8 ms·

I was watching something on youtube recently that brought back memories of the early days of the internet and the campaign to discredit it (it will bring smut d

I was watching something on youtube recently that brought back memories of the early days of the internet and the campaign to discredit it (it will bring smut directly into your home... it will be all over in 5 years..) and now I see HN users glee with the failure of fellow engineers and entrepreneurs and the same campaign (it's a scam, it will bring drugs directly into your home...). The bear market has been brutal and some very good teams were caught off guard because they lack to experience and know-how to balance a treasury or keep a startup alive. Many of us here are also equally unqualified to succeed though. In the aftermath of the 99 crash, Amazon shares were trading for a few dollars and so were many other companies that today are huge monopolies. I believe that many of the blockchain native companies that survive this crash likely have the same growth.

Retric 8y ago
Beanie Babies and housing both saw significant bubbles. But housing and the stock market have mechanics that push recovery. Crypto however is closer to the Beanie Babies model where it might come back, but people will continue to hype it either way.
- decentralised 8y ago
  I'm going to take the time to respond to you because you were the first reply to my comment. Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money. Both have had bubbles but only one of them is tied to a brand name and there have been plenty of great new collectibles that have taken its place since. Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are a new solution to a new problem (digital native representation of value) and even if the current offer isn't perfect their development hasn't stoped or even slowed down in any considerable way and there's no reason to believe we won't continue to grow and make better products and solutions. Money isn't going away anytime soon.
  - lkrubner 8y ago
    "Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money." It's been established over and over again that cryptocurrencies are not money. They are a collectible like Beanie Babies. Cryptocurrencies vary too much in value to be used as money. Would you go into a Starbucks and spend $4 USD dollars to buy a coffee, if there was a chance that the $4 might gain 10,000% in value over the next year? Of course not. There have been dozens of good articles over the last two years comparing money to cryptocurrencies and detailing all of the differences. If you still don't understand the differences, at the end of 2018, then you are keeping yourself willfully misinformed, and I suspect no comment on Hacker News will be able to change your mind.
    - decentralised 8y ago
      >t's been established over and over again that cryptocurrencies are not money. Sorry but that's not true. You may be confusing "money" with "currency" though. There's at least one US state that allows paying taxes in cryptocurrencies and there are a few countries here in Europe where cryptos are legal tender.
      - robin_reala 8y ago
        [citation needed]
        decentralised 8y ago
        https://medium.com/ab-chain/market-news-germany-officially-recognized-bitcoin-as-a-legal-tender-5f1a45189a92 https://medium.com/ab-chain/market-news-germany-officially-r... https://cointelegraph.com/news/ohio-appears-to-be-first-us-state-to-accept-bitcoin-for-taxes-wsj-report https://cointelegraph.com/news/ohio-appears-to-be-first-us-s... https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-georgia-next-state-in-line-to-accept-crypto-for-taxes-licenses https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-georgia-next-state-in-line... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country_or_territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country... Some reading required. ;-)
        8y ago
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    > Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are a new solution to a new problem (digital native representation of value) I'll bite. "Digital native representation of value" isn't a problem, it's a solution. Cryptocurrencies are a medium of facilitating that solution. No one would think to themselves, "I have a problem: I need a digital-first store of value or currency, now how can I do this?" Instead they might think to themselves, "I have a problem: I need to do <thing>; this can probably be accomplished if I use a digital-first store of value." I don't see why you would care about how your money or asset is being represented unless you have another problem that forces you think about it. With that out of the way, this leads me to my actual point - what is an actual problem you see being solved by a "digital native representation of value"? For example, a common one I see a lot is distrust of governments due to control or censorship.
    - decentralised 8y ago
      >'ll bite. "Digital native representation of value" isn't a problem, it's a solution. Cryptocurrencies are a medium of facilitating that solution. No one would think to themselves, "I have a problem: I need a digital-first store of value or currency, now how can I do this?" How about HTTP 402? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_Server_Error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_...
      - shkkmo 8y ago
