Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

85 pointscapableweb267 comments

I remember reading about cryptocurrencies on HN around the time Bitcoin was first published. A lot of skepticism was already there, of course. But the discussions were mostly curious, and people trying to learn more, even when they didn't really understand any value of the thing, or when they thought it might be bad.

Contrast that with how the discussions on HN are today, where there are basically two camps that are just screaming at each other. Curious conversations about cryptocurrencies on HN are basically gone, and one group yells how great everything is while the other one is warning of the impeding doom and zero use cases.

Why did it get like this? Is the sentiment similar on other social media? Is there any particular reason cryptocurrencies are so divisive while other subjects are not?

View on HN

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus.

One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster.

The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the environmental impact is just a temporary problem, that is solved when proof-of-stake is ready (which IMHO will never happen).

The tech itself is quite simple in concept with a few novel key insights in the old days (which by now are generally accepted).

So all in all, it is back to good old politics and do you believe in "it" nor not.

I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it - but I am not sure whether I just project my own skepticism ...

EDIT: typo proof-of-state -> proof-of-stake

In fairness to the present, the first post on HN about bitcoin[1] had 3 comments:

1) this is amazing and will save humanity

2) this is dumb no one will ever use it

3) this is confusing

That ratio doesn’t seem that much different than recent posts.

I think you’re right that most people at least on HN have decided what they believe when it comes to bitcoin.

Ultimately money is a belief and not just any belief but one so central to our identities that we often organize our lives around how we can get enough money.

Strong beliefs get tied into our identities so that threats to those beliefs will be viewed as many as attacks on their identities.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

Is there a place for the #1 group to go for curious conversation? (Curious conversation requires subtracting out the speculation about price and money)

I've been following Alex Gladstein[1] on Twitter and there's been lots of interesting podcasts and other discussions worth checking out.

[1] https://twitter.com/gladstein

Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like a great rec, I see he retweeted some kind of debate that looks interesting.

I'm pretty dubious of Twitter as a platform though. There's so much other stuff, and Twitter injects its own crapola into the feeds too. I've bookmarked his profile instead, look forward to checking it out.

If you're interested, but want to skip the noise on Twitter, uou can read most of his work in regards to Bitcoin and its humanitarian impact here: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein

Thanks! I had not realized bitcoinmagazine could be a good source. I had grouped it in with other crypto media junk like cointelgraph.

I disagree. There is a lot of interesting things to discuss. But all of them start from the premise "blockchain works as a distributed ledger". People in the camp you are in are not that interested in those discussions, because you disagree with the premise.

These interesting things are about how to do privacy, build second layers, make other smart functionality, etc. In general there are actual cryptographic innovations coming out of these systems. Zcash was truly positive to research into Zero Knowledge Proofs.

At the same time, discussions often get muddied by a few vocal people who are trying to hype up their investments. I imagine some of these people are just hyping, and others have bought into the believe, and cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of 'maybe there is something wrong with this'.

Oh, it works as a distributed ledger (that is already proven).

I just fail to see how it is better than so many other alternatives on a case-by-case basis... mostly on efficiency...

And just because I don't believe in the idea itself, I acknowledge that some good can come of it..

See for example wars, where most cutting edge innovation happens. I think wars are bad (but sometimes necessary), but we are reaping the benefits of generals wanting to throw more cannonballs further (If you are unsure I mean our computers where developed mostly because of that), also microwaves, the internet (a cold war though) and lots and lots of other stuff...

Yeah, I'd say your entire approach is antithetical to healthy discussion: insinuating anyone who is interested in crypto is technically inept, and turning the discussion into a 2-sides polarization. There's no use in talking about crypto in a sincere way now because of the way its been politicized.

I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance), in a purely theoretical sense - but they just kept making disgusted faces and saying bitcoin is a scam (?). I'm not sure there's any rational energy behind any of it, it seems to me like any other political "issue" since 2016, like the Rittenhouse trial.

> I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance)

There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues.

For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.

You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: As a response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide.

Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.

> You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: A response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code?

> Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority.

Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate.

> Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.

I don't think you quite grasp that people are already building blockchains for government use. You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.

> You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Yep, and we have seen some government bodies using Github or other platforms to publish open data, or to be more transparent on procedures, and yet most of them still don't do it. Which is my point: the problem is not lack of technology, but lack of motivation/human capability/initiative to do it.

> Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates.

I'm sorry but this looks incredibly naive. I can tell you a very real example: in my country, Spain, we have papers proving that, among others, a certain M. Rajoy, of the PP party, received money that came from illegal donations. The prime minister at the time, Mariano Rajoy from the PP party, denied that it was him on the papers. He didn't face any legal consequence.

There have been so many times that a central authority has clearly gone against the protocols of the system without it disintegrating... You can't apply tech solutions to a problem that's not at all about tech.

I don't dispute that this is mostly theoretical. But I wouldn't say it's naive, because we know that when people buy into systems they follow the rules as best they can. The problem occurs when others take advantage of the system to game it with plausible deniability, within the confines of said system. That's the entire point of "the emperor has no clothes" allegory. When people buy in to a broken system, broken things happen.

That's why you get papers "proving" someone's guilt, but no action taken because the handling of such situations lies outside of the common understanding of the system. I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Obviously one major problem is how to build a system which handles all of the edge-cases that crop up? One possible answer is to use a DAO which can modify itself through whatever means (usually democratic).

> I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Or people think to themselves "well, the papers are authentic but the meaning is open to interpretation" or "well, it's not such a bad thing" or "well, but the others are doing worse", or a myriad of things. All of those are real arguments I've seen made.

It is naive to think that you can codify everything into a system in a way where there's no open interpretation possible. It is naive to think that people will trust the system instead of what they heard the system says, or that people will trust the system over leaders, or the the people responsible for enforcing the system decisions and feeding the system information won't find a way to elude responsibility.

In general, it is naive to think that the problem of corruption, which is a problem about trust (if the person I like says he didn't do it or did it for a good reason, then I trust him above all else), enforcement (the ones responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones breaking them) and tolerance (people don't care that much about corruption if it doesn't harm them) will be fixed by a solution that at most will help a little bit in the enforcement part.

I think of it more in terms of a highly secure and decentralized online videogame. Most people will be happy just to play the game, some people will start guilds and min/max, some people will try to cheat. When someone is found cheating, the system gets patched to prevent others from doing it. The dynamics of a game nudges people into behaving within the incentive structure of the game mechanics - even though technically they could strip naked and /dance for a month straight.

In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.

I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.

On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.

> You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions.

This is useless and unconstructive generalizaton. AFAIK many non-tech problems were solved with technical solutions.

It's a basic fact. If a problem is caused by something that is not related to lack of technology, you won't solve it with a technical solution. This is obvious in any other field (for example, you won't see a doctor that says that drugs could fix poverty) but a lot of tech people don't seem capable of admitting that some problems cannot be solved by technology.

But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology? Not enough food? Invent agriculture. Or invent the spear and the sandal so you can hunt further afield.

Technology is not a field. Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives.

> But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?

Not at all. I mean, to take your example:

> Not enough food? Invent agriculture.

Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives when they don't have a way to do something. Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues... Having the technology is far from enough in most cases.

The idea that "technology solves everything" permeates HN and you'll see it all over the place in threads about education, politics, corruption, music, math... Funnily enough, when the people who actually know about the topic show up in those threads, most of the time they end up explaining why the problem at hand is not at all technology related.

> Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Perhaps we could invent a new thing to solve that too? Improvements to crop technology, breeding, farming methods continue to happen every year. Inventions like the Internet bring information to people in rural areas who might not otherwise have had access to it. Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

> Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues...

But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

It seems anything humans invent is just one more tool we accumulate as a society. Once it was language, then writing, then mass communication, now perhaps it'll be a secure economy.

> Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

> But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

No, I don't think you can. You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech (unless you want to create a slaving machine, and I don't think that's the idea), you can't make tech that magically eliminates energy requirements to transport or build things, or that eliminates costs. I think we need to be at least a little bit realistic when evaluating the problems.

I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. It's like someone saying that you only need a hammer for woodworking.

> You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech

At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience.

> I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology.

Who said that all problems can be solved by technology?

> Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

Technological progress often goes against the will of governments. See Twitter-triggered revolutions.

The commenter above just said "But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?"

This looks like another useless generalizaton to me.

Did they ask you to explain it? Did you talk about shortcomings of it?

Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins.

I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.

No, they didn't. Most people just make inflammatory comments or make extremely complex "gotcha" claims that aren't true, which need both parties to be cooperative to resolve. I was busy trying to make arguments against wild claims, and ended up saying dumb things like "Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does"; things that are technically true but don't resolve the attacker's underlying unease - and so are unhelpful.

Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc.

These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.

Out of curiosity how do you estimate this comparison:

> Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does

I actually looked into it and got the quote wrong, it's not Amazon Alexas globally, it's all "always on devices" in America; including computers, gaming consoles, etc.

From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu:

> American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year

> Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year

> Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year

> Online advertising: 106 TWh per year

> American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year

That is almost 630 watts per person (250 million people, 24*365 hours per year)... That seems like a lot...

As a north european techie spending power on quite a few always on things (respberry pis, a nas, a router, wifi, ps5 etc)- but also freezer, fridge, cooking - and lightning for half the year and a little extra heating, I have used around 2500 kWh year to date, which is roughly 320 watts in total (or half that stated figure for always on devices alone...)

EDIT: I remembered the american population size wrong, the right figure is 475 watts @330 Mln people, but my point stands..

I would say less technically savvy people probably use more electricity, not less. And you're assuming that you're the average American consumer. There are probably old toasters and electrical heaters that contribute significantly to that figure. In any case, the conservative estimate is still several times that of Bitcoin's usage.

I'd also say cruise ships are more egregious, which no one seems to care about despite them definitely not using clean energy or being remotely useful, using 2.5x the amount of energy as Bitcoin - or as much as Spain!

It's inherently a political, not a technical, question. I think people on the whole recognize it as such, but it's often easier to try to invalidate the stuff on technical grounds, because for crypto to be beneficial it must satisfy BOTH the political and the technical requirements.

Even if you completely agree with the political aims of crypto, if there are technical flaws it catastrophically ruins everything crypto hopes to achieve.

Even if you completely agree with the technical side of crypto, if the intended end-game horrifies you, you're not gonna want to see it proliferate.

Actually I agree with you that a "blockchain of law" would be great..

But that could also be done just by putting all law on somewhere public like github...

Or by having a block chain with a hard limit of 10 khashes/second per country (detecting cheaters is easy as far as I understand) and you can have a network of 200 raspberrypi zeros running it for around a single kilowatt..

It seems many of these ideas stem from failures of USA's political system. That is entrenched players fighting against government breaking their hold on their profit models even if that would be net benefit for general population. See taxation and even access to law, which I heard cost something 650$ a month from private provider.

For example Finland already have laws online accessible for free: https://finlex.fi/en/

And Finland probably isn't only country doing this.

Hello fellow scandinavian.

