6 ms·

Bitcoin.com Lists Ponzi Token, Hex, to the Dismay of Bitcoin Fans

36 points by kylebenzle 7y ago

mrosett 7y ago
The religious wars within the cryptocurrency community are fascinating to watch and are the single biggest reason I doubt we'll ever see a meaningful use for cryptocurrency or blockchain other than speculation.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  But is this one of those? HEX is a lulzworthy new issuance stretching the imagination of the market by someone I’m not even sure could pass KYC with any bank It’s like if WeWork actually did become publicly traded by issuing shares at different prices over 365 days. It would be a non-sequitur for an outside observer to dismiss the problems - and some actual religious affinity towards Adam Neumann - as why the US markets won’t go anywhere. Itd would be A) what are you talking about and B) nonsense drivel like that is just giving WeWork a pass by criticizing the whole market instead of a shitty offering and organization
- loceng 7y ago
  Bitcoin et al is indoctrination into religion tied to financial incentive, greed.
  - djohnston 7y ago
    faith is the foundation of any economic system
    - loceng 7y ago
      Faith in that someone giving you $1 means that you trust you'll be able to spend that $1 for something of equal value?
      - djohnston 7y ago
        from the time it was given to you, yes
  - solotronics 7y ago
    I think you can make the exact same argument about any form of money. Fiat currency is definately has some religious aspects.
    - loceng 7y ago
      Actual currency - crypto-"currency" which misappropriate the term - doesn't increase in value transferring wealth to the earlier adopters, that's why currencies don't mimic Ponzi-Pyramid schemes. Currency is tied to tangibles of a nation and the intangibles of trusting that society is stable, meaning the value of the currency will be relatively stable.
  - codehalo 7y ago
    "In God we trust"?
    - loceng 7y ago
      That's a marketing statement - doesn't mean currency is a religious structure.
- wolco 7y ago
  It's similiar in the programming world but the language wars don't prevent work from getting work done. I feel like the cryto has a different story. There is a struggle to find utility because the structure of the system has too many holes. For bitcoin electrical usage is the true currency + specialized gpus. Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all. The side effect is wasting resources for no reason. For other coins each has there own story. At the core we want people to do something valuable as side effect of obtaining prove. I'm not sure we're close.
  - flyingfences 7y ago
    > Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all So, nobody can take all, then. Even putting aside power, nobody has unlimited boards. The supply of GPUs is very tightly limited by real-world factors, as anybody who tried to buy an AMD GPU a few years ago found out.
  - mrosett 7y ago
    > It's similiar in the programming world but the language wars don't prevent work from getting work done. I worked for a crypto startup in ~2017. Our product wrote a decent number of transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain, so when transaction fees went from a dime to $20 it caused a lot of headaches and I ended up dealing with it. When I asked questions online about managing transaction fees, I inadvertently wandered into a holy war and was thoroughly flamed for my trouble. It was the least pleasant experience I've had trying to get help as a dev. How can such a toxic community grow and achieve anything meaningful?
    - tom812 7y ago
      Crypto currency is a cancer community where even the sanest people are convinced they hold some sort of power to see the future.
- doublement 7y ago
  To me it seems mired in contradiction. The use case for cryptocurrencies is motivated by (though perhaps doesn't require) the assumption that accountable government is a lost cause; yet it also assumes that society provides enough stability for the protocol to operate, instead of devolving toward anarchy or totalitarianism.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    I think that's the public ideology, but the reality is the largest percentage of those who own cryptocurrency are using as nothing more than a speculative investment, and therefore, a proxy for fiat.
    - bb88 7y ago
      The original arguments for BTC are long abandoned. Store of value, cheap transactions, etc. Once those were proven to be invalid, they couldn't talk out of both sides of their mouth anymore. But it seems like the primary use cases are speculation, criminal and terrorist funding schemes, tax evasion, and money laundering.
