Comment by Tangokat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tangokat | Hacker News Reader

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Yes HN has an irrational hatred for everything blockchain which especially gets magnified if there is a lot of money involved. As for why.. this is interesting as on the surface you'd expect HN to be on the forefront of new technology. My guess would be a combination of these:

1) If you research anything about blockchain/cryptocurrency you inevitably stumble into fanatics who shill the project without knowing anything technical. As this is the usual method for the HN crowd to understand subjects it turns them off immediately.

2) The HN crowd mostly have cushy US jobs and as such do not value trustless systems as much as people in other parts of the world. Banking mostly works for Americans and alternatives don't seem to give much benefit.

3) It threatens US control of the international monetary system. Swift, USD etc.

4) The environmental impact of the first generation PoW systems, mostly Bitcoin at this point, is a waste of energy in the mind of HN. The trust and security that it provides to the blockchain is not valued.

5) Many are tired of getting asked about blockchain/crypto by people who have made a lot of money on it, especially if the HN people have not. It has to be a bubble since the tech savvy guys don't believe in it.. right?

I don't think you can call it "irrational". The moment when people buy power plants just to mine bitcoins you have to admit we have a serious problem. So when you say:

> The environmental impact of the first generation PoW systems, mostly Bitcoin at this point, is a waste of energy in the mind of HN. The trust and security that it provides to the blockchain is not valued.

First, we don't care what generation it is: the fact is that Bitcoin causes significant environmental damage. It is not "in the mind of HN", it's physical. As for what you call "trust and security", Bitcoin is an instrument of speculation (or investment, depending as you see it) and as such is extremely unstable, so for me it provides much lower level of trust and security than fiat currency. Not to mention alternative coins that appear and disappear every day.

You're proving my point here right? The trust and security of the Bitcoin blockchain does not have value to you, so in your mind we're completely wasting all that energy. The fact is that a lot of "useless" things cost a lot of energy - Facebook? Useless to some, not to others.

Personally I view Bitcoin as the first implementation, we can and should improve on that concept. See Polkadot, Algorand, Eth 2.0 etc. as the new generation which does not use up a lot of energy.

No, I don't think you are completely wasting the energy. I think the waste is disproportionately large in relation to other services providing some value to society, including the ones by FAANG.

I understand that you personally view Bitcoin as the first implementation, but the reality is that it is now the dominant one that is starting to exert non-negligible influence on the planet we are all living in. And it is not fixable, because it is one of the core features of Bitcoin. Good luck convincing people holding millions in Bitcoins to migrate to altcoins.

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