22 ms·

There is way too much Ethereum and Bitcoin stuff on HN now. :/

by shp0ngle 9y ago

jacquesm 9y ago
Said the person with one submission in a year.
- it_learnses 9y ago
  what does that have to do with his observation?
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    That if you want less of 'x' on HN that you should at least do your best to submit more quality links on other subjects.
- shp0ngle 9y ago
  :O
coldpie 9y ago
I was kind of vaguely interested in this digital currency stuff, and even saw a few local stores tentatively start dipping their toes in last year. But now I have no idea what's going on with a thousand different currencies and now forks of the major ones and huge thefts and I don't even know. From a casual observer's perspective, they seem to be imploding and destroying any credibility they had built up over years. I'll stick to real money, thanks.
- problems 9y ago
  They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles. Others... not so sure. Bitcoin is a huge driver for the hype cycle in cryotocurrencies in general. If you want to watch anything, watch what happens with Bitcoin between now and August 1st. It's a make or break time for whether that trend of slowly increasing value keeps going or blows up horribly.
  - coldpie 9y ago
    Eh, I'm not really interested in "watching" it, I just see what comes my way by chance. That mostly seems to be scary emails from CoinBase[1] and snippets of news of "the community" having major arguments about the fundamental nature of its value. This is not confidence inspiring for the casual user. Maybe it'll settle down sometime and I'll re-evaluate, but for now I've officially moved into the "not interested" camp. [1] """The User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) is a proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size scheduled to activate on August 1. The UAHF is incompatible with the current Bitcoin ruleset and will create a separate blockchain. Should UAHF activate on August 1, Coinbase will not support the new blockchain or its associated coin. The User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) is a proposal to adopt Segregated Witness on the Bitcoin blockchain and could result in network instability. It is scheduled to activate at the same time as the UAHF."""
  - Ilikesoup 9y ago
    >They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles Have we even seen a single cycle yet? Bitcoin hit the mainstream, what, five years ago? The value certainly hasn't "crept up"; it's growing exponentially like every bubble in history.
    - jnbiche 9y ago
      > Have we even seen a single cycle yet? I mean, just look at the data. Yes, there have been -- without any doubt! -- at least 3 cycles that I recall. And by cycle I mean Bitcoin losing at least 50% of its market capitalization suddenly (bust!) and then slowing crawling back up, then quickly shooting up (boom!). No one, not even Bitcoin's biggest detractors, doubts that it's been through numerous boom and bust cycles (and that's not even a good thing, for a store of value).
      - Ilikesoup 9y ago
        >I mean, just look at the data. I look at day-to-day - or even month-to-month- variations as noise, not cycles. How far down the time-series fractal is considered a cycle? All of this variance might look hilariously insignificant in 20 years. Perhaps we have a difference of perspective.
- twelvedogs 9y ago
  yeah, none of that shit happens with real money
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    It does, sure, to a vague degree. (Fiat money is not exactly as easy to fork, so you don't get the scenario of economic system disputes leading to alternate currencies as much. The rest certainly apply, of course, even the huge amount of thefts -- see the 1MBD Malaysian scandal as an example..) The main issue to be aware of with cryptocurrency at the moment is quite a bit more volatile than the most major currencies. For now, at least, I would classify cryptocurrency investment as "speculative". EG: I wouldn't recommend anyone put their life savings into a cryptocurrency, at the moment.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  >I'll stick to real money, thanks. By "real" money, you mean more established and widely used, correct?
jstanley 9y ago
30 years ago: "guys you're writing way too much about internet stuff, I can't wait for this fad to be over"
- it_learnses 9y ago
  strawman
joeyspn 9y ago
I was going to post this! I've been in cryptocurrency-land since 2012 and initially the posts on HN were very occasional... now we have 2 or 3 on front-page at any time. IMO this means that we are reaching peak interest among techies. It happened with node, with angular, with react and now with crypto... it'd be fun to see some data graphs with info from algolia or the HN dataset from GCloud... https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news Regarding the post: I opposed the fork, but now I think it was the best way to go. When there are irreconcilable views/goals in a community, the best thing to do is to separate ways. It happened with linux distros, with dev frameworks, etc and cryptos are not different, it's just software.
grabcocque 9y ago
There's drama, conflict, hacks, fuckups, civil wars, bugs, theft, more drama, bailouts and all of the growing pains that make a story worth telling.
- empath75 9y ago
  So basically Eve Online.
  - Macha 9y ago
    Along with the same harsh attitude if you get burned
ricksharp 9y ago
From my reading, many comments are negative. I was interested in crypto currency, but after reading enough HN, it has made me very cautious. I especially enjoyed learning about the horrible design flaws of the Solidity language. I think HN plays a vital role and these opinions by very intelligent people are very helpful to me. Your comment also made me wonder about a sentiment analysis of HN comments. Something like: "What does HN Think about It?" App
- flush 9y ago
  Careful--there is a tendency for engineers to conflate superior technology with the success of a product.
  - saurik 9y ago
    FWIW, many of these negative comments that I read and most remembered as making powerful points happily admitted, as part of the criticism (not a hedge against it), that the security issues inherent in Ethereum are due to the very factors that might have made it successful (such as making web developers think they can now write smart contracts by offering a language that looks like JavaScript and is even as quirky as JavaScript, and sweeping verification under the rug). I actually see lots of parallels to companies like StackMob, Parse, and Firebase, which launched incredibly insecure "serverless" database products that didn't even support any notion of security and even as they added security would almost encourage "anyone can read and even write all of your data" in the documentation as even mentioning security in a tutorial made the product look hard to use. But the result, of course, was that there were even companies offering dating apps that even claimed in their marketing "we are actually secure, unlike others", which were listed as featured users on the StackMob website, where you could just dump their entire database--including both offline Facebook access tokens for all the supposedly-anonymous users as well as the entire database of what they were saying to each other in their supposedly-private messages--as it was all public. The market is fundamentally incapable of optimizing for secure products in the same way it is incapable of optimizing for open products. Both of these properties of a product are too complex for users to analyze and the benefits often come in some difficult to measure effect that happens on some difficult to predict timescale. We need to work on this problem before the "Internet of things" becomes too popular and we hit truly dystopian levels of insecure centrally-controlled products.
wyldfire 9y ago
If the voting for stories is fair, then "too much" means "the HN community is more interested in this than I am". There's a lot of activity lately so it makes sense that there's more news on this lately. IMO it's relevant to HN. If I see stuff that I'm not interested in on HN (of which there is plenty) I just move on to the other stories.

