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Refuting crypto is an exercise in futility, because there are only two types of people in that space: True believers who act like literal cultists and who are beyond the reach of rational arguments and hustlers who understand that it is nonsense, but will never admit that, because they are just there to make money from the first group.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted - to some degree or another it describes the majority of the crypto enthusiasts I know.

Furthermore I'm not even going to bother sending them this paper because I know that most of them rarely read anything longer than a Tweet.

Well you describe them as "crypto enthusiasts" so maybe the part of the crypto community you are interacting with is self-selecting?

> Not sure why this is getting downvoted

I'm not entirely sure either (and I didn't, for the record) but I could imagine why people would. Grouping a huge industry into just two groups generally is seen as over-simplification, and I would agree with that. There are clearly people working in the space that don't fit in in either groups.

Even users on HN use downvote to "disagree" even if the intended functionality is to denote the comment as "low quality" or "irrelevant".

It was a low quality comment

Smearing an entire group of people by claiming they’re exclusively “literal cultists” or scammers and providing no additional argument for such a strong claim is the definition of a low-quality comment.

It's being downvoted because these kinds of black and white arguments which just call people names don't actually add anything to understanding. There are plenty of people other than died-in-the-wool haters or blind enthusiasts/hucksters. I personally fall between those two camps as do several others in these threads.

I guess I'm not really "in that space" even though I work with various companies who call their projects "cryptocurrencies", as I'm neither of those two groups.

Maybe there is a third group: Believes that are some uses with cryptocurrencies, but most of the space is over-hyped, but that doesn't mean everything is vaporware, and someone who doesn't care about the money earned by working in it but rather that it replaces money as we know it today.

> Refuting crypto is an exercise in futility

If your only goal is to persuade people who have no interest in utilizing reason, or to dazzle people who already agree with you with your rhetorical skills, then sure, there’s not much point. But if you actually want to utilize reason yourself and construct or refine a rational argument, that’s certainly not futile.

plenty of “crypto refuters” act in a cult-like fashion as well

I guess I'm part of a third group: not a bitcoin maximalist but understand the innovation.

I wonder if you have thought about why you only see the subject in black and white? Is this something you do for other subjects as well? If so, getting to the bottom of what leads to this thought pattern would be very valuable to you I think. Then you could come up with strategies to avoid this.

Terrible comment, this isn’t Reddit. Take your smugness somewhere else please.

To be fair to Mr. Taleb, he does mention the technology argument at the very end of his paper in the conclusion - although his counterargument is very much a handwave. "The customary standard argument is that "bitcoin has its flaws but we are getting a great technology; we will do wonders with the blockchain". No, there is no evidence that we are getting a great technology — unless "great technology" doesn’t mean "useful". And at the time of writing —in spite of all the fanfare — we have done still close to nothing with the blockchain.

So we close with a Damascus joke. One vendor was selling the exact same variety of cucumbers at two different prices. "Why is this one twice the price?", the merchant was asked. "They came on higher quality mules" was the answer.

We only judge a technology by how it solves problems, not by what technological attributes it has."

> this is how you refute bitcoin

I don’t need to refute cryptocurrency for the same reason the onus isn’t on me to disprove the existence of god.

Obviously you’re not under a moral obligation to make an argument, but what I think the OP means is if you want to actually convince people, and thus actually reduce the usage of cryptocurrency, then this is how you would do it.

The fact that I think that all cryptocurrencies are worthless in their current form does not mean that I need to convince people at large of this. (I may want to convince my friends, but my friends are generally already convinced.)

The religious argument (I must convert everyone!) resonates most strongly with current true believers. It is the same projection that many Prosperity Gospel Christians feel about atheists wanting to convert them.

> The fact that I think that all cryptocurrencies are worthless in their current form does not mean that I need to convince people at large of this.

How did you convince yourself of this ?

A thought is just an idea - it can come from reasoned analysis or irrational feelings.

What’s the basis for your thought that current cryptocurrencies are worthless ?

I've asked a lot of people what cryptocurrencies are good for, and read many articles on what people think cryptocurrencies are good for, and they never give a satisfactory answer. So: either I haven't asked the right people, or nobody has a good answer. My current prior is about 90% that a good use for cryptocurrency in their current form has yet to be invented, and may never be.

Answers I've seen:

- you can do various crimes.

- you can gamble in many ways.

- you can send cryptocurrency to people in places which have reliable electrical, computing and networking environments but no Western Union or equivalent, and they can use that in place of the local currency with other people who are similarly inclined. (Why you would want to do this is rarely specified.)

- you can have fun being part of competing/cooperating cults.

Regarding your third point, the argument I've heard for it that I sort of understand is if you're living under a crazy dictator (or other less than stable government) who has ruined the local currency and you have no other way to store or transfer your hard earned money. So you resort to crypto.

Is there a name for the phenomenon that just happened here? The GP was speaking from an principled/idealist perspective and you replied with a realpolitik perspective.

I see this a lot in discussions and parties mostly end up talking past each other.

I’d be interested in the name too because it seems to happen to me a lot

> I don’t need to refute cryptocurrency for the same reason the onus isn’t on me to disprove the existence of god.