Well, it is the same in my country (Denmark), we have retsinformation.dk (litterally "information of the law"), but that does not hinder a corrupt state from altering "history" as they see fit.

Also, my mother was a german teacher and her ex-DDR speakers (many who were quite some time in prison) told us that, that basically all of them where enprisoned with due process. Their problems were, that the laws where constructed so you were a criminal if you did X, but also (due to a different law) if you did not do X.

It is the basic catch-22, that you cannot escape.

You are intimately dependent on the benevolence of your state/society, and if your state/society is not benevolent you can only throw your life at trying to change it (for everybody else)... You will the most likely fail (and be dead) unless a lot of (by definition) uncoordinated action happens at once.

Even in my country that boast of being a free and civil society we have problems once in a while.

In the 1990 we had a police chief should (sadly for him on camera), "shoot at their legs" (police shooting at citizens is very uncommon in Denmark) at a somewhat violent demonstration.

And we have what is called the Tibetian case where our police mislead protesters so that the visiting Chinese gov people did not have to look at the (otherwise legal) demonstration...

Maybe you just failed to explain to that person what the roadmap of going from coin to blockchain powered book of law looks like, because it's quite the road.

> cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance)

Would 51% attacks spoil the party with that? The incentives would be enormous to do such a thing, it might even become a polarized political imperative to try to do these attacks.

It might also be like replacing the one citizen, one vote system with a one gpu (or future hardware item), one vote system. Would that remove political power from citizens?

We don't really know. A lot of work has gone into trying to minimize incentive for 51% attacks though, and it continues. "Fork off" is a classic argument, that the attacker may take over the chain but then cause a fork where they're left with a worthless system anyway - meaning the 51% attack would only be profitable for a short duration before a fork devalues their winnings and everyone continues on the new system.

Vitalik Buterin is involved in a lot of the theory in handicapping plutocrats, and enabling fair representation/voting in the blockchain space. Check out his blog.

I think Ethereum (as in its contracts) is interesting, there's just too much get rich quick fud, SNR too low, for me to confidently be 'actively interested'.

Some kind of novel things could be done with it, like that distributed storage thing is sort of interesting. There's a peer to peer betting thing based on (somewhow the outcomes are available to the program?) it I saw on HN a while ago which is sort of interesting.

A way to decrease the noise would be most appreciated.

I'm confident there's lifetimes worth of signal, even in crypto developments in the last year. But there is an ungodly amount of noise over price, outrage, etc.

I asked in a new thread about where to go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611

I think this is pretty much the same question that was discussed a couple of weeks ago. Worth a read, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139813

Oh wow missed this! Will link to it from the thread I started as well. Thank you!

For anyone else who reads that thread -- the good links and suggestions are near the bottom of the thread.

There is a 3rd camp I count myself in that sits somewhere in the middle and stays out of most HN CC discussions because there seem to be almost only extremists discussing.

I actually belong more to camp three than the "no/scam" camp... But I do lean towards no real purpose, that cannot be better (i.e. more efficiently) done otherwise...

Indeed, which is why the inefficiency in Bitcoin is deliberate. People seem to overlook that. If you goal is simply to send numbers around the world, of course there are better methods.

Interesting comments! Do you mind sharing your thoughts on why proof of stake won’t happen?

IMHO because it depends on uncloneability of digital assets.. Which I believe is not possible.

The whole thing that makes cryptocurrencies work now is the un-cloneability of the amount of work done (which is why the 51% problem exists in the first place).

The only good way of doing it would be through a cartel with strict enforcement of hashrates etc.. And welcome to the financial banking system...

You're confusing concepts and blockchain fundamentals. "Uncloneability" is the double-spending problem solved by proof-of-work/hashcash scheme. The 51% attack is not the problem, it's just a requirement for a PoW based blockchain to work. Just like how you have 1/3 honest node requirements in traditional BFT distributed database designs.

So cloneable cryptocoins is a thing? Where do I sign up wink.

IMHO cloneablitiy IS the problem, PoW is just a (very, very unfortunate) solution to that. PoS (stake as in possession, not pledging) is IMHO inherently impossible, so PoW is all we got, now and for ever...

I'm also curious about this but don't really understand this explanation.

Can you elaborate more on what "uncloneability of digital assets" means exactly and why it's a pre-requisite of proof-of-stake? Happy to take some links if there are any that explains this well.

All kind of trade depends on value and value depends (mostly) on scarcity.

In the real world cloning money (historically precious metals) is really really hard (and btw. much easier with paper money that the metals that have a basket of physical attributes that cannot be emulated at once).

Digital bits on the other hand are indefenately cloneable (by design, that is one of the base properties of "digital").

Just for you to see my text here, along the way somewhere around 20 perfect copies were made by various routers (i.e. computers)..

Proof of stake is already happening. It's on Ethereum (though they haven't switched over to the beacon chain from proof-of-work yet), and it's on many others.

If you look at the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, maybe bitcoin and 1 are 2 others are proof of stake. There are a bunch of 'tokens' cryptocurrencies which exist on top of another blockchain, but the remainder of the layer 1 blockchains and all of the layer 2s that use a consensus mechanism are using proof of stake now.

Arguing against crypto because of proof of work is like arguing that computers won't see mass adoption because vacuum tubes make them impractical to fit inside of a typical home.

Last I looked the so-called proof-of-stake was more a system where somebody put up a stake to be witnesses (in lack of a better word).

When I say proof of stake, I mean it in the way of "proof of possession"

Just to point out, you're using a common term very differently than others in cryptocurrency who say "Proof of Stake". This will add friction to your conversations.

You are right, we disagree about what PoS means...

I believe I use it in the original meaning from around 2010, but I might be mistaken.

I do fail to see how the current use of the term PoS guarantees anything against a cartel of bad actors...

With "Proof of Stake" to mean a consensus system, are you saying the Ethereum Proof of Stake implementation doesn't do anything to guarantee against a cartel of bad actors?

My understanding is "slashing" may be one such mechanism. This is where staked funds are taken away from bad actors. ie if you propose a block with bad transactions, the 32 ETH you have staked will be reduced by some fraction as punishment. When your stake is slashed down to 16 ETH you are booted from the system. So that us a clear punishment against a bad actor, though I'm not sure what a cartel means i this case. Perhaps you know about this already however.

A cartel is a group of bad actors working together with full, but hidden coordination....

Proof of Work is not resilient to a sufficiently large 'cartel' either in this case. If your cartel is 51% of bitcoin miners by hashrate, they can agree to let each other spend their bitcoin twice. Of course, this is sufficiently hard to do with proof of work, as with proof of stake, as to make it infeasable, perhaps even moreso with proof of stake.

As an example with bitcoin specifically, it would probably be cheaper to buy enough mining hardware to constitute 51% of the bitcoin network than it would be to buy 51% of all bitcoin.

Of course, both would be very expensive endeavors.

Proof of stake is a decentralized consensus mechanism that is (usually) trustless, and prevents attacks like double spending.

Most notably, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Avalanche, Terra, Algorand, Polygon, Elrond, and Fantom are all using permissionless networks where nodes which have some amount of the native token of those blockchains staked produce blocks and validate transactions

Your answer reads like a marketing blurb and only tells about the goal (on which we agree) and not the mechanism (where we disagree). I tried reading a few of the coins you mentioned and all of them were witness ("validator") based...

They still do not prove that they have something in possession, they stake their own coin on being honest... BIG difference.

Do they allow you to prove that you (and you alone) have possession/control of the coin itself, and if so, how? (That is the part that I consider impossible).

The whole problem is that proof-of-stake has been redefined by the new PoS networks and does have the original meaning of "stake" (i.e. sole possessor) anymore.

I can prove to you that I have access to a gold coin by taking it out of my purse and showing it to you. You can do three simple tests (weight, volume and ringing) that ensures that it cannot be any other material than pure gold (due to any material that is both cheaper and heavier than gold is tungsten and that does not ring). You can also be sure that it is not a clone of another coin so that it "just disappears" or gets double spent.

There is also no witness/validator that can break your trust and betray you.

Every POS network I have ever looked into (and I admit that it has been a while) relies on witnesses. And that removes my way of knowing whether the witnesses lie or not.

Is there any of the socalled PoS networks that actually allow you to prove that you have exclusive possession/control of the digital coin in question without any witnesses ('validators')?

If so, their founders can already book their ticket to the Nobel Gala next year, as that would AFAIK be a feat in the same scale as disproving gravity...

lots of PoS chains are live today.

As I regularly post whenever it comes up, SPL USDC is a dramatically better payment experience than wire transfers or debit cards or whatever, and I wish I could accept all payments this way and pay all bills this way.

I basically agree; but this oversimplifies the diversity of opinion in both camps. For example, it might well be worth the environmental damage to shift control of international monetary flows from the US government to a true free market.

Although the US has been as good a steward as can be hoped for no entity should have that much control over international finance.

Sure it oversimplified (most opinions that are somewhat transferable are).

I agree with the hope for a better stewardship, but as all people end up moving cryptocurrencies in and out of the "old" financial system (creditcards, swift etc). I fail to see how crypto would help me..

I for one cannot pay for my rent, food, heat, water, power, internet with crypto, can you?

I can't pay my rent in US dollars, that doesn't make them worthless.

Although, to be fair, I did pay a security deposit in bitcoin 6 years ago.

Actually, in El Salvador, Bitcoin is now the national currency, so I suspect a lot of people are paying their rent in bitcoin

Isn’t El Salvador completely dollarized? It wouldn’t be surprising if most landlords still demanded rent paid in dollars rather than bitcoin (a difference in “the” national currency vs “a” national currency).

It's illegal to conduct business and not accept bitcoin in El Salvador.. it's the national currency now. I don't know for certain if this applies to landlords however.

Legal and enforced are also different things (especially when an autocrat is in charge). There are articles on how many poor people lack internet and are completely unbanked. That it is extremely unpopular in El Salvador. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/amp/cryptocurrency/articles/...

I think it goes a little deeper.

The whole discussion basically mirrors real life politics. One camp want's more collective action to help the unfortunate, the other wants absolute freedom for the individual.

Further than that: one camp believes in collective action and the welfare of an extended population, encompassing the worthy AND the unworthy, and the other considers that there must be penalties for being unworthy or inferior, and rewards for being worthy or superior.

This is a genuine difference of ideology, authentically held. To insist on absolute freedom for the individual, including any penalty or consequence for any lack on any level (and any degree of reward for any superiority no matter how it's arrived at) means you do not care about the unfortunate any more than you'd care about the pile of chips produced whilst making a great sculpture. Not only is the sculpture the point, but it's actively harmful to insist on leaving the superfluous chips stuck on: some waste has to be disposed or you're just poisoning yourself/harming your sculpture.

This is a position often held by sculptures and people not often thought of as waste. People who get thought of as waste, frequently would like this assumption re-examined.

People who are garbage but occupy categories way beyond their inherent value really REALLY don't want that assumption re-examined…

How do you see bitcoin fit into that axis, i.e. how does bitcoin help the unfortunate (that is VERY late to the "game") ?

That might disprove my "nothing interesting to discus.

