Hacker News Reader

Comment by celticninja | Hacker News Reader

By that reasoning computers make ransomware possible, cryptocurrency just makes it economically viable.

Yes, and it's pretty clear that computing as a whole comes with a huge amount of downsides (hacking, revenge porn, video game addiction, etc). It's also pretty clear that the overall benefits outweigh the downsides.

I'm personally not convinced that the upsides of cryptocurrencies outweigh the downsides.

I was surprised it wasn’t classified as some kind of counterfeiting scam tbh. When you mine crypto you are pretty much printing money. Sure yeah it takes proof of work/storage/stake ect but so does counterfeiting. The philosophical differences are kind of vague.

Mining BTC is as much like counterfeiting USD as mining gold is like counterfeiting USD, which is to say, not alike at all.

Except gold exists as a material/commodity. Cryptocurrency was invented.

When thr government prints money, it isn't counterfeited. When you mine crypto, it isn't counterfeited, because everyone is crypto's "government"

Crypto does not pretend to be dollars, so no it's not counterfeiting any more than the X foreign government printing Y non-USD currency is counterfeiting.

Yes? That's precisely the argument the parent poster was making -- technology (both computing and cryptocurrency and everything else) comes with both upsides and downsides.

In the case of general purpose computing, the upsides are obvious and massive. Whereas it's much, much less clear that the upsides of cryptocurrencies outweigh their downsides.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com