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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

So basically get rid of all the legitimate use cases and leave the nefarious ones? Not everyone lives in the developed world where they can just Venmo their friends for brunch. Some people live in counties with capital controls that means they see their wealth disappear year after year.

Gamers in western countries have to pay slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs. Excuse me while I clutch my pearls!

The cavalier attitude people have about this tech is really disheartening to see.

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Can anyone claim with a straight face that the current state of the crypto ecosystem permits use cases like "splitting a bill with your friends after lunch" or "hiding your earnings from unjust taxation"?

It may aspire to be/do these things, and that's great, but that’s not the present reality.

If you want a (relatively) untraceable cryptocurrency, they exist [0]. Yes, most cryptocurrencies are _perfectly_ traceable - you can trace the source/destination of every transaction - contrary to the common narrative.

[0]: https://www.getmonero.org/

It's the base layer of payment system. There will be a layer on top of it for things like that. When you split a check on venmo, that money isn't really there until a few days. The venmo system is a few layers removed from the equivalent of Bitcoin..

What Bitcoin provides is sound money with a fixed predictable supply not at the whims of politicians and fed officials. There is no way to increase the supply of Bitcoin by 23% like we had with the us dollar over the last year

I would expect "sound money" to have a fairly stable, predictable value in terms of real-world goods and services for which it can be exchanged. I haven't observed that to be the case for Bitcoin.

Being "at the whims of politicians and fed officials" seems in practice to provide much better stability than being at the whims of a horde of reddit "investors" (or a cabal of Chinese miners).

> Being "at the whims of politicians and fed officials" seems in practice to provide much better stability than being at the whims of a horde of reddit "investors" (or a cabal of Chinese miners).

Not to mention almost everyone I know who "invests" in crypto does so "at the whims of politicians and fed officials." SEC rulings and the likes.

> There will be a layer on top of it for things like that.

How many monkey butlers will there be?

> What Bitcoin provides is sound money with a fixed predictable supply not at the whims of politicians and fed officials.

A naturally deflationary currency is such a bad idea that every single country went away from them in a fairly short time period.

> slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs

This is across the board, not just for high-end cards.

Newegg has a total of one graphics card released in the past 5 years in stock that it sells directly (https://www.newegg.com/p/1DW-001Z-00042), a RX 550 going for $200 (plus $8 shipping) -- the 2GB model launched at a MSRP of $79; I assume the 4GB model's MSRP would be somewhere between that and the $99 MSRP of the RX 560.

The rest of the items for sale are third parties which are often no-name brands/shippers from China (e.g. Yeston which seems to have lackluster reviews about short warranty and sloppy build quality, Corn which has many horror stories about shipping delays or just missing products), and all have similarly drastically hiked prices. Next cheapest card shipped from the US is a 560 at $279+15.

The 550 is by no means a high-end gaming GPU, nor was it when it came out.

I think you're missing my point.

No one has a claim on any one product such that they can demand the destruction of something millions of people find value in and that has a market value of a trillion dollars so you can have your GPU return to a price in the past that they found reasonable

You're exaggerating why people dislike cryptocurrency by focusing on a singular reason.

I think the root cause is because it's conflated with bitcoin and the PoW system it's built on top of, which is generally considered to be unproductive. Take away PoW, and you remove the incentives for miners to suck up vast amounts of electricity, the supply of graphics cards, probably even infrastructure hijacks to some point.

(And yes, I understand that the graphic card shortage is more strongly tied to Ethereum's ASIC-resistant hash. But that's still a PoW system.)

Bitcoin and PoW crypto is priced to the global lowest cost of energy. For instance, it would not be economical mine bitcoin in Los Angeles in the middle of the day in August. Most of the mining happens in remote areas in China where there is abundant cheap energy at off-peak times.

So it's not fair to look at pure energy used by the Bitcoin network as though its some fungible limited supply that we can just move away from Bitcoin production and move to Texas during the winter storm.

Regarding carbon emission, that's a political problem. If you want to create a tax on carbon, you can do that, although I'd prefer carbon capture tech. But in no way should some governing body try to allocate the validity of carbon emissions based on purpose. That would be no different than central planning where some central authority determines how many X should be produced, when and where. It's been tried and failed.

