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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

One odd things is that blockheads have been going ahead with the blockhead things they do even though normies have lost interest.

What it is going to take to turn a generation permanently away from crypto is a serious drop in prices and that hasn’t really happened yet. I mean, Bitcoin has fluctuated, not in any particular direction. Bored Apes are down from the peak but it hasn’t been a bloodbath.

So blockheads are starting to spam the Bitcoin blockchain with shitcoins and Pepecoin is getting talked up (how is it we didn’t have Pepecoin three years ago?) but now most people just don’t care. In my pod we are taking bets on if Pepecoin or BRC-20 are going to get mentioned at all in Bloomberg Businessweek at all.

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> One odd things is that blockheads have been going ahead with the blockhead things they do even though normies have lost interest.

Yeah, and Worldcoin is still scanning eye-balls for proof-of-personhood [0] whilst AI bros here are AI generating everything in front of your screen all for the sake of this 'AGI' nonsense. None of it can be stopped and there is nothing to trust since it can be easily faked with AI.

> What it is going to take to turn a generation permanently away from crypto is a serious drop in prices and that hasn’t really happened yet.

Believing that there is something to 'turn a generation permanently away from crypto' is just as delusional and naïve as believing that there is something out there to stop the influx of deepfakes and faked AI generated content.

In both cases, and especially public blockchains and AI projects, the cat is out of the bag and it cannot be stopped and both will continue to be used.

[0] https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...

I still cant believe people voluntarily scanned their fucking eyeballs!

For the generation to turn away from get-rich-quick schemes pumped by millionnaires (incl crypto), there has to be a reasonable standard of living that's achievable by the majority of society.

Anything short of that will simply lead to crypto being replaced by some other craze: meme stock, MLM products, forex derivatives and what have you.

You can make the case it is the other way around, bubbles tend to inflate when the business cycle is on the upswing and there is money to steal.

It is not retail investors that are directly inflating asset bubbles. The fallout of their bad decision-making is limited because they have to pay market rates for loans.

There are no such limits for venture capital and private equity or state-backed wealth funds. That's why Softbank and Saudi Arabia can flood SV startups with money, even as the companies themselves use that money to somehow deepen their losses further.

It was a bloodbath especially for NFT (90%+ of value lost). Of course, there will be always a floor price. You can't have a $0 Bitcoin in crypto, since it'll enable you to buy it all of the available supply.

The market has moved from speculative to mature. The prices will always fluctuate but it'll remain a 1-3 Trillion market for the time being and for the use cases that it enables.

We printed an enormous amount of money that mostly went into insane asset bubble which includes shitcoins among other things. It’s going to take time for it to percolate back into real economy (assuming they keep interest rate where it is for that long)

I’d say much more of it went into inflating house prices.

Yes, it went into all asset classes, even normally depreciating assets like cars. That said, the massive influx of cash into an asset with no underlying value seems like an especially egregious symptom of this trend.

The difference here is houses are actually useful for something

But you HAVE to have housing, so inflating that price is bad (and actually helps cause homelessness) whereas buying cryptocurrency is totally optional.

We'll never turn permanently away from crypto because the underlying technology and networks are a revolutionary improvement.

Improvement over what exactly?

Several decades old centralised technology batch processing ALL CAPS messages in COBOL with a transaction time measured in days or weeks, a 10-15% transaction failure rate, no finality and exorbitant costs?

Source?

Age and technology used: https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2021/05/cobol-jobs-ba...

Failure rates: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/settlement-fails-gett...

Finality: https://www.swift.com/our-solutions/swift-gpi/stop-and-recal...

High fees and days/weeks wait times for international wire transfers are common knowledge - check at almost any bank.

The above links partly explain why this situation exists in a world where all money is basically already "digital".

It's kind of not. And the only system making radical inroads to actually improving the status quo (which has been deeply entrenched for decades) is crypto, which right now offers real solutions adopted by consumers and institutions.

Doesn't mean its perfect or that there's no dark side, just as with everything. But the media - and HN largely, on this topic - loves to play up such things, so good luck finding much accurate information there, or here.

High fees and days/weeks wait times for international wire transfers are common knowledge - check at almost any bank.

Because the fundamental task at hand is only partially about transferring money.

In reality, it's mostly about precisely what crypto payments seek to circumvent: fraud prevention and KYC.

What nonsense. Crypto payments are more heavily-regulated via KYC than traditional payments. Anyone who's signed up for any crypto exchange attest to this fact. Crypto payments, as with all payments, over any mediums serve all purposes good & bad.

Just because the news typically only reports the murders that happen in a given city, doesn't mean that the only thing that's going to happen to someone in that city is to get murdered. Crypto reporting is much the same.

But yeah, technically you are still more likely to get murdered there, so only go if you're really into the other things it offers.

Just don't assume that with hundreds of billions invested, from all kinds of participants large and small, that the entire city is a fraud or otherwise nefarious. It's a major city - it has a lot going on, much under-reported.

Unless you live there, and you read the local news, attend local events, etc. Then you might have a better idea of what it's really like, and which alleys not to walk down alone at night, and where you can get the best bagels.