        How is a status code that almost nobody uses a problem. Randomly posting a quote and a link is not discussion, nor is it an argument.
        decentralised 8y ago
        Well no one actually uses that status code... because there was no solution to guarantee that a digital payment is ever truly "done" until Bitcoin was invented. I posted a link that people who are familiar with the development of the internet and HTTP will remember that there was a big problem back then.. we didn't have a digital native representation of value and all digital data structures can easily be copied so the fear of double-spends is what caused Digicash, Bitgold and a few other earlier digital currencies fail.
  - betterunix2 8y ago
    "Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are a new solution to a new problem" The solution may be new but the problem is not at all new. The first solution to that problem was proposed in the 1980s and there is a large body of academic work on cryptographic approaches that preceded Bitcoin.
- seandougall 8y ago
  Plus, even Beanie Babies have some intrinsic value as toys. Housing far more, as shelter. Cryptocurrencies’ value is entirely extrinsic, as far as I can tell; it doesn’t have a nonzero lower bound built in.
  - decentralised 8y ago
    Depends on the valuation models used. There's no accepted standard yet. The way I value currencies, the size of the network and the number of projects built on top of it is what matters and in that view Ethereum and Bitcoin are definitely worth much more that their current fx price.
    - jf- 8y ago
      Serious question: do you have a personal financial or professional stake in blockchain that may be colouring your view?
      - decentralised 8y ago
        I'm a professional blockchain architect and before I worked in Fintech for 20 years. Most of my views are definitely impacted by my own experiences.
        jf- 8y ago
        Then does the bias you assume others to have not apply equally to you? It doesn’t matter what arguments are made here, if you’re all-in on blockchain you’re not going to listen to any of them. Also, how do you account for such scepticism from the community? Do you think everyone just irrationally hates new technology? Given where we are that seems unlikely.
        decentralised 8y ago
        I do tend to change my opinions when presented with new evidence and took my time to go "all in"into blockchain professionally because I thought it was not going to last and in any case it was mostly a solution to a problem I was being paid to solve with other technology... Bitcoin was my enemy! I take HN user's reaction to Web3 to be within expectations for any revolutionary technology. If von Neuman criticised FORTRAN for being too high-level and not needed for serious computer science and IBM failed at capturing the web, Warren Buffet didn't invest in Microsoft, Apple or Google, then this to me suggests that the bigger the paradigm shift, the more those who created or benefit from the status quo will fight it. It's my belief that the web as we know it was developed without security or privacy in consideration and that this is the ultimate reason why we have the current "surveillance economy" and the cyber risks affecting people, businesses and nation states and that the Web3 will offer a cryptography-first alternative within the next two years. We could go through my comment history and you'll see that for the most part I try to share my knowledge and experience in a positive way and never assume others are irrational, but a few interactions were generally negative. I do get a gut reaction to comments that insinuate my line of work benefits criminals, for instance, and lashed out once or twice at terrible articles or blogs that were shared here and were taken as authoritative when in fact they were complete nonsense for anyone _working_ in the space. I regret those but won't delete them. This is my work and I sustain a family with it so yes I am biased but not uninformed or incapable of learning new facts. More broadly, I'm familiar with how trends work and some aspects of the blockchain community can be off putting and the technology itself is often misrepresented as simply a "distributed ledger" but I'm also confident that anyone who cares enough to try and join a developer focused meetup (Ethereum!) or event will see the side that I try my best to represent.
mosdl 8y ago
Amazon was able to survive as they still making money (in fact they grew their income) - people never stopped buying books online.
- decentralised 8y ago
  BS. Amazon operated at a loss until very recently and people were NOT buying books online because on-line payments only existed in a hand full of countries and the tech itself was immensely immature.
  - segmondy 8y ago
    Amazon MADE A CHOICE to operate at a loss. They did so because they invested everything back into the business to grow. Their loss was not because they didn't have sales or because they were giving their products away for free at a discount, but because of investment towards future growth. As can be seen, they went from a bookstore, to an ecommerce platform, to having shipping logistics, streaming service, cloud provider, etc.
    - decentralised 8y ago
      I'm not sure why you believe we are disagreeing. They chose to operate at a loss because they couldn't generate enough business to do anything different. Their shareholders wouldn't have allowed for it otherwise.
