Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely
cynicusrex.com
cynicusrex.com
I agree with the author that many people rationalize or fall into some of the standard Bitcoin beliefs to justify their desire to get rich, but to project their own case of that on all Bitcoin enthusiasts is completely unfair. Some of the smartest engineers I know work on Bitcoin, and don't see a paycheck for it. The availability of grants for Bitcoin open source work is pretty new, and many of these people have been working on BTC long before there was a strong financial incentive. The real money-motivated play for them would have been to fall into a FAANG and collect a guaranteed high salary.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
>“sheer amount of ad hominem in it.”
I wouldn't say sheer, but admittedly yes, I couldn't help myself since that's part of the reason I opted out. I just don't like to invest in things associated with shady people. And if calling Saylor shady is an ad hominem, then I'll live with that. Rebuke accepted.
>“The USD is also owned by terrible people, and is used to fund terrible things.”
This is whataboutism which I mention in the article as well.
>“but to project their own case of that on all Bitcoin enthusiasts is completely unfair.”
I'm not doing that, or at least it wasn't my intention. That's why I opened with “Realizing the extent”. By using “extent” I mean a lot, not everyone. That why I also added: “So, governments are not without faults, but likewise not the evil bogeymen as many people make them out to be, and neither are bitcoin enthusiasts.” I am definitely aware that not everyone is toxic. Although I could've given it some more weight throughout the article. But I stand by my observation that cryptocurrencies really are the most toxic communities I've ever encountered, on par with religious fanatics. Anyway, I'll look where I can add some extra nuance.
>“Some of the smartest engineers I know work on Bitcoin”
Anyone can say about anyone that they're the smartest people they know. It carries zero validity. I'll just copy-paste my reaction to an identical comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448833:
«“you'll see some of the smartest engineers of our generation working real hard”
“I've been reading those cheap empty words way too much lately. Unless they are the likes of John von Neumann I'll just assume they're people of average intelligence working on things that look incredibly intimidating to outsiders.”
Also, an excerpt from Marcus Aurelius - Meditations: “How corrupt and two-faced is one who claims, 'I intend to be fair and honest in my dealings with you.' What are you up to, my friend? There is really no need for this preamble. The matter will soon become plain. It should be written on your face,* it should ring out immediately in your voice, and shine out at once in your eyes, as the loved one at once knows everything about his lovers from the manner of their glance. In short, a good and honest person should resemble one who smells like a goat in this respect, that anyone who comes near him is immediately aware of it whether he wishes it or not. But the mere pretence of simplicity is like an open blade. There is nothing more odious than the friendship of the wolf for the lamb; avoid this above all. A good, straightforward, and kindly person reveals these qualities in his eyes, and they will not escape you.”»
That being said, I appreciate your civility. Have a great one.
On the smartest engineer front, I'll grant you that it's an overused platitude, but I'd consider any engineer I know who's in the 80th percentile to be "one of the smartest engineers I know", which to be fair is going to be quite a few people. But my point there wasn't to give Bitcoin credit by association, but more to demonstrate that I have no doubt that those people are smart enough to land lucrative jobs at big tech companies. So if they're just in it for the money, why haven't they?
I've known my fair share of programmers that make me look like a blabbering cretin. I still don't think what they worked on was something special though.
So this line of argumentation IMO leads to nowhere [productive]. Sure there are extremely smart people working on BTC. But the same could be said in literally any area, right?
Add to this exchanges / tether printing manipulating the price and i'm pretty bearish on BTC and crypto right now, seems like the only problem they are trying to solve is "how can I become ludicrously rich by writing some code from scratch."
But what if I'm wrong?....
Suggested correction: "is constantly being expanded and added to"
I grew my own Bitcoin thesis (legally in my basement for fun and profit). When people say that people changed the Bitcoin narrative, I can always unwrap those layers of opinions and evaluate them against my home-grown thesis.
It still make no sense to me, but if rich people want to gamble their money and by doing so support some artists, that doesn't sound too bad IMHO.
I would be more cautious if retail investors would start to gamble in this market, but that's not what I've seen so far.
(I'm also bearish on BTC, mainly because of Tether and the horrible incentives of PoW)
Something everyone wants for sure, but if that's all it is, the party's gonna stop someday.
Because of the circles you're in and the loud minority that's constantly talking about the price. There's a whole community of people just building stuff without wasting their time constantly arguing for price on social networks.