      - jraedisch 7y ago
        What's bad about speculation? Or do you mean short term speculation? There are many bitcoins that did not move for many years. I do not get why speculation in ETFs, land/housing and other assets is accepted as normal, and with Bitcoin it is somehow bad.
        bdcravens 7y ago
        Nothing is wrong at all with speculation. What feels wrong is the disingenuousness of claiming the anti-government, anti-bank ideology when that's not its primary pragmatic use case.
        bb88 7y ago
        Actually I disagree speculation for the pure sake of speculation is bad. Otherwise it's no different than gambling that some random number will be worth more or less in the future. It's like roulette, only for the nerdy-set. If I buy Apple stock, technically that's tied to a corporation named Apple that has assets and revenue (more or less, maybe less these days than you might assume). But bitcoins are just numbers, some more valuable than others. But more to the point, hoarders were encouraging the use of bitcoin as a store of value, lying about their true use cases (speculation), hoping the big fish would start investing so the early people would cash out. It turned out to be one massive pump and dump scheme, but with cryptography, so that makes it okay.
- gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
  I read a recent opinion piece that sort of mellowed my feelings on the space, basically that crypto was never made to be mainstream (I'd argue many would view widespread use as 'meaningful'). Most of my thinking you can read crypto as bitcoin i.e. some general payment system, where in bitcoin's case its stated purpose is sort of this inexorable transaction system, it feels intuitive that the meaningful use space is intrinsically going to be fringe/taboo, because it's outside government, outside permission. I know its cliche that freedom isn't free, but what is the honest practical value of freedom unless it's scarce i.e. its impossible or someone it trying to stop you? But the point is that crypto may be an inherently fringe construct, it may provide no benefit to society because its value add might solely live in activities outside the confines of society at large. Now you can argue whether that is a net positive or negative for humanity, but I think that if "that's it", you know, I think that is a meaningful use.
nemo1618 7y ago
Headline is somewhat misleading: "Bitcoin fans" generally could not care less about Bitcoin.com, which is actually the home of the Bitcoin Cash altcoin. Bitcoin.com has been widely discredited for a long time now, largely due to its repeated attempts to conflate Bitcoin Cash with Bitcoin and thus trick unwitting consumers into using the former when they intended to use the latter; see e.g. https://bitcoinist.com/1000-people-join-crypto-industry-figures-sue-bitcoin-com-fraud https://bitcoinist.com/1000-people-join-crypto-industry-figu...
- adventskalender 7y ago
  The headline of the article actually says "BCH fans". Why does it say Bitcoin in HN? Hope it will be corrected soon.
  - diogofranco 7y ago
    Besides the BCH part of that quote, the "fans" part is also interesting. Coins having fans is... new.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      No it isn't. Rabid fanaticism goes back to the early cryptocurrency days. If anything, it's why us skeptics have a hard time taking ANYTHING the coiners say seriously.
      - awrence 7y ago
        All monetary value is entirely socially constructed, very similar to religion. And as with religion it naturally feeds on evangilizing and convincing others to join. The more adherents you have the more powerful your network / adoption gets. It's a natural consequence that any adopter of a given monetary asset will try and convince others to join. That's how you have gold bugs, real estate bugs, art bugs, fiat bugs and yes ... now crypto bugs. Don't hate the player...
        7y ago
gerikson 7y ago
The original title is “Bitcoin.com Lists Ponzi-like Token HEX to the Dismay of BCH Fans”. BCH is Bitcoin Cash, a fork organized/promoted by Roger Ver, among others. It’s currently trading at $180.67, which is 2.3% of the current Bitcoin (BTC) price. Ver owns and operates Bitcoin.com. Confusingly, /r/btc is where BCH is discussed/promoted, while /r/bch was quickly taken over by BTC proponents after Ver failed to get exchanges to recognize BCC as the ticket symbol for Bitcoin Cash. (BCC was already in use by Bitcoin Connect, a ponzi/exit scam that imploded shortly after BCH forked). Please note that using the otherwise innocuous “bcash” moniker will get you branded as a troll in the Bitcoin Cash community. I’ve forgotten the specific reason for this.