      - shkkmo 8y ago
        No, they chose to operate at a loss because they wanted to continue investing their positive margins from the large amounts of business they were doing back into building infrastructure so they could do even more business. Now name a single crypto currency start-up that is making able to even cover their own operating expenses, let alone invest their cash flow into growth.
        8y ago
cryptoplot 8y ago
Yes, it is sad how some glee from failures. I will keep on working, crash or not, because I like what I do.
kolbe 8y ago
I'm not saying that crypto is a scam, but the most common sales pitch for pump and dump salespeople is to liken their investment to the early dot com era. "Company X looks exactly like Amazon when they only sold books." "Company Y is like an early Google, but with a larger addressable market." If you want us to believe crypto will be like the internet, support that belief with real evidence. But don't uses these cheap FOMO tricks to manipulate people into buying in. Tell us why "many of the blockchain native companies that survive this crash likely have the same growth."
- decentralised 8y ago
  I never claimed any company looked like amazon or google, only that the bear market has affected us similarly to how the 99 crash affected the .com companies.
test1999 8y ago
Hacker news banned all the pro crypto hackers. It's really sad to see people dismiss a potentially world-changing technology so that they can jump on the backs of engineers and entrepeneurs that are already hurting. Some of us have held btc and alts for over 5 years, but apparently we're all get-rich-quick moonboys.
jf- 8y ago
The problem with your argument is that blockchain isn’t comparable to the internet. It’s an energy inefficient immutable public ledger. There just aren’t many, if any, applications that require an immutable public ledger, or that derive any benefit from using one. Some blockchains allow smart contracts. Smart contracts sound like a nice idea, but when you think about potential use cases, you quickly realise they actually have no utility. Any application for a smart contract requires information from outside the blockchain which must be supplied by a trusted authority. This being the case, why bother with blockchain at all?
- decentralised 8y ago
  With due respect mate but you say that blockchain isn't comparable to the internet because you say so, and I say it is because that's what I work on.... How are we to move forward? Should we have a discussion on what the internet is and what blockchain is? I mean, you define a blockchain by its ledger component while I believe that's only a small part of it...
  - jf- 8y ago
    You could have started by putting forward an argument in support of your position, rather than an appeal to your personal authority.
    - decentralised 8y ago
      I see your point about argument to personal authority, my bad, but what I am saying is that I see your argument as being too far off my experience, and it would be very hard to reconcile our views.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  “Ledger” was just the first app we worked out how to do as a blockchain. There will be more, but the design process is hard. The reason Ledger was cracked first is because ledgers are pretty simple. Saying blockchain is “just a ledger” is like saying the web is “just a bunch of nerds uploading documents about their hobbies”. That’s where it started but after many years we learned to solve other problems with the same ideas.
manigandham 8y ago
The "internet" was useful from conception. It was created through purpose to connect remote locations and share information, and has only exploded in utility since then. What has the crypto industry actually done other than replicate some basic currency transfers through a highly inefficient and unintuitive trade of virtual points? It's a great research concept but it had no purpose in its creation, and finding some utility to bolt on top has so far proven to be futile in practicality and feasibility.
- nikanj 8y ago
  There's some controversy on whether this is a bug or a feature, but cryptos have enabled a lot of drug trade, ransomware, and all sorts of other crime to happen at an unprecedented level of anonymity. I have a feeling there will be a steady demand for this in the future, but I'm not sure how the bitcoin <-> fiat exchanges are going to avoid government attention.
- decentralised 8y ago
  >The "internet" was useful from conception. It was useful but it was not understood to be useful by a large majority of people. The crypto industry has developed novel crowdsourcing (ICOs, DAICOs, etc), fungible and non-fungible tokens, transparent voting mechanisms, token curated registries, oracles, prediction markets, state-channels, distributed time service, Zero Knowledge cryptography, leaderless consensus in distributed systems, fraud proofs, algorithmic stablecoins and a lot more.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    We're discussing cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. Prediction markets (called options or futures) have existed for a very long time and many other things you list are not related. We're also discussing whether it is actually useful or not, not whether it is widely understood to be (which depends on it being useful first). So the question remains, what utility do cryptocurrencies provide so far?

