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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

The one interesting thing about all the rehashed boring arguments is that, despite being 13 years old, it's still so, so new that even smart, technically minded people like the HN readership will still bag it for not being whatever they heard it was attempting to be when it started.

Bitcoin is a new thing, sitting on the shoulders of the giant technologies we're otherwise so proud of - all us highly paid software industry folks.

But no, it's worthless, it shouldn't exist, it's not worth any further time or effort or research, fuck it off my fucking planet.

It's so weird this attitude so prevalent on HN.

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> The one interesting thing about all the rehashed boring arguments is that, despite being 13 years old, it's still so, so new that even smart, technically minded people like the HN readership will still bag it for not being whatever they heard it was attempting to be when it started.

That's not really what people are "bagging" it for. Or at least, not why I'm "against" crypto.

> But no, it's worthless, it shouldn't exist, it's not worth any further time or effort or research, fuck it off my fucking planet.

I think the technology is super interesting as a technology (I'm talking of blockchains here). I think there is currently one solid, known use case for that technology - cryptocurrencies. I'm not sure how "beneficial" they are overall, but I'm not so sure how beneficial Facebook is either. They are for sure providing some value to some people.

My big problem is that for the last 8 years, I've been hearing about how the Blockchain technology will solve other problems, revolutionize other fields. And as of now, that just isn't the case. There are no other problems that blockchain solves that can't be solved better with other technologies.

I'm not saying that no further time or effort to research this should be done, not at all. I'm just saying that people claiming there currently are use cases for it are wrong, and pushing back against them.

Decentralisation is the thing. But most people don't care about that, or even really understand what it means.

If people don't even care about the privacy of their personal data, they're already two layers away from caring about decentralisation.

I remember what people in 90s were talking about the future of internet. All the crazy ideas and how it will solve everything in a crazy way. But yet we are here, using internet in a completely different way (I mean, nobody were talking about Tiktok back then, right?). But even more people were saying that internet have no use case and no future. That's normal for every disrupting technology, it doesn't just directly applies to the existing things, but brings something new instead.

You are incorrect twice. First internet usage really didn't change much from the 90s, the fact that we have wider pipes, didn't change content types at all. Second - NOBODY was saying that internet has no use case or no future in the 90s. Tokenbros are just retconning the history saying such bullshit.

Lol, the good old crypto-bro attitude that uses the "you don't know what you're talking about, stop bashing the technology". Except you are mixing the technology (blockchain) and the usage (crypto).

On HN the consensus is that every current usage is either worthless, utopic or scammy. Nobody denies the technology. A recent post on HN about AWS and blockchain ended with the following sentence : "the blockchain is a solution looking for a problem"

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Block...

Those things that claim to use blockchain but don't have the crypto are marketing technologies that could be better served by other and better solutions. Blockchain and crypto are intertwined and one without the other doesn't exist.

As a distributed database technology, the blockchain and its mediocre transactions per second are quite unimpressive.

Now High-Frequency Trading is technically impressive, the ridiculous lengths they go to to shave microseconds are awe-inspiring. Too bad it's for a purpose that is almost as devoid of redeeming value to society as cryptocurrencies.

> "you don't know what you're talking about, stop bashing the technology".

It would be nice if any of them understood finance or just bank panics and financial contagion.

It seems to be the people / groups starting companies offering cryptocurrency services that don't understand that stuff and fall into well-signposted-by-history traps.

People then fall into the (equally?) well-signposted-by-history trap of thinking that any company is trustworthy.

Thirteen years is a very long time in technology. The "problem" with HN is that many of us have been around since the start of cryptocurrency, and have a very deep rather than superficial understanding of the technology. That means we have seen how the cycles work out (start out with something reasonable, e.g. a system for "small casual transactions" in Bitcoin's case, fail to deliver, change promises, fail to deliver, and rinse and repeat, each time with a new generation of greater fools) and understand that each new wave of promises are impossible to deliver for various technical and in some cases non-technical reasons. Unfortunately the current generation of proponents just don't have the depth of experience to understand this, and are blinded by false hope that this is their generation's breakthrough technology, so are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forebears. FWIW I don't think it'll go to zero or disappear - it satisfies a niche in some human's psyche to try to "get rich quick" with little effort - just like we've had Multi Level Marketing schemes like Mary Kay for decades, and casinos and various forms of gambling for centuries.

It's a long time in technology, but that's just the foundation upon which it's built. The industry it's placing itself alongside to compete with is one of the pillars of society, and as such 13 years is a long time to survive in competition, but also a short time in which to create a defendable position.

It took 20 years to go from the car phone suitcase in Lethal Weapon to the first release iPhone.