Bitcoin is an unconfiscable, permissionless inflation hedge. It's a big deal for people that live in authoritarian countries that coincidentally always have huge inflation numbers.

Until you end up in jail... sadly.

That is my point. If your country is "sufficiently bad" bitcoin will not (and cannot) help you in the long run.

Until you cross the borders and move all your wealth with you by memorizing 12 words.

Tell that to the the people of the ex-DDR, the North Korea and REALLY targeted individuals..

Sadly there exists no sure way to secure you belongings if the other party is sufficiently motivated to strip you of them (or your life)..

You can also be killed/robbed outside of your country by intelligence officers of your country...

What a weird attitude of helplessness. You might as well argue against encryption because the state can always do the $5 wrench attack.

It is much easier for the government to confiscate your money from your bank account than to go after your Bitcoin. And it is impossible for the government to stop you from accepting payments in Bitcoin and to cut you off from financial system.

Maybe it is the other way around.

I live in an old and free democracy in Scandinavia (in the EU) and actually believe in my government's mostly pure motives. Our laws are solid and confiscation is unheard of outside of criminal activity.

If that changes drastically, I am screwed either way...

And it might be impossible for my government to stop me taking bitcoin but they could surely hinder me in converting them back to regular currency. And in my country nothing can be bought by any cryptocurrency.

I'm not sure how does you living in an old and free democracy in Scandinavia negate the fact that Bitcoin helps the unfortunate who are living in authoritarian states.

Obviously it doesn't, and I might be seriously wrong, but....

But would said unfortunate person have access to a passport and are they allowed to leave their authoritarian country?

Do they have anywhere to legally go, where they have the right to residence and can get into the new countries banking system? In the EU at least that is NOT easy unless you already have citizenship in another EU country....

I.e. say you are that person in that country, could you just decide to leave with your twelve word password, your passport and a backpack. And could you setup life in another country?

I do also see the value of storing your money in bitcoin due to inflation, if you believe bitcoin is here to stay (I don't believe that), and you can manage to buy it without too much suspicion from your state and convert it back at a later day if you decide to stay in your own country.

> the North Korea and REALLY targeted individuals

There are always edge cases, where nothing helps. Fortunately, most countries are not like North Korea and you have some freedom, often enough to use crypto.

I'm so curious about your posts, this seems like an endless thread of gotchas. What's important to you about this topic? I have read all your posts in this thread and am puzzled. Thanks for any insights.

Complaining about "gotchas" like this so much sounds a lot like admitting defeat but desperately trying to phrase it as a win.

HN is a place for curiosity. I'm genuinely interested to hear svennek's perspective, it's coming through in a bunch of fragments throughout this post.

> the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it

your network seem to be opposite of general population, where less technically apt less believe (economists, news people, etc.)

i suspect it has more to do with political leaning, i.e. more center-conformist less believe, outside center more believe

Why will proof-of-stake never happen?

Not op but will give my thoughts-

The only theory I'm aware of, which the "proof-of-stake" approach is based on, is some form of "game theory", my translation - "people won't do evil stuff since it's against their interest", which generally aligns with people being rational and basing economic theories on top of this thesis.

Every major chain except bitcoin and ethereum is proof-of-stake now. And in less than a year, ethereum will be proof of stake. People that say proof-of-stake "won't work" have no idea what they're talking about.

>People that say proof-of-stake "won't work" have no idea what they're talking about.

My understanding is every POS blockchain is centralized and not secure.

Can you name a POS blockchain that you think has achieved sufficient decentralization and security so we can test your claim?

PS: How about answering the question instead of preemptively downvoting and attempting to shutting down the conversation. If POS truly works, you should be happy to provide an example or even multiple examples. Any reluctance is a red flag...

In my opinion it's because it has not happened yet. Yes I know about the etherium experiment that has been delayed many times but may be running currently, but the crypto community seem to prefer the proof of work.

They prefer POW because it's actually more secure and decentralized. ETH POS results in a smaller group of people controlling the network, majority of fully validating nodes running on AWS, and introduces massive collusion/attack risks.

ETH POS has many of the bad characteristics current central banks have...

Agreed, there is nothing left for the HN community to discuss about cryptocurrencies. There is plenty worth discussing for others though. I posted a thread here asking where to go to find curiosity driven discussions about the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611

paper money is also enviromental disaster. How many trees were cut just for it and how many people were paid to keep the paper money innovation going eg. bank employees siting on chairs waiting for customers while doing harm for the enviroment by producing CO2 (opportunity cost)

Paper money is not actually made of paper.

proof-of-stake already exists - we call it "traditional bank"

You could have written this summary in 2015, you're not keeping current.

> I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it

This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment.

The other aspect is that they just look at Bitcoin through a technological lens and judge it inferior to other networking & data storage technologies. They don't have a deep grasp of the concept of money and what properties makes for a sound form of money. Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job explaining it from that perspective [1].

It's a shame that so many, otherwise smart, people are sleeping on such a revolutionary change in the world. The idea of Bitcoin has been thought about and predicted for many years by people held in high-regard among HN readers, such as Buckminster Fuller [2], Henry Ford [3], and Friedrich Hayek [4], and they'll still dismiss it out of hand.

Such a massive lost opportunity for great skills, knowledge, and talent to be applied to what I think is one of the most important innovations of our civilisation.

[1] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/look-at-how-buckminster-fuller-pred...

[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-henry-ford-envisaged-bitcoin-10...

[4] https://twitter.com/janpaul_f/status/1461596623038038017?s=2...

Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish. Sorry I don't know how to phrase it so it doesn't come as a personal attack. Most of the crypto posts sound like it.

> This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database

I think it's crazy that you feel this way, I can only speak for myself and a few others, but we do in fact fully understand it and why it works this way.

Satoshi is not some god that has come to save us. He saw something that fraction of people in society consider to be a problem and attempted to solve it. He did not consider complex ways that his solution would interact with the society. A lot of us think that crypto causes more problems than it solves.

> Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish

That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.

Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.

But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.

If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.

But this is why Bitcoin works though. It's why it's important. Because it solves a problem most people have no idea even exists. That's why they get angry when people talk about it, because it seems like people are lying to them or trying to wind them up.

The environmental argument is a straw man, and not really related to crypto, but actually related to our energy mix.

If crypto was mined only on renewables there is no environmental argument. Ergo, not related to crypto technology itself.

It's not a straw man. Yes, if the energy mix was only reliant of renewables, energy usage wouldn't be as much as a problem. But it is not, and won't be in years, decades, so we can't just brush off the energy usage of crypto as "well it's the energy mix fault". You cannot evaluate a technology in isolation of its real world, practical context.

Not to mention that even with renewables, energy usage would be still a concern. Renewables will still have issues around distribution, power peaks, energy storage, price, and crypto wouldn't be helping any of them. A discussion of how would crypto affect the rest of the people compared to the benefit it brings would still be relevant.

How come you see this argument pedaled on crypto but not every other technology?

Cobalt mining for batteries?

Energy consumption for processed metals?

Oil refining from rocketry (largely used by military in practice scenarios)

This list goes on. It seems crypto is the only technology evaluated in relation to the whole environment. For all the others we shrug and ignore externalities.

56% of energy used for Bitcoin mining is coming from renewable sources of energy.

Is there a source for that? Last time I checked there weren't reliable reports even on total energy usage, much less energy sources.

https://www.hope.com/content/dam/hope-assets/collateral/Mini...

That's a self-reported survey by members of a Bitcoin mining council, which represent an unknown portion of the total mining capacity, and if I'm correct the term "sustainable energy" includes "carbon-based energy with net emission credits". It doesn't seem the most reliable source to me.

In other words, 44% comes from non-renewables.

It's not like those 56 are free either, we could use that energy to run more important things instead that crypto is taking away from.

In many cases, you can't use the energy that is used for Bitcoin mining for anything else, since there are simply no consumers next to the renewable energy source.

That is one heck of a waste, at a time when managing the thermal runaway of our planet is a matter of great and immediate urgency.

Separating money from the state is worth the cost.

I think this is what every crypto argument secretly comes down to, this ideological disagreement.

I don't want money to be separated from the state, and especially not at a cost.

One man's crypto-anarchocapitalist utopia is another man's dystopian capitalist nightmare that we sacrificed our environment for.

Imagine telling a guy who lives in a state with over 15% inflation rate that he's destined to stay poor because some people in first-world countries think that hard money is an utopia.

I never said money in any form is an utopia.

The utopia would be post-money imo and moving money away from the state would make that harder to achieve.

If crypto was only mined on renewables and there was sufficient (and sufficiently distributed) renewable energy that the presence of crypto did not otherwise detract from our desperately overdue de-carbonization efforts, then sure, whatever, knock yourselves out melting your processors to do funny math.

But that isn't the reality we live in.

The environmental aspect is manifestly a part of how crypto phenomenon, and attempts to separate the underlying technology from the manner in which it is (and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be) used, are disingenuous at best.

Energy is fungible, we don't have 100% green energy and won't for a very long time, we make up the difference with fossil. Even if crypto used green energy only, it means more fossil burned.

To continue human civilization we need to stop fossil burning as much as possible, crypto is unnecessary and should therefore be stopped.

But that is solved with a price on carbon. That would make mining without renewables unprofitable.

How do you argue that something is unnecessary? Aluminum uses heaps of energy… we haven’t needed in for 1000s of years, is it neccersary?

I think the renewable energy is the real straw-man.

What about the non-recycable waste after "renewable" energy. Windmills have steel coated by epoxy wings, those cannot be recycled.

Solar panels is also ready for the trash-heap after 20 years, due to being a complex composite..

The only real energy source that would help would be nuclear, but even if we get that where have more efficient room-heaters and better use of the computing.. (protein folding could be one for example)

Solar panels aren’t complex composites. They are silicon with some coatings on it. You can definitely recycle them.

Renewable are also not free. The technology of crypto (as it exists today) is more energy consuming than a single computer processing all the transactions centrally.

No matter how you cut it, that delta is waste if the additional functionality is useless.

That’s not a straw man. It’s literally how huge portions of crypto are mined right now. Were you trying to say “red herring”?

Regardless, energy is a market and even if crypto used purely renewable energy, that’s energy that wasn’t used for replacing fossil fuels in some other use case. Literally any technology that massively boosts energy consumption has the same problem.

Burning electricity as heat just so our currency is little bit more resilient doesn't really seem in anyway efficient way to do things. And any efficiency gains are negated because we will just do more of it.

Any other industry including financial one will try to minimise the waste if it becomes unreasonable. Not so with proof of work crypto.

Crypto mining is using renewable capacity that could be used for other purposes.

Your argument lacks a modal operator I think.

Renewables have environmental impact too.

There’s only so much to be said for retaining my curiosity after years and years of getting shouted about it by people who have no understanding of what they are peddling.

I’m actively involved in the space, I explored my curiosity through designing a few DApps, building some coins, the usual. The tech is interesting, the approach is worthwhile, the whole FOMO pyramid on top of it is just noise and I wish it would stop. I’ve never seen so much nonsense discussions about GSM, GPS or other widely used and useful systems.

