Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogogmad | Hacker News Reader

This might be a purely stylistic criticism, but it's hard to take articles seriously when they lack professionalism: "Why all cryptocurrencies should die in a fire". I can see the editor smiling and rolling his eyes when making that title. It was cute at some point, but now it's painful, and it's unprofessional.

View on HN

It's a casual interview, not a dissertation. Beside the tone is the right one, crypto does a lot of damage to the planet and society for the benefit of a few already wealthy people, while pretending to be doing the opposite.

Surely, yes, but the whole social metasystem does a lot of damage to the planet for the benefit of the few, so why scapegoat one part of the system?

Because it is wasteful by design and gets more wasteful as it scales. Transaction fees are onerous and transactions themselves are excruciatingly slow. Then the deflationary nature of cryptocurrencies makes them terrible currencies. It makes more economic sense to hold them than spend them.

The rare events where their use doesn't involve crime are overwhelmed by the criminal uses.

>Because it is wasteful by design and gets more wasteful as it scales

Plenty of other things are wasteful by design, like military for example. The more military things we build, the stronger we'll be. Same with BTC hashrate, the more power the stronger the network.

Our entire fossil fuel driven economy is also "wasteful by design".

Fossil fuels are used to make just about every thing you touch. That's the opposite of waste. They're utilized. They can't be replenished but they're certainly not wasted.

Things being so cheap due to fossil fuels that you buy new things instead of fixing them is wasteful. And there is value in CCs, even if you personally don't find them valuable. They money that is zero trust, private, and eliminates some mechanisms of manipulation (inflation). Let's not forget that bitcoin grew out of the financial crisis and the mismanagement of monetary policy leading up to it.

Have you ever heard of the phrase "Whataboutism"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com