Ask HN: Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto?
twitter.com
twitter.com
> Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
> Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
> Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Do I just not get crypto?
So, I started doing the Certified Blockchain Professional course to understand the technology and hear first hand from the proponents.
I've come to the conclusion that Crypto / Blockchain just isn't solving any interesting problems. It is the epitome of a solution looking for a problem.
There's a huge amount of money being spent to convince the technologically illiterate that this is the next big thing - and I think that's morally abhorrent.
The amount of energy the space takes up is nothing short of an ecological crime against humanity.
Fundamentally, there are a couple of niche computer science problems in there - muddled in with some semi-interesting philosophy - and that's about it.
Most people here, I suspect, have seen hype-cycles come and go. Blockchain seems identical to all the other failed scams in the past.
With Crypto, it seems to go the opposite way, i.e. "Let's think of possible problems that Crypto could tenuously solve, and then build a blockchain".
Going the other way though leads to solving problems that might not exist, and a technology choice that isn't necessarily best-fit. I work in Supply Chain, and as an example, while Supply Chain Traceability has long been touted as a 'golden child' example of where the blockchain can help, in the last 15 years centralised solutions have had much more traction and success. My personal explanation? Starting with blockchain as the solution led to the problem statement focussing on decentralisation, which actually hasn't turned out to be that important compared to other NFR's.
Look at other technologies such as a REST APIs, which solved lots more propblems across the first 15 years of their life despite being much a more subtle improvement from a technology perspective. Despite this, REST API's didn't come with the same level of hype from the general public, because you couldn't sell REST-API-COINS and speculate on them.
Finding great solutions might sometimes need thinking outside of the box; I can see solutions in search of problems as being that kind of long shot that's rarely but sometimes spectacularly useful.
But crypto is particularly tricky for that, because it's not just a solution in search of a problem; it's also a Ponzi scheme. And it's really hard to disentangle the two.
Were "crypto" merely a bunch of clever algorithms allowing an ever broader set of zero-knowledge proofs... then perhaps we'd find actually useful problems to solve with that. But instead, it's already a huge market by virtue of its artificial scarcity. Any new cool thing these algorithms might do is overshadowed by the lure of the Ponzi scheme; even a tiny probability of turning that pyramid into something solid is easily worth more than a long-shot at some revolutionary technology you probably couldn't even control if you did think it up.
It's the combination of so much money that drowns out everything else with a dash of gambling, a sprinkling of a pyramid scheme, all lathered onto a solution in search of a problem that makes it particularly dispiriting.
Or give you new tools to make art with.
I can't entirely agree with this. Originally Bitcoin seemed it could be a solution to a problem (i.e. decentralized digital currency), and it turned out it became something a bit different: a kind of digital investment that is highly volatile but has some advantages over, say, traditional stock (and plenty of disadvantages, too). So for a few people, Bitcoin did solve some problems - and created many problems for others on the way.
Blockchain in general has proved to work for what it's been intended, that is not being able to forge transactions. Even though we don't have any really useful applications for it, it's good that it exists, because in 10, 50, or 100 years it will turn out it's a perfect missing puzzle piece for some invention we still don't have any idea about.
The issue of course being that there's a LOT of new and exciting issues with things like this, and more importantly, some ancient and critical issues....like mass scamming and inconsistent tech. Decentralization sounds great until all your money goes out the window, never to be seen again.
I do think there's a home for the tech, and I think there's a small chance some of this really explodes (in the understanding that i don't understand something about it, which is likely), but I do feel that it's impossible to find any reasonable discussion of the topic because it's COVERED in bullshit.
It seriously reminds me of marketing. No one would say that marketing doesn't work. There's plenty of evidence it does. But actually trying to learn about certain facets of the industry is a NIGHTMARE because it's just other marketing people marketing to you, and sifting the bullshit from the legit is hell.
Ding ding ding.
I'm still in the "new and exciting" part of my life, but crypto just doesn't solve any interesting problems.
The decentralisation of crypto currencies is great (i.e. there's no central bank that can devalue its currency to prop up their national economy), but it's way too volatile to actually be useful as a currency. Would you agree to be paid your salary in bitcoin? Without adjustments if it drops relative to the dollar? Heck no. It's a speculative device, not a currency.
Smart contracts are cool too. Zero trust transactions etc. Conceptually I think these are really cool, but I see no practical need for them (for 99.99% of people).
Blockchain as a data structure, again for 99.99% of applications a DB and PGP do the trick. (And I'm still waiting on that 0.01% to show up.) I'm a software engineer by trade, and firmly believe you should pick the simplest way to solve a problem, not the coolest.
All of the different uses of crypto are "cool" but pretty useless. A solution in search of a problem indeed.
Why? The "economy" isn't something abstract, everyone participates in it. Yes, losing money through inflation sucks, but losing your job due to an economic crisis sucks even more. Some central banks are downright inept ( Turkey) but in those cases it's not just them, it's the whole government, which is ruining the economy through other means as well, so even having the money as independent from their influence wouldn't be of huge help because their ineptitude will show up in other places.
For example, a new country with a new government could set up their governing bodies on a blockchain for full transparency. Ditto with their financial and currency based systems
The real issue is that there's very limited _demand_ for any of these things at present, so the money sunk into it needs to look for something that siphons cash from the existing systems
Crypto losers will see people point out how wasteful it is, how few problems it actually solves and how many it creates, and they turn their blind eyes and wonder “Why is EVERYBODY so wrong?”
Grow up. Build something that matters. I volunteer at a soup kitchen and I’ve seen regulars disappear and come to find out, some of them get killed by gang violence. Some are hooked on dangerous drugs and can’t get access to effective programs to help them. Some turn to crime when they can’t come up with enough money from working to get off the streets. Why should ANYBODY care about crypto, when it doesn’t propose any solutions to these problems that are present as a result of the current economic system? Crypto would only make it worse, if it did anything at all!
100% of crypto is a shameless grift, and the afterlife will treat none of them very kindly.
Now, there's lots of issues here, like how you translate the crypto into other traditional regulated assets if need be, or traceability, or energy use, or security, but that's the putative value: easily moving value outside traditional governmental boundaries.
To be fair, if you've ever looked into buying something grey or black market online, I think the value of some sort of cryptocurrency in theory is apparent?
I'm not sure any crypto at the moment checks all the boxes, though, and some of the assumptions about use seem a little naive or disingenuous, but I can see the idealized use case value. I could in the abstract imagine some kind of decentralized accounting system taking on the role of currency, probably de facto, but I'm not sure current cryptocurrencies are that.
Funnily enough, the only thing I see any value in are NFTs. (Remember crypto currencies are essentially just the T in NFT). But not the url asset nonsense.
