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Comment by WrtCdEvrydy | Hacker News Reader

Crypto content on HN... this is either gonna go really great or the opposite of that.

Yup. It's always felt like there's a disproportionate amount of hate for crypto -- not that people should like it or love it, but that I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability.

So it seems like they treat it as something to be killed (impossible) as opposed to something to buckle up and get ready to manage (more or less like they correctly do with AI.)

We are so familiar with the technology we have actual informed opinions in either direction. The only dispassionate people are those who don’t know yet.

Not what I've seen here. This is one of the few topics here where I think emotion STRONGLY gets in the way of reason. Too few people are "first princpl-ing" this to understand that the crypto-train, to some extent, is happening whether any of us like it or not.

Honestly I hear this a lot from crypto advocates, but it just seems like wishful thinking on their part. There are a ton of legitimate complaints about cryptocurrency that come up, and the fact that after a decade the field still hasn't made any real progress is telling to me. At this point the "shitcoins" have mostly collapses, NFT has been devalued, and use cases seem to be disappearing. While I do think things like migrating away from proof of work have been helpful, I still don't believe that we're going to see larger adoption.

I do think you are right that this is a topic where emotion strongly gets in the way of reason, but I think the people lacking reason are the advocates and not the critics.

What progress do you want cryptocurrency to make? They’re bearer assets. You can go pay people with them today.

The most obvious first step is to stop all initial coin offerings against money. If the cryptocurrency is a security, then that is ok, but there are some regulations that need to be followed. In the EU there are plenty of companies willing to manage a security token offering for your company. A security token is basically a cryptocurrency that acts as an informal stock.

I don’t see what that has to do with cryptocurrency like Monero, the topic of this post.

The problem with the cryptocurrency advocates is that they have zero clue about money. Neoclassical economics declares money irrelevant and not something to study, so there is hardly any research how money influences a society beyond central bank policy about how much money there should be.

Here is a tip. Money is a transaction cost reducing device. That is it's primary function. By transaction costs I don't mean just fees that a bank or payment service provider charges you, no I mean every economic cost that is involved in negotiating payments. You could think of transaction costs as friction and money as a lubricant. If you have to exchange currencies this causes friction, if you have to physically transport goods or meet in person to barter with them this causes friction. If the value of the goods you are trading is unknown this causes friction. The purpose of money is to be better than some alternative world without money and most cryptocurrencies are hardly better, they are worse or outright useless. The legitimate niches that cryptocurrencies occupy will barely even influence the real world.

I 99% agree and and also argue that the 1% is significant.

Money is sometimes that, but it's also merely a store of value. And I think this what people are missing. I agree that we're almost certainly not going to say paying for coffee in bitcoin.

But where it has legs is as the 401k/money in the mattress replacement; a space that's still very "competitive," i.e. a lot of the options here still really suck, thanks to inflation and/or third parties.

It's been almost 15 years. There's still no valid crypto use case outside of speculation and crime.

Speculation is all that is required for validity.

Parallel to barter, desire-to-use is all that is required for use-case.

Governments are going to remain challenged by the need to now assert that possession or use of a legal instrument, with no inherent illegal characteristic, is now evidence of intent to crime.

Not that I don't expect them to rise to the occasion. As they have been by implementing crude sanction power in place of legislation.

Call it "programmable money" and we're good to skyrocket.

I think of it as a bunch of bad early implementations that are being used for dubious financial purposes and outright fraud, fueling a bubble. The same could be said for joint stock corporations in the 1600s. Something can be inevitable (maybe it is maybe it isn’t) and the current situation can still be bad.

Someone in the 1600s saying that joint stock companies are terrible, solve a problem that doesn’t really need solving, and are being used to rip off investors and fund unethical colonialism would have been right. It took a while before people used them in good ways. And even today they are questionable.

No hate, but no interest either.

After all these years, all scam stories apart, what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources? Really I don’t know, and I admit I never wanted to dig the topic as there are many other topic I will never have the time to learn and yet doesn’t seem to have such an issue of what is at best a tremendous noise/signal ratio.

> what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources

International money transfers, for instance. The traditional banking system was always slow and expensive, and, on top of that, countries cut each other out due to geopolitical reasons. Many third-world countries have a decent crypto adoption, you can send someone money in a matter of minutes (I do).

> and, on top of that, countries cut each other out due to geopolitical reasons

For a sovereign state this is a feature, not a bug. If you think that countries will take sending of funds to embargoed countries lying down you are sorely mistaken.

