I love how the crypto community encourages circumventing laws, UNTIL someone steals from them using their own “smart” contract then calls on authorities for help.
It’s ironic you’re asking this question in a thread about news proving how stupid crypto is to begin with.
That's not what post modernism is
maybe they dont just understand it at all, too. and its a lot, wrapping your head around all the defi fiasco alone is mentally challenging as hell, haha.
Of course that doesn't apply to everyone, and perhaps not even them majority, but certainly at least the majority that shows up in crypto threads. HN members tend to be very smart, very technical, and very confident, all of which combine into this ugly blind spot to creative/unusual forms of technical innovation. Crypto in particular is good at sitting right in the center of that blind spot.
This explanation has made more sense to me than anything else I've seen, you'll have to decide for yourself if you agree with it.
Crypto has been around for quite a few years already. How is everyone still close minded? Maybe the issue is that crypto has several problems that are consistently ignored by the community and crypto products keep on underdelivering on their promises.
In the end, it all boils down to one fact: the differentiating feature of blockchain is decentralization. That's mainly it. However, the crypto community keeps on promising changes and improvements in areas that don't have anything to do with decentralization without any actual arguments, ignoring what is the reality of those issues.
The other side of that coin – excessive open-mindedness – however, leads to being susceptible to cults, snake oil salesmen, and hyped up technologies. Crypto currencies, in particular, frequently tick all three boxes. Skepticism is generally a good thing, and so far crypto currency proponents have failed to refute the arguments of sceptics.
Cryptocurrency offers new primitives that are unavailable in any other system known to man. It takes time to build up a backbone of technology that can take these new primitives and get them to the point where they can compete with established trillion dollar industries, but it is happening, and it's starting to happen very rapidly.
It's certainly true that crypto is full of snake oil salesmen, overhyped technologies, and culty communities. But the presence of those things doesn't change the fact that the technology is real, and that it can do things at a fundamental level that no other technology can do.
but every once in a while great discussions pop up here, vitalik buterin himself even posts here sometimes, also that guy from coinbase etc
I think it has to do with a misconception about how much effort you have to put in to have a good understanding on crypto. If we are speaking about topics like high mathematics, most people realise that their knowledge is not enough to have a meaningful opinion on the cutting-edge. For some reason people on HN treat crypto like politics: almost everyone has a strong opinion without much knowledge. Crypto is a much deeper subject than how it is treated on HN. You need to have not just technical knowledge (like understanding why a proof-of-stake algorithm has no vulnerability is VERY hard), but also very deep knowledge of the philosophy of value/money/trust. For example any substantial interview with Vitalik Buterin discusses the topics in a much deeper way than it is treated on HN.
TL;DR: People are reasonably smart here but extremely uneducated on crypto, and for some reason they think that they are informed enough to have a strong opinion.
In fact, it has happened to the first two, at least temporarily. Someone who bought gold in 1980, say, is probably not particularly happy with it as a store of value today (adjusted for inflation, they _may_ just about be breaking even now assuming that they paid no transactional or storage fees); the same goes for someone who bought bitcoin in May. Or, er, an hour ago.
Picasso's time will presumably come, too.
As the other commenter said, "censor resistant" is impossible to achieve. It's society the one that gives value to things, and society can decide to censor you and stop you from storing/getting value from that network. Not to mention that most blockchains are traceable, so it's not that difficult to know how money is flowing.
> potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far
Why? This always happens in crypto: somehow it's going to fix a lot of issues even if the features that differentiate it from existing solutions don't have anything to do with those issues.
Are you a gold investor? I am. There are lots of problems with gold: 2-3% inflation, hard to store, hard to transfer, hard to divide, hard to examine whether it is really gold. BTC has some advantages (and some disadvantages). Proof of stake ETH have even more advantages (but also some more disadvantages). It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit.
Most people don't deal with those problems because they use banks and official currency. If the target of the blockchain is to replace gold, then I don't know why people insist on regular people using it.
> It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit.
Of course it is. But it's also meaningful to not treat it as the revolution as the crypto community does, or say that the people who don't think crypto is great is just uneducated.
Neither of those things are true about Bitcoin (it will not become deflationary until 2140, and "censor-resistant" requires a lot of extra elaboration). But then what's the economic basis for that being a good store of value?
I'm mostly upset with crypto because it hasn't delivered on any promise, while still causing untold ecological damage, and has tilted the price of computing equipment so already rich industrialists can earn even more. Up until recently that was just GPUs, but the latest invention in the space is they made a cryptocurrency based around using up hard drives. The joy.
First, I am very crypto skeptical, but I don't have any problem with "research continuing". However, that's not what I am experiencing. If crypto enthusiasts were off in a lab trying to figure out how to make it solve a real problem then great! Instead, I am the "tech expert" for many of my friends and family, and frequently have them reach out to me as they are on the verge of putting a non trivial amount of money into crypto that they can't afford to lose. Most of these people can barely keep their passwords safe, so I have to spend a lot of time talking them out of it because I care about them. A similar thing happens at work. Some random business exec has a great idea to "use blockchain" for some thing that frankly would be better solved with a regular database. I've had to spend a lot of time convincing business people to not use crypto or NFTs yet.
