Why HN is a decade behind on crypto | Hacker News Reader

Why HN is a decade behind on crypto

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I am surely no expert on this topic but in my opinion plenty on HN know how crypto works but have no use for it or do not trust the exchanges or ledger operators to be outside of government control. The original promise was to bank the un-banked, proven untrue as governments can easily shut it down. Some tech enthusiasts use it but the primary use appears to still be for crime. Bucket shops, wash trading, laundering, recreating the criminal platforms of the 1920's - 1930's in a digital medium and that's before getting into topics like drugs, firearms and other things that draw the ire of governments. I am aware it is just a tool but that tool is drawing the wrong attention.

Crypto is also heavily focused on by the IRS here in the USA and some do not want to deal with even more complexity in their taxes. Governments are playing catch-up with cryto and it is they who are a decade or more behind on it. There are too many unknowns regarding what retro-active laws are coming. I know for a fact I will never go anywhere near it.

Disclaimer: I did watch your video but I did not hear any reason why I would use that as none of the examples given really apply to me. All of the purchasing examples provided are covered by cash for me. I lost confidence in online purchasing ages ago and barely trust one vendor enough to utilize them for things not sold locally. Most of the online stores using crypto carry the risks of unknown-unknowns for me. If I can not get something locally, I go to Amazon and if they don't have it then neither will I.

> I did watch your video but I did not hear any reason why I would use that as none of the examples given really apply to me.

Do you have a savings account? Do you sell or wish to purchase content for less than 30 cents? Do you pay capital gains tax?

I am not looking for ways to evade taxes. My taxes are very straight forward and will never involve crypto. I have also dealt with the IRS legal system and nobody wants to draw attention that will get them involved in that insane bureaucratic system that has their own courts and legal officials that operate entirely outside of the federal government and take part of the year off.

Owning assets and getting loans against them rather than selling them is considered tax reduction, not evasion, and is a very common accounting pattern.

I am aware of this process. That does not require crypto and I am not interested in it either way, crypto or otherwise. Most certainly never investing in crypto. I am however waiting on Full-scale QE for other reasons that also do not apply to crypto but I doubt the fed chair has an HN account.

Ok, I only responded because you mentioned you thought that it was illegal tax evasion earlier. The is much easier with crypto - I can walk into a shop and use Apple Pay to instantly get a loan against my assets. It’s vastly more convenient than otherwise.

As is getting more interest on your savings, with insurance.

Buying anything for less than $.30 (and in reality much more because people need to make a profit) only works with crypto right now as far as I know. This is huge not just for individuals that purchase small items of content but also for agents making calls for each other.

I think your concerns the governments may have backdoors in projects are reasonable. Blockchains and decentralised exchanges are open source and there is a culture of auditing prior to releasing, however (like Dual EC DRBG years ago) government can do attempt to subvert public systems. It is generally harder to subvert something with public code and a verifiable build though.

> Most certainly never investing in crypto.

Good. Crypto itself is a wrapper, that makes things instantly tradable globally 24/7.

It could be a wrapper for government bonds, it can be a wrapper for Nvidia stock, it could be a wrapper for real estate, it could be a native token used to pay fees on on a blockchain, or as mentioned it could be a wrapper for garbage. The people telling you to “invest in crypto” are often talking about the latter and generally also have no idea how blockchain works beyond scamming the next person. They don’t build anything and they should be ignored.

Where are you getting this 30 cent things can only be bought with crypto?

There’s a whole section covering this in the video, here’s a direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhGrk8dp91M&t=334s

Shameless plug, I've actually spent the last 2 years working on a HN alternative for crypto people because I got similarly frustrated with the HN community. It's still online and we're kinda trying to get an influx of people who'd like to use such a product. I'm not going to disclose the product name here because I feel like I'd be risking getting moderated. That said, if you wanna check this out please message me in private and I'm happy to send the link to you. My bio should have info

Quicknode founder here. video checks out. there are still a good chunk of smart engs who “don’t like crypto” because of what it was 5, 10 years ago. “crime” “drugs” “ransoms” “no utility”… we made this video to demonstrate today’s real-world use-cases, in an effort to educate and perhaps update the perception of onchain products, and general view of onchain technology. thanks in advance for watching!

Looks like a good video based on the overview. But like many here I’d prefer a text option.

Hold on a sec…this won’t have the on screen graphics or text obviously but here you go.

Transcript:

I've been a member of Hacker News for 19 years since the site was called Startup News, and a lot of the criticisms it makes about crypto are correct, but they're also about a decade out of date.

(intro)

So I've been regularly contributing to Hacker News for a really long time. There was a particularly a five year period where I had a company that worked in TLS that would post articles about, HTTP, HTTPS, brotli, gzip, NGINX, Apache that regularly made the Hacker News front page. I work in developer relations now, and even before that I was a computer journalist writing for magazines. I generally get a technical audience and I know that Hacker News hates crypto and it's actually fine to hate crypto. It's totally reasonable. But I think the reasons they hate crypto are about a decade out of date, and it's a little bit strange.

I get why people hated crypto. because I hated crypto too. When I had my TLS company, the smart people I met at any conferences to do with [00:01:00] InfoSec or cryptography, all have the same sticker on their laptop, and rightly so, a bunch of get rich quick assholes had taken a term crypto that is used to describe a pure science that is thousands of years old, spanning from ancient Egypt to Dan Bernstein and reused it, to describe large, obnoxious men that wear dive watches but can't dive. And it always seemed like if you read the docs and asked the right questions, the cryptography community was genuinely very helpful. So the hatred of blockchain seemed entirely justified.

