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Your comment is a nice summary of the vitriol surrounding crypto. I have never seen such an anger surrounding a technology since maybe printers or possibly what

Your comment is a nice summary of the vitriol surrounding crypto. I have never seen such an anger surrounding a technology since maybe printers or possibly whatever device Planned Parenthood uses to perform abortions. While gambling is an extremely obvious one (secure and trust-less escrow certainly appeals to the black-market), you _must_ be being disingenuous to posit "Ethereum doesn't have any fundamentals". The US Dollar is also no longer a "claim on a productive asset" - in your mind, do only stocks count as a claim on a productive asset? Because stocks (as well as mortgages and physical assets) can, have, and will continue to be represented by Ethereum contracts...

cft 8y ago
I think it's the echo chamber of big tech: they don't like crypto. Probably because they want to align themselves with the regulators rather than with the anarchists. HN comments have become increasingly dominated by Google/FB employees and mid management.
vkou 8y ago
The US Dollar is a commodity with a semi-guaranteed demand, barring no radical changes in monetary policy. That's what gives it a relatively stable value. The same cannot be said for cryptocurrencies. Demand for them is speculative, and fickle.
- seibelj 8y ago
  Recently asset-backed stablecoins like USDC from highly regulated US organizations (Circle, Coinbase) have emerged that allow stable asset transfer over Ethereum[0]. If ETH is seen only as an asset to pay for computation, then other assets like USDC can be used as value transfer. [0] https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc
  - vkou 8y ago
    If I want to buy computation, I can buy compute time on AWS/GCE/Azure for orders of magnitude cheaper then I can on the ETH network. Asset transfer is a better case, but why not use quite literally any other cryptocurrency for that, instead?
  - Qworg 8y ago
    Even though they are highly regulated, you're still taking a credit risk against the organization, not the US Government. The government can create new money to service its debts, where Circle/Coinbase might go out of business.
- ourmandave 8y ago
  USD is fiat money. It's value is only as good as people's faith in the US government. Commodity money still has worth from what it's made from (e.g. gold) even if it's no longer used as money. I'm not sure what Ethereum is.
  - vkou 8y ago
    USD's value is only as good as the US government demanding that its citizens pay it ~3 trillion dollars by April of next year. I, and the rest of the world have pretty good faith that this will happen in April 2019, and pretty good faith that it will also happen in April 2020. I have pretty good faith that if it will not happen in April 2021, I'm more likely to be scavenging for bottle caps, canned beans, and ammunition[1], then I am to be be using eth. [1] Actually, it's more likely I'd be dead, but the point would still stand.
    - ourmandave 8y ago
      Point taken. I too would be one of the first casualties as I try to pay for my plane ticket to Canada with Ethereum. Hmmm... I wonder what would happen if everyone tried to pay their taxes with Ethereum?
      - vkou 8y ago
        The same thing that would happen if everyone tried to pay your taxes with turnips, of if "What if they started a war, but nobody came?" The government would, quickly, and decisively increase punishments for non-compliance, print or borrow a wagon-full of money to make payroll, and send the police, and army in.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        Nah. If everyone is demanding it then the laws can be updated. If you had just 10% of the population loudly demanding such a payment method, and 90% generally ambivalent, you could probably make it happen.
      - 8y ago
TACIXAT 8y ago
When you dress something up like a stock (ownership of a piece of a company) but there is nothing behind it, it really starts to look like a scam. That is where the hate comes from. There are no fundamentals to analyze. For Ethereum, what do you propose? It is a way to buy incredibly inefficient computation. What are the killer smart contracts? How does the price reflect the price of computation? Has someone made a more efficient EVM? A less efficient one? The US dollar is the currency that you need to use in order to participate in the largest world economy. No one claims it has a market cap. No one claims it is going to the moon. No one tries to analyze it's fundamentals. No one is pretending it's a stock.
- aey 8y ago
  World spends about $2t on moving money around. The fee that you pay to transfer wealth on ethereum isnt compeating with AWS, it’s compeating with the banks computer that moves a few digits around when you make a transfer.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkou 8y ago
    The world doesn't spend $2t on moving money around, it spends it on moving money around, and a slate of other financial services (Mostly to do with issuing loans.)
    - aey 8y ago
      https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/A%20mixed%202015%20for%20the%20global%20payments%20industry/Global-Payments-2016.ashx https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financi... From what I can tell in the report 16% is account liquidity. The rest is actually transfers and maintenance
- gweinberg 8y ago
  If new dollars were created at a fixed rate rather than an accelerating one, the purchasing power of dollars would tend to go up over time.
CPLX 8y ago
I love gambling. When I was in college I learned how to beat single-deck blackjack by counting cards, which I was very proud of at the time, and I've played tons of poker in my adult life. I enjoy a trip to Las Vegas from time to time. So note that there's not a hint of anger when I point out that the fundamental use case of Ethereum is and has always been speculation.
- seibelj 8y ago
  If the only point of Ethereum is to speculate then the only point of angel investing is to speculate. Or perhaps you also invest for reasons not entirely based on making money?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - brokensegue 8y ago
    there's a difference between investing and speculation. angel investors should "invest"
    - seibelj 8y ago
      It’s possible that some or many of the people who bought into the original Ethereum ICO did so because they liked the idea and wanted to support development. It’s not always a pure cash grab. If the only definition of speculation is buying and selling an asset in the same day (the government’s definition of a day trader) then most are investors.
      - brokensegue 8y ago
        That's not the distinction between investing and speculation.