Better coins don't have this property. Monero is a better currency in every way and it's essentially a stable 200 USD coin.
People like to talk about money. Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1138/
The only way to do MMS over the internet that isn't completely crazy* or requires a google account is jmp.chat as far as I can tell. It looks like they originally accepted paypal and paypal did it's thing so now the default is bitcoin. For small projects like this bitcoin is one of the easier ways to set up payments.
My DNS provider also had a bug in their payment form when I went to renew the domain name (or maybe it was really my bank despite them telling me it was on their end, who knows.) I was able to just pay them with bitcoin and that solved the problem.
Whether you like it or not, crypto is here to stay and it's way easier for both users and developers.
*One of the providers I was looking at even tried activating my camera on the log in page (the browser didn't say anything but the camera on that machine is weird and if you don't use a special API it just spams the kernel log with errors, idk how they did it.)
Bitcoin looks like it should solve something, but it doesn't. Except makes crime easier. Just the tax evasion alone must be staggering.
If you’re looking for cryptocurrency technology aspects that don’t include money or greed, look at cryptocurrencies outside of the top 10 or top 20 by market cap. The ones around rank 30 or more are less about the price and more about the technology and fun of it.
Here are the problems I’m concerned about. If Bitcoin supporters want to defend it, please could you explain why:
1. A scaling proof of work is not environmentally disastrous. The “renewable energy” argument doesn’t make sense, I think, and existing financial systems seem to be more energy efficient, but open to other counter arguments.
2. A decentralised ledger which concentrates initial supply amongst a tiny fraction of the world’s population would be a good idea and somehow preferable to the current situation.
Finally, please explain whether Bitcoin is a currency (like the dollar) or a store of value (like gold). If it’s a currency, please explain how it can be used as such when transactions are slow and expensive. If it’s a store of value, please explain why the fact that gold is physically useful and in strictly finite supply (on earth) compared to crypto currencies (in general), does not matter.
NFTs are definitely switching me off from cryptocurrencies as I find the use of it ridiculous. Sure there are _some_ genuine use cases, but so far it's just been terrible, and does not fill me with confidence. Time will tell if NFTs are gonna become anything that's not silliness among the rich.
If by "collective" you mean a tiny portion of the community that are core developers, megaminers, megapools, exchanges and whales, uhh, then sure, but that doesn't seem much different than fiat. There is still an elite minority in control.
In addition to that, most of those megaminers, and megapools, can't do much without working with a large chunk of other miners. Without it, the worse they can do is not fulfill individual transactions (which other miners can continue to accept).
Just because a minority is hoarding bitcoin, does not make bitcoin's core issue invalid, that is, don't trust financial institutions or governments.
Bitcoin never claimed to solve the issues that are at the core of monetary systems (greed, corruption etc). It solves the issue of trust. I don't have to trust a financial institutions or government to tell me how much money I own. Nor is there a government or bank that can freeze my account because I've been naughty (or, in certain cases, because the government deems you naughty because of $ideology). That's what bitcoin solves. Not the issues that are core to monetary systems. Issues that mostly come from human psyche.
No it does not. There are already complaints of vested interests holding back technological advances to BTC. Nothing technically prevents vested interests from colluding to fork the chain ala the ETH DAO scandal. It's not a minority hoarding bitcoin, it's minority controlling bitcoin. You could say you haven't seen enough evidence of this being a problem, but then BTC hasn't been around for centuries or nor does it run a global economy at scale yet.
On the other hand, individuals can still put their trust in crypto exchanges, but unlike the old system, you are not required to put your trust in an exchange.
What is more bizarre is that some comments here got down voted without answers even though they are relevant to the post. It's becoming a bit harder to talk about Bitcoin while we need to discuss it more than before. And these fanatic energies from Bitcoin lovers and haters don't help.
I’m not a Bitcoin holder but the correct finger pointing here is at monetary policy.
At this point, even calling it "policy" is utter delusion: it would somehow implies the people who hold the wheel have a minimal clue about what the impact of their decisions ("Policies") will have for the mid to long term future of the economy.
They absolutely don't. They are driving without a map, only worrying about the next turn in the road.
We are raised to believe our leaders are at least vaguely competent.
At best: they aren't. At worst: their actual competence is centered around how much they can do for themselves.
i disagree if you mean people are somehow buying it as a hedge to the dollar
Without a central bank to print out money, it's unlikely for there ever to be a fractional reserve banking system in Bitcoin. Any large scale bitcoin bank exit event would completely crash the bitcoin economy.
