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Comment by teh_infallible | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why, despite Coinbase and Kraken being headquartered in the Bay Area, HN hates cryptocurrency so much? It is literally just a neutral technology.

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I'll explain it in a convoluted way. There is a saying that "knives don't kill people, other people do", which is statistically correct. Meaning that a vast majority of knives are utilized for benign purposes. And it is quite hard in multiple aspects to kill a person with a knife. Same saying can be used for guns, and suddenly not all agree with it. Because guns facilitate easier killing than a knife and simultaneously have smaller amount of benign purposes. And we can also use this saying for example for anthrax. Sure "anthrax" doesn't kill people, other people do. Despite that we don't allow people to buy anthrax freely, because there are no benign uses for it and killing ability is off the charts.

Tokens-as-a-currency is an example of this saying. Sure, they theoretically can be used for some benign legal uses, but technology and implementation is so bad that in practice it is never used as such (I repeat - for completely legal purposes). Most of the people using it are breaking some regulation or laws. Some people break laws in absurd amounts, stealing real money from the governments and funneling illicit gains into offshores.

So while most people can't formulate their aversion to the tokens, I think this is the subconscious reason for it - we are observing an unregulated anthrax in the financial world. The world which is corrupt and dysfunctional as is, but tokens destabilize and corrupt it even more now, making live of people shittier on average globally. And of course environmental aspect too.

> It is literally just a neutral technology.

It's not. It's a technology with big societal costs and few benefits.

But it is not, if it gets used mainly for one thing: scams and eluding taxes. It's like claiming social networks are a neutral technology. It's the lie that gets sold, but technologies are not neutral in themselves. They have underlying mechanics that lend themselves to particularly good or in some case bad use cases. If you could go back and flip a switch and Facebook never happens, would you do it? would you rather have the minimal good that came from it, or avoid that people get slaughtered in Myanmar because of social media amplification of fake news? Same for crypto.

How is the location relevant? I think the subtitle of the article presents the thesis clearly: Selling itself as the new American dream, crypto exposes the vulnerable to fraud and scams, and loads risk onto the poor

Except most of the article is not about crypto, but speculation in general. And the location is relevant because y combinator is about launching startups like Coinbase and Kraken, which have been extremely successful.

Hating a tech is a variation on the them of immaturity that powers The Subject Article itself.

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