The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it.
Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs. In other words, they are perfectly ripened marks for the hucksters.
"Crypto is bad for the earth? Well fuck it, ima still get mine."
Even though I can't personally get behind it, it's easy understand the appeal of hopping on the wagon to make some easy money. Especially if one feels FOMO and has little empathy for others or concern about the long-term prospects for humanity surviving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
Granted, the crypto debate on HN is pretty well hashed & Guido's tweet doesn't add anything to the discussion besides making clear where he stands on the issue
This is a classic example of the Halo Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect).
I trust his intellect and judgment for Python, and that's it. I don't trust him for programming in general, for example, let alone a completely different arena.
I really don't know how to square that with basically everyone else in the space being clearly morons or hucksters.
The problem (like many others) is that Vitalik doesn't necessarily think practically about the situation. For example, how do you explain to my grandma that the fork of BTC is the newly reached consensus or the original one? Vitalik would have an answer for this, but it's not a practical one.
Lucrative opportunities attract frauds. The dot com boom attracted frauds, was the internet a big scam? Literally every technological development in history that was potentially very lucrative attracted swathes of con men. For every stock worth purchasing there are a dozen garbage ones. For every innovative product you can buy online there are dozens of cheap worthless pieces of junk. The fact that idiots and scumbags are attracted to crypto only means there's money to be made, it says nothing about the actual utility of the technology.
Also I would like to point out that the idea you can ever be fully anonymous on the internet is a lot of bunk. Regardless of what kind of cryptography you use or how many obfuscation layers you put things through you're still generating a great deal of identifying data just by accessing other servers. This is a problem I have with most of the marketing behind any privacy technology, it's not just these privacycoins that are making false promises.
This statement is false. Zcash's shielded transactions hide both the wallet ID and the transaction via zero knowledge proof.
If they in fact worked like Bitcoin, with balances & account-numbers transparent to everyone, I might believe as you do. But I know the tech obscures both amounts & recipients, so I don't.
Your 2nd paragraph, that people are spraying all sorts of privacy-destroying info with every interaction, is mostly true. But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible. Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
>But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible
Yeah and that's a huge headache most people don't want to go through, very few even in the privacy community want to have their money tied up in that kind of system forever because it's so cumbersome to use correctly.
>Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
I have seen no evidence that this kind of technology actually helps those people in any disproportionate way, the same technology can be used by criminals and abusive regimes to conceal their activities and in fact it is being used that way right now. Long-term I think it's unwise for them to use it for that purpose, for the same reason it's unwise for others to use it for the purposes of evading them. Remember that the human factor of people making stupid yet honest mistakes is the biggest vulnerability in any system of this kind.
I could give you my Zcash z-address right now, & there's no way known to cryptographic science for you to know its balance, when and how much ZEC it has received or sent, from or to whom, or even if it's ever been used at all.
None of the metadata thrown off gives any hints to that. Even godlike omniscience about my every interaction with the internet, or a man-in-the-middle attack against all my connections to other Zcash nodes always, would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times. You'd still know nothing about my address's activities. (The case is somewhat weaker for Monero, though savvy Monero users can start to approach Zcash's privacy with some extra steps like 'churning'.)
If you keep spreading falsehoods, you're harming people who have a right to know what's technically possible, whether they like the implications or not.
And while I'm unlikely to convince you, any other lurkers who want to do their own research, and confirm my claims, should take note: I am providing truthful, reliable info here, under my real name, which you can use to discover many other facts against which to calibrate my credibility (including the fact that I'm a compensated advisor to Electric Coin Company, the original developers of the Zcash software). A anonymous account is spreading falsehoods that will mislead you. Proceed accordingly.
