You don’t have to be interested in it but I hardly find this blog as a compelling or well thought out reason for finding them boring. It’s more like a reason for why you want to stay ignorant about the tech which no one asked you to know about in the first place.
With those as with crypto you are better off taking a view from above. The only problem crypto solves is going around regulation. It's a sleight of hand, if you convert dollars to tokens suddenly regulators won't go after you. This and 101 ways of trading imaginary tokens hoping there is going to be a bigger sucker or that you won't be the last to sell. To increase chances of either happening you scream: "it's still early", "diamond hands" and "hodl!" creating a sense of companionship to promote behaviors that increase your chances to cash out before the whole thing collapses.
Consider me a lazy consumer, waiting for my niche(s) to be filled.
Once again, HN doesn't disappoint. As a community, we continue to promote solutions to technology problems, but as soon as it involves finances, we draw the line in the sand and don't dare cross it.
Well if the author of the post really hated cryptocurrencies and being a 'security researcher' as well, just find the bugs inside the cryptocurrency industry (exchanges, smart contracts, etc) and then highlight these bugs in your post as to why cryptocurrencies still have a long way to go. Maybe then the author might be taken a bit more seriously when it comes to that.
After all, one even said they are so called 'self-paying bug bounties' [0] A great way to show the world that these systems are still in their infancy.
> as soon as it involves finances, we draw the line in the sand and don't dare cross it.
Just don't ask about stocks, cryptocurrencies or investing on HN. This is why. [1] [2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29451300
"Interesting problems" implies wanting to work on them or being curious about the solution.
You don't want to work these problems, whether they involve cryptocurrencies or not. You want solutions as a consumer, which is an important voice to be heard, but different.
For example, a quiet running refrigerator would be useful to me but is not an interesting problem to me.
A title better aligned with the content would be "Problems I want solved as a consumer that crytocurrencies do not solve" or "As a consumer, cryptocurrencies haven't solved my problems".
I didn't take it that way. I interpreted it as the author's personal list of "stuff I wish cryptocurrencies could do for me today." And, of that list, micropayments stuck out to me as a problem people have really, really wanted to solve for a long time, but just can't manage to make a solution work yet. Of course, the problem of micropayments effectively reduces to the problem of reducing transaction costs to a point where it becomes feasible to pay someone 5..10..50 cents without having to pay the payment processor an equal or near equal amount. But, that, unfortunately, seems like less of a technical problem and more of a social problem, which makes it a Hard Problem(tm).
The questions are:
- how long will it take to solve those problems?
- how much effort will it be?
- how likely is it to succeed?
- are there other efforts that are more promising?
- what are the costs/downsides associated?
- etc...
And when you start asking those practical questions about the real world, and not just thinking about "maybe this will be great someday", then cryptocurrencies start to look a lot less attractive.