By the mid-1990s, tens—if not hundreds—of million of people had mobile phone subscriptions, and those who didn’t clearly understood the tech offered humanity a profoundly new ability: communicate anywhere, all the time.

What’s the crypto equivalent?

https://img.phemex.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/09074656/t...

https://peterdavidconley.com/crypto-vs-internet-adoption/

Estimates I could find online put the number of bitcoin users between 25-150 million.

Many HN'ers like myself were crypto enthusiasts in the early days, because there were so many promising things it seemed like it could be used for.

Over the last 13 years, every last use case with the arguable exception of Ponzi schemes and ransomware scams has turned to shit. Payments, store of value, distributed computing, NFTs, nope all across the board. You can't even buy drugs with Bitcoin anymore!

You want drugs you use Monero these days (or so I understand). Dark net markets are still pretty big (or so I'm lead to believe).

Payments, store of value, and NFTs I don't think has turned to shit.

Distributed computing I don't know much about, but if you're talking smart contracts that seems to be pretty healthy and well, but if you're talking decentralized AWS then I think there's a ways to go before that's a realistic expectation.

Payments, can work well in certain scenarios and better / worse for different cryptocurrencies. Cross border large value transfers Bitcoin can still be a cheaper and faster option than some (countries) banks.

Store of value is an interesting one, more so because we're (maybe?) near a local bottom down 80-odd percent from all time highs, but on a single line from inception to now, it's outperformed much of the stock market (I have no direct citation for this, but have heard it from a number of not necessarily trustworthy sources).

The whole stock market being down a large percentage takes some of the stink off Bitcoin's store of value argument as well.

Gold seems fairly consistent; boring, but boring can be good as an investment or store of value.

NFTs, that's all just in fashion mode at the moment, the new application of cryptocurrency / blockchain. Better applications of NFTs will surely appear.

> It's so weird this attitude so prevalent on HN.

If you want a quick rundown of what might be happening...

People have a very finely tuned sense of who is winning status games. It is clear that some people in crypto are winning by several billion dollars. Add to that a (fairly reasonable) argument that there is cheating afoot in this status game and you get people arcing up trying to do get something done about it. Very natural response - people don't like cheaters and do play status games.

I think they're mistaken though - I'm put in mind of Utopia, Limited (a classic 1893 production) lampooning the obvious stupidity of a limited liability corporation. Turned out limited liability corporations were a game changer and extremely beneficial to society.

I mean, it could also be happening because people are genuinely evaluating the technology and deciding it's not worthwhile, right? It could just be status games that's making people say things, but it could also be... reality.

I'm finding less and less that people are driven by reality.

True. But if you use that idea every time someone disagrees with you, you'll never learn when you're wrong.

Crypto is regularly turning up on HN with tides of negative comments, including people calling for it to be banned. We've got this article theorising how it will go to zero, including calls for it to be banned. This isn't a usual response for people who just think that a technology is not worthwhile.

I'm sure people are genuine in their beliefs, but the aggregate response is unusually ferocious.

At what point would you stop calling this 13 year old tech thing "new"? Is there some point at which that's a silly thing to say? Or is it only once everyone's thoughts on it agree with yours?

Data has been transferable by electric means for 184 years, since 1838, an entire order of magnitude longer than transferable value (Bitcoin). It took nearly all of those 184 years to get to a point where a majority of people had a regular use for telecommunications.

Calling it "tech" misleadingly groups it with a category of things which largely tie into existing "tech" in every obvious and specific ways; most of which were created very recently.

This is the wrong way to think about "tech" as fundamental as one which gives every person 'the ability to transfer real world value over photons in the form of IP packets', which is the essence of Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency generally). A better comparison for Bitcoin is something like telecommunications.

Banking on regular use cases in the near term is probably a bad idea. But what is far worse is dismissing, much less prematurely regulating or banning, something fundamentally comparable to the advent of telecommunications.

> Data has been transferable by electric means for 184 years, since 1838, an entire order of magnitude longer than transferable value (Bitcoin).

Western Union started doing wire transfers in 1872.

Western Union doesn't transfer value, it creates and settles credit.

What is the difference?

It creates risk and slows things down because you can’t trust your counterparties

So it is transferring value just somewhat different?

Not exactly. Credit creation creates an asset and a liability. The creation of credit facilitates the ability to create liabilities in excess of the underlying asset (e.g fractional reserve banking).

By introducing the ability to transfer a scarce asset globally you resolve the requirement for credit, as no one ever needs to redeem.

Credit is a hack, Bitcoin is the fix.

That still sounds like you are transferring value just in different ways.