Retric 8y ago

Beanie Babies and housing both saw significant bubbles. But housing and the stock market have mechanics that push recovery. Crypto however is closer to the Beanie Babies model where it might come back, but people will continue to hype it either way.

decentralised 8y ago
I'm going to take the time to respond to you because you were the first reply to my comment. Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money. Both have had bubbles but only one of them is tied to a brand name and there have been plenty of great new collectibles that have taken its place since. Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are a new solution to a new problem (digital native representation of value) and even if the current offer isn't perfect their development hasn't stoped or even slowed down in any considerable way and there's no reason to believe we won't continue to grow and make better products and solutions. Money isn't going away anytime soon.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  "Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money." It's been established over and over again that cryptocurrencies are not money. They are a collectible like Beanie Babies. Cryptocurrencies vary too much in value to be used as money. Would you go into a Starbucks and spend $4 USD dollars to buy a coffee, if there was a chance that the $4 might gain 10,000% in value over the next year? Of course not. There have been dozens of good articles over the last two years comparing money to cryptocurrencies and detailing all of the differences. If you still don't understand the differences, at the end of 2018, then you are keeping yourself willfully misinformed, and I suspect no comment on Hacker News will be able to change your mind.
  - decentralised 8y ago
    >t's been established over and over again that cryptocurrencies are not money. Sorry but that's not true. You may be confusing "money" with "currency" though. There's at least one US state that allows paying taxes in cryptocurrencies and there are a few countries here in Europe where cryptos are legal tender.
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      [citation needed]
      - decentralised 8y ago
        https://medium.com/ab-chain/market-news-germany-officially-recognized-bitcoin-as-a-legal-tender-5f1a45189a92 https://medium.com/ab-chain/market-news-germany-officially-r... https://cointelegraph.com/news/ohio-appears-to-be-first-us-state-to-accept-bitcoin-for-taxes-wsj-report https://cointelegraph.com/news/ohio-appears-to-be-first-us-s... https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-georgia-next-state-in-line-to-accept-crypto-for-taxes-licenses https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-georgia-next-state-in-line... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country_or_territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country... Some reading required. ;-)
        8y ago
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  > Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are a new solution to a new problem (digital native representation of value) I'll bite. "Digital native representation of value" isn't a problem, it's a solution. Cryptocurrencies are a medium of facilitating that solution. No one would think to themselves, "I have a problem: I need a digital-first store of value or currency, now how can I do this?" Instead they might think to themselves, "I have a problem: I need to do <thing>; this can probably be accomplished if I use a digital-first store of value." I don't see why you would care about how your money or asset is being represented unless you have another problem that forces you think about it. With that out of the way, this leads me to my actual point - what is an actual problem you see being solved by a "digital native representation of value"? For example, a common one I see a lot is distrust of governments due to control or censorship.
  - decentralised 8y ago
    >'ll bite. "Digital native representation of value" isn't a problem, it's a solution. Cryptocurrencies are a medium of facilitating that solution. No one would think to themselves, "I have a problem: I need a digital-first store of value or currency, now how can I do this?" How about HTTP 402? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_Server_Error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_...
    - shkkmo 8y ago
