I think toxicity from the anti-crypto crowd is basically inevitable at this point. It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. None of their claims have materially panned out. There's some promise in some places - mainly in the most nerdy corners of ETH, but it's still only promises.
Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour in the crypto community. Even if you're curious about hearing how the latest project is justifying itself, you can't have a conversation about it because the entire conversation is dominated by memes and spam about other scam projects. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to say "No, actually this whole thing is just bad, and shouldn't be treated seriously". There's only so many times that you can humor the same lie. Web3, NFTs, DAOs, Altcoins, Smart Contracts, Stable coins. It's just the same grift repeated every 6 months. For every claim of how this tech could help someone there are thousands of people who have been harmed by scams using this tech.
>It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd.
Agreed. For me it was the NFT'ing of a fart that was the jumping the shark moment that drove me from being merely a crypto skeptic to being vociferously anti-crypto and advocating against it at every turn.
It's not about getting rich on Bitcoin, it's about taking back our choice of what money to use. Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap.
I fail to see the difference between what I said and "Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap."
Anyway, you have your choice of what money to use. I prefer USD and Euro myself. And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto.
I grant that 3rd world countries without banking systems may, may need it, but I don't know why we just wouldn't start banks there.
> And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto.
Hi. Here is a use case you can carry on to future discussions. There is a flourishing scene of dark net markets where people can purchase drugs using cryptocurrency. Merchants have reviews, products have reviews, and the whole process is much safer, secure, and convenient than meeting a drug dealer in real life with cash.
Except (at least in the case of BTC) that transaction will be permanently recorded on an indelible blockchain for everyone to see. Such security and privacy.
1. Bitcoin Lightning is not Bitcoin and is in fact a centralized by design layer 2 system which the transactions are off-chain [0][1], a direct contradiction to what Bitcoin was designed for. A peer-to-peer on-chain electronic cash system.
2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations. [2][3][4]
You can still use Monero, but the on-ramps, exchanges will have banned the privacy coins under these regulations, cutting a way to easily exchange it for fiat.
> 1. Bitcoin Lightning is not Bitcoin and is in fact a centralized by design layer 2 system
Yes, but I personally have node equipment sitting in my closet waiting to be setup. (time constraints) It's not so centralized that it's obviously destined to be controlled by Governments and Corporations. I would put proof of stake down as being much more controllable by monied interest.
> 2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations.
That's sad, but it leads me to two thoughts. One, I'm glad I don't live in the UK or EU, and I think it's gross that something like that happens without the input of the people. Not that I'd put it entirely past the US to do this either (sigh). Two, hopefully Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges will allow for people to swap into privacy coins without a regulated exchange, but I agree there are probably numerous ways to penalize or track the entrance and exit thereof.
I think really this comes down to getting off exchanges asap and trying to actually use the currency. My local community has a group that actively uses the currencies for exchange, but who knows how strongly that would survive if the currencies couldn't off ramp to fiat.
Right, anyone can generate NFTs though. How does this differ from saying something like "the artist who called an empty room art is the jumping the shark moment, now I'm advocating against art at every turn"?
Because artists haven't generally backed themselves by weaponized ASICs and a very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception (not to mention pollution)
> Because artists haven't generally backed themselves [into a] very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception
Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolutely an unhealthy social scene of greed and deception.
You're absolutely right, and I personally find 'modern' art unappealing and a scam (banan on wall 30k plz), but this is because it is being used a commodity in a rotten, oligarchic financial system where we bail out corrupt bankers at the cost of the people.
With crypto, the pollution is built into the system. It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.
> It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.
So is the contemporary art world. The contemporary art world is vastly polluting as well. How much GHG do you think is generated to run a museum, or warehouse, transport aircraft, ect, filled with bad contemporary art?
This is a wild argument. You're comparing apples and anteaters.
No-one is proposing that contemporary art is some sort of technological breakthrough that will completely revamp society, make everyone rich and change finance for the rest of time.
(Also, I'm sorry, but I do NOT believe that contemporary art consume even a tiny fraction of the power that cryptocurrencies do when nearly all of it sits in a handful of warehouses and never moves, just changes ownership abstractly. You would really need to prove this claim.)
>The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe.
Yes, there are strong parallels between the art market and the NFT market. The main one being that money laundering seems to be the primary purpose of both. But at least art does provide people with some level of subjective enjoyment beyond that.
I'd agree that a rotten shark in a tank has more substance to it than an NFT. Shame it's in embalming fluid. You could eat it if you fall on hard times otherwise.
I suppose in the sense that concentration of mining power makes a cryptocurrency vulnerable to 51% attacks or that concentration of mining power centralizes influence and cryptocurrency in a way philosophically antithetical to the principle of decentralized cryptocurrencies.
You dilute the meaning of the word at that point. Weapons are specific tools that are used with intent to cause harm. If something happens to cause harm without intent, and you define it as a weapon, the word becomes useless.
Lots of art is pretty dumb, I don't advocate against it because who has time to go advocate against dumb, pointless things? Just avoid it. I'm not into art, not into NFTs, but while bumbling around in the world I've encountered enough genuinely beautiful art that I don't think the field as a whole is a joke. This isn't the case for NFTs.
On the other hand, NFTs are pretty new. Maybe someone will make a museum of NFTs that don't suck in a couple years and I'll be proven foolish.
You literally can't make a museum of NFTs because the jpeg they point to is actually distinct from the NFT itself. A museum of NFTs would just be a giant list of hashes
I dunno. My main point was that I haven't stumbled across many interesting NFTs, but I wanted to at least leave the possibility that the medium just hasn't matured enough to create art that us non-NFT-hobbyist people would find interesting.
I'm not sure how one would curate an NFT museum, I imagine you'd want to display the jpeg and then select for pieces that play with the uniqueness guarantee somehow.
I haven't the foggiest clue how that would work, it if it is even possible, or what it would look like. But people have only been doing them for a couple years. If we made a museum that sampled the NFT population as selectively as an art museum samples the overall art population, that NFT museum would have approximately zero entries, right?
After the 100th clone of the million dollar home page, I would have dismissed the web, if there hadn't been also been hundreds of good/useful/entertaining websites around at that point.
Just like that for some of us working with web3, the amount of useful applications that come up more than make up for all the stupidity going on with the "NFT art" space.
> ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata.
So, for $5 (as of right now) a year, I can create a DNS-ish entry that points at a static piece of data (though not an IP?)? There are plenty of companies who sell DNS addresses (which can do the same things, plus IP), and while they do report to a single authority, that's to keep them in line, not to keep me in line.
Unlock Protocol:
> Create memberships and sell access NFTs in minutes
How is this not possible without a "central authority"? Exclusive community membership and cryptographically signed tokens have been around longer than you or I, likely even on the internet.
Being honest, neither of these are compelling technologies. At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend. This isn't a bad thing, but neither is it very exciting.
> How is this not possible without a "central authority"?
Ask that to the people that got shut out of Patreon, OnlyFans, business in Russia that have nothing to do with the war and yet got blocked from transacting with the rest of the world, a freelancer in Venezuela who does not want to have their funds confiscated by Maduro's thugs...
> At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend.
The big thing that you are missing out is that this backend is permissionless and that it can not be captured by any single entity. It's not so much about what it can do, but what it prevents from being done.
Basically, web3 can be the place where we can build the next search engine that is as revolutionary as early-day Google, without worrying that it will become a Goliath that controls every aspect of our lives. And that to me is very exciting.
This is a prime example of what others were saying!
We asked for an example of "good/useful/entertaining websites", and you are giving us technology demos, something that is only interesting to Web3 people.
How about some real-life useful stuff? Don't give me youtube, show me Kurzgesagt channel. Don't talk about Javascript, DOM and browser optimization, show me Google Maps.
Right now, all the stuff Web3 people produce is only interesting if you are into Web3 as well.
You are basically saying "these GNU people only produce things that are interesting for people into software stuff. Don't give me a C compiler, give me Visicalc."
It's not because this is not "real-life" enough for you that it means that it is not worthy of being done.
Um, no -- the goal of GNU was to provide free software, so the analogy would be: "These GNU people only produce things for their weird philosophy. I don't care about freedom, give me software I can use."
And guess what? In just 4 years since GNU started, they had "assembler, an almost finished portable optimizing C compiler (GCC), an editor (GNU Emacs), and various Unix utilities (such as ls, grep, awk, make and ld)" [0]. Something that could be used even if you don't care about Stallman or software freedom.
If the goal of Web3 was to create blockchain libraries, no one would complain. But people, like you, say that Web3 has "useful applications" -- so what are those? Web3 is around for way long than 4 years, and it has much more people working too.
I am pretty sure that Ethereum got their VM, Solidity and plenty of libraries to support the development of smart contracts in (much) less than 4 years.
> so what are those?
Make up your damn mind! What counts as "useful" for you, GCC or Google Maps?
My guess is that you don't really care. You just want to take whatever answer you get and spin it in a way that pleases your biases and can score you some internet points.
So please quit wasting my time and go find something better to do with your life. Come back when you have done something that actually matters to people.
You are defining the GNU project as something for "programmers", which is simply wrong. The point of GNU is to have a Free/Libre Operating system (beyond the kernel) for everyone.
> What is the target audience of crypto websites?
People that care about self-sovereignty. Anyone that can not /does not/wants not to rely on central authority as their only means to interact with others around the world.
> You are basically saying "these GNU people only produce things that are interesting for people into software stuff. Don't give me a C compiler, give me Visicalc."
Yes we are. Yes, we re saying that. Because Unix was announced outside Bell Labs in 1973, and VisiCalc's first release was in 1979. It wasn't released on Unix, but that's really beside the point. Two years later it was available for basically any consumer system in existence.
And on top of that there was a wealth of other software available on those systems. For example, vi and emacs are both from 1976.
What you are saying is that "well, bitcoin paper is from 2008 (14 years ago), smart contracts are from 2014 (7 years ago), and we still have nothing even resembling VisiCalc, scratch that, we don't even have an equivalent of emacs or vi, `it's still early boohoo`"
> Visicalc was not free software... but Linux 1.0 is from 1994.
Goalposts: shifted.
The shift itself is also extremely funny because web3's entire premise is: "you pay for everything"
> The point is not just in having an application, the point is in having an application created under the new paradigm.
So, where are they? Where's web3's VisiCalc (1979), emacs (1976), vi (1976)? Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos was in 1968 [1].
Oh, I know the answer. "Bitcoin paper was 14 years ago, smart contracts first proposed over 30 years ago, appeared on Ethereum 7 years ago, but it's still early for this new paradigm because Visicalc, Unix erm Linux, muble mumble"
Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3 as a way to justify its existence. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.
Not only is absurd, it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.
"Oh, but BTC is volatile!". Yes, but I could in 2011 send money from the US to Brazil instantly without going through any international bank (buy in US exchange with USD, sell it in Brazilian exchanges in BRL, wire from the exchange to my brazilian bank) with minimal exposure to BTC volatility and at a lower cost than the fees charged by the banks.
But I am sure you want to ignore that, or find a reason to say that "it doesn't count". I can not fight your own prejudices.
> Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.
No. Your response is literally "you wouldn't ask Unix people to create VisiCalc instead of compilers", but they did, to which you responded "but it isn't free".
> it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.
You mean, the thing that people have been doing since the invention of borders is the killer app?
> But I am sure you want to ignore that
No, I'm not ignoring that. And the reason it doesn't count because original question was about web3, and if all web3 has to offer is sending money across borders, it's not web3, it's Western Union 2.0.
So not only you are misinterpreting every thing I said, you also are resorting to call me a shill?
My work is on making it easier to have crypto for e-commerce, focused on stable currencies. If you go look at all my writings and discussions, you will find me telling people to avoid speculation on token price and to not look at crypto for a quick buck.
You are completely lost in your hate, dude. Quite fitting for a "anti-crypto toxicity" thread. Go find something better to do with your life.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. That's seriously not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of HN from now on.
Perpetuating flamewars on HN and breaking the site guidelines yourself is not cool, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and regardless of how badly they've been behaving.
> you haven't seen it, you were not interested in looking and I doubt that any "evangelist" is going to change your mind
This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.)
One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they presently can't. VR has that. Crypto, not so much.
Instead we have pitches of doing the same things one can currently do, but decentralised. (Again, see App.net.) That will be appealing for a certain political niche. But Truth Social for libertarians, while definitely worth something, isn't the narrative web3 wants.
> ENS is "only" a domain registrar. It has absolutely nothing to do with app.net.
App.net was Facebook, but decentralized, also you pay for it. ENS is a domain registrar, but decentralized, and you still pay for it.
In response to "a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling [one] presently can't [do]" we got a thing we can already do. But decentralized. Sort of.
> hyperinflation that leaves poor people with no perspective to save
What does web3 do in solving this that crypto doesn't?
> corruption that shuts the citizens of any quality service
Like domain registration?
I'm honestly trying to understand this, including from managers of funds I'm in that have invested in it. At best, the end market is poor people in unstable countries. The same people Bitcoin is allegedly saving. In reality, it appears to be a (granted, wealthy) ideological set.
Respectfully, pointing at the Unlock protocol and justifying it with "poor people dealing with hyperinflation" is a bit disingenuous. The unlock protocol (and, to a lesser degree, ENS) is not about or for poor people. It's for socialites in first world countries with money to burn.
Yes. To this day if you work with marijuana dispensary you will be denied of any payment processor. Sex workers are denied credit card applications, even where prostitution is legal.
There is also "not exactly blocked but so many hoops to jump that is practically as it doesn't exist" markets: try being a consultant working from South America without getting ripped off in transfer/exchange fees and ask them how many would wish that their customers paid them in crypto instead.
So, those South America consultants, why are they not using crypto right now? The tech to transfer money via crypto has been around for a long time.
Could it be that crypto has a number of practical problems, so unless you are a crypto enthusiast or wanting to ~~steal~~ raise some money, traditional methods are more available?
> So, those South America consultants, why are they not using crypto right now?
Because the people on the other side of the transaction are saying "why can't I just PayPal you? Oh, it costs 8% more? Not a problem, I'd rather pay more than having to learn how to deal with crypto or worry about the tax implications from it."
> It's much easier to "sell" web3 to someone that has lived with dysfunctional institutions and has faced one of its many problems, whether it is hyperinflation that leaves poor people with no perspective to save, or systemic corruption that shuts the citizens of any quality service
I have lived in such countries (Moldova, in the 90s; Turkey, early 2000s). I wouldn't touch this web3 shit with a 1000-ft pole. All this narrative about "poor people" and "dysfunctional institutions" usually comes from relatively wealthy people in stable countries whose idea about "poor people" comes from watching a Netflix overproduced dramatic documentary.
web3 is more unstable and volatile than the absolute vast majority of existing countries (including most of the "dysfunctional" countries), and its only modus operandi is "pay to play" which surely makes wonders for the "poor people".
> usually comes from relatively wealthy people in stable countries whose idea about "poor people" comes from watching a Netflix overproduced dramatic documentary.
Ok, I was born in Brazil and I experienced 40% per month inflation in the 80s and I saw a government confiscating everyone's saving accounts as part of a "economic plan". I also saw another government putting a tax of 0.38% on every financial transfer (does not seem like much until you think of all the cascading effects) and I can tell you how little of all those taxes came back to the people in the form of public services.
Are you satisfied with my credentials or are you going to continue with the gatekeeping?
> web3 is more unstable and volatile
If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you. But web3 does not need Bitcoin to exist.
> government putting a tax of 0.38% on every financial transfer (does not seem like much until you think of all the cascading effects)
Unlike crypto/web3 which checks notes puts a tax on everything
> If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you.
Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200%
No one is "defending their tech". It's not even about the tech.
It's about how much of a strawman this is. People are literally using the worst possible example of a new class of applications
to dismiss all of it. It's usually indicative they don't understand it or were fortunate enough to never having the need for anything like it.
To make an analogy with evolutionary theory: every single technological breakthrough results in mutation pressure and consequently a massive explosion of new species (products). Some of these products are good, fit well with the environment and thrive. Some of them are ill-conceived or mal-adaptive and do not last long.
Yeah, "NFT-as-art" is bullshit, and I would bet that it will go away sooner or later. But that does not discredit NFTs as whole, much less blockchain/crypto/web3/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
well, same could be said for Facebook. Only now, less than 20y later, we're all scrolling through endless feeds and digging comment section trenches of the latest culture wars
I wouldn’t say 20 years later. Facebook was the way of connecting with people you just met even after 10 years after its inception. I would even say, pretty much everyone I knew had a Facebook account in 2010, and it delivered on the claims it made. Whether we agree with their mission is a different topic, but it certainly had an impact on the real world.
Yes it is -- its blockchain is longer. The blockchain with the longest proof-of-work is always the real blockchain, when given multiple competing blockchains to select from.
This is the essence of the Nakamoto Consensus Algorithm, which underpins the entirety of blockchain economics.
there are forks of bitcoin, to be sure... but the majority of "cryptos" out there are GPU mineable coins, because there's hardware that can be exploited to mine "profitably". not to mention the need to pre-mine shitcoins so they can be given to grifters and shills who pump & dump.
> None of their claims have materially panned out.
* Starknet is running a Turing complete VM using nothing but zero knowledge proofs. It's now possible and practical to trustlessly prove general purpose computation with O(logN) proof sizes.
* Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner.
* The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network.
> * Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner.
An overwhelming majority of these are bot trades.
> * The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network.
Visa does 597 million consumer transactions per day. Not only is that magnitudes more, I would wage to guess that >75% of Solana's transactions aren't consumer purchases.[0][1]
They meant 65,000 transactions per second (they left that crucial word out). And that's the max that the Solana network can handle, not what it's currently doing all the time. So at it's maximum, the Solana network could handle 5.6 billion transactions per day. Visa only claims to handle 24,000 transactions per second, btw. [1]
Actual approximate volume of transactions per month was around 500 million as of Nov 2021[2], so around 16.5 million transactions per day, or only about 5,800 transactions per second on average, so it can handle a lot more.
It's handled just under 70 billion transactions to date[3] since it debuted in early 2020, so roughly 35 billion transactions each year for the two years it's been out.
> An overwhelming majority of these are bot trades.
Likely the same is true on the Australian stock exchange. Not that this is a bad thing. There is a person behind every bot - and in the case of Uniswap, the arbitrage is what makes it work in the first place.
BTC was the only way I was able to pay for hosting/domain for my non-commercial pet-project (~1,5 years of almost daily after hours development) after sanctions raised against the country I live in.
This is my anecdotal experience (and no, I don't invest in crypto), but that's enough for me to not consider cryptocurrencies "just scum".
P.S. Also I pay for VPN with it, because this is also the only way at the moment, and without it I cannot even read news I prefer.
I'd be interested to hear who you bought the hosting from, I'm sure the US government would also like to hear who has been helping you evade sanctions. Sanctions are there for a reason.
Yeah, "crypto is great because it allowed me and my co conspirators to do illegal things" isn't gonna be the most persuasive to governments or above-board businesses -- love the rebellious spirit though.
I dont know what you mean by "co conspirators" and "illegal things", but my project is site for cardboard game and 99+% of userbase is from EU/NA/SA.
P.S. There are no sanctions prohibiting companies to sell hosting to me (by me I mean ordinary citizen with "toxic" passport), it is just VISA/Mastercard decision not to serve us so I dont have other means to pay.
It's doubtful seeking these hosting services were illegal in his own country. It's also doubtful the host has performed a crime if they had no idea the purchaser was sanctioned. It's questionable a law was even broken, as in many jurisdiction there is an element of 'mens rea' necessary.
> None of their claims have materially panned out.
Well, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of money across the planet, to any country with internet access, for tiny sums, safely, irreversibly, to anyone.
Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example. Transnational, permissionless internet money is quite handy.
That wasn't possible before, and that's pretty useful, so I think the basic claim (that cryptocurrency is useful) is holding up fine.
> Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example
Far more has been sent over traditional rails [1]. Once you consider state aid, e.g. the billions the Congress has authorized, crypto's contribution is irrelevant.
Given Ukraine had to convert 80% of its crypto into hard currency before it could use it, crypto was also the most expensive donation vector. If we consider crypto’s likely role in softening Russian sanctions (also almost negligible, but we’re comparing two small things), the net contribution could be a wash.
>Far more has been sent over traditional rails [1]. Once you consider state aid, e.g. the billions the Congress has authorized, crypto's contribution is irrelevant.
When you put it that way, your or my life is just a point of irrelevance in the sea of humanity. While that has a ring of truth to it, it's an odd way to dismiss each piece from making its contribution. A house is built of many bricks.
The amount doesn't matter as much as the latency and resources* used to send it.
*not going to address the green energy mining debate here but yes I know it is a thing.
Given funds sent by congress that went through how many approval gates, delays, and intermediaries, vs. millions sent almost over night to the UKR address...
What are the pros/cons of the the two approaches?
- billions were sent via congress, and the last time this occurred at a similar scale and sense of urgency was covid relief. The [0] fraud [1] involved [2] and what scale was somewhat substantial and is now a focused DoJ investigation. Scale of $2bil seizures, for instance. Sending direct to a crypto address also has issues and fraud certainly exists, but wouldn't say irrelevant in the alternative controls it offers. $100 mil almost overnight with no strings attached vs. billions from Congress that has strings and will take some time presumably.
- Zelensky has consistently been upfront about the need is both resources, and speed of receiving resources [3]. What's more in line with that need - overnight donations, or Congressional authorizations that eventually lead into donations.
- Conversion: per Zelensky, biggest need is armaments, and he's been able to buy armaments directly in crypto, so that neutralizes your last criticism a bit, or at least more accurately fills out the picture [4]
Do you have any information the aid issued by Congress - has it actually reached UKR, how much of it, strings attached, etc?
Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen?
What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
> Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen?
Which part of the claim are you refuting here? It is a fact that one can send very large sums of value between two addresses for a trivial transaction fee. This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
I spoke with someone yesterday who lives in Nigeria, they were moving to Rwanda and needed to pay a deposit in advance. They were unable to pay via MoneyGram, Western Union etc. - one provider offered to handle the payment and requested many documents for a few days and in the end rejected the transfer. This person then had to send money to a friend who lived in the US who then forwarded it to Rwanda. This experience made the person feel isolated and outside of the system. This is an anecdote however my guess is if you think PayPal is "good enough" you don't live in a country that is marginalized by the status quo payment system.
> So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
So that's your take, global finance is a solved problem? No todos? No improvements needed we can pack it up? This is a stunning poverty of imagination in my estimation and a denial of the very real struggle many people face day to day in transacting.
>one can send very large sums of value between two addresses
This is not the same thing as sending money to Ukraine. If I send money between two addresses, I've just sent money between 2 addresses.
> This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
But not to actually buy anything in Ukraine. To do that you have to find someone with Fiat. As you see with all the other examples I gave you, what you've done is used the modern banking system to buy crypto currency - some bank transfer to a crypto exchange, send it from one address to another, and then left yourself with the problem of getting the money back out of crypto in Ukraine. Which as you'll see with almost all of the charitable giving in crypto to Ukraine, happens via the modern banking system, often with the direct involvement of the Ukrainian government.
