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Comment by wikitopian | Hacker News Reader

Cocaine is great stuff, with a lot of medical uses, safe enough to include in popular soft drinks.

But when you introduce a delivery system that short circuits your brain's reward circuitry, it's incredibly dangerous and destructive.

Ponzi tokenomics are the crack rocks of blockchain technology, which is itself really nifty. The only thing that can and will stop the tokenomics craze is a popular backslash, which is building.

And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.

Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive. And smart contracts won't find any general utility unless and until one arrives that offers reliable homomorphically encrypted private smart contract resolution.

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Your other points were good, but

> And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.

Maybe you missed the irony of using a term that was coined and invented in traditional markets, but they seem to be fine and not very "slimed".

Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.

> Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.

The question is: what would the market cap of crypto be if a bunch of novice investors weren't lured in by scams and promises of 20% APY? I suspect it would be a lot lower than what we see today. Indeed, how many crypto ecosystem participants would care about BTC if they weren't expecting to get outsized returns on their investments?

Without the scams to pump up the value, I don't think cryptocurrency would have legs. Not many people care about Bitcoin's ideological goals (breaking free from fiat, etc.), and the genuine use cases that work today (mostly remittances and cheap wire transfers) have a limited audience.

> The question is: what would the market cap of crypto be if a bunch of novice investors weren't lured in by ..

Umm ... what? Why is that the question? Because you have an agenda? Sure ok, but you haven't provided any information to the context of the topic of conversation -- that crypto scams are more-or-less rehashes of scams in traditional finance.

A friend did an thing where he shadowed a neurologist for a week. He saw the neurologist use cocaine in an arm surgery: its a vasoconstrictor (stops bleeding) and local anesthetic. Dabbed a little on the cut and it stopped bleeding or hurting. Pretty amazing.

If it wasn't for the pesky reward-system hijacking, cocaine would probably be in everyone's emergency first aid kit.

> Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive.

No.

That ship has already sailed and it is not early days anymore; just like the failure of the free software movement or the privacy movement who have both failed to stop spyware and privacy invasive technology from proliferating and proxied / developed by the majority of big tech.

Why is it that regulators are chasing after privacy tools / coins, like Tornado.cash, Monero, etc and not attempting to ban the others? The regulators have made it totally clear that they don't want these certain coins / tools to be around or used as a side benefit by scammers, criminals, etc.

I would say only the compliant few coins, crypto projects, etc that comply with regulations will survive and it will allow companies to accept crypto and use it safely.

Regulators absolutely love blockchain btw. A public ledger with a machine readable consistent interface that everyone's activity can be data mined through? Hell yes.

The privacy coins are going to get axed first. The rest are just tooling up to see what scumbags law enforcement can rake in with CI jobs.

Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.

> Regulators absolutely love blockchain btw. A public ledger with a machine readable consistent interface that everyone's activity can be data mined through? Hell yes.

Indeed they do. As long as they are able to see everyone's transactions and also identify and trace up illegal transactions easily, why would they ban it? Of course they won't hence they instead went after the privacy coins and will keep a compliant few that will survive regulations.

> Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.

Correct, and crypto is here to stay, just like spyware and closed-source software is. Anyone who thinks that crypto or closed-source software would go away entirely or having all of it get banned completely 100% is also already on the highest quality of cocaine or LSD to dedicate their whole life to try stopping all of it completely.

> a popular backslash

That will help many of us escape, but for normal people, it will just be part of the path.

Bravo.

> privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain

They don't deliver on one aspect, which is full auditability. I think all existing privacy chains are completely broken by knowledge of the discrete log of one particular curve point.

I'm not sure I fully understand how XMR guarantees fungibility of its token, but I think a big part of it is the construction of ring signatures to prove transactions are zero sum, with a pool of participating signers that all have statistically valid plausible deniability. Start here maybe https://web.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/clsag.html?

I fully understand how privacy coins like XMT audit their supply. They assume that Pedersen commitments r*G+v*H can only be openend in one way. Which is false if the discrete log of H w.r.t. G is known. I said "I think" because there might by privacy coins not based on Pedersen commitments that I'm just not aware of.

Sure enough https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/pedersen-com...

Whelp, I'm gonna be bullish on some kind of move from cryptocurrency to a cypherpunk / plan9-esque Renaissance of distributed social computing, maybe taking ideas from e lang, and sprinkling in some web of trust auditable ledger if its appropriate and get the heck out of (web3) Dodge.

Dude, have you read about some of the early fuckery around stock markets circa 1800's or so? I forget who but one of the great American business barons fought off a hostile takeover by cajoling his share certificate printer to print more shares.

I don't think very highly of crypto but if the stocks can shrug that off, so it can too.

stocks have some inherent value as a holder of value, crypto currentcies don't and don't have any utility beyond making the ponzi schemers at the top a bunch of money whereas companies actually make stuff that people use.

At least some of them...

There´s a reason why in the 90s there was huge SPAM on pumping penny-stocks. Right now, there are a bunch of crypto-currencies that do hold some inherent value (ETH, Golem, FileCoin, STORJ, Augur, Polygon, Polkadot, are some of them), and I am sure with time, more will appear.

What is inherently valuable about any one of those examples?

Fellow DERO holder I see. ;)

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