Sure, and that's exactly why sovereign states don't like monero and mixers - but that is their problem, not mine. Also, in many cases transferring crypto is not illegal - for instance, it is legal to transfer money to non-sanction banks in Russia, but in many countries, the banking system doesn't allow that. If you had a 90y.o. starving grandma there, you'd be grateful for the crypto.

Via sanctions, it is illegal for you to use specific mixers assuming you are a US citizen. Which does make it your problem.

And if you have a mixer or private coin that isn't under sanction, it is only a matter of time as determined by the US gov's assessment of the risk of it being widely adopted.

I am not a US citizen, but, regardless, I'm not sure you're right: as long as I don't consider something to be immoral, I don't particularly care if it's legal or not. Given how easy it is to obtain untraceable crypto, I still think it's mostly their problem.

I can send money in minutes too from bank to bank, internationally and domestically. I could do it for years now.

Some very big sums require approval and are delayed. But guess what - it's not a technical limitation but a legal one. It not like some TCP packet can transmit wire transfer of 1000 dollars and unable to do so for 50000 dollars. And we as society do want to control large sum transfers, unless we want to end up like my home country, with funds funneled with close to no control to offshores.

Sure, if a person want to skirt the law and transfer millions without control then current token systems are perfect for him.

> I can send money in minutes too from bank to bank, internationally

To any country of your choosing? I doubt that.

Bitcoin will be imported with immigrants to the 1st world.

The other day I tried to wire money to somebody in a different country, but my bank didn’t support that country. So I used USDC and sent the funds in seconds without any issue.

That's a minuscule use case whose benefits are arguably exaggerated next to the UX inconvenience and other downside factors for the common abuela looking to receive grocery money.

Until crypto becomes at least as easy to get set up with and use as dealing with a bank, Western Union, or online banking, it'll remain niche.

You hear about "scam stories" because they're usually interesting and they get clicks so media will naturally put them on the spotlight. You don't hear about thoudands of people in third world countries who are able to get capital for their projects, start up their business by avoid sanctions put on their countries banking systems, NGOs who are able to collect donations while in autocratic regimes, sick people who can order their medication on the darknet which for whatever reason is not available to them in their country, and so on and so on. The fact that you can just wire $100 to your buddy across the world for a 50 cent fee without caring about banks or IBANs or SWIFT codes or whatever else just blows my mind to this day, it creates so many opportunities one cannot just brush the whole crypto concept off as some nft scam shit.

Being able to wire $100 to your buddy across the world isn't so useful when you can't be sure if it'll be worth $90 or $100 or $110 by the time your buddy goes to use it.

Silly example.

Add some zeroes to those numbers and now it is.

(especially if the transaction fees remain in the 10s)

>inevitability

I think it's the crypto bros who misunderstand it's "inevitability." Crypto has far, far fewer practical applications than the people pushing for it it claim. There are two useful situations for crypto:

1) Where you need a trustless distributed consensus method or database (and where the Oracle Problem doesn't get in your way). Trustless is the key word here, 99% of the time that someone proposes a potential use for crypto it would be better served by traditional databases like Postgres, or traditional consensus algorithms like Raft, because being able to handle such things in a trustless manner isn't actually as desirable as crypto bros suggest.

2) Where you need to bypass financial regulations, sanctions, laws, etc. Crypto has shown some real utility for buying illegal drugs and guns online, for example. Whether or not you see this as a good or bad thing depends largely on your political leanings.

Bypassing financial regulations is indeed a great thing. It’s none of your business whether someone wants to trade derivatives or earn interest on their own money. Love it when supposed investor protections aren’t opt out, and then the surveillance infrastructure they put in place get used for tax enforcement or state sponsored looting of political enemies.

Maybe if you lived in some 3rd world countries - you could find more utility for it. Hyperinflation is the default for some countries, being able to keep some evil dictators from your money might be a good thing.

F.x. instead of your money funding illegal wars in Libya you could save some of that wealth and try to build a better future.

One could quite easily construct arguments that sound exactly like this, but for encryption and/or online anonymity, for what its worth.

I think tech people are in the best position to judge that in most cases the technology doesn't bring any benefits that a current / non-ledger like technology doesn't bring already. Use-cases are few and far between. I doubt it's actually inevitable. (again some use cases are, especially in the utility realm)

> I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability.

All progress depends on the "unreasonable man". I don't think it's inevitable at all, nor have I seen any evidence that it will be. Thus far non-government blockchains have proven to be ill suited for applications other than speculation (and crime). Central bank "programmable money" is definitely a threat - but it's hardly inevitable if popular opposition is vigorous enough.