So it seems to me, that this entire thing about using Crypto for Ukraine is rubbish. And it seems like that to you too - because when I start interrogating the idea, the Crypto to Ukraine story morphs into a Rwandan sending money to Nigeria.
My take is that Crypto in your example, was a worthless layer of complexity that doesn't solve the difficult problems of international banking, it solves the trivial bit in the middle.
For most trade questions, and that's what Ukraine is using the funds for, international finance is a solved problem. When it comes to tax evasion, large scale fraud, money laundering and so on it is definitely not. Unfortunately, crypto is only making the unsolved problems worse.
And regarding the case with the guy in Nigeria: How much access do people in the developing world have to crypto? And don't start with the crap scam Sam Altman came up with.
> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer?
My cards don't work on PayPal and I don't keep money in banks (because they've robbed me without cause before). I can, however, donate with cryptocurrency without friction.
What has crypto provided: If paypal/bank transfers decide to exit that space, no more donations. Not the case with crypto. Also, weapons are getting bought directly with crypto in UKR, so your last point is not not necessarily true[0].
Question of course is has such exiting happened. Have payment processors threatened or actually left a space over somewhat subjective judgements? Answer in this case in recent years is yes: Assange, OnlyFans, Canadian Truckers, etc.
Stating the above doesn't imply I support the above 3/etc., but it does show to me that based on which way the wind is blowing, payment censorship can and does happen. Assuming a payment processor/corporation will always be on your side ideologically isn't a great call. Popular German firms today were popular German firms under National Socialism. Or, are you going to tell me there isn't a single successful and well-regarded corporation today that wasn't enforcing segregation happily 60 years ago?
I'm also not implying necessarily an equivalence in present day payment censorship to segregation. But I certainly standby that hedging your bets on your ideological views always aligning to corporate/govt entities and as such you don't have to consider payment censorship is a bad call. Crypto isn't perfect, and 999/1000 times I'll use a credit card, but its an important alternative.
What happens when Climate Action groups get fed up, really start turning the screws on Exxon, and also rely on corporate infra (GSuite, Slack, Paypal) for running everything internally? Who does a payment processor side with - climate action groups perhaps doing not nice activism, or their ~largest client (ignore details here for a second) Exxon who is fed up with the activism and starts turning screws back? This has already happened with communications platforms via warehouse unionization, and QED Signal is pretty widely used. Are you saying it won't happen with payments, or there is at least a risk worth acknowledging?
As I understand it, somewhere around 20MM was sent to Ukraine via crypto. The National bank of Japan sent 100MM the first day with lower transaction costs (fees, electricity, complexity). And the Ukrainians still have to convert the crypto to money to use it.
Meanwhile, everyone could just send money to Ukraine via the standard banking system if they wanted to.
It turns out there are actually things that lawmakers don't really have the power to effectively ban, drugs and prostitution and gambling and cash transactions principally among them.
A lot of people don't seem to integrate this fact. The practical power of a lawmaking body is not unlimited. There are certain things they simply cannot stop, no matter how many laws are passed.
It won't "end" for either group, really. The latter will pass some laws, and the former will mostly ignore them, same as happened with hookers and blow.
The people who inhabit both groups (the subset of lawmakers that like being able to pay for their hookers and blow with unreported bitcoin) will laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."
--Malcolm Turnbull, Australia Prime Minister (2015-2018)
There are some people who see attitudes like that in the government and think how can [things backed by math] survive a coordinated government onslaught that'll happen any year now? And then those that just look at such statements as the unlettered nonsense they are. Bitcoin lets you "be your own bank", independent of any KYC laws that may or may not apply to other banks in your jurisdiction.
I definitely think a huge part of the business of government generally is enforcing society's suspension of disbelief, it's a lot cheaper to merely convince everyone that you're all-powerful and resistance is futile than to actually become all-powerful.
They're not obligated to, just as I'm not obligated to accept a check from your bank and can demand cash or some other form of payment. Your question is like asking what if no one wants to talk to me with PGP or some other secure message protocol.
What if selling things to US citizens via any means is criminal, and enforced?
Theres one big weakness in the use of cryptocurrencies: swapping back and forth with the local fiat currency at scale. All a government has to do is shut those commercial ventures down, and the value of the $coin will disappear for those residents.
Plus, unlike drugs and prostitution, the ledger is public and permanent… simplifying enforcement against the remaining fringes dramatically.
If they shut down, they will just push even more of their economy to the black markets.
Also, anonymity is not yet something that people care enough. But it already exists - monero, zcash, or the Aztec Network on top of Ethereum. I can bet that any serious attempt from the government at chasing regular people based on their Blockchain activity would lead to a lot to adopt the "truly private" networks.
> All a government has to do is shut those commercial ventures down, and the value of the $coin will disappear for those residents.
So long as any of those residents can travel to another place where they can exchange it for hard money, that's not true. Countries do not exist in isolation.
Carrying large quantities of cash across a border is usually investigated by the border guards. If you don't declare it, you're breaking the law.
This is compounded by how some countries are big enough that traveling across a border is a fairly significant undertaking (Brazil, for example). Not something most folks can or will do on a whim. Plus, you'd have to transfer a fairly significant amount of money to be worth it, making it more likely you'd run afoul of the border patrol.
It doesn't matter. As long as some members of society are willing to cross the border with cash, the availability of liquidity will be preserved (albeit with a slightly higher cost). "Most folks" won't need to deal with it any more than most folks know how to drive a semi full of groceries.
You're saying that the use case for cryptocurrencies is crime, which I agree with, and the world's police won't touch you because they can't, which I think is ridiculous.
If the EU and the US alone said, "In a month, we'll consider every crypto transaction to be criminal in nature, and we're going to enforce it," the market would collapse as everyone stampeded for the door at the same time.
> If the EU and the US alone said, "In a month, we'll consider every crypto transaction to be criminal in nature, and we're going to enforce it," the market would collapse as everyone stampeded for the door at the same time.
True. And yet, cryptocurrencies would still remain useful! A market collapse is not the same as it not having utility. Bitcoin was useful even when it was only pennies, and it will remain so.
This thread is about whether or not cryptocurrencies are useful. They are. Could governments crash their markets? Yes. Could they stop people from using them? No.
>> If the EU and the US alone said, "In a month, we'll consider every crypto transaction to be criminal in nature, and we're going to enforce it," the market would collapse
> True. And yet, cryptocurrencies would still remain useful! A market collapse is not the same as it not having utility.
(Genuine) Q: How many market participants are interested in "the utility" vs the (potential for) "getting rich"?
This would be one way to do this, yes, and I think it would be overall good for society if there was a clear association of cryptocurrencies and crime.
There would still be shady cryptocurrency things (just like we still have illegal drugs and gambling and prostitution), but at least we won't have smart people proudly announcing that they made new crypto system (just like we don't have people proudly announcing they made a new kind of illegal drug today).
Because for each person who genuinely believes into monetary anarchy and/or does not trust the government, there are lots more (thousands? tens of thousands?) people who read about it in New York Times and want to earn their money. It is the second group which is fueling the first, and so getting rid of it will make crypto harmless again.
Except Bitcoin transactions (or any other blockchain transaction) is forever public and forever traceable. It's the complete opposite of a cash transaction.
Once your wallet is in some way connected to you, all your transactions since the beginning of time are now known. This is a wet dream for government enforcement.
> they've gotten rich from selling their early-adopter cryptos to the next fool.
And that's where it all falls apart. Crypto-fanatics assume that "good for me" translates to "good for us." As we know, the crypto-rich only exist because others (usually many others) became crypto-broke and/or fiat-broke.
At least, in general, people have no realistic expectation of winning the lottery. You also don't usually have people betting their entire life savings on the lottery. The analogy is only very loosely true.
Of all the comments here, yours triggered one capital "R" Realization, probably repeated here in other words a dozen:
Lots and lots of people want to succeed like the early adopters of crypto by (nearly) any means.
Their biggest "means" is denial of the capital "R" Reality: Its already too late to repeat the rise, like wanting netflix stock price to grow after it already rose high, because you just bought some and deserve another 500% gain.
And so, since you need that rise badly, you dismiss each argument and everyone against your wish for repetition. Instead you hope for more "suckers" to buy after you so you can have the monyey and with it the break you think you deserve.
And the thing is: I would want that too, damn - I would not mind 100.000 suckers to go broke for me to be rich. I'm just sane enough to see that this gamble is not worth to enrich the ones who are already "in". sigh
>Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour
are you talking about the internet or crypto? or maybe you were referring to finance. wall st? i get hundreds of scam emails a day, shall we get rid of email too? seriously, just because there are scams, doesn't mean that the internet, or wall st, or crypto are all worthless. that's just lazy and ignoring that scams are from people, and not from the tech. some people will use whatever means they have available to scam other people out of money. that doesn't remotely mean that all of crypto is a scam.
Have you seen the companies funding the pro-crypto crowd? The 3 people and a discord server projects get the most attention and generally act toxic, agreed.
For the rest of the space, plenty of Fortune 500's investing in it for the long haul/"humoring the same lie."
"How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?
How can we reduce the power that a small few currently hold over the web?
How can we improve data privacy and ensure that people have control over their personal information?
How can we create reasonable privacy in the financial system?
How can we make information more available to everyone?
How can we fix a society where so many people are in untenable financial situations?
How can we reduce the enormous wealth disparity in today’s society—both in the existing distribution of wealth but also in access to new opportunities to earn it?
How can we enable creatives to make a fair living from their art?
How can we address inequities on a global scale?
How can we create self-governing communities around shared interests or goals?"
Cryptocurrencies as a tech are not the answer for any of those questions, they could be a tool to support some of those things but as of now are not the most efficient way to improve those. Maybe the "movement" / hype behind cryptos could help but you have to an absolute uncynical person to think that given the types that are most loudely hyping it up, society won't be worse off in the end.
Bootstrapping a new cryptocurrency where 90% of the coins go to relatively few early adopters is the worst possible way to fix financial inequality.
The crypto holders would love if the world switched to using the cryptocurrency they’re invested in because it would make them extraordinarily wealthy relative to the average person buying in late.
I don’t understand how anyone can honestly suggest that a gradual changeover to a specific cryptocurrency would be anything other than disastrous for financial inequality.
Pretending a system that has specific names for various scams will somehow reduce inequality is hilarious.
I feel people think “if everyone had bought Bitcoin when it was cheap, everyone would be rich now” and then think that Safemoon rugpull #42053 will somehow do it.
Not sure why you are downvoted since here on HN, a bad egg soils the bunch. The logic with them is as follows with an example of a fallacy with cars and the environment:
'The majority of cars worldwide are not electric. They are all petrol and diesel cars. That means that ALL cars are bad for the environment and that will not change and thus should be all banned.'
Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams, just like not all cars are burning up the planet.
The absolutism towards whether if all cryptocurrency projects will go away due to a 'bUnCH OF Scam PrOjEctS' or 'it's ALl a scAm™' is just as silly as suggesting that all cryptocurrency projects are guaranteed to survive, 'becAuse iT is the FutURE, bRO™' or 'JUst WaiT fOr ThIs PrOJEct ReAL sooN™'.
I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect. That is even before accounting for regulations getting involved.
What's incorrect at the anti extreme? In other words, what crypto-currency isn't a) burning down our planet and b) disproportionately rewarding early adopters?
> What's incorrect at the anti extreme? In other words, what crypto-currency isn't a) burning down our planet and b) disproportionately rewarding early adopters?
It can just take a single example to invalidate that question and Nano [0] perfectly does so. Unlike the others, it is not'burning down our planet', was not 'pre-mined' / 'pre-allocated' or ever did an ICO back when it was launched. sorry.
Now here's my question to you since I answered yours: Hence your support for the anti crypto-extreme: Are they all going to go away 100% guaranteed despite all the other scam projects existing and with looming regulations on the horizon?
You didn't invalidate the question, you answered it.
And that's great. But why is everyone and their dog still using proof of work? Large nations worth of power is being burnt to process all the others.
Why would they go away? Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time. See: the effect of regulation on drugs.
> But why is everyone and their dog still using proof of work? Large nations worth of power is being burnt to process all the others.
Are you sure that's an argument not to use 'cryptocurrencies' (since you tried to label all of them as 'burning up the planet' which that was debunked) or was that more to do with those using PoW? It's like asking 'Why is everyone and their dog still driving diesel and petrol cars and trucks, with those still emitting tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, despite the existence of greener alternatives?
> Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time.
That's the same way of saying that they are not going away 100% guaranteed and there will be lots of regulatory compliance; exactly what I already said. That's why mining PoW cryptocurrencies are banned in countries like China [0] and Kosovo [1]. Instead with regulations, it is going to get a lot harder for tax cheats, criminals, etc to use their privacy coins as the exchanges will delist them to prevent undesirables from converting it to fiat. [2]
Exactly. More crickets that are unable to respond to my question(s). Is that why you also haven't responded to my latest question and went on to vent your anger on to the latest crypto post?
Being extreme or not have little bearing on an opinion being correct. Some opinions, such as "murder is bad", are both extreme (they suffer very few exceptions), and correct.
And it happens quite often that the most informed opinions also happen to be the most extreme. And as far as I can tell, this seems to be the case for crypto currencies: the more I look at them, the more I think they cannot be redeemed: to date, I have seen no problem that is best solved by a blockchain, and I increasingly doubt there ever will be.
---
> Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams
I can believe that. However, I do believe that all crypto currencies, without even a single exception, are a net bad for the world. If we restrict that to proof-of-waste crypto currencies, that belief is a near certainty.
Long story short, it seems that in practice, all crypto currencies eventually devolve into a pyramid scheme. They're also used as an actual currency, but their volatility is such that it's not very practical to begin with, and that use is so marginal compared to "investment" that the financial freedom gained by people who actually need it is outweighed by the harmful side effects of the pyramid. (We ruin more people than we save.)
Add proof of work (or space-time, or whatever scarce resource you can think of), and you end up with a massive waste of resources on top of that. A waste so massive in fact that it manages to influence electronics prices around the world, not to mention the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network alone, in a world that really really needs to reduce its CO2 emissions. Like right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report
They may not be all scams, but as far as I can tell all honest attempts are doomed to fail.
>they're all built on the idea of creating a fake, unregulated private money out of nothing and then getting people to pay increasing prices for it.
As opposed to our current financial system which is built on the idea of creating real (except when we reeeeally want some extra money, in which case we just make some more), regulated (unless your regulated activity is conducted by an entity that is sufficiently rich or powerful) money and then control a global hegemony with it.
Crypto is not a solution to every problem and it definitely makes some new ones, but it sure would make for an interesting redistribution of power. I think there reaches a point where the levers of the modern currency system are much, much too attractive for human governments to be trusted with.
No that's not what I was saying and this is one of the most terrible things about any cryptocurrency discussion. People can't seem to avoid viewing it as something "opposed" to any current financial system, when that's not true. Cryptocurrency at best is the same as the current financial system and that's a huge stretch if you can somehow avoid all the negative externalities created by the insistence on using blockchains. So I would really suggest you avoid this angle when talking about this. Yes, all money is technically "fake". The difference is that real currencies that function as currencies are backed by some kind of real productive human activity to sustain that thing. Cryptocurrency by definition is not this, and it never can be unless you discard the fundamental concepts of it.
>but it sure would make for an interesting redistribution of power.
No not really. If you define "interesting" as something unpredictable and dramatic, then it would be more interesting to have the government raise tax rates to 99% and then randomly redistribute the proceeds via lottery. But nobody wants to talk about that because it doesn't require any kind of tech solutionism like cryptocurrency does. And also it would just be awful for most people. But hey, if you just want to convince some rich people to voluntarily pool their money into a trust that then redistributes it via lottery, you might as skip straight to that and avoid all the cryptocurrency shenanigans.
Sorry, if we're speculating about alternative financial systems comparing to the existing one is a pretty natural direction to go.
As for your next point, I'm not sure in what sense our current currency is backed by real human activity in a way that crypto is not. Currency is backed by bullets, bombs, and bayonets ( and sometimes softly spoken implications of the aforementioned alliteration). I guess that's a sort of human activity.
This is the lazy answer that gets trotted out every time cryptocurrency gets called out as a scam
"But the regular financial system is a scam too!"
It has lots of flaws, but it grew organically over thousands of years, and so did regulation that offers some reasonable protection that lets people use currency without massive risk of getting scammed (I'm sure there is a pedantic counterpoint to this, but overall, people get by on real money, much better than if they "invested" - because that's all you can do, you cant actually transact in any normal way - in the current crypto nonsense.)
Anyway, if your best argument is that real money is also a scam, it's hard to believe anyone would be lining up to switch to your scam
>Are you saying if an industry has any bad parts, it can't have any good parts?
Cryptocurrency is not an industry and doesn't have any good parts. The technology itself is useless and universally bad for any practical purpose. It solves no problems, it only creates them. The "good things" done by companies using cryptocurrency are in spite of the technology, not because of it. Some companies don't even seem to bother with this though, and I'll call those out specifically.
I would also call out a virus-scanning company if we found out they were secretly developing and deploying the viruses on the side and then selling the solution to increase their own profits. The same thing is happening here with a lot of blockchain products except they aren't even trying to keep it a secret what they're doing.
The aristocracy loved gold because it was money for the elites. Farmers in the US hated it, because it was money for the elites.
Honestly, the arguments are basically the same as the gold bugs and the motivation is the same. People are invested in gold so they want it to succeed even at the expense of other people. Same with cryptocurrency.
As I understand it, “equality” in a society refers to people’s equal access and treatment in some aspect of society (health, education, financial, legal, …)
Whereas “inequity” in a society refers to different outcomes for people (billionaires vs the indebted unemployed, for instance).
Outside of scams and fraudulent or deceptive launches, crypto seems to be very equality supportive to me.
That it has magnified inequity isn’t a reliable indicator of a lack of equality.
Equality enables everyone equally, it doesn’t provide equally for everyone.
Inequality leads to inequity. Inequity leads to inequality. For wealth inequality the hair-splitting difference between equity and equality is a matter of the time frame you are looking at. As for Crypto gains being an equal opportunity - no, not in the least - access to capital to invest in crypto schemes is not equal.
Even if everyone had equal access to capital, we would still be talking about the equality of restructuring economies to wildly benefit a minority who gambled and got lucky. Should a single currency gamble "win", it will be in no small part due to heavily invested and politically powerful people making that happen.
Some inequity is from chance, but of significant inequity comes from many other reasons
People pursue very different paths in life. People dedicate themselves to the paths they do take with varying degrees of effort, thought, etc.
Inequity is going to always be the result. Enforced equity has (so far) simply enabled enforcers to create inequity in there favor.
I think it is a mistake to treat all inequity as “the” problem. Because it isn’t, and because that distracts from solving problems that can be solved. (To a higher degree.)
While trying to not regularly call the majority of cryptocurrencies (the term currency misappropriated) an MLM-Ponzi scheme, I've started to realize that an easier or perhaps better way to state the problem with them is to use one of the key values that is virtue signalled against them: it's claimed that Bitcoin et al are anti-inflation, when in fact the inflation is just built into it - and only benefit the early/earlier adopters, the burden of inflation otherwise being shifted and weighted away from the earlier adopters towards the latest adopters.
The crypto holders not only would love if the whole world switched but they actually depend on it to realize their profits, and for the latest adopters to not be left holding the bag, which at least the last 50% of adopters will be holding some portion of the bag/losses before and once it collapses; the wealth transfer will already have happened to the early adopters, and so whether the "community" or army of HODLers pity themselves and keep dabbling in it to keep their dream alive or not, will be interesting to watch at least, perhaps if it's not too embarrassing for the majority; the ones who exited with millions to $100s of millions, at least some of them of course will proudly showoff their gains by being in the MLM-Ponzi scheme(s) early - not being shameful of the unknown harm and losses their gains caused others and society as a whole. A lesson, to say the least.
But the above is why those of us who see what Bitcoin et al are for what they are need to take a stand because regulatory/systems and policy capture will happen and is attempting to happen, perhaps the most extreme example of this so far being El Salvador - where their current "elected" leader at one point brought in military with guns into their parliament to threaten their parliament if they didn't adopt whatever he is/was gunning for; then you have a government/organization that's shown an example of what they're willing to do wanting to then influence the rest of the world (by whatever nefarious/violent means they may be so inclined to do) in order for a global-decentralized financial database to be required to be used, to then realize their gains, which richness wise, if they succeeded at getting the world to adopt - would make them as relative early adopters, very rich indeed - at least those in government who actually control the keys to their kingdom's crypto vault.
Once I saw a significant portion of the mainstream VC-finance industrial complex buy into it, arguably heavily lead by USV with their Coinbase and other ecosystem investments - gaps they knew someone would have to fill, including funding a crypto lobbyist organization, then I knew things would get too serious to ignore. The solution however simply seems to be thoroughly educate the population so they understand the mechanisms - as most of what they will have seen or heard about is easily considered propaganda to hype up to sell more of whatever flavour of MLM-Ponzi scheme they can convince/trick you into buying.
Yeah, one of the things cryptocurrency supporters often claim is that the coin pools were generally designed to be fixed size and "deflationary" as a goal (at least from certain points of view), but deflation as a goal is just as bad as inflation as a goal. Too much deflation tends to spiral [1] and there are plenty of examples of real world economies in history torn apart by deflation.
I don't know what an equitable monetary policy would be, but I know that intentionally deflationary currencies look nothing like it.
Social Security at least in Poland, also is a Ponzi-like scheme. The difference is that to crypto you arent forced to participate in in opposit to govt backed schemes.
Well, all redistributive social security systems have a strong pyramid like scheme inherent to them. Take the German retirement funds which - AFAIK — works similarly to „social security“ in the US:
Every employee in Germany is required to pay a share of about 20% of their income (1) into the retirement „fund“ — which isn’t one really as the money is not invested to gain interest but instead is immediately payed out to the current generation of retirees. On the other hand, employees are promised to receive a future pension based on the payments by the next generation of employees (i.e. their kids). In Germany, this is called „Generationenvertrag“ („contract between generations“).
This is almost like a Ponzi/pyramid scheme where obscene „profits“ are payed out purely based on the exponentially growing number of payees until the day the growth stops and the system collapses like a house of cards.
This breakdown has been happening for decades already albeit at a glacial rate in the German public pension system as the population has been shrinking and therefore the number of payees. It is artificially kept alive as the German federal government pumps 100 billions of tax money every year into it which is 30% of the whole federal budget …
Of course, a redistributive pension system can sustain itself as long as the population age distribution looks like a literal pyramid. But that’s not the case for most Western countries.
(1) Formally, the employee pays only 10% and the other 10% are taken from the employer. But, of course, the employer could as well pay his 10% share as salary instead. So, either way, it’s the employee paying everything.
OK, so redistributive pension systems are pyramid schemes… I’ll just note that this is a highly debatable interpretation of such systems.
Now if we think about it for a moment: social security need money for 3 major things: unemployment, retirement, and health care. At any given point in time, you can divide the population in 2 categories: those who are currently working, and those who are not. And those who are currently working pay those who are not (gross oversimplification). The question is whether the workers pay enough money to sustain the idle.