      How is a status code that almost nobody uses a problem. Randomly posting a quote and a link is not discussion, nor is it an argument.
      - decentralised 8y ago
        Well no one actually uses that status code... because there was no solution to guarantee that a digital payment is ever truly "done" until Bitcoin was invented. I posted a link that people who are familiar with the development of the internet and HTTP will remember that there was a big problem back then.. we didn't have a digital native representation of value and all digital data structures can easily be copied so the fear of double-spends is what caused Digicash, Bitgold and a few other earlier digital currencies fail.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  "Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are a new solution to a new problem" The solution may be new but the problem is not at all new. The first solution to that problem was proposed in the 1980s and there is a large body of academic work on cryptographic approaches that preceded Bitcoin.
seandougall 8y ago
Plus, even Beanie Babies have some intrinsic value as toys. Housing far more, as shelter. Cryptocurrencies’ value is entirely extrinsic, as far as I can tell; it doesn’t have a nonzero lower bound built in.
- decentralised 8y ago
  Depends on the valuation models used. There's no accepted standard yet. The way I value currencies, the size of the network and the number of projects built on top of it is what matters and in that view Ethereum and Bitcoin are definitely worth much more that their current fx price.
  - jf- 8y ago
    Serious question: do you have a personal financial or professional stake in blockchain that may be colouring your view?
    - decentralised 8y ago
      I'm a professional blockchain architect and before I worked in Fintech for 20 years. Most of my views are definitely impacted by my own experiences.
      - jf- 8y ago
        Then does the bias you assume others to have not apply equally to you? It doesn’t matter what arguments are made here, if you’re all-in on blockchain you’re not going to listen to any of them. Also, how do you account for such scepticism from the community? Do you think everyone just irrationally hates new technology? Given where we are that seems unlikely.
        decentralised 8y ago
        I do tend to change my opinions when presented with new evidence and took my time to go "all in"into blockchain professionally because I thought it was not going to last and in any case it was mostly a solution to a problem I was being paid to solve with other technology... Bitcoin was my enemy! I take HN user's reaction to Web3 to be within expectations for any revolutionary technology. If von Neuman criticised FORTRAN for being too high-level and not needed for serious computer science and IBM failed at capturing the web, Warren Buffet didn't invest in Microsoft, Apple or Google, then this to me suggests that the bigger the paradigm shift, the more those who created or benefit from the status quo will fight it. It's my belief that the web as we know it was developed without security or privacy in consideration and that this is the ultimate reason why we have the current "surveillance economy" and the cyber risks affecting people, businesses and nation states and that the Web3 will offer a cryptography-first alternative within the next two years. We could go through my comment history and you'll see that for the most part I try to share my knowledge and experience in a positive way and never assume others are irrational, but a few interactions were generally negative. I do get a gut reaction to comments that insinuate my line of work benefits criminals, for instance, and lashed out once or twice at terrible articles or blogs that were shared here and were taken as authoritative when in fact they were complete nonsense for anyone _working_ in the space. I regret those but won't delete them. This is my work and I sustain a family with it so yes I am biased but not uninformed or incapable of learning new facts. More broadly, I'm familiar with how trends work and some aspects of the blockchain community can be off putting and the technology itself is often misrepresented as simply a "distributed ledger" but I'm also confident that anyone who cares enough to try and join a developer focused meetup (Ethereum!) or event will see the side that I try my best to represent.

