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serious question, why do you hate crypto (bitcoin, ethereum, etc..) so much? I see your username in a lot of places, from hacker news to wikipedia, always doing

serious question, why do you hate crypto (bitcoin, ethereum, etc..) so much? I see your username in a lot of places, from hacker news to wikipedia, always doing your best to criticize or stop these sort of technologies. I don't understand this obsession. I don't like say... angular.. but I don't go around trying to sabotage or bad mouth the project as I prefer to spend time on more productive things.

wslh 10y ago
Yes, it seems David chose specific community member characteristics to criticize the cryptocurrency/blockchain technology. So why not make a book about the community instead of the technology? If he is not clear about this, he is just following a classical fallacy.
dpc_pw 10y ago
I'm a Bitcoin enthusiast, yet the whole crypto-ecosystem is ridden with crooks and frauds trying to make money of suckers. Altcoins that are obvious scams, services that have "accidental" bugs and loose your money, services that get "hacked", and so on. As a rule of thumb everything in cryptofin should be considered a scam before proven otherwise. It's quite rare for angular-like libraries to try to steal money of their users.
tps5 10y ago
Instead of calling him out over his "obsession," please try to respond to his argument. Is he wrong? Is he making incorrect assertions? I am genuinely curious. I don't know a lot about cryptography, blockchains, bitcoins, etc. I try to take everything with a grain of salt, but seeing two knowledgeable people civilly discussing the merits of these things would be interesting. Calling someone out for "being obsessed" isn't. To use your angular analogy, if someone went around criticizing angular everywhere, I'd like to see a discussion between that person and a pro-angular guy. Because I guarantee there are smart people and good points to be made on both sides of that argument.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  Well I'm sure someone has engaged him before so I don't think I would be particulary productive. Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses, regarless it's also very easy to criticize something and far more interesting to find solutions, you can critize the current decentralization tech much like you could easily criticize and dimiss this internet thing in 1984. I was just genuinely curious about his motivations. My example with angular is that even though I really don't like it, I wouldnt want to waste time criticizing it or stopping people who want to advance it.
  - tps5 10y ago
    >Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses Such as?
    - heliumcraft 10y ago
      for e.g the article claiming "100 bugs per 1000" takes a crapy contract and considers refactors as bugs, critizes well known things to take into account, and generally exagerates. Another example, is the infamous 'solar exploit' article (since then slightly modified due to criticism), which is written by someone with a financial interest against ethereum (due to owning a startup with a competing product) essentially makes a claim equivalent to saying the internet is broken because you can do this in nodejs http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg
desireco42 10y ago
I don't think 'not liking angular' is such a rare trait, it is more of a common view
cashmonkey85 10y ago
It's an amazing technology and I believe it's only going to get better. But let's be honest here. Ethereum is a scam and so are 90% of the projects of there.
noio 10y ago
I'm reading the article he linked and others on the site. It's super interesting stuff and he does paint a convincing picture.
pjc50 10y ago
Cryptocurrency advocates have, in the past, aggressively promoted the currencies with not just over-hyped arrogance and refusal to acknowledge reasonable criticism, but also tying it to a politically confrontational ideas that would be very damaging to society if they were actually successful. This has produced a lot of anti-advocates. Etherum combines un-upgradeable code with a lack of formal verification systems. As a result, the only way an exploit could be fixed in one of its largest and most heavily promoted use cases (the "DAO") was to fork the currency. Both forks are still trading, although one at greatly diminished value.
- DennisP 10y ago
  Fwiw, the Ethereum Foundation has someone working full-time on formal verification systems, and the online solidity compiler has a partial implementation of formal verification for smart contract sourcecode. Aside from that, the DAO disaster has made people realize they need to build backup plans into their contracts. Maybe you can't change sourcecode at will, but you can add emergency shutdown mechanisms, predefined paths for upgrading code via systems of modular contracts, etc. There's a tradeoff vs. trusting the admin, but for now it seems like a good one in many cases.
empath75 10y ago
I've played around with investing in bitcoin and I'm a strong believer in cryptocurrencies and blockchains as a technology, but there really are a ton of scams in the industry and it's worthwhile to point that out.
- gertef 10y ago
  What are your investments that aren't speculations?
davidgerard 10y ago
It's those fat Goldman Sachs paydays. No, here you go, actual reasons: * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative. * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.) * Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself. * Bitcoin ideology, which has carried through to its descendants, is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong". * Cryptocurrency advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone. * Cryptocurrency advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or - best of all - suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted. * Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise. * Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case. * Literally everything about smart contracts is bad. The DAO (and the fallout from the DAO, i.e. smart contracts are inviolate until the moment the whales might lose money) should have conclusively buried the idea and I'm still amazed it didn't. * Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service. * I feel like it.
- sayurichick 10y ago
  what about the silk road? I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie. I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.
eternalban 10y ago
Angular is not a construct based on, and promoting, socio-political theories. It is entirely fair to have a political stance regarding these systems.