Now health care and unemployment ought to be fairly constant (barring some major crisis), and you can have rules so people don’t abuse the system too much. So no pyramid there: we adjust how much workers pay for health and unemployment and that’s the end of it.
Retirement however is subject to longer term variation because of that age pyramid. And at a time where we have boomers retiring, we have less working people to sustain them all. And it’s made quite worse when the salaries of the working people don’t even keep up with inflation. We could have solved this by having an exponentially growing population, but that is bound to crash at one point.
So okay, I understand the pyramid analogy there. There’s a problem though: the boomers will die. Population will eventually get over that hump, and we’ll have a more reasonable proportion of working & retired people again. So the temporary deficit is just that: temporary.
And if that’s not enough, there’s something simple we can do to solve the problem. It’s so obvious that (at least in France) people don’t even dare utter it on national television: just raise contributions a little bit.
But no, doing this is so unthinkable that our rulers would rather have people retire later. Which won’t work, because of structural unemployment. So what we’ll have instead is lower pensions, and an increased reliance on pension funds.
There’s a snag however: pension funds are actually a form of redistributive system. Because redistributive systems are the only system there can ever be. See, even though you’re ostensibly investing money so you can retire later, what happens in practice is that your money is being injected in parts of the economy to fuel your investment. And ultimately, part of that money will be used to pay currently retired people. And when you retire, and the time comes to get your money back, you won’t get your money from a frozen value store. You’ll get it from the current economy, be it interest rates from your investments or currently paying people. However you cut it, your pension has to be taken from the current economy, and the only way you get paid is if your pension fund (and by extension the whole economy), can support it.
I’d rather have an explicitly redistributive system, it’s more honest that way.
Right. In essence, I think these details of the redistributive function are what make it Ponzi-like or sound.
On one end of the spectrum, you have personal and "defined contribution" saving and investment schemes: the individual carries a personal pool into their later years where they draw it down. How are differences between the contribution+performance and lifetime needs reconciled? Estates pass inheritances or individuals are bankrupt and we recursively ask ourselves what sort of system will cover their needs.
In the middle, you have what I think you want. An insurance pool redistributes the contributions, performance, and needs among a cohort. How are the aggregate assets and lifetime needs of the cohort reconciled? Contributions could be curtailed in response to excess accumulation or increased to cope with unexpected needs. Like any insurance scheme, the risk management has complexity around managing liquidity in the face of time-varying needs, contributions, and investment/economic performance.
But what skeptics see is an ugly reality unfolding further down that spectrum. Population growth and the long delay between contribution and withdrawal is (either naively or willfully) misinterpreted as excess accumulation. This is used to justify either insufficient contribution or "theft" of assets to fund other initiatives than the insurance pool. This leaves a hollowed out pension systems with defined benefits that cannot be satisfied with their meager holdings. As with a Ponzi scheme, they appear to work while the incoming contributions from an ever growing cohort are used to pay outgoing benefits to an earlier, smaller subset of participants. They collapse when the participation rate fails to grow fast enough to meet the ever growing needs of the aging cohort.
Every aspect of life is related to population distribution graph which is doomed in Europe.
Even if you save your retirement in a real estate, it's value is tightly correlated to amount of people in productive age when you try to sell it.
The only thing that can save one, is to start saving money early and give it to componding effect. Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it”.
Anything else wont work because demographic at least for europe is bad.
The good information is that to make componding effect to work, crypto is much more compund effect friendly asset in the world. Of course, in the mean time you need to use your brain to not lose your priv key or being phished etc.
Under these population curve assumptions, doesn't crypto have the same inflationary risk, as a share of future economic value? It's not a technical characteristic of the financial instrument, but instead a basic imbalance between a net supplier and net consumer generation. A bunch of retirees holding crypto tokens is only rational if there is a reason to believe that a bunch of future kids would see value in those tokens. Just like dollars or euros or yuan.
If the future population does not drive a large enough economy, there are dwindling products and resources available to swap for all existing financial instruments. These real resources are things like clean water, food, medicine, shelter, energy, technology, and services which cannot be stored over a person's lifetime and then consumed decades later.
It seems to me that the instruments with meaningful value in this picture are those rooted in a right to capture future production. That is things like ownership shares in continuing business enterprises, industrial infrastructure, natural resources, buildings, and developed land for housing and commerce. Of course, infrastructure and buildings decay over time, but they do represent a kind of real stored value for a planned service lifetime.
An actual plan to take care of a shrinking population would need to think about how automation can increase the efficiency of production such that a smaller future generation can generate sufficient output to satisfy the needs of the whole population including the elder non-workers. To avoid the Ponzi threat or more generally the "musical chairs" game mode, this plan needs to accomodate continous, incremental decline. The important technological and cultural skills to operate this system need to be passed down to ensure continued production for all who remain alive.
> So okay, I understand the pyramid analogy there. There’s a problem though: the boomers will die.
Well, after the boomers have died, Generation X and the Millenials will demand their retirement package. The population age distribution will not become a pyramid with the next generations.
> just raise contributions a little bit
A little bit. Lol. In Germany the contributions are quite unpopular, too (and rightly so with 20% removed from your gross income), but the government just increased the tax subsidies over the years. Nowadays, they amount to about 30% of Germany‘s federal budget — on top of all the contributions. How much money do you think does a society need to pay for their retirees to make a redistributive pension system sustainable?
> See, even though you’re ostensibly investing money so you can retire later, what happens in practice is that your money is being injected in parts of the economy to fuel your investment. And ultimately, part of that money will be used to pay currently retired people.
No. You have a weird notion of how capital markets work. In a capital based system an individual saves for his retirement. Money is put aside every month and invested over a long time. The individual‘s money and its returns of investment are used to pay the pension.
You can make this a public system where everybody is forced to pay and even set up a national fund. It can be subsidied a little to support the poor when retiring.
This is how to render this system fair and sustainable.
> No. You have a weird notion of how capital markets work
My point is, you can't eat money. You can only exchange money for food. You can't heat your home with money. You can only pay for energy. You can't drive with money… well you get the idea.
So you're saving now so you can retire later. From an accounting perspective, sure, you increase a number there now, so you can decrease it later. What you cannot do is store actual food for several decades, accumulate enough energy for several decades, or store all the material you'll need several decades from now.
What you'll eat 20-30 years from now will not be taken from the current economy, it will be taken from the economy we'll have 20-30 years in the future. If there's no food there you will not eat, and that's the end of it. Maybe you'll have your money all right, but food will just have become too expensive for you to buy enough of it. (Now I talk at the individual level, but this is obviously a scale thing: some people will eat all right, just not everyone.)
Hence my argument that even capital markets ultimately are a form of redistribution. Because at some point, either the young work so the old can enjoy retirement, or we leave the old to fend for themselves. Or something between the two ends of that spectrum.
Inverted pyramid means that each succeeding generation is smaller than the next. There will be no relief when boomers are gone, because generation Y is even smaller than generation X and there is even less millennials than there is of generation Y.
When you go from 10 active people to 1 retiree to 2 active people to 1 retiree, you can't solve a problem by increasing contributions by a little.
And no, investing money for retirement is absolutely different from spending it on the retirement.
A friend with nickname "G3rn0ti" from Germany explained in the longer comment what I had on mind.
I am not sure how it works in USA, but in Poland it's similar scheme as in Germany.
Pure Ponzi-like scheme, but if you decline to participate in it, then you go to fail for avoiding it.
Anyway, there are many more people who can join the crypto trend than polish Social Security system. Growth trajectory is downward, and only printing more many can save it from collapsing.
And I figured I'll reply to my own comment since I can't edit it any longer:
Had 4 points upvoted and now down to 0 points, arguably Bitcoin et al enthusiasts/gamblers who instead of actually responding to my points can suppress my comment from the top of a thread by a quick click of a downvote - giving them a reward, dopamine hit at the same time; ideologues who are financially incentivized to suppress counter narrative and promote their propaganda, whereas I'm not financially motivated or incentivized to spend all the time I have to write out what I do.
Those are all political problems. Technology does not solve political problems. Politics solves political problems.
All cryptocurrency does is obfuscate the politics behind its monetary system. As flawed as our monetary system is, the politics behind it are visible and under control of a government. In my country, my government is elected, and I'm an active and informed voter.
Thus, I think the best way to solve those problems is to be an informed voter, vote, and encourage other countries to adopt democracies.
>> That is a problem that was already solved. I've personally bought things from foreign countries (in person, and via mail order) with a credit card.
> Try to buy something from not-so-friendly urisdiction. And you will see the difference between storytelling and business.
Give an actual example, rather than a vague hand-waving hypothetical.
Some random points:
1. For mail order: paying is only part of it. Shipping is just as important. Are you hypothesizing a "not-so-friendly [j]urisdiction" where international payment difficult but international mail is easy?
2. For in person: would the person prefer my crisp American dollars or dicking around with Bitcoin addresses and waiting hours for transactions to confirm?
3... I could go on.
My general problem with cryptocurrency "use cases" are they tend to assume the utility of cryptocurrency, ignore alternative solutions, and latch on to some narrow aspect of a situation when zooming out even a little would reveal contradictions and problems.
It's probably more accurate to say that it's creating a political problem by circumventing existing political solutions like sanctions, currency controls and law enforcement.
Politically working in sound money (no printer go brrrr) is governmentally forbidden. Bitcoin subverted the corrupt political process and has brought that choice back.
Bitcoin will only be "sound money" when I can pay my taxes in it. Or at least pay for my oil change. Sure it's artificially limited in quantity. Great! Doesn't make it money. It's a commodity like any other.
In addition to that I would add it needs to be a real store of value. Over any moderate timescale (a few years, say), it should reasonably maintain its value over that period. Swings of 40% purchasing power are unacceptable for a useful currency.
Sure, bitcoin maximalists love to point out that if you bought it a year ago, it's up XXX%. But what if I bought near its high value? Not so good a proposition then.
Is the money in your bank account a real store of value?
Do you not notice what’s been happening to it at an accelerated pace over the last 30 years?
I’m not arguing for bitcoin either way. But I implore you to take a hard look at your definition of real value in a system with inherent inflation that forces you to speculate in order to preserve any “real value.”
> Is the money in your bank account a real store of value?
Cash encompasses physical notes, bank deposits and Treasuries. On one end, we have a form optimized for transacting. On the other, for transporting value over time [1].
Bitcoin is less efficient than Visa or Mastercard. It's more volatile than a Treasury.
I feel that the value of my bank account has been far less relevant than (a) my salary and (b) my mortgage. And I suppose my pension, but since that's a government tax exempt deferred income mechanism it's not "mine" in quite the same way.
It always feels strange talking to people for whom the hoard of cash is the important bit. For many people it would be far more useful to stabilize house prices - which are affected by a completely different set of factors.
I am honestly surprised that so many people care about what they earned in the past and did not spent, aka the portion of money they need the least, instead of what they are going to earn over the course of their life.
Even pensioners are still dependent on a young population that is earning/producing.
I think this is because the hoard of cash is obviously useless today due to inflationary pressures.
Today you get a loan (if you can) to start a business.
It used to be you saved to start a business. But today savings is literally penalized.
This debt based system makes you depend upon it. I wouldn't need a home loan (or at least not such a large one) if the government didn't subsidize loans and cause inflation.
>I wouldn't need a home loan (or at least not such a large one) if the government didn't subsidize loans and cause inflation.
You are mixing up money and land. Those are completely different topics. You need a land value tax for land. Your monthly payments are going to be limited by your salary. A higher interest rate means the bank takes a bigger cut. You're spending the same amount of money either way. A higher income would help you more.
>It used to be you saved to start a business. But today savings is literally penalized.
You are saying this, while savings are at an all time high. The money supply is growing significantly faster than inflation. If anything, we are pandering to savers way too much. What people don't seem to understand is that the rich save way way more than anyone else so increasing overall savings doesn't matter for the vast majority of people.
Also, let me tell you something. Let's say you visit your family and your parents make you food. Would it be reasonable to tell them that you want to make your own food? It makes no sense, your parents already made food. Just take it. Don't pile up more food that nobody wants.
It's the same with money. The rich have saved such an incredible amount of money, that there is literally no point in saving your own money.
> inherent inflation that forces you to speculate in order to preserve any “real value.”
Wow, also this!
Say inflation is 8.5%, and you're holding an ounce of gold, then that gold raises by 8.5% in kind, you are still losing value as now you have to pay taxes on the 8.5% gained even though you didn't really gain anything.
That isn't the point. In fact you're basically illustrating my point. Without taking risk, you will lose the value of your money.
If you had some perfect asset (not gold since the volatility distracts you) that increased in dollars exactly as much as inflation, then you would still lose value to taxation even though you only gained as much as inflation.
In the real world, yes, no perfect asset like that exists, so it's worse than that. You have to risk your earned value to keep your earned value over time.
Would you be willing to pay a demurrage fee on cash equivalent to inflation if it meant no inflation in the unit of account? The difference is small but important. Such a currency wouldn't lie to you. The money illusion would be gone. You can plan decades ahead. You know what the negative interest rate is going to be. Loaning out the currency avoids the demurrage fee on cash. So a 0% loan would maintain your savings.
Why doesn't this happen? Two reasons, people have loss aversion so they prefer being lied to through the money illusion. They get to blame you when the truth is that they are at fault. If they preferred taking the loss they wouldn't have to find a scapegoat. The other reason is that inflation has an uneven impact on the economy. Some gain and some lose and many people want to be winners or at least for there to be the possibility of winning, even if it is a detriment to society overall.
TBH I don't know too much about them, but from what I'm seeing they're something like 1-2% interest. Inflation is > 8% right now per the government's own numbers
> from what I'm seeing they're something like 1-2% interest. Inflation is > 8% right now per the government's own numbers
That's a real yield. TIPs "adjust in price (principal amount) in order to maintain their real value" when inflation rises [1].
So if you buy a TIP for 100 that pays 2%, and inflation is 8%, the face value is adjusted to 108 and you get a 2.16 coupon. (Super simplified, to the point of being technically incorrect, but framework-wise fine.)
Please stop with the money illusion. Numbers on a balance sheet don't store anything. People do. Companies do. Governments do. Agreements between those sectors are needed to store value. Real value is stored in the warehouse, in the sewer pipes and roads, in the heads of the government officials and so on.
Why does the government need to drop the gold standard? Why does it happen so many times? I am under the impression that it is the gold standard that is flawed. After all, it didn't fail for a lack of trying. It was adopted and abandoned so many times.
What surprises me is that people think that the problem is evil/incompetent governments mismanaging the currency. Wouldn't it be more productive to think of reasons why such mismanagement is inevitable instead of just sweeping it under the rug? Greece did austerity and it didn't work. If Greece hadn't done austerity, it could have gotten a few more years of 5% growth. Austerity ended up increasing indebtedness instead of reducing it by massively reducing the GDP of Greece.
It's only rational to "mismanage" your economy away from such a financial crisis. The real question should be, why is growth required every single year? Why can't we just stand still for a year and then pick up growth again?
In my opinion it is quite simple. Savings and debts must equal in the global economy. So if the government introduces a debt brake, the private sector must reduce the amount of savings it holds. If those savings are held as cash, the government can't do anything about it. It can't just recall the bank notes. So debt can't go down. If it does anyway, then the money that is currency circulating, moving around from person to person is saved as cash until the amount of money that is actively circulating shrinks so much that daily transactions can't be made. That is what recessions are. A sudden malfunction in the medium of exchange function of money.
> gold standard would force governments to be financially disciplined, right?
This is such a weird belief. Is the claim that prior to the 20th century there were no wars of conquest or colonies? No kings and countries running up ruinous debt?
> If the government told you you're not a person, would that hold?
Governments have always had the ability to dictate who is a citizen and who isn't. Someone born in Angola is not protected by or subject to the US Constitution.
> To me your saying nothing's money unless the government says it is.
Now you're learning! Granted in a democracy the people have a say in what governments do, so if you convince enough people that using bitcoin as a medium of exchange is a good idea then it may eventually be so. Good luck!
Here's what happens right now if you try to pay your taxes in Bitcoin and refuse to convert to dollars:
1. The IRS warns you and charges you back-taxes for the delay
2. If you still refuse to pay after a certain period of time, they audit you and garnish any accounts they have access to until your taxes/back taxes are paid
3. If you have no IRS-accessible accounts, men with guns show up and seize your property, including but not limited to your Bitcoin, to make up the difference.
And for extra points you may get charged with Tax Evasion, which can send you to jail. This entire process may take decades, but it happens.
Sounds like pretty crappy money to me if that's the result of trying to use it at any significant scale.
> In my community there's a whole ecosystem of people trading goods and services in Bitcoin, silver, and Monero.
Great. You and I could also arrange to barter bars of extruded aluminum for goods and services. That doesn't make extruded aluminum money, or at least not "sound money". Note however that in the US those transactions are taxed just like any other, with the amount of tax determined by their value IN DOLLARS. If you're not reporting those transactions you're theoretically subject to the previously mentioned series of events.
Now the IRS can't see literally everything, so you can get away with it to a point. But if Bitcoin/crypto eventually reached the scale where a significant number of economic transactions are transacted in it, one of two things will happen:
1. Enough voters/lobbyists will be convinced of its viability that political changes are made to accept it as currency (unlikely, given the traits of bitcoin)
2. An epic tax-evasion crackdown that will make the conviction of Al Capone look like a Cub Scout picnic.
> 1. Enough voters/lobbyists will be convinced of its viability that political changes are made to accept it as currency (unlikely, given the traits of bitcoin)
One can dream
> 2. An epic tax-evasion crackdown that will make the conviction of Al Capone look like a Cub Scout picnic.
Monero FTW.
Your response to governments dictating who's a person:
> Governments have always had the ability to dictate who is a citizen and who isn't.
You're saying a non-citizen isn't a person? I find all your viewpoints defeatist. Maybe that or you still side with governments worldwide? If so, fine, but I don't.
> Granted in a democracy the people have a say in what governments do
Do they though? In America, from a purely signals and systems perspective, my choice comes down to red or blue (1 or 0) on a number of representatives and measures I do get to vote on--that's ignoring possibly corrupt voting.
In the myriad of complicated laws that are passed, and even wars that are fought, I don't get more say than a binary choice on abstractions (representatives)? In what way is that government ruled by the people!?
Monero makes things more difficult, not impossible. If the government decides to outlaw Monero then by definition it will only be used by outlaws, and so long as the majority of the population doesn't see trading in Monero as worth the risk, it will remain limited in scope.
> You're saying a non-citizen isn't a person? I find all your viewpoints defeatist. Maybe that or you still side with governments worldwide? If so, fine, but I don't.
All right, you define what a "person" is and how it's relevant to this discussion. For all practical matters a random person in Angola might as well not exist to the US government, unless the US government decides they're important enough to warrant attention.
I fail to see how the government not being able to deny my being a biological human is relevant here. And actually theoretically they could deny it and refuse to treat me as a person, it just wouldn't change the laws of physics. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were notorious for telling people they couldn't be starving because "we're all equal, so if we're not all starving how can you be starving?"
I also wouldn't call my views "defeatist", I'm just presenting uncomfortable truths that I've yet to hear a coherent strategy for tackling. Which can be summed up as: "How do you plan to handle the men with guns, and the authority to use them, who don't agree with you?"
> Do they though? In America, from a purely signals and systems perspective, my choice comes down to red or blue (1 or 0) on a number of representatives and measures I do get to vote on--that's ignoring possibly corrupt voting.
> In the myriad of complicated laws that are passed, and even wars that are fought, I don't get more say than a binary choice on abstractions (representatives)? In what way is that government ruled by the people!?
I'm not saying the system is not corrupt or that it's perfectly representative. No system is either. But changes do generally follow the will of the populace in the long term on issues that affect a given population as a whole. Just look at Marijuana legalization, or the fact that we did withdraw (albeit with criminal incompetence) from Afghanistan. Now whether those changes are objectively positive or negative is another story, the whole process is full of half-measures, short-term thinking, corruption and unsatisfying messes. And citizens don't have perfect power as they would in a direct democracy (for good reason, lots of issues there). But we've yet to figure out anything better than some variety of democracy, and I don't see how crypto solves any of these problems unless you think the government has already collapsed beyond the ability to enforce laws on crypto users (it hasn't, at least in the US).
You can either try to reform the system or replace it. Either way you need a solid plan for what comes after that accounts for the known variables, and I've yet to hear a "crypto will replace the dollar" argument that does so, from even a cursory reading of history.
I actually don't know what that is supposed to mean. You know, I am tired of these word games. Democratic People's Republic of Korea sounds cool until you realize that this is the official name of North Korea which has absolutely no relationship with democracy.
In theory sound money would imply a money system that acknowledges the existence of the real world and human needs instead of deferring to theoretical models that are known to diverge from reality. Since money is capturing reality perfectly, it introduces no representational errors i.e. money that is in your bank account actually represents the capability to purchase a good or service immediately.
Gold does not do this, unless you want to exchange your gold certificates (gold standard) for gold. When people save gold by putting it under their mattress, they effectively shifted their production schedule ahead, i.e. they produced today and they shifted their consumption schedule back, i.e. they consume later. The problem with this approach is that they are not asking anyone, whether they are willing to switch roles. By that I mean, is there anyone who agrees to consume now and produce later?
If nobody made such an agreement then you will be surprised to hear that there is less produced than you planned to consume in the future, after all, you didn't tell anybody, nor did anyone approach you and explicitly gave you permission to consume in the future. There is increased demand and you get inflation. At some point people start working again and end up overproducing, there will be deflation. This mismatch in the consumption and production schedule is the cause of inflation or deflation over the short term with a gold standard. Sound money does not solve the problem. In fact, it is the root of speculation.
If Bitcoin is sound money then the world doesn't need sound money. It needs money that isn't divorced from reality. It needs money that rewards planning ahead. It needs money that signals both abundance and scarcity of capital. It also needs to account for capital depreciation of idle capital and the loss of time of the unemployed.
No it didn't. Cryptocurrency is not "sound money" in any way because it's not backed by anything, in the case of proof-of-work coins it's only "backed" by random people solving random pointless math puzzles. Proof-of-stake is even worse because that's only backed by how much money people have already invested into the system.
Remind me how many cryptocurrencies were brred into existence the last year? Bitcoin merely replaces corrupt politics with even more corrupt politics (El Presidente Nayib Bukele for example)
> Technology does not solve political problems. Politics solves political problems.
I don't think this is true, bluntly.
Technology does not automatically solve political problems. But technology does sometimes render bad political actions unviable.
I would argue that a large part of the widespead acceptance of homosexuality in Western society was due to the deconstruction of singular media gatekeepers by the move of discourse from newspapers to the internet.
That is absolutely technology solving a political problem.