Rather as a distrubuted authentication system. Concert tickets, system access etc. are all viable.
But why would NFTs or a blockchain be good here? We have an identifiable central authority, the ticket issuer, so… why do we need a decentralised record for that?
I mean, you could issue tickets to an event as NFTs, and it would probably work ok, but why bother?
The, in theory, idea is that you can tie an NFT to an account, and make sure it can't be resold, but you could also tie a ticket to an ID, and that'd probably work better because it's not hard to spin up a wallet, get the "ticket" nft, and then sell the whole wallet.
So the idea as I understand it is that tickets as NFTs would allow you to prove your ownership of the ticket. With tickets being increasingly electronically-issued, there's currently no way to prove you've been sold a genuine ticket, or the only copy of a genuine ticket - until you get to the gate, they read your barcode, and turn you away.
So we have a second-hand market that runs through ticketmaster currently, which solves this trust issue by interacting with the issuer directly. Tickets via NFTs would help remove this dependency on ticketmaster, so we could have a healthy, trustworthy second-hand market that doesn't just feel like ticketmaster encouraging bots so they can sell the same ticket twice.
So the question is - does this benefit ticketmaster in the slightest? What problems does this solve for them? Because without them issuing the tickets as NFTs in the first place, and recognising them at the gates - it simply doesn't happen. As you say - from the issuer's POV, "why bother?"
As far as I can tell, everyone hates the current system - except the people that control it. The solution to this isn't some wonderful modern technology, it's plain and simple competition.
So it mostly exists as an example of why you'd want to be able to prove ownership of a unique token. Everyone can see the problem if I print my ticket 10 times and sell it to 10 people, it's easy to explain. The telling question is why we don't have a good example of an implementation.
I guess my point is that there's already an authority in the picture, and there always will be, so a blockchain solution is unnecessary complexity. What's needed, as you say, is a better authority!
And look how well this is going for us? Ticketmaster is one of the the most anti consumer companies in history. There is no need for a single central authority here. Plus you get the benefit of authenticating the tickets in case of resale, etc.
It's actually a great usecase. Fraud is rampant, binding tickets to individuals doesn't make sense, and the main issuer is a literal supervillian.
Regardless - "concert" tickets isn't even my point. It's as a general purpose access token that literally anyone can verify. There is obvious utility in this.
> There is no need for a single central authority here.
Right, but there is one. If it's not tickemaster it could be the venue, the band, anyone. In which case, we don't don't need a trustless, decentralised register. We have a ticket issuer, therefore we don't need a heath-robinson type blockchain arrangement.
> Plus you get the benefit of authenticating the tickets in case of resale, etc.
Blockchains aren't needed for this. We have a central authority that can easily run its own marketplace, if it shoudl wish to.
> Fraud is rampant
A central authority can solve this just as well as a blockchain, without the need for the tradeoffs.
> binding tickets to individuals doesn't make sense
Sure it does, many bands and venues specifically want to prevent resales as it encourages profiteering over fan accessibility.
> There is obvious utility in this.
Yet the example you came up with doesn't seem to have anything over a more traditional solution, other than "I hate ticketmaster". All of this stuff can be done anyway.
You're absolutely correct. And this is because I never told you that the industry would embrace it.
> Right, but there is one.
Right but there's no need.
> heath-robinson type blockchain arrangement
A system already exists and is perfectly usable and understandable. Hyperbole isn't doing any favours here.
> We have a central authority that can easily run its own marketplace, if it shoudl wish to.
This is true of all distributed systems.
> A central authority can solve this just as well as a blockchain, without the need for the tradeoffs.
They haven't though have they? And it comes for free with blockchains, alongside being able to do so without silly blockers like having to sign up for a business account and be verified by ticketmaster and pay fees as though you are a venue etc. etc.
> Sure it does, many bands and venues specifically want to prevent resales as it encourages profiteering over fan accessibility.
Fair, but this isn't what happens. What happens instead is that not only are people making fake accounts and bots, but the ticket issuer themselves is involved and profiteering. Literally the worst. If this takes place on a public chain then the ownership and scalping of any given ticket is fully traceable.
I'll grant you however that blockchain stuff doesn't solve KYC problems. It can certainly help though, given vouching systems by trusted third parties can be implemented and blah blah blah
Additionally, overbooking is easy to see coming and know about in advance, as well as a host of other benefits (expecting a big gig? Traffic reports can grep the chain and see attendance expecations. Blah blah public data.) Once again you can say something _ridiculous_ like this can be done by a central authority - but I'll let you be the one to hold your breath for ticketmaster to create data APIs for individual gigs.
> All of this stuff can be done anyway.
Yes. As discussed everything that can be decentralised can be centralised, basically. Unless you want / care about the additional data transparency and public programmability the chain gives, ofc you won't care.
There is always a need for a central authority to issue tickets. Some company operates the venue, and opens the gates for people. There is an organisation that is running the show.
When this is the case you don't need a distributed ledger and all the complications that come with that.
> Hyperbole isn't doing any favours here.
That system is overcomplex for ticket issuing. Anything that requires the general public to keep secret keys secret (and not lose them, ever) is pretty much a bad idea.
> This is true of all distributed systems.
No, it isn't. As much as I'm not a cryptocurrency fan, the whole point of things like Bitcoin is that there is not a central authority, and all the complexity in the protocol comes from building a distributed consensus. When you have a central authority (ticket issuer, venue operator, whatever) that is not going away in this scheme, you don't need that.
> They haven't though have they?
This is a market failure and won't be solved by a blockchain. What you need is competition which unlocks the venues and their exclusivity agreements. Nothing about the specific software implementation of the ticket issuing system really helps here.
> And it comes for free with blockchains
No, it doesn't, someone has to run the infrastructure (even if it's just nodes), write the smart contracts (and pay the gas or whatever to run them), tie in a web UI that runs somewhere, connect all this to the information about the venues, all sorts. That's not 'free'. A database can manage ticket records for a trivial amount of money, and would have a similar amount of other infrastructure needed around it to provide a full service. The datastore implementation here is not a particularly interesting part of the problem.
> If this takes place on a public chain then the ownership and scalping of any given ticket is fully traceable.
Yet we don't need a chain to do that. We can do that with any old DB. Blockchain also can't (for instance) stop people selling their private keys to each other instead of actually performing transfers, just as a DB can't stop people doing that with a username and password or whatever gets used there. And if you say "Well we tie that to real ID using a third party system"...
> I'll grant you however that blockchain stuff doesn't solve KYC problems. It can certainly help though, given vouching systems by trusted third parties
Again, a blockchain adds nothing, if there's a third party vouching system we can just use that in the traditional system too.