If you were to ask a tech enthusiast in 2010, they'd might you that 3D TVs were inevitable. Instead they fizzled out. Then there's "the Metaverse", which seems to be on bumpy terrain as well. SPACs seem to be doing not so hot[1]. Not every tech/financial trend sticks around if the value proposition isn't there. And the value proposition for cryptocurrency is very poor in my view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_acquisition_co...

You should look harder for the evidence. 1% is all you need. There is a not-insignificant number of people using crypto to move and store money today. I agree A LOT of garbage is going to get shaken out, but this says to me "okay, what part/idea in crypto survives this bloodbath and gets bigger," not "throw the whole thing out."

Inevitable for law avoidance? Sure. We know quite well that humans like very much systems which allow them to avoid laws of any kind, so of course such a system will survive for a long time.

Inevitable for lawful daily usage? Nope. Fundamental problems and lack of benefits will prevent blockchain based ledgers to be deployed in any useful scalable way. Actually not "will" but rather "did". Token proposals had a decade of time already and all failed (except for law avoidance of course). Any legitimate proposal has failed spectacularly:

1) Legal currency - failed due to no privacy, bad performance, atrocious UX, unstable exchange rate, shady providers;

2) Distributed storage - fail

3) Distributed calculator - fail

4) Distributed network (Helium) - fail

5) Smart contracts - neither smart nor contracts, very pricey, limited functions (on chain only), oracle problem unsolved

6) NFT - one big lie, impossible to implement any promise made about them because they don't facilitate transfer of the ownership

7) Supply chain ideas - fail, the problem is not securing the DB but securing the humans doing data input in the DB

Anything else I've forgot? Basically most of the good ideas on paper turned out to be either impossible or impractical with blockchains.

> Anything else I've forgot?

Going by the claims I have encountered:

* Inflation proof/Store of value/Stock market hedge

* Bringing banking to the poor

* Web3

* Play-and-get-paid gaming

Also, preventing corrupt goverment and court from finding and stealing stored value.

Not daily and I think that's the thing. I suppose when one says "cryptocurrency," there are a lot of possible ways one might use it. I agree that for a daily driver, very unlikely.

But "store of value" is still very much in play.

Crypto as a competitor to the 401k or "money in the mattress" strikes me as damn near inevitable.

> Crypto as a competitor to the 401k or "money in the mattress" strikes me as damn near inevitable.

Yes, agreed. If you can stomach the volatility over decade-long time spans, of course - which very many people can't.

There's no way in hell you could convince me to invest in anything as volatile as a pile of crypto coin for my retirement. My retirement account is for slow, gentle, growth, not for a rollercoaster that could end up at zero (within the realm of reasonability - yes, the entire stock market could disappear, but at that point we're not retiring, we're firing up the pursuit special and heading into the desert). This is why ETFs are so popular - they remove a lot of the volatility.

Why would I put my money under the mattress if I could pull it out tomorrow and it'd be worth half of what I thought it was? Yes, inflation is a thing for fiat, but that's nowhere near as volatile as crypto has and continues to be.

And a lot would say "good luck with that?"

Putting a lot in a retirement account today is of course less dumb than putting a lot in crypto.

But neither is guaranteed or certain; and quite a few people diversify their portfolios.

Today, I'd say you're an idiot if you do a lot of crypto -- but also, you're not too bright if you don't throw in a little.

As for tomorrow, who knows. The technology of crypto definitely works. The humans might also decide that this is worth something, or they might not.

Not to mention that in that same decade crypto coins have failed at everything but item 1 the instant payment systems solved the problem of digital money transfer beautifully (and legally)

Yours is a great way to explain it. I'd say - bitcoin and siblings are 'inevitable' like drug trafficking, not like breathing air

I really like this analogy, especially if you go deep on "drug trafficking," -- a corrupted, but not "wholly corrupt" activity that has potential to be legitimized and thus there may be a need to consider something other than "legal annihilation."

(as in bootlegging was also once drug-trafficking)

The government/big pharma just have a monopoly on drug trafficking.

Heroin bad/Codeine good. Prozac good/marijuana bad.

etc...

My point exactly; Yes, "crypto" is useful for many presently illegal activities, but on its face, it is arguably "morally neutral," so you can reasonably throw it in with "encryption," "anonymity" etc -- potentially dangerous techs that the bad guys CAN use, but also important for freedom in the face of authortarianism.

Keeping your hands off of other people’s money - success.

There are several thing you have missed

1) International transfers: crypto is the best here. No stupid regulations, fast and cheap unlike SWIFT or something like it.

