Hacker News Reader

Comment by ArtTimeInvestor | Hacker News Reader

Strange, that these shallow anti-crypto posts keep hitting the HN frontpage.

What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?

There is so much amazing technology being developed at the moment, which one would think is a main topic on a site for hackers.

As a random example, take arweave. Which is a really clever tweak to make a bitcoinlike blockchain store huge amounts of data. The top post about it here on HN has 8 comments, which do ot even touch on the tech.

While the current top post on the frontpage is "Radios, how do they work?".

View on HN

> What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?

The massive quantities of shallow fraud and bankrupt integrity that is either at the core of or openly embraced by the industry does it for me. But I suspect the frequent, confident inaccuracies in respect of the financial system parroted by many crypto enthusiasts particularly grates this community.

I haven’t written it off yet. But it’s never going to be long for this world, outside the low-FICO subset of the three generations that have gone whole hog on it [1], if it continues as anything resembling its current form.

[1] https://www.stilt.com/blog/2021/03/vast-majority-crypto-buye...

And yet HN people in general don't hate on cash. The sentiment is usually against regulating cash transactions.

> yet HN people in general don't hate on cash

Cash is more dominant than crypto, and while lower incomes are also over represented among its most-frequent users, it doesn’t show as much of a spike among specific generations [1].

People advocating cash use aren’t preying on anyone to get rich. There is no inherent gambling feature built into it. And it’s obviously used in a lot of legitimate circumstances for legitimate reasons.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/05/more-amer...

1) cash has an anti-gambling function inherent to it these days aka inflation. Unfortunately, this affects the investing decisions of millions of people rather than a few thousand hopeful & unsophisticated would-be investors in bitcoin et al.

2) cash has a multi-century head start from the entire cryptocurrency milieu, which has barely stepped out of the cradle.

3) Central banks and nations extract Seignorage from fiat currencies which has a recurring history of preying on the population of entire nations to keep incompetent and/or corrupt administrations and their adjacent buddies (the 0,01%) afloat, or in practice in say the USA, major corporate banks that control most of the day to day flows.

Can't speak for everyone naturally, but HN has a lot of skepticism on a lot of things from a lot of different angles.

Personally, my skepticism on crypto has not been based on technical merits but on practical ones. Basically, there is no technical solution to a legislative problem. It's hard to trust any crypto enthusiast who focuses on dethroning fiat when fiat (i.e. governments) can just... make crypto illegal or heavily impractical. There's no technical solution to that.

From the moment you have to go through rigorous KYC to onramp to crypto (as most will do these days), and EU slowly making "anonymous" crypto difficult/illegal, I feel it really loses merit as anything other than what BTC is mostly used for - an alternative asset class. That's not very interesting IMO, because then the only innovation of (the most popular) crypto is artificial, technologically enforced scarcity.

Of course, there are many flavours of enthusiast and skeptic, who each prefer or dislike crypto for different reasons, so my argument might not even apply for many.

And many think something being valuable just due artificial scarcity makes absolutely no sense. There is nothing actual behind it. With fiat money at least there is state demanding it as taxes. Gold, well people think it is pretty.

With crypto, nothing? Just this one is better than others, because it was first? And it is valuable because more people think it will be more valuable in future? Sounds like collectibles which have crashed time after time.

> Gold, well people think it is pretty.

I think that (math and tech behind) crypto is pretty.

> Gold, well people think it is pretty.

$2,100 per oz of pretty? Gold has a history longer than the US dollar and there's a lot more than goes into its price than people think it's pretty. If it were just about being pretty, the market for gold would have bottomed out on the invention of gold colored paint and pyrite would be worth way more than tens of dollars an ounce.

> Basically, there is no technical solution to a legislative problem.

Although it's definitely true, the alternative (pseudo-)solutions additionally push the legislation to improve.

the current top post on the frontpage is "Radios, how do they work?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813679 is a straight up technical post about a field that is, verily, one among the remaining instances of black magic. You can say things like 'superheterodyne' and it's not even made up - people have been making antennas for a century+. You just have to get past the ICP meme reference title.

The arweave HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461631) I see is 5 years old and is a generic company/investor brochure puff piece vaguely promising something 'forever', a thing with a far poorer track record.

These are hardly in the same category of HN post and the comparison doesn't seem to do your argument any favours.

Because all the pro-crypto posts are being flagged and removed, so these are the only ones left. Often see them in my RSS feed before they're removed. In general I recommend subscribing to HN via RSS feed only. Unrelated to crypto, it's absolutely crazy what kind of other stuff gets flagged and removed and how politically biased it is in certain topics. Echo chamber is an understatement.

"pro-crypto posts" sounds just as shallow as "anti-crypto posts".

There is so much interesting stiff going on in crypto, but the HN crowd seems to be more interested in retro-computing than in how the world will work tomorrow.

This post here is as shallow as it gets. But surprisingly it hasn't been flagged and removed yet. It may eventually, but the opposite political side is usually removed/flagged within minutes or at most an hour.