Second, what you're doing, and many crypto people do this, is identify real problems that would be great if we could solve them. And then you go, "and isn't crypto great because it hasn't solved these problems, but maybe it could". Yeah, maybe, but it hasn't yet. Crypto reminds me of the semantic web people in a lot of ways. They said, "wouldn't it be great if semantic information were embeded in data and APIs could be machine understandable". Sounds a lot like smart contracts doesn't it? Yes, it would be great if we solved that problem, but we never did. The most we got from the semantic web was the semi-useful json-ld you seen in HTML headers for SEO optimization. Here's the thing, the vast vast majority of new ideas don't pan out. It's a lot easier to identify legit problems than it is to solve them. Crypto people get super excited because it would be amazing to solve those problems, BUT there's no good reason to believe it's likely that it will. I say this as someone who spent years trying to get teh semantic web to work. It never did.
PS Mined some BTC in 2011 and some LTC in 2012-2013.
The original promise (per Satoshi) was that it could be used as electronic money. That goalpost was moved onto other currencies and sidechains and regular public acceptance has been low.
Most of crypto activity is related to other crypto(see Ethereum, see DeFi). All of the "cool" stuff happening in crypto seems to be dealing with other crypto...
It is useless to non-crypto people.
The only somewhat useful moral use case are remittances to unstable countries.
The rest of crypto is just bad bad stuff: scams, ransomware, large scale capital transfers by bad actors(tax evaders being the least evil).
I am in a business(high rate of CC fraud) where I would really benefit from an easy onramp for non crypto users.
PSS Last not least, POW and the horrible incentives going along with it is a serious issue as well. POS remains unproven in the field.
The other piece is a reaction to the pro crypto crowd who are making claims about how amazing crypto is and why it is the future. Most of these people have a large financial interest in moving the price of various coins up. The use cases so far 10 years into this are buying drugs and ransomware and the price going up.
Another example "Smart Contracts" are supposed to be this amazing technology for changing the world, but as you see here they have some significant downsides that the pro crypto people seem to either ignore or not understand.
It isn't just HN folks who feel this way. One of the smartest and most accomplished AI engineers alive today had this to say. https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1401267972044328961
e.g. why is a pixelated horse worth $10k? the least worrisome conclusion is that it's a tax optimization thing.
It’s really no different than a wealthy old man hating crypto. He has no need for it, he doesn’t want others to use it to get past him. He sees no problem with the current wealth inequality because he is at the top.
The 100 richest ETH wallets own 25% of mined ETH. Many of those wallets are probably owned by the same person/organization. Switching to PoS will make inequality even worse.
Some critics are definitely jelly about not hitting the crypto-lottery...but crypto is not a solution for wealth inequality.
Not to to mention anything dealing with money that isn’t reversible or doesn’t have a clear method for recourse is not something I want to put my money into.
Short answer: Crypto has been touted as a primarily technological advancement (blockchain!) while the primary use case for most crypto proponents is simply getting rich (flipping coins or spreading "HODL" encouragement).
Imagine if Venmo had launched with the requirement that all Venmo transactions had to be performed with VENMOCOIN instead of dollars. To transact on the Venmo platform, you had to buy some of this VENMOCOIN from the founders or early adopters, funneling your real money to them in exchange for tokens you could use on the Venmo platform. The VENMOCOIN early adopters really, really want you to use Venmo so the price of their VENMOCOIN goes up, so every online discussion gets filled with people talking about how amazing Venmo is and how it's the way of the future and everyone should buy as much VENMOCOIN as possible.
Sound ridiculous, right? That's more or less what the crypto discussions have become: People pretend to talk about technology but it's really about getting rich by flipping coins and pumping their value.
My impression is that most of the pro-crypto communities are rather new; most people involved just haven't been disillusioned yet.
I think the overly trashy environment of the crypto space made it an acceptable target for behaviour that's otherwise seen as childish and unacceptable when it comes to other subjects.
Lack of methods to handle fraud and abuse is the one hilighted in this thread.
Another reason is that most people on HN don't realize that there are roughly two sets of people in crypto. There are bitcoiners and then there are all the shitcoiners and scammers (who talk about use cases, ICOs, NFTs etc.). It's ok to hate all the scammers, but bitcoiners should be left out of it, because they're totally different set of people.
Actually, I was flagged over $6000 deposit over the sale of a car.
The IRS gives rewards to bank employees if they report (successful conviction) any suspicious behavior.
I still don't know why I was flaggged. Probally because I had long hair at the time?
I had a bunch of sleepless nights over that incident, and a bunch of emails back and forth.
Internet file sharing is older than you think. Together with remote terminal access (TELNET), file transfer (FTP) is one of the oldest Internet protocols. When file transfer over the Internet first started, that is, when the Internet itself started, it was not "illegal".
I don't think what the government calls "drugs" should be illegal, but, selling and buying drugs with cryptocurrency is an oft advocated for activity that I've seen in these communities.
Biggest eyeroll in history.
As for the legitimacy of the law itself, and the opinion of the 'crypto community' on it: the distinction you're missing is that some laws prohibit victimless crimes, by infringing upon the freedom of contract, and always in the name of some supposed greater good, whether that's 'limiting systemic risk', 'protecting retail investors' or 'preventing money laundering', while others prohibit genuinely victimful crimes, where one party violates the rights of another. It can be entirely morally consistent to oppose the former while supporting the latter.
In fact, we have already seen what happens when the financial industry is entirely deregulated multiple times worldwide.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
When such laws are used to prohibit mutually voluntary interactions between consenting adults, I think it's a human rights violation, and it is an accurate adjective to use, whether it's the CCP doing it to "maintain social harmony and political stability", or the USG doing it to "limit systemic risks to the financial system".
>>In fact, we have already seen what happens when the financial industry is entirely deregulated multiple times worldwide.
That is a revisionist account put out by some of the most powerful special interests in the world, who benefit from rampant gatekeeping/centralization of private financial interaction.