> I would argue that a large part of the widespead acceptance of homosexuality in Western society was due to the deconstruction of singular media gatekeepers
And yet folk from my (mostly homophobic) part of the third world argue the opposite: that homosexuality is widely accepted in the west because it was promoted by media and entertainment gatekeepers. I disagree with them (and with you) - I think sexual liberation was an idea whose time had come; and the progress can be plotted to the 60s and beyond (maybe even as far back as WWII, when women were economically empowered); preceding even ARPANET.
And there's also plenty of political problems politics have failed to solve. Like getting rid of Confederate statues (they're not being put back up), which were eventually removed via vandalism.
I think the article has a strange reasoning about crypto trying to "save the world".
For me it's pretty clear: individuals can now store and transfer value on the internet using a consensus algorithm. Plenty of you claim that it's enough to have a democracy that controls a central bank. That way you also have some kind of consensus on your value storing and trading. Problem is that this democracy/central bank is not stable in every country. So crypto provides real "internet money", with all benefits and drawbacks.
Whether that improves or worsens society, is purely a political question. But it's clear that cryptocurrencies try to live outside of governmental control, which is of course where most of the benefit comes from.
> Problem is that this democracy/central bank is not stable in every country. So crypto provides real "internet money", with all benefits and drawbacks.
Except that, from a practical perspective, if you live in a country without a stable "democracy/central bank," using fiat from a stable country (e.g. dollars or euros) is a better solution than cryptocurrency in pretty much all cases. AFAIK, cryptocurrency isn't in proper circulation anywhere, so you're likely going to have to do the same kind of forex transactions to get it, plus you're going to need a computer and internet to use it. Also stable-country fiat also doesn't come with weird ideological monetary policy ideas baked in (e.g. "money should be deflationary!").
> Well on your last point it does. "Money should be inflationary" is a "weird ideological monetary policy idea" it's just one that you agree with?
The idea that money should be stable with mild inflation seems to be the consensus view of the people (in multiple countries!) who actually have responsibility for the economy as a whole, and the economies that have stumbled into deflation don't seem very healthy.
Deflationary money seems to mainly appeal to people who are most concerned about jealously guarding the value of their little private hoard. Bitcoin was likely designed by someone like that who happened to be a talented programmer.
Deflation implies that the medium of exchange function of money has malfunctioned. You can't use money both as a medium of exchange and a store of value at the same time. It just doesn't work.
Inflation ruins the store of value function of money, but a little inflation isn't a bad tradeoff if the medium of exchange function of money keeps working.
The reason for this bias is that our society defines itself through a high degree of the division of labor. If money stops flowing, the division of labor stops and without the division of labor we are going straight back to the stone age (hyperbole). This is why economic recessions and depressions are feared more than economic booms.
> using fiat from a stable country (e.g. dollars or euros) is a better solution than cryptocurrency
So how do you get your money out of the country when you are not allowed to get your money out of the country? Strap dollar bills on your chest, or just use crypto?
> So how do you get your money out of the country when you are not allowed to get your money out of the country? Strap dollar bills on your chest, or just use crypto?
For that scenario, the better question is: how are you supposed to get cryptocurrency if you're not allowed to get your money out of the country?
But that's not the scenario I was addressing, what I was addressing the circumstances that lead to the very real practice called "dollarization":
> The U.S. dollar is also the official currency in several countries and the de facto currency in many others, with Federal Reserve Notes (and, in a few cases, U.S. coins) used in circulation.
> But it's clear that cryptocurrencies try to live outside of governmental control, which is of course where most of the benefit comes from.
I believe it’s naïve to expect that it will remain outside of government control. That it won’t get slammed with the same laws and regulations applied to fiat currencies.
Governments live on money. As alternatives gain traction, the governments take notice and start regulating. There’s a fair bit of historical precedence around this.
> it’s naïve to expect that it will remain outside of government control
Not sure what about crypto is outside government influence.
Crypto is regularly taxed, seized and landing people in jail. Countries that can't manage that wouldn't find an offshore bank account, as evidenced by their entire population of elites having one. "Government can't touch my crypto" is a founding myth.
I don't think it needs to be beyond government control in the way you mean to be useful. It just needs to be beyond the control of corrupt actors, in government or elsewhere. I don't mind the government being able to tax my crypto gains - I mind the people in it being able to bail out their golfing buddies when they gamble too aggressively on junk bonds.
It's counterintuitive to think that a financial instrument that increases transparency would make people more difficult to govern, and it would - unless the government is very corrupt.
> As a species, we have developed government control because in general, large-scale anarchy doesn't work well.
Not really. Society has long since been a push and pull between governmental control and anarchy of disobedience rendering some control irrelevant or impractical. And we are much better off for that - governments worst authoritarian instincts are frequently tempered by the general public simply ignoring their pronouncements.
> How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?
In the EU - easy - get rid of PSD2 which requires banks to add OTP before actions, account number and password are not good enough anymore.
Information and transaction providers now exist because of that but they require an application and a certificate that costs money.
If in the EU we get rid of those and go back to old "home banking computer interface" everyone can access their own account in an automated way.
Instead we now have to pay an external service which pays the state for certs each year to be able to automate our bank accounts.
This is essentially legal theft or a protection racket.
Image you have to pay a 3rd party for every sale you made. That is PSD2 in a nutshell.
Also easy - provide free bank accounts. Banks make enough money as is and are bailed out with citizens cash if they crash.
All crypto(currency) does is contribute to the pollution of the planet and provide no real value (progress). I'm not talking about all the scams that are going on in terms of value and I'm aware people got filthy rich by gaming the market, which isn't a market to be honest. It's a manipulative scheme, unregulated and I repeat myself, bad for the environment.
None of which is relevant to the core thesis of the post.
Ms. White's point, here, is that there shouldn't be so much toxicity directed at individuals taken in by the crypto hype in the desperate hope of getting ahead. That level of discourse should be directed at the influence peddlers and grifters who are drawing folks in in the first place.
The paragraph you quoted is intended to help set the stage for why folks who don't know any better might look at crypto as the answer to their financial fears and anxieties. Later she points out that "I don’t think they are a feasible solution, and in fact I think they will worsen many of the problems they ostensibly aim to solve, but they are certainly being sold as the solution, and a solution that people desperately need."
For anyone who reads the comments before the article, note that the article explicitly agrees with this point. What it's arguing is that many of the people attracted to crypto are there because they're desperate for answers to those questions or for help with their own situations, and that approaching them with hostility will drive them further into the grift instead of back out.
I mean, it’s great if crypto makes more people think about these questions, even if it’s not the answer. OTOH we’re also seeing it mess up problems for which perfectly valid solutions already exist. In Germany a couple “digital government” projects had a pretty bad start because they used blockchains where they likely didn’t have to.
I agree in sentiment with your statement that if this shines a light on a problem and we get more valuable thoughts generated then that is an asset. However there is also the opportunity cost of this which is quite significant. Imagine the benefits we could accrue from humanity if we had put all this talent, capital and energy into a significant human problem? Obviously I'm being hypothetical because there is no way to coalesce efforts on that scale without self interest at the heart of it.
I've done some, admittedly relatively shallow, thinking about the end results of "revolution" in various contexts, and the conclusion that I keep coming to is that revolutions only ever end up replacing the bums in the seats, whilst the position and structure of the seats remain.
I dabble in cryptocurrencies, but I can still see the inevitable inequality inherent in the rise to dominance of any one or small group of them.
I do have to say, however, that Vitalik Buterin says all the right things to appear as someone that does want to help the world be better. Separately to his creation which, if it dominated, would also not be a harbinger of equality for all.
How? By fostering balanced trade between nations. The Bancor was a good idea and that is why it wasn't adopted.
People should abandon the shared hallucination of believing money can have a physical manifestation. Money represents relationships between people. You can't own relationships without them becoming abusive.
People who maintain abusive relationships against the will of other people should be stopped and punished.
The way most cryptocurrencies are designed as if the people involved truly believe they can own someone else's time indefinitely.
Underlying all of our financial transactions is debt. Even an ACH transfer is a very temporary debt in a network of trust. That's why people with "bad credit" can't get accounts at traditional banks. This hurdle does not exist in crypto.
I'm not suggesting crypto is some panacea, but it does eliminate this very important problem for people on the bottom of the economic ladder.
You can't pay for groceries with crypto. The easiest way to transfer money people can actually use without a bank account is probably texting someone a prepaid card number, though for low amounts the purchase fee is kind of a lot. Crypto is good for circumventing the legal system (ex. getting DIY HRT where it's not legal) but for most basic needs it's not very useful.
Some people can pay for groceries with crypto, for example in Slovenia there is a supermarket chain that accepts Bitcoin Cash (BCH) [0]. map.bitcoin.com [1] displays local businesses that accept crypto.
Then there is acceptbitcoin.cash [2] which lists online stores and services that accept Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies.
That is one of the main things I like about Bitcoin Cash: it focuses on user adoption as money and not as a store or value or speculation investment. Avoiding the exchange to fiat money is essential for P2P electronic cash like Bitcoin was meant to be.
You can't pay for groceries with crypto yet. The government is making adoption more difficult by doing things like classifying all crypto as assets, so every transaction by a legitimate business requires they have to do a ton of tax paperwork about it. Some countries use bitcoin as official currency, so this not universally the case.
I don't know if adoption will increase, nor do I have a strong opinion on whether it should. But it does solve the specific, narrow problem of lack of basic banking for the poor.
Bitcoin in particular would be the absolute worst tool to use to fix any of these problems. It is 90% owned by a very small group of people. If it becomes more valuable, this will result in a significantly less equitable financial system.
> How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?
Is a government mandate away. If you want it, got to the streets or call your representatives. In most countries, a simply executive decree is enough to get it.
In most countries, more equity would not benefit the ruling class. Do you have a political solution that accounts for this which I could suggest to my representative? Because absent one, a digital gold standard seems the least bad option to me.
Granting everybody access to the banking system is just a matter of some regulatory entity requiring that banks create a kind of account they can grant to anyone and that they don't deny it, or of the government itself making a bank that doesn't deny service to people.
There's nothing there about equity. It's a completely different problem.
Broadly, no political order functions in the absence of a moral society.
We've become rather fixated on the notion of systems that can somehow produce good outcomes no matter how vicious its members are. The problem here is that any political and social order is only as good as its members and governing bodies. There isn't some disembodied "system, out there" that can strap us all into externally imposed restraints and put us all in cages to constrain our bad actions. The quality of a society is absolutely dependent on its members respecting the common good which includes respecting good laws. (That's another point. Leaders are not free to impose any old law and claim it is legitimate. Laws can only determine the general good as proscribed by natural law, i.e., human nature.) Indeed, I wouldn't want to live in a society of savages in which a tyrant exercises such control. This is precisely the lesson to be learned from Hobbes' Leviathan: the more immoral a society becomes, the most governments clamp down to try to maintain order and the viability of that society.
That doesn't mean we can't discuss better or worse political orders. Indeed, political orders are determined by law and law by objective moral principle.
And a word on equality. So far, crypto seems to be a place for wild speculation and the amassing of (real or imagined) wealth by a relatively small number. That's probably a large part of the appeal, like the lottery. But more to the point: equality is not a virtue. Justice is. But who said we are all due the same? We're not. No two people are economically equally valuable (nor is economic value all there is). The problem is poverty, or the excess influence of money in politics and culture, or usury and left, or unjust pay, but not inequality. How is crypto a solution to these social problems, and in ways that surpass traditional currencies?
If someone is trying to get to the moon by climbing successively higher trees, are you doing them a disservice by reminding them that the highest tree is not tall enough to reach there? Especially when they are burning large amounts of resources trying to get there?
If people are genuine about solving the world's poverty and inequality problems, recognizing that cryptocurrencies are unlikely to help with those problems is a valuable first step.
They're describing the printing of fiat as "taxation." While I'm not sure how that differs from cryptocurrencies minting coins, GP isn't talking about direct tax evasion.
> People shitting on crypto, while sitting on their ass without addressing the problems in other ways are doing society a disservice.
But cryptocurrency doesn't address any real problems. The claims that it does are mostly BS and marketing.
The problems cryptocurrency solves are ones that are created by holding to peculiar ideologies and/or speculating about problems that haven't happened and may never happen.
The one thing cryptocurrency has succeeded at is being something for financial speculation, which has given a lot of people strong incentive to hype it relentlessly.
Crypto has addressed real problems for Ukraine's military.
> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,”
> Crypto has addressed real problems for Ukraine's military.
>> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,”
Here are the next two paragraphs after your quote:
> But Mr. Bornyakov [Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation] seemed wary of overstating crypto’s importance to the Ukrainian cause.
> “I don’t think crypto is playing a major part,” Mr. Bornyakov said. “But its role is essential in this conflict in terms of helping our army.”
Ukraine needs every bit of support they can get, and they won't turn away tens of millions in donations from cryptobros, but it's a minor part of their effort. You can also easily donate USD or do a bank transfer to send them money:
> But cryptocurrency doesn't address any real problems.
Nobody was comparing the market share of different forms of currency or anything like that. We can discuss the viable rate of market share growth for new forms of currency some other time.
This is a high ranking government official saying that bitcoin is helping solve a real problem. Can you at least acknowledge that maybe he's telling the truth? Or when the next bitcoin thread rolls around will you just repeat the same tired old complaint about no use cases?
> But cryptocurrency doesn't address any real problems.
...that aren't better addressed by other, existing technologies. There might be some weird corner cases where it makes sense, but that's not anywhere close to the "future of money" hype.
> This is a high ranking government official saying that bitcoin is helping solve a real problem. Can you at least acknowledge that maybe he's telling the truth? Or when the next bitcoin thread rolls around will you just repeat the same tired old complaint about no use cases?
Sure he's telling the truth. I'm not saying cryptocurrency can't be used to solve problems, what I'm saying it's not anything special as a solution and is often a pretty bad one.
If I add some horse-drawn carriages to my fleet of trucks, because I'm so desperate to haul the absolute largest quantity of something that I can that I'll do anything, that doesn't mean horses are the future of transport or are even a good transportation solution in the modern world.
A lot of that money has been withdrawn via an exchange registered in an offshore. My bet is that someone who set it up has profited nicely during the war.
I would characterize this situation (of crypto helping perform fast transfers) as a very temporary "advantage" that would almost certainly disappear over time.
For one thing, this advantage over the national bank, is during a WAR. Assuming the war disrupts the national bank, yet over the long term will not also disrupt all the infrastructure that bitcoin needs (cheap high speed computing, available networking, reliable electricity, etc) strains credibility.
In the case of Ukraine, yes, this is probably a temporary state of emergency. But on a global scale, there is always a disruption somewhere. Or as one google SRE put it (I couldn't find the exact quote) "on our scale, once-in-a-million events happen every day". And, for many people out there, crypto is still the fastest way to transfer money, and the situation is very much not temporary. It's just that they are not the people that typically feature in the NYT.
Speaking of Ukraine, the banking sector is working fine there at the moment, for what it's worth. Not for moving wealth out of the country and out of the local currency, but otherwise works.
> Russia's invasion has caused untold damage to lives, buildings, and roads. It also threatened to destroy Ukraine's banking system.
> But a month into the war, Ukrainians in most of the country can still put their money in savings accounts, pay their telephone bills, and withdraw cash easily.
> Today, we speak to the CEO of Ukraine's second-largest bank to learn how the country's banks are continuing essential business in the wake of devastation on the homefront.
I really appreciate how like four of us simultaneously drilled into this one fractally bad take but I do think this is the most concise of all of them so far.
nah you don't know how people spend their time. I'm very active in attempting to address all sorts of problems as I find them, it's my major activity other than working for survival. shitting on crypto is like 2% of my time and energy, it's very easy to fit it in alongside.
that said, given the ecological and economic costs of crypto and its failure to produce anything of value so far. sitting on your ass is more a service to society than getting involved in it is.
If you see someone pounding nails into his dick and when you ask what he's trying to do, he says "I'm building a house". It is fair to tell him that he's doing it wrong. That his proposed method will not get him any closer to a house than he already is. It does not matter that you are not also trying to build a house. It does not matter that you are not going to build him a house.
Knowing what will not work is important. And just because there is no proposed alternative does not mean we should keep doing the thing we know won't work. Especially when the thing we know won't work might even exacerbate the problem it is trying to solve. Sometimes, nothing is the right thing to do.
Cryptocurrencies might not answer to all of these questions. However there is one question where it gives an answer. It is how to create more efficient financial system. And part of this answer might lead to rebalancing some of distribution of the wealth, mostly by reducing operating costs and profit margins of the current Wall St and other local oligopolic financial institutions.
Blockchains do create fundamental value, not just speculative value. Tech people often dismiss this claim and do not want to analyse further. To demostrate this, I wrote a post where I am comparing stock and cryptocurrency trading venues and showing that a decentralised system is the most cost efficient choice at least with some data points and why it is so:
> Maybe the shadiest form of these deals comes from the public equity markets from a no-fees online broker Robin Hood and its Payment For Order Flow (PFOF) because of the conflict of interest of a broker making more profit when it is "saving in customer transaction fees."
>
> In decentralised markets, such shenanigans do not exist.
MEV is an extremely well-known, well-studied empirical phenomenon that happens today and does not have a known solution, and it's exactly analogous to front-running. It's especially funny that you put out this blog post almost exactly on the 3rd anniversary of the publication of the Flash Boys 2.0 paper.
What I want to know is, are you just ignorant of MEV-related problems, are you trying to mislead your readers, or do you have some sincerely-held belief that MEV front-running is somehow morally okay in a way that PFOF isn't?
Thank you for a good insightful comment. You are incorrect, I have a sincerely-held belief MEV is not ok and your assumption what I do believe is wrong.
I am well aware of MEV issues, as I have been developing for Ethereum for the last 6 years or so. They hurt me as a user as well. However, due to the already long post, I decided not to include them in this post and hope to write a comparison in the future. As you said, the comparison could be really interesting.
I believe MEV hurts the ecosystem overall. It is wrong, but I know it can be technically solved, as opposite to solved with regulation, on multiple levels. Some of the current solutions include e.g.
- Avalanche commit and reveal subnet
- Short-term auctions like Cowswap
Basically, everything where you can wait for a better trade execution effectively counters some of HFT issues, both in traditional and crypto world. You can always decide which price you are willing accept and then just wait for it.
Unfortunately Ethereum 1.0 generation AMMs and swaps are not built this in mind, because they come from the era when MEV was not an issue yet. But as I said, this is being addressed in the next generation of the technology. Also unlike on stock markets, as a user you have more transparency on the execution so you can verify that you did not get screwed over (unlike with Robin Hood).
Thank you for heads up. I hope I was transparent enough with my content marketing efforts not to be rude and spammy. Maybe you can clarify if it is against HackerNews rules to link my own posts?
I agree, Uniswap has its issues with scams. Even with added compliance and listing policy, it is highly likely to be most cost efficient. For example what we can do is that we focus only known good trading pairs like Bitcoin and Ethereum that are not scams. These are not scams and they still trade more efficiently on Uniswap.
There are efficiencies you do not see in traditional financial systems like
- Open source
- Open data
- Open ledger
I think the most relevant talking point is about the open source. We know Linux beat UNIXes on the server market. We know Android beat Microsoft Windows Phone.
More about this in-depth in the blog post, of course.
as a trader I know defi is not more cost-effective. the fact that most of the alpha in defi is in arbitrage tells the whole story.
the range of possible exploits on centralized equities and futures exchanges is very limited. HFT works, and works well, to drive down costs for retail and institutional traders.
there is no happy path in defi which results in narrower spreads, and less risk of block re-orgs, or other exploits which either drive up costs or massively undermine the entire ecosystem.
once again, trust is a lower energy state which pays for itself. this trustless, decentralized mania only serves a tiny subset of early entrants, arbitrageurs, and VCs. it does not result in a better market system by any way of measuring that I can see.
> As a trader I know defi is not more cost-effective.
> the fact that most of the alpha in defi is in arbitrage tells the whole story.
What measurements do you use to define cost-effective? I am happy to do an apple-to-apples comparison if you tell what would you like to see in comparison. Also if there is a post/study that shows that there is only arbitrate in DeFi I am happy to read it and try to understand if I am wrong. While this might have been a situation in the past, I am seeing it changing over the last year and half.
In my post, towards the end, I pointed out some facts that even with HFT and industry consolidation, traditional finance has not always worked in the favour of a consumer.
I don’t think there’s a bifurcation between “good” and “bad” people in crypto, the real world is a lot more grey, and how people behave doesn’t depend so much on their character, but on culture and incentives.
These days, we painfully observe the culture of crypto in every single online medium that isn’t very carefully moderated, for example Twitter.
And about incentives, I think it’s very hard not to become some kind of “evangelist” or “shill” when a significant fraction of your net worth is invested in a digital item whose sole value depends on enough other people also believing in the project. You need to spread the hype.
In my opinion, all of this would be fun and games if it weren’t for the massive negative externalities all of this cause in terms of environmental damage and accelerating the climate catastrophe. This is completely evident, which doesn’t stop some crypto holders from denying it with all kinds of illogical arguments. That’s understandable — see previous paragraph.
> In my opinion, all of this would be fun and games if it weren’t for the massive negative externalities all of this cause in terms of environmental damage and accelerating the climate catastrophe.
The climate externalities are significant, but they're not the only problem. If the whole cryptocurrencies space shifted to Proof of Stake tomorrow, cryptocurrencies would still have a tremendously bad effect by increasing wealth inequality (because just as with Proof of Work, it's baked in to the code).
>I don’t think there’s a bifurcation between “good” and “bad” people in crypto
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart."
and
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
You have many cryptos with completely negligible environmental impact, thanks to smarter consensus mechanisms. It's a really new tech field, and as almost everything in tech, it improves over time.
> as almost everything in tech, it improves over time
This doesn't describe crypto over the past decade. It's become more pervasive, more corrupt, more destructive (from environmental impact to its role in facilitating hacking) and, with NFTs, more slot machinesque.
You seem pretty biased. You now have cryptos that allow you to transact with anyone in the world, instantly and without fees, while consuming barely any energy. And all of that, while remaining 100% in control of your money. You have others that let you lend or borrow assets in a permission-less fashion, without many intermediaries. More and more companies are using it as a backbone for their operations, for example in IoT settings or in financial situations. If you look a bit more, you will see many interesting development. But like everything in tech, there are good and bad things.
Use the state to fix failures of the state? There's a weird cyclic optimism here that I don't think can really be supported by the facts. After all, those who write a law can just as easily add addendum to that law, or remove it all together. Even with equal banking laws, there's always going to be an individual who the state deems as less equal than others. That's just how it's always been.
Its bizarre that this is such an unpopular idea, when if posted in a thread about anything other than crypto, it'd likely not be scoffed at this hard.
Any fix for a failure in human organization(s) is going to come from ... humans. There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. When things are of a large enough scope, the way that humans tend to organize to get things done, or get things fixed, is called "a state". Just like all human efforts, the outcome will likely not be perfect. But there actually isn't another way. Sure, you can suggest the idea that some alternate organization could do something, but it too will not be perfect. And an organization large enough to do substantive things about the issues at the top of TFA will essentially be a state, whether you call it that or not.
Who advocated to blindly trust the government? I thought that whole point is that democracy works by trusting your goverent with open eyes and working to correct it when it strays?