When I talk to a crypto peddler, I never have to reach out for my know how as it’s never the case that the discussion progresses past THIS IS THE FUTURE NOW YOU GOTTA JUMP ON BOARD OR ELSE YOU MISS THE MOON TRAIN.

That's a good point.

I can really see how the constant hype and downplaying of downsides has fatigued a lot of technically minded people. If most of the discussions about a topic are over-hyped and on shaky ground, it makes sense to be skeptical about any new discussion. Especially if that new discussion is actually quite technical, and needs either niche mathematics or deep knowledge of existing blockchain.

That s like arguing that because things like scrum masters are a thing in the software world then the whole software industry is valuless bullshit

No, that’s like arguing that it’s bullshit to expect people to keep fighting whether SCRUM is bullshit or not.

When I go work for a company that does SCRUM, they inform me and I accept or not. I don’t expect to battle on ideas and wits regarding the subject and then one of us to declare defeated that there’s no longer curiosity regarding scrum mastering.

In these threads we usually only hear about Bitcoin and Ethereum, which is sort of like posting exclusively about scrum when the topic is "why are we as a community not having curious conversations about project management?"

But have your heard about my new project management style?

It’s called N.I.M-ble and it has some sort or people making sure the project moves along, managing expectations of both stakeholder and employees in the process.

The employees themselves do the work and also document it, maybe using some sort of cards, and push it forward in a shared view where everyone can get a good idea of there the project is.

It’s similar to traditional approaches, but we haven’t really had the technology to implement it yet as all tasks are encrypted as JSON files on the IPFS and have pointers to it on a custom made blockchain, which we call N.I.M.-chain.

Whenever a task gets pushed, a random person in India or Africa needs to shake their phone to acknowledge work has been done and the managers have to write slam-poetry on a public blockchain that is used as a decryption key for the task details as required by key shareholders. It doesn’t work on traditional companies, you need a DAO for it.

We also minted a NFT with the guidelines, it helped us secure about 20 mil in financing to further develop the tech but now we’re looking to launch an ICO to reach 100 mil because really, we are getting slower down by the slow progress in the management-tech space.

Is there a place to go to talk to other people like you? I would love to hear about your Dapps, what's working, what's not.

You can start your search on the Matrix official chat.

I’ve found a lot of interesting conversations in the distributed channels and IPFS channels, less so on company-focused or specific-blockchain-focused channels.

As a long time supporter and developer of cryptocurrency I myself am pretty disconnected from the space right now. Almost all of the goals we set out in the early days of Bitcoin, like "be your own bank" have failed terribly. After more than a decade all we've managed to accomplish is creating a slightly different arrangement of the same pieces.

Is there a place I can go to talk to people like you? Or maybe you but before you totally disconnected?

I'm curious what your hopes were for being your own bank kinda stuff. How did you imagine it would work, what was important about that to you... and the the other side, what fell short etc. You rightfully probably don't want to answer these questions as your curiosity has moved on, but I would be curious in case you are.

The hope was that consumer adoption would be more broad and people would have little incentive to keep their money in silos/banks because the security offered by regular wallets would be enough. In a world where most businesses accept crypto directly banks would be relegated to their proper function: facilitating loans.

Consumer adoption was going pretty well until the technical hurdles were hit. Each blockchain handled it in a different way, but the poster child of crypto, Bitcoin, is still seen today as expensive to transact and impractical for consumer adoption. When Ethereum got more popular in the last years due to the NFT boom the same thing happened to them. You can't reasonably market the "be your own bank" narrative when each transaction costs $25 regardless of the amount being transacted. Lightning is an interesting alternative but after 5 years it's still impractical to use for regular consumers and if you look under the hood anyone saying they're "using lightning" is actually using a custodial wallet that just has a coat of Lightning paint on top of it. Bitcoin Cash increased their blocksize to reduce transaction fees, but since they are a minority chain the lackluster adoption means it's not widely available for commerce.

Probably the biggest flaw in the entire "be your own bank" concept was underestimating how little people care about privacy. I mean, they claim to care and they get "outraged" whenever XYZ company gets caught harvesting their data without their consent or whatever, but in the end they don't actually care and happily will fork it over for a few pennies worth of goodies. Maybe there is a future where privacy becomes more important to consumers, but for now if you tell most anyone that their bank is looking at all their transactions and selling that data to someone their answers will range from "don't care" to "make some regulation" - neither of which really seem to move the needle or solve anything.

With regards to where to have discussions: I don't know. I have unsubbed from every subreddit and forum that primarily covers crypto. They are mostly all echo chambers now that just try to rally the troops against whatever they perceive their "enemy" or practice sketchy censorship and misinformation. A part of me doesn't really like "giving up" like this because it's well known there are many actors in the space that are actively trying to disrupt and manipulate the conversation, but at the same time I only have limited time on this rock and would prefer to do things I enjoy.

Appreciate the thoughtful response. I've also found the subreddits to be echo chambers. I am looking for more curious places.

Regarding be your own bank -- agree that $25/transaction doesn't make sense, and that this a regular occurrence on bitcoin and ethereum. Does not seem like layer 1 will be in a position to solve this ever. Could take a decade for level 2 to get there. Inevitable though?

I don't see anything interesting to be discussed about cryptos.

The initial promise of blockchain seems to have been side-lined: independent governing systems, tamper-free databases, and all the good stuff that the enthusiasts used to sell the dream to everybody else.

Nowadays it just seems like a speculative market for "get rich quick" suckers to lose their money so the other 1% to 5% who are better informed can actually make a buck.

What is there to discuss regarding cryptos according to you, OP? I am not as aggressive as other HN posters in all crypto threads (in fact I almost never engage with them even) but I just don't see them being worth a discussion in general.

> independent governing systems, tamper-free databases, and all the good stuff that the enthusiasts used to sell the dream to everybody else.

That stuff is all still there though.

So, there is a camp of people who think that cryptocurrencies are inherently bad. For these people the interesting discussions left are moot, because they do not address their main problems.

At the same time, nuanced discussion / curious discussion requires talking about downsides. Any mention of downsides also draws in the people who think its a bad idea. Moreover, it is my sense that a lot of discussions are filled with people trying to hype up their investment. These people will try to play down any downsides mentioned. The people who dislike cryptocurrency notice the people trying to downplay the downsides, and that overpowers any other discussion.

Edit: A point made by ThalesX also seems quite on point to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295405 In summary, people are tired of the over-hype that existed. Making them suspicious of any new discussion.

Here on HN, I believe there's the effect of a shouting class when it comes to crypto [1].

I think we can take it as a fact that the broad opinion of HN is that many crypto-related links satisfy the hacker's curiosity as outlined in HN's guidelines. That's why we see frequent posts on the front page. A large group is upvoting.

But when you look into the comments of the threads, I find that often the topic is discussed unfairly and in a very polarizing and political fashion. Links also disappear rapidly from HN as they get flagged heavily. I've gotten this confirmed from dang via email.

As a blogger, I've learned that for my arguments to have impact, I usually have to be fair to both sides of the spectrum, for the argument to land.

And this is what I've come to observe isn't happening in HN discussions on crypto.

It's very a very aggressive, personal and destructive controversy from both sides. A classical flamewar.

It's sad, as I think the topic could have much more depth.

- 1: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-cla...

Is there a place to go where there is curiosity driven discussion of crypto technologies?

I would suggest https://ethresear.ch/. It's Ethereum focused, but pretty open to more general blockchain topics.

Thank you! Checking it out now. I just found it on this relevant HN thread as well for anyone else looking for curiosity driven cryptocurrency communities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139813

I think it's because this community doesn't need/enjoy the speculation side of it. Most cryptocurrencies reflect on buy today, worth more tomorrow. Especially when you hop onto reddit or 4chan /biz/ communities. They don't necessarily want to understand, how or why - just that it's new and treat buying today as getting early on an IPO (like an ICO, before those were mostly barred.)

The above could be mostly because the community on here, doesn't necessarily need/want to survive on pure speculation. Sure you can do forecasting and projections, but when compared to traditional investment methods, e.g. compounding, load averaging and buying "blue" chip stocks - it seems high risk, low reward.

Now if the conversation was more on blockchain, and what problem it solves, I can see it gain traction on here, especially when Visa wanted to hire "blockchain engineers" and when they even purchased other companies in that similar space. Also, startups, well, when they were "startups" like coinbase adding a new coin, and such, etc.

In my case there isn't curiousity left. I was curious at some point, learned and explored about the subject, and made up my mind. After that there was also a period where I was curious why people were disagreeing with me, but that's gone now too, mostly because I repeatedly find their arguments make no sense.

In a nutshell, I'm all for cheaper money transfer, but I've never seen convincing arguments that it follows that bitcoin should be worth X. If I write a cheque for $60,000, that piece of paper is still worth $0.50. Just because it can be used for a transaction, it doesn't follow that it's worth as much as the amount being transferred.

Fundamentally on the one hand bitcoin has loads of negatives and very very few positives. On the other hand I can never find anyone addressing my objections in a manner that I find convincing. After much trying, I just ran out of curiousity.

Agreed. There's no reason why one Bitcoin should be worth X, right? It's just monopoly money, right? Right...?

So homework question: what does define the value of a Bitcoin?

Sorry to hear it. Curiosity is a special thing. It's hard or impossible to force it. I wonder where my own curiosity about cryptocurrencies comes from.

Don't be sorry. There's infinitely many things I no longer have any curiosity left for. Astrology, scientology, homeopathy....

There you go, well then I trust your curiosity has continued to drift in its wonderful way as it always does, defined by where it is rather than where it is not.

I would say it's because people on Hacker News are pretty intelligent.

Either they are intelligent and manipulative and are looking to maximize their investments whatever the cost to others, the externalities, whatever… or they are intelligent and accurately perceiving the first type of intelligent person.

By now, if you're a techie nerd, to be naive about this topic would mean there's something seriously wrong with you. You should have picked a side by now as this is not complicated or ambiguous. There is only furthering crypto by any means necessary, or opposing it (increasingly, by any means necessary). It's not going to get any blurrier. If you feign naivete and curiosity at this stage you are probably being manipulative and actually in the 'furthering by any means necessary' camp…

I think that is disingenuous. Because there remain interesting things to discus and consider in the world of 'crypto', even if you acknowledge there are issues and its not perfect yet.

There certainly are some loud 'shills' out there. But there are also actual interesting technical developments. It seems to me that between the shills and the people shouting down who they perceive to be shills, the interesting discussion gets drowned out.

If you're a sufficiently intelligent person, you can frame said interesting things in such a way that it establishes your position w.r.t crypto. It's like a sort of chess.

If you're a sufficiently intelligent person, you can recognize arguments like "you oppose X, but you do not acknowledge Y. And Y exists. Therefore, you are disingenuous: you are not candid or sincere, you're pretending that you don't know Y. Therefore nobody should listen to you about X.'

Um… I oppose X. At this stage, not interested in Y. And I keep running into arguments that are trying to shut me up about X… by any means necessary, including flat-out sophistry of every possible description.