UncleMeat 8y ago
And most people will tell you that holding lots of US dollars and expecting to get rich is a bad idea. Stocks, bonds, land, housing, etc are all productive assets. Even if you hold these via a contract, that has precisely zero impact on the price of Ether and does not mean that holding Ether is a good investment.
arkis22 8y ago
Cash is definitely a claim on a productive asset. It is used to buy food, shelter, and pay taxes. Perhaps you're referring to the USD no longer being redeemable for gold? Ironic considering I cannot eat gold or use it for shelter. Any portfolio manager of stocks and bonds will tell you cash is a powerful asset because of its general state of constant value. Stocks and mortgages are not represented by the blockchain, their legal ownership is represented by titles given to their owners by government institutions. Your response would be more adequate if you disproved the previous comment by actually listing a fundamental of Ethereum instead of claiming vitriol.
VonGuard 8y ago
BitCoin was backed by heroin. Ethereum is backed by something you can readily buy with a credit card. The value in crypto was initially 100% about black market liquidity among parties that could not trust one another. The second wave was speculation. Now, we're in the phase where the speculators took a bath, or even worse: they saw no movement at all. Now they're out, and we're back to buying drugs with crypto, and there are newer, better cryptos for this purpose. Dollar was originally backed by gold. BitCoin was originally backed by Heroin.
- wolco 8y ago
  Why would you say bitcoin was backed by herion and why was that word capitalized?
  - hi5eyes 8y ago
    I've noticed an area of the internet where there are prolific opium growers (and would say some are into synthesizing other schedule 1s) but they mostly use eth btc, eth and xmr are all predominantly used on dnms
  - VonGuard 8y ago
    Heroin is a commodity drug. Unlike pot, LSD, and shrooms, heroin and other opiates are must-haves because they are so addictive. There is literally a steady pace at which the users require it, different though it may be per user. Without heroin, the user is in serious pain and suffering. This basically means there is tremendous and steady demand for heroin, and thus suppliers have the upper hand. On the black market Tor sites, a lot of the forum transcripts you read insinuate that, while initial contacts may be made on these markets, some people were and are moving very large quantities of drugs through outside agreements. I've seen forum threads describing transactions between two parties that grew up to the $100k range, but of course, the side that money was transferred to vanished immediately. That means the black market sites and escrow systems are basically mandatory for these transactions to take place reliably, and thus, the market for them is out in the open, with visible pricing. In the end, the one thing that was lacking in this market was the BitCoin. High demand, low supply. Thus, the market cap of BitCoin quickly rose toward being an equivalent for the entire black market worldwide, but a better proxy for that, with a steadier definition and a fairly tight correlation to the whole shebang that is illegal commerce, is heroin. So while black market transactions in general are what really made BitCoin what it was, heroin was the only real commodity being traded that could be considered to be something similar to gold, oil, or pork bellies: more traditional goods for which the market has steady demand. I capitalized for emphasis. I consider Heroin to be sort of a synecdoche for the pricing of the black market. Heroin is the S&P 500 of the black market.
ForHackernews 8y ago
I hate proof-of-work cryptocurrencies because they're literally killing the great barrier reef to run an extremely slow database. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/602995137/climate-change-is-killing-coral-on-the-great-barrier-reef https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/602995137... As far as I'm concerned, the vitriol is more than justified. If I had my way, PoW cryptocurrencies would be illegal.
- berberous 8y ago
  That nature article is not great. It just assumes a straight line growth of energy usage. But proof of work, interestingly, could incentivize green energy development —- unlike other forms of energy production which generally need to be near the site of consumption, you could have a solar farm in the middle of nowhere and still mine bitcoin.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    Give me a fucking break, man. The “green energy” argument is a pack of crap. All that “green energy” could be going to something actually useful (say, aluminum production) instead of being literally pissed away on a “currency” that can only pull off 4 transactions a second. Just admit bitcoin and all other crypto’s waste energy by design. You can’t argue any other way and have people take you serious.
- Temasik 8y ago
  Try baking with tezos liquid democracy
r00fus 8y ago
> The US Dollar is also no longer a "claim on a productive asset" I never really saw bitcoin as a "currency" as it was designed to appreciate and consequently become an asset. USD also backed by fiat, so you don't have to trust it, just that the US Government will be solvent by the time you divest of the currency.
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  Nobody gives a shit about crypto currency. In contrast every government will perform blood magic to save the US dollar. Betting against the USD is betting against human civilization itself.
nopriorarrests 8y ago
> I have never seen such an anger surrounding a technology IMO, there is nothing emotional about stating the fact that ether&bitcoin have no fundamental value. It's as anry as "Autumn is rainy" statement. And I get that bitcoin could be the best way for me to send 10K to, say, China. I don't even dispute it. I just want to note that I can do it with bitcoin or ether priced at $10K, $1K, $1 or $0.1. It's just bits and bytes.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
pathseeker 8y ago
>Your comment is a nice summary of the vitriol surrounding crypto. I have never seen such an anger surrounding a technology since maybe printers or possibly whatever device Planned Parenthood uses to perform abortions. Because people are losing immense amounts of money to these scams. It's causing real harm.
brightball 8y ago
The value proposition of bitcoin was a mathematical limit of supply in a decentralized currency. A million currencies per day popping up essentially kills the supply limit which causes rapid, catastrophic inflation. It’s exactly the same thing as printing money with a whole lot of people trying their hardest to convince that it’s not.