There is way too much Ethereum and Bitcoin stuff on HN now. :/

jacquesm 9y ago

Said the person with one submission in a year.

it_learnses 9y ago
what does that have to do with his observation?
- jacquesm 9y ago
  That if you want less of 'x' on HN that you should at least do your best to submit more quality links on other subjects.
shp0ngle 9y ago
:O

coldpie 9y ago

I was kind of vaguely interested in this digital currency stuff, and even saw a few local stores tentatively start dipping their toes in last year. But now I have no idea what's going on with a thousand different currencies and now forks of the major ones and huge thefts and I don't even know. From a casual observer's perspective, they seem to be imploding and destroying any credibility they had built up over years. I'll stick to real money, thanks.

problems 9y ago
They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles. Others... not so sure. Bitcoin is a huge driver for the hype cycle in cryotocurrencies in general. If you want to watch anything, watch what happens with Bitcoin between now and August 1st. It's a make or break time for whether that trend of slowly increasing value keeps going or blows up horribly.
- coldpie 9y ago
  Eh, I'm not really interested in "watching" it, I just see what comes my way by chance. That mostly seems to be scary emails from CoinBase[1] and snippets of news of "the community" having major arguments about the fundamental nature of its value. This is not confidence inspiring for the casual user. Maybe it'll settle down sometime and I'll re-evaluate, but for now I've officially moved into the "not interested" camp. [1] """The User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) is a proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size scheduled to activate on August 1. The UAHF is incompatible with the current Bitcoin ruleset and will create a separate blockchain. Should UAHF activate on August 1, Coinbase will not support the new blockchain or its associated coin. The User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) is a proposal to adopt Segregated Witness on the Bitcoin blockchain and could result in network instability. It is scheduled to activate at the same time as the UAHF."""
- Ilikesoup 9y ago
  >They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles Have we even seen a single cycle yet? Bitcoin hit the mainstream, what, five years ago? The value certainly hasn't "crept up"; it's growing exponentially like every bubble in history.
  - jnbiche 9y ago
    > Have we even seen a single cycle yet? I mean, just look at the data. Yes, there have been -- without any doubt! -- at least 3 cycles that I recall. And by cycle I mean Bitcoin losing at least 50% of its market capitalization suddenly (bust!) and then slowing crawling back up, then quickly shooting up (boom!). No one, not even Bitcoin's biggest detractors, doubts that it's been through numerous boom and bust cycles (and that's not even a good thing, for a store of value).
    - Ilikesoup 9y ago
      >I mean, just look at the data. I look at day-to-day - or even month-to-month- variations as noise, not cycles. How far down the time-series fractal is considered a cycle? All of this variance might look hilariously insignificant in 20 years. Perhaps we have a difference of perspective.
twelvedogs 9y ago
yeah, none of that shit happens with real money
- soundwave106 9y ago
  It does, sure, to a vague degree. (Fiat money is not exactly as easy to fork, so you don't get the scenario of economic system disputes leading to alternate currencies as much. The rest certainly apply, of course, even the huge amount of thefts -- see the 1MBD Malaysian scandal as an example..) The main issue to be aware of with cryptocurrency at the moment is quite a bit more volatile than the most major currencies. For now, at least, I would classify cryptocurrency investment as "speculative". EG: I wouldn't recommend anyone put their life savings into a cryptocurrency, at the moment.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>I'll stick to real money, thanks. By "real" money, you mean more established and widely used, correct?