> I'll let you be the one to hold your breath for ticketmaster to create data APIs for individual gigs.
And I'll let you be the one to hold your breath waiting for them to embrace your blockchain solution too. Again, it's the market issue that you need to tackle, not the implementation one.
> Yes. As discussed everything that can be decentralised can be centralised
Right, and in this case it is centralised by necessity, because someone is running the gig. You can't remove that authority and that renders the blockchain part of solution a complete irrelevance and an implementation detail.
The problem here is you are looking at a market failure and deciding that if we just throw blockchains at it then it'll magically be fixed. But the blockchain solution doesn't address any of the market problems, and everything you're saying is a wonderful side-effect of using a blockchain can be done with any ticketing software solution.
I could sing the praises of a piece of software I'm building with a nice web front end and API access and a database backend, ownership traceability through simple DB records, the same third party ID integration. I can make the whole DB accessible for the public to query if I want, so data transparency is preserved. See how this solves the same sorts of issues? I could even claim mine's superior because if you phone me up and say "my ticket was stolen" and can prove your ID through that neat third party service, I can sort that out for you because my data structures aren't immutable.
But in the end my magic solution would be just as useless as yours in the face of ticketmaster's swathe of venue exclusivity agreements and stranglehold on the market, because the software implementation details are not a solution to the actual problem.
So you can shout "this could all be solved if we forced the world to use a blockchain solution!" and you wouldn't be wrong, but the fact that it's got a blockchain or not is not the good part, it's the forcing change that's the good part.
> Unless you want / care about ... public programmability the chain gives, ofc you won't care.
Exactly! Spot on! If public programmability was the whole problem in that space, you might have a great solution, but it's not! That's not even a tiny part of the problem with the ticket marketplace, and certainly isn't remotely interesting to most ticket-buyers.
This whole argument is the very definition of what's wrong with the cryptocurrency/blockchain space - instead of trying to solve the real problem (ticketmaster market dominance and abusive practice, backed up with effective monopoly) you're trying to see where you can shove a blockchain, and pretending that fixes something. It doesn't, it's just an implementation detail of a software solution that by itself does nothing to address a market problem.
Wouldn't it be nice if ticketmaster didn't rule the roost and act like dicks? Sure would. And if we could do more with our tickets? And maybe push profiteers out of the system? Oh yes. The specific way we encode, store and transfer ticket ownership records in a non-ticketmaster ticketing system isn't going to change that. Market competition or market regulation might. A specific data structure can't achieve this by itself.
For the record my stance is "some of this will probably stick around, but most of it is junk".
There's stuff like bitcoin, which is basically a digital asset.
There's stuff like monero, which is basically a digital asset that's very hard/impossible to track. So anything blackmarket/anti governmental.
There's stuff like USDC (stablecoins), which is literally supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar, and "supposedly" backed to some % (depends on the coin. Tether is an infamous nightmare waiting to happen to most people in and out of the scene). The main use being that it's VERY cheap and easy to move stable coins(not just for crypto trading but say if you want to send someone money), and you can get great interest rates on them by staking (6-8% compared to the average savings account of "fuck you for asking").
And then there's basically everything etherium spawned with smart contracts, which is just a token that can execute actions based on programmatic conditions.
None of that is "new" so to speak. Any code/database can already do something like that, but the quasi decentralized nature mixed with certain features does open some theoretically interesting opportunities.
It gets complicated from there and EVERYTHING above is filled with caveats and issues and other problems, but it certainly seems to have stuck around for quite some time, and had quite a lot of legit business use, for a "scam". There is 0 doubt that something like 90% of the coins out there are scams, and of the remaining 10% probably 99% of those will fail for some reason or the other, and of that remaining % a LOT of this will probably wind up abstracted waaaaaaaaay out like IP addresses are for the modern user, but yeah there's probably something there.
I used to live in China. Many of my friends still do, or did until recently. China makes it very, very difficult to legally transfer money abroad, even if that money was earned legally and had all required taxes paid on it.
It is trivial, though, to buy Bitcoin in China, and trivial to immediately sell it elsewhere. You are not exposed to much risk, because you can execute the transaction quickly, and although you're breaking the law in China, because you're circumventing their capital controls, you're not breaking the law anywhere else — the money was earned legally and all required taxes were paid on it.
So Bitcoin is pretty popular as a way to get money out of China if you are not living there any more (or are comfortable with the risk, if you are living there). I imagine there are many other places where it's also useful in this way.
Except the part where a tiny fraction of a populace can print an infinite amount more of it, sure. But that's just a small thing, amirite?
Given a list of possibilities for action, profit is merely an ORDER BY mechanism to prioritize them.
Incentives matter in the buyer/maketplace/seller realm of economics.
When you don't build anything of value the only moat you have is your political ability to convince people that you are.
I mean banks and insurance companies don't have to justify their existence, whereas the massive campaign that crypto enthusiasts mounted on the interwebz is telling that they are not even sure that their movement can survive.
The historical acts, good or bad, due to these ideas are owned by the actors.
Yes, if you care about blame then you can just blame people for bad actions and call it a day. But if you care about actually preventing bad actions then you need to look at incentives, and that's where the study of political economy comes in.
> Incentives matter in the buyer/maketplace/seller realm of economics.
Materialism is the driver of the mischief in either the capitalist or Socialist case.
Like say you are a cocaine kingpin. You instruct your minions in countries where you sell your product to buy crypto. How do you access that value where you live?
Or say you are a wealthy Russian with millions of rubles that you want to move out of the country. Is there really a seller with unlimited willingness to exchange their crypto for rubles?
You say "think ATM", the street value of a ton of cocaine is tens of millions of dollars. Nice ATM.
I hope I never become as intensely default-skeptical of new technologies.
That's an absurd take. It's ten years of hype, get-rich-quick schemes and other scams, hardly new.
It's not "default-skeptical" to be questioning it after all that. The bizarre position is the wide-eyed naive butt-hurt of the tweet.
The internet was doing interesting stuff well within 5 years. Modern smartphones were interesting and taking over the world within 5 years. Graphics cards came and revolutionized the gaming industry immediately. Crypto has been around for 13 years and all we've seen are pump and dump schemes, and by extension randomly generated chimpanzee pictures whose market has already collapsed.
Right, a portion of which happened right here on HN until it became too blindingly scammy to ignore. NFT's came out which are demonstrably a scam that don't actually do what they claim to. DAO's show up, claiming members will have cryptographic (?) guarantees about decision-making when in fact they are ultimately dependent on some level of human decision-making, so ripe for scams. This maybe climaxed with the push for "web 3.0" to be some sort of new crypto-based meta-internet. People are trying to cash out, I think.