Except that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is:
1. Bad laws got us into this place
2. There's a lot of inertia in government
3. There's a lot of stake holders in government who don't have citizen's interests at heart
4. It's illogical to think you can, in light of this, just pass a law and fix it.
Yeah, we designed the law, and we know how it works. Sadly, we know also that the way it works is generally not how it should, and it has been co-opted often for the powerful.
And crypto isn't dominated by the wealthy and being used to serve their ends? Open your eyes my friend. There is far more corruption and disfunction in the average cryptocurrency org than the average government.
Did I say that? I explicitly say in multiple places that I'm not advocating for crypto, just asking people to not put the blind trust into their government "just passing a law".
It always baffles me why someone can't say "I'm opposed to X" without another person coming along and saying "that means you're in favor of Y". Don't respond to what you think I said, respond to what I actually said.
I'm not sure how the advice of "just pass a law" is anything other than blind trust. If you didn't think I was advocating crypto, then what purpose does:
> And crypto isn't dominated by the wealthy and being used to serve their ends? Open your eyes my friend
serve? Why would you mention something completely unrelated to their point, then tell them to open their eyes? To me it sounds like you're retroactively recasting your argument.
> You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
Here is the "just pass a law" line. I've summarized a line that makes this exact point. I see no straw-men here. Can you point out where I make a straw-man? Genuinely interested in why you see this as creating a straw-man in my summary. I fail to see how else you can interpret other than 'just pass a law'.
"just pass a law" is longer than "make a law" and is thus not a summarization...
Quotations marks imply a quote or a refernce to a term / phrase. When you deliberate misquote someone and then repeat that all over the thread as the basis for your argument, that is a strawman at best and pure bad faith at worst.
I see nothing in the line you are referencing that indicates any sort of blind trust is suggested. Even simple, easy legistlation works best when the trust it is based on is not blind.
Yeah, I'm done with this. I told you my objective was to summarize, you have decided I'm maliciously twisting someone's words. I'm not. I've told you as much. My misuse of quotation marks isn't proof in the pudding. I've explained multiple times, to you no less, my point but you've ignored it and have actually strawmanned it yourself. This is what you're doing right now actually by accusing me of random things.
I suggest you look into the "principal of charity". Its fine to disagree, but being hostile and accusatory isn't.
The principal of charity is why I suggested you are stawmanning rather than actively trolling. You asked for am explanation and I provided it.
You've never explained how you got to the assumption that anyone here is suggesting "blind faith" in the government. Please go ahead and do that or don't claim you've "explained multiple times."
I suspect because "make a law" conveys some sense of the actual process of legislating, whereas "just pass a law" sounds as if it deliberately minimizes the process and makes it sound as if it is something trivial to do.
I agree with your points 1-3 but I don't think your conclusion in 4 follows logically. It misses important historical context of where passing laws did in fact create more equitable access to important civic resources. Take for instance the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. You could have made the same argument you are making now to dissuade people from passing those laws.
I definitely think laws can do what you say. But I think that's not always what happens. What I object to is really more specifically how the gist is "change the laws, its an easy fix". Anyone who spectates government (odd phrase, I know) will understand that this is very much not an easy fix.
"The economic system isn't working well, so let's smash it, eliminate the ability of the government to tax people, and give almost all the world's money to a tiny number of anonymous people, 90%+ of whom are affluent white Libertarian males."
Honestly, this whole thing just makes me tremendously sad now.
Well let's face it, there's a widespread and popular political philosophy floating around (especially in the USA) which essentially boils down "the rich are not rich enough and the poor are too rich", so this proposal would fit right in with that !
Let me change the context and see if you still believe that argument: Countries like Russia and China don't need a global internet; they should just fix their censorship problems. VPN operators are scammers taking money from ordinary citizens.
Don't know anything about China, but many programmers have been leaving Russia for a last few years, and internet censorship is one of the big reasons for that. So it has the desired effect -- Russia has less talent, and thus its regime is less stable. It's tiny, but it's there.
As for "VPN being a scammer", this is all about trade-offs. If we had companies destroyed and robbed by VPN-powered ransomware, and we had plain people losing their life savings to VPNs, I'd argue for making VPN illegal. But it's not VPNs who are stealing people's money, it is cryptocurrencies.
> the way that humans tend to get things fixed, is called "a state"... But there actually isn't another way.
Sure there is. It's called "entrepreneurship". In fact, far more of the improvement in the human condition has come from it than the state.
It's astounding to me that we're on an Internet forum about startups, and people are saying that the only way to improve the world is through political activism.
Well, first of all "Hacker News" is not an internet forum about startups. You're thinking of the purpose of YCombinator, which hosts Hacker News but is not Hacker News.
Second, some of us have the experience of having been through, or been adjacent to, the social and political movements of the 1960s, which largely shunned actual political action in favor of personal change and the creation of new, non-state organizations. Despite the widespread availability of wholewheat bread in 2022, an honest retrospective analysis of this approach would have to conclude that it was largely a failure, at least in terms of the various goals involving widespread political and social change.
Thirdly, some of us have been a part of certain, ahem, startups that have gone on to be as much as part of "the problem" as anything that came before them, meaning that our expectation that entrepeneurial capitalism as the savior doesn't seem particularly promising either.
More like that's how democracies fail. Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation. We do nothing to address the root causes of those failures because that would mean closing a lot of the loop holes that allow politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions aka corruption. Why else would we need bills that are thousands of pages long and seem to accomplish absolutely nothing?
> Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation.
The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.
English law is the preferred basis for cross-border contracts and English courts are the preferred venue for litigation between entities from different jurisdictions. This is very well attested - e.g. first result from Google:
>The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.
Allowing politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions is still better than the alternative. What's the alternative, by the way? What do you suggest we replace democracy with?
You could start with a lot more transparency. Everything that isn't critical to the defense of the nation should be public and auditable. Hot button issues like stock trading while in office, term limits and corporate lobbying could be fixed with simple laws if you ignore the whining of current office-holders. If you want to be more drastic, then start shifting power away from the federal government and towards local governments. Politicians who are close to their constituents are the only ones that can be sufficiently supervised. Reduce the role of the faraway central government to that of referee and coordinator and make sure that 99% of representatives time is spent in their own districts where the people can get a hold of them. Finally, if you want to flip the table completely then institute some form of sortition where another branch of government with equal power is formed from randomly selected citizens who are given the opportunity to represent their communities at the levers of power.
You have to accept though that just saying "ah, the government will fix it" when historically governments have been a major contributor to wealth inequality, is somewhat glib. There's a reason NGOs and private charity exist.
I think this approach is just as wrong as saying "crypto is the answer".
And that is another instance where many people part ways, because another big aspect of crypto is that it is partially motivated by a political ideology that most people politely reject and many people think is full of crackpots and scam artists (because it is).
I'm not advocating crypto here, I'm just pointing out that saying crypto is bad because you can "just pass a law" is just as illogical as saying "internet blockchain money will give us freedom".
> saying crypto is bad because you can "just pass a law"
I think you're misconstruing the original suggestion, which was that a legal solution to the problem of the unbanked would be viable. You could pass legislation mandating that banks turn no one away, you could establish a publicly run bank of last resort, etc.
I believe those measures would be "easier" solutions to the problem than replacing the entire financial system, but that's just an opinion about a hypothetical.
Not suggesting we replace the banking, just pointing out how this path you suggest is still not going to be an easy fix. There's no easy fix. Again, not advocating for crypto as a solution. Just asking people to consider more deeply the issues of saying "use the government to solve it!".
> You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
This is the one I'm specifically discussing, its from a different user. This is the line that started the thread. Plenty of users are discussing this specific line I believe.
FWIW, I thought the "Easy." you cite was meant sarcastically. The full context is:
> The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
and national health insurance is famously a fiendishly hard public policy issue (albeit one for which several competing models exist and have been put into practice). Working from an existing public policy model (like using France's example of offering bank-of-last-resort services through the postal service) still seems way easier than just deciding to solve it with crypto.
On the other hand, what would the world look like without democratic governments? Look at history, and you will notice that it is rarely better. Those who seek wealth and power aren't created by governments, nor will they magically disappear if governments disappear (or if their power is neutered). At least democracies have some checks and balances, even if they are nowhere near as effective as we need them to be.
> On the other hand, what would the world look like without democratic governments
Nobody here is advocating against democracy. People are just pointing out that blind trust in state institutions is equally as illogical as blind trust in the EVM. States have a track record of serving the powerful first, and sometimes exclusively. Trusting apparatus with a track record like this masks a sort of flawed optimism, just like putting your hopes of change in the blockchain.
Why are you so insistent that the trust necessarily be blind? Having legislation is the first step to getting banks to comply with how we think they should work. What's the alternative method of coercing their behavior?
The initial discussion started with someone saying something to the effect of "just change the law, easy". To me, that reads as "just use the government, it'll be fine". Perhaps it's just me, but that sounds a lot like blind trust in an institute.
> There's a weird cyclic optimism here that I don't think can really be supported by the facts.
That's a pretty American, libertarian take. As somebody who grew up in Western Europe, I'm not disillusioned by "the state" per se, and I think that the facts rather support that privatisation doesn't always make things better (e.g. railways). None of us may be "right" (it always depends on your experiences), but it's worth considering that "using the state to fix society" isn't a completely ridiculous take for everyone.
I'm not American. This take tends to come out of countries where the government has strayed away from its objective of serving the people. There are plenty of governments I'd trust, and not hold a libertarian view towards. Funny enough, most of these are European governments, so your point is well taken. That said, using the state to solve this problem isn't universally going to work. I bet Nordic nations could pull it off, if they've not already.
In short: if the government doesn't work for the people, and is structurally broken, I hold a libertarian perspective. If I see a government that works for the people, I lean neoliberal.
The lack of banking services for the poor is a market failure not a state failure.
State competition in markets that have failed to deliver necessary services has long been effective whether its through provision of housing or bare bones post office bank accounts.
It not only provides underserved communities it whips competitors into line because - surprise surprise - competition works.
It's the one weird trick parasitic oligarchs hate.
The crypto world is full of serious, borderline genius innovation as well as scammers and lies. I don't know why people can't accept that both can be true at the same time.
What percentage of emails sent in the world are legitimate vs spam? I don't think in principle we care about the volume of BS, we only care about how easily we can filter it out from the genuine stuff. I think over time our ability to do that will get better.
Once crypto as a platform has more useful products, it'll be more obvious that it's worth it to put in the work to filter out the BS. For now, I can see why it's not so obvious. But don't be disappointed that you didn't get in early.
As a related information nugget, HashCash that popularised proof-of-work concept before Bitcoin, was originally designed a email spam prevention tool. Goes far back as 1997.
What you are doing with Proof of Work is demonstrating that you are spending a relative amount of money to accomplish something by demonstrating some energy usage. As energy gets cheaper you would have to do more of it to keep up.
IMHO the problem with crypto is the very thing that its proponents cite as one of its key benefits, its decentralised nature.
We are told that crypto is supposedly a way to "stick it to the man", to fight those "evil banks/governments".
The trouble is that unlike fiat currency, there is no fundamental means of valuation. Crypto is worth what its worth on the day based largely or exclusively on entirely non-economic valuation, which is why its so incredibly volatile.
The trouble is that you cannot escape the truth that the world is based on trade. People make goods, people supply services and other people buy goods and buy services. People also buy and sell essential commodities. This happens both domestically and cross-border.
The value of fiat currency is ultimately tied to the economics of global, and therefore provides an objective means to value said currencies, both themselves and relative to other currencies.
You don't get that with crypto.
Well, you could argue that you do to a limited extent, but that limited extent would only make crypto comparible to emerging world fiat currency of some tiny country.... high-frequency boom and bust cycles, high volatility, potential for episodes of illiquidity etc.
Can you expound on the fundamental means of valuation for Fiat currency? It's my understanding that there is no fiat currency with any fundamental backing. I was pretty sure Khadaffi was killed for promoting an African currency backed by gold, in lieu of the USD hegemony.
> The value of fiat currency is ultimately tied to the economics of global, and therefore provides an objective means to value said currencies, both themselves and relative to other currencies.
The fundamental value of fiat currency is that it is effectively a share of the productivity of a particular economy. The underlying driver of that value is that debts are denominated in and payable with the currency, and the underlying driver of that is that the government levies taxes.
> make crypto comparible to emerging world fiat currency of some tiny country
This is my basic viewpoint regarding bitcoin et al. The significance difference is that bitcoin and similar are not territorial countries but free associations of people under particular conditions. This is where it gets interesting.
> We are told that crypto is supposedly a way to "stick it to the man", to fight those "evil banks/governments".
The supposed “decentralized” revolution sounds about as likely as some kid who just read Marx leading a revolution. I think there’s a fine line between decentralized and deorganized.
The problem is that while these topics are interesting (and even crucial these days) they're often used in bad faith by people who are just in it because of the get-rich-quick scheme. You'll often see people push some cryptotoken using a thin veneer of political activism, saying that it's about taking control back or redistributing wealth etc... but it's rarely more than that.
In my experience if you attempt to push back and ask how exactly they propose to fix these problems they'll just resort to enumerating the failings of our current system (the 2008 crisis, wealth inequality, tax evasion by the wealthiest etc...) which is all fair, but how does cryptocurrency fix this? I'd argue that so far it's mostly demonstrated that it shares all these issues, only even more pronounced.
The pyramid scheme at the core of cryptocurrency poisons the well, that's the original issue with this entire thing. You can't have a good faith discussion when one side expects that they're going to be billionaires if things go their way. I acknowledge that there's definitely toxicity coming from us cryptoskeptics, but you have to acknowledge that these days easily 90% of any discussion involving cryptocurrencies is going to use shallow catchphrases pushed by people who don't understand the technology, don't understand basic economic principles and are just hoping that their $1000 in ShitCumShibaCoin is going to make them millionaires.
On top of that the cryptocurrency side has over a decade of unfulfilled promises to account for. As far as I'm concerned we've exhausted the discussion years ago. Any debate surrounding cryptocurrencies on HN from 2017 is equally as relevant today, there's no need to keep repeating the same arguments over and over again from both sides. So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.
90% of projects out there are scams and have a crypto-token attached to it with a pyramid scheme on it and there also exists a 10% of projects somewhere that it is not purely a 'get-rich-quick-scheme', or a 'web3' crypto project that doesn't require a crypto-token attached to the product that has utility?
Thus, it also must mean that it is not going away 100% guaranteed, despite the rampant scams?
> So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.
So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?
I really hope you try your best to avoid it and 'move on'. I should not expect you to continue to react to yet another HN post about crypto projects since you think all of them are a scam.
The issue is that with so many more scams than real projects, and so much focus on buzzwords, it’s more likely to fall for a scam than to actually find a real useful project.
And even the not-entirely-a-scam projects, be it NFTs, the entire ETH or BTC sphere, are so full of money laundering, trade front running, people using it as investment vehicle, etc. that you can’t trust these projects either.
The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.
Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage?
People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?
There's plenty of bad actors anywhere, but it becomes toxic when you have an app with an optional crypto integration and people come out of left field preaching their climate doom, crypto will boil the oceans, capitalist greed will be the end of us all, and all crypto is a scam. Meanwhile I'm offering a free to play game?
There's a toxic confluence of engineer's anti-biz perspective combined with a larger ID politics theme. Some benefiting from crypto are outside of the traditional channels. Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
> Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage?
Criticizing over-engineered cloud solutions is done all the time. At the same time there are a ton of useful and pragmatic cloud solutions.
> People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?
This is being criticized all the time. At the same time there are useful financial products that are quite important for many.
> Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
There is no disruption taking place. That's the issue. It's all just pure hype that quite obviously creates more problems that it claims to solve. People are tired of hearing the same arguments and excuses since years.
This is not like the Internet (or anything similar that has been used as an analogy) that was not taken seriously at the beginning, typically by established players who then got surprised shortly after.
Quite the contrary. It has been taken seriously but it didn't turn out to be what was promised. Just yet another hype, and "this time it's not like the last time". The negativity surrounding these topics came from insiders and initial adopters who started to speak out.
There are maybe some useful things in here that get overshadowed, but to be taken seriously those parts need to very clearly distance themselves from the rest.
Exactly. Hence my questions about regulations that haven't been answered since you seem to answer for that other person:
> Is it going away 100% guaranteed due to the rampant scams everywhere?
> So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed?
From the other reply:
> Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam.
Buy Bitcoin and use it for what? Currency? Payments?
Bitcoin has failed at being useful at all and it's intended purpose which is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Not an 'investment', 'store of value' and 'digital gold'.
> a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency
As a sibling comment said, they move to a separate able currency like dollars or Euro.
No one in their right mind will move to a fantasy token whose value oscillates up and down every second, sometimes to within several orders of magnitude.
Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200%
Etherum's is ~300%
Monero, 330%
It's not as bad as Venezuela's or Zombabwe's hyperinflation, but no ine in their right mind would use a currency this volatile.
Hyperinflation is one-way volatility. In either case the value changes rapidly making the "currency" in question useless as a long-term store of value.
That’s the issue, even Bitcoin can’t really be used as currency anymore. I used bitcoin when it was still new. In our friend circle, we paid each other with thousands of bitcoins for a single pizza back then. And yet it was still more usable as currency back then than it is nowadays.
Lightning is not Bitcoin. The implemented design of Lightning is a highly centralised off-chain layer 2 [0] which is a direct contradiction and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was designed and built for: ' a peer-to-peer electronic cash system'
Bitcoin has failed in being an efficient on-chain payments system and is somehow now an investment asset since that is its new narrative which is also a 'store of value' or 'digital gold'.
It seems that many supporters have admitted that it is not useful for its original purpose and that it is not instant, significantly slower than VISA and a extremely volatile to use as a currency.
True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. I can’t really use BTC to store money, as it fluctuates too much.
The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)
> True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed.
What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.
> being unable to run a full node anymore
Full node syncs & runs fine even on a raspi 3... it's slow... and you're not participating in mining... but it's running, and does what you would expect a node to do (validate, receive & broadcast transactions).
> What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.
Yes, but bitcoin is so volatile that you can’t keep money for daily usage in it. You can only use it as long-term investment or ultra-short-term wallet.
The regular usage – storing money for somewhere between one and 30 days – is really painful with bitcoin.
> Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ?
Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage. You get paid, you spend it over a month on wages and expenses.
Bitcoin originally promised to be usable for that. Some companies actually paid you in BTC, some stores actually allowed you to pay with BTC. The original goal was to use BTC like a checking account.
Lightning is great at replacing the BTC network itself for transactions, but it doesn’t help much at allowing BTC to accomplish this original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
This is (roughly speaking) the description of a currency, isn't it? I would point out that as a store of value, bitcoin's up
> [BTC's] original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
I don't think BTC was intended to serve in the way you're describing. I believe it was designed to neuter/obviate at-large Central Banks (e.g. money printers, debasers of currency, economic overlords). In this way, it's gone a long way towards the intended purpose. Furthermore, as a base-layer, it's been extended considerably to support day-to-day usability. Further, as a Store of Value, it's done a lot better than USD in almost every time-scale you can compare, and all the ones that matter.
>>>
The main properties:
Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.
No mint or other trusted parties.
Participants can be anonymous.
New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work.
The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the
network to prevent double-spending.
>>>
I would also like to add that the original point of money is not to support a month's worth of planning... the point of money is to support planning across planting seasons and lifetimes. Wages and wage-work came along long after money was invented.
Don't quote the old magic to me, I was there when it was written.
And Bitcoin was treated and hyped as a true replacement for Euro or US Dollar. And we hyped it as well. Online stores started accepting BTC, some companies started paying wages in BTC, the first BTC ATMs showed up.
Dogecoin started their tip bot with a tipping culture.
Neither Doge nor BTC absolutely were seen as investment vehicle or store of value, but instead as payment system and true currency.
I remember discussion about the volatility, and claims that with more and more people using it, its value would change less and less and it'd stabilize at about a BTC per Euro cent.
Even if you set aside the transaction costs and the staggering environmental toll of Bitcoin, it just doesn't function well as a currency because it has been used, and is being used, as a speculative investment vehicle by so many.
You absolutely do not want your currency to be rising and falling by double-digit percentages in value even over the course of a few years, let alone a few days the way Bitcoin frequently does. Furthermore, people accepting currency don't want that. This is one of the major reasons so few people do, in fact, accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. (Yes, I know some do. It's still very few, and always will be.)
I would argue that Bitcoin is already outdated tech so has the only benefit to be the first one. Now you have crypto doing what Bitcoin does, but with instant transactions, feeless, while barely using any energy (think a wind turbine would suffice to maintain the complete network)
It’s hard to fully avoid it and move on while people are still being scammed. My position on cryptocurrency is identical to my position on home marketing businesses: I’ll happily concede that there could in principle be a good one, and that in the scheme of things it’s not the largest issue in the world, but when so many people are being sold false promises it’s hard for me to just brush that under the rug.
I don't think I am ever going to get used to "crypto" meaning "cryptocurrency" and not "cryptography". Can't we just keep calling it "cryptocurrency"? I thought this article would be about the various misguided governments' attempts to outlaw cryptography.
Given the recent decline in interest in both NFTs and cryptocurrency in general, I'd say within the next 5 years or so we'll be able to go back to using "crypto" to mean "cryptography" without much fear of confusion.
HN probably could return to "crypto" and "cryptocurrency"; the rest of the world will keep on being "crypto" and "cryptography". Orders of magnitude more people care about cryptocurrencies than cryptography.
In my view it is quite difficult to find insightful and civilized long-form discussion on the topic of crypto, compared to most other "controversial" topics I'm personally intersted in (e.g. geopolitics or economics). I might be mistaken – but it is my impression that the blockchain-space is fast growing and attracts a ton of intelligent people. Surely there must be a lot to talk about?
On reddit, the crypto-themed subreddits (that I know of) are almost entirely comprised of doom-and-gloom-sentiment and astroturfing, while subreddits outside of this bubble are reminiscent of HN, where specific crypto projects almost never reach the frontpage and if they do, the discussion is seldomly about specifics.
I've found that all the smart crypto people congregate on twitter and discord, which is sort of a shame because it results in a lot of the conversation being ephemeral.
There is plenty of interesting discussion, both on Twitter and in community-specific areas like blogs and Discords and such. It’s just drowned out by the nonsense, which is inevitable due to the association so many people have with getting rich quick with cryptocurrencies. It’s the same with retail traders buying options - there is some interesting discussions happening in some places, and interesting strategies being run, but it’s hard to find over the masses of spam.
It's unfortunate that Bitcoin has become so mired in partisan politics.
For me its purpose is simple.
If my money is a representation of my time and effort, why should I accept the central banks' inflation "target" of even 2%, due to money printing? I don't see why anyone should be okay with that, particularly given that central banks rarely meet that target for long and more often than not overshoot by a significant amount.
It's insane to me that anyone should expect the purchasing power of their money to reduce, debasing their own time and effort. Why is that acceptable to people?