And this becomes an intellectual game. How can this NOT be fascinating to Hacker News readers? :)

> You should have picked a side by now as this is not complicated or ambiguous. There is only furthering crypto by any means necessary, or opposing it (increasingly, by any means necessary).

I think crypto coins are as worthless as subprime mortgages, Pets.com type dot com stocks, or any other bubble going back to tulip bulbs. However as I am mostly uninvolved (aside from getting a free cryptocoin drop my friend wanted me to get), it has little effect on me. I find it annoying to see scams discussed, in the same way I don't want to hear an MLM pitch. I want to warn people it is a scam if I see a discussion, out of obligation. Also they say it hurts the environment, which I have not looked at much but suppose it makes sense.

On the other hand, people with large crypto positions or who are invested in mining rigs and who have invested their time and have made large "capital" expenses and whose life is cryptocoins are much more apt to further crypto coins.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the Bitcoin market cap in the next market correction where credit is tightened, stocks go down, margin calls go out etc. This is a game of musical chairs where the music has yet to ever stop.

I agree 100%, except my memory of the early crypto conversations is a bit different. I remember very little curiosity on display, and a whole lot of confidently wrong predictions of imminent collapse.

My view is that if cash is crude oil, Bitcoin and mined currencies are whale oil; competing against fusion.

The discussion here these days is basically people saying things like, whale oil is better than nuclear fusion because you can put it in your pocket; fusion is dangerous because Chernobyl; whales probably aren't that great for the environment anyway because they eat so much krill, etc. It's ignorance and delusion at best, and self interested FUD at worst.

Despite all their tech savvy, and socioeconomic advantages, most people here seem to be proudly and willfully ignorant re crypto. There are people in this thread, and indeed every crypto thread here I've ever seen, still moaning that proof of stake is a pipe dream, that proof of work / mining is necessary, that the environmental impact is too high, etc.

And that hasn't been true for at least 6 years.

Newer generations of crypto, such as Nano, are: * nearly instant (<1 second confirmation time) * more efficient than a credit card tx by an order of magnitude, and vastly more decentralized * over 6 million times more environmentally friendly than bitcoin (0.000112 kWh vs 741 kWh) * completely fee-less * mining free - there are no coins being added or taken away, they are all distributed

If you think about it, there are literally hundreds of different groups with various vested interests who would fight tooth and nail against something so superior; and for the moment it's kinda working, because the new generation of crypto sounds a bit too good to be true next to BTC. It's truly disheartening seeing those discussion get flagged, full of nonsensical arguments that are so trivial to disprove. I remain confident that truth and efficiency will win out, just like fusion will. It just might take some time, and you'll probably have to give up on the idea that this community will wise up to it any time soon.

> My view is that if cash is crude oil, Bitcoin and mined currencies are whale oil; competing against fusion.

Of course, in this analogy, fusion, while of course always being "10 years away", is moving to post-scarcity instead of inventing new forms of artificial scarcity.

There should be a subreddit or other forum that does have such conversations. The alternative is that there isn't one, which would make one wonder why aren't there intelligent people discussing this? Asking why where aren't intelligent discussions on HN seems to be a special case of the latter.

Because it's not two disinterested parties, it's owners versus mockers. Owners say irrational things because they've drunk the water. It's like asking why don't believers in ressurection ever have curious conversations about the impossibility of ressurection.

This is an important aspect! Crypto is new in that way where everyone can have ownership. I believe everything in the future will be more like this than less. Everything will have financial incentives tied more directly to it. So if anything, the lack of crypto curiosity is a challenge to solve -- how do we get curious in a world where every article, upvote, and comment has a financial stake?

So I think this is exactly why there's not much of a discussion. There's folks that are really excited about what you described, no doubt.

But then there's folks like me that think that vision of commodification of everything is a dystopian nightmare that devalues humanity by forcing everything into an economic corset.

I fundamentally don't want financial stakes tied to anything, in my world view we'd ideally move past money and scarcity.

I don't see how you'd reconcile those two views and that's why there's two very polarized takes on crypto with little nuance in between.

Oh appreciate your thoughts here!

I can certainly agree that it can sound dystopian. Let's talk about how to make sure it's net positive! How do we built things better, where do we improve, what are the weaknesses?

To me the rise of cryptocurrencies is a given -- so the role of being curious is about shaping what it becomes, rather than deny their impending dominance. (Not putting words in your mouth, if anything this framing comes from my own bias).

Does that come through? To use a tired analogy, pretend it's 1950: I would love to talk about the possibilities of computers, good or bad. Though nascent, I believe computers are here to stay, and will be a bigger part of our lives, like it or not. I'm curious about our role in shaping those possibilities. When people say they don't want to talk about computers or think they're stupid does nothing to change that inevitability.

> Let's talk about how to make sure it's net positive! How do we built things better, where do we improve, what are the weaknesses?

I think what puts people at odds here is that the conversation on your side is "how can we improve the model we're creating" while the other side's conversation is "we don't want this model at all".

Wrapping everything in a financial model is like giving us handcuffs to wear, then asking how you can make the handcuffs more comfortable.

Appreciate the reply here! Your analogies are effective and point out an important difference.

It comes down to this question: "Is wrapping everything in a financial model inevitable?"

1. If yes, then let's seize the moment to figure out how to make it the best we can.

2. If no, let's create an alternative, or figure out something else that's inevitable, or perhaps at least resist #1.

I've landed on the side of #1. Therefore it becomes a matter of shaping it to be the best it can be. Same with solar power and electric cars. They are inevitable, let's make them the best they can be.

For those that land on #2, I can see the point of resisting. However, the best way to support #2 would be an alternative hypothesis "Inevitably some things will be financial and other things will not" and then building tools to support that.

Thanks for talking this through and creating this clarity about where the difference is.

Things are currently wrapped in a financial model of sorts. You pay for network resources, the provider does too. They pay for hosting costs and decide whether or not to pass those through. I, for instance, publish everything for free, with an open content license. Wikipedia does as well. We're happy to pay the hosting costs to make our content accessible. The web archive handles long-term archiving, in case we stop hosting.

In this new "everything is wrapped in crypto" model, nothing is free. You still have to pay for the network and hosting costs, but now you also need to pay middlemen to access the content, even if the author wishes to provide their content for free.

Also, everything becomes more brittle. Since content isn't centralized, it can (and will) disappear when folks stop hosting it. They can be incentivized to host content by being paid to do so, but that really means it makes the most sense to host the most popular content, and to ditch everything else.

The whole concept, technically, is worse than the system we currently have. If you want to see numerous reasons why this is a bad idea, look through Wikimedia's various email lists to see this idea being shot down over and over again for nearly 20 years. It's simply an inferior approach to the problem.

It's religion. I find it as useful to explain the flaws of cryptocurrencies to believers as I find discussing the flaws of 'your garden in heaven' with jehova's.

This, but in a world where the believers' net worth doubles almost every year.

Plenty of people own appreciating assets like bitcoin and etherium while ignoring hot garbage like NFTs.

I think some of your premises are wrong. I don't think cryptocurrencies are especially divisive on HN. It's like a lot of other topics - a lot of different people with a lot of different feelings, some of them more strongly than others. It's not surprising that when something is new, there is a lot of curiosity around it that is different 12 years later, when it's just part of our world, and many of the "questions" have been "answered".

In addition, cryptocurrencies just happen to also have an incredible amount of real-world impact in way other technologies don't. E.g. debates on AI - not even AGI, just plain old AI, and have there been any real new breakthroughs lately, etc, also have a lot of disagreements. But while that impacts grant money and investment in some technologies, it doesn't also directly translate into billion-dollar markets and potential fraud, etc.

You also have to separate "cryptocurrencies" to a few underlying actual topics that people disagree about:

1. Whether actual cryptocurrencies, e.g. bitcoin, are a good investment.

2. Whether actual cryptocurrencies are good for the world, or whether they enable fraud/scams/etc.

3. Whether actual cryptocurrencies can achieve, are achieving, or should achieve their original goals or any newer goals (e.g. replace fiat completely).

4. Whether the blockchain technology itself is interesting at all, or is it only interesting for cryptocurrencies. (This point is especially relevant in a forum of founders, given the massive amounts of creating and investment in blockchain-related startups.)

I think it's especially divisive because the only way to further it is with increasingly ingenious, sophisticated argument. This doesn't come down to simple concepts: it's hypotheticals, projections, a call to imagine what COULD be, and a great deal of pressure to buy into one or another predicted outcome.

This becomes like a game. It's a logic puzzle. How do you construct an unanswerable argument that produces your desired result? It's much less interesting to go 'well, wait and see, things will doubtless become more obvious as this progresses'.

Under some circumstances, the ONLY way to establish a currency that actively supplants and destroys all fiat currency, displacing governments and replacing their control with only market pressures enacted through completely liquid and untrammeled flow of capital… is to ram it through with such desperate haste that it's too big to fail by the time it's recognized as a threat by those controlling governments. To topple governments and replace all their control with anarchy governed by only market pressures, the ungovernable replacement currency has to be so huge that the pressure of committed capital ITSELF is more powerful than any government.

This is a big, dramatic 'ask'. Whether it's wrecking the world and ruining the environment is a whole separate question. Arguably the bigger question is, 'SHOULD there be a currency that allows the pressure of purely capital to overthrow this or any government?' Especially since by design it is NOT a hierarchical power structure, but distributed and impossible for anyone to control… does that produce desirable results?

Mind you, if you get that and THEN find out it's possible for the system to be controlled anyway, you're pretty thoroughly hosed… you have to trust very much that the system put in place to overthrow all governments, truly represents a distributed and ungovernable system. Otherwise, you just overthrew all governments in order to hand all power over to somebody that you don't know who it is.

Svennek said it well, there is not much of interest left to discuss, the remaining ambiguities are up to taste, not novelty. The only interesting things are talking about whether decentralisation is a value in and off itself without e.g. equity and whether people actually inherently care about it. But those are charged topics, also because people who are all in on crypto have a material interest in pushing the idea that YES it is and YES they will. So you can't have that remaining interesting conversation in a detached manner. (In my analysis the no-coiners have much less to lose in this and so are able to have more detached conversation because if it turns out that people really go for decentralisation we can still hop on board, we won't get rich anymore but we won't drop much either - it is naive to assume that systems which wield material power and are intricately tied to the foundation for the private property rights crypto builds its use cases on would simply collapse. The same way we had banks and commodity billionaires before microsoft and google, we will have old wealth smoothly migrating into the new system - otherwise the old wealth wouldn't adopt it).

This seems like such a bizarre take to me. It's like saying in 1960 that everything to discuss about computers is up to taste not novely. I see an entire world coming to life across thousands of different blockchains. So much of it is experimental, mistakes, catastrophically bad. But other parts will succeed and define the future. The recent push around DAOs is fascinating, a way to delegate voting and decision making, an experiment that will fail endlessly until it doesn't.

Edit: However, that doesn't mean this conversation should be forced on the HN community over and over again. That's not right, and that's not the nature of curiosity.

