HN hates crypto for no apparent reason other than hive-mind. Not even worth arguing around here.
Crypto people think it’s getting rid of visa, Western Union, and government censorship.
Arguably it’s even more annoying than if we just had posts that only say “I hate crypto”. But the idea that there is no apparent reason is laughably wrong. People give a lot of reasons.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
That's an oversight of the year.
To give you an example of a HN reader with reasons to dislike most cryptocoin stuff:
- cryptocurrencies, particularly those mineable on CPUs and/or easily laundrable, provide a serious financial incentive for scriptkiddies and other hackers to go and hack systems to have them mine for coins, encrypt them in coin-extortion schemes, or steal the content of wallets they find. Basically, it's like the absence of STIR/SHAKEN on a phone network - it invites scammers to robocall people and pull scams on them.
- mining of cryptocurrencies, especially on Bitcoin and other ASIC based coins, consumes an awful lot of electricity, which has been incentive enough for multiple operators to reactivate fossil fuel plants that had already been shut.
- cryptocurrency mines of everything but proof-of-stake coins produce an awful lot of e-waste. Some of that can be repurposed (e.g. CPUs, RAM, GPUs, FPGAs) which has serious side effects on its own (such as enormous gluts in the used markets when miners drop their rigs), some of that is uneconomical to repurpose (HDDs/SSDs for proof-of-storage coins, the mining process eats through them at an insane pace) and some of that is impossible to reuse (ASICs).
- cryptocurrency mines can lock up large parts of the hardware supply because miners pay so much more than even the richest gamer can afford. One might argue that that's a natural function of a capitalist economy, but sorry when you can't get a new halfway-decent GPU for years because scalpers buy up all the stock then the market has fucking failed.
- cryptocurrencies invite undesirable people and events. There have been almost infinite amounts of these, documented on [1] - legitimate hacks, legitimate coding issues that sent coins to null addresses, rug-pulls disguised as hacks, shoddy accounting or general business practices by people who got in way over their head (MtGox) or had no idea WTF they were doing (FTX). Or NFTs which all went down the drain once the free money spigot and the novelty wore off (on top of the OG NFT Bored Ape copying and thus promoting outright Third Reich Nazi symbols and edgy far-right memes [2]).
- cryptocurrencies invite those who think it's a good idea to use them as a proxy to evade securities laws or KYC rules, luring in gullible morons in the process and leading to loss of money.
tl;dr: too much money lures in too many morons and everyone but the original "investors" loses.
* shitty people scamming other people: Yes, everyone knows. It happens with normal money as well. I regularly get "How to avoid scammers" emails from my bank too. As long as something has value someone will try to use it to scam someone else.
* mining: Yes we know, mining is bad. Nobody wants it, it's going away. Could it go away faster? Yes, but it will happen eventually. Ban mining for all I care, nobody really needs it.
The thing is, governments don't want people to get scammed, and so they act to prevent scam avenues. But unlike, say, the trad-bank system the percentage of "scam" vs "legit" operations in cryptocurrencies is drastically skewed to the "scam" side, made easier by the anonymity that cryptocurrencies provide by design.
Many early adopters are salty that nobody would listen to us and investigate the criminals we were pointing out all along.
> cryptocurrencies invite those who think it's a good idea to use them as a proxy to evade securities laws or KYC rules, luring in gullible morons in the process and leading to loss of money
Generally the criminal schemes that actually took everyone's money were so simple as to not even be securities scams. The complex non-deliverable defi contracts were something people were playing around with to make prediction markets and other useful things.
> when you can't get a new halfway-decent GPU for years because scalpers buy up all the stock then the market has fucking failed
Okay, seriously, what system would actually create more cards here, some command economy where gaming is allocated a higher value than other activities? How does the company know how many fabs to buy/lease to prepare?
> promoting outright Third Reich Nazi symbols and edgy far-right memes
I don't see a lot of value in some censorship system that makes that enforceable. Should books not have been invented until we developed a technology to make it impossible to say mean things?
I don't claim to have a solution that benefits everyone, but at least personally I prefer actual people having GPUs to have fun with them over some miners polluting the environment for a ponzi scheme with them that brings benefit to no one but a select very few.
> I don't see a lot of value in some censorship system that makes that enforceable. Should books not have been invented until we developed a technology to make it impossible to say mean things?
The Nazi crap was just the cherry on the cake. It just speaks volumes about just what kind of ideological toxicity was freely allowed to spread. Or, to use an older analogy, when a Nazi walks into a bar and isn't kicked out, well guess what you have? A Nazi bar.
I think Nvidia/etc missed some serious PR by not giving out tickets to buy cards via gaming and hardware sites, to be rewarded with more tickets if those cards ended up being used for gaming. However, I think it's unrealistic and unhelpful to call prices "scalping" when there are conflicting markets for a product.
> a Nazi walks into a bar and isn't kicked out
A bar is a private entity with a target clientele and limited availability. It makes sense that the patrons can be and should be curated.
> ideological toxicity was freely allowed to spread.
Now we're talking about NFTs, literally DeFi. How would you make NFTs that would allow for pro-Tibet messages, etc, and not also allow any other text/image that people want?
The correct filter is in which markets list it, and which customers buy it. It's like a disgusting book - it doesn't invalidate the very concept of libraries.