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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Crypto-people? As in that that other part of Homo Sapiens that is about to split off, or what? (Yes sarcasm) What are you even talking about? Please do some research before coming with such a response.

Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth because as soon as the term comes up there is a heavy emotional reaction.

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Podcasting 2.0 seems to be a cryptocurrency project. Saying that Podcasting 2.0 invented chapters and transcripts is saying that cryptocurrency people invented chapters and transcripts.

"Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here."

That couldn't be father from truth :) . Tokens are very much liked and often used by the HN crowd and by the IT workers in general. But there is a crucial nuance - most people using tokens, are using them for tax/customs avoidance. So in the topics where people are discussing how to pay for this or that and avoid taxation or or avoid sanctions etc. tokens would be shown in a positive light and those comments upvoted. What you've stumbled upon is the case of "selling" tokens to people for any other task, and that is widely ridiculed for a reason.

It’s been 18 years and there are still no useful blockchain projects that go beyond trading and speculation. It hasn’t even produced a compelling currency, <2% of households use it for goods and services. I have no idea how or why anyone is still hanging on.

How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself? What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)?

Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.

> How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself?

"Anonymously paying for VPN" seems a bit ironic given that almost all VPN users then immediately proceed to completely deanonymize themselves towards the VPN by accessing it from their (not anonymous) home Internet connection and/or to access sites that deanonymize them. Add to that the fact that most blockchains are very much public, and I couldn't think of a better way than crypto to deanonymize my entire payment and Internet usage profile in one go if I tried.

I do agree that payer (not necessarily payee) anonymity is really important and most existing payment methods fall short of what's arguably the absolute minimum in a non-surveillance state.

Still, this seems like a problem largely orthogonal to crypto. It's possible to build a payer-anonymous payment system based on regular centralized databases just fine, see e.g. GNU Taler.

> What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)?

Mine is to live in a jurisdiction where banks aren't allowed to get away with stuff like that (and where "identity theft" is not really a thing because knowing a 9-digit number and maybe having a photo of somebody's driver's license is not considered a valid KYC method), but I realize that this is not an option for nearly everybody in the world, and I do see some value of crypto as a forcing function in those.

What about inflation that eats your savings? Can your bank solve this?

No, but I'm not sure how that would be their responsibility. Banks don't set interest rates, nor monetary policy.

Who does?

> Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.

I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to have a niche value to speculators and investors.

All of the examples you gave either don’t matter to 99% of everyone (“hey mom, how do you donate to whistleblowers”) or isn’t the most practical way to do a thing. E.g. bank account-related fraud is vanishingly small (the vast majority is credit card-related); in the US it affects ~10k people per year. Is the average person more likely to lose their savings to fraud or lose a crypto wallet due to human error?

I did not say it was ready for the average person yet. It took over a hundred years to build our fiat systems and it may take as long to fully replace them. But for technical people that need privacy, the types of people that use tor, it is an invaluable tool, today, for which no viable alternatives exist. The actual cypherpunk crowd using it as intended for privacy and sovereignty absolutely exists. The noise of the traders and grifters just drowns it out.

Also I have legitimately purchased things in person all over the world with bitcoin, including at major department stores. A great way to meet the rare actual cypherpunks though are places that are crypto first, like the pubkey bar in NYC.

I do not trade, and have no interest in trading.

Decentralized payments will be as easy as paypal soon with Silent Payments allowing you to pay someone by email -> dns -> private one time use address, all automatically.

> It hasn’t even produced a compelling currency

It has produced Monero which absolutely is that currency. Now if only we could get people to actually use it.

You don't want people to actually use it because like all cryptocurrency it's got quite limited maximum throughput. The problem is worse than usual with Monero - because it's so secure, no data can ever be proven to be unused, so no data can ever be removed from the blockchain.

All of that can be solved or worked around. The much bigger problem is that it's a bit "too anonymous" to ever be tolerated even in most democracies, for better or worse.

I think the only thing that stands a chance is something that partially anonymizes one party to the transaction but not the other, or something that can deanonymize a given transaction only by very publicly and verifiably "breaking glass".

The government would just break glass on every transaction because what would you do about it?

Fortunately, not all governments have completely normalized warrantless wiretaps yet. I think requiring a court order and retroactive notification of suspects whose privacy has been invaded is a good model.

I'd rather have my money work in a way that allows that than in the current status quo, i.e. a complete lack of privacy for anything other than cash (which has different issues and doesn't work so well online).

What will you do when they break glass on every transaction and don't do that?

Or when Lithuania breaks glass on every transaction and sends the data to the FBI, like what they did with Anom?

I would regulate value of currency. To be beneficial for few get more rich.

Buying drugs.

And even when it's not drugs, I sometimes use it to pay for things online because Visa randomly doesn't want me to use my Visa card for unknown reasons.

I was under the impression you were referring to the Podcasting 2.0 <-> Lightning monetization history. (Podcasting 2.0 includes a few Lightning-related extensions as far as I understand.)

My point stands also if you weren't: Podcasting 2.0 did not invent chapter markers, it only added them to the RSS feed.

> Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth.

I can't deny that I'm coming into crypto-adjacent discussions with some preconceptions, even though I'm sympathetic to many of the ideas, and don't treat the ecosystem as a monolith. There are well-intentioned folks in it, but also libertarian fanatics, corporate short-term-profit maximizers, social media grifters... I really wouldn't say that only crypto critics are at fault for the lack of grounding in truth. (And I say that as somebody that's been somewhat involved with it for a very long time.)

If you're one of the remaining well-intentioned folks in what has largely become a sea of grift, I do feel for you, but I also understand where people here are coming from.

Ok, yes, that is true (some podcasting 2.0 features are re-implementations, but there is much more and I wouldn't call them "crypto-people", that's just a term that paints those people in a bad light, especially here on HN, where "crypto" is a loaded term.

Yes part of podcasting 2.0 is lightning payments (which address a lot of issues people here have with crypto and has the potential to support indi devs and creators more fairly), but I admit I played with it and it is not there (yet).

Edit: And thank you for your thoughtful answer. There are some real lunatics on the crypto side indeed.

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