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Comment by kgraves | Hacker News Reader

This is how the scam begins, the downfall of Solana. It is yet another pump and dump just like all of these coins.

Cryptocurrencies must be stopped, there is absolutely NO benefit to having them.

We seen them all before, ransomware becoming rampant, massive waste of electricity and resources and now the pandora's box can't be closed quicker enough.

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Ok, but this is such a repetitive, generic-indignant response to every similar topic that it is highly predictable, and that makes it off-topic for HN. We only want intellectually curious conversation here, and curiosity and predictability are antithetical. As are curiosity and indignation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I absolutely don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a systemic problem. Also, threads are a co-creation of comments and upvotes, and reflexive upvotes are by far the bigger problem.

If you or anyone wants further explanation about what we are/aren't hoping for in HN threads, the following principles and the associated links should help:

Curiosity withers under repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Generic discussion is not interesting, at least not on internet forums: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We want reflective rather than reflexive conversation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Diffs are what make an HN conversation interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Which of these principles demands you let a cabal of intersectionalists flag their enemies off the front page? Just curious where the intellectual curiosity and lack of reflexiveness comes in.

I ask because if there's one thing I've noticed, it's that these people are unable to tell the difference between low quality arguments and low status arguments. Consistently.

Those are just 4 principles- there are dozens more where those came from. As Marshall McLuhan used to say, "You don’t like those ideas? I got others."

Everybody with ideological passions feels like their enemies always flag them off HN's front page and dominate HN in every other way too. This is not an accurate perception—it's produced by your passions. I don't mean that you're imagining the datapoints you see, but rather that you're filtering out the ones you don't see. Since there are more than enough datapoints to supply any perception, this creates von Neumann elephants (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

In your case the passions are clear from how you swoop in with guns blazing—"cabal of intersectionalists" and so on. The people with opposite passions—your enemies—are just as shocked and dismayed by what they imagine, which is that you dominate HN. I can give you endless examples, but if you're able to make do with a few dozen, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. The striking thing, to the rest of us, is how closely you and your enemies resemble each other. The comments and rhetoric are isomorphic—they just have the sign bit flipped.

During the Stallman saga of a couple months ago, we were getting all sorts of "why are RMS stories all being flagged off the front page" (note that word all) in comments and emails, even after 30+ major threads about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636. Similarly, during the George Floyd aftermath of a year ago, people were saying "any mention gets aggressively removed from discussion" (note that word any), even though it was the single most-discussed topic on HN by a long shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. As I said at the time, when you're 10x bigger than Rust on HN, and someone calls that "aggressively removed from discussion", we seem to have left behind shared reality.

That is why I say that these perceptions are (a) inaccurate; (b) produced by political passions; and (c) isomorphic under ideological flippage.

The bias here is probably that you notice what you dislike and elide the rest (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you felt differently, you'd notice a different set of stories getting flagged and overlook different ones remaining on the front page. The filters are in you. By "you" I don't mean you personally, of course. We all do this.

There's a serious discussion to be had about how flagging actually works on HN, and I've posted many answers about that too, but when the "question" is so ideologically driven, my experience is that it doesn't help much. For anyone who's interested, you can find some of the past explanations here:

We sometimes turn off flags when an article can support substantive discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

For common topics, significant new information is generally needed: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

(See? More principles!)

I believe I agree with the last paragraph and that the issue ends up becoming a status quo issue and unfairness.

I assume that’s what you mean by low status? Something that may be good, but isn’t of the status quo?

This is a much harder and rarely attacked or solved problem.

EDIT: it is all the harder when people like your sibling play the victim and say they are being oppressed. Which could be true for low status comments, but the oppressed/victim mindset/thinking is true across all quality of posts.

What good does suppression of opposition do?

It's not about suppressing opposition, it's about comment quality. I'm sure there are many interesting ways to express opposition.

Predictable/generic comments are internet noise. Reducing noise is good for signal/noise ratio.

Can’t agree more. The tech is interesting, but it is the same greed behind it which is old as mankind. It solves absolutely nothing, does nothing of value and adds none. Crypto is quickly becoming a failure of immense proportions.

The externalities of cryptocurrencies include:

Massive carbon emissions. Funding "rogue states" such as North Korea and Iran. Tax evasion. Laundering the proceeds of crime, including the drug trade, theft and fraud, and armed robbery. An epidemic of ransomware. A wave of securities fraud targeting the greedy and vulnerable. Shortages of products including graphics cards, hard disks, and chips in general as limited fab capacity is diverted to mining ASICS. Abuse of free tiers of Web services. Noise pollution.