This is a general problem with zero knowledge proofs by the way, you can use them all you want but they ultimately mean nothing when some other party that actually has the knowledge leaks it. And since the blockchain is required to be public there's going to be so much publicly generated metadata available that it eventually makes no difference what you hide behind a ZKP, the information leaks are built into the system. The weirdest and most self-defeating part of your comment is this:
>would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times
Sorry but this is identifying metadata. It gives away a lot about you depending on who you are. I don't know why you wrote this and then wrote the rest of your comment trying to claim that I'm promoting falsehoods, when you refuted yourself in your own comment! I hope you were honest and forthcoming about these problems in your advisory position.
Your insistence, wordiness, & goalpost-shifting can’t cover up that you’re trying to assertively bluff knowledge of things you don’t understand, like a child trying to pretend they’re an adult. The adults aren’t fooled!
If your impression, based on what you've seen, is that "crypto is generally dominated by marketers and pump and dumps", well I suppose you're the expert about what's in your junk info-diet.
But even if most email, by count, is spam or promotional, people with good filters see little of it, and it'd be a total misreading of the transformative social/economic value of email to say it "is dominated by marketers".
I have good filters against seeing, or spending any attention, on the carnival-barker & naive-speculator froth. (And, any truly momentous economic shift is often wrapped in a phalanx of such pretenders & hangers-on. I don't mistake the lampreys for the whale.)
And looking at tangible measures, like total market cap, real innovators with interesting tech & growing histories of stability are a comfortably majority of all value.
For 100+ years, the most fervently 'socialist' regimes have promised various utopias but actually delivered famines, prison camps, pathologically dishonest & oppressive police states, and even genocides on a larger scale than famous 'fascist' regimes.
I can see why you might get into bickering if you find those situations analogous!
Here:
Socialist governments have been a mix of successes & failures, among the very-privileged who can afford to take risks, for just the last ~100y. Everyone involved knows there's a lot of things left to solve, but sees reasons for hope.
For 13+ years, the most fervently 'crypto' fanboys have promised various utopias but actually delivered scams, fraud, pathologically dishonest companies, and even financial ruin on a larger scale than other technologies.
(please note I am not comparing genocide and financial ruin as being analogous)
Of course you can always do a MadLibs-style search and replace on rhetoric.
But are the resulting linguistic similarities relevant in the real world? Isn’t all the real impact on people - who aren’t mere language models - dependent on the relevant magnitudes, & other salient distinctions?
We real people suffer financial losses, or bleed, or starve, or die in revolutionary purges & prison camps. Of those 4 outcomes, only the 1st one can be blamed on some subsets of the 13yo cryptoeconomics movement. For the last three, you've got to wage a "socialist" war on other traditional economic arrangements over decades.
Crypto believers don't have "limitless patience". If after 100y, the fiercest crypto zealots have killed tens or hundreds of millions, they'll update their beliefs. (Probably, much sooner.)
But hey, thanks for at least describing Zcash's privacy-protecting-qualities accurately in a sibling thread.
ETA to make my point clear, it's an inverted "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
Many of us still have hope in crypto because in 13y, it's made amazing progress & hasn't yet done mass murder – and we're suspicious of those who rally under a banner of "socialism", without reservations, because there's now a long history of that having a large body count. If 100y from now, those patterns reverse, check with me then. YMMV.
It is not, because people are not angels. Everyone has their own goals and wants to have something only for themselves. Soviet Russia and Maos China are great examples of cool idea that has no possibility to work in reality. Because people are people, not because they "did it wrong".
> The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it.
"political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics." - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
> Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs.
Replace "risk taking" with "compliance" for outgroup point of view. (Being "into it" then meaning heavy investment into being opposed to cryptocurrency.)
Eric Schmidt is president of ChainLink
Silvio Micali professor at MIT created Algorand
Emin Gün Sirer creator of Avalanche is a professor at Cornell
Nicholas Szabo holds a honorary professorship
etc. etc. etc
I guess you either don't know these people, or they don't count as intelligent to you.
On another note, Web3 technology will soon be everywhere. Individuals are building tools everyday, and so are governments. The latter because they have found a powerful tool to subvert your rights. Wake up, adapt, or die.