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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

“Roughly every decade, technology makes a giant leap that erases the old rules and wipes out our assumptions. The Internet. Mobile. Video. Blockchain.”

You know you’re in the silicon valley echo chamber when you think blockchain is some sea change. So far it’s proven to be of basically no use at all except perhaps convincing your dumbest friends they’re now expert currency traders.

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You forget about drug trade, tax evasion, bypassing currency controls and many other illegal use cases.

Can you provide sources for your claims and make good faith comparisons based on evidence? As I posted below: Crypto doesn't even hold a candle to the criminal activity that's going on in traditional banking. It's a public ledger after all, that's why more and more chain analysis startups are gaining traction and more criminals are brought to justice.

"The crypto community must be applauded for its focus on identifying and measuring – and mitigating – illicit crypto activity. And the fiat community has much to learn from the crypto community." - https://antimoneylaundering.wtf/f/financial-crime-estimates-...

> Can you provide sources for your claims and make good faith comparisons based on evidence?

Pick any illegal use case online at random. 99% probability there's an option to pay via bitcoin or other crypto.

Pick any legal use case at random. 95% probability online, 99.9% probability offline there's no option to pay in bitcoin.

What kind of evidence would you expect to see?

That is true. Criminals thought it was a safe way to pay for things anonymously online but it turned out to be the opposite.

All while assuming it was super private.

> convincing your dumbest friends they’re now expert currency traders.

Once you remove the geopolitics (that sovereign currency has), forex trading is just technical analysis which anyone can teach themselves

You know you are in the HN echo chamber when we have yet another comment telling us how useless crypto is.

True. Outside niche forums like HN, blockchain isn't even notable enough for people to brand it useless...

Who says it's useless? It's a godsend for grifters and criminals.

Crypto doesn't even hold a candle to the criminal activity that's going on in traditional banking. It's a public ledger after all, that's why more and more chain analysis startups are gaining traction and more criminals are brought to justice.

Notice how you are downvoted without a single counter argument, in fact all the anti-crypto diatribes in this thread have 0 substance and are just toxic 1-liners which bring no benefit or substance to the discussion. They hijacked an AI-Products thread and derailed it from discussing AI-Products to purely anti-crypto flame-bait.

It wasn’t really an anti-crypto diatribe. It’s useful to know where authors are coming from when evaluating what they say, and somebody who puts Blockchain in the same league as mobile phones clearly isn’t thinking clearly. They’re obviously caught up in some echo chamber.

I don’t know, maybe Blockchain and/or crypto will be widely used one day, but it’s been around for quite a while now and so far it’s been nothing other than speculative gambling. It hasn’t really changed life for most people, other than maybe them having won or lost some money on it. It’s not exactly a ubiquitous technology that most people use every day. The internet and mobile phones impact all of our lives daily, even if we somehow opt out of them. NFTs don’t. It’s more akin to the advent of online poker than an iPhone currently, and hardly a once in a decade world changing tech.

And that’s sort of the point with LLMs too, it’s so new we don’t know if it’s going to be mobile devices or Bitcoin yet. I’m inclined to think the former too, but it’ll take time to tell.

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