You could entrust a messenger to deliver a message long before electronic telecommunications.

But a trusted mail carrier and direct end-to-end encrypted video calls from/to anywhere on the planet are not even in the same ballpark. Trusted wire transfers and trustless peer-to-peer value settlement are potentially just as dissimilar.

I don't think it will take nearly 200 years for the scale of the difference to be as substantial as the difference pre-victorian mail and modern video calls. But it will take substantially longer than 13 years, that is pretty clear.

Even still, it is obvious to me (and many others) that this eventual future is inevitable-- and no amount of price fluctuation, scamming, or environmental concerns can shake that belief because these things simply don't even remotely address the core of what a foundational change this "tech" is in any way.

> You could entrust a messenger to deliver a message long before electronic telecommunications.

That is not what a wire transfer is.

> I don't think it will take nearly 200 years for the scale of the difference to be as substantial as the difference pre-victorian mail and modern video calls. But it will take substantially longer than 13 years, that is pretty clear.

The first electronic value transfer happened somewhere around 1872 so it is already at 150 years which is far nearer to 200 than to 13.

> Even still, it is obvious to me (and many others) that this eventual future is inevitable-- and no amount of price fluctuation, scamming, or environmental concerns can shake that belief because these things simply don't even remotely address the core of what a foundational change this "tech" is in any way.

It would be nice to hear arguments on this topic than proclamations of belief.

EDIT:

Just noticed that in your first post you said:

> It took nearly all of those 184 years to get to a point where a majority of people had a regular use for telecommunications.

At first I read it as it took 184 years for telecommunications to become widely available, which would be a reasonable comment. Your claim isn't reasonable since even far before 1832 majority of people had a regular use for telecommunications but the technology wasn't there. Bitcoin technology is here but majority of people have no use for it.

> That is not what a wire transfer is.

I didn't say it was a wire transfer. I said it was a mail carrier and made an analogy. You seem to have misread this part and misinterpreted my entire reply, as the rest of your comment makes little sense as a response.

> The first electronic value transfer happened somewhere around 1872

No, wire transfers are data, not value, transfers. The humans and institutions on either end of the data transfered "over the wire" are then entrusted to transfer yet more data to a central bank which eventually completes a physical value transfer of assets to perform settlement of the balance.

Central banks move around ships filled with gold and other precious assets-- that is the value transfer. Direct non-physical electronic value transfer, i.e. settlement, did not happen until 2013.

until 2009*

It is one of the saddest aspects of my interest in crypto that I cannot share it with anyone in HN, because somehow the hive mind here has decided that it is beyond worthless. So I stick to reddit.

Fuck 'em :)

I'm no Bitcoin maxi or "crypto will kill traditional finance in 5 years" type, or even really a get rich quick chaser (it'd be nice, but I've lived in reality for too long to expect anything like that) but I'm smart enough and humble enough to recognise it's a brand new thing (even 13 years later) that will grow and evolve to find its own niche or niches and then they will grow and evolve and fragment as all things do.

Cryptocurrency isn't going away, and Bitcoin has the 'original' going for it, the Veblen good association unrelated to any other pro or con argument. Ethereum is the 'original' smart contract version of Bitcoin, already an evolution of function, and has an ecosystem of vast proportions that any other smart contract platforms are a long way away from reaching (although getting closer faster than Ethereum is moving away).

It's interesting to watch and there are a lot of smart developers working on difficult problems in the space.

I'll also admit that I'm not smart enough to understand the intricacies of things like ZK proofs, but I somewhat understand their applicability in the space and look forward with interest to seeing whats possible when such technologies are applied to cryptocurrencies in practise.

I'm rambling, but I want you to feel comfortable sharing here. I want to harvest the down votes on behalf of all those chilled.

I agree with you. I actually think most of it is fraud, there are huge problems. But not being excited in it the least is so weird to me! This is exciting! This is tech!

Well, I can't see the value of wasting so much energy for something looking for problems to solve.

The idea is nice, but has no applications, esp. in Finance. Also the idea of replacing monetary systems built since the beginning of written history in a decade with cryptocurrencies is a bit naive.

I'm a bit tired from discussing same things over and over, but at the end, banks gonna bank.

OTOH, I'll not downvote/flag/harass/gatekeep for anyone sharing their views. Discussion is always good. This is how things move forward. So, go ahead, share on :)

> Well, I can't see the value of wasting so much energy for something looking for problems to solve.

The energy is being paid for though, so it's competing in the same energy market as everything else. "Waste" becomes entirely subjective at that point.

Also, Ethereum is now proof of stake, reducing it's power usage by something like 95%. PoS has its own pros and cons though.

