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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Your whole four paragraphs can be simplified to:

90% of projects out there are scams and have a crypto-token attached to it with a pyramid scheme on it and there also exists a 10% of projects somewhere that it is not purely a 'get-rich-quick-scheme', or a 'web3' crypto project that doesn't require a crypto-token attached to the product that has utility?

Thus, it also must mean that it is not going away 100% guaranteed, despite the rampant scams?

> So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.

So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?

I really hope you try your best to avoid it and 'move on'. I should not expect you to continue to react to yet another HN post about crypto projects since you think all of them are a scam.

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The issue is that with so many more scams than real projects, and so much focus on buzzwords, it’s more likely to fall for a scam than to actually find a real useful project.

And even the not-entirely-a-scam projects, be it NFTs, the entire ETH or BTC sphere, are so full of money laundering, trade front running, people using it as investment vehicle, etc. that you can’t trust these projects either.

Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam. And if you want to launder money use Dollars just like everyone else.

That’s the issue, even Bitcoin can’t really be used as currency anymore. I used bitcoin when it was still new. In our friend circle, we paid each other with thousands of bitcoins for a single pizza back then. And yet it was still more usable as currency back then than it is nowadays.

You can use the Lightning Network to send Bitcoins instantly.

True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. I can’t really use BTC to store money, as it fluctuates too much.

The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)

> True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed.

What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.

> being unable to run a full node anymore

Full node syncs & runs fine even on a raspi 3... it's slow... and you're not participating in mining... but it's running, and does what you would expect a node to do (validate, receive & broadcast transactions).

> What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.

Yes, but bitcoin is so volatile that you can’t keep money for daily usage in it. You can only use it as long-term investment or ultra-short-term wallet.

The regular usage – storing money for somewhere between one and 30 days – is really painful with bitcoin.

It's hard to not talk past people about these things... i'm really struggling to understand what you're trying to communicate.

Are you saying that keeping some amount of bitcoin tied up in a LN channel is painful?

Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ?

Also, you completely ignored the point about running a node.

> Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ?

Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage. You get paid, you spend it over a month on wages and expenses.

Bitcoin originally promised to be usable for that. Some companies actually paid you in BTC, some stores actually allowed you to pay with BTC. The original goal was to use BTC like a checking account.

Lightning is great at replacing the BTC network itself for transactions, but it doesn’t help much at allowing BTC to accomplish this original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.

> Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage.

This is (roughly speaking) the description of a currency, isn't it? I would point out that as a store of value, bitcoin's up

> [BTC's] original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.

I don't think BTC was intended to serve in the way you're describing. I believe it was designed to neuter/obviate at-large Central Banks (e.g. money printers, debasers of currency, economic overlords). In this way, it's gone a long way towards the intended purpose. Furthermore, as a base-layer, it's been extended considerably to support day-to-day usability. Further, as a Store of Value, it's done a lot better than USD in almost every time-scale you can compare, and all the ones that matter.

Here's the quote from the release (via: http://satoshinakamoto.me/2008/11/01/bitcoin-p2p-e-cash-pape...)

>>> The main properties: Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network. No mint or other trusted parties. Participants can be anonymous. New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work. The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the network to prevent double-spending. >>>

I would also like to add that the original point of money is not to support a month's worth of planning... the point of money is to support planning across planting seasons and lifetimes. Wages and wage-work came along long after money was invented.

Don't quote the old magic to me, I was there when it was written.

And Bitcoin was treated and hyped as a true replacement for Euro or US Dollar. And we hyped it as well. Online stores started accepting BTC, some companies started paying wages in BTC, the first BTC ATMs showed up.

Dogecoin started their tip bot with a tipping culture.

Neither Doge nor BTC absolutely were seen as investment vehicle or store of value, but instead as payment system and true currency.

I remember discussion about the volatility, and claims that with more and more people using it, its value would change less and less and it'd stabilize at about a BTC per Euro cent.

Not the point.

Even if you set aside the transaction costs and the staggering environmental toll of Bitcoin, it just doesn't function well as a currency because it has been used, and is being used, as a speculative investment vehicle by so many.

You absolutely do not want your currency to be rising and falling by double-digit percentages in value even over the course of a few years, let alone a few days the way Bitcoin frequently does. Furthermore, people accepting currency don't want that. This is one of the major reasons so few people do, in fact, accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. (Yes, I know some do. It's still very few, and always will be.)

