Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

The reason is because the real things that are happening in the cryptocurrency space are overwhelmingly negative.

People are getting their wallets hacked, losing their savings by investing in pump-and-dump schemes, using "custodial" crypto wallets that defeat the whole purpose of crypto, raising "ICOs" that skirt securities laws, starting underground markets that sell heroin and guns, quitting their jobs to make a living in "play-to-earn" schemes that can't possibly last. It goes on and on.

If you have an article about how crypto is positively affecting people's lives (not just the lucky ones who made some good trades and profited), then please share it on HN!

I read somewhere that a large number of Ukranians are currently holding crypto as they flee the country, as they view it as a good way to transfer funds in the midst of a lot of uncertainty. If so, I view that as a positive (assuming many of them don't end up losing their funds one way or another).

I wouldn't be surprised if most in the HN community thought some form of "blockchains are a really neat idea." It's just that the technology is in its infancy, and so far it has attracted a lot of criminals, fraudsters, and speculators. Not much to write home about.

Another issue is that the actual, theoretical benefits of blockchain are very narrow.

Right now global financial system is much more stable than cryptocurrencies, and even if society collapses, Bitcoin is unlikely to take over or buy you anything. In practice, centralization is fine for most tasks, and even if something is decentralized it doesn’t always need blockchain.

Most problems can be solved with encryption, asymmetric encryption, torrenting, and consensus protocols. I honestly can’t think of any real situation where those aren’t enough and you need blockchain. (although i’m pretty sure blockchain is a combination of those…I should say, i can’t think of any real situation where things like BitTorrent aren’t enough)

And then that leads to all of blockchain’s drawbacks, mainly incredible space and computation redundancy. There are proposed and implemented ways to reduce this redundancy, but most of them actually end up redoing centralization. Even if we can somehow completely eliminate the redundancy and make blockchain almost as fast as centralization, like I mentioned, there’s still just not much benefit.

I’m not at the point where, whenever i hear blockchain, i throw my hands up and claim “useless”. Honestly, whenever I see something blockchain or web3, i usually read about it and try to see how it works. But surprisingly often I just find confusing filler text and buzzwords. And moreover, so far i’ve never found any technology where I actually thought both “this is useful” and “this needs blockchain”.

The only time I hear positive, real-world crypto news is when a country's economy goes down the drain and people are desparate to transfer their assets so they can buy things or get out. Or when a totalitarian government is withholding its citizens from receiving USD from abroad. In those cases, the volatility of Bitcoin is less than that of their own currency, and you can transfer it with a droplet of internet.

I think the value of free money is lost on most people who live in highly functioning societies where the trade-off of centralised money doesn't show its backside, and the tradeoff of decentralised money at its infancy mostly just shows the backside.

Interesting, this sounds like the Old West. Look at it now.

I think these hardships are the exact indicators of a dynamic new frontier. Apply caution, yes, but ignoring it might not be a good strategy either.

Great analogy.

Yes!

Especially considering Bitcoin is built with the property of scarcity to mimic gold. :-)

Your analogy is fair, but I'm not sure it works in the way you want it to. Cryptocurrency now exhibits a lot of the same issues that the Old West exhibited then (lawlessness, criminality, etc). But the Old West didn't result in some free-market hard-currency utopia. Eventually the powers that be brought in the same regulations, police, courts, etc that governed everything else. So that "Old West" was destroyed. In your analogy, that would be the "status quo financial system" taking over crypto and either outlawing it or changing it beyond all recognition.

> I for one, take this perceived negative bias as a confirmation that Bitcoin is a genuine threat to the existing financial system.

I think you are taking things the wrong way. I, too, dislike our current financial system and want it to radically change. And I, too, hope that cryptocurrency can play a part in that. Your assumption that others feel "threatened" by cryptocurrency just because they point out the negatives isn't a good one. They are just being reasonable and fair.

> Am I just a dumb ass?

No, but be careful of becoming a shill for crypto. Don't slide down the slippery slope of ignoring things that are bad -- or claiming that they aren't -- just because crypto may align with some of your values and beliefs. I'm not saying you are. But the wording of your original post leaves one to wonder whether you value your vision of a utopian financial system above the very real tragedies occurring every day in crypto. You can both love crypto and hate those tragedies.

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