> Also the idea of replacing monetary systems built since the beginning of written history in a decade with cryptocurrencies is a bit naive.

That's why I say it's still new despite being 13 years old. It's naive to think it's already failed when it's barely learnt to walk.

Happy to be either totally ignored or told where I'm wrong.

> The energy is being paid for though, so it's competing in the same energy market as everything else. "Waste" becomes entirely subjective at that point.

Actually, "I can do whatever do with electricity, because I pay for it", is a wrong perspective, esp. in today's energy climate.

Let's put the fact that Bitcoin and Proof of Work systems are very energy inefficient as of today, and paying for it doesn't make this inefficiencies right.

Today, supercomputer centers discuss about reducing capacity, or add downtimes. CERN is discussing about temporarily shutting down some experiments, incl. accelerator ring. Hotels in Europe is fixing (locking in fact) their rooms to 18 degrees Celcius, and turning off heating the second events/conferences end. Last, but not the least storefronts are turning off their extremely efficient LED lighting at nights, after stores close.

In this climate, running a very inefficient network which uses equivalent energy to a small-mid European country "just because we pay for it" is wrong on many levels.

I'm normally very lassiez-faire person, but in the face of this energy crisis, climate change and other existential threats looming, saying that "we can do that because we pay for it", really grinds my gears. It's just carelessness. I don't know when we have detached from ethics this far, and this is disturbing (AI has the same problem for different reasons, but let's not digress).

Ethereum's Proof of Stake migration is something I support. I still don't believe in cryptocurrencies and all utopia surrounding it, but at least one step in a right direction.

> It's naive to think it's already failed when it's barely learnt to walk.

I don't think it's failed, but it has not won any battles either (yet alone the war). It's just another instrument which will be normalized under banks at most. I'm saying that it won't arrive where people dream, but somewhere else, and that place will be boring, if it ever arrives.

Any people evangelizing cryptocurrencies are excited for small money (personal finance), any people evangelizing it for medium-sized money (hedge funds, etc.) are running Ponzi schemes. This is not a good outlook from my perspective.

I don't disagree, but with politicians pointing out Bitcoin is a waste of energy whilst also doing nothing about climate change is the world we live in. As gross and demotivating and radicalising as that fact is, they're the boundaries society has chosen to judge: 1kw paid for is no better or worse than any other 1kw paid for.

Anything beyond that and you're literally picking winners and losers - which wouldn't necessarily be wrong either, but it's politically suicidal and so it will not happen.

Make non-renewable power prices higher. I'm for that, but Bitcoin and proof of work cryptocurrency mining will adapt to whatever new rules are put in place, and people will still complain that it's a waste because there's no direct benefit to them individually.

I agree, however, that the popular understanding of the end result of cryptocurrencies could be something incredibly boring and potential anathema to the core reason for existence of Bitcoin such as central bank digital currencies.

However, there will always be groups working against the interests of the establishment, creating new avenues of alternatives (here, direct proof of me being utopian).

Putting my words to the same bucket with politicians and the establishment, just because they somehow align is enough for me to leave this discussion here.

I'm neither near to them, nor have the same perspective on climate change & the energy crisis, because of my vantage point, most probably.

Have a nice day.

Most of the stores I've worked with leave their LED lights on at night because they want it to be apparent from the street when someone is in there robbing the store. They pay for it, so I guess it is their prerogative. Apparently the profit they make from sales is enough to offset this cost.

I think the energy people spend on cryptocurrencies comes from a similar logic. If you want to stop people from externalizing the costs of energy waste you will have to increase the price of energy until the costs are covered, or else we will continue to run at a deficit at the expense of the planet.

On the flip side of this coin, energy expansion has driven all known human (and evolutionary) progress to date, so it's a delicate ecosystem to mess with.

> Most of the stores I've worked with leave their LED lights on at night because they want it to be apparent from the street when someone is in there robbing the store.

Unless it’s prohibited by law, which is in effect in Germany and France (if I remember correctly).

Energy prices are on the rise in every form, at least in Europe, and people feel the pressure profoundly.

The problem here is, we don’t have unlimited energy as of now. So, we need to at least use it a bit more carefully until we clear this bottleneck.

Cryptocurrencies’ energy waste problem also still needs to be addressed, because if they can do this more efficiently, we can use the energy for more production.

However, this doesn’t mean that I believe cryptocurrencies are solving anything. I’m firm on that view.

Bitcoin doesn't stop working with less energy available. The beauty is that difficulty adjustments will work at any level.

> So I stick to reddit.

Bless you. That made me laugh out loud.

Im not happy about it!

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