wslh 10y ago

Yes, it seems David chose specific community member characteristics to criticize the cryptocurrency/blockchain technology. So why not make a book about the community instead of the technology? If he is not clear about this, he is just following a classical fallacy.

dpc_pw 10y ago

I'm a Bitcoin enthusiast, yet the whole crypto-ecosystem is ridden with crooks and frauds trying to make money of suckers. Altcoins that are obvious scams, services that have "accidental" bugs and loose your money, services that get "hacked", and so on. As a rule of thumb everything in cryptofin should be considered a scam before proven otherwise. It's quite rare for angular-like libraries to try to steal money of their users.

tps5 10y ago

Instead of calling him out over his "obsession," please try to respond to his argument. Is he wrong? Is he making incorrect assertions? I am genuinely curious. I don't know a lot about cryptography, blockchains, bitcoins, etc. I try to take everything with a grain of salt, but seeing two knowledgeable people civilly discussing the merits of these things would be interesting. Calling someone out for "being obsessed" isn't. To use your angular analogy, if someone went around criticizing angular everywhere, I'd like to see a discussion between that person and a pro-angular guy. Because I guarantee there are smart people and good points to be made on both sides of that argument.

heliumcraft 10y ago
Well I'm sure someone has engaged him before so I don't think I would be particulary productive. Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses, regarless it's also very easy to criticize something and far more interesting to find solutions, you can critize the current decentralization tech much like you could easily criticize and dimiss this internet thing in 1984. I was just genuinely curious about his motivations. My example with angular is that even though I really don't like it, I wouldnt want to waste time criticizing it or stopping people who want to advance it.
- tps5 10y ago
  >Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses Such as?
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    for e.g the article claiming "100 bugs per 1000" takes a crapy contract and considers refactors as bugs, critizes well known things to take into account, and generally exagerates. Another example, is the infamous 'solar exploit' article (since then slightly modified due to criticism), which is written by someone with a financial interest against ethereum (due to owning a startup with a competing product) essentially makes a claim equivalent to saying the internet is broken because you can do this in nodejs http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg

desireco42 10y ago

I don't think 'not liking angular' is such a rare trait, it is more of a common view

cashmonkey85 10y ago

It's an amazing technology and I believe it's only going to get better. But let's be honest here. Ethereum is a scam and so are 90% of the projects of there.

noio 10y ago

I'm reading the article he linked and others on the site. It's super interesting stuff and he does paint a convincing picture.

pjc50 10y ago

Cryptocurrency advocates have, in the past, aggressively promoted the currencies with not just over-hyped arrogance and refusal to acknowledge reasonable criticism, but also tying it to a politically confrontational ideas that would be very damaging to society if they were actually successful. This has produced a lot of anti-advocates. Etherum combines un-upgradeable code with a lack of formal verification systems. As a result, the only way an exploit could be fixed in one of its largest and most heavily promoted use cases (the "DAO") was to fork the currency. Both forks are still trading, although one at greatly diminished value.

DennisP 10y ago
Fwiw, the Ethereum Foundation has someone working full-time on formal verification systems, and the online solidity compiler has a partial implementation of formal verification for smart contract sourcecode. Aside from that, the DAO disaster has made people realize they need to build backup plans into their contracts. Maybe you can't change sourcecode at will, but you can add emergency shutdown mechanisms, predefined paths for upgrading code via systems of modular contracts, etc. There's a tradeoff vs. trusting the admin, but for now it seems like a good one in many cases.

empath75 10y ago

I've played around with investing in bitcoin and I'm a strong believer in cryptocurrencies and blockchains as a technology, but there really are a ton of scams in the industry and it's worthwhile to point that out.

gertef 10y ago
What are your investments that aren't speculations?

davidgerard 10y ago

It's those fat Goldman Sachs paydays. No, here you go, actual reasons: * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative. * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.) * Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself. * Bitcoin ideology, which has carried through to its descendants, is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong". * Cryptocurrency advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone. * Cryptocurrency advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or - best of all - suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted. * Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise. * Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case. * Literally everything about smart contracts is bad. The DAO (and the fallout from the DAO, i.e. smart contracts are inviolate until the moment the whales might lose money) should have conclusively buried the idea and I'm still amazed it didn't. * Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service. * I feel like it.

sayurichick 10y ago
what about the silk road? I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie. I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.

eternalban 10y ago

Angular is not a construct based on, and promoting, socio-political theories. It is entirely fair to have a political stance regarding these systems.