Lightning is not Bitcoin. The implemented design of Lightning is a highly centralised off-chain layer 2 [0] which is a direct contradiction and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was designed and built for: ' a peer-to-peer electronic cash system'

Bitcoin has failed in being an efficient on-chain payments system and is somehow now an investment asset since that is its new narrative which is also a 'store of value' or 'digital gold'.

It seems that many supporters have admitted that it is not useful for its original purpose and that it is not instant, significantly slower than VISA and a extremely volatile to use as a currency.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062

I would argue that Bitcoin is already outdated tech so has the only benefit to be the first one. Now you have crypto doing what Bitcoin does, but with instant transactions, feeless, while barely using any energy (think a wind turbine would suffice to maintain the complete network)

Exactly. Hence my questions about regulations that haven't been answered since you seem to answer for that other person:

> Is it going away 100% guaranteed due to the rampant scams everywhere?

> So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?

From the other reply:

> Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam.

Buy Bitcoin and use it for what? Currency? Payments?

Bitcoin has failed at being useful at all and it's intended purpose which is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Not an 'investment', 'store of value' and 'digital gold'.

HN is heavily affluent and westerner-skewed, but how about when you have a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency?

We often praise projects that morph from their intended purpose in to something else (e.g. a good % of tech out there).

Then monero is what you’ll want to use. Not ETH, BTC, or NFTs.

My understanding is that in those circumstances the people move to US dollars.

> a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency

As a sibling comment said, they move to a separate able currency like dollars or Euro.

No one in their right mind will move to a fantasy token whose value oscillates up and down every second, sometimes to within several orders of magnitude.

Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200%

Etherum's is ~300%

Monero, 330%

It's not as bad as Venezuela's or Zombabwe's hyperinflation, but no ine in their right mind would use a currency this volatile.

Volatility!=Inflation

Hyperinflation is one-way volatility. In either case the value changes rapidly making the "currency" in question useless as a long-term store of value.

From the point of view of people who live with a volatile currency (aka highly inflationary) it doesn't really matter, does it?

Given Bitcoins overall direction compared to the dollar, it appears deflationary (worth more over time) rather than inflationary (worth less).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/326707/bitcoin-price-ind...

Once again, you're completely missing the point. Yes, it's both deflationary and volatile.

What part of "300% value swing over the year" do you not understand?

> and so much focus on buzzwords

The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.

Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage?

People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?

There's plenty of bad actors anywhere, but it becomes toxic when you have an app with an optional crypto integration and people come out of left field preaching their climate doom, crypto will boil the oceans, capitalist greed will be the end of us all, and all crypto is a scam. Meanwhile I'm offering a free to play game?

There's a toxic confluence of engineer's anti-biz perspective combined with a larger ID politics theme. Some benefiting from crypto are outside of the traditional channels. Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.

> Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage?

Criticizing over-engineered cloud solutions is done all the time. At the same time there are a ton of useful and pragmatic cloud solutions.

> People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?

This is being criticized all the time. At the same time there are useful financial products that are quite important for many.

> Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.

There is no disruption taking place. That's the issue. It's all just pure hype that quite obviously creates more problems that it claims to solve. People are tired of hearing the same arguments and excuses since years.

This is not like the Internet (or anything similar that has been used as an analogy) that was not taken seriously at the beginning, typically by established players who then got surprised shortly after.

Quite the contrary. It has been taken seriously but it didn't turn out to be what was promised. Just yet another hype, and "this time it's not like the last time". The negativity surrounding these topics came from insiders and initial adopters who started to speak out.

There are maybe some useful things in here that get overshadowed, but to be taken seriously those parts need to very clearly distance themselves from the rest.

It’s hard to fully avoid it and move on while people are still being scammed. My position on cryptocurrency is identical to my position on home marketing businesses: I’ll happily concede that there could in principle be a good one, and that in the scheme of things it’s not the largest issue in the world, but when so many people are being sold false promises it’s hard for me to just brush that under the rug.

That's not what his four paragraphs sum up to.

He said 90% of discussions about crypto descend into shouting shallow catchphrases. And it's been that way since at least 2017.

He seems to believe that 100% of the projects are scams.

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