But look at the point of PoW and the purpose of crypto. Its sound money and has value, and an expense to maintain. Whats the alternative? Create a currency with a trusted central bank, and build an army to defend your organization when someone uses your currency to "fund terrorism"? I imagine there's CO2 emissions w/ maintaining an army as well

HN has hated crypto for a decade now and it's only recently been about energy consumption. It was and will be about monetary policy and the role of government in issuing currency. Kaynes vs Hayek kind of thing. Which in a way is about authoritarian vs market forces. For some reason Hacker News really likes the idea of centralized authority and criminalizing things like math and free association by threat of violence and imprisonment.

> For some reason Hacker News really likes the idea of centralized authority and criminalizing things like math and free association by threat of violence and imprisonment.

The new kind of "geek" in the opposite of the traditional "geek" who was a libertarian / pro freedom.

My guess is that most geeks can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them (google/facebook/twitter...) so they decided to loudly proclaim their allegiance to modern values (environmentalism/social justice/wokeness in general)

There were leftists among geeks the whole time. Stallman didn’t even want passwords. A lot of people viewed technology as a way to achieve mass human prosperity and end the bullshit accumulation of numbers in a database/blockchain ledger as a proxy for social status/power. The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent. The difference between math and computers back then was that computers would let you do math stuff and thereby transform society.

I disagree.

> There were leftists among geeks the whole time

Clearly a much smaller proportion.

> The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent

Is it not interesting in how this is a new social good, especially for geeks working for large corporations in California?

I believe all behavior is based in self preservation: it would be career suicide for a young googler to be part of the christian right, or pro Trump, or try to pull off a Damore like memo.

So I am not surprise they do not bite the hand that feed. I am only surprised in the convoluted rationalization they engage in, instead of being more honest (at least online where they can be anonymous) and say "I pretend I'm woke because I like my job because I like the money and status it gets me"

Oceans razor good sir. And left desire to transform society has if anything decreased in the last fifty years. In the 1970s people with sincere belief said The US is on a journey towards a just and free society. Where we honor e pluribus unum. Where people programmed computers to unleash the potentially awesome society it would enable. What is new is a bunch of smart and powerful individuals settling for a salary while they give their power over to corporations that are structurally unable to stop stealing everones privacy and stop from putting human decency under the next quarters profit.

The reason why so-called Christians are unpopular is because they are seen as public hypocrites; rather than follow Jesus and condemn praying in public, and instead helping the poor, the widows, and the orphans, they seem to spend their energy seemingly endorsing superstitious racialist ideas that were clearly un-Godly 100 years ago.

Those ideas are horrid and they are rejected because they are horrid. Not because Google is pushing an agenda of the sacredness of all human beings, a mirror of the image of God no matter what history they walked to get here.

And the environmental movement is just the same as the people saying “there is a flood coming from the blocked sewer drain, let’s go unblock it.” The anti-environmentalists are the people saying, naw, don’t worry about it.

A second reply. If you sincerely believe all behavior is based on self preservation, perhaps you do not understand that a sincere Christian, seeing each person as good and capable of more good and worth suffering for, can thrive in all sorts of environments, being a angel to others and not being untrue to God and without being a notable asshole. We have songs for training people in how to do this, about Love and the Christ in me greets the Christ in thee and on on.

I do not fully understand indeed, but I really appreciate both of your replies as it gives a different perspective that I did not consider.

> Some people live in counties with capital controls that means they see their wealth disappear year after year.

So the purpose of cryptocurrency here is to enable people to evade the laws of the society in which they live? Not sure I can regard that as a "legitimate use case".

> slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs

I do not care about that part, but massive amount of scams around BTC and similar is fueling my growing dislike.

As a moderator on small forum most of the work is blocking cryptocurrency scammers.

The saddest part is that apparently they steal enough money to keep their crime profitable.

Under PoW each of those GPUs consumes significant energy and that's the real issue. It seems like a fairly cavalier attitude to ignore that fact. Maybe PoW will be fine in 200 years when fossil fuels are finally phased out, but likely not in this century.

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