If you believe Bitcoin is a terrible idea and/or will eventually be you obviously can abstain from it.

But if you feel significant portions of society are becoming trapped in it, and will reach an unfortunate end result, that is relevant to you. If you live in that shared society the failure of that idea will impact you. If you are concerned about the future impact on you, you have a reason to be concerned about refuting it.

If a bunch of people join a cult, I don't care. If a bunch of people join a cult, and believe that judgement day is at the end of 2022, that they will set fire to all the buildings and people in around them as a test, and their god/leader will protect the true believers leaving them unharmed, I do care. A lot.

So the question isn't do you have an obligation to correct everyone who is wrong. The question is, what are the consequences of the belief continuing to spread, and does it negatively/harmfuly impact society and me as a member.

I believe in the existence of bitcoin.

The hype train is all I need to know to stay away from it.

> Going through monetary history, we show how a true numeraire must be one of minimum variance with respect to an arbitrary basket of goods and services

This isn't true. In the 14th century, for example, someone would find a silver mine, get the blessing of the king and start making money. Money wasn't connected in any way to "an arbitrary basket of goods and services." If Taleb rejects silver coins as a 'true' numeraire then he's just arguing a definition.

But that's not really a counter example. Discovering a silver mine would not alter the price (in silver) of an arbitrary basket of goods and services.

There are many crypto-enthusiasts for whom no level of rigor will ever satisfy them despite being obsessed with various "whitepapers" which are mostly marketing fluff. They endlessly defer to various whataboutism's until you find out they are taking an inherently political position (usually some sort of neo-libertarian) and hence the "merits" of the proposed currency _really_ only apply to people who are disenfranchised by existing economic systems. Usually, little is said of how to improve existing systems as that challenges the notion that the status quo is so flawed that it needs to be replaced wholesale.

Any idea how to refute crypto to these folks?

Why do you have to refute cryptocurrencies to anyone? Make up your own mind and leave it at that. I'm atheist, but I'm not gonna go around and try to refute religion just because I don't believe in it, although I do think it does more harm than good.

People will believe in what they want to believe in, and there is little you can do to change their mind if it's already made up.

I was doing just this until they came up with that silly "web 3.0" moniker which is trying to attract developers for smart contracts. As a developer, I have zero desire to code for any of that stuff as it sounds like a security nightmare. Hopefully other developers here reach similar conclusions in light of good discussion on HN; but that could be naive as you suggest.

But then you've haven't been doing that at all? "web3" has been around as a concept since before Ethereum was even launched, plenty of people in the space have been talking about it for ages (internet time), and it is nothing new. What is new is the internet outrage against it, but easy to avoid that outrage too.

If you have zero desire for something, just stay away? I don't want to write Java code, so I don't.

Hopefully other developers will do whatever the fuck they want to do. Wanna work on cryptocurrencies? Go for it. Wanna write Java code? Sure, why not! Why care about what others are doing?

I don't have anything else to add to this discussion that I haven't already said. Cheers!

The best part is, in the pure Web 3.0 vision, http:// would be deprecated. It's somewhat absurd. The description of a proposed post-WWW Internet as "the Web" is incoherent. That being said, I think there are some critically important ideas involved. I came up with the term Internet 4 as a substitute but that's also not exactly accurate.

What is this "pure Web 3.0 vision" you talk about? As originally meant by Gavin Wood, Web3 is an idea or concept, not a particular technology. If it's using http (the protocol) or not has nothing to do with that particular meaning of Web3, so maybe you're referring to something else, as I have not yet heard about this "pure Web 3.0 vision" you talk about.

You're correct, it's not an actual thing. I'm using it as a device to summarize the kinds of protocols and networks that are part of common visions for what Web 3.0 constitutes. There is no canonical "pure Web 3.0" vision I can point to. But http:// doesn't play strongly in most advanced visions, especially if you subscribe to the hypothesis that wallets will move on from the web browser for average users for security reasons. Speculatively, wallets could possibly become a kind of browser themselves, with http://'s utility becoming more marginalized eventually.

I'm not referring to Gavin Wood's specific conception or the associated Polkadot and its foundation's specific usage of the term. FWIW, I'm really trying to dissect the name and not the vision and perhaps not doing it that well. As far as I'm concerned, the usage of the term predates even bitcoin and originally meant Semantic Web. Content-addressable networks like IPFS or Arweave could be seen as related to that conception, but it's a bit of a stretch.

Apologies, but not really. I became "involved" with bitcoin in 2013 somewhat accidentally through a job in behavioral finance. I was at the first bitcoin conference and was one of the few willing to talk to the "suits" who were there. Some of the neo-libertarian stuff used to frustrate me and I would refute certain points, only to uselessly draw ire from groups.

What I've found is like most people's relationship with money in general, a person's beliefs on the subject are usually rooted in their emotions. The area has always been technologically interesting to me so I tend to ignore everything but identifiable FUD, because that's part of what I do generally.

> As someone who has stood up to FUD about bitcoin on this forum

One of the problems with cryptocurrency communities is that they often immediately label any criticism they don't like as "FUD". It's a thought stopping cliche.