The quality of discourse at this stage of the thread (2 hours, 20 comments) is incredibly disappointing.
Hn usually has high quality discussions. What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?
Hn usually has high quality discussions. What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?
It has been a lesson to me about humans and intelligence since that time.
Still love the place though, but I learned never to let comments be the source of the things I need to investigate.
The "anti-crypto sentiment" that was the unwavering average sentiment on HN is, to me, a point of pride, and I'm thankful for it, because it inoculated me when I was most vulnerable - early on, where it wasn't obvious yet what type of people are promoting crypto and for what reasons.
What community that wouldn't have confirmation bias would understand crypto currency better? And what are their thoughts on it?
Personally, I'm fully against promoting crypto as an end all be all solution to economic problems the way that many scammers do. I'm even against trying to onboard the masses.
However, I see in crypto and smart contracts a green field of opportunity to experiment with unique forms and formats of human interaction using the medium of programmable money.
For example, I like how NFTs (despite many shortcomings) play with the concept of digital ownership. I also like how defi brings us unique financial instruments like flash loans, etc.
I think draconian regulation in this space will effectively squeeze a lot of these experiments out from under legitimate actors. It's a technology that is worth playing with. I think it's better to punish bad actors rather than raise the barrier to entry for the tech.
Of course you are right that enthusiasts of the technology would have a confirmation bias, but the opposite is also true. The confirmation bias here is that this is de facto bad.
Some HNers just aren't that interested in the use cases, which is fine. But others tend to critique decades-old technology, and don't seem interested in learning about modern solutions, since their minds are made up.
At least for me, my main concerns are with the seemingly short sighted libertarian implementations that don't take into account the bad actors of this world. I think there are definitely some issues with our current financial system, but I think its like democracy in that it seems to be the least bad solution. I wouldn't want to live in a world without regulation of our financial markets. It is too easy for people to defraud the little guy and for criminal organizations to prosper. Do you think there are solutions in newer technologies for those concerns?
I feel like both sides should be able to agree that there are pros and cons to the different technologies and use cases, that there are some that are better for the pro camp and less negative for the against camp. Maybe pushing harder to make the cream rise to the top could make these conversations less tribal and divisive?
To be clear, that is absolutely not solved for Bitcoin, which still wastes energy at a disgusting rate. Some crypto things have shifted to non-proof-of-work approaches, usually proof of stake, but Bitcoin is still pumping out more CO2 than many countries.
It wasn't as bad as some forums, since some skeptical voices were present too, but there absolutely was a ton of breathless hype over the years.
Here's just one example, when stripe added bitcoin support [0]
I personally feel like HN sentiment finally "turned" on crypto only after some of the more egregious scams started going really mainstream - in the months leading up to and during the pandemic.
I went back a decade and randomly clicked on a discussion and found most of the comments constructive and matter of fact. Perhaps I got lucky, but it lines up with my memory of the period.
Personally, I think I can reason through a great number of things. But I still get depressed, angry, jealous, happy, enthused, etc. in ways that reason has to catch up to, before the instinctive emotion makes itself public - and sometimes reason does not or cannot catch up.
(Generally the positive ones I leave to run wild, but sometimes they need to be suppressed too).
Almost on the actual topic, I think cryptocurrency has proven it's use case in the global transfer of value without a centralised third party. And that, in itself, is pretty amazing. All the rest is the application of this technology having to work itself out.
The whole argument about criminal activity or porn or whatever is just proof of the use-case. The internet itself was accused of just being a conduit for porn not really that long ago.
Because it's related to "value (transfer)" means it should have been considered inevitable that it would attract, well, the kinds of people it has obviously and very publicly attracted. And that nicely ties off the loop of human nature...
It's a sobering moment when you realize that a lot of tech is actually net negative to you - not the least because it outsourced to you the work that previously was done, much more efficiently, by specialized labor.
HackerNews was weirdly credulous about this stuff for a weirdly long time, but it does seem to have shifted in the last few years.
1. At this stage of the game, there is not a lot new under the sun to discuss that is likely to alter people's opinions. I would say that I did think there were some good comments in some of the other posts about what constitutes a security by the legal definition, and helped me understand better the specific points of the SEC's argument. This story, though, is just about the SEC wanting to freeze Binance US's assets. To be frank, I don't think there is a lot of substantive things to discuss about this particular story.