Please read the article and study the underlying technology. Most of your statement is incorrect and lacks insight and facts.

Solana uses proof of stake and does not have the energy consumption issue, or does not use graphics card. It is cost and energy efficient alternative for Bitcoin and other proof of work public blockchains.

More about the history of proof of stake here:

https://capitalgram.com/posts/history-of-cryptocurrencies/

> Most of your statement is incorrect and lacks insight and facts.

You expertly avoid all arguments except that Solana uses proof of stake. Who cares. Prox's point still stands: folks will continue to use blockchain-powered "pseudo-currencies" for illegal drugs, murder-for-hire, money laundering, ransomware, and speculation. No one's buying groceries with BTC.

Like real money, it can be used for fraud and for legitimate usecases. Your generalization made up from thin air brings nothing to the conversation.

So then what's the point of this thing then? All these crypto things reek of ponzi schemes and I have yet to see an application of it that makes me think the technology is good/needed. So far, crypto is a solution looking for a problem.

You’re entitled to your opinion. But the rest of the world doesn’t care about it. People use something because it is useful for them.

Way to not answer the question.

What’s the point of money? Really?

How can you create a coin, get investors into a private token sale (or even allocating pre-mined coins), hype the trojan horse onto the public to get them involved, then getting the coin on main exchanges and then investors dumping the coin causing it to be worthless. All this being unregulated by the way.

This happens all the time with these projects most recently ICP (Internet Computer) and just one of the reasons why this is all a complete scam.

There is a name for this type of rinse and repeated scheme.

There is no reason why this can also happen to Solana, rendering cryptocurrencies even more worthless than real money.

Replace ‘blockchain-powered “pseudo-currencies”’ with “cash”, and the same is true. Better outlaw cash.

This thread is not about BTC…

> Replace ‘blockchain-powered “pseudo-currencies”’ with “cash”, and the same is true. Better outlaw cash.

You can't be serious. Ad hoc cash transfers are regulated (can't bring more than $10k across borders without declaring, for example), supply is limited, and bills have literal serial numbers on them.

And yet a ton of illegal activity is performed with cash.

On one hand, some cryptos (not Solana) are useful for illegal activities. On another, they’re also useful for privacy, censorship resistance, and financial freedom.

It’s no different than the argument against E2EE, but I’d rather live in a society with E2EE than without.

Crypto is a relatively new technology. Illegal money is as old as civilization.

Yes, there are regulations to make it harder to carry out elicit business, but that doesn’t change history, nor does it invalidate the point I was trying to make.

My favorite Bitcoin joke: "so it's full of fraud, scams, Ponzi schemes, money laundering, and is heavily used to buy drugs and contraband... so this means it's a real currency now?"

Isn't that why we don't have $10,000 notes? Or even $500? To make illegal activity more difficult?

We have Paypal / Bank Transfers to send money quickly, BTC is a slower way of sending money.

What is your point?

There is more than just bitcoin

Again, this thread is not about BTC, and limitations that are specific to BTC (like transaction rate/speed) are irrelevant.

> avoid

Because I am typing on a mobile.

Happy to answer later if you are genuinely curious and not just ranting.

> Funding "rogue states" such as North Korea and Iran

Not a big fan of crypto, but this is one of the less convincing arguments against it—as the current situation where the US more or less gets to decide who are the rogue states, because of the global financial system’s dependency on the US dollar, doesn’t seem all that great.

For example, the US have ruled: “Saudi Arabia good, Iran bad” for a long time now. Since the signing of the nuclear treaty with Iran, the EU had been trying to normalise trade relations, but this has proven exceedingly complicated since the US pulled out, since most financial transactions at some point pass through a US based financial institution that are beholden to sanctions towards Iran.

I don’t think crypto is the ideal answer for this problem, I would prefer a financial system that can deal with multiple fiat currencies and has less reliance on the USD, but that won’t happen overnight.

cf https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-finance-idUSKBN29O1ZI

Obviously many people disagree.

Just to pick on one issue, carbon emission is negligible (unless you talk about bitcoin).

Many people also rely on transfers of cryptocurrency. Just not you or your entourage.

Yes, the people who disagree are those pumping and dumping and the bag holders.

And cryptocurrency mining consumes as much electricity annually as the country of Argentina. Country scale emissions is not at all negligible, particularly in light of catastrophic global warming.

That’s your opinion. And I guess that’s all you have when you can’t talk about the tech.

In reality, nobody actually cares about the tech, Not even the VCs care, they're just buying into a project for an exit.

The general public are even more oblivious to the tech, all they want. to know is 'How do I 100x my money? When is coin X going to the moon?'.