cft 8y ago

I think it's the echo chamber of big tech: they don't like crypto. Probably because they want to align themselves with the regulators rather than with the anarchists. HN comments have become increasingly dominated by Google/FB employees and mid management.

vkou 8y ago

The US Dollar is a commodity with a semi-guaranteed demand, barring no radical changes in monetary policy. That's what gives it a relatively stable value. The same cannot be said for cryptocurrencies. Demand for them is speculative, and fickle.

seibelj 8y ago
Recently asset-backed stablecoins like USDC from highly regulated US organizations (Circle, Coinbase) have emerged that allow stable asset transfer over Ethereum[0]. If ETH is seen only as an asset to pay for computation, then other assets like USDC can be used as value transfer. [0] https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc
- vkou 8y ago
  If I want to buy computation, I can buy compute time on AWS/GCE/Azure for orders of magnitude cheaper then I can on the ETH network. Asset transfer is a better case, but why not use quite literally any other cryptocurrency for that, instead?
- Qworg 8y ago
  Even though they are highly regulated, you're still taking a credit risk against the organization, not the US Government. The government can create new money to service its debts, where Circle/Coinbase might go out of business.
ourmandave 8y ago
USD is fiat money. It's value is only as good as people's faith in the US government. Commodity money still has worth from what it's made from (e.g. gold) even if it's no longer used as money. I'm not sure what Ethereum is.
- vkou 8y ago
  USD's value is only as good as the US government demanding that its citizens pay it ~3 trillion dollars by April of next year. I, and the rest of the world have pretty good faith that this will happen in April 2019, and pretty good faith that it will also happen in April 2020. I have pretty good faith that if it will not happen in April 2021, I'm more likely to be scavenging for bottle caps, canned beans, and ammunition[1], then I am to be be using eth. [1] Actually, it's more likely I'd be dead, but the point would still stand.
  - ourmandave 8y ago
    Point taken. I too would be one of the first casualties as I try to pay for my plane ticket to Canada with Ethereum. Hmmm... I wonder what would happen if everyone tried to pay their taxes with Ethereum?
    - vkou 8y ago
      The same thing that would happen if everyone tried to pay your taxes with turnips, of if "What if they started a war, but nobody came?" The government would, quickly, and decisively increase punishments for non-compliance, print or borrow a wagon-full of money to make payroll, and send the police, and army in.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        Nah. If everyone is demanding it then the laws can be updated. If you had just 10% of the population loudly demanding such a payment method, and 90% generally ambivalent, you could probably make it happen.
    - 8y ago