I'll be honest, until then I wasn't even aware of things like the oracle problem, the "nothing at stake" issue inherent to proof-of-stake systems, and the horrible horrible idea that is programmable smart contracts. Cryptocurrency seems like a nice idea when you handwave the actual implementation details as "the tech people figured it out somehow!" Unfortunately, they never really did. This stuff only "works" in a frictionless vacuum.
But almost all of the problems you list apply to blockchain uses other than cryptocurrency. The failures and scamminess of Web3, DAOs, oracles, and Proof-of-Stake are not arguments against the original Bitcoin whitepaper.
The “tech people” have definitely figured out something. The question is whether or not enough people really want to use whatever that something is.
That's why I feel that bitcoin is always going to be ripe for abuse and highly adjacent to scams, even if the original paper is impressive and an interesting result.
One thing was non-repudiation, i.e. if I send you a digitally-signed email with a purchase order, then you can legally rely on it. There were some attempts to use similar techniques to allow trusted third parties to register documents, but nobody was willing to pay for the service.
The "nothing at stake" problem was inherent to proof-of-stake more than six years ago. It has, since then, been solved on Ethereum (and Polkadot) with Slasher, which is a penalizing system that burns (a portion) of the stake of malevolent actors, and then kicks them off the consensus layer.
Ethereum's consensus layer has been live for 1.5 years now, and there have been 175 slashing events during that time [1]. Some have been misconfigurations by small pools, others have been caused by users running their keys twice on two different machines (causing double attestations and double block proposals).
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8653269
The most effective mitigation mentioned in the paper is the use of a "trusted" CPU module such as the Secure Enclave in Apple devices. Suffice to say, that's probably not going to see widespread adoption anytime soon and doesn't consider the other security problems inherent to such enclaves.
E.g. most blockchain clients come with a genesis state baked in, which is effectively a (very old) trusted checkpoint. Someone could try a long fork attack by changing the genesis, but the attack would be obvious from the git history. (Many users might still not notice, but that goes for any attack on the client codebase.)
But my point is mainly that moving checkpoints is the standard solution to long forks, so a discussion about PoS security should probably focus on that, vs theoretical alternatives like trusted hardware.
[1] https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-wea...
https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-int...
> The reason people are dredging up this old quote is that Krugman jokingly said Bitcoin is Evil. He doesn't think it's evil, but he is skeptical that Bitcoin can be a real store of money, and actually work as a currency.
[...]
> We emailed Krugman for a comment on the quote and here's his explanation:
Krugman:
> Well, two things.
> First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.
> But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.
> And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that they don't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary economics.
Also, Krugman had to go back on his take of the internet, all I'm saying is that none can predict future and the "smartest" of us can be and often are wrong.
My point is that people presumably smarter than you, have in the past said things which turned out to be wrong. So then what evidence do you have other than your words?
At least I brought a quote to illustrate my point. You brought a subsequent explanation by the author why they were wrong. I'm expecting the same from you, in 8 years, saying how you were wrong. Thanks ahead of time.
At some point, the line always goes down. Just try to cash out before it does, and don't fool anyone to do so. See you in 8 years.
This is in no way a historically accurate statement. Thirty years ago the utility of data networks was well demonstrated. Not just the IP-based Internet but X.25 networks before and parallel to it (Tymnet etc). Data networks were only a "niche" technology because they were expensive. They increased in size and utility in step with decreasing prices.
Cryptocurrencies haven't brought anywhere close to that same utility. The only "problem" they have solved is separating rubes from real money in trade for Geoffrey dollars. Cryptocurrency has in fact trended the opposite direction from Internet technologies as they're more expensive to work with as time passes.
If cryptocurrencies (and associated technologies) were actually meant to be useful their costs would be decreasing over time allowing wider access. The fact their very design increases costs as they scale should tell you they're naked rent extraction vehicles and nothing more.
The result is that HN as a whole is quite judgemental about whether people are doing that. People here will regularly tell you that AirBnB rides on externalities, Amazon treats everyone badly, and FB is destroying democracy. Basically, HN tries to hold the world accountable to the optimistic promise of technology, and to do so we have to point out some things that aren't working well.
Crypto is no different. There's some interesting stuff in there for sure, especially if you just look at the tech. But in terms of making the world a better place, it gets held to a standard just like all the tech giant firms. At the moment there's a lot of minuses on the board and we've yet to see the positives that justify the optimism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
As others have pointed out, the HN zeitgeist regarding crypto has changed significantly over time. Several years ago folks here were clearly at the "peak of inflated expectations" phase. Currently we're in the "trough of disillusionment" phase.
The question is whether crypto will follow the rest of the curve or - as often happens but Gartner fails to note - just fall into the abyss. However, even according to the most optimistic reading, Twitter Guy is clearly several years slow on the uptake.
I think the thing to remember is that tech people see through all the hype before everyone else. People who are close to a tech will be able to tell you the endgame before someone who doesn't, because they understand the constraints of the system.
Being on HN is a bit like time traveling, you can ride on everyone who has zoomed forward into the future.
This is very true. I remember when I was fascinated by the Red programming language and at some point they started to promote some new cryptocurrency. It was the last day I even looked at it.
Edit: and a scam.
Today, it is far less clear that there is something new at hand. To the extent that blockchains enable innovation, the early wins are complete and the strengths and weaknesses of the entire ecosystem largely have become clear.
In 2014, it was rather clear that blockchains had some sort of substantial potential value, something competitive with the total amount of money circulating in the world. In 2022, cryptocurrency is worth that much. Bitcoin alone is "worth" perhaps a trillion dollars, while M1 is around 20 trillion.
What we're seeing today is a lack of clarity and direction. HN was stoked on crypto when it offered something new. Today, crypto offers a lot of pump-and-dump schemes and financial curiosities, but nothing like the promise and obvious direction it held in 2014.
Something cool and new may yet emerge -- expect HN to get real excited when it does happen.
You can't compare the liquidity of M1 with the liquidity of BTC. M1 USD is accepted everywhere, ranging from a 300M apartment on NYC's Billionaire's Row to a banana stand in Madagascar.
If you believe that BTC would get to that level of acceptance then it's still the early days.
Honestly after looking under the hood the technical part of it seems like a solution on search for a problem, unless the problem you aim to solve is wealth redistribution with the same GINI index (or even higher given the concetration of wealth in the ecosystem).
Similarly the social aspect of decentralization is a really hard sell when you have Satoshi sitting on 30B and Buterin sitting on 15B and they hold so much power.