They all want the 'moon' more than the tech.

I care. I thought HN would as well.

You are in the .00001% minority that cares about the tech and everyone else is making millions on the backs of cryptocurrencies.

Global warming needs to be sped up in my view.

I guarantee you that you engage in activities that provide far less benefit to humanity but use far more energy than cryptocurrency.

Obviously people who have money to launder don’t like the idea of stopping money laundering. The same for people doing drug trade, avoiding international sanctions, tax evasion, etc.

is this copypasta for every crypto thread?

> Cryptocurrencies must be stopped, there is absolutely NO benefit to having them.

I don't think that they're perfect, or that they're good for everything, but your statement is hyperbolic.

Well there isn't, and I mean it. They do way more harm than good.

There isn't anything wrong with using existing secure and regulated methods (Paypal, Bank Transfer, etc), Cryptocurrencies claim to be decentralised when underneath they ARE still centralised and manipulated, especially Bitcoin.

I will only admit it has been a good run, but now it is time to for the regulators to step in.

> Well there isn't, and I mean it. They do way more harm than good.

Tell that to the Venezeulans who used bitcoin because their local currency is suffering from severe hyperinflation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-bitcoin-story-puts-...

I've personally used bitcoin to send money between my brother and myself (he was in Australia at the time, I was in the EU) because it was both faster and cheaper than a bank transfer or western union.

> I've personally used bitcoin to send money between my brother and myself (he was in Australia at the time, I was in the EU) because it was both faster and cheaper than a bank transfer or western union.

You do realise Bitcoin is unable to scale with a large volume of transactions, grinding it to almost a complete halt.

So even if Bitcoin reaches critical mass, your brother will be waiting a very very long time to receive their funds, all with extremely high fees. Questioning the use of Bitcoin would start and by then the BTC price would have gone down had a mass sell off occurred.

Not hypothetical by the way, actually happened only months ago. [0]

So how is this better than Paypal or Western Union?

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/massive-bitcoin-selling-sp...

I always love the "grinding to a halt" metaphor because it's so terrible. Bitcoin average block times don't change when lots of people are using it, and neither does tx throughput. Nothing grinds to a halt.

> You do realise Bitcoin is unable to scale with a large volume of transactions, grinding it to almost a complete halt.

Please research the topic more, the Lightning Network solves this problem and is already being used with no issues in El Salvador.

> ...with no issues in El Salvador.

Sounds like this is a huge issue in El Salvador [0].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57507386

Throughput in blockchain is solved. Just saying.

Any evidence or sources for this statement for it to be completely solved?

Or are you 'just saying this' because...?

Avalanche, algorand, solana, hashgraph, etc.

Listing random coins isn't sufficient evidence for your claim, back them up with links.

Since you claimed it's a solved problem, I am assuming these coins never had congestion issues which is why you chose them?

What about the unbanked? People in high-interest countries? Cross-border payments?

You present a strong claim that they "ARE still centralized and manipulated, especially Bitcoin". Please present concrete evidence.

You have Transferwise and Western Union for this, the latter being there for over 100 years and still in use.

Before you argue about WU fees, Bitcoin's fees are no better than Western Union's, hence Transferwise.

> You present a strong claim that they "ARE still centralized and manipulated, especially Bitcoin". Please present concrete evidence.

Princeton University concluded in a study that the bitcoin network is 50% controlled by 5 of the 6 bitcoin mining companies [0] [1] so how is Bitcoin decentralised If it is becoming more centralised by mining organisations and if most of the hashing power is centralised in China?

That seems to be that means that Bitcoin isn't really decentralised then no?

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-31/bitcoin-s...

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.02466.pdf

I’d say 50% is far less then the single-entity in a centralized solution.

> Before you argue about WU fees, Bitcoin's fees are no better than Western Union's, hence Transferwise.

Early in a new technologies adoption there will be pain points. I consider we are still very early on. Work is actively being done to alleviate this.

Still waiting on your response for high-interest countries and the unbanked.

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-taproot-upgrade-dogecoin-te...

> I’d say 50% is far less then the single-entity in a centralized solution.

So even with concrete evidence, you still cannot even admit this fact that Bitcoin is currently centralised?

Maybe you should read about the 51% attack [0] and then come back to me and say with a straight face about Bitcoin being decentralised.

You mean the 'unbanked' can use digital wallets like M-Pesa and Paytm?

What's wrong with that?

[0] https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-a-51-percent...

5 of 6 mining companies own 50%. Id be much more concerned if it was a single mining company owning 50%. I think you are the one unable to admit it isn’t centralized.