TACIXAT 8y ago

When you dress something up like a stock (ownership of a piece of a company) but there is nothing behind it, it really starts to look like a scam. That is where the hate comes from. There are no fundamentals to analyze. For Ethereum, what do you propose? It is a way to buy incredibly inefficient computation. What are the killer smart contracts? How does the price reflect the price of computation? Has someone made a more efficient EVM? A less efficient one? The US dollar is the currency that you need to use in order to participate in the largest world economy. No one claims it has a market cap. No one claims it is going to the moon. No one tries to analyze it's fundamentals. No one is pretending it's a stock.

aey 8y ago
World spends about $2t on moving money around. The fee that you pay to transfer wealth on ethereum isnt compeating with AWS, it’s compeating with the banks computer that moves a few digits around when you make a transfer.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 8y ago
  The world doesn't spend $2t on moving money around, it spends it on moving money around, and a slate of other financial services (Mostly to do with issuing loans.)
  - aey 8y ago
    https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/A%20mixed%202015%20for%20the%20global%20payments%20industry/Global-Payments-2016.ashx https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financi... From what I can tell in the report 16% is account liquidity. The rest is actually transfers and maintenance
gweinberg 8y ago
If new dollars were created at a fixed rate rather than an accelerating one, the purchasing power of dollars would tend to go up over time.

CPLX 8y ago

I love gambling. When I was in college I learned how to beat single-deck blackjack by counting cards, which I was very proud of at the time, and I've played tons of poker in my adult life. I enjoy a trip to Las Vegas from time to time. So note that there's not a hint of anger when I point out that the fundamental use case of Ethereum is and has always been speculation.

seibelj 8y ago
If the only point of Ethereum is to speculate then the only point of angel investing is to speculate. Or perhaps you also invest for reasons not entirely based on making money?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- brokensegue 8y ago
  there's a difference between investing and speculation. angel investors should "invest"
  - seibelj 8y ago
    It’s possible that some or many of the people who bought into the original Ethereum ICO did so because they liked the idea and wanted to support development. It’s not always a pure cash grab. If the only definition of speculation is buying and selling an asset in the same day (the government’s definition of a day trader) then most are investors.
    - brokensegue 8y ago
      That's not the distinction between investing and speculation.

UncleMeat 8y ago

And most people will tell you that holding lots of US dollars and expecting to get rich is a bad idea. Stocks, bonds, land, housing, etc are all productive assets. Even if you hold these via a contract, that has precisely zero impact on the price of Ether and does not mean that holding Ether is a good investment.

arkis22 8y ago

Cash is definitely a claim on a productive asset. It is used to buy food, shelter, and pay taxes. Perhaps you're referring to the USD no longer being redeemable for gold? Ironic considering I cannot eat gold or use it for shelter. Any portfolio manager of stocks and bonds will tell you cash is a powerful asset because of its general state of constant value. Stocks and mortgages are not represented by the blockchain, their legal ownership is represented by titles given to their owners by government institutions. Your response would be more adequate if you disproved the previous comment by actually listing a fundamental of Ethereum instead of claiming vitriol.

