Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

“the most impressive innovation we have seen with crypto has been in separating average people from their money.”

That seems about right. It's just amazing how many crypto scams there are. White's site has a new big ripoff almost every day. You can go back and read the web sites of some of those crypto companies selling to consumers. They deliberately misrepresented the risk. In some cases they out and out lied, claiming FDIC insurance they didn't have.

As for Web3, that's a mess. None of the NFT metaverses are any good. Most of them don't even exist, to the point that you can log in. Many of them promised to go live in Q2-Q4 2022. We're there. Many of those guys are going to have serious trouble with the SEC, which is now hammering about one crypto business a week. Of the ones that work, Decentraland has about 600 concurrent users, and in a day, about 30 of them do a transaction. The others are even smaller. $4 billion market cap. Right.

View on HN

Web3 being somehow related to VR is a clear sign of the ultimate strawman. NFT’s are a tiny innovation, VR is completely unrelated, Web3 on HN is a derogatory term leaning off the assumption that it’s focus is NFTs and VR video games.

Wat.

Metaverse is web3. Metaverse is also VR. Its not a strawman if there's a big, well known example that markets itself as an example of the thing being criticised.

What isn't web3 is the absence of a counterexample.

"Web3" didn't start to refer to anything VR or metaverse-related until very recently. For years, it's been the vague promise of a decentralized system, enabled by handwavey blockchain technobabble.

But now, with Meta's metaverse being hyped to high heaven, but also proving to be pretty much a nothingburger, suddenly web3 means metaverse, too? I smell shenanigans.

Also tells you about our society where money rules. Most everyone wants more than they have yet will vote for every thing that gives them less today for some theoretical future of being mega wealthy that will never happen.

I remember how many people were still cheerleading it up to a year ago. Folks would have been better off reading “Black Swan” by Nicholas Taleb and save some money.

The irony is that Taleb was a big promoter of bitcoin for many years, and even wrote the forward for the first edition of "The bitcoin standard" praising it for being anti-fragile and a black swan event that mainstream financial experts will fail to understand.

Around 2020 he fell out with some of the btc community due to their covid stance (he was and is very anti-anti-lockdowns and anti-anti-vaxers). Since then he gradually moved first to btc skeptic then to a major anti-btc figure.

He seems anti BTC Twitter. BTC isn't a scam.

> BTC isn't a scam.

Is it not? I think "scam" fits well.

Unless buying illegal things on the Internet - but BTC is not anonymous, so even then

BTC is open source, decentralized, and you can mine it. The existing coins were mined. People may use the tool for scams, but that doesn't mean that the tech itself is a scam.

By contrast, many alts were pre-mined or similar and initial coins were sold or given away via airdrops. Thus, the developers had greater control over the network.

To be fair, there was initially some very justified excitement around cryptos and BTC in particular. Once the drawbacks became obvious, it's totally fair to change one's mind.

Am not sure you can give him that much benefit of doubt. He was promoting btc heavily way after the initial excitement of crypto up until the end of 2019 (he gave a public lecture in Lebanon where he suggested it and blockchain technology are a good safe haven and solution for the country's currency crisis).

He was basically a fan and promoter from 2015 - 2020, that is a really long time for a critical thinker like him not to notice the flaws. I think he was blinded by his ever growing fanbase he had in the BTC community.

Thanks for the explanation, I'm not terribly familiar with the case so my point of view is not so refined.

BTC didn't really go above $12k in 2019 so anyone who bough in then and held would be ahead still (at about $19k now in the current slump). Maybe the flaws weren't that bad.

He also seem against the move from Bitcoin as usable money to just a store of value.

The market cap of crypto went from 0 to 1 trillion USD over the last 13 years and created peer to peer, decentralized, electronic cash with properties varying by implementation.

I’m having trouble seeing how this is separating average people from their money. That’s not an assertion substantiated by data. It’s sensationalism based on news headlines about crypto scams.

Most of the 0 to 1 trillion has been Bitcoin and Eth going up. Amongst the 30,000 or so other cryptos there has been a fair bit of money separating.

> Most of the 0 to 1 trillion has been Bitcoin and Eth going up.

Since it is useless, buying crypto is "being separated from your money".

Totaly

> a new big ripoff almost every day > the SEC, which is now hammering about one crypto business a week

This is still an impressive imbalance. Though I have to admit I have heard nothing from european regulators....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com