This says it all.
What there is is people saying "here's some artificial scarcity you can buy into early and make a fortune from!"
So it's a scammer haven of minimal utility. That's why.
People talk about these topics like they "truly" understand them, when there isn't much to understand in the first place. As I have said many times already on HN - it's unnecessarily complex at the very core of it, and is often spoken about through traditional marketing jargon.
"It's the future.", "But, it's decentralized!".
An example we can look at is Crypto.com - which has invested billions upon billions of dollars into the US market. Do you really think the average Joe gives a rats ass about blockchain or decentralization - the goal of these investments is to hook people on something they don't understand.
And then milk their stupidity with cheap tricks like NFTs, bullshit investments, and scam coins that come and go on an hourly basis.
I still find the idea of decentralizing web services interesting it just seems to me that most projects heavily rely on their front end and not seldom on a centralized backend too (eg OpenSea, the platform for NFTs, which themselves in most cases are just links to centrally hosted resources, contrary to what most seem to believe). At that point, you just have a normal web app with horrendous UX. The idea that you can create protocols as sort of a public good is interesting in theory, but effectively it's still whoever owns the domain name (+ usually Discord server, Twitter handle,...) that effectively controls everything.
But there are some interesting approaches to mitigate that. I believe Aave hosts their app on IPFS now, Liquity has an incentive mechanism for front end hosters for their protocol. And there are some interesting aspects beyond decentralization, the ability to make binding promises to anyone is powerful.
Solving the double spending problem in a completely decentralized manner is quite the achievement, but rather than embrace speculation, Bitcoin should have deterred it, keeping the price low and limiting environmental impact.
Well, for something that's said to be a currency, that would be logical. But for something that's meant to be "deflationary" it isn't.
But I have to add: if you are rich enough and have money to spent, why wouldn't you believe in crypto? It's like web3: it takes a lot of knowledge to figure out what it is really about. Rich people don't have this time because they are busy. Why shouldn't we monetize this? If people really want to believe in fairy tales and it doesn't hurt anyone then you should just let them, life is probably more fun for gullible people anyways.
It also cost a lot more money than setting up your own server. The argument against non-crypto is that you have to trust a middle man. But most solutions to the problems crypto have is to create middle actors. Like NFT marketplaces, crypto exchanges that hold you wallet, and off-chain payment transaction systems which makes transactions faster.
Maybe a lot of the things I mention is not entirely correct, but that the other issue. It is hard for someone technical to learn about these things because most of the content online about crypto is written for non-techincal people.
It's been a decade. What can I do with it that isn't a variant of "here's some artificial scarcity you can buy into early to make some cash"?
- https://makerdao.com/en/ (there is a growing "real-world asset"-collateralized pool as well)
These all offer rates competitive or superior to traditional methods thanks to being able to access a global pool of capital through a single programming interface that simplifies coordination and risk sharing between counter-parties.
And another early example Valora (on the Celo network) where you can make global transfers of money with a Venmo-like experience for fees <$0.01.
(Genuinely curious about the answer) How would that be different from, or better than centralized platforms like kickstarter?
> These all offer rates competitive or superior to traditional methods
Also what do you mean by competitive rates? Note that if the borrower is getting paid interest at a rate above the market rate, the borrower is getting paid a competitive rate, but the lender is paying an uncompetitive rate.
[1] https://docs.goldfinch.finance/goldfinch/general-faq [2] https://blog.trusttoken.com/introducing-truefi-the-defi-prot... [3] https://maplefinance.gitbook.io/maple/protocol/borrowers
I browsed through all those web sites and all I see is ways of using the crypto wallets that have to be previously created through various means incompatible with each other. Let's not talk about the "be your own bank" motto which means that you have to secure your own money which is, at least scary for most people, and at most very difficult to do even for people knowledgeable with computers.
Here is something that is revolutionary and actually happened in the past 10 years: *online banks* that have no bricks-and-mortar offices! I created an account in less than 10 minutes, I have a debit card that I can use all over the world, I literally cannot spend more than what I have, and it's still a real bank which means that my account is insured if something bad ever happens. Where is the crypto equivalent?
The issue with control is trust. The answer is to enable more trust, not to reduce the control.
If you are that worried about losing the money you lent you can pay for insurance. Here are some examples.
You can have assets on chain that can be used as collateral which can be liquidated if a loan isn't paid back. Additionally lending money is not only done so people can borrow from it. For example decentralized exchanges need a lot of liquidity in order to execute trades without very much slippage. You can provide liquidity to them and they will pay out transaction fees to you in exchange.
If doing so was useless, pawnshops wouldn't exist in real life. There is value in not having to sell something and later try to rebuy it.
Borrowing and lending is the primary and most important function of finance. It allows economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption. Yet it is fundamentally impossible using blockchain technology.
a) expected to appreciate in value b) yield-bearing itself
and you don't want to sell it.
These technologies are good to have in case someday they become actually useful, but the amount of energy and money spent on them today far exceeds their usefulness and is purely hype-driven.
For example, there may be actual utility in NFTs: EU law requires that if you buy a game on e.g., steam, you should be able to lend it out, get it back, and resell it. If the EU, in a few years, were to decide games had to be portable between stores, and started actually enforcing these, it would make sense to put the actual game license key up as NFT and allow transfers.
But that's a hypothetical. It's not what's happening today. Today's excitement is purely hype.
The total energy consumption of PoW blockchains has increased global CO2 output enough that it exceeds the amount of CO2 saved by switching to renewables in the past 20 years. That's not worth it if there's such little utility in there.
[1]: https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-...
That's true. But we didn't have a hype cycle spending billions and destroying the environment for Pong. We had that only once an actual market of applications for the technology appeared.
Crypto isn't there yet, and likely won't be for the next few years. And likely none of today's chains will be used for these applications.
You know, it's not skepticism for its own sake. You can actually read through some of the critiques you encounter and then conjure your own refutations against them rather than dismiss them without digesting them. You should also pay heed to the opinions of HN'ers more-so than any other group because it's overwhelmingly comprised of objective people who are both tech and finance savvy, which a majority of people involved in crypto are neither, ironically.
Here's a good one:
Deflationary currency & the hallmarks of a greater fool scheme: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987714.
Here's a couple of my own opinions: The idea of peer-to-peer currency is ideal in theory, but it doesn't seem to work. You still get manipulation like with traditional currency, only the manipulators cannot be identified or held accountable, and there aren't hundreds of years worth of laws and regulations and systems for preventing these crimes and judging bad actors. PoW is viable but doesn't scale, unless we figure out a way to swallow whole planets-worth of fuel by 2100 every time someone wants to buy a baguette. PoS scales, but it's just reinventing banks in the most inefficient way imaginable, replete with all the centralized ills that crypto people ostensibly desire to escape.
