Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnebgd | Hacker News Reader

No one in the media seems to still question if cryptocurrencies are serious investment assets despite little actual proven utility beyond being a speculative investment asset.

View on HN

>Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud

>Speculators might make money on it, but the arguments for its usefulness fail completely.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is...

>Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history

>It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocu...

>The Great Cryptocurrency Scam

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2018/11/20/the-grea...

>Dogecoin Creator Says Crypto Is a Scam

>Jackson Palmer went on Twitter for the first time in two years to remind us that the wealthy are ruining everything—even cryptocurrency.

https://gizmodo.com/dogecoin-creator-says-crypto-is-a-scam-1...

Articles you cited are from years ago or a contributor (not an employee) of Forbes.

I met Jackson Palmer in 2017/2018 and he had a level head for looking through this mania.

Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy.

> Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy.

OT, but why would Tether impact Bitcoin? They are totally different use cases of crypto.

The market structure allows tether to be printed and then to pump Bitcoin. So it doesn’t matter what the use case is.

The first one was from under a year ago.

I’d like to bet someone on this. If you or others are interested maybe we can refine a wager. :)

I’m thinking that in 7 years there will be something built with blockchain tech (not cryptocurrency) that is used by 10M people?

(I know you said cryptocurrencies but many people conflate the two and feel it’s all bogus..)

Anyone could win instantly by pointing out git. The hype is new, but not the concept.

Is git fueled by superfluous energy-wasting (=environment-destroying) "proof of work"?!?

There's a decent amount of bike-shedding over which workflow is the best, and that is a sort of inefficient "fuel" for git as a tool at some level...

Hashing is not the same as blockchain.

What definition do you have of blockchain tech that git fits into it?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

"A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked together using cryptography.[1][2][3][4] Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree). [etc]"

Do you have a definition that git doesn't fit into (without getting too pedantic, e.g., git being a DAG of records rather than a list)?

A blockchain can be a turing complete computer?

I don't understand what your question is. Are you saying that all blockchains must be turing complete and that git isn't therefore it's not a blockchain?

I didn't mean it as a question. What I meant was that blockchains can be Turing complete and git doesn't have that level of sophistication as a system.

I didn't think blockchains had to be turing complete. What definition do you use that requires that? I can't see that the original bitcoin paper implies such a requirement, but maybe it can be derived somehow.

Sure it wasn’t in Satoshis paper but most of the largest block chains are now essentially virtual machines and transactions can be arbitrary code written for those VMs, where the fee is the computational cost for the nodes to run that code.

I still don't understand where this is going. If you're saying git is not a blockchain because it's not turing complete that means all blockchains must be turing complete. I don't think that is true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com