- flyingfences 7y ago
  > I’ve forgotten the specific reason for this It's because they desperately want you to call it "Bitcoin" to further their ploy. Shortening "Bitcoin Cash" to a name that isn't "Bitcoin" exposes them.
  - greenhacker 7y ago
    Exactly. Ver has repeatedly tried to hijack the bitcoin brand and confuse adopters, most notably via his ownership of bitcoin.com domain and subreddit r/btc https://greenhacker.dev/bye-bye-bcash-good-riddance-to-bad-actors/ https://greenhacker.dev/bye-bye-bcash-good-riddance-to-bad-a...
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    Well, why can’t they rightly claim they are “Bitcoin” and the current “Bitcoin” is the altcoin?
    - flyingfences 7y ago
      Because they aren't. They hard-forked away from the Bitcoin protocol to a protocol that did not adhere to the Bitcoin consensus at the time, that >90% of the nodes, miners, and businesses did not accept.
- 7y ago
Aaronstotle 7y ago
Bitcoin cash is a scam, so it's not surprising to see them list other scams. I hope that bitcoin goes back to a few hundred dollars in order to purge the market of weak crypto-currencies.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Most informed people would say that the scam is that the original Bitcoin was taken over so that its throughout could be stifled and the people controlling it could sell an awkward and unnecessary second layer. When one side says the other is a scam but goes to enormous lengths to stop technical discussions while saying that throughput below a 144p YouTube video is too much data, people should start to question whether they are being fed propaganda.
  - gruez 7y ago
    >[...] while saying that throughput below a 144p YouTube video is too much data [...] That's a gross simplification of the issue. The problem with large block sizes isn't with bandwidth, it's with the storage requirements of running a full node, and the time it takes to bring up a full new node.
    - lawn 7y ago
      None of them are good arguments against a moderate blocksize increase, such as 2 MB or 4 MB. (Segwit is an extremely inefficient increase, which in practice only increases it from 1 MB to around 1.4 MB.) And none of these limits have been tested or examined by those who oppose it. The claim is, it seems, that the current limit is perfect. Or that hard forks are "too dangerous", despite coins like Ehereum, Monero and Bitcoin Cash proving that to be false again and again. And Bitcoin also had an emergency hard fork fix (which never split the chain) when they fixed the recent infinite inflation bug. Oh and they've had a hard fork once before too. Also with storage being so cheap it's not a valid argument. Time to propagate blocks between miners is the biggest, with initial sync coming in at a distant second.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
iamaelephant 7y ago
They're all Ponzi schemes.
- behringer 7y ago
  What's all ponzi schemes?
m3kw9 7y ago
Finally, the correct name for an ICO.
tom812 7y ago
This article is a total misleading piece of information. The code of the HEX token smart contract is publicly accessible and one can clearly see it implements the logic of a CD (certificate of deposit), you only need javascript knowledge to verify that. https://etherscan.io/address/0x2b591e99afe9f32eaa6214f7b7629768c40eeb39?__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=6c62c0c1ff88063aecf8bbe033e221e734811546-1576689550-0-Ae25k10o-gxjaLKM8MUigIeBK2kc1juIy2YHsF_PzXTWYnIaCPX2N5Sbu1UxBlEvufmbUqIjLg1xq63pf20CG4qWrME79dKuzgK-OC-T-TIjgCQPSBw4PV25rrwHMX5ptdyEPArpFcRFZp25C_HIDYu4Tw71l6Sf07fCkkxNd2ryf6xeTBKJDPL4VidzL9sXEwpPoeSfGl0Cv2O9oHHX25r7DMb60y2GH-PWuNVcxozQ858TTEmlRNZU7sm9nny1QDVbuScmRJAGp0tpb5ypOC-ANrnsr1Rp7n-7FXKwqRRp5aQqLVHubuqdByDGV_BkfN4dEIH6REUCcZQruXCtVvZbsoQK73MNwOVz5i1wdOz6grGka7Rl-QvPlKuA7Ql81JCce6sBlxf0fAT-134h6HzXJ5w7kRmqky1ez0YmM5Qr66SrcMgFaM2AmJMXZCMdHA#code https://etherscan.io/address/0x2b591e99afe9f32eaa6214f7b7629... The initial airdrop amounts are totally arbitrary though, with a founder getting more than everyone else. But that doesn't make something a ponzi scheme. To qualify as a ponzi scheme you need to directly use newcomers investment money as return for old investors. There is absolutely no line of code in the contract that does this.
draw_down 7y ago
Dang, they’re tarnishing Bitcoin’s impeccable reputation!