I've been lurking HN since 2019-ish and indeed it's an echo chamber. And I don't mean on polarizing topics. The front page became boring. You see the same authors, websites, topics upvoted by HNers reflexively regardless of actual content. Kinda puts me off submitting any interesting links if they're gonna be buried under n-th Paul Graham's or Seth's or Noahpinion blog post.

This is sadly a recurring phenomenon on all "Social" media, Facebook, Twitter, IG, HN... When a place becomes a "digital village", people tend to upvote/like/pat-on-the-back the known names automatically without applying scrutiny to their words or arguments, if any.

What kinds of posts get selectively removed?

Can you give some broad examples?

I agree. The whole "crypto" idea-environment is not far removed from an ideological trench warfare which makes fair debate without the incessant toxic sneering that I see often here on HN impossible. It is (should be?) possible to have a moderate stance on Cc as there are legitimate uses to Cc, but obviously also severe problems around the Cc phenomenon, ransomware being the prime example of such.

16 years of complete pointlessness, I would think?

As a long-term crypto watcher, this place actually used to be definitely on the credulous end of the spectrum, but it gave up eventually.

HN can be strangley luddite about new technology actually. It's the same with self driving cars - there's a large, vocal crowd on this website who are highly critical of it. And god forbid you put a touchscreen in their car...

I think crypto is failed experiment but there are plenty of new technologies that are way more interesting than the latest React competitor or UI framework that tend to get the most positive attention from the HN crowd. Shallow, risk-free innovation is where it's at.

Crypto is not new technology. If it was a dog it would be a senior by now.

There is real criticism about crypto.

The massive CO2 production is real. There is a company in NYC who restarted a gas power plant for crypto...

The same criticisms can be leveraged at the major fiat currencies; the US dollar hegemony is basically built around an assumed easy access to hydrocarbon energy (ref the long-term US partnership with Saudi Arabia), and has apparently dictated the US foreign policy on multiple occasions, fx. Operation Desert Shield-Desert Storm to protect Saudi Arabia in 1990 and later liberate Kuwait after Saddam torched the Kuwaiti oil fields.

Putting the worlds biggest military into operation a quarter of a globe away isn't exactly energy or GHG-cheap.

It's not.

Our current fiat system is a highly tuned PoS system with a ton of mechanism in place like you said.

Us military, printing technology, money laundering, international agreements etc.

Bitcoin and crypto is not solving any of those things in real life for real people.

Bitcoin already fails hard at simple but critical tasks like getting your money back when you loose your key.

And as soon as you want to exchange anything in the real world you need the real world PoS system anyway like contracts or a law system.

> god forbid you put a touchscreen in their car...

Isn't that mostly because the implementation has, for the most part, been terrible at best or dangerous at worst?

> What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?

Expertise and excellence.

I'd guess the unreliability of crypto, at least based on how often https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com is being linked here.

> What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?

HN readers are, as a rule, technologically literate - many of them programmers/engineers themselves. They have the skills to distinguish genuine innovation from marketing BS.

Illusionary thinking on crypto bros side leading to ignorance regarding the massiv energy and GPU consumption.

People saying things like Bitcoin is inflation save and ignore that Deflation is also a problem.

Or saying people should just use their own wallet but ignoring how many people lost access to their crypto due to this.

Or how it can't be censored but ignoring how countries make laws against it.

Just to tell us that they do crypto basically for the 3th world people who need a stable currency instead of just saying how it is: they like to get rich fast and actually don't care about anything.

Lucky enough Bitcoin is not hard but to complicated for the masses otherwise this virus would have eaten us by now (paperclip )

And lucky again: instead of having to read all the crypto bro shit every day we have ai which actually does things. It's much more interesting than reading the same green washing and other lies left and right

Everything you write here cast the "crypto bros" in the worst light possible, leaving no room for a middle ground. But I am probably being too hopeful, your username considered.

I would not complain if we as a society have test nodes and talk about scenarios and do everything besides using crypto in the current state with real money.

Or in a way we're the money thing is more for overhead or play money without a chance for pump'n'dump/get rich fast and similar shit.

And than introducing it later when things are actually stable and reasonable.

> What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?

> There is so much amazing technology being developed at the moment, which one would think is a main topic on a site for hackers.

The subject of cryptocurrencies transcend technology. It leaks into the realms to finance, economics, and politics - all of these being heavily subjective.

Beyond this, I think there's an exhaustion surrounding the topic. A lot of people have their ideas solidified, and this poison the well for discussion, which becomes stale and uninteresting.

> While the current top post on the frontpage is "Radios, how do they work?".

Eh, I can see how this may sparkle the interest of people here. I have only a vague idea of how a radio works in term of hardware, and a more in depth article explaining its inner workings may make for an interesting read. A lot more than cryptocurrency, for reasons mentioned before.

> What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?

Jealousy, obviously.

This is wrong, dumb and exactly the "technical excellence" claim but with its sign reversed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com