I've used to work as international freelance programmer since 2003 or about and payments were the pain all time before 2015 or about when I have moved to crypto. Lost transfers, compliance investigations without any real reason with blocking funds for many months, failed transfers because of some stupid errors like missed letter in the receiver name, etc. And even in the best case you should wait for day or two without any info about the transfer progress. Instant card payments are illusion only, it works only in some cases until it fails (for example, my country currency exchange rate is very volatile sometimes, and some people used to buy with card payments smth nominated in US dollars during this periods, hosting for example, and they thought they have saved their money with this buys, but they were really surprised when their accounts were decreased in several days after that, because real transfer takes several days, and it is executed with the exchange rate actual at that time). There is nothing comparable with crypto in international transfers.

2) Distributed storage. I can't believe you don't know about IPFS. When I've tried to download the book I've failed to buy last time I've found that pirate sites use IPFS links more often than torrents now.)

3) Smart contracts allows amazing things sometimes. Do you know about the flashloans for example? You can loan a millions without any credentials, use it for exchange arbitrage for example and if you fail to get your profit and can't return loan plus interest it suddenly becomes like you didn't loan it at all.) Looks like some kind of magic for me.)

4) NFT is misused tech. It really guarantees the ownership, but not for associated media.) Best cases for NFT are tickets or license keys. But this cases can't give you millions in a minute that's why nobody knows about them.

1) You didn't read my comment carefully. I did say that crypto is great for law avoidance. So yes, international money transfers avoiding any taxes, fees and regulation is indeed better with crypto. The thing is, I'm not an oligarch plundering my country and funneling stolen money to offshores and UAE. I do value AML laws and all the "stupid" regulations which come with it. Even if I'm personally affected by them and have to procure papers for money origin, is limited by in amounts and time to transfer - it is better that a so called "free market" a wild west libertarian dystopia.

2) I have heard about IPFS and other file storage projects like Filecoin or Siacoin. All of them are noncompetitive with any centralized service. And as for illegal filesharing - sure, it may be useful, bittorents are better though and have no shitty monetization attached to them.

3) Yes, I have heard about flashloans, a lot. It's an amazing source of lulz and comedy godl, finding out how another bridge had been abused, often by the flash loan. It's a completely bullshit and useless idea for a normal human, unless you are a technically inclined hacker, who looks for vulnerabilities in the shitty code running on a virtual machine actively discouraging writing longer code with test coverage and better programming practices, because the longer the code the pricier it is to run. To such hackers flash loans are invaluable to properly abuse broken contracts.

4) NFT doesn't guarantee ownership of nothing but the token itself (and token is useless, because of the tech limitations). Tickets have no benefits on the blockchain because they are always issued by the centralized source. Any property you wish can and MUST be set by that same centralized corporation. NFTs add zero, nothing to it. Same with license keys, again issued by a central authority. NFTs is a cargo cult by tokenbros who don't know how business works.

I don't see cryptocurrencies as something to be killed. I think the vast majority of them are illogical, based on wishful thinking and severe ignorance or outright scams. People will point out one among twenty thousand without realizing that the exception proves the rule.

Yeah sure keep speculating on your "digital gold" I don't care. Unlike holding dollars as demand deposits or cash, you can't hijack the economy. You are accountable for the risks you take but that doesn't mean anyone is going to use Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay their groceries, especially since so many of the crypto credit card companies love operating in jurisdictions where they are completely unaware about the tax implications of their product. What a well thought out business model...

Even though Europe/EU is embracing a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and making it easier to do business, crypto exchanges operate in regulatory safe havens, engage in shady practices or get hacked and lose your money.

> People will point out one among twenty thousand without realizing that the exception proves the rule.

This argument doesn't hold well. Creating huge amounts of value is expected to be the exception rather than the rule - one of the powerful mechanisms at play here is this is an unusually free market where failure is cheap and all the money clusters to success.

It is reasonable to ignore the thousands of failures. They failed because they were easy to ignore.

>> this is an unusually free market where failure is cheap [public quick]

The speed and amount of effort to innovate, by basically every demographic of persons, is breathtaking and exciting. Due to low startup costs (lack of gatekeepers), most will fail. That is okay, because the builders are not playing with super powder.

> its inevitability

crypto's new paradigm is always just around the corner.

i've been involved in cc for long enough to know that it's popularity (and price) are not driven by utility.

as vb said, it's the linux of money.

> step 1: install gentoo

> step 2: install xmr wallet

I’m kind of surprised it made it to the top of the page. HN is certainly divided about crypto, not recently it has felt to me it’s slipped the wayside in favor of AI stories.

There are aspects to hate about crypto but monero is not one of them.

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