But then without proper digital money protocols, how are we supposed to build the next wave of web applications?
Ethereum can be used to do useful things. E.g. we're rating data sets by quality through staking [1]. NFTs seem to make sense for artists (see what Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park said) [2]. Those products are simply not possible without projects like Ethereum.
2: https://mobile.twitter.com/mikeshinoda/status/13580909764142...
Crypto currencies and block chains are mostly reinventing existing wheels, with a weak promise of decentralization on top, which seems to break down whenever a big-enough event happens.
Additionally the space is heavily regulated. I worked for a company that did several million EUR a year legit revenue in the music industry. Stripe, Adyen and others slammed the door in front of us when we wanted to build automated royalty payments.
I really think if there was one thing we got right - that’s money as a civilization. What we need to do is fix the loop holes. That includes taxes, corporation as persons, the whole 2011 movement of Occupy Wall Street.
I contribute to open source, as many others here do. Lots and lots of people contribute to society and the common good in other ways without the expectation of capitalistic reward.
Because you want to make something useful and helpful for the world? Personal satisfaction? Passion? Necessity?
Granted, those are no arguments to work for free in a world where operating a business and keeping yourself fed cost money, but if somehow those weren't concerns, I can assure you people would still have plenty of motivation to innovate still.
There's a lot to be said for the social technology of markets and the extrinsic motivations of money. But from FOSS to mutual aid to gift economies [0], currency-denominated markets should only be one tool in our political-economy toolbox.
How about giving inactive bitcoins to new people? Is it possible? Can you really access the bitcoins that were created at the beginning without updating your bitcoins to latest standards. How do you even update your bitcoin?
Which is to say: Your examples have a strong stink of survival bias. There are endless examples of technologies which failed, even where proponents were being heavily that they would be world changing.
There are those who would call that a feature, not a bug.
This
The right to bear arms is an extreme right wing viewpoint? This is quite the rant but the author is all over the map
Note that you can get serious calibre rifles in the UK but only in bolt or lever action. Case in point: https://www.gunstar.co.uk/desert-tech-hti-bolt-action-50-rif...
I frankly don't care if the price of Nano plummets to 1 cent. And I actually hope it doesn't skyrocket and get the attention BTC got, because, to quote the article, "I came for the money", but I stayed for the community. The tech being superior to Bitcoin is just a bonus.
If you go on places like Twitter and reddit somewhat, I agree with you. But if you look on Github, you'll see some of the smartest engineers of our generation working real hard and I wouldn't discount their work based on some loud mouths on social networks.
You're the one who refuses to see those solutions.
I've been reading those cheap empty words way too much lately. Unless they are the likes of John von Neumann I'll just assume they're people of average intelligence working on things that look incredibly intimidating to outsiders.
Also, an excerpt from Marcus Aurelius - Meditations: “How corrupt and two-faced is one who claims, 'I intend to be fair and honest in my dealings with you.' What are you up to, my friend? There is really no need for this preamble. The matter will soon become plain. It should be written on your face,* it should ring out immediately in your voice, and shine out at once in your eyes, as the loved one at once knows everything about his lovers from the manner of their glance. In short, a good and honest person should resemble one who smells like a goat in this respect, that anyone who comes near him is immediately aware of it whether he wishes it or not. But the mere pretence of simplicity is like an open blade. There is nothing more odious than the friendship of the wolf for the lamb; avoid this above all. A good, straightforward, and kindly person reveals these qualities in his eyes, and they will not escape you.”
A frequent claim about cryptocurrencies is that they can enable a better society than fiat.
The proof is in the pudding.
> Bitcoin uses the Hashcash proof of work system.
Do you feel that way about all proof of work systems? Do you prefer proof of stake instead? Can you elaborate on what you find subpar about the tech surrounding Bitcoin?
I don’t understand how it works yet, but I generally hold what I think is your skepticism for proof-of-stake.
To me, proof-of-stake takes all the technical guarantees of the blockchain and throws them out for a hand-wavy weak guarantee of correctness based on incentive structure. I don’t see how it’s that different from historical digital (or even fiat) currencies based on trust.
Proof-of-work is the interesting bit it crypto currencies.
Buy only when it is nearing ATH.
Just HODL!
Dude, do you post anything else on HN?
It is also an unfair assessment of the bitcoin community as it is pretty much based on the most vocal proponents and not for example based on the development community.