Money is a leaky representation of your time and effort that we accept because it is better than isolated subsistence agriculture. It's purpose is to motivate you to devote time and effort to satisfying the needs and wants of other people, opinions differ on how well it accomplishes that. Mine is roughly it's not very good but I don't think bitcoin as it exists is likely an improvement.
I kind of suspect you're missing some idea about how your particular idea of money leaks but I can't tell from your comment what in particular you're missing. Maybe try thinking through the relationship between not consuming something now, and wanting to consume something in the future without using the idea of money?
> it is better than isolated subsistence agriculture.
Have you ever considered why banks look like temples?
Do you know the weight of a shekle?
Consider discovering more about these topics before you opine on "money".
> Maybe try thinking through the relationship between not consuming something now, and wanting to consume something in the future without using the idea of money?
Do you know about "time preference"? Do you appreciate how an inflationary currency promotes a shorter time preference? Can you see how that impacts the world by promoting rapid consumption?
Consider investigating how hard money impacts time preference.
> why should I accept the central banks' inflation "target" of even 2%, due to money printing?
If crypto were the currency of a small emerging economy, it would find company in the volatility of its peers. (It would still stand out in a class of its own.)
Most people in those currencies prefer steady +2%/year (worst case: eight for a few quarters) to -70% one year, +90% the next [1].
> Why is that acceptable to people?
Nobody financially literate experiences it. Real wages vary within a narrow band, and have increased over the decades [2]. If you're storing value over longer periods of time, you store it in appreciating forms of cash (e.g. Treasuries [3], interest-earning deposits) or securities (e.g. bonds, equities, et cetera).
The people who do get screwed by inflation, the poor, do because of commodity volatility. Turning around and making everything volatile by handing them a volatile currency is the opposite of helpful.
Because I can’t make 99% of my transactions with Bitcoin. Sure there’s a handful of vendors online that take BTC and a BTC ATM in the gas station in the shady part of town, but for majority of pitches, money is probably going to have to be converted to USD and go through a bank.
I can store the majority of my wealth in Bitcoin over the long term and know that my share of the total supply won't be significantly diluted, because it's disinflationary with a max supply hard cap.
This is not possible with fiat. You can't have any confidence how much fiat will be produced by central banks at the press of a button. Millions? Billions? Trillions? Who knows...
Whenever I need liquid cash to buy things I can quickly and easily convert to fiat at anytime, and gain the benefit of price appreciation over the long term (+4 years).
The only problem with that at the moment is capital gains tax, but I believe that will be addressed eventually.
People don't "accept" the reduction of their purchasing power. They live with it due to lack of better alternatives. Bitcoin doesn't adequately meet the criteria most people have for something to be considered money, namely portability and stability. All of the existing solutions that could help it meet the requisite criteria involve some kind of centralization, therefore it is not a better alternative.
It is insane to me that anyone should expect the purchasing power of their money to increase without spending any of their time or effort. Why is that acceptable to you?
The answer is this - a slightly inflationary currency offers the greatest good for the greatest number. It encourages people to _invest_ their money so it doesn't lose value.
Deflationary currencies encourage people to _hoard_ money as a viable strategy, and the more people hoard, the more valuable it becomes.
In a society where the most profitable and safe strategy is simply to hold your money and do nothing with it, no business ventures will start.
----
So many questions people ask about crypto could be answered in a first year economics course - or simply by sitting down for a while and working out strategies with poker chips.
If people weren't so pugnacious about their complete lack of knowledge of economics, it would be rewarding to explain to people why things are how they are.
I hasten to add that as a socialist, I have a lot of issues with modern economics, but pretending that it's nonsense or that its mathematical models aren't useful is just silly.
> a slightly inflationary currency offers the greatest good for the greatest number. It encourages people to _invest_ their money so it doesn't lose value.
>Deflationary currencies encourage people to _hoard_ money as a viable strategy, and the more people hoard, the more valuable it becomes.
What's the primary source for this theory?
I hear it espoused a lot but it seems counter-intuitive. People still have to buy food, shelter and clothing in a deflationary environment.
Maybe if I read the larger arguments in works that established the idea I can get a better grasp on it.
>Deflationary currencies encourage people to _hoard_ money
People hoard things regardless. Inflationary currencies cause people to hoard property and we're watching the destruction from that unfold in real time in the US.
Crypto offers nothing but highly volatile securities trading. That can never accomplish any of the positive goals listed in the article. Simple realistic analysis is all that is necessary to reject crypto as currently offered as an agent of positive change. Having noble ideas or goals is no excuse for doing damage with inherently unstable technologies.
> If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable.
Phrased like that, sure, how can anyone disagree?
But what about urging folks to not loose their shirts in a scam? Situations like going to a wedding, meeting up with relatives/family-friends, and finding out they're about to get involved in Amway, bizarre religions, Tony Robbins or other self-help guru's, or nutritional supplement scams? Does it ever work to intervene? Probably not often, but there's value in speaking to them about it. Same thing with crypto.
One useful thing you can do is to direct folks to the "Line Goes Up" video from Dan Olson (https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g). It's an epic, 2 hour long take-down that's perhaps the most comprehensive and air-tight argument against crypto thus far. Does it convince people? I hope so. It should?
It pains me to see even smart progressive orgs like Popula (https://popula.com/) get themselves involved in crypto. And I don't want the most vulnerable people to be left "holding the bag" when this stuff inevitably pops.
Nowadays, I don't really discuss Bitcoin anymore with anyone.
The people who need it the most will ask questions like: "How can I send money from the EU to the Dominican Republic without paying 25% 'banking commissions'?" or "How can I help my mother in Jakarta to get money quickly?" and totally organically, we come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is the answer...
We in the West tend to be blind from the problems and solutions that the rest of humanity has found by using bitcoin...
Funny, because when I lived in the Dominican Republic, not a single one of the people I knew used Bitcoin to transfer money from the EU to the DR (and that wasn't for lacking of knowing people doing that.)
Meanwhile, overall computer literacy and even access to a computer was a massive challenge for many people in that country.
Yeah, because with transfering money via Western Union you have one problem: they take a cut, but the person on the other end gets fiat in their local currency and you pay in your local currency.
With sending bitcoin you have many more problems: converting your local currency to bitcoin, and if you're like 99% of regular people using a hot-wallet like Coinbase and they take a cut to buy bitcoin, waiting for that to clear, sending it to another bitcoin address, waiting for that to clear, then the person on the other end has to cash out. Is there a coinbase-like in DR? If we're talking about underbanked, then how do they get their money? Is there a window for this coinbase-like thing that will pay out in fiat of the local currency? I've seen plenty of bitcoin ATMs around my area, but none are for withdrawal.
She said "toxic" because she's talking about poison. She basically said: "I myself am anti-crypto. But I don't think that we anti-crypto people should be poisonous in our interaction with pro-crypto people."
I'd like to say more, but HN has a clear "Anti-Didn't-RTFA Toxicity" policy.
There are ways of expressing disagreement which are toxic, and there are ways of expressing disagreement which are not toxic. She has observed is that many anti-crypto people have been expressing their disagreement in toxic ways, and feeling justified in doing so. She is discouraging the first while encouraging the second.
If you'd spent any effort trying to understand what she or I were saying, you'd know that. It seems rather that you'd rather fight against imaginary arguments from your own head, which is far more troubling.
The author does not state that people "disagreeing" with crypto are toxic, just that a subset of anti-crypto people are toxic. (Same applies to some pro-crypto people).
Toxicity is the right term if we stick to its original, biological meaning. Energy generation leads to large toxic outputs. Wasting energy leads to more toxic outputs.
In my experience, the relative meaning, popularity, and aptness of words like "toxic" are generational and geographic.
When I hang out with people 10 years younger than me, "toxic" means things as mild as "buzzkill" or "wet blanket" and "gaslighting" is whenever someone says something you doubt.
Those word carried very weighty and serious connotations when they started becoming commonplace vocabulary years and years ago. These days they're meaningless, and we just have to adapt that new reality.
You cannot solve contract/legal problems and wrong transactions through decentralization. You can't also make a democratic system act on every conflict. You assign a central authority to act on them and you select that authority through a democratic process, which is what we already have.
- I want to have a beer!
- ok, scan this QR, and accept the transaction
- there you go!
- thank you, here are your 5 beers
- oh, did I just pay for 5? I wanted 1! can you refund me and take these back?
- no can do! pretty sure you said 5!
You can convince the 51% to cancel the transaction or you can call the police. What would you do?
Bitcoin may fix some friction issues if it's integrated into the current financial system, but it'd then just be a very small cog in a giant machine.
You may not agree, it may also be that you do not want to agree, and it's ok.
Now if you start calling people toxic because they state what's obvious for them, you can never get a proper discussion. It's also a little red flag that should make you question if you are in a cult.
Same could be said about paying in cash. Order a beer, hand over a 20 expecting change, bartender gives you 5 beers and no change. In that case you can convince the bartender (who allready said no can do) or call the police (though it might be a civil issue rather than criminal, so calling the cops won't produce any results and you will have to take it up with them via the civil court system).
BUt I get your point, I used some automated "pay by crypto" checkout system a few months ago, their automated system never picked up the transaction even though the coins where in their wallet, they first blamed me and said they would refund if I paid the fee's which were not in a coin I had on hand so had to do some giggling about to get this small amount (was like < $1 of coins so it was easier to just pay this fee than it was to complain), then after they recieved this fee they said they would return the funds minus 8% as that 8% was their "handling fee".
NOW they did return all the funds I transfered so maybe that 2nd email was just a canned message but it was still a jab to the gut them saying "yeah, our system messed up and we want you to pay to fix it".
My bank handles card disputes very well imo. Basically I can start the dispute via my banking app and based on your past history the bank will front you the refund while they wait out the dispute.
Things like that happen when you have an intermediate handling the transaction, and personally for my day to day transactions I'm happy with using the existing banking system
BUT the existing system does have flaws in my opinion. For one example, sex workers, banks do not like touching that subject. Crypto removes the gatekeepers to electronic payment transfers, well it does until you want to convert it back to fiat and your crypto gets blacklisted by the exchanges. But me personally, I don't think crypto is the answer, but kicking banks into understanding that adults are adults and don't need banks holding the reins.
(Granted payments in the adult industry are some of the most charged back which becomes a pain for payment providers).
US experiences come to me like from an alien world, most of the time. Zoning laws messing with cafes, banks kicking sex workers, and this is only from the last 5 minutes HN reads...
And back to the topic: yes banks deserve some stronger kicks and that can be achieved only through politics (aka, getting involved). Cryptids only shuffle the burden around a bit.
I wasn't specifically giving a btc example, qr code can also be apple pay or anything like that.
It's just that in the case of btc, there's no central authority to cancel the transaction. You need a court order to force the bar to manually send the money back to you. The bank cannot freeze the funds. Enforcement is crippled. If this is not a reputable business (unlikely for a bar and very unlikely for a small sum like that but bear with me), it's way more likely to lose your money.
This is one of the reasons why money transactions are hard and costly. You cannot pretend that a blockchain fixes all that.
If I lose 50 € to some unscrupulous merchant, that's worth it to not have to ask the bank for permission for and tell them about every transaction.
in other words, you aren't poor enough for the loss of 50 € to mean that you are going to have less food this month and won't be late on your rent because of it.
It isn't that banks are looking out for poor people. That should be obvious.
But poor people do use banking services and in both countries I've lived in (US and Norway), there are built in consumer protections. They aren't perfect, but they are stronger than you get with crypto. You can often resolve a payment issue, for example. FDIC protection in the US covers most folks (most folks don't save more than whatever the limit is now).
And this protection, even if imperfect, helps folks have a little more stability in their lives.
But cryptocurrency is the same as with cash. Yes, we need to teach people that they shouldn't send cryptocurrency to some shady "investment" company, just as they shouldn't give cash to a guy in a van promising them returns, but the risk profile is exactly the same as with cash, which people have been using successfully for centuries.
The risk profile is, currently, not the same as with cash, for the reasons some people further up the thread mentioned (no or nebulous ability to freeze/seize assets of bad actors).
To the extent that the risk profile is or will become (with expanding regulations) the same as with cash, cryptocurrencies provide no meaningful improvement over cash, but have significant drawbacks.
So why should we take all this effort to get to "just like cash, but with extra steps"?
Because it's cash you can easily carry with you, even if you have millions, you can send to anyone anywhere in the world instantly, they're much more difficult to steal if you have a cheap hardware wallet, etc etc. They have many more advantages.
These are all features as long as you live in a world where there is no bad faith, no misunderstandings, no drama of any sorts.
In this world however, disputed transactions may even be more than half, depending on the industry. You can't approach something that ignores this as a serious financial tool.
I don't use cryptocurrency as a replacement for a credit card, I use it as a replacement for cash. Banks aren't risk-free either, it's a lower probability of problems for a much more devastating impact.
Compare a frozen bank account to a fraudulent transaction you can't revert. Sure, the latter is more frequent, but the former is devastating.
No crypto software I know makes a transaction based on a QR code scan. It always shows you the address, and then you have to enter the total in the check and then complete the transaction. If you paid 5x more than was asked, have your 5 beers.
You can't get rich with bitcoin any more. That's a good thing and also separates the people who believe in better money, from the "get rich quick with crypto" types.
If you believe that Bitcoin is better money, then you also realize that we need just one Bitcoin. In this world view, every copy-cat project doesn't serve any purpose, other than making their founders and early investors rich.
Bitcoin toxicity stems from this mindset. Bitcoiners are anti-crypto. There has been so many broken promises, and so much lost money from newbies, that it's better to just defend toxically against every crypto project, rather trying to go through their arguments and trying to rationally invalidate them. You can safely assume that everything in crypto is a scam.
I've never heard of a bitcoin or Ethereum deterministic wallet being canceled because someone found out its owner is from Iran or Venezuela. That's a huge improvement over the crap that is the current financial system.
Also have you thought about the novel idea of old school policing to catch criminals instead of collaterally damaging the lives every single human in the world other than the 13% privileged who happen to be citizens of stable democracies?
I was more positive about crypto before the big NFT grift came along.
But even then, hardly anybody seemed to care about making crypto work as a currency. It was all about the speculation/gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, and memecoin pump+dumps. Nobody bought their groceries or paid their rent with crypto, it was just the currency of darknet drugs and cybercrime. And multi-million-dollar exchange hacks seemed to be almost weekly headlines.
Crypto wasn't going well, even before NFTs came along, and before the environmental opposition to mining ramped up.
That's our western perspective. Apparently NFTs and financialization are an ethereum and clones thing. Bitcoin has placed a ton of focus on cheap payments on the Lightning Network. Monero is focusing on privacy. Our media is hyper focused on tech bros getting rich on monkey pictures but out there people in Nigeria and Sudan are using Bitcoin and Tether as their life line. Ucranians did it too and that's the only option for Russian content creators who are mostly against Putin's regime. Yeah yeah scammy tether but for them its leagues better than the hyper inflated money they have available.
I guess its time for a reality check: Putin oligarchs are still filthy rich, the ruble has come back to pre-war levels while average Russian citizens who have been excluded from the rest of the world.
The ruble's course doesn't matter because it's close to unusable. The Russian economy is cut off from vital supplies, and will soon have all sorts of shortages of all sorts of high tech/quality things - vehicles, phones, computer parts, sensors for their precious resource extractions. China and India cannot fill all the gaps, there's too many of them.
As for the oligarchs, they're still rich, but much less so, and they've lost many precious toys ( yachts, villas, football clubs).
Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen. I have zero sympathy for the average Russian whose inaction made them unable to purchase a new phone or car. They won't starve to death, and they won't be bombes to pieces, which are the prospects facing Ukrainian citizens suffering from the invasion which brought all of this on.
> Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen. I have zero sympathy for the average Russian whose inaction made them unable to purchase a new phone or car.
What do you expect the average Russia to have done exactly? I’m curious what you would have done in their position.
IMO we should do the opposite. We should bombard those countries with our shit. Our cheap services, our shows, our food, our way of life. Hire their engineers. Give them tech like Uber and crupto to create a nightmare for their control freak governors. Erode and drain their funds. Capture the hearts of their young. But instead Russians are listening to their government say "See I told you they hate us".
That's what has been done until now. Germany even had an explicit policy of economic interdependence to make a war unimaginable. You can see how well that worked, right?
And they don't have it anymore. Those people who _actually_ protested and got beaten and arrested by _real_ tyrannical governments are being told by their government "see I told you they hate us" while also being criticized for "not doing enough" by people like you who probably never experienced what is to live outside of the privileged 13% humans who are born in stable democracies.
Not vote for Putin and his party for decades? Go out in the streets when opposition leaders or dissidents were assasinated in broad daylight? Something? Anything? Because of them allowing Putin to get where he is, now innocent Ukrainians are suffering terrible atrocities. I know which population is more guilty and which deserving of compassion.
Something like the Belarusians who went to the streets to protest against a fraudulent election and got violently crushed by their police state? The same "evil complacent" Belarusians that are also being sanctioned now?
When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
Of course now is too late, the police state is well too developed for such protests to not turn out very bloody. And yes, Belarus and Kazakhstan crushing their protestors is also partly the fault of the complacent apathetic Russians. Without Putin's support both would have probably succeeded.
> When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
Many times. Admittedly the risk of arbitrary incarceration or death has always been low in my case, but it's because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are.
Lukashenko has been belarus president since the fall of the USSR. Do you really think they ever had a chance at a fair election? What can be said of Russia then? Didn't they just used KGB strategies to poison the strongest opositor Navalny?
> because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are
Was it you or people who fought and died decades or centuries ago to achieve the presumably stable democracy you enjoy today? Please do not misunderstand I'm not saying your activism or causes are not important but trying to tell you that things are really tough outside the comfort zone of the first world.
I'm sorry but is just seems cruel, unfair and childish to expect that by starving people living in dictatorships they will just topple their corrupt government.
> Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen.
Speaking for a point of privilege right here aren't we?
Any state with sufficient laws can enforce exchanges, businesses, etc. to blacklist wallets which have been identified as foreign owned - if there are sanctions / embargos against said country/countries.
Of course, there are ways to obfuscate the money trail, but if they start handing out hard prison time and fines, that alone will probably deter most.
So while you still have a "bank", so to speak, you're still limited to whom you can do business with.
I really don't see how it could ever be a financial system. It would require regulation, control and identification. It requires a central and powerful supervisor per country. It would render the system at most equally accessible, possibly less.
If you want a bank with a publically accessible ledger, fine, build it, or have your government publish all banking transactions. But don't pretend bitcoin can be an alternative to the current banking system.
My point is: you won't be able to avoid "tradfi" regulation. It's there for a reason, and it will be implemented. It's one of the government's sources of income.
What level of economic activity in crypto is unrelated to speculative gain.
If you want to stop angry responses to claims for the value to economic process you need to be honest about the extent to which crypto is a game for massive speculative gain, pump and dump, washing and money laundering.
Use of public signed ledger to audit value flow and provide certainty to low doc activity like cash in Africa, payments to farmers worldwide, ending the game of 90 day credit and discounting for prompt payment, reducing rent seeking. All laudible.
But please instead of just listing them, give us some numbers.
A smaller amount of speculation is informing of belief on future value. When it dominates, it tends to be gambling, ponzi, or both, as in ponzi to enrich a few, fuelled by gambling by many.
It took me quite a while to understand what Bitcoin is about. Of course, decentralised systems are exciting tech, but what's really interesting is that Bitcoin focuses attention onto fundamental questions of society:
- How can we transport value through space at the speed of light?
- How can we transport value through time?
- How can we protect our life savings from inflation?
- How can we develop a free market of currencies which solves the issues of centrally controlled currencies?
- How can we align incentives such that we stop consuming low quality products that produce lots of waste and start valuing high quality products that last for decades?
- In general: How can we, as a society, enjoy the benefits of a low time preference?
Such questions are the reason why I believe Bitcoin is one of the most disruptive technologies of our century.
I started as a hater and skeptic but the more curious I got about the technical details of it and the more I learned, the more it started to grow on me.
I just want to say that I really appreciate the writing style in this article. I consider crypto a highly-politicized subject, but there are ways of talking about such things without getting political. Specifically:
But I also think that these proposed solutions are enormously attractive to people who see them as a tangible option in a world where these problems are not being solved—where we are being failed by our political establishments in so, so many ways.
I may disagree with the author about where to place blame, but I think saying "political establishments" is more authentic than "the government". At least in the US, it's We the People. We're the government. So when I hear anti-government sentiments, I generally start to discount whatever it is that the person is saying. Especially in this era, when the main problem is concentrated wealth in private institutions and corporations, who unlike the government, operate outside of election oversight. Meaning we can't throw them out of office when they do wrong.
And that's been my main concern with stuff like crypto. I feel the sentiment that the political establishment often lets us all down. But rather than creating an anarchist playground in crypto to get mathematically free of regulation, maybe it might have been good to put some energy into getting involved politically and solving the actual problems. Vote, raise money for non-establishment candidates, run for office, all that stuff.
The long game for crypto looks like any other unregulated game: winner takes all. Perfect wealth inequality. Whatever edge I think I may have to skim a little capital out of that pool, would only end up being used to exacerbate inequality as I take from someone else. Which is why I feel that the original goal of crypto to empower people (by bypassing the rules of the system) is only going to backfire and make things worse. Just like with trickle-down economics, the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act or any other policy that claimed it would enrich all but only enriched some.
We don't fix the evils of the system by feeding from it. We fix them by paying into the good, getting involved and doing the work.
Regarding the list of questions that are presented here EG - "How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?"
Can anyone explain to me how crypto is uniquely suited to solve this problem? I'm not in principal against crypto currencies existing, but more and more I just see people trying to apply it to problems that they think exist because "the financial system is over regulated" - without providing any argument for why regulation is causing the unfairness in the first place?
I have yet to see anyone define a single problem in the financial system that crypto is uniquely placed to solve (besides funding criminal activity and bypassing sanctions), that wouldn't be better solved from better competition between banks.
Not every country in the world has a banking sector that serves it's customers as badly as in the US.
I'm 100% onboard with the enabling underbanked people argument for crypto. There's countless people all over the world who can't get a bank account, or if they could, can't get one that is reliable or useful enough for their needs. Eg, maybe the currency is too unstable, or maybe there's too many restrictions on international transfers and commerce etc etc. These people are left with cash and predatory "businesses" like Western Union as their only options. It's not fair and can and should change, but sadly, crypto has spectacularly failed to deliver on its potential here.
I agree here, it would be nice if this was the case. Like you I also worry that in it's current form a crypto banking implementation for the underbanked people of the world would be a worse solution for everyone.
- No human being that's able to reverse fraudulent or mistaken transactions
- Currency that's hardly more stable (probably less so) than the world's the least stable currencies
- A digital environment that's rife with fraud and a completely fresh and unknown attack surface due to the nature of smart contracts
There are several properties of blockchains that could improve upon our current financial structures.
1) Custody: with fiat, the concept of self-custody is "store your cash under your bed," and as we continue to move away from cash into digital money, this option is being eroded. In crypto, the concept of self-custody may be an EOA (account based on a private key) smart contract (such as a multi-signatory account), or some combination. This is not to say that all users should be choosing non-custodial wallets, but the ability to choose and diversify your assets across a range of these technologies is, in my opinion, better than having no choice at all.