But times changed. The academics that were spending their PhD a few years ago working on experimental techniques like fully homomorphic encryption, are now running blockchain companies providing those same techniques to companies building financial software and reaping the rewards.

But Hacker News is still strangely outdated. And again, I'm not saying it's wrong to hate crypto. You can hate anything you like, but the reasons they give are really strange. It's like someone turning around and saying they don't like node.js because of callback hell and no strict typing. Yeah, it was true. It's just not really anymore.

So take this recent Hacker News post. It's to a paywalled fortune article that wraps a free X article from Y Combinator saying that their startups will now be able to receive their funds in stablecoins. The comments are strange.

The top comment in the article is saying, Hey, you're already running a startup that's risky. Why are you making another investment? These are stablecoins. They're backed one to one by dollars and bonds. It's not an investment to hold a balance in stablecoins.

The next highest rated comment is startups can't legally pay their employees in crypto. Startups can legally pay their employees in crypto. The follow up comment is like, yeah, but you have to pay tax. Well, yes. Obviously.

It's probably not fair to pick apart individual comments since these sentiments are pretty common for all of Hacker News. So I want to just go through a quick list of points to bring you up to date on what has happened in crypto in the last decade.

1. Stablecoins are regulated

So the first thing is that stablecoins are regulated. There's a thing called the Genius Act. It [00:03:00] basically says that if you issue stablecoins in the United States, they must be backed one to one by US dollar currency or by US government bonds. That's actually more capitalization than your bank has. You are probably familiar with USDC. USDC is the most popular stablecoin on Solana. There's also something called Tether, USDT, uh, that's not genius compliant. So Tether has actually had to make USAT, which is their 100% collateralized US-based stablecoin from Tether.

2. There are low and zero-cost offramps

A lot of people had pretty reasonable questions about how do you get stablecoins into a bank account and whatever savings that you are making from using stablecoins are removed because these off ramps charge a lot of fees. Everyone you see in America probably has a Solana address that you can send them stablecoins to with zero off ramp fees. In the crypto tab of the PayPal app in their phone, they'll have a Solana address. You just send stablecoins to that address. If you have 1234.56 coming in, and then you put that in your bank account, you'll have [00:04:00] 1234.56 in Chase or Wells Fargo or whatever else.

3. There are insured stablecoin products that provide more interest than your bank

So why do people even hold stablecoins? I actually held a lot of stablecoins last year because I was getting married and I needed money to pay suppliers. The reason I held it in stablecoins rather than my bank was, because I earned 5% interest on it. There's an app in the app store called Lulo. It's basically a crypto savings account. And before you ask, yes, it has insurance. So I was very happy to park that money in Lulu and earn 10 times the interest that I would've otherwise.

4. You can loan against your assets using Apple Pay (capital gains tax)

Next thing you might want to do is buy some assets and get a loan against that. It's a very common pattern from high net worth individuals. You buy assets, then you get loans against their value. There's an app called Pyra that allows you to do that, and then have a card that you can use anywhere that accepts Apple Pay, where you can buy things. and get micro loans against that collateral. Full disclosure, I was doing this manually with Kamino and PayPal and a bunch of things in between before Pyra came out. So when it was released, I invested in their seed round.

5. Moving stablecoins US->Europe is much cheaper, compared to wise.com

Moving US dollars to Europe is about 0.55% on wise, which is [00:05:00] generally considered one of the best traditional money transfer services. Swapping USDC to EURC on Jupiter is a fraction of a penny. Moving the EURC into your European bank account costs about 0.10 or 0.15% depending on your bank. That's still vastly cheaper than wise.

6. Retailers pay 1-3% of revenue to card companies

For retailers, it's not always worth the one to 3% of the value of every transaction that you pay to a credit card company just to be able to receive cards. Yes, you get a fraction of this back using rewards and you also get insurance. When was the last time you used insurance on a coffee?

7. Cards don't handle small payments. Crypto does, well.

What about helping people sell their things on the internet? This very Fortune article asked me to subscribe to Fortune for a dollar a month. They probably couldn't make it too much cheaper because the minimum payment you need on a network like Stripe is 30 cents. But blockchain payments can be nothing fractions of a cent. The X402 standard allows a website to ask for a payment, a user to make a payment, and to do things like having Fortune sell me this individual article [00:06:00] for say, 5 cents, which I would happily pay, and which I would more likely pay than the $1 a month subscription.

8. You get to work practically with cutting edge cryptography.

Final cool thing is just the actual hacker aspect of it. The idea that I can go and take two encrypted values, run arbitrary Rust on them, and then get a result but none of the machines in the MXE network that's performing multi-party computation, no one who's running those nodes, no one who works for the company that runs that network or wrote that software can see those values. That's amazing. I use MPC pretty regularly and I am like a senior software engineer. I'm not a cryptographer, I don't have a maths degree or anything else like that. The idea that I can process data without the machine that is doing the processing, being able to read the data is amazing. Honestly. I love that. And I don't get it anywhere outside of blockchain.

In summary:

Look, I don't want to pretend that crypto is magic, that there aren't vast quantities of scammers, that people don't frequently tokenize rubbish, or that there's always an easy path between traditional finance and [00:07:00] blockchain. Those are all valid points, but blockchain is as much financial tech as whatever Stripe has released recently. And if you're gonna criticize the technology, you should do so based on what it is now, rather than what it was a decade ago.

Thanks! I read it.

Thanks for reading! I’m actually in an event now with Altitude (a new product from the Squads team) who have a 0% on and off ramp.

Hey, author here. I encourage HN actually listen to the video - there's timestamps underneath so you can get specific concerns addressed - rather than comment about a topic that was already addressed.

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