2. I feel the need to roll my eyes whenever I see the "Well, it's well known HN hates crypto..." lamentations. I will only speak for myself, but I don't "hate crypto". On the contrary, I remember reading the Bitcoin whitepaper early on and thinking how brilliant it was. As time has gone on, however, I've simply come to the conclusion that most crypto technology has very little actual utility. I believe the primary thesis of crypto enthusiasts, that it can somehow "escape" the legal frameworks of human beings (the "code is the law" stuff), is just fundamentally wrong and misguided. I think things like NFTs are just dumb. All this coupled with the fact that the crypto "ecosystem" has drawn in the scummiest set of characters I can think of, and that I think its net utility over the past decade has been negative, just leads me to believe that most crypto technologies deserve to die. This isn't some irrational "I hate crypto" take. This is my (fair, in my opinion) assessment that crypto has little overall utility. I also think this is highlighted by the fact that the amount of real crypto utility that its backers can point to is extremely limited.
In general, I think the HN community is by-and-large quite rational when it comes to evaluating and discussing new technologies. I'm not saying it is always "right", and of course you always have fan boys on all sides, but I do think that reasonable, insightful comments about crypto still bubble to the top.
Crypto is interesting as a kind of libertarian pseudo-oppositional secular religion that flatters itself that it's edgy and non-conformist but is actually dead-centre mainstream in a capitalist culture with consistent shades of criminality dedicated to making money at any cost.
The tech is interesting, it was still embedded in and made to promote an ideology that's frankly just immature fantasy. You can't separate the symbol from the religion it was born in, and born to promote.
And yet multibillion dollar companies whose entire business is illegally running hotels or taxis get nowhere near the vitriol?
Airbnb clearly causes harm for locals in popular tourist cities.
I have perturbed many electrons around here on both illegal taxi companies and shitty world-burning cryptography. I contain the capacity to think more than one thing is awful society-corroding trash.
Do you not?
They’re locked into irrationally promoting crypto because it’s the only way to protect their “investments” and their dignity.
The other large contingent, myself included, sees the never ending scams, shady dealings, and blatant money laundering. Some of these projects, like Bitcoin Lightning Network, are like honey pots for smart people that have no idea how serious the government is about sanctions.
Don't miss: and energy costs grow much faster than linear with that expansion, and the incentives are all wrong - with traditional financial systems, energy expenditure is waste, upkeep, something you need to pay but want to minimize; with PoW, it's value generation and something everyone wants to maximize.
Long-term, fossil fuels don't even matter here. Even with 100% clean energy derived from a Dyson sphere or something, it's still pure waste of energy, done for the sake of not having to ever trust each other. What crypto people missed is that trust is a feature, not a bug.
The First Law tells you can't create or destroy energy, but you can transform it. The Second Law tells you that this transformation always reduces the amount of useful work you can extract from it. This is how energy is "used up" - it's transformed from a high-grade form (e.g. electricity) to a lower-grade form (e.g. waste heat). Per the Second Law, you can't then go back the opposite direction.
(For a hands-on example, compare the utility of an egg vs. that of a smashed egg, and the amount of effort required to convert one into the other.)
So no, Proof of Work isn't destroying energy, but it's wasting it. It's literally the whole point: you're meant to burn high-grade energy down to waste heat in order to prove you can afford it - there is math to show that trying to make it not wasteful (by e.g. doing some useful math like protein folding, instead of brute-forcing a random hash) creates incentives that defeat the whole system that PoW is supposed to establish.
Waste as a rationale depends on the assumption that the Earth's atmosphere heats up as a result of any excess power generation beyond equilibrium solar radiation, and so there is a limited power budget available to humanity for "useful" work.
Asking the question of whether someone finds it acceptable for PoW to be performed in space or on the Moon is a useful way to discuss crypto when someone just wants to make the climate change argument because it separates the concerns.
Today, this may be increasing fraction of energy generation on the planet. In 50 years, this may be dedicated space satellites beaming energy from the sun. 500 years later, a Dyson swarm constructed for the sole purpose of keeping the blockchain going.
Nah.
So with K3 civilization, we're not talking about dismantling a few planets - but rather dismantling the neighbourhood galaxies.
There may simply not be that much that is novel to be said about this. The SEC's complaint was discussed at length yesterday. This order is a prophylactic procedure tied to the complaint. It seems even the best of us fill vacuums with tribal genuflection.
People are unable to have discussions when talking across a divide where people who think one thing think things that cause pain for the other side.
If you have money in crypto, you think you're rich. The thought you might not be tends to be painful.
If you are in tech and don't have money in crypto, you think crypto is a scam. The thought you missed out tends to be painful.
Those two groups aren't going to talk to each other very well.
tl;dr: frustration towards people in the cryptocurrency scene, feeling they've gained wealth through luck rather than skill or hard work. Also a disdain for how some cryptocurrencies are overzealously promoted.