I'm down to discuss application of distributed technologies and various consensus mechanisms for concrete use cases. But cryptocurrency has been debated to death and now needs to prove itself. DAOs without currency would be interesting to talk about, DAOs with currency is just Feudalism redone - and feudalism isn't an interesting technology to me personally.

Edit: I'm also down to discuss interesting cryptocurrency project with clear and theses, not just "change the world". I'd be interested in a federated Cryptocurrency that is meant to be easily "self hosted" in small communities and has a mechanism to convert between these communities according to rules/exchange rate set by each community - with the final consensus mechanism rooted in the social sphere. I'd be interested in discussing cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate once received, to test the idea of inflation driving investment.

Thinking about it, there's lots of interesting discussions to have, but nobody is having them. I guess I need to modify my statement to saying that the discussions that people in the cryptocurrency community want to have are boring because they are all rooted in the "anarcho"-capitalist perspective and that angle has run out of interesting things (in my eyes)

[Oh shoot, did you edit your parent reply later on? Wondering if my above reply was meant for another message.]

Re: "DAOs with currency is just feudalism redone" - I like the way you put this. There does seem to be this kind of land grab where giving ownership somehow changes everything.

Re: Self-hosted currencies in small communities - this one I'm less curious about so am wondering what you see in it. Would the 15,000 cryptocurrencies in existence today start to meet this criteria of different currencies across many different communities?

Re: Cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate - also interesting to think about. Kind of like having a digital tomato or something, it must be used before it molds. I've heard Dogecoin has a high issuance rate, I wonder if that would apply. My sense is it's hard to disconnect from everything else though, and if I had a bunch of rotting tomatoes I would convert them to something more stable (tomato sauce, or trade them for money) unless I had immediate utility for tomatoes.

Re: your above point about nocoiners having more of a disconnected view, agreed. Curious what you think of my comment here on this, speculating that as more of the world becomes a financial instrument, it gets harder and harder to be a nocoiner. In that case we must figure out how to be curious while having/talking our book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297148

Like I said, would love to find a place for more discussions like this with you, more distance than the "to the moon", but less technical than an https://ethresear.ch.

no, i didn't edit the first one, maybe you meant to reply to svennek.

communitycoins: these are interesting because they'd be small-people-fiat, giving tiny communities the possibility to bootstrap mini-economies and then linking into some federated system according to some rules and based on people vouching for them. notably, they'd be the inverse of todays crypto- nonanonymous, consensus based on trust.

re decaying currencies: yeah, but then you'd need to buy an explicit store of value, and especially if money decays fast, whoever sells that to you will need to get rid of it again. but i think this one would be an experiment in money the same way gopher and gemini are experiments in hypertext

Re your comment: I think it doesn't quite hold, because I can buy shares in the VT index and can then talk about it without needing to hype it - the underlying value is highly independent of people's opinions because everyone eats,shits and dies and so needs the commodities and services provided by the underlying companies (in the long run). I think it is only the most hype-dependent securities like cryptocurrency and Tesla where the underlying is questionable and so bag holders feel the need to defend their investment quite literally (note to all the true believers in either:relax, I said questionable, not nonexistent, if I'm wrong with my opinion you can pay someone to laugh at me later)

Honestly, I think it needs to be specialises forums or side threads like this, any crypto community will be overrun by the moonboys and libertarians too quickly.

I'm going to attempt an answer, but as with all things this is only my perspective and I obviously don't speak for all HN readers.

HN is largely for founders who want to build things. That's certainly how it started, and there's still traces of that vibe around in the Show HN and startup-y threads. There's a lot more going on here now, like more code topics, AI, electric vehicles, environmental things, a little futurism, etc, but the core is and always has been startups. In itself that doesn't rule out having a reasonable conversation about cryptocurrency. There are a lot of opportunities around crypto. There are startups to found, and pain points to solve. The problem is that crypto has three significant problems for HN readers:

Firstly, a lot of people trying to make a living in crypto are purely speculating. They're not building anything. They're simply trying to "buy low, sell high". Entrepreneurs, in general, don't really have much respect for that. Founders admire and respect people who go out, found a business, and build something real that solves a real problem, even if it's a problem we don't have ourselves. Leeching off the system isn't a skill.

Secondly, a lot of crypto isn't solving a real problem. It's essentially trying to be "digital gold", but without the usefulness of gold. It's only a store of value. There absolutely are good uses for crypto, and even for things like NFTs, but most of the speculation isn't about those things. It's only the "buy low, sell high" side of things. HN is not a forex or trading forum. Again, we respect people who make things.

Lastly, no matter how you cut it, and even with the latest lightning and taproot and proof-of-stake tech considered, crypto has a massive set of problems to still to solve with its environmental, regulatory, and money-laundering issues. To be honest, to me, they look pretty unsolvable. I have a decent understanding of the tech and I can't see how you can build an anonymous system for transferring wealth around that requires significant bandwidth and CPU and not screw the planet by providing a service for drug dealers and terrorists. The fact people are trying is awesome, but I suspect they'll fail. All of the upsides of crypto are also upsides for people who want to use it for bad reasons.

All in all, cryptocurrencies are an interesting idea, and the tech seems like it could have some valid applications, but the downsides are huge. A lot of the pro-crypto people involved don't want to acknowledge that. A lot of the anti-crypto people can't see that the tech could be useful. There's no middle-ground. That makes talking about it pretty boring.

The community doing things around the ethereum / smart contracts world are certainly on the building things side of things yet they are met with the same cynical skepticism around these parts.

Because there is mainly two kinds of eth smart contracts: identification/verification (there was still lobbying for crypto ID being recognized by law courts last time i checked), and "new" crypto, which is 75% scams (maybe a bit less lately, but still). Sadly the ID/verification part was dying last time i checked.

It's a bit of shame by association, and irrational, but i've put all crypto related-stuff in a box called "scams until proven they're not".

> There absolutely are good uses for crypto, and even for things like NFTs

What do you think are the good uses for crypto and NFTs?

(This is a genuine question; I've never been sure what to think about crypto.)

Crypto solves a problem around distributed trust. If you have a bunch of people who need to trust something is correct, but don't trust each other, putting that data on a verifiable blockchain that you pay people to cryptographically sign is a good solution. The thing is though, that's a really unusual problem that few people actually have. If you're buying diamonds or bananas or cobalt, and you need a provable supply chain though.. yeah.. it fits.

NFTs could enable people to transfer digital assets between platforms without needing the platforms to talk to one another. I could buy an NFT of a 3D model of some Yeezy sneakers, and then bring that NFT to Fortnite for my avatar to wear there, and to the Metaverse to show off there, and to a sneakers forum to verify my ownership in the community there as well. That could be quite useful. 3D cosmetic assets for games and stuff is a massive market, and using NFTs would enable people to transfer goods between those markets. It'd only really work if the asset itself is stored in some sort of distributed architecture though (IPFS for example.)

> NFTs could enable people to transfer digital assets between platforms without needing the platforms to talk to one another. I could buy an NFT of a 3D model of some Yeezy sneakers, and then bring that NFT to Fortnite for my avatar to wear there, and to the Metaverse to show off there, and to a sneakers forum to verify my ownership in the community there as well. That could be quite useful. 3D cosmetic assets for games and stuff is a massive market, and using NFTs would enable people to transfer goods between those markets. It'd only really work if the asset itself is stored in some sort of distributed architecture though (IPFS for example.)

This ignores the actual implementation. You still need the platforms to talk to one another in the design stage at least (the most difficult one) in order to be able to create an asset that can actually be used in different applications. If right now you cannot upload a 3D model to Fortnite straight away, why do you think it would be easy to do with NFTs?

Implementations are really really messy. I'm not expert but I would argue that likely most engines have slightly different ways of doing things like sneakers on character model. So you can't really transfer from one engine to other. Might work between Unreal-engine games, but even there there might be issues.

And already seen with NFTs, that are much simpler thing. Where does the data live? If it is not on blockchain how do you ensure it stays alive and is accessible. Is it somehow streamed when you load the game and object? Let's say there is dozen character each with multiple pieces of unique one of the kind objects. Maybe from dozens different servers? That will likely cause issues.

Or maybe everyone must include in download every other products stuff too? Seems unfeasible really.

And in the end why? Wouldn't it be better to try to sell a same kind of object in your own product and then make more money from that? Instead allowing use of objects from other places...

Wouldn't it be better to try to sell a same kind of object in your own product and then make more money from that? Instead allowing use of objects from other places...

Every business loves a walled garden because they can pretend that all the customers will spend all their money inside it, but it's anti-consumer, anti-choice, and if the business fails then everyone loses all the things they own there.

Plus, if people could bring their own assets to a game then the number and variety of things in the game grows significantly. It's no longer limited by what the producers can build themselves. For a lot of games, especially ones made by smaller companies, that could be a considerable boon.

If right now you cannot upload a 3D model to Fortnite straight away, why do you think it would be easy to do with NFTs?

I didn't say it would be. NFTs are about access control and ownership, not 3D models. That was only the example I've used. The (huge, but largely unrelated) issue there is about standardizing assets which would also need to be solved (gltf does go some way to doing that though ... it is "the gif of 3D models" according to Kronos). If it's easier to think about, try applying the same solution to unique avatars or something, where the display mechanism is solved.

> I didn't say it would be.

You said it would enable it. But the stopper about that implementation is not ownership tracking, it's integration. So it's an use case that's not enabled by NFTs, just an use case where you could use NFTs but also any other ownership tracking technology.

> If it's easier to think about, try applying the same solution to unique avatars or something, where the display mechanism is solved.

I can move my avatar image between games without requiring NFTs. Now, if you want "uniqueness", then again the problem is not solved by NFTs, but by some kind of DRM tech. What stops me from copying the image and using it? Or from minting my own NFT with the same image? Do you think that game platforms going to implement complex DRM solutions to avoid people from using avatars they don't own?

The overall point is a trend that I wrote in another comment [1]: just because X has not been done and crypto/NFTs can be used for X, that doesn't mean that crypto enables X. You might find that there are other issues that explain why X hasn't been done.

To this day, 99% of the times I see someone propose crypto/NFTs applications they haven't asked themselves the questions of whether you can do that (or a 90% similar thing) without crypto and why hasn't that been done yet. Possibly because when you ask those questions most of crypto use cases are not "use cases enabled by crypto" but "use cases where I can use crypto or other storage technology".

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295514

What stops me from copying the image and using it?

Games would need to implement a mechanism so users could only use an NFT as an avatar. Or it'd attach a little tick to show you're the verified owner. Or something.

I've thought about this for about five minutes. I don't have a full working solution.

You might find that there are other issues that explain why X hasn't been done.

"It hasn't been done so it probably can't be done" is a really dumb attitude. It's utterly defeatist. It could simply be that no one has tried yet. Or the wrong people tried. Or people are trying right now and you haven't heard about it yet. Not seeing something is not evidence it can't be done. That's beyond ridiculous.

> "It hasn't been done so it probably can't be done" is a really dumb attitude. It's utterly defeatist.

