Average HN is a salty nocoiner.
We poor old salty nocoiners can only wipe our flowing tears with the 100$ rags from our fat wallets. Oh poor us, we foolishly put our wealth into cashflow producing assets. Oh the sorrow every quarter as the dividends are deposited in our flash-loan-hack-proof bank accounts.
My stocks are doing good enough for me to not care at all about crypto since then. Even if that wouldn't be the case, I wouldn't invest in something that I don't think has a viable path.
Eg. The current solutions are using off-chain centralized transactions to fix core things ( eg. transaction fee).
Also flash loans don't take anything out of your wallet/account either and I know of people whose bank accounts have been hacked.
There's plenty to complain about btc but you've somehow chosen the least convincing argument for why you are a noncoiner.
This one recent example of an crypto exchange that fled with the money, has defrauded more in value than the entire ACH payment system worth ~51T ( fraud = 0,0008 % = 0,08 basis points).
https://www.engadget.com/africrypt-bitcoin-disappearance-174... https://silamoney.com/ach/understanding-the-basics-of-ach-fr...
Not only are the comments salty, they are generally ill-informed.
See Dang’s recent call to HN for more insightful comments and less vitriol for example.
It hurts me to say this about HN because on other topics comments are often deeply insightful but when it comes to Bitcoin (and other cryptos) HN comments are often ignorant and dismissive.
It is becoming apparent as time goes by that there are very many of them here. I seem to have attracted some that downvote every comment I make.
I now own precisely 0€ worth of Bitcoin and strongly recommend all my friends never to fall into that kind of trap. Because capitalism and speculation ruins lives, whether you trade stocks or magic BTC numbers.
I'm not alone: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...
I am also fortunate and with enough self-awareness to understand that the economy that I operate in is not the same for everyone all over the world. I understand what being un-banked means, I understand the extra costs that come with being poor. I understand that remittances from developed nation to developing nation are a lifeline for many many families. I understand that the traditional ways of sending money to these destinations involve fees as high as 20% or more and doesnt always include the ability to immediately access those funds at the other end. I know that there are unscrupulous Western Union branches/employees that will charge further fees at the receiving end. So whilst it is nice to have a high horse to sit upon, perhaps you could use that perspective to understand that not everyone is in the same position as you. Where you see waste someone else sees financial access, where you see speculation others see utility.
You don't plan for the future because you forsee the downfall of society, so through choice you elect not to plan. Others don't plan for the future because they cant plan further than a week or 2 weeks ahead because the subsist and survive on a day to day basis.
I am not a huge fan of capitalism, but here I am living in a world where it exists and I have to survive in it, it's. It going to change before I retire so I need to invest in the stock market via a retirement/pension fund. Of course I could choose not to do that but the only cost there is a negative one for me, it won't change the system.
I don't exactly have one, because i'm also from the global north (france). I'm betting that before i get to "retire" (i'm not a employee so there's not really a such thing for me) either climate change will collapse the capitalist economy (let's enjoy clear water before industry has used it all) or government will have turned fully fascist and put the rest of us (anarchists, muslims, homosexuals/trans*) in concentration camp...
> it won't change the system
Do what you need to do. But keep in mind together we're strong enough to change it. Changing the system (which can only happen through a global revolution) is the only thing that matters to give new generations a chance to live a better life than the shitty one we had... and to escape all dystopian scenarios that are slowly coming to life.
So sign me up for the revolution mailing list but let's get some content.
And yet here you are on hackernews, owned and run by ycombinator, an organisation that exists to capitalise on both of these things, with the aim of making a small group of investors and founders very very rich.
https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/
Are you aware of the cognitive dissonance in your position?
Yes bitcoin has pivoted now to a store of wealth or even a cheap way to move large sums and it is less efficient for smaller transactions, but lightning network solves this problem sufficiently.
Again pivoting is not something unique to bitcoin and many tech firms have pivoted to find their niche. Being able to react and respond is a feature not a bug.
I am more than aware of my position and my surroundings. But i don't feel any dissonance, though i do feel a lot of ethical/ideological conflict in these forums (which i'm happy to take part in on occasion).
Consensus can also be achieved by trusting a 3rd party in a certain context. Funny that's precisely what BTC people are doing with their exchanges, with Lightning, and even with Bitmain & Cie owning the majority of the network.
Also, you should know historically the luddites were artisans who destroyed the machines (introduced by the bosses) that ruined their lives and work conditions. They were not loonies opposed to any form of technological progress. In that sense, maybe some of us from HN are in fact luddites, because we want the machine to help, not to ruin society and the environment.
Blockchain tech is unrelated to bitcoins/crypto's.
Just like Stackoverflow doesn't correlate with the value of the .Net framework or HN doesn't correlate with the value of the ARC programming language ( since it's build on that tech)
It's an example of the tech, but the value of blockchain does not have a correlation with any of the 8000 implementations as crypto.
Additionally, the implementation of El Salvador uses Lightning network and since that obfuscates transactions off-chain to a centralized authority. It's not what i'd call blockchain anymore.
Yes and no. The latter is built from the former. But the former is ensured to build wasteful tech. I explain the difference between consensus and gossip in an article about decentralized forging, if you're interested:
https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/
Eg. With the lightning network