2) Mitigating the need for intermediaries in certain situations. Currently to handle escrow of digital assets in fiat systems, you typically need to hire or use a third-party agency. In some cases escrow could instead be managed by a (cryptographically-verified) program execution, e.g. "transfer X domain name record for Y amount of stablecoin assets".
3) Privacy-preserving attestations via zero-knowledge proofs, which could use a public (decentralized) ledger so that all parties can verify the validity of the proof.
4) The immutable and public nature of smart contracts gives them certain properties we do not have with our traditional financial systems. For example Libor manipulation went unnoticed for several years; partly because the systems were closed and difficult to analyze. The public ledger is comparatively easy to analyze and difficult to manipulate. (The most common manipulations rely on social engineering; e.g. convincing somebody to sign a transaction, or buy ShitCoin2000.)
5) General security and operational improvements. Much of our traditional system is upheld by FORTRAN and questionable security methods (PINs, passwords, cell phone 2FA). Crypto currencies are extremely adversarial environments that are forcing new security models and cryptographic primitives: zk-proofs and zk-VMs, multi-party computation, new methods of private key storage and management, post-quantum cryptography. Hopefully some of these advancements (being funded by crypto currencies) will eventually spill over to other sectors.
While I agree with some of your points here, (Mitigating the need for intermediaries in certain situations)
- Crypto inherently holds no security benifits over traditional banking. Fortran has been used for decades because it has worked, and there has been little need for change.Fortran isn't a security hole in itself. In fact it has all of the same problems with private PIN access and MFA, PLUS all the downsides that come with malicious smart contracts. As far as personal security goes, crypto is much much worse.
- The immutable and public nature of smart contracts. Why should anything be immutable? What if something is done by mistake, or by fraud? The benefits of traditional banking is that at the end of the day, there is a human on the other side that can reverse things if stuff goes wrong.
- I see no benefit of the entire chain being public, just because I give someone my public key, because I spend money with them, or my employer needs to pay me, why should they be able to see EVERY transaction I have ever made?
- Banks and financial systems use COBOL/FORTRAN not because they want to, but because the systems are decades old, the knowledge of how it works often lost, and making small changes or adding new features could lead to catastrophic failure[1][2][3]. Crypto on the other hand tends to be on the cutting edge of cryptography and heavily reliant on open source. Despite crypto systems having a better bedrock than a bank trying to maintain their multimillion lines of COBOL spaghetti, I can agree that many end-user applications in crypto do not provide better security than today's banks (e.g. MetaMask hot wallet storing user private keys in the cloud).
- The ledger is generally considered immutable; but the platforms and protocols built on top of it need not be. Social consensus can pivot to a new contract address. An analogy would be a git commit; you can update the head of your codebase, but your past changes are still present and analyzable.
- Better support for zero-knowledge proofs would be the eventual end goal for many of these systems, allowing users to shield data and maintain their privacy. I agree that not every transaction should be public, and it's a limitation of current crypto currencies that will likely take several years to solve.
I'm grumpy about Visa/MC taking 3% of every transaction. I want a technofix for that. There are new blockchains that cost less than a penny per transaction use about a millionth of the wattage of bitcoin and I hope they turn out to be non-BS. I just want an efficient low-cost barrierless payment network.
> Moving money between bank accounts in an immutable way is extremely cheap already.
Only true in certain countries, between certain banks/processors, and within certain thresholds.
My last last transaction fee on Tezos was a fixed cost of 0.000544 xtz ($0.00177 USD), had no threshold limitations, required zero privacy invasion, settled in ~30 seconds, and was not limited to a particular bank or regional currency. This is essentially the 'technofix' that crypto users want to see adopted by the rest of the financial sector.
Where are you located that visa and MasterCard are charging 3%?
In the EU the fees are limited to 0.3%, and in other areas (e.g. the UK) it's 1%. As a card holder I'm pretty happy to pay a ~0.3% service fee to know that I have recourse with a merchant, for example.
> I just want an efficient low-cost barrierless payment network.
There, banks and credit card companies offer huge perks and cash-back to card holders. That money must come from somewhere, and that's from the transaction fees paid by merchants (and transitively customers, as merchants still need to make a profit). AMEX has even higher transaction fees, which is why some businesses don't accept it.
The situation is now at an idiotic local maximum: if I don't use one of these cashbacks cards, I am losing money paying for my neighbor's air miles, as I don't get a discount anyway. You don't need a "technofix" for that, you need regulations that cap interchange fees like the EU.
I don't know who ValuePenguin are, but those rates are definitely misleading. The interchange setup in the US is nuts, but only the highest tier of rewards cards are 3%, when used to purchase travel (see mastercard [0]). The vast majority are 1-1.5% ish. I will admit that this is higher than I expected, but MasterCardaren't taking a 3% cut of every card transaction.
> AMEX has even higher transaction fees, which is why some businesses don't accept it.
Given the opacity of the fees (or "discounts") as amex calls them, I don't know how to believe this. Lots of retailers in the EU don't accept them, yet amex are bound by the same interchange limits as Visa and Mastercard. How much of this is actually true and how much is "well it was true 30 years ago and I've not questioned it"
> You don't need a "technofix" for that, you need regulations that cap interchange fees like the EU.
Agreed. And using crypto to limit network fees is a terrible idea. I just had a quick look and the current gas fee for ethereum is $20!
Note that the 0.3% cap is on the interchange, i.e. the fee that goes back to the card issuer, it doesn't affect Visa and Mastercard directly.
PSPs in the EU/EEA charge around 1% overall, a bit more to small businesses (for instance SumUp), and a bit less to the really big retailers that have more bargaining power.
In the most abstract sense, with a blockchain you’re paying for the _consensus_, not the _computation_ to handle transactions - and there are projects (such as Starkware) aimed at taking that to its logical conclusion, using computation proofs to reduce the cost of transactions by orders of magnitude.
The whole article seems like a cop-out. You could write it about any group or movement, good or bad: identify some legitimate grievances and then frame the group as just trying to solve those grievances. Hand wave away any disagreement by saying "well, I'm not saying they have a good solution..."
In this case it's set up as "they're asking the right questions". But everyone's "asking the right questions" as long as you don't look too deeply into whether they're actually asking those questions or not, or whether their proposals could even hypothetically answer those questions, or what other actions they take aside from answering those questions.
Any Internet conversation is going to have some toxic people just due to low barriers to entry. When you see someone who thinks “that maybe a lucky crypto buy could help them dig out of crushing debt”, you shouldn’t be mean to them, but it’s very important to let them know that it’s a bad idea! I remember going on a few snarky rants back during the Safemoon pump, and I probably should have moderated my tone a bit, but it was just incredibly frustrating to see people close to me sinking substantial sums of money into an obvious, obvious scam.
I don't think everyone who engages in crypto is evil. Some are, to be sure (as some are in any human endeavor), but for the most part I think they're just credulous. I think that's a belief shared by a lot of anti-crypto people, which makes me wonder if the toxicity stems more from exasperation with evangelism of a thing people find ridiculous. Like, yes, we know about crypto and we think it's silly; please go away—that sort of thing.
>Or the policymakers and governmental agencies who have failed to uphold their duty in regulating crypto and enforcing existing regulation that would protect people from rampant fraud.
This is completely tone deaf. Crypto exists because markets are too regulated. Look at PayPal's fees and understand that they exist due to regulatory compliance.
Want to pay users fractions of a cent for killing monsters in a game? Not possible with PayPal. The regulatory overhead is too high for microtransactions.
If you want to participate in heavily regulated markets because you feel that is the safe or morally correct way to transact, then stick with the existing infrastructure. Why prohibit others and force your views upon them?
I expect the paternalist response to go along the lines of, "Well, the plebs are being taken advantage of. They aren't as smart as us. We need to step in and protect them from spending their money incorrectly"
Meanwhile, those magical regulators the author loves so well have centrally planned interest rates. Savings accounts have negative real interest rates. "Stimulus" is repeatedly injected into the economy by the wise, all knowing regulators. Don't blame the regulators though, demand more regulation instead?
> Look at PayPal's fees and understand that they exist due to regulatory compliance.
Look I’d be thrilled to be rid of paypal but until eBay let’s you accept payouts to a Bitcoin wallet, I’m stuck with the banks and companies built on their platforms.
Oh whoops eBay doesn’t even let you receive payouts through PayPal anymore it has to be done through an ACH transaction.
> hostile against people who have become involved with crypto because they felt they had no other option
I've been a victim of this. People in crypto hate you for trying to do things the right way (connecting crypto to real economic value instead of engaging in tribal maximalism and hypemongering popular projects) and people outside of crypto hate you for being involved in crypto which they think is all scams.
The irony is that only the scammers on both sides win.
It's hard for me to be sympathtic to cryptocoin maximalists when there are so many in their camp that push "shit" coins and coin-drop scams. Then there's power usage. It's use in aiding fraud and crime (something cash does as well and money laundering with fiat is not new...) as well as it's inability to scale compared to existing solutions to be used as a clearing house (yes, there are other blockchains that seek to speed this up but it's not at parity from what I can tell).
So all of this allows me to not feel bad about reveling in the latest crash, or scam, or exchange hack, or when the price falls or what not because I have no skin in this game and can't care any less than I do. I think the whole thing is a speculative farce that has hit a critical mass of adoption and intertia (at least for bitcoin) that will continue to be a puzzle (at best and a scam at worse) for years to come.
But that’s just an argument against any technology that will increase electricity demand, such as EVs.
When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised:
“The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.”
No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies.
You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of people.
Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.
Crypto avocates likes to say they _could_ do it with imaginary wealth, but that are very far from being able to afford it; if they could, it would break their business model. In the mean time, they are settled in the countries with the worst carbon footprint possible. They tried to hide it but you can’t really hide that amount of waste. They have distrupted the energy market of China, Kazakstan so much that thousands of people died in energy shortages. For now, all we have from those people is mountains of unrecycled electronic waste.
> Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.
This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.
Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time.
The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.
Every 10 minutes, a new coin is minted. That coin is given to the person who solved the correct hash. The chances of being the correct hash is 1/n where n is the number of miners active.
So if I fire up a miner and I'm the only one, I get a coin every 10 minutes. Life is good. Now, if you want bitcoins as well, you can fire up your own miner. Now we'll both get a coin every 20 minutes. But I was making 6 coins an hour, now I'm making 3. My production is halved. That sucks. But. I can spin up another miner. Now I have 2 to your 1. I get a coin roughly every 15 minutes, you get a coin roughly every 30.
You see where this is going, right? More miners, more coins. And the only way to get value out of these coins is to sell each coin for more than electricity used for all of your miners.
So you're incentivized to not only use every available unit of electricity to mine, you are also incentivized to sell at exorbitant prices. Bitcoin will not switch us over to renewables. It will also use renewables if and when they become available. Bitcoin has also caused long dormant fossil fuel generators to come online again.
> This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.
No: both types of organisation are looking at areas with cheap electricity and free cooling, but large internet companies are looking at area with stable polical regime and low carbon footprint. Bitcoin miners _could_ value that; they certainly loudly claim that they do. In reality, they don’t. They set-up shops in countries with cheap coal like China and Kazakstan. It sounds like areas known for their corrupt officials and no rules around dumping electronic waste have some appeal.
They don’t go where electricity is carbon neutral. You know how I know that? Because I live near a lot of hydro power, Arctic cold, where all the big players have their European data centers——and there’s no crypto operation here.
Bitcoin advocates are delusional and loves confusing their claims (like they could operate a trust-less financial network) with reality. But reality is still easy to see: crypto a collection of wasteful, polluting, short-term scams.
It's not that easy. Renewable power plants could be setup in areas where it makes no sense due to the logistics of transporting that energy to normal society and that plant could be 100% used to mine crypto which in a way makes crypto a "wireless energy transport technology".
Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.
I strongly disagree with the points that you make. There are many ways to implement fair financial systems. Crypto activists chose to ignore them, refused to understand the sources of failures and just attact principles.
Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.
What's offensive about it? Today energy generation of any kind has to have a way to transport that energy to a consumer. Bitcoin is in a privileged position of being able to use energy to create value locally to the energy producer. You might argue a datacenter could do the same thing but a datacenter requires a lot of staff and infrastructure while a mining operation doesn't. There's also the problem of a high speed high bandwidth internet connection.
So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet.
How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument.
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> There are many ways to implement fair financial systems
Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways
But that's not what anyone's doing, or what anyone's going to do, with cryptocurrency.
Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already being produced and going to be deployed by someone does not reduce the overall carbon load of the planet)...
That requires the miners to sink all their profits into buying solar panels, rather than, y'know, making money for themselves, which is the reason they're mining cryptocurrency in the first place.
I never stated that miners are doing this, only that crypto mining could enable this new opportunity that never existed before it.
I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.
"Cryptocurrency miners could, in theory, buy massive amounts of solar panels with the money they make by mining" is not in any meaningful way a refutation of the criticism that cryptocurrency actually, right now, in the real world, uses an absurd amount of energy and contributes significantly to the greenhouse gases warming our planet.
By that logic, anything that makes money makes energy. Because money is fungible. I could use money from any source to buy solar panels and use them to create energy.
I could use money I earned from selling power generated by a coal plant to buy solar panels. That doesn't make the coal plant produce twice the energy.
Environmental impact is only an issue if the energy source is dirty (which is becoming less of an issue as cost for renewables goes down and green energy mix in the grid increases) and or if you see no value in it. I agree with the former but at the same time I think the issue is not crypto in specific but ANYTHING whose energy source is dirty. The latter is obvi subjective and at the end of the day irrelevant as, like it or not, there are plenty of people that see value in it (2 trillion total market cap in cryptos right now).
Well of course there is plenty of speculative investment going on in this field (also not unique to cryptos, just look at what's has been going on with tech stocks and the Nasdaq), there is no doubt about that. But at the same time all adoption metrics have been increasing like crazy. Two things can be true at once here. There are plenty of people gambling (no bueno) and there is also plenty of other people using the tech/network/etc with other intentions as well. You have governments (at regional and country level) adopting the tech (like it or not), you have people in South America using it inflation hedging (yes it works for this when you country's currency devalues like crazy on a weekly basis) and for remittances, etc. The speculation part fuels the volatility, but it is also obvious that it has proven to withstand many bubbles while at the same time increasing its reach an adoption as this (like it or not) fills a need. A need for an alternative that while not the most efficient, is inclusive, fair, and open by design.
There are new blockchains based on technology a million times more efficient than Bitcoin. Ethereum is trying to upgrade. Bitcoin is terrible, but this is fixable by using things other than bitcoin.
That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwakiutl.
You’re comparing database to a trust-less distributed fault tolerant system. Of course the db has a smaller energy footprint but it doesn’t provide the same features. It’s like saying a bicycle rolls down the road just as well as a car so we should not use the car.
There are blockchains now that are designed to be optimal for what they provide.
The bigger issue is that there are applications running on chains that clearly don’t need the features of the chain.
I’m saying that for 95% of journeys currently done with cars, bicycles would be perfectly fine. I mean that both litterally and figuratively. More importantly, both for transport and for digital services, if we don’t switch to bicyles, there won’t be a planet to run those services for.
You are advocating for the end of the world as we know it within ten years.
I wouldn’t say the energy use of non-proof of work chains is millions of times worse than existing traditional finance and web2 solutions. Probably comparable. There is much energy wasted in the products themselves and knock-on effects. Machine learning for ads and analytics, for example. Banks using thousands of warm bodies to push around excel spreadsheets.
Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
> I wouldn’t say the energy use of non-proof of work chains is millions of times worse than existing traditional finance and web2 solutions. Probably comparable.
Then you would not know what you are talking about.
> Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
No, they have dozens of data centers, on every continent, and all of them are in areas with cheap, carbon-neutral supply. You think that you are being smart by being dismissive about their effort, and the effort of dozens of companies who host their own infrastructure, but that condescension and lack of expertise is just one more example of why Crypto advocates are so unconvincing.
More centralization (AFAIR you need 32 ETH to get started, so ~$100000, not to mention possible issues where you loose full 32 ETH) vs a single GPU with only lose is your electricity cost.
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It accelerates our transition to renewable energies. Bitcoin makes renewable energy sources more profitable because it offers a base price for excess electricity. Any time, any place.
And Bitcoin incentivises having a low time preference. This leads to a much more sustainable consumer behaviour. Bitcoin helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
Maybe 90% by count, but not 90% by volume of transactions, prominence, etc. Bitcoin seems to be entirely resistant to moving away from PoW and Ethereum have been in the process of moving to PoS for years.
Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?
Yes, 90% by number transactions. Binance chain, Solana, Luna, AVAX, ADA, DOT are doing around 15 million transactions a day altogether while Bitcoin and Ethereum are only doing 1.5 million altogether.
> But when you come across someone on Twitter with a hexagon-shaped profile picture, your chances are at least as good that you’ve come across someone in the first bucket than in the second
Ah so this is about twitter culture. I agree, it is strange that people showing some outward interest in crypto are ignored.
These conversations basically go like this
<user with nft monkey avatar>: thats not accurate, the flash loan was used to borrow and acquire a bunch of the governance token and then launch and pass an emergency governance proposal and the primary issue is that the protocol allowed for this to occur in a single block, not the flash loan
<user with predisposition that requires crypto to be bad>: you have an NFT profile picture your opinion is invalid! I just screenshot it!
so the technical person that could improve understanding is surrounded by perpetual ignorance
I'll have to side with <user with predisposition that requires crypto to be bad> for the same reason I wouldn't give a Scientologist a chance to speak either.
I would argue I have a less ignorant view of Scientology or cryptocurrency than someone who is indoctrinated. There isn't going to be any useful information to glean from an active cult member expressing their views on their cult. Who is really ignorant?
My example was about the accuracy of a statement, it seems the conversation should more often be about accuracy instead of deflection. Or if the accuracy was undermined by indoctrination then the conversation should be about why its not accurate and why that would be clouded by indoctrination.
And even in your Scientology analogy, I think there are limited similarities because you are talking about scientology often to scientologists? Do you get into those kind of conversations? If you're not getting into those kind of conversations than thats just an ad hominem attack which is a very poor form of argument and also meets one of the Oxford definitions of ignorant ( informal - discourteous or rude; west indies - angry or quick-tempered.) These are traits to avoid, pejoratives.
The other night I watched the Crypto Startup School video series by a16z on YouTube [0]. It includes presentations from smart people saying that blockchain/ethereum is the computing platform of the future.
One issue with ETH/smart-contracts that is not addressed in the series is how to ship patches to a smart contract. Let’s say there’s a vulnerability in my contract that accidentally leaks ETH.
How do I ship a patch to fix the contract? Could my buggy contract be taken advantage of indefinitely? Maybe I could move all my ETH to a new wallet and leave the bad contract? How is this problem handled today?
Some interesting observations muddled by poor articulation. I hope this trend of describing everything as "toxic" (when other more specific words exist) will go away.
For example, the author could use the word "evangelism" rather than "toxicity" and drill down much deeper to the core mechanism of what's going on. Are individuals being toxic within a community? Absolutely. But are they being accepted because "the ends justify the means" for the evangelists? Almost certainly.
That, I think, could be a real story being buried beneath the baited lede of "not only crypto supporters but DETRACTORS are being 'toxic'" so it's unfortunate that's never explored in more detail.
As somebody who's delved into the crypto world and attempted to provide utility in the space by building a token aggregator / scam detector [1], I'm more disillusioned than ever with the state of crypto.
"Legitimate" projects are in between a rock and a hard place - either pay outrageous sums to the shillers or have no avenue to promote your project, as Google/Twitter/Facebook won't touch your crypto ads. Instead of the decentralised utopia we were promised, we've shifted power from traditional marketing channels with a vested interest in providing some ROI to scammers with no accountability, only in it to make a dollar at whatever cost. Scammers and hustlers are the gatekeepers of new tokens - unless you're paying thousands of dollars [2], it's almost impossible to get recognised.
Most projects are scams/get-rich-quick schemes preying on people's ignorance. There are well intentioned tokens out there, but even these have very dubious links between the price of the token and the utility of the project. The buybacks, reflections, stable-coin rewards, promises of guaranteed returns b/c we reinvest into other projects quickly part the ignorant from their hard-earned. Any attempt to dig deeper and understand project economics are met with the same platitudes and flawed arguments.
Of course there's the other side of the ecosystem where smart and talented people are raising VC money and working on interesting problems. I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO) or technological innovations (blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps - I do see a whole host of problems to which smart contract based dApps are a viable solution). The end result of this isn't a financial revolution but rather a host of entrepreneurs utilising web3 technologies to build the next generation of software startups.
Crypto has solved one problem and that is removing consumer protections - which was really not a problem that needed to be solved. Accept crypto directly - chargebacks are a thing of the past. Once that payment is made, it can't be taken back. This changes dynamics a bit - a company can do less checks for fraud (say an isp/cloud provider can accept more abusive things with out penalty) with out the fear of getting a chargeback fee, loosing that money or getting a merchant/payment processor closed for too many chargebacks or even fraud. Sure the market might be able to solve that with bad reviews but this simply shifts the burden to the holder of crypto.
The article goes to some length to talk about what questions the crypto community is asking itself. Very conspicuously, there is no discussion of sustainability, operational effectiveness, or how to ensure people born in 2022 can get into this system when bitcoin is already 40k a pop. Like any system, how do new entrants get a foothold? Why are questions of energy use and lag time on each transaction left for only the reader to ponder?
like others have said, crypto doesn't meaningfully solve much of anything. we need more anti-crypto sentiments, not less.
the really exciting, yet unexplored, leverage point that a new ecology of mutual credit currencies will likely have is in their use in what pioneers have dubbed Network Resource Planning (NRP) software. the DWeb project http://mikorizal.org is working on this. essentially it entails the open mapping of supply chains using DWeb p2p app frameworks (self-describing protocols, instead of centralized third party Silicon Valley-made platforms), using new (e.g. collaborative, automated) forms of resource accounting already employed by ERP systems behind closed doors (undemocratic stewardship of resources as done today is the real reason we are overusing resources). if anyone can see what i mean i'd love to hear you explain in your own words what you see and what you think of the impact it could have.
No amount of crypto scams outweighs the good crypto has and will done for us. Technology is empowering, there is no comparison on the effect crypto has on the poor. There is no other way I would be ever able to participate in trading, speculation or investment, no other way I'd ever be able to afford a home.
"Hey, guys, the people are promising all the socially friendly things. Why are you so toxic at us for participating in an illegal subsidy gambling system which is massively polluting the planet? You're bullies."
Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to.
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
Largely crypto seems to fail at being distributed internet money. If a project is fast and cheap enough for it that correlates with being too niche to be viable.
We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
Bitcoin being a crypto asset (I know everyone will want to dig in on that moved goal post, but it doesn't matter) is still extremely valuable and a massive step towards its intended goal. As a settlement layer, which is by now clearly what it should be, it is very good, and layer-2 and centralized layer-3 solutions if and when adopted will bring it the rest of the way.