By definition it isn’t centralized. Even in the current state.

Why are you talking about bitcoin specifically? It’s the least advanced crypto

> there is absolutely NO benefit to having them.

Oh come on this is absolutely hyperbolic.

> They do way more harm than good.

Well that was quick. Can we start with the more nuanced position next time? Now we can analyse costs and benefits and perhaps learn something.

Not surprised Mark Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are at the center of it. They were on Clubhouse shilling NFTs all pandemic.

this is ridiculous. If either Horowitz or Andreessen are into something there is usually a pretty good chance that the thing is going to be big. pay attention.

So Clubhouse has gone pretty well has it? Considering that Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Spotify and even Facebook is getting in on Clubhouse's format.

Also, every time a VC comes along and does this with cryptocurrencies, there is almost a guaranteed complete dump in the price coin, only hurting the general public.

The problem with this comment is that it ignores advances in crypto meant to address the primary downsides.

I’m 100% in agreement that some aspects of some crypto currencies are extremely problematic and should/must be stopped.

But generalizing all crypto the way this comment does is not helpful or constructive. Recognize the nuance, and be specific about the issues.

Well, what are the upsides? I can't think of any that our existing system can already do.

People have been saying this about crypto for 10 years and bitcoin 30x'ed despite all the negativity, with tons of big institutions loading up on it behind the scenes. It's here to stay.

When you buy something at the store, the cashier doesn't question you how you got the money. They don't care. All they know is the currency is the proof that you did something, or sold something that other people valued.

Valuing a unique crypto hash is no more ridiculous than someone valuing a painting, old baseball cards, ancient pottery and all the other random stuff people collect and trade that are nothing more than a decoration.

Well, except crypto completely mobile, easy to exchange and can't be taken from you like all other the assets we have been exchanging since the beginning of time.

> People have been saying this about crypto for 10 years and bitcoin 30x'ed despite all the negativity, with tons of big institutions loading up on it behind the scenes. It's here to stay.

The main goal of bitcoin is to be a decentralised peer to peer cryptocurrency, it has completely failed in its original purpose to become that in 10 years.

And when more people realise how inefficient it is in terms of energy, transactions, fees and utility, the quicker the price will go down.

Monero fulfills the original promise of bitcoin.

Right, so Bitcoin failed in its original purpose then no?

Why are we talking about bitcoin when there are 100 more advanced cryptocurrencies?

Because the volatility of bitcoin moves the entire cryptocurrency market, if it falls, all those '100 more advanced cryptocurrencies' fall in value as well.

So it's pointless for me to use something like Cardano only for the price of it to fall because of Bitcoin rendering my holdings significantly less than what it was.

And don't get me started on Ethereum fees due to congestion and networks like Polygon going down all the time, doesn't seem advanced to me if congestion is still going on.

Sorry but you’re dismissing a good chunks of cryptocurrencies when you talk about high volatility or high fees

Such as?

What coin has never been affected by bitcoin's volatility, except for stablecoins?

>Cryptocurrencies must be stopped, there is absolutely NO benefit to having them.

Do you truly believe this? Or is it tongue in cheek?

Crypto ain't going away. And nothing will stop it. It'll encroach on all industries long term. It's global open competitive darwinism playing out before our eyes.

No domain on earth is as open & competitive as crypto.

> Do you truly believe this?

YES.

Spoken like someone talking about immigration who knows only what they've seen on Fox News.

You're so unbelievably short sighted about a tech innovation. There's more to crypto than bitcoin & greed is an unsolvable issue in humanity, not a crypto bug,

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree with this comment. The FUD on HN about crypto and fraud is disappointing to say the least. Impossible to have a good technical discussion around cryptocurrencies because of that. I’m going to start flagging these.

In sorry but I don't really see any crypto advocates talking about the tech at all. It's always at some undetermined point in the future, always products that solve problems created by crypto, and never anything consumer based or meant to actually reduce friction to make it a usable product for banking.

Crypto advocates' ideas of problems in the financial system have no mapping to the issues that people working in real fintech and its consumers identify.

It’s out there. Up to you to read the stuff and ask questions.

it’s not impossible. just harder. also, remember that hn has a bit of an echo chamber effect. I’ve been downvoted over time for expressing unpopular opinions that turn out to be mostly true. i don’t care. i’m here with an open minded and will listen to the other side arguments.

X is dangerous and must be stopped is not an argument. You need to articulate why it’s dangerous and exactly what you mean when you say that and when you say it must be stopped.

also, crypto is not going anywhere. If you cannot see that maybe you should start looking into it a bit deeper

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