> Crypto payments are more heavily-regulated via KYC than traditional payments.

So this is why Ransomware peddlers and North Korea use bank transfers to move their money around, and why dark market users mail checks to each other? Or do they use crypto coins instead?

Money is used for crime.

Crypto is money. Checks are money. Bank transfers are money. Cash is money.

It's all money, and it all "facilitates" crime.

That wasn't what I was responding to. Did you read what I said or did you just spout off a canned answer when you saw a retort?

Well if you'd read what I've said, you'll know that's not really my style.

Unfortunately, I assumed you knew a slight more about the topic you're discussing than you evidently do.

My reply's intended to suggest that the privacy coins you are referring to - unknowingly, or otherwise - are simply another form of money. Bracketing them with regular crypto, something I did only in keeping with how you initiated, isn't the best.

In practice, privacy coins are a small subset of crypto, some of the least-used of all types available. And again there are also legitimate use-cases with them that reduces this further to the point it's a bit silly. A subset, of a subset, of a...

But, you're welcome to succumb to the endless brainwash of BS and biased media reporting for crypto and think whatever will make you happy. Reality lay in waiting, for whenever you wish to join it and the complicated world that doesn't get clicks.

So you respond with a thought-terminating cliche that does not even address my comment, and then when called out on it, you accuse me of insincerity and lack of breadth. Interesting tactic.

What are you talking about? I've addressed your comment twice now. First in a way I assumed you knew enough about crypto to understand, and second explaining that in more detail. I've "accused" you of ignorance, not insincerity.

Meanwhile what you've done is failed to read my comments properly and then attempt to insult me. Read them until you understand, and if you don't, ask questions. That's the spirit of discussion and learning I'm engaged in.

If you aren't, good luck with that, and I wish you the best.

Calling people ignorant while giving a barely concealed bitcoin talking point in response to something completely unrelated (you claimed KYC was harder for crypto, but can't explain why it is favored for those looking to avoid it) is not doing your part in a productive conversation.

I would re-evaluate your methods.

It's not "favoured". Crypto use is a tiny subset of all financial activity criminal included. "Ignorant" is not intended as an insult, it's merely accurate. You appear not to know some things and I've tried to help with it.

Money laundering alone is estimated in the trillions per year according to the UN. This is significantly greater than the entire value of all privacy coins combined:

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.htm...

Eg, even if the entirety of Monero was purchased only for money laundering, it could only account for 0.1-0.2% of the total that occurs. Where is the other 99.8-99.9% being conducted? What systems are "facilitating" that?

Well, everything that isn't crypto... banks, cash, checks, etc.

As I pointed out at the beginning.

are we talking about blockchain or fednow?

As if the zit goo that holds the cryptoverse together is not, in its own way (behind the façades of functional programming and fabncy consensus protocols) -- basically another form of ALL CAPS and COBOL.

Well, transactions settle with finality in seconds or minutes and cost pennies. Success rate is much higher, and failure is funds never left your account. So whatever it's held together with, which generally seems to be cryptography, mostly works.

You, ah...you know that "finality" is bad in a system that needs to transact money, right?

Fraud exists. (You should know. The cryptocurrency universe is mostly that.) But more importantly, judges exist, and they do not give a single sweet damn that you say it "cannot be reversed".

(And a hearty LOL at "costs pennies". Ethereum gas fees yesterday, on the say you posted this, averaged eight bucks in actual-money terms. I can send a wire cheaper than that.)

Not the GP poster, but if you read some of the more recent research coming out of the groups that were originally founded by Facebook/Libra/Diem/Novi/whatever they call themselves this year, these actually do seem like substantial improvements eg over existing payment systems. Their papers (yet to be confirmed in live production systems afaik) report an order of magnitude capacity improvement over eg the Visa network (160k+ TPS vs 24k, at latency in the low seconds, or even subseconds).

For some of those systems, it would be a stretch to call them blockchains (there's no comparable data structure, sometimes not even consensus), but the important thing is that they come with peer-reviewed BFT security guarantees. So I do wonder, if you can have BFT guarantees for such a system, and still more capacity than you'll likely ever need, why wouldn't you?

Ponzi schemes are indeed revolutionary improvements for those who benefit form them.

There was a Pepe coin, and I guess technically there still is, started five or six years ago. but it was issued on a different Bitcoin based colored coin protocol called mastercoin. edit: I just remember the token was actually called Pepe cash, and was pretty much a complete, functional implementation of what would eventually be called an NFT a couple years before the term even existed.

Mastercoin IIRC was further tweaked into something called Counterparty, on top of which ERC-20 -like tokens can be created that exist on the Bitcoin blockchain. I'm pretty sure there are special wallets that still trade them floating around somewhere, because it's not on its own separate blockchain. That said it was like all crypto spaces, a sock puppet filled ghost town as there are vanishingly few people who are interested in collecting obnoxious self-centered tech libertarian brolet memes.

I mean everything has been done before in crypto, often multiple times, with no success that lasts, because the people in charge are almost universally incapable of cooperating with one another in the public's best interest. The same public they want to lure into their little feudal utopian experiment.

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