jstanley 9y ago

30 years ago: "guys you're writing way too much about internet stuff, I can't wait for this fad to be over"

it_learnses 9y ago
strawman

joeyspn 9y ago

I was going to post this! I've been in cryptocurrency-land since 2012 and initially the posts on HN were very occasional... now we have 2 or 3 on front-page at any time. IMO this means that we are reaching peak interest among techies. It happened with node, with angular, with react and now with crypto... it'd be fun to see some data graphs with info from algolia or the HN dataset from GCloud... https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news Regarding the post: I opposed the fork, but now I think it was the best way to go. When there are irreconcilable views/goals in a community, the best thing to do is to separate ways. It happened with linux distros, with dev frameworks, etc and cryptos are not different, it's just software.

grabcocque 9y ago

There's drama, conflict, hacks, fuckups, civil wars, bugs, theft, more drama, bailouts and all of the growing pains that make a story worth telling.

empath75 9y ago
So basically Eve Online.
- Macha 9y ago
  Along with the same harsh attitude if you get burned

ricksharp 9y ago

From my reading, many comments are negative. I was interested in crypto currency, but after reading enough HN, it has made me very cautious. I especially enjoyed learning about the horrible design flaws of the Solidity language. I think HN plays a vital role and these opinions by very intelligent people are very helpful to me. Your comment also made me wonder about a sentiment analysis of HN comments. Something like: "What does HN Think about It?" App

flush 9y ago
Careful--there is a tendency for engineers to conflate superior technology with the success of a product.
- saurik 9y ago
  FWIW, many of these negative comments that I read and most remembered as making powerful points happily admitted, as part of the criticism (not a hedge against it), that the security issues inherent in Ethereum are due to the very factors that might have made it successful (such as making web developers think they can now write smart contracts by offering a language that looks like JavaScript and is even as quirky as JavaScript, and sweeping verification under the rug). I actually see lots of parallels to companies like StackMob, Parse, and Firebase, which launched incredibly insecure "serverless" database products that didn't even support any notion of security and even as they added security would almost encourage "anyone can read and even write all of your data" in the documentation as even mentioning security in a tutorial made the product look hard to use. But the result, of course, was that there were even companies offering dating apps that even claimed in their marketing "we are actually secure, unlike others", which were listed as featured users on the StackMob website, where you could just dump their entire database--including both offline Facebook access tokens for all the supposedly-anonymous users as well as the entire database of what they were saying to each other in their supposedly-private messages--as it was all public. The market is fundamentally incapable of optimizing for secure products in the same way it is incapable of optimizing for open products. Both of these properties of a product are too complex for users to analyze and the benefits often come in some difficult to measure effect that happens on some difficult to predict timescale. We need to work on this problem before the "Internet of things" becomes too popular and we hit truly dystopian levels of insecure centrally-controlled products.

wyldfire 9y ago

If the voting for stories is fair, then "too much" means "the HN community is more interested in this than I am". There's a lot of activity lately so it makes sense that there's more news on this lately. IMO it's relevant to HN. If I see stuff that I'm not interested in on HN (of which there is plenty) I just move on to the other stories.