There is so much meta talk about crypto on the internet, but no one has the chops to actually talk about the ups and downs, challenges and successes of something like the lightning network, which is perhaps one of the most important developments in the space despite not being a speculative vehicle.
> Largely crypto seems to fail at being distributed internet money. If a project is fast and cheap enough for it that correlates with being too niche to be viable.
So is that why other 'crypto' like XRP, Stellar, USDC and Algorand are also compliant for the ISO 20022 standard since they are useful at being 'distributed internet money'? [0]
> We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.
Both of them have completely failed in their original purposes.
Then you did not look (closely) enough at BTC. When transaction prices went up in 2017 [1] the second layer technology "Lightning" was invented and build-out.
Right now, Joe Average, can transact for fractions of pennies. [2]
Haven't you realised that 'the second layer technology "Lightning"' aka Lightning Network is not Bitcoin and is an off-chain system and is centralised by design which contradicts and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was built for? [0]
The Lightning Network is decentralised because it is trustless and permissionless. Anyone can send Bitcoins instantly and almost for free. Check out the code to convince yourself.
"Can" is doing a lot of work here. I finally got around to playing with Lightning recently, my sense was it's quite a ways away from being ready unless you've got a decent amount of frequent income + spending going through btc. The worst part is it seems poisoned by nodes that want to extract a %-amount fee rather than a flat or bytes-dependent fee. It was actually one US penny more expensive to send a ~$50 lightning transaction via ACINQ (a recommended node that would actually accept opening up a channel) than just sending a normal blockchain transaction, where recently you can pay the minimum 1 sat/byte and get confirmed in not too long.
Lightning has promise but the regular chain is still just fine for many use cases especially for normal people, barring those rare periods of exceptionally high transaction fees. A transaction will typically show up in the mempool "instantly" and for many vendors that's good enough; much like the classic written checks system they can trust the purchaser isn't going to try any funny business before the transaction is fully confirmed/settled and you can let them go on their way with their groceries or coffee or whatever. If they do try something (successfully), well, you're out a small amount (maybe, an intermediary like bitpay may tank those for you), and you ban them from your business. For many other types of transactions, even waiting for at least one transaction but not expecting that for 24 hours from now is fine and impacts nothing. My hope is the effective minimum of 1 sat/byte will be decreased because right now it's 9 cents to send the median sized 224 byte transaction and if btc doubles again to $80k USD then the minimum fee doubles to 18 cents without anything changing, that's like an extra pack of ramen. Well it's still not that bad, especially since it's not amount-dependent; my whole state recently mandated grocery stores start charging 8 cents per plastic bag when they used to be free, many people are just personally tanking it and still throwing them out, but everyone would rather pay no fees if they could.
Unfortunately at the the surface, it’s all cranks. The people you see trending on Twitter and such almost seem like an alien species. And then there’s all the advertising for exchanges and such being blatant “get in at the bottom of the pyramid scheme” nonsense.
I was also “into” crypto roughly early, never found a community (nor should I have to), that’s all I see, and that’s all I therefore assume exists.
I had a fantastic experience at DevCon V. Ethereum developer conferences attract all the technical folks and almost none of "money" people.
I haven't gone to any Bitcoin conference, but I can't see it being the same. Bitcoin's aversion to change means mostly demagogues are left, and all the talk is money talk.
Bitcoin isn't averse to change, it's averse to changes that impede on its core attributes: decentalized, permissionless, global, censorship-resistance. Increasing the block size as a patch to keep fees down infringes on the core attributes, because you increase the minimum requirements for running a node.
There's a lot of innovation happening in and on Bitcoin. RSK for smart contracts, BetterHash for mining pool decentralization, the Lightning Network or Liquid Network as examples of layered scaling.
Bitcoin's dev meetups are great examples of the helpful, thoughtful, enterprising and conscientious community that exists, without the overly loud, overly shallow speculators.
> Bitcoin's aversion to change means mostly demagogues are left, and all the talk is money talk.
That's true, but you say it as if that's a bad thing. Bitcoin is valuable because it does not change, its proven to work, and people know that. If the downside is that there isn't as much to talk about at a conference, then I don't give a shit.
You’re right that Bitcoin is still the most valuable because it’s resistant to frivolous changes, however there’s far more development happening in the space today than ever before!
Here’s links to 3 full days of talks from the Open Source Stage at the Bitcoin 2022 conference:
> The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there
It is important to note that crypto currencies are distributed blockchains, a subset of blockchain methods. Blockchains for tamper detection purposes have been around for longer than bitcoin and its ilk, IIRC they date back to the mid 80s or before.
I love Git. It is a distributed cryptographic chain technology. Git is open source and free and used by many millions of people every day. You would think that proponents of decentralized cryptographic chain technology would talk about Git a lot.
But the crypto people don't talk about Git. They are focused on being early adopters and investors in something that will generate 1000x returns, even if those returns come from a pyramid scheme mechanism.
I saw this happen with the early internet, and then later with crypto... It took a long time for the Internet to go from 1) only know to geeks to 2) grifters promising the world to 3) wider acceptance. Maybe this will happen too with crypto, but until it sorts out its grifter problem, it will be always be stuck at stage 2.
The amount of time the internet took to show it is a solution to real problems, as well as the time it took for the internet to 'grow up' beyond the grifter stage (which was about the same time, and probably that is not a coincidence) is far shorter. Already - and bitcoin/crypto shows no sign of growing beyond the grifter phase. What, something like 1/3 of everybody who bought Bieber's NFT thing got it grifted? That's insane.
No, people distinctly remember that when the first wave of hype about the web came along, the public was being encouraged to buy books on Amazon.com, other stuff on eBay.com browse masses of content on Yahoo and AOL and of course post lots of messages on the social media of the day. Most of this interaction was free to the user not an "investment", and it was recognisable as a slower and lower resolution version of most of what we had today by the middle of the first decade of the Web.
The Internet existed before then in various forms, but never as an industry of rich people trying to convince poorer people to invest all their savings in email.
You're getting downvoted for that, but you aren't wrong.
There aren't fewer grifters on the internet. There are just more regular people. And also more grifters, but they can hide in the rest of the noise.
It's going to be the same with cryptocurrency if it sticks around. There will always be people trying to trick less-wise people into giving up their money for nothing.
It's not about the tech. IMO a payment should just work. You don't need to understand the technology. It's foolish to expect people to know the tech in and out, it is irrelevant for 90% of people.
There's no need to have cool applications of blockchains, there's only need for decentralisation.
> mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias
The whole movement came out of monetary crank-ism, those people were always there.
Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.
I assume by "Monetary crank-ism" you mean scepticism of the dominant economic playbooks. That is very different from investment bubbles which the parent is talking about.
You can call it crank-ism if you want, but the movement behind Bitcoin's properties were born out of very real concerns about current economic models and what their effects are.
The origin is the cypherpunk movement and coders looking into ways to exchange money peer-to-peer. If you think that's "crank-ism" I'm not sure I want to know what social and monetary policies you support. Certainly Bitcoin gained initial popularity fast because it enabled the people to take back some control.
> Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.
Bitcoin continues to inflate until ~2140. The difference is that it inflates in a predictable curve and is not subject to the decisions of central bankers.
Inflationary policies also have a very tight link with speculation in the economy. You only need to look at the past 2 years.
Bitcoin supply does grow until 2140. It will inflate only if the backing economy and users does not grow until then. If this growth outpaces the supply of bitcoins, it deflates. And just every economist (and every piece of empirical data we have) will tell you deflation is about the worst thing that can happen to an economy, in terms of monetary events.
> it's going to be used as a speculation vehicle rather than money.
I see this claim time and time again, but it's hardly convincing. Deflationary assets don't exist in a vacuum, they compete with inflationary assets that create value over time (such as stocks), and it's not a binary decision as to which one is going to be the best investment/use of your money. Additionally, the value of pretty much anything (whether deflationary or inflationary) is hardly a factor of their availability in the future but rather their actual or perceived utility at a precise moment in time.
>Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism.
While using the per-design resource destroying, planet burning Proof-Of-Waste? Are you Kidding?
And no, deflation does not encourage more long term investments, it does simply encourage hoarding, not exactly a desirable thing, form any perspective. And of course it is the fatal (and likely never fixed) flaw in bitcoin-as-a-currency.
I find the GP's comment tenuous but I also find the environment-damaging rhetoric you and a sibling (and thousands of others) give on proof of work even more so. If you want to bite the bullet and say people shouldn't be able to pay for energy and do with it what they want, fine, but otherwise, price out the actual energy costs, and realize the purpose of such costs: security. Bank of America alone spends $1bn/yr on cybersecurity, bitcoin mining costs the world about ten times that. It's not that unreasonable. Another comparison is it's about 1/8th the US spending on cigarettes.
> Bitcoin being deflationary helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
No, it does not. How could it? It does nothing but encourage hoarding. Not only that, but also a economy where everything is more scare tomorrow than today, is a economy in perpetual decline.
>You can use the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as a currency. It's almost instant and free.
That does not side step the proof-of-waste on the main chain. This is a completely unrelated debate.
No it doesn't. And you are moving goalposts. But still, it's a obvious and transparent lie. It wastes electricity that could have been put to good use, like power2(gas|ammonia|syngas|heat|cooling) or just normal, dispatchable consumption in a Wide area synchronous grid, a thing that exists pretty much everywhere where electricity generation is a thing.
And bitcoin does not use electricity, it just flat out wastes it. And that's not because bitcoin in itself is useless (it is), but due to the design of the Proof-of-Waste. Electricity use implies that electricity is converted into something. Every iPhone uses X Wh. If you dail up the usage, the output increases. It's not perfectly linear, but that's a reasonable approximation. Bitcoin is different: More electricity will never produce a better service, more bitcoins or whatever. Bitcoin will not ever get better by using more. And yet it is designed to waste a amount of electricity proportional to it's price. Oh, and it is only profitable to mine if you use a below-average electricity price. E.g. use the laxes regulations, the most polluting or the most illegal sources of electricity.
Unless this is sarcasm, do you wanna talk about the environmental ramifications of so much work being duplicated and dumped in the bitcoin network? Like, the sheer number of machines and waste heat that comes from nodes who weren't quite fast enough to get the payout, and just had to put all those calculations into /dev/null?
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It makes renewables more profitable because it offers a base price for excess energy. Any place, 24/7.
I think some inflation is good as it is an incentive to invest in capital projects. If you only have deflation, why shouldn't you hoard your wealth? I mean, since it's always going to be worth more tomorrow than today. Inflation is a shadow that people use to excuse their greed
It seems you assume investment is generally good. As you can see right now people invest in anything just to save their cash from rising inflation, but the investments often aren't sensible to put it mildly. Valuations of many companies based on realistic forward P/E ranges are outright silly. Nor is investing necessarily beneficial for society in general. In fact many of these corporations are outright destructive, but capital gets allocated to where it can multiply the best, not where it might have a positive influence on society.
It's the fiscal policy of many countries that's massively driven up asset prices including cryptocurrencies. Those who didn't invest saw their savings printed away.
Inflation (of IOUs) is good for those holding the actual wealth (resources, land, farms, factories, real estate, etc - often through public shares). It's good for those who have debt denominated in inflationary currency. It's definitely good for some people and their business. What many people simply don't understand is they're not part of that group.
This is something I’ve thought about and while I agree that a deflationary currency would be detrimental to our constant economic growth, I wonder if that’s actually a bad thing.
Do we really want constant growth and pointless consumerism knowing what it is doing to our environment? Maybe a deflationary currency would be good, as people wouldn’t want to spend it on frivolous things and only use it to buy things they really need.
I don’t really know where I stand, but I have come to doubt my initial concerns over deflationary money and I wonder what others think about such a radical shift.
While this is the most thoughtful comment, it seems like without the effective equivalent of population caps, price controls, and a large redistribution network, a deflationary system would involve people fighting over progressively smaller pieces of the pie, while those who have more than enough continue to take a smaller amount of their resources over time until the effective expenditures of the wealthy are effectively zero. This also would effectively bar new entrants to the system, so children, those with little access to tech and energy resources, and those in developing counties.
> Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for.
If having a solid understanding of the tech underlying crypto is a prereq of any sort, it will never reach mass adoption. Personally idgaf what fiat we choose or tech underlying my debit transactions, so long as the value is reasonably stable, my account reasonably secure, and my form of payment is accepted by almost all merchants.
Unfortunately, the world tends to dish out black swan events that invalidate your assumptions of what is reasonable. Canadian truckers, Argentinian hyperinflation, Sri Lankan federal deficits, Turkish central banking mismanagement, Russian expansionist delusions... the list goes on and on.
Sure, the dollar is reasonably stable. The problem is that the global financial system is deeply flawed in its fundamental properties. Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation, financial meltdowns, geo-spatial catastrophy, and more.
This doesn't make sense. The vast majority of people aren't interested in the slightest about the technology. Nobody needs or wants to know the intricacies of SEPA payments, I just want to touch the terminal with my watch and boom, payment completed.
I actually do still use it to pay for a SAAS side project from a retired startup founder who got kicked off paypal. It's super convenient for digital stuff like that.
When do you think that happened? For me it was around 2012. Thats when I exited crypto and never looked back.
I actually built an app before that which would easily transfer money between countries, by finding matching local trades. Unfortunately to turn it into a service, it requires the currency to both be popular and stable.
If I replace crypto with "web", your comment still feels the same, yet the WWW is more popular than ever. Maybe look under the rug a bit deeper, but at the same time I'm not saying that the abuses aren't there.
> The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
Check out DeFI on Ethereum and your hope will resurrect. aave.com, pooltogether.com, goodghosting.com, polymarket.com, ens.domains, gitcoin. https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
The key thing is, of course people are getting vocal - and vocally annoyed! - at crypto-bros, given what cryptocoins have brought upon us over the last years:
- a shortage of all components used in building PCs, starting with CPUs, then GPUs, then RAM, then HDDs, and back to GPUs. Simply because scalpers and shitcoin miners could outbid everyone else.
- People getting hacked left and right (particularly blue-checkmark accounts) on Twitter, Youtube or Facebook to rename them to Elon Musk and promise crypto airdrops
- the amount of corruption that has been necessary to enable said hacks. "SIM swapping" attacks used to be something nation states did against top-of-wanted-list criminals, not something that could be bought on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars
- the loot of said hacks ending up to fund Iranian or North Korean nuclear terrorism programs
- the amount of large scale hacks made only possible by Bitcoin and friends providing a relatively easy way to launder money, in particular ransomware
- an awful lot of "stars" peddled NFTs, ICOs and the likes and let their fans hang out to dry when the hype collapsed
- an awful corresponding lot of friends and sometimes family that got lured in by shitcoins, actually made money and now peddles shitcoins instead of crap MLM products to everyone whose ears haven't fallen off since long
- all the "rug pulls", "hacks" and other instances where serious amounts of money got stolen or vanished into thin air
- artists getting their works minted as NFTs without authorization
- people buying up coal power plants of all things to mine shitcoins
- instead of delivering the promised "there are no banks and taxes!" world, all shitcoins (obviously... as everyone predicted) ended up depending on centralized institutions like exchanges, large mining pools, auditors and the likes, especially once governments around the world caught up with developments. And to make it worse, many of these institutions end up with lesser consumer protection than banks! Hooray!
The only positive contribution that cryptocurrencies brought to the world was that people had a safe way to pay for and order illicit drugs, as taking out shady dealers and cutters reduced the amount of contaminations. Oh and maybe kick some arses at Western Union into reducing their rip-off rates for international currency transfers.
Ok... so the political and economic foundations of the crypto ecosystem are flawed. It's a movement driven by fascists and criminals posing as libertarians. It's based on the Austrian school idea of, "sound money," itself a poorly conceived idea with roots in racism and fascism. If that doesn't corrupt the entire enterprise, what are the good parts?
In the pursuit of this, crypto supporters have blasted exorbitant amounts of excess CO2 into the atmosphere for very little work done in over a decade.
And it literally doesn't do anything. It was adopted as a national currency by one country and hardly anyone who lives there seems to use it. It doesn't by-pass international sanctions. It's not free from government regulation like the criminals want.
All it seems good for is divesting money from technologically illiterate rich people who jumped on the bandwagon, advertised their crypto holdings, and have poor or non-existent opsec. It's a scammers' dream: it's way easier and far more profitable to rip these people off than to run a scam against a bank or old people.
If your goal is truly altruistic and you want to see more transparency in the financial system, access for people from all economic and diverse backgrounds, etc: get into politics, banking, or just vote. Start a non-profit think-tank and hire analysts to help inform positive policy changes.
The technology behind this stuff is pretty useless at providing financial services because those systems are social/political systems. Technology is but a small part of supporting them.
I read wun0ne point as how blockchain implementations has a disastrous environmental impact. The article doesn’t mention that at all, and openly advocate for blockchain.
Even if crypto doesn't become a problem, I hope politicians will try hard to regulate them, and add tight regulations on companies who convert crypto to dollars and vice versa.
I'm afraid crypto will become a tool to launder money, escape taxes and do all sorts of things that are illegal with normal money.
It might already be the case and be full of corrupt practices, but I can clearly see people defend it on a political premise of libertarian ideology.
By the way, I wonder if Russia is involved a lot with crypto.
It's hard to have a charitable take on a huge majority of the cryptocurrency space when the web is drowning in all of the greedy bad actors that use the ideologies listed in this article as cover to push the grifts that inevitability harm my less technical friends and family.
Well put. The same may also be said about both social media and, especially in context of less technical friends and family, even the general internet.
I am also questioning this claim and given there is zero evidence for that, I can also only conclude that it is completely unfounded and baseless.
That's is the problem with some of the crypto-critics and the crypto-maximalists as they are just as bad as each other attempting to demonize, categorize and outrage one another with such absolutist rhetoric with zero evidence.
I had trouble reading beyond that in the second sentences. You can’t just retroactively assign a political affiliation to the origin of an algorithm application.
I don't think it's retroactive at all, unless you believe that the message in the origin block "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" is coincidental.
Beyond that Bitcoin's design decisions (deflationary currency, trustless) embed a political ideal. Algorithms can very well be political, it's absurd to argue otherwise. For example taxes are, effectively, algorithmic in nature and I don't think anybody would argue that tax brackets are apolitical.
For me it is rather hard to separate the Libetarians and Anarcho people... Other one might be right and other left, but there is some weird commonality when it comes to state and control of financial system...
It's really not that hard. Libertarians, minarchists and "anarcho-capitalists" take one of the things which inherently need a state to uphold it (private property) and use it as the conceptual foundation of their social order - while not liking "the state". All other anarchists don't and hence get labeled as "left". That's the main difference, and the reason why "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical.
There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state (creating public goods, giving weaker participants of a system protection, internalising externalities via regulation etc.) but keeping the bad parts (police and military with their massive potential for rent seeking and state capturing of money pots, not to speak about violence and abuse).
Hi, minarchist here. You are almost right in the distinction between right and left anarchism being about private property. But it's a little more profound. The main difference radicates in the conception of legitimate power. For a right anarchist, power is illegitimate only when it's carried out through violence. Meanwhile, for a left anarchist almost any power hierarchy is illegitimate in itself. To the extent that private property could give rise to power hierarchies, a left anarchist will reject it. But it's only a particular case derived from the core belief.
> "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical
Well, anarcho-capitalists believe that there are ways to provide property rights outside the state. As a minarchist, I'm skeptical about it, but if you believe it there's no paradox.
On the other hand, I do find deeply paradoxical the left anarchist stance on rejecting capitalism but also (AFAIK) reject any means to stop its emergence in society.
> There is also another conversation to be had about minarchist/libertarian ideas basically wanting to remove all the good bits of the state [...] but keeping the bad parts
As a minarchist, I strive for reducing the weight of the state as much as humanly possible. Justice, defense, and a minimal social security net are the only services I can't think how to provide without the state. If you think these are the bad parts I'd love to hear a viable alternative, maybe you can make me fully anarcho-capitalist ;).
I agree with you on the more nuanced distinction, I just didn't want to open the discussion of what legitimate power structures constitue.
Re your criticism of left-anarchism, one of the big unsolved challenges in my eye is exactly your point: how do you keep per from pooling? In a sense, you also need a "state" but one which has as it's explicit goal the self dissolution - which is of course the same paradox that ancaps face. The difference to me is that it seems to me more feasible to build societal systems and cultures that disperse power if we build our ideology around consent and cooperation than to build a society where the central building block is the by-necessity cooperation of small dictators who somehow are supposed to also respect their weaker neighbors private property rights. The former seems like positive feedback loops are possible (and we see spontaneous cooperation like this emerge throughout history, without any powerful person pushing it) while the latter...was the robber barons and cleptocrats of the 19th,20th and 21st century
Re your question, I don't like to quibble to much about this if it doesn't have a possible payoff, but do you believe in e.g. environmental regulations, provision of public goods via a regulated healthcare system, basic education etc? If yes then I think your position might be rare amongst self identified minarchists. If not, then do you see how e.g. natural monopolies like healthcare or highly influential realms like healthcare are open to power concentration and state hijacking?
> Libertarians, minarchists and "anarcho-capitalists" take one of the things which inherently need a state to uphold it (private property) and use it as the conceptual foundation of their social order - while not liking "the state".
Very well said. As someone who was a "libertarian" in my high school days, I ultimately abandoned the philosophy after realizing that it was at its root far more about "property" than "liberty" and ought to have been termed "propertarianism". Furthermore, none of it's logico-moral justifications for property rights actually worked for the most fundamental forms of property (land and unproduced natural resources).
Left anarchists are mostly pretty down on the concept of money full stop. Magic cypherpunk money is no different to state-backed fiat money in that respect.
And on my desk as I type, a slim volume entitled "The politics of bitcoin : Software as right-wing extremism". To be fair, it seems to be more about some bitcoiners rather than bitcoin itself.
I suspect but cannot prove that we could argue any political leanings we like.
I don't know about what satoshi thought. I do however know that most of the folks talking about it in the spaces I was in were libertarian (in an american sense).
They were all about gold standards and hard money and auditing the fed as well.
Just here to say that besides the good points that the author makes in defense of Crypto, I also support wholeheartedly its right-libertarian roots, despite the negative connotation it receives in the article.
I think that the widespread implementation of crypto would immediately make the world more complex and thus less susceptible to centralizing forces. This means that in order to get things done, society will have to rely more on self-organizing small groups of individuals.
In my view, less centralization is the at the bottom what libertarianism strives for, so it makes sense crypto is seeing as supporting it.
Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour in the crypto community. Even if you're curious about hearing how the latest project is justifying itself, you can't have a conversation about it because the entire conversation is dominated by memes and spam about other scam projects. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to say "No, actually this whole thing is just bad, and shouldn't be treated seriously". There's only so many times that you can humor the same lie. Web3, NFTs, DAOs, Altcoins, Smart Contracts, Stable coins. It's just the same grift repeated every 6 months. For every claim of how this tech could help someone there are thousands of people who have been harmed by scams using this tech.