Crypto is a new technology contending with a very old and mature one that's working well enough - finance. And though finance has some problems (nothing is perfect), crypto has solved none of them, other than fattening the wallets of a few scammers and lucky idiots.
I would love to hear of just one time where crypto solved a problem a person or business had where modern finance could not. A real example, a thing that actually happened, not a theoretical scenario. I haven't heard of one yet.
Of course, if you're married to an idea like "crypto good; skepticism bad", then no one can help you, and if that's the case, then I'd like to let you in on something (don't tell anyone!): SCMME is pumping and we're still early: great yields, stake and earn 10000% APY - you DO NOT want to miss this.'
This dude rented out a massive mansion in the middle of the city and the tickets were like some $15 only. There were a lot of people like me, but there were a lot of old people too in the crowd. They didn't look like the rich types to me. This guy literally promised 10x ROI for every dollar invested in some crypto under his own name.
He got a lot of "pre-bookings". I was curious, read more about this dude and crypto itself and realized it wasn't as useful as people hype it to be. I tried to build some applications on top of it. It always felt I had to go out of my way to make a use case for it. Eventually, that's when I realized most people who talk about crypto are marketers or scammers like this dude.
The rest of us - we are just tired of hearing it everywhere around us when it makes no sense even in certain applications.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301824
leading to this article about paid shills:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgdbx3/buying-authenticity-i...
It's almost as old as android and ios, but instead of changing the world like they did, it's perennially on the verge of something big, according to its proponents. The cryptocurrency revolution is just around the corner! And you should give us your money now!
Meanwhile the entire space is pretty much defined by scams, and economic projects built by people with a questionable grasp of economics and ethics.
And looking into the tech, well it's interesting(ish) in itself but it doesn't really solve any interesting real-world problems for me. PoW in particular seems like the most inelegant hack.
* Relying on trusted parties will always be significantly more efficient than a trustless system
* Most people don't want to manage their own money and if most people are going to really in third parties to manage their coins, how is that substantially different than the current situation?
* Being able to reverse transactions in a system is actually good when theft is common
* Crypto has a strong polarizing function: most people interested in crypto are also financially invested which makes it hard to get accurate takes from knowledgeable people
I am interested in the technology behind crypto, however, I have only seen limited use cases for it so far. The major selling point for crypto seems to be deregulation, however, having worked in Finance for over two decades I have witnessed what (too much) deregulation can result in. If crypto is here to stay, it will be end up as much regulated as money.
The early 90s internet was pretty rough too and also had a lot of annoying hype and greed that made a lot of people swear it off instead of looking closer at what it could become over time.
Some 90s engineers managed to look past the short term hype and greed problems of the early interent to see the true innovations and think long term. They did very well.
The Bitcoin whitepaper started a chain reaction of demand that produced better human friendly backups for private keys like BIP39, cheap general purpose personal hardware security modules like Ledger and Trezor, better privacy with innovations like zero knowledge proofs, greener datacenters and computational effeciency improvements to reduce energy waste, and massive improvements in quorum computing patterns so no one malicious sysadmin can manipulate societially critical network services.
Visa, Mastercard, virtually every bank, supply chain companies, governments, general sysadmin teams at companies everywhere, etc, etc, have huge think thanks harvesting and incorporating technology from decentralized value storage and governance experiments that spun out of Bitcoin.
The entire field of mathematics and cryptography has gotten a massive cash injection as a result of these too. Ask anyone that works in the cryptography departments at Universities like Stanford.
Sure, traders and people who hype things without understanding the fundamentals are annoying. They annoy me too, but I look at this from my role as a security researcher. Crypto-assets have seemingly overnight generated massive demand for security technology that can reduce theft and scams online. As a result those invested in crypto-asset technology are often light years ahead in security from your typical SaaS company in other industries. Crypto-asset holders and those against them all have a common interest in a safer internet.
We would all do well to learn to find common ground instead of taking unproductive stances against major technological advancements just because the early stage versions of them are a bit rough.
I'm sure a wave of burglaries would spark demand for better locks and alarms too, but that still doesn't make burglary itself a good thing. "Things got better because we exploited them" does not excuse the exploitation.
The above stands, even if you feel you have a superior understanding of technology. It doesn't mean you have license to generalize or an exclusive license to determine what is valuable. Others may value things differently, and that is fine.
Different strokes for different folks. Don't want to transact in cryptocurrency? You don't have to. Problem solved. Value it however you want to, but don't dismissively condemn it or generalize by calling it a scam. The claim is arrogant. Even more so when, "Because we understand tech better than..."
Sure, apart from all the energy use, and the predatory scammers and all the other bad effects on society this stuff seems to promote.
But sure, other than those things, problem solved!
Maybe under these circumstances we could dismiss the negative outcomes of regulation and central planning. Until then, we live in the real world, where utopian dreams are not within our reach.
Ironically enough, it is the regulation which you opine for which creates the value for cryptocurrency. Want to pay a user 0.00001 cents? Not with Paypal. The regulatory overhead is too high. Want to transact online with no ID? Not possible with banks or traditional instruments. Have a problem with government issued currency? Sorry, you cannot transact at all!
The comments here citing the technical problems of cryptocurrency miss these points. The generalizations about energy usage dismiss altcoins which have innovated beyond these issues.
The last resort of these arguments always backpedals to, "But that's not the popular usage of cryptocurrency"
The point stands, the generalization is inaccurate, presumptive and arrogant.
> Maybe under these circumstances we could dismiss the negative outcomes of regulation and central planning.
Who did that? Not me. But neither do I knee-jerk believe that effective regulation is impossible, nor fall into the binary-thinking trap that it must either be 100% effective or it's worthless.
> Want to pay a user 0.00001 cents?
Nope.
> Want to transact online with no ID?
Nope, and there are great reasons that this sort of thing is generally not allowed.
> The generalizations about energy usage dismiss altcoins which have innovated beyond these issues.
But they haven't solved the issue of bitcoin burning the energy. That's like saying "shut up about cars polluting, we have tesla now!". Sure, and when every car is a tesla, that changes things. But every car is not a tesla, and every coin is not an altcoin which has solved the problem.
The post I responded too said "Don't want to transact in cryptocurrency? You don't have to. Problem solved."
But this problem is not solved by not transacting in it, and is not solved by "altcoins which have innovated beyond these issues", because it is ongoing despite these things.