The development is not a victim here.
Bitcoin never goes down
I hate that expression so much.
Faux righteous indignation is one of the most toxic takes around.
The worst part about virtue signalling nowadays is that it throws out the accumulated history and cultural knowledge of humanity - as expressed in art, literature, etc. Which in a million repeated ways demonstrate that evil in humanity is ubiquitous and ever-present.
There's so many people soap-boxing acting like they don't suffer the same circumstance of every other human around them. And it's almost guaranteed that the ones preaching about how they know to do things better are almost always the worst offenders themselves projecting their own mental obsessions onto the world.
Got it - this evinces a certain idealism that ignores some pretty glaring stuff that defined the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. All the places that either outright outlawed profit, or otherwise viewed it as evil.
Also regarding your list - what a weird view - that there's angelic spheres where we somehow transcend human behavior.
You only have to look at the scandals of the knitting community to see that no one is immune to toxicity.
The issue I have (and for me it applies to crypto in general) is how difficult it's to take even the most banal statements made about it at face value. That's not to say I'm a complete sucker and don't do my research. More that I find it considerably harder to find authorities I can trust (for want of a better word) on the subject than I might with some other piece of tech.
In that case "Have fun staying poor"
Also, these Bitcoin flamewars are supremely boring. They're exciting in an activating/agitating sort of way, but they aren't intellectually interesting. You're not the only user responsible for that, of course, but you're contributing way too much to it.
If you want to use HN as intended, please post instead on other things of intellectual interest. If you don't want to use HN as intended, please don't post to it. Either way, please stop posting on this topic.
That about sums it all up. I too watched the rise of bitcoin and was too lazy to mine some on my own computer. I have screenshots of people buying pizza for like 20 BTC.
All we had to do was buy some. We can still do it.
> If I'd have deserved it is something else.
Does it matter if you "deserved" it? So many literal sociopaths are running the world and getting rich by exploiting everyone else. Did they deserve it? Does a lottery winner deserve their gains?
Better to throw out all these notions and just start playing the game. Anything else means being exploited as well.
So you look at the four orders of magnitude that separate the famous "dude overpaying for pizza with Bitcoins" from the current price. And you apparently feel so strongly you leave out the argument for why that is relevant to encouraging others on HN to make a current investment in Bitcoin.
Are you seriously implying that a Bitcoin will be worth $500,000,000 over the next decade? I don't think you are, so what's the relevance of history of Bitcoin's price? Why does that generate FOMO in you?
Is there a more persuasive explanation than simple gold fever? Are you really not able to think of practical circumstances which would cause the price of Bitcoin to go down?
Why wouldn't it? Is there anything that would put a cap on its price? The value will keep increasing for as long as people keep believing it's valuable. It may or may not reach absurd prices like 100 thousand dollars or more.
I think there's a good chance that it will. The set of people who value the coin keeps growing. It's grown to the point even companies are buying bitcoin now.
> Are you really not able to think of practical circumstances which would cause the price of Bitcoin to go down?
Sure I can. People could attempt to sell large quantities, crashing the market.
Bitcoin itself could be attacked in any number of ways. Electricity costs could be adjusted to reduce mining efficiency. Nation states could seize control of the network via 51% attacks. I'm not really sure whether these events will come to pass though.
Op should read The Ascent of Money and maybe worry less about the moral failings of other humans.
Peace and trust cannot exist without currency. Money lubricates peaceful resolution of conflict.
If you need food and I have it, trade or violence are your only options if currency doesn’t exist.
Screaming at Bitcoin is like screaming at evolution. As long as humans evolve, money will keep pace.
Will money evolve? Certainly.
Does Bitcoin have a future beyond a bubble? We don’t know.
Another option is debt. You give me the food and I owe you something equivalent later.
This is completely false. Currency is orthogonal to trust.
>Money lubricates peaceful resolution of conflict.
Just as easily as it is the driver behind conflict.
>If you need food and I have it, trade or violence are your only options if currency doesn’t exist.
Trade, gift or violence are your only options regardless of the existence of currency.
What currency does is help to expand the number of people that can do business beyond the number of people one can have a personal relationship with.
That is immensely powerful, but it also enables a whole world of fraud and bad things that we need a functioning trusted regulator to deal with.
An NFT sold for 69 million the other day. Crypto is here to stay. It’s time to rethink the critical analysis of crypto.
What percentage of stimulus checks are going to be spent on BTC?