VonGuard 8y ago

BitCoin was backed by heroin. Ethereum is backed by something you can readily buy with a credit card. The value in crypto was initially 100% about black market liquidity among parties that could not trust one another. The second wave was speculation. Now, we're in the phase where the speculators took a bath, or even worse: they saw no movement at all. Now they're out, and we're back to buying drugs with crypto, and there are newer, better cryptos for this purpose. Dollar was originally backed by gold. BitCoin was originally backed by Heroin.

wolco 8y ago
Why would you say bitcoin was backed by herion and why was that word capitalized?
- hi5eyes 8y ago
  I've noticed an area of the internet where there are prolific opium growers (and would say some are into synthesizing other schedule 1s) but they mostly use eth btc, eth and xmr are all predominantly used on dnms
- VonGuard 8y ago
  Heroin is a commodity drug. Unlike pot, LSD, and shrooms, heroin and other opiates are must-haves because they are so addictive. There is literally a steady pace at which the users require it, different though it may be per user. Without heroin, the user is in serious pain and suffering. This basically means there is tremendous and steady demand for heroin, and thus suppliers have the upper hand. On the black market Tor sites, a lot of the forum transcripts you read insinuate that, while initial contacts may be made on these markets, some people were and are moving very large quantities of drugs through outside agreements. I've seen forum threads describing transactions between two parties that grew up to the $100k range, but of course, the side that money was transferred to vanished immediately. That means the black market sites and escrow systems are basically mandatory for these transactions to take place reliably, and thus, the market for them is out in the open, with visible pricing. In the end, the one thing that was lacking in this market was the BitCoin. High demand, low supply. Thus, the market cap of BitCoin quickly rose toward being an equivalent for the entire black market worldwide, but a better proxy for that, with a steadier definition and a fairly tight correlation to the whole shebang that is illegal commerce, is heroin. So while black market transactions in general are what really made BitCoin what it was, heroin was the only real commodity being traded that could be considered to be something similar to gold, oil, or pork bellies: more traditional goods for which the market has steady demand. I capitalized for emphasis. I consider Heroin to be sort of a synecdoche for the pricing of the black market. Heroin is the S&P 500 of the black market.

ForHackernews 8y ago

I hate proof-of-work cryptocurrencies because they're literally killing the great barrier reef to run an extremely slow database. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/602995137/climate-change-is-killing-coral-on-the-great-barrier-reef https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/602995137... As far as I'm concerned, the vitriol is more than justified. If I had my way, PoW cryptocurrencies would be illegal.

berberous 8y ago
That nature article is not great. It just assumes a straight line growth of energy usage. But proof of work, interestingly, could incentivize green energy development —- unlike other forms of energy production which generally need to be near the site of consumption, you could have a solar farm in the middle of nowhere and still mine bitcoin.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Give me a fucking break, man. The “green energy” argument is a pack of crap. All that “green energy” could be going to something actually useful (say, aluminum production) instead of being literally pissed away on a “currency” that can only pull off 4 transactions a second. Just admit bitcoin and all other crypto’s waste energy by design. You can’t argue any other way and have people take you serious.
Temasik 8y ago
Try baking with tezos liquid democracy

r00fus 8y ago

> The US Dollar is also no longer a "claim on a productive asset" I never really saw bitcoin as a "currency" as it was designed to appreciate and consequently become an asset. USD also backed by fiat, so you don't have to trust it, just that the US Government will be solvent by the time you divest of the currency.

Tsubasachan 8y ago
Nobody gives a shit about crypto currency. In contrast every government will perform blood magic to save the US dollar. Betting against the USD is betting against human civilization itself.

nopriorarrests 8y ago

> I have never seen such an anger surrounding a technology IMO, there is nothing emotional about stating the fact that ether&bitcoin have no fundamental value. It's as anry as "Autumn is rainy" statement. And I get that bitcoin could be the best way for me to send 10K to, say, China. I don't even dispute it. I just want to note that I can do it with bitcoin or ether priced at $10K, $1K, $1 or $0.1. It's just bits and bytes.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

pathseeker 8y ago

>Your comment is a nice summary of the vitriol surrounding crypto. I have never seen such an anger surrounding a technology since maybe printers or possibly whatever device Planned Parenthood uses to perform abortions. Because people are losing immense amounts of money to these scams. It's causing real harm.

brightball 8y ago

The value proposition of bitcoin was a mathematical limit of supply in a decentralized currency. A million currencies per day popping up essentially kills the supply limit which causes rapid, catastrophic inflation. It’s exactly the same thing as printing money with a whole lot of people trying their hardest to convince that it’s not.