No, that's not what I am saying. What I am saying is that if something has not been done yet, you should think why that is. And if it turns out that someone could have already done it with existing technology, one should really consider why is that. Yes, maybe it's one of your reasons, or maybe is that it isn't worth it, or that there are implementation issues that are independent of the storage technology, or whatever. It's a basic step before evaluating any solution and it is missing constantly in crypto discussions. And the worst thing is that, when we point out that there are other issues apart from crypto/nocrypto, the only response we get is "but it could work" and "don't be defeatist".

That basic question could be applied to your avatar example. A game developer could implement a similar system where the only allowed avatars are the "official" ones, and you need to buy them. You don't need NFTs for that, and yet you don't see it a lot. I think PlayStation had only official avatars, but they discontinued them in the latest PS5. Could it be that it isn't a feature users want? That the development costs are greater than the possible profits?

> If you're buying diamonds or bananas or cobalt, and you need a provable supply chain though.. yeah.. it fits.

I've heard about this supposed use for blockchain before and I genuinely don't get it. So what if you have a tamper-proof blockchain containing information about a supply chain? How does this prove anything about the particular diamond you're selling me?

Again, this is a genuine question. Can someone please walk me through this? What information do I need to verify about the supply chain and how does blockchain help? How were people solving this problem before blockchain?

I’ve never been convinced by claims of using blockchains for probably supply chains. While it’s true a blockchain can’t provide a shared ledger that both parties can trust has not been tampered with after the fact, it doesn’t say anything about the world outside the blockchain, so does not remove the trust problem.

> I can't see how you can build an anonymous system for transferring wealth around that requires significant bandwidth and CPU and not screw the planet by providing a service for drug dealers and terrorists.

I think you can accept that with any new technology there will always be bad actors using it, so this argument makes no sense to me.

There are also cryptocurrencies out there that are more efficient than others and solve the environmental issue, I just hope that you're not conflating Bitcoin, Ethereum with all cryptocurrencies.

Do you mean that without crypto the bad guys are unable to perform exchanges of value?

How is crypto different from a Big bag of cash? Both are anonymous/trustless transactions.

Cat memes and mindless YouTube videos use more bandwidth and cpu cycles than crypto ever will…

Cat memes and mindless YouTube videos use more bandwidth and cpu cycles than crypto ever will

You cannot win an argument that something is bad by pointing to something that's worse. You're just reinforcing the idea that we need to do better in both things.

I’m saying neither are bad. This is what computers are for.

For me:

I liked the idea in the start. But in 2017 i didn't think it was a viable alternative anymore.

Many people say banks are bad, but they protect many people against fraud, Bitcoin doesn't ( eg. Chargebacks or losing access)

Banks are replaced by unknown platforms in unknown countries in many places. Which results in an insane amount of hacks ( internally or externally). Hence: https://rekt.news

If banks use it as settlement later, they won't adopt any of the existing solutions. Leaving all the current implementations of Blockchain in the dust ( the proponents of crypto don't understand this argument though).

Many non-tech minded people won't keep an offline wallet, since most people are lazy ( that's not a bad thing, it's just a fact). But in this case it can be very dangerous.

The people buying Bitcoin have no idea how it works and can easily get scammed by other people ( eg. One coin wasn't even a Blockchain and I knew people that fell for it and they couldn't be convinced that they were being scammed. They know by now though, the hard way).

Even the original premise of Bitcoin is gone ( decentralization) and is being replaced by workarounds ( eg. Lightning and offchain wallets).

It's the same story over and over again. Now NFT's and later probably something else. The only constant is pump and dump schemes from whales and that it's the preferred destination of criminals.

In the end, it doesn't solve much and perhaps the solution for the rare case "it solved something", is just increasing internet availability to enable banking for poor people in remote areas. So they don't need to drive 3 hours ( eg. The actual problem/ solution of El Salvador and Bitcoin as a solution was a fake dogma)

"the discussions on HN are today ... two camps that are just screaming at each other." Not really... HN has made its mind up, it's become mostly indifferent to crypto. Too many unfulfilled promises over the last decade.

The screaming happens not here but on Twitter.

What are the top bitcoin related unfullfiled promises?

Curiosity happens when you are uninformed about something and something seems interesting. Once you're informed it's less interesting so there's no need to be curious.

For me it’s just not very interesting. The people I meet who seem to be interested in it seem to be primarily motivated by getting rich. This is an understandable interest, but just not something which sparks my personal curiosity. And since this initial impression has been constantly stoked for quite a while now, I think I’m naturally more receptive to learning about the downsides, like the absurd environmental impact.

There is no consensus on this topic because a lot of people just want to "get rich quick" ignoring the question of the source of richness.

The community generally doesn't have a problem when the source of richness is harvesting the personal information of a few million victims and getting bought out by Google.

Everyone in HN is not the same.

It's likely that the people that question the source of bitcoin's wealth are also questioning google's ethics, and that the bitcoin get rich quick people are happy working for google too.

Taking a community to be homogeneous is a common fallacy.

Twitter founder is the best example right now. Those people are omnivorous.

Because after ~13 years, mind boggling amount of money and development time, it is still just as useless in the real world as it ever was.

Actually no it is not useless in the real world! Using crypto makes it very easy to send and receive money very quickly, without the need to rely to the "system" of banks, governments etc. I can't think of a more useful application, for me it's more of a revolution!

I'd argue that's not a problem that cryptocurrencies somehow uniquely solve, and in fact even this is solved inefficiently by them. Enormous amounts of energy have to be expended to facilitate a fairly low number of transactions. There are zero technical reasons why non-crypto/non-blockchain technologies wouldn't allow instantaneous money transfer. And in many places of the world, they do. I can instantly transfer money from one bank account to another in Europe. The only reason this is not the case in many parts of the world is that the banking system still runs on archaic technical and procedural frameworks.

And finally: > without the need to rely to the "system" of banks, governments etc I consider this a severe bug. When hackers empty out your wallet, you'll wish there was a system of banks and governments that provide some sort of insurance - like most western banks and governments do.

The sole case that can be made for cryptos is that alongside enabling money laundering and tax dodging, their unregulated nature allows people in oppressive regimes to funnel out money. I'd say that may be a valuable tradeoff, but somehow it's not the one being discussed usually.

In Europe, you cannot send wire transfers to Japan on weekends in a couple seconds. So the problem is not solved in Europe. Posting "there's no technical reason why every bank cant coordinate to provide a non-terrible experience eventually in a hundred years" is not helpful. We have working international settlements for any origin to any destination for any amount of money in seconds today.

Proposing cryptocurrencies as somehow uniquely capable of solving this problem is incorrect. Furthermore, there are also valid reasons why payments may take longer when crossing certain national boundaries. E.g. KYC/AML checks and so forth.

I do not propose cryptocurrencies as uniquely capable of solving the problem. I propose them as actually solving the problem today. Similarly, I don't propose that you *couldn't* travel internationally using a personal jetpack or an ornithopter. I just think that a passenger jet is a likely to be better choice for now.

My experience with international wire transfers so far is that KYC/AML performed at the time of the transaction is cursory. They're just slow because I have to wait for business hours at the sending bank, then wait for the bank to call me (if it's my personal bank rather than my business bank which just sends them automatically), then wait for the funds to make their way to the recipient through intermediary banks who will skim off an unknowable-up-front amount of money.

We can say that when it will be easy to withdraw the transferred coins (convert them into real, offline currencies such as dollars, euros, and so on). Right now you need to confirm your identity, pass the KYC procedure - no difference in comparison to real banks.

My real bank won't send a wire transfer on a weekend with settlement time measured in seconds, so no, it's not like a bank.

I’m talking about withdrawal only.

But it's not like a bank, I agree - a bank gives some protection to your money, because they have responsibilities.

Worked great in Greece, when people couldn't withdraw more than 60 euro from their bank accounts.

Withdrawal as in obtaining cash? Most payments don't use cash so it seems like a bit of a red herring.

No, just converting crypto coins into real currencies. I wrote it in the first comment.

Alright. This happens by default if I take no actions when I deposit USDC at FTX - the USDC is redeemed for dollars and added to my dollar balance. I can head over to the FTX OTC desk to trade my dollars for other fiat currencies at competitive rates provided by their HK banking partner. So the process of withdrawing to fiat takes a few seconds.

It's funny how you are trying to ignore my words about identity confirmation and KYC. For me, while this is required, the whole point of “crypto” is nullified. And this process is not fast. And I hate to share such information.

Sorry about that. I guess I mean to say, it improves over banks in X dimension, while being no better than banks in Y dimension that you really care about. I've sort of become desensitized to this sort of thing after sending a hundred or so people my passport and TIN this year alone.

There are bitcoin ATM s where you can withdraw real money without any of these things.

Given the very limited scale of cryto currency, and limited usability in the real world isn’t it pretty much a failed revolution?

Bitcoin is still the biggest crypto currency, and compared to Euro, dollars and other currencies, it’s practically useless. The network can’t compete on scale, compared to VISA, MasterCard or AMEX. The crypto currencies try to solve problems much of the western simply don’t have.

The tech will live on an small pocket, such as money transfer between banks and large organisations, but it won’t be useful to the public at large.

Technology takes time to mature and see widespread adoption. Whether you believe this will ever happen with cryptocurrency or not, you can't ignore that it's grown (by users, development, and many other metrics) faster than most other technological revolutions.

The internet took roughly 20-30 years to reach mass adoption. Cryptocurrency is about 10 years in, and while there are many active users, there user experience is still behind that of most payment options, and smart contracts which enable a host of other decentralized financial primitives are really only a few years old.

I disagree. Of course you can't just give (or receive) crypto to anybody. However, moving crypto between two crypto-aware parties is simple and fast. Definitely easier than using the "system" (especially if your are not part of it; consider how difficult is to open a bank account).

So I will be more specific and say that it is a revolution for the people that use crypto. I don't know if it will be a revolution for the general population but my belief is that it won't be. The "system" will find ways to crush crypto then it starts to become more popular. Right now it doesn't care that much ...

> The network can’t compete on scale, compared to VISA, MasterCard or AMEX.

Yes it can. Bitcoin Lightning solves this. They're using it in El Salvador right now.

And really banks or large organisations don't need crypto for money transfers. They are already doing it in vey well established systems, with well defined contracts and so on. Blockchain adds nothing, when piece of paper or electronic record saying "hey we owe you this much" or "this loan is debt obligation is now yours"...

That's a bit like saying that paragliders allow you to fly from one country to another, without the 'system' of aviation, airports, passports, customs, etc. Apart from the fun of it, or for smuggling drugs, it's not that practical for everyday use - just use 'the system'.

Bitcoin was the only way for WikiLeaks to accept donations back when they were cut off from all payment processors.

The issue of payment processors cutting off perfectly legal and valid organizations, individuals, or whole classes of activity is a separate issue.

Since they provide what should be considered essential infrastructure, they should be required to provide service to anything legal, IMHO.