36 points by kylebenzle 7y ago

The religious wars within the cryptocurrency community are fascinating to watch and are the single biggest reason I doubt we'll ever see a meaningful use for cryptocurrency or blockchain other than speculation.

rolltiide 7y ago
But is this one of those? HEX is a lulzworthy new issuance stretching the imagination of the market by someone I’m not even sure could pass KYC with any bank It’s like if WeWork actually did become publicly traded by issuing shares at different prices over 365 days. It would be a non-sequitur for an outside observer to dismiss the problems - and some actual religious affinity towards Adam Neumann - as why the US markets won’t go anywhere. Itd would be A) what are you talking about and B) nonsense drivel like that is just giving WeWork a pass by criticizing the whole market instead of a shitty offering and organization
loceng 7y ago
Bitcoin et al is indoctrination into religion tied to financial incentive, greed.
- djohnston 7y ago
  faith is the foundation of any economic system
  - loceng 7y ago
    Faith in that someone giving you $1 means that you trust you'll be able to spend that $1 for something of equal value?
    - djohnston 7y ago
      from the time it was given to you, yes
- solotronics 7y ago
  I think you can make the exact same argument about any form of money. Fiat currency is definately has some religious aspects.
  - loceng 7y ago
    Actual currency - crypto-"currency" which misappropriate the term - doesn't increase in value transferring wealth to the earlier adopters, that's why currencies don't mimic Ponzi-Pyramid schemes. Currency is tied to tangibles of a nation and the intangibles of trusting that society is stable, meaning the value of the currency will be relatively stable.
- codehalo 7y ago
  "In God we trust"?
  - loceng 7y ago
    That's a marketing statement - doesn't mean currency is a religious structure.
wolco 7y ago
It's similiar in the programming world but the language wars don't prevent work from getting work done. I feel like the cryto has a different story. There is a struggle to find utility because the structure of the system has too many holes. For bitcoin electrical usage is the true currency + specialized gpus. Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all. The side effect is wasting resources for no reason. For other coins each has there own story. At the core we want people to do something valuable as side effect of obtaining prove. I'm not sure we're close.
- flyingfences 7y ago
  > Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all So, nobody can take all, then. Even putting aside power, nobody has unlimited boards. The supply of GPUs is very tightly limited by real-world factors, as anybody who tried to buy an AMD GPU a few years ago found out.
- mrosett 7y ago
  > It's similiar in the programming world but the language wars don't prevent work from getting work done. I worked for a crypto startup in ~2017. Our product wrote a decent number of transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain, so when transaction fees went from a dime to $20 it caused a lot of headaches and I ended up dealing with it. When I asked questions online about managing transaction fees, I inadvertently wandered into a holy war and was thoroughly flamed for my trouble. It was the least pleasant experience I've had trying to get help as a dev. How can such a toxic community grow and achieve anything meaningful?
  - tom812 7y ago
    Crypto currency is a cancer community where even the sanest people are convinced they hold some sort of power to see the future.
doublement 7y ago
To me it seems mired in contradiction. The use case for cryptocurrencies is motivated by (though perhaps doesn't require) the assumption that accountable government is a lost cause; yet it also assumes that society provides enough stability for the protocol to operate, instead of devolving toward anarchy or totalitarianism.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  I think that's the public ideology, but the reality is the largest percentage of those who own cryptocurrency are using as nothing more than a speculative investment, and therefore, a proxy for fiat.
  - bb88 7y ago
    The original arguments for BTC are long abandoned. Store of value, cheap transactions, etc. Once those were proven to be invalid, they couldn't talk out of both sides of their mouth anymore. But it seems like the primary use cases are speculation, criminal and terrorist funding schemes, tax evasion, and money laundering.
    - jraedisch 7y ago
      What's bad about speculation? Or do you mean short term speculation? There are many bitcoins that did not move for many years. I do not get why speculation in ETFs, land/housing and other assets is accepted as normal, and with Bitcoin it is somehow bad.
      - bdcravens 7y ago
        Nothing is wrong at all with speculation. What feels wrong is the disingenuousness of claiming the anti-government, anti-bank ideology when that's not its primary pragmatic use case.
        bb88 7y ago
        Actually I disagree speculation for the pure sake of speculation is bad. Otherwise it's no different than gambling that some random number will be worth more or less in the future. It's like roulette, only for the nerdy-set. If I buy Apple stock, technically that's tied to a corporation named Apple that has assets and revenue (more or less, maybe less these days than you might assume). But bitcoins are just numbers, some more valuable than others. But more to the point, hoarders were encouraging the use of bitcoin as a store of value, lying about their true use cases (speculation), hoping the big fish would start investing so the early people would cash out. It turned out to be one massive pump and dump scheme, but with cryptography, so that makes it okay.
gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
I read a recent opinion piece that sort of mellowed my feelings on the space, basically that crypto was never made to be mainstream (I'd argue many would view widespread use as 'meaningful'). Most of my thinking you can read crypto as bitcoin i.e. some general payment system, where in bitcoin's case its stated purpose is sort of this inexorable transaction system, it feels intuitive that the meaningful use space is intrinsically going to be fringe/taboo, because it's outside government, outside permission. I know its cliche that freedom isn't free, but what is the honest practical value of freedom unless it's scarce i.e. its impossible or someone it trying to stop you? But the point is that crypto may be an inherently fringe construct, it may provide no benefit to society because its value add might solely live in activities outside the confines of society at large. Now you can argue whether that is a net positive or negative for humanity, but I think that if "that's it", you know, I think that is a meaningful use.

