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Comment by medellin | Hacker News Reader

Hackernews has a problem with crypto. Just see any thread related to crypto for the completely one sided and biased view most users on this site have. They will willfully ignore all valid and good uses cases for it so they can feel smart and self righteous when they see it crash…

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Still waiting to hear one of these valid and good uses cases for a publicly distributed ledger. One of these days I’ll hear one, but I haven’t yet. Circumventing oppressive regimes seems to be the only thing I’ve heard of that vaguely sounds like a value proposition.

That you don't see one just means that you don't see one and by shouting down anyone else who disagrees, as the HN hivemind has in every crypto thread I've seen to date, doesn't mean one exists, it just means that in this community a valid and good use case may as well not exist. People, including me, have tried to explain, many times, the valid use cases but HN at large disagrees and has made that distaste clear. That's fine but you'll forgive us for giving up. Those you disagree with aren't idiots, they just have a different perspective and don't see it as useless.

I'd love to have a meaningful conversation. I'd love to hear a novel idea. You have to forgive me for being a little jaded though when I continually ask to hear a use case and I continually don't get use cases.

"Some places are so terrible that the only external financial systems unregulated enough to allow them to participate are these specific unregulated financial markets" is some net good being produced in end for the citizens of those regimes, and circumstantially the "block chain did that" I guess, but that still doesn't tell me why you needed a block chain to be involved to begin with.

At risk of sounding like I'm patronizing you, which I'm not, that ship has sailed. If you'd like to view arguments by people with a more balanced view of crypto, there are a ton of threads you can find on the topic with the help of Algolia. Maybe when the HN majority finds a way to interact with us that isn't awful, people like me will be willing to engage in discussion again.

This has come up so often that I have listed some interesting real world examples of Bitcoin usage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

These all appear to be the same use case of "to transfer money, outside the control of governments".

The problem with that is, these transactions are now on an immutable ledger (which is the actual use case of block chains).

These transactions could have been made with any "thing" that enough people agree has some value.

> could have been made with any "thing"

"any" is going a lot of heavy lifting there.

Apart from people agreeing on value, that thing also has to be: 1. out of their governments' control (all the examples had governments gone bad), 2. easy to transfer/carry, 3. durable.

Can you please name a few alternatives if you think that's a simple problem?

Bitcoin fits the bill for those aspects. Can you name a few other "things"?

Gold. Shells. Anything that people have used as money over the years.

I do not disagree that blockchain tech has a good use case. It's just that it does one thing: a distributed ledger. That's it.

"That's it" fails to capture the fact that said tech still has a collective market cap of $984B[1], after it has had precipitous drop in value over the last 12 months. Maybe, a distributed ledger for digital goods is a massively valuable tool for humanity?

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/

Thank you for this list.

> Hackernews has a problem with crypto.

No, most reasonable adults have a problem with crypto.

Okay, I'll bite. What are the valid and good uses of it?

What's the advantage in burning the entire power consumption of Zaire for a month, just to pay for a tin of beans?

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