. The amount of transactions where Bitcoin is both legal and necessary is very low.

Your argument is essentially (a) and (b) combined. That you don't find it valuable (however you choose to define "necessary") and you envision that the environmental impact could be lower and still provide the same function.

"Essentially", no. A and B are your own fabricated strawman arguments.

You say "you don't find valuable". Its not just me. People, in general, don't find cryptocurrency valuable. Nothing backs them up, and besides that you cannot widely use them in the clearnet/sneakernet.

What happened is it hasn't replaced the default currencies such as USD and EUR. Its been mainly adopted by criminals/crooks (e.g. drugs trafficking), tax evaders, people who live in banana republics (hyperinflation), speculators, and a bunch of libertarians/preppers.

So next time you say "you don't find it valuable", please realize you're talking to the vast majority of honest, casual people in the world. Of the above mentioned groups, the _only_ group I have respect for using cryptocurrency, is the people who live in banana republics (such as Venezuela).

What about the skyscrapers that finance companies build and the workers that burn fossil fuels to commute to them every day to spend their time doing basically nothing? Is that a waste of energy too?

It's required because of PoW.

I'd say every bank teller in the USA driving to work every day is a total waste of energy.

Ever since working in a finance company myself, I've realised that existing finance basically is doing proof of work. It's very hard to put my finger on it and come up with a coherent thesis, but so much of what they do is utterly pointless, yet somehow necessary. Take a walk through the City and you'll see grand buildings, but there's nothing going on in them. It's all just an illusion. The company I worked for had drones in call centres in out of town business parks in other parts of the country. The people working in the city were engaged in just completely wasting their time. We could also see into the Swiss Re building from up there. Nobody was inside. It was practically empty every day (this was before lockdown).

But yet it all seems necessary to build trust. Is it proof of work?

This concern usually stems from the idea that the energy used by the Bitcoin network could be otherwise used for more productive functions. But if, like many, you believe that bitcoin can succeed in becoming a decentralized world currency, the reality is that there may be no greater, more important use of energy than to secure the integrity of a monetary network which coordinates economic activity at a global level.

I highly recommend this piece (which I'm paraphrasing here) if you're interested in the topic:

https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-does-not-waste-en...

Bitcoin fork (maintaining BTC balances) onto Algorand consensus, call it algoBTC, would solve 2/3 of these issues. Scalable as money and environmentally friendly pure proof of stake. The greed/scam aspect is human nature and the appeal of a 'trustless' store of value. Clear regulation would go a long way here and more opportunities for [high risk]-reward yield for retail investors would drive people away from scams (current accredited investor and private share-holder restrictions; us govt. intends to change definitions as of this year)

Who even cares, institutional investors are buying crypto, huge market making firms are trading crypto, etc.

I think a lot a people would be surprised about how much volume and demand there is from "traditional" investors in crypto.

Billions of dollars of volume and new exchanges popping up like wild fire.

Hell, you might have exposure to crypto through a pension fund, or fund of fund, or whatever.

It's here to stay.

> Is there a reason for the fervent crypto bashing on HN?

To prevent more ordinary people from getting scammed either by ICOs or otherwise?

What actually useful things are coming out of the cryptocurrency space? All I see is illegal security offerings, ransomware, child pornography, assassination markets, illegal drug trade and ponzi schemes.

You are looking at a part of crypto, it's not crypto if it doesn't enable illegal activities. Whether this double-edged sword is net positive is the real question!

It's an inevitable side effect. The day before the knife was discovered to slice animal flesh, someone had already killed their enemies with it.

I buy a few totally legal things from sellers on the other side of the world who can't (be bothered to) get to transact with visa/mastercard. A lot of people can't get into a traditional bank, a lot of people are fed up with how complicated it had become to simply receive money in a timely manner, and reliably.

That's whats coming out of the crypto space: a borderless payment system.

It's often criminals, porn businesses, then gamer, then teens, and then the rest who adopt new good tech. It's okay,it takes some time, those who don't see the value in crypto will eventually pass away.

Some cryptocurrencies can only send funds to a receiver by interacting with the receiver wallet. Those at least are somewhat ransom-resistant.

The real projects are being built in the background. You cannot find them right now but they will rise to the surface eventually and they will help to drive Bitcoin's value as a reserve cryptocurrency.

DIDs are probably the most relevant. See https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/.

Look at people being fed in Venezuela and South Sudan: https://eatbch.org/

Also in Venezuela there are people surviving thanks to cryptocurrencies protecting them from hyperinflation and capital controls.

What cryptographic standards have come from cryptocurrencies?

Also, instead of complaining that you don't like what's being submitted, submit good articles about what you see as positive things? Good non-marketing-fluff submissions are dearly needed.

>What cryptographic standards have come from cryptocurrencies?

Zk-STARKS, which are fairly revolutionary and completely unknown outside magic internet money dudes. Non-trusted setup ceremonies and the newer Zk-SNARKs are also pretty much crypto-only. Bulletproofs arguably as well. Maybe verifiable delay functions; not sure of the history there. Most cryptocurrency engineering is evolutionary, and it's the combination of things (Mimble-wimble etc) that makes it worth something.

On the non crypto side, there are novel consensus algorithms, interesting data structures and contributions to distributed computation in general.

There's lots of social problems with blockchains, including carnival barker types overhyping things they don't understand. You could have said the same things about the internet in the 90s. The technology is pretty interesting, and making the things do useful work is one of the few actually innovative areas in software engineering right now.

There's lots of obvious places for this sort of distributed, trustless database that aren't just magic internet money. DNS is an obvious one. Identity is another one. Provenance of food/wine/art is another. Pretty much any place where database disintermediation is desirable, which is almost everywhere.

When most people think Bitcoin, they think of a) the scary dark web, and b) the energy used to mine bitcoin is 3 countries put together which is killing us through global warming.

Cryptocurrencies have moved on from 2009

Well, if you're free to pick countries with low energy demands, then I'm sure it's many more than 3 countries put together.

Yep, exactly.

Wow... the Tromp. I’m blushing

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