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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

What reason would anyone have to believe in their benevolence? It would be safer to believe in and use their greed and self preservation.

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If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value. It is your greed that is guiding you, not your benevolence.

Eh, I think it’s naive to believe that greed is sufficient protection. Owning a bunch of ETH so you can set ETH on fire would be a waste of money, only so long as the person setting the fire didn’t value the mischief more than the ETH. I don’t see why nation states wouldn’t attack each other by burning down the crypto assets of citizens, either.

> I think it’s naive to believe that greed is sufficient protection.

I never said that, I actually agree with you. I was just explaining GP's point to parent who in my opinion missed it.

Ah, apologies. I read you as agreeing with and clarifying GP's argument.

One problem with this - speculative assets are at least partially valuable because of their volatility - their ability to appreciate quickly. Even if eth is untrusted for long term value, so long as it has the potential to make money for someone in the short term it's going to continue to get transactions.

And, as always, sometimes folks just want to watch the world burn. It's a relatively low investment (~$50k) to become a validator, and the fine's only about $7k (.5 eth).

Imagine the damage someone with a few million (say, some baby-boomer who just sold their California duplex) could do if they wanted to.

> If you own a large amount of a currency,

you rug pull, divest into hard cash at peak, <any of the dozens of ways people with large amounts of cryptocurrencies get rid of those>

Google short selling.

If you hold eth, you are long eth.

Not really, you can be long in one market, and short in the derivatives market, and your net position be short. You'd be holding eth, but you'd be short.

not really, in that case you have two separate positions, one long and one short.

If you make money when the price goes down then your overall position is short.

The point is that it can be profitable to crash the price even though you're holding the asset at the same time.

> it can be profitable to crash the price even though you're holding the asset at the same time.

in that case, the less you hold the more profitable it is. I'm not sure I get your point...

The point is that your assumption

> If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value.

is fundamentally flawed. You can own a large amount of a currency and profit from it losing its value.

OK, now I see what you mean, yes I agree with you then. But I think you are trying to generalise my comment - it wasn't an absolute statement, I was just trying to tell parent that in my opinion they misunderstood the grandparent's point.

thanks, I work at a financial institution, so I "Googled" it a few times, short selling is based on borrowing the underlying securities - not owning them - or alternatively owning a(n often bespoke) derivative, related to those securities, which behaves as a short.

If you own a security you are long, not short.

No one would use a network with this level of centralization, or at least, it would be unwise to.

like a 51% attack on a PoW through pool conspiracy, it will be impossible to tell if (when?) the network is controlled by a single entity.

By the time the public has figured out the plot, it's too late: the attacker has already run to the exchanges with double-spent coins.

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