Hacker News Reader

Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Cryptoeconomics has been a mix of successes & failures, among the very-privileged who can afford to take financial risks, for just the last ~13y. Everyone involved knows there's a lot of things left to solve, but sees reasons for hope.

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!

View on HN

The phrase "most fervently" is carrying a lot of weight in your argument.

ETA to make my point clear, it's an inverted "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

Yes, but I do think it's valid to include such a qualifier to draw a distinction between people who apply a very mild "socialism" to enhance a welfare state – while leaving most traditional freedoms and private property intact, and most of the economy operating by capitalistic principles (like the 'Nordic model') – and those who endorse full nationalizations & revolutionary socialism.

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.

Thanks for proving my point with perfect irony.

And thanks to you, for demonstrating your flimsy analogy can only be defended with attitude, not reasoning!

The point I think the parent was making is not that they are analogous situations, but that in the reasoning they've encountered (and you helpfully provided to illustrate their point), one could literally just swap the positive aspects for negative aspects, and it would read as supportive of socialism and against crypto.

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.

It's the same exact logic.

(please note I am not comparing genocide and financial ruin as being analogous)

Thanks for at least trying to explain!

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.)

The reason I didn't try to engage with you is your awful and misinformed reasoning in your original reply, and your post history, which indicates you aren't worth the time. If you had a history of intelligent comments and not trolls, you would be worth engaging with. Maybe clean up your act a little and people will take you more seriously?

I'm quite comfortable with my 15+ year comment history, associated with my real name – especially as compared to a 55-day-old anon account that just expresses peeved attitude, above as here, instead of reasoning.

But hey, thanks for at least describing Zcash's privacy-protecting-qualities accurately in a sibling thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com