Why is it that the rest of the time we should solve problems and this time we should wait for the state to solve them?

it isn't 'just this time'. It's the same principle as law, vs lynch mob.

sure. so uber shouldn't exist and we should all be paying more to local taxi monopolies who don't have mobile apps, and so on.

uber is perfectly legal the last time I checked?

And let's see how that story pans out actually. I don't agree with the taxi mafia, but uber are not exactly knights in shining armor either, and are only really viable because of a Venture Capital subsidized attempt to create a monopoly.

Is your argument that bitcoin circumvents established institutions, particularly the unjust ones? I see the appeal, but those should be attacked directly; legally, and politically, IMHO. Not with tech hacks, the ultimate consequences of which are quite unpredictable, but also quite likely to just shift the concentration of power to a different set of people.

uber was not perfectly legal in all jurisdictions at all times. I would guess they were operating illegally in almost every jurisdiction when they began operating there. They in fact had teams dedicated to illegal activities in specific regions. There's an article about that here by Mike Isaac who also wrote a pretty good book about Uber: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

It seems like if we ought to be waiting for the state to fix payment processors, we should also be waiting for them to fix taxis, instead of operating illegal "ride share" apps.

My argument isn't about Bitcoin because Bitcoin isn't a technology that provides cheap settlement of dollars. Other technologies do though, and they additionally avoid the need to pay e.g. 3.6% (!!) to Stripe, which seems like it makes them worthwhile on its own.

You shouldn't just be waiting for govt to fix anything. Govt acts through the mandate of the people, so if you want it to do something you should be lobying and voting for it.

Private enterprise quite legitimately alters the playing field by introducing new products, services and business models. LEGALLY. When it does so illegally, it should be stopped.

That is exactly my argument, bad institutions should be disrupted by legal competition, or (better), legal or political pressure. Not by illegal circumventions.

I don't think you have to do anything illegal to send or accept payments in crypto.

It doesn't seem very fast or simple or possibly even cheap if I consider only fiat as money.

That is I have money in one country and I want person to receive it in their own currency in other one.

To me, most of it is about the boring parts of cryptocurrency. The actual cryptography is still interesting, the financial aspects are (to me) utterly boring. And a lot of the interesting bits are only tangentially related to cryptocurrency. EG this paper[1] is interesting and potentially applicable to cryptocurrency development, but is far too specialized for most of HN to discuss (and well outside the understanding of most of the cryptocurrency enthusiasts).

The finance makes for poor discussions, and the interesting parts of the tech are too obscure for most HN readers to understand. And the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, doesn't use any of the interesting parts anyway. So of course the discussions here are crap.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1530

Why is there no curiosity here about cryptocurrencies?

Well, let's ask "what makes cryptocurrencies different from startups or programming languages?"

Crypto are financial instruments anyone can buy into. Does that explain the drought of curiosity somehow?

Startups are financial instruments but you can't buy unless you're an accredited investor -- When we talk about the latest startup, like it or hate it, close to zero of us have skin in the game. However, investors benefit from the work of curious conversations.

Articles are not financial instruments -- so when we talk about an article or topic, there's no financial aspect to it.

Driving the point home, I believe cryptocurrencies will bring that financial lens to everything, from whether an article gets read, upvoted, to whether a startup succeeds, individuals will have ownership and that will change the nature of curiosity.

If we look at the current moment there’s not much in the way of new, interesting things going on with cryptocoins tech wise or use case wise.

It’s top of mind because some people are getting rich quickly in it. What’s interesting about that?

Should we also still be talking about people making tendies on GME?

The division between those who despise a negative sum game and those who don't mind as long as they are winning is very well understood by now. What would be left to discuss?

I personally had a hope that we’ll build some new decentralized things, some real new web - more sustainable, reliable, less regulated, less censored.

My heartbeat was increasing every time I was finding some project promising to build this new network.

But every time, after lines of poetic, pure, brave, and romantic description of their mission, there was a line about their new token and why you should buy it.

With the time I’ve got the immunity to such promises and prejudice - they all are just scam projects.

Lokinet and Session is pretty interesting, onion routing and Signal fork respectively. And as a user you don't even notice any of the crypto except for your seed phrase.

You just need to buy 15000 $OXEN to run a node (USD 10800 at the moment of writing). And without nodes, it can not be decentralized. Ponzi scheme.

I think discussion are better suited toward blockchain technology and if we are going to see any businesses using this technology to do anything cool :)

Appeals to "curious discussion" sound an awful lot like a request to omit any reference to any of the many downsides and known problems and failures of crypto in general, and instead just focus on convenient cheerful angles that pump it up.

It's not possible to have serious, informative, and insightful discussions on a topic like crypto while turning a blind eye to the elephants in the room.

What's left to say that hasn't already been said a hundred times before? The NFT stuff was fun for a while (people getting mad at right-clickers and / or not understanding that they weren't buying an image but rather--at best--a link to an image), but I don't think there's much appetite on this forum for laughing at erotic chickens.

The issue isn’t that there’s nothing left to discuss, the issue is that there’s two „opposing“ sides that will downvote the comments they disagree with, causing a chilling effect where only inflammatory comments will end up being posted. It’s exactly the reason why Facebook et al. don’t have a dislike button.

My explanation: people on HN like to think of themselves as 'smart' and 'good with tech', but missed out on something they dismissed as pointless and now need ways to justify missing out that isn't "I may not be as smart as I thought I was"

> one group yells how great everything is while the other one is warning of the impeding doom and zero use cases.

When one side is yelling and the other side is giving warnings I think it’s fair to say that this is not really a situation where one would describe as ‘divisive.’

I think it's because no real tangible thing has come out of the cryptoverse (apart from rare exceptions like ransomware gangs cashing out tumbled coins and buying lambos and rolexes). Everything in the crypto sphere is just 1s and 0s or in the ether. Everyday Joe reads up about Bitcoin and the first thing they want is a solid physical coin they can hang on their wall. On the other hand: people use BTC to acquire illegal drugs via the darknet, so there is a case to be made for BTC being exchanged for tangible goods, albeit a tarnished one, since those drugs are banned in most countries. BTC got a bad name early on, and has yet to shake that off.

I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to banks and governments launching their own digital currency. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. If it means it's highly traceable so it can't be used for illegal things, then so be it. That's where we're heading now.

Nuanced and ‘curious’ thought gives way to what is fashionable and easy: black-and white-thinking. Extremism is sexy, empowering and rewarding for the self-righteous little person in our brains. Things are rarely clear-cut ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

Related question: Where can I go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies?

Because its been years and years, and the arguments usually boil down to something like "scarcity creates it own value", which some people find obviously correct and some people find obviously false.

The technology behind crypto is interesting, the hype (and gambling) is not

My main criticism comes from the fact that Bitcoin (and other crypto-coins) had a good several years to find a purpose, to this day, I am not aware of a single use-case where they are used to solve a real world problem.

If I had to sum up how I feel about Bitcoin (/ crypto / block chain..) - magic buzz word for the non-tech-savvy ,draw for gamblers & ego driven individuals, theme of quasi-fake money-grab startups..

I think one of the things that ruined Bitcoin is it becoming this "asset" instead of a tool to get something done, maybe proving something about a truly "free" market, maybe there's a lesson here.

Blackmail, extortion and drug dealing absolutely are real world problems that bitcoin directly serves to facilitate.

The notion of it being in any way an investment vehicle is a whole separate thing, an arguably non-proven use-case.

Being able to use bitcoin to conduct actions outside the control of any government or law is absolutely, demonstrably proven. That part delivers on all its promises.

Nobody ever said that the things you want to DO when you want to do them outside any legal or governmental control, are nice things. On the whole there are fewer impediments to doing nice things within the confines of laws and governments.

The more reasonable governments are, the more Bitcoin becomes only a method for facilitating straight-up crime. If you're fixing to be paid for being an absolute monster you've got to have an infrastructure that works even when the government wants to lock you up. You'll be doing things where you must not be identified or traced: where there are real specific reasons for law enforcement to be gunning for you, bigtime. Ransom, extortion, kidnapping: there are whole classes of behavior generally considered undesirable where you'd require a completely liquid and untraceable way to get paid off in order to get you to stop doing the thing.

Bitcoin is that tool, today and as long as it lasts. It's no investment vehicle but it is a very effective mechanism for ransom payments and enabling the avoidance of consequences no matter how monstrous you are. That's a practical and very active use case right now.

Good point.

If Bitcoin was shutdown today, how would these criminals collect their ransoms?

Most phone scammers don’t use cryptocurrency, they use gift cards. Ransom will work the same it always did, hacked bank account transfers, money mules, gift cards and gift credit cards. Even cash in the mail. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are just money like any other surrogate. Money doesn’t create crime, but it is a necessary component. It’s not the money that is bad, it is the criminals.

Cryptocurrencies are a divisive issue, perhaps stemming from our overly-strong preferences, biases, and prejudices.

> Is there any particular reason cryptocurrencies are so divisive while other subjects are not?

At this day, end 2021, for what concerns the daily life of billion people worldwide, they are still a very small niche for first-world, trading-like unauthorised gambling? From a technical point of view, sufficient progress has been made… it is politics now, geopolitics and environment, if you like, preventing wider, global deployment, maybe?

>From a technical point of view, sufficient progress has been made

The ancient greeks used to think that they have reached the pinnacle of human progress and that there is no use for further developments because of how comfy life has gotten.

I have a hard time processing this comment. Is it because I'm ESL or is it legitimately incomprehensible?

Imo it basically became more of a money-grab and less about the potential of the technology. It also doesn't matter if ultimately all the networks or it's endpoints are centralized.

Then you also get into the government's implication (see Biden's plans), which more or less rots it.

Saying it's useless or entirely a scam is not accurate and we've seen that, but depending on how much of the hype you ate up, it either stagnated or only now some develop upon their promises(and there are a few).

Assuming we fix the complexity,effiency and speed problems, you still have a lot of work about implementing the technology from start to finish.So far we've only seen the vast majority of the development being top->down.Crypto networks that rely upon centralized services are a joke, to put it mildly.

It's because we're all a bunch of salty nocoiners that spend our days wishing we had got in on the ground floor.

As the famous saying goes: "It's hard to make a man understand something when he could have been a millionaire if he'd only understood it sooner."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

Because small dick energy just doesn’t work for me. Some 95% of commentary on the topic is off the rails. The 5% rarely gets a mention here.

People on Hackernews tend to be very intelligent and can see crypto for what it really is, so there’s not really much left to discuss.

Yes, this certainly sums it up well.

Cryptocurrencies are a problem. From the environmental disaster they cause (and social problems caused by higher electricity prices due to increased demand), to tax evasion, illegal porn, or the fact that an important share of an entire generation became addicted to gambling under the guise of "technology".

The real world has problems, and crypto currencies have made some of them possible. Far from making the world any better and bringing the current financial and political system down (lol), they made the world worse. As these problems become more evident and widespread, cryptocurrencies become a political problem. The world needs to deal with the problems they cause and the political solutions will differ. That's why people argues.

> tax evasion, illegal porn, or the fact that an important share of an entire generation became addicted to gambling under the guise of "technology"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

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