So you can take your "inaccurate, presumptive and arrogant" and apply that to your own arguments. They don't address reality, and their superior tone is laughable when it goes alongside what is effectively handwaving.
Apply a little imagination here. "I don't want to send 0.00001 cent transactions" becomes, "I don't think anyone else should be able to"
It isn't hard to see where this paternalistic frame of understanding leads. "I know what is best for the larger society, my values are the only valid ones, everyone else must adhere and agree"
If you cannot see where this goes astray, there's very little to say here on the Internet. The authoritarian impulse is more dangerous in my view than any of the imagined cryptocurrency boogeymen.
>"altcoins which have innovated beyond these issues", because it is ongoing despite these things.
Then perhaps we shouldn't generalize about all cryptocurrencies?
Finally, let us consider that all of the horrible things you cite are valid. What is the practical alternative to transacting in cryptocurrency, if not central bank currencies?
Does holding USD or other central bank currencies not finance wars around the world? If climate doom is horrible and non-violent transactions threaten you, how bad is war in your opinion?
Again the argument presented is an appeal to utopia. Even if we accept that cryptocurrency is dangerous and horrible, the present alternative isn't great either. Apply the same standard of logic and sloppy generalizations to central bank currencies.
>According to Rummel, democide surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide#:~:text=democide%20su...
Apply a little logic here, "I don't want to send 0.00001 cent transactions" becomes "I don't think cryptocurrencies are the only way to achieve this, or even a good way, given their other costs to society"
I'm not even going to bother engaging with the rest of your post, you're stuck in a binary mode of thinking in which any and all regulation is necessarily 'paternalistic' and evil, and from such a skewed viewpoint, your conclusions play out.
To summarise - my assertion is that the problems with cryptocurrencies are not solved by merely not taking part, which is what the OP of this thread argued. Your response has been a set of straw men and unfounded assumptions, and a bunch of pointing at other things to say they're worse. This is not really a counter-argument so much as a lot of noise.
>> Want to transact online with no ID?
>Nope, and there are great reasons that this sort of thing is generally not allowed.
It is true that I generally dislike regulation, but the same regulations you advocate for are the same regulations preventing the functionality provided by crypto. You then try to make the largest possible exaggeration, by asserting that I am against all regulations, therefore you cannot engage in the discussion. Backpedal. Yet you are supporting these same regulations, in this same thread.
Binary thinking? Strawmen? You construct the premises which make it impossible, then call it a strawman. You set these premises and then call it black and white, all or nothing.
Perhaps a more reasoned argument would be outlining how you intend to reduce regulatory overhead so state backed debt instruments can compete with cryptocurrency on the merits.
As you are preoccupied with the moral ills (energy consumption, voluntary transactions) of specific cryptocurrencies, it would behoove you to explain how the incentives of central bank currencies can be changed. Ideally they wouldn't be used for morally perilous outcomes like war, or in your case, excessive energy use by the military.
Otherwise, what are you advocating for here? What are the practical alternatives to cryptocurrency? Engage in the discussion.
In general, if you happen to have a large stake in crypto or are depending on crypto to make you significant returns, you are more likely to be pro-crypto.
If you have no stake, it’s likely because you never saw a point to cryptocurrency and never invested, so you will likely be anti-crypto or neutral at best.
The technobabble of blockchain tech does not work on highly tech-literate people of Hackernews, we know this is basically useless technology in its current form. At it’s peak it would essentially be nothing more than a globally distributed database anyone could read from or write to. But inherently this has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.
It would be a red flag IMO if hackernews was pro-crypto.
As far as I'm concerned, cryptocurrency already has a killer app: it increases economic freedom in some parts of the world.
Is there more? I'm sure there is. But from what I've read, I'm not going to need a kitchen sink anymore because crypto's gonna solve it.
There are a lot of neat technologies in the world with a lot of applications. Crypto is one family of such technologies. Neat stuff, but doesn't apply to everything. And I'll happily be proven wrong, if it comes to that.
Enough time has passed. I've seen enough. They are simply scams. They will never deliver and they have no place in my news feed.
Another way of saying that is "If you can not hold it in your hot little hand or touch it, it is not yours at all.". So don't expend your work or cash on it.
But I think the answer is that be people here understand what it is from a technical perspective; you would get the same level of anti-crypto if you went and asked a bunch of computer scientists.
Bitcoin is like a real time index measuring the health of the cult of Ayn Rand and you can bet on how the cult is faring and if it's expanding or contracting.
Much like Tesla is a real time index measuring the health of the cult of Elon Musk and you can bet on how the cult is faring and if it's expanding or contracting.
If you are interested in sociopolitical and cultural phenomenons you have a way to make money off that expertise for the first time in decades.
If we get Saylor vs. Bezos in 2024 lots of people building prediction markets for political purposes are gonna be disappointed, because at that point people would just bet on Bitcoin or Amazon stock according to their assesment of which cult would prevail and who is gonna win.
Don't get me wrong, I actually like the Blockchain Technology but I kind of have to agree with the notion that most of the "advanced" Crypto stuff is still looking for an actual problem to solve, except for Bitcoin and some of the other OG coins, the purpose of which I kind of sympathize with.
I'm not old, you're just looking for an excuse :)
One reason might be that HN is just too woke. Probably you even get censored here for saying that men are not women.
That’s why they don’t understand the problems that crypto is solving.
If you look at the comments here, you’ll see that many comments are saying that crypto isn’t doing anything useful.
However, crypto is literally solving the extreme problem of infinitely printable FIAT money and very slow and expensive cross-border transfers, which might be the most impfactful invention of the last 2 decades.
On top of that, crypto adds transparency, accountability, interoperability, decreases fraud in every possible market.
However, hacker news doesn’t understand that, because they simply don’t global finance, global markets, business and moneys.
It might be an extreme problem to you, not to everyone else.
> very slow and expensive cross-border transfers
This has been solved again and again by different companies, be it wise.com or others.
> On top of that, crypto adds transparency, accountability, decreases fraud on nearly every consumer product.
Except for the fact that nobody can get their money back after they have been scamed. There is no authority to complain to or reverse a transaction. Wich makes it useless for the masses.
> which might be the most impfactful invention of the last 2 decades.
This is why people are tired of crypto, it has been over 10 years and it has't really changed anything. Crypto enthusiast think that, but it didn't and it won't.
So mass inflation is only an extremely problem to me? This is probably the most false claim possible.
> This has been solved again and again by different companies, be it wise.com or others
Except they constantly freeze user accounts for no reason.
> Except for the fact that nobody can get their money back after they have been scamed. There is no authority to complain to or reverse a transaction. Wich makes it useless for the masses.
