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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

> it was a lie the whole time.

how many of these y'all need before you learn: all crypto is a scam. It never was anything else, it never will be anything else because it can not be anything else.

There's an awful lot of fancy piled on the simple fact that all crypto"currencies" are negative sum games. The only disagreement is whether this is an entirely new type of scam , a "Nakamoto Scheme" or the difference between these and the classic Ponzi are irrelevant like the difference between a CRT and a HDTV and then we are looking at a Ponzi.

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Distributed ledgers are not a scam, and our true best hope for anti-corruption.

I would like every elected official to have all their income and spending listed on a public ledger.

True accountability of representatives to those they purport to represent will solve so many problems, both in terms of the types of people incentivized to become public servants, and also in terms of public understanding of spending and waste.

All this "crypto" is intellectual warm-up for what is to come, I'd highly suggest looking at rollups (what I would describe as ledgers within ledgers) which are delving into the true possibilities of next-to-zero cost of immutable transaction records.

>Distributed ledgers are not a scam, and our true best hope for anti-corruption.

They are not a scam, but they are almost completely useless

>I would like every elected official to have all their income and spending listed on a public ledger.

A public ledger is not necessarily a decentralised ledger. This could be accomplished by any bank account controlled by a US politician to send the payments made to a US goverment controlled webapp that's then publicly accessible (by FOI request, if necessary). No blockchain, no decentralised woo needed. What you have stated is a POLTICIAL problem, and those require POLITICAL solutions. No new or speculative technology, of any sort, is needed to accomplish the problem statement.

Ok, why is this statement not true then:

> There's an awful lot of fancy piled on the simple fact that all "currencies" are negative sum games.

Because it is currency itself that you measure everything else against. What my sentence meant is that without transaction fees it would be a zero sum game -- ie if you undid all crypto-money transactions then nothing is left -- but with transaction fees their sum is a negative number. But you need to measure this in something.

Note how stocks are decidedly not like this because if you undid all stock-money transactions the sum would be positive because of buybacks and dividends.

> Because it is currency itself that you measure everything else against.

So what? I cannot see the significance of that. There are many possible measures of value.

> if you undid all transactions then nothing is left -- but with transaction fees their sum is a negative number. But you need to measure this in something.

Yes? So what's the important difference between cryptocurrencies and traditional currencies?

The thing is you can buy anything in this world for money. That's what money is for. Thus, we measure these things in money.

I don’t see how it answers those questions.

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