mosdl 8y ago

Amazon was able to survive as they still making money (in fact they grew their income) - people never stopped buying books online.

decentralised 8y ago
BS. Amazon operated at a loss until very recently and people were NOT buying books online because on-line payments only existed in a hand full of countries and the tech itself was immensely immature.
- segmondy 8y ago
  Amazon MADE A CHOICE to operate at a loss. They did so because they invested everything back into the business to grow. Their loss was not because they didn't have sales or because they were giving their products away for free at a discount, but because of investment towards future growth. As can be seen, they went from a bookstore, to an ecommerce platform, to having shipping logistics, streaming service, cloud provider, etc.
  - decentralised 8y ago
    I'm not sure why you believe we are disagreeing. They chose to operate at a loss because they couldn't generate enough business to do anything different. Their shareholders wouldn't have allowed for it otherwise.
    - shkkmo 8y ago
      No, they chose to operate at a loss because they wanted to continue investing their positive margins from the large amounts of business they were doing back into building infrastructure so they could do even more business. Now name a single crypto currency start-up that is making able to even cover their own operating expenses, let alone invest their cash flow into growth.
      - 8y ago

cryptoplot 8y ago

Yes, it is sad how some glee from failures. I will keep on working, crash or not, because I like what I do.

kolbe 8y ago

I'm not saying that crypto is a scam, but the most common sales pitch for pump and dump salespeople is to liken their investment to the early dot com era. "Company X looks exactly like Amazon when they only sold books." "Company Y is like an early Google, but with a larger addressable market." If you want us to believe crypto will be like the internet, support that belief with real evidence. But don't uses these cheap FOMO tricks to manipulate people into buying in. Tell us why "many of the blockchain native companies that survive this crash likely have the same growth."

decentralised 8y ago
I never claimed any company looked like amazon or google, only that the bear market has affected us similarly to how the 99 crash affected the .com companies.

test1999 8y ago

Hacker news banned all the pro crypto hackers. It's really sad to see people dismiss a potentially world-changing technology so that they can jump on the backs of engineers and entrepeneurs that are already hurting. Some of us have held btc and alts for over 5 years, but apparently we're all get-rich-quick moonboys.

jf- 8y ago

The problem with your argument is that blockchain isn’t comparable to the internet. It’s an energy inefficient immutable public ledger. There just aren’t many, if any, applications that require an immutable public ledger, or that derive any benefit from using one. Some blockchains allow smart contracts. Smart contracts sound like a nice idea, but when you think about potential use cases, you quickly realise they actually have no utility. Any application for a smart contract requires information from outside the blockchain which must be supplied by a trusted authority. This being the case, why bother with blockchain at all?

decentralised 8y ago
With due respect mate but you say that blockchain isn't comparable to the internet because you say so, and I say it is because that's what I work on.... How are we to move forward? Should we have a discussion on what the internet is and what blockchain is? I mean, you define a blockchain by its ledger component while I believe that's only a small part of it...
- jf- 8y ago
  You could have started by putting forward an argument in support of your position, rather than an appeal to your personal authority.
  - decentralised 8y ago
    I see your point about argument to personal authority, my bad, but what I am saying is that I see your argument as being too far off my experience, and it would be very hard to reconcile our views.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
“Ledger” was just the first app we worked out how to do as a blockchain. There will be more, but the design process is hard. The reason Ledger was cracked first is because ledgers are pretty simple. Saying blockchain is “just a ledger” is like saying the web is “just a bunch of nerds uploading documents about their hobbies”. That’s where it started but after many years we learned to solve other problems with the same ideas.

manigandham 8y ago

The "internet" was useful from conception. It was created through purpose to connect remote locations and share information, and has only exploded in utility since then. What has the crypto industry actually done other than replicate some basic currency transfers through a highly inefficient and unintuitive trade of virtual points? It's a great research concept but it had no purpose in its creation, and finding some utility to bolt on top has so far proven to be futile in practicality and feasibility.

nikanj 8y ago
There's some controversy on whether this is a bug or a feature, but cryptos have enabled a lot of drug trade, ransomware, and all sorts of other crime to happen at an unprecedented level of anonymity. I have a feeling there will be a steady demand for this in the future, but I'm not sure how the bitcoin <-> fiat exchanges are going to avoid government attention.
decentralised 8y ago
>The "internet" was useful from conception. It was useful but it was not understood to be useful by a large majority of people. The crypto industry has developed novel crowdsourcing (ICOs, DAICOs, etc), fungible and non-fungible tokens, transparent voting mechanisms, token curated registries, oracles, prediction markets, state-channels, distributed time service, Zero Knowledge cryptography, leaderless consensus in distributed systems, fraud proofs, algorithmic stablecoins and a lot more.
- manigandham 8y ago
  We're discussing cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. Prediction markets (called options or futures) have existed for a very long time and many other things you list are not related. We're also discussing whether it is actually useful or not, not whether it is widely understood to be (which depends on it being useful first). So the question remains, what utility do cryptocurrencies provide so far?