Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

What is it with cryptocurrencies and HN that makes people make low-effort comments like this? Seems so emotional if you compare to other subjects, even threads about Facebook has better arguments for/against Facebook than with cryptocurrencies. In general HN commentators seems to be relatively emotionless and focus mostly on facts, while as soon as cryptocurrency stories appear, the threads get filled with comments like this that doesn't actually try to make faithful arguments but rather appeal to peoples emotions about cryptocurrencies.

I see it happening from both sides (pro/against), but always around cryptocurrencies.

View on HN

Well it's simple.

- Cryptocurrency market is a scam.[0]

- It spends inordinate amount of electrical energy that can be better spent maintaining existing bank/credit card infrastructure [1]

- It's a scam[2]

- It contributed to overall graphics card shortage [3]

- It has another scam (NFT) growing on top of an existing one [4]

Have I mentioned it's a scam?

What irks me the most is people are acting as if crypto currency is real/usable or a sane solution for a problem it can't dream of solving.

It feels a bit like yelling "King is naked", but the rest of the populace is "No, it's just spider silk.", and "Would they waste all that effort to just make nothing?"

[0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2022/01/09/an-anatomy-of-bitcoin...

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/22620464/tether-backing-cryptocurre...

[3] https://medium.com/geekculture/cryptocurrency-graphics-card-...

[4] Just use your brain for 5 min and realize that NFTs don't work.

> [4] Just use your brain for 5 min and realize that NFTs don't work.

Nothing says low-effort group think than the claim that "NFTs don't work". It is a certificate of authenticity (we know those work as the art world has been using them to sell intangible art for decades) in a spreadsheet (we know spreadsheets work). There is literally nothing there that could possible "not work".

> Nothing says low-effort group think than the claim that "NFTs don't work".

NFTs are based on crypto currency - a scam.

* You get a mined crypto, one with body that's essentially a fancy IOU.

- Alarm bells begin to ring. Who enforces the IOU? The anarchist collective?

* You download the funny art, by clicking the link.

- Air sirens start to blast. How do you know link is secure? Could someone else already got there and download the picture? Is there a way to limit the download number. If no, they can't guarantee a single owner. If yes, can you authenticate. What if link expired? Etc.

* You proudly display your art. Someone right click and save as. They now have your art for $0. Or for hell they might steal your real asset or even the NFT used to verify you own it.

- What is your recourse? Who will believe you own right to online pictures? What court considers NFTs real asset?

I'm about to shoot the shit. Oh well, here goes nothing!

* You proudly display your art. Someone right click and save as. They now have your art for $0.

Is this any different from owning a picture now, in the sense that pictures have always been a bundle of bits, which you could freely share across the interwebs since around 1995? People still buy pictures because there's some sensation in "owning" something. You can copy-and-paste a picture without legitimately "owning" it, but you've been able to do that since ~1995.

I don't buy art, so perhaps I shouldn't be the one speculating about these things. Maybe I buy CDs? But those have nice posters and concept drawings -- it feels premium.

I think NFTs lead one to ask what it means to own media in an age where the physical cost of media is $0.

Or for hell they might steal your real asset or even the NFT used to verify you own it.

- What is your recourse?

This is a serious objection. Maybe there's some mechanism you can build on top to deal with it. But that mechanism would be a human court, and we're back to where we started.

Ssh keys are also certificates of authority, except they don't allow anyone to steal your 1/3 of a billion dollars because some dev thought they were "smart enough".

People make comments like that to counter the low-effort cryptocurrency shilling and parroting of lame boilerplate ignorant excuses and apologetics, which don't belong here.

And just because most people here agree that anonymous internet users breathlessly shilling cryptocurrency get-rich-quick pyramid schemes here are scammers, doesn't mean it's groupthink. It's simply, objectively, and obviously true, and it's all the irrefutable evidence of scams and crimes like the subject of this discussion that cause most people here to believe the truth, not "groupthink".

It's not groupthink to believe 1+1=2, and casually dismiss anyone who says otherwise.

If you want to wag your accusatory "groupthink" finger at people causing actual tangible damage to the environment and economy, while lying, shilling, pumping and dumping, ripping people off, committing crimes, and laundering money with NFTs and cryptocurrency, then point it at the cryptocurrency shills parroting bullshit talking points. They're the ones all thinking and talking the same, and generating all the hype.

> People make comments like that to counter the low-effort cryptocurrency shilling and parroting of lame boilerplate ignorant excuses and apologetics, which don't belong here

How come the “counter” comments are far more common on HN than the low-effort shilling?

>In general HN commentators seems to be relatively emotionless and focus mostly on facts

This is a myth. Commenters on HN are good at disguising emotional arguments as reasoned arguments. That's not to say that people don't apply logic here--they certainly do--but don't be fooled into thinking that HN comments are relatively emotionless.

> What is it with cryptocurrencies and HN that makes people make low-effort comments like this?

The idiom, "the truth hurts," means that hearing the unvarnished truth makes one experience sadness or other such negative emotions. You are replying to one such truthful comment.

There are similar snarky comments in some politics threads. I'm not pro-cryptocurrency, but this is how you identify HN groupthink. "Cute", "jaded", snarky comments. I mostly just downvote instead of confronting HN's groupthink.

Maybe because blockchains are just a Ponzi scheme while Facebook may have some actual value?

Replying to a complaint about low-effort comments with your own low-effort comment? Brave effort, but you'd be doing everyone a favor to stop doing one-line middlebrow dismissals that have been done here at least a thousands times before. It's not creative nor interesting, which I hope is why most of us are here in the first place. I may agree or not with you, but it simply doesn't make for a good reading of the comments to hear the same thing over and over again...

The only way your comment isn't low effort, is that you need to do lot of mental gymnastics to just look at it and not see it as obvious scam.

Like stop and think. A peer-to-peer money log with no real world guarantees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com