Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the title should be updated. It doesn't have anything to do with decentralization per se, but about cryptocurrencies, which is just a technology that happens to use decentralization as a technology.

I actually thought the article was gonna be about decentralization (as in P2P technology, like BitTorrent), but instead it's about the authors distaste for cryptocurrencies.

Edit: Maybe it's just me, but the article feels less and less honest the more I look into it. "Stephen Diehl" (the author) apparently founded a company that has the following tagline on GitHub "Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates." (https://github.com/adjoint-io) but I didn't find this disclosed in the post. There is a clear conflict of interest, but it's not highlighted for some reason.

View on HN

Normally when we use the phrase "conflict of interest," we use it to imply a conflict between parties. One of the parties in your account is the blog author and/or their company; who is the other? The cryptocurrency community? They aren't a party in the traditional sense, and the concept weakens further when we consider the press campaign among cryptocurrency fans to rebrand their schemes as transaction substrates.

Framed as such, this seems more like an impassioned technical rebuke from an informed individual than a "conflict of interest."

The article is about how the term decentralization has become a generic buzzword for good and in fact could describe a range of technologies that are either good or bad, hence we should be immediately skeptical whenever we see the term decentralized used to describe something as good and innovative and look more closely at the details.

> clear conflict of interest

That's not a conflict of interest.

The company (Adjoint, Inc) is described as "digitises cash and settlement processes", something that cryptocurrencies aim to do as well. His company clearly doesn't use decentralization (since why would he make a post against it?), which cryptocurrencies do. How is that not a conflict of interest in this specific blogpost?

Reading the post it seems like he has no stake in the outcome of what people think about cryptocurrencies and decentralization, but that's not true, as a founder he has a huge stake in the outcome.

"Conflict of interest" here would require that he's in a position that gives him some special power over whether people continue to invest in crypto (or "decentralization" generally). Writing a blog post is something anyone can do. The fact that he's put a financial stake in his views doesn't make it unethical to express them the same way as everyone else.

It's not that he shouldn't express his views in a blog. The part that feels shifty here is that he's not disclosing his position in the space in his articles. I think most people are at least somewhat susceptible to "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." so a disclosure of interest is useful to frame thoughts on a topic.

I didn't know about any of this until @capableweb brought it up. It explains a lot more about this series of blog posts.

The repo/company you linked is about utilizing zero knowledge proofs which is literally the best we've got in regards to decentralization.

If anything, that gives him credentials to talk about it?

All you'd have to do to look at their website and see that they offer a product to banks, it has nothing to do with decentralization. http://adjoint.io/

Rather than argue semantics, I'm just going to thank you for pointing out this person has other motivations for their position. I'd wondered why they go on such long anti-crypto rants.

It’s about the authors distaste for decentralized woo given human society literally falls apart without centralization.

Why do we need a literal Matrix running 24/7 when humans themselves can fill in the network gaps SMS doesn’t?

It’s about uneconomical, fantasy driven technology creation by a minority who seek to monopolize it for their social goals.

Shut the computers off and the power of the system is none. It’s not real unless we spend a lot of effort on it. Who is that empowering?

I’d like you to divulge any crypto holdings, crypto business associates, profits, you might have, since you seem to believe full disclosure is a requirement of every post online. I need to know if you have skin the game, leading you to question others motives.

Edit: to down voters; I don’t care. It’s such an impotent flex. “Oh look it me click button get dopamine carrot. I have stabilized reality!” Internet culture is sad af

Reply on news.ycombinator.com