It was the top comment of a 640 comments thread, so it presumably had a lot of up votes and is representative of how HN feels about cryptocurrency.
Unfortunately, the low quality discussion on crypto related threads dates back a long time and some of us just got tired of always correcting the same misinformation and low effort criticism.
Please, point out one single application of blockchain that is useful and more efficient, beneficially transparent, and faster than a different implementation that doesn't utilize blockchain. Being somebody who is a big fan of blockchain yourself, surely this should be a very straightforward thing to point out.
If that's how you feel then you're not going to like startup culture in general. Every second SaaS founder thinks that they're changing the world with the launch of their crappy CRM #3432.
- At least for me that's it, it would be stressful to deal with that so I go elsewhere to discuss the technology.
And this is probably precisely how an echo chamber can be created even without recommendation algorithms.
The "in-group" harasses the "out-group" until all of them leave - or not dare to speak anymore - and only the "in-group" is left.
I think refraining from posting due to fear of downvotes is a massive disservice to HN. People should be exposed to views of all kinds. It wouldn't be very interesting if we all agreed. I actively try to post and reply even when downvoted. In the course of doing so I often discover that I'm not alone. Posting freely seems to somehow embolden others to reply as well.
Besides, I've got what 17k HN points? I can't even keep track of them anymore anyway.
I'm not going to evangelize for seeing other positions, when the majority seems to prefer one-sided views.
No evidence for this, but I think more commonly people refrain from posting because if you have a controversial opinion you don’t get one thread of posts to reply to suddenly everyone piles on and you’re “discussing” it with 50 different people.
This is a fundamental flaw in link aggregator style social media where the community is large.
It’s debilitating to have people throwing their 2c in to a growing tree thread and bounce! At least with linear vbulletin forums of old people would have to scroll past the conversation or look like idiots when they reply something totally out of context.
> At least with linear vbulletin forums of old people would have to scroll past the conversation or look like idiots when they reply something totally out of context.
Alternatively, they'd recreate threads via extensive quoting, leading to massive in-line quote trees... Socializing is a messy affair no matter what we do, I guess.
So, you have to consider that when talking about downvotes being discouraging— for people that don’t submit stories it can feel very real.
I care a lot more about the names of people than internet points. I've commented on threads here only to realize days later I was interacting with the creator of a major programming language. Some people are interesting enough that I've bookmarked their comments page.
Especially as none of this is new. It's been obvious since the mtgox collapse, nearly a decade ago, that offshore unregulated "institutions" run by small teams of opportunists were going to be extremely risky places to put your money. It's been obvious for a long time that selling tokens to people with the expectation of profit later that could only materialize from selling to others (no fundamentals) was fraudulent, which the SEC is gradually catching up on enforcing.
The remaining questions are political, and as such unresolveable. Delusional people who thing the US dollar has been on the verge of collapse since 1932 vs people stuck in actual collapsed currencies who want access to pseudodollar banking. Europeans annoyingly pointing out that regular bank transfers can be free and quick vs Americans insisting this is impossible.
That’s the tradeoff of an open web. When you have a limitless design space, you get lots of trash.
But saying “websites are a scam” is just disingenuous to the fact that some websites are very legit and very useful.
Lmao keep deluding yourself. What the hell did y’all put in this kool aid.
But it was hyped up to be the future, cure cancer, end poverty etc.
And now none of that has materialised it is just being hyped "down".
People are understandably disappointed or disillusioned. But unbridled pessimism is no more realism that unbridled optimism.
You see the same basic "roller coaster" with other "phenomenon". Elon Musk was a god, now he is the devil. Obama had the same Hope->Disappointment thing. Self driving cars, fusion (and fission) power, various climate accords, there are many examples. AI is the current biggest bubble.
To speculate wildly: I think it is caused by a mix of the same bubble-forming forces you see in financial markets AND a sort of In-Group psychology of humans where they value "being on the right side" (where popular=right) very highly.
Crypto is a strong example but not unique I think.
It's concerning that people on HN are not introspective enough to see what their own psychology is doing to them, but the same applies to me some times. Minds are slippery...
It doesn't.
That doesn't deny its purpose though. I've gotten paid via XMR for programming tasks. Anonymously, even. The fact people treat cryptocurrencies like stocks doesn't nullify that.
The truth is the true source of all problems in this space is the exchanges themselves. They are literally unregulated banks in disguise. Cryptocurrencies should not be regulated at all but exchanges definitely should be.