Of course there is, all the exchanges have to comply by with law enforcement and that’s what they are doing. This way, since the transactions are all public and can be traced endlessly it’s very difficult to evade law enforcement through scams.
Thats also why this $4.5B scam was caught https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/nyc-coupl...
Of course inflation is a problem, but saying crypto could solve it is not true. But even if it could, why would anybody who cares about inflation use crypto, when the value fluctuates so much?
> Except they constantly freeze user accounts for no reason.
And crypto exchanges disappear with all your money. I am not saying there are no problems, just that this problem (simple currency exchange) is solved.
> Of course there is, all the exchanges have to comply by with law enforcement and that’s what they are doing. This way, since the transactions are all public and can be traced endlessly it’s very difficult to evade law enforcement through scams.
So instead of a bank I have a "exchange". All my transactions are public (which is not a positive) and if someone exchanges cryptos from bitcoin to monero then you are still fu*ed.
But ignoring all things we said. All crypto enthusiasts have one important saying: "Not your keys not your crypto". Go ahead and try to explain to someone, how to safely secure their keys and that all their money is bound to them. That if lost/stolen, they have nothing. Crypto makes things (for the avg. user) less secure, more complicated without any benefit. If you fear the government or have specific reasons, go ahed use it, nobody is saying there are no use-cases, just that it's not a useful system for the masses.
Inflation happens because central banks have been trying to fix structural problems by printing more money, and this time it didn't work out. Sometimes it has worked. If they didn't do that, the problems would still be there. If we didn't have the possibility to print more money, we couldn't even try out if that helps. Ultimately, the structural problems would be worse if financial system was ran on cryptos.
Except crypto does nothing to prevent that; and the printability of fiat money is controlled by a number of systems from historians pointing at what happens if you don’t to international treaty to democratic accountability; and the multitude of different cryptocurrencies means it has an echo of the same problem overall only with no accountability, and even within single currencies it has one-dollar-one-vote rather than one-person-one-vote accountability of a democracy.
> and very slow and expensive cross-border transfers, which might be the most impfactful invention of the last 2 decades.
My banks do this at zero cost. Literally zero. Slowest time it a few minutes to show up as a notification on the other bank, normally it’s about as fast as the time it takes iOS to show a notification banner.
> On top of that, crypto adds transparency, accountability, decreases fraud on nearly every consumer product.
Bank can’t refund you if you get ripped off when there’s no bank.
The EU did more to solve that issue than crypto ever did.
15'000€ in under 10 seconds, for free, across the entire SEPA zone.
Converting fiat into crypto, transferring it, converting it back still takes far longer. And keeping money as crypto isn't a working solution, because the currencies are so volatile.
Not every crypto solution adds transparency and accountability, look at monero or mixers in other chains.
And then there's the issue with deflation. Inflation is something valuable, because it means doing something today is valued more than what you've done in the past. It encourages people to spend money, to do something with it, instead of saving it forever.
The question is not really about what are the downsides of FIAT money. All solutions have problems. Even if cryptos could solve all problems that FIAT has, that does not mean it is a better solution to the problem that FIAT solves.
The question is really about what problem money solves in the first place. The foremost purpose of is to distribute resources. Money is a completely social construct that does not have any value itself, all value is derived from the promises of those who have resources make. Real world resources, like oil, are what ultimately matters. As a side note, this is also why the Russian sanctions don't really work as well as some people hope for, and they are ultimately a bad idea.
Anyways, I think it's fair to say say that the current financial system has been extremely successful compared to any earlier financial system, such as the gold standard. Everyone who understands finance even a tiny bit knows that a system with finite money supply like gold does not solve the actual problem the current financial system is solving. It may solve some issues that money has, such as efficiency, transparency, and transfer costs, but as a tool for distributing resources it's useless.
So the comparison you are making is meaningless. Even if those problems would be solved, it won't solve the problem money is actually solving.
On top of that, the problems you mention are not problems of money. They are problems of people, of human nature. New money will not fix them.
That sentence literally refutes itself.
Fiat currency can solve problem Alpha while having itself a problem Beta, and something else can solve problem Beta without solving problem Alpha.
1: It is hard to grasp.
And the majority of tech people have a hard time coping with the fact that there is something they can't grasp while some others do. We tech people think of us as smart. So accepting that others are smarter in some areas is hard for us. Especially when it is in the tech area.
There are investors who see value in crypto and put hundreds of billions of dollars where their mouth is?
It's easier to say "Bah! Idiots!" then to accept that there is something that is beyond ones mental reach.
2: Some people got very rich by grasping it early on.
This creates envy and the fear of loss. You can see a similar disdain for technology in programmers and how they think about programming languages they are not used to. They don't know the benefits of the other language and they are invested in an alternative. That creates a strong "with us or against us" drive.
can you please tell us what's hard to grasp?
A block chain is an immutable data-structure due to the fact that there's more computing power out there that proves the data is integral.
you get "coin" for doing the work. People then trade coin like they trade anything else.
What is there not to get? if bitcoin is an immutable data-structure, what is that data structure holding?
Your statement is like saying the internet is cables between machines so they can morse code each other.
Another way to look at the internet is to see all the applications that will sit on top of "machines morse coding each other". And how it will change the economy and society. That is the hard part.
Yes, and the complexity is not necessary, it is there to obscure conceal the scams and central vacuity of the idea.
This idea, that complexity is a hallmark of scams, is discussed (in other contexts) in more details here
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/04/house-always-wins/#are-yo...
What's hard to grasp? The "blockchain" is just a Merkle tree, like git, which much of the industry uses every day. You build a tree of hash codes by using the hash of the old tree as an input to a new tree. It's a clever data structure and you can do cool things with it.
All the blockchain adds to this is a distributed consensus system. This allows deciding what the HEAD of the tree is without needing a central, authoritative server. But honestly, in 99.9% of applications, an authoritative server maintaining HEAD is fine. Pay some law firm or specialized clearing house to do it.
The only other aspects of crypto is that it creates a deflationary currency with ruinously-high transaction costs, plus a permanent public record of every transaction. Oh, and starting with MtGox, most of the immitation "banks" have periodically disappeared with everyone's money. This is usually followed by Bitcoin users angrily demanding government fraud investigations.
In the meantime, all those proof of work contributions contribute to global warming.
Back when Bitcoin was new, it was an adorable technological dystopia that amused libertarians in tech. As long as it was basically real-life science fiction roleplay, it did little enough harm.
But then "crypto" promotors started treating it like some kind of timeshare condo scam, and started advertising heavily to elderly non-technical users. And all I have to say to that is, if you don't want to get treated like a timeshare scammer, don't act like one.