nemo1618 7y ago

Headline is somewhat misleading: "Bitcoin fans" generally could not care less about Bitcoin.com, which is actually the home of the Bitcoin Cash altcoin. Bitcoin.com has been widely discredited for a long time now, largely due to its repeated attempts to conflate Bitcoin Cash with Bitcoin and thus trick unwitting consumers into using the former when they intended to use the latter; see e.g. https://bitcoinist.com/1000-people-join-crypto-industry-figures-sue-bitcoin-com-fraud https://bitcoinist.com/1000-people-join-crypto-industry-figu...

adventskalender 7y ago
The headline of the article actually says "BCH fans". Why does it say Bitcoin in HN? Hope it will be corrected soon.
- diogofranco 7y ago
  Besides the BCH part of that quote, the "fans" part is also interesting. Coins having fans is... new.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    No it isn't. Rabid fanaticism goes back to the early cryptocurrency days. If anything, it's why us skeptics have a hard time taking ANYTHING the coiners say seriously.
    - awrence 7y ago
      All monetary value is entirely socially constructed, very similar to religion. And as with religion it naturally feeds on evangilizing and convincing others to join. The more adherents you have the more powerful your network / adoption gets. It's a natural consequence that any adopter of a given monetary asset will try and convince others to join. That's how you have gold bugs, real estate bugs, art bugs, fiat bugs and yes ... now crypto bugs. Don't hate the player...
      - 7y ago

gerikson 7y ago

The original title is “Bitcoin.com Lists Ponzi-like Token HEX to the Dismay of BCH Fans”. BCH is Bitcoin Cash, a fork organized/promoted by Roger Ver, among others. It’s currently trading at $180.67, which is 2.3% of the current Bitcoin (BTC) price. Ver owns and operates Bitcoin.com. Confusingly, /r/btc is where BCH is discussed/promoted, while /r/bch was quickly taken over by BTC proponents after Ver failed to get exchanges to recognize BCC as the ticket symbol for Bitcoin Cash. (BCC was already in use by Bitcoin Connect, a ponzi/exit scam that imploded shortly after BCH forked). Please note that using the otherwise innocuous “bcash” moniker will get you branded as a troll in the Bitcoin Cash community. I’ve forgotten the specific reason for this.

flyingfences 7y ago
> I’ve forgotten the specific reason for this It's because they desperately want you to call it "Bitcoin" to further their ploy. Shortening "Bitcoin Cash" to a name that isn't "Bitcoin" exposes them.
- greenhacker 7y ago
  Exactly. Ver has repeatedly tried to hijack the bitcoin brand and confuse adopters, most notably via his ownership of bitcoin.com domain and subreddit r/btc https://greenhacker.dev/bye-bye-bcash-good-riddance-to-bad-actors/ https://greenhacker.dev/bye-bye-bcash-good-riddance-to-bad-a...
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Well, why can’t they rightly claim they are “Bitcoin” and the current “Bitcoin” is the altcoin?
  - flyingfences 7y ago
    Because they aren't. They hard-forked away from the Bitcoin protocol to a protocol that did not adhere to the Bitcoin consensus at the time, that >90% of the nodes, miners, and businesses did not accept.
7y ago

Aaronstotle 7y ago

Bitcoin cash is a scam, so it's not surprising to see them list other scams. I hope that bitcoin goes back to a few hundred dollars in order to purge the market of weak crypto-currencies.

BubRoss 7y ago
Most informed people would say that the scam is that the original Bitcoin was taken over so that its throughout could be stifled and the people controlling it could sell an awkward and unnecessary second layer. When one side says the other is a scam but goes to enormous lengths to stop technical discussions while saying that throughput below a 144p YouTube video is too much data, people should start to question whether they are being fed propaganda.
- gruez 7y ago
  >[...] while saying that throughput below a 144p YouTube video is too much data [...] That's a gross simplification of the issue. The problem with large block sizes isn't with bandwidth, it's with the storage requirements of running a full node, and the time it takes to bring up a full new node.
  - lawn 7y ago
    None of them are good arguments against a moderate blocksize increase, such as 2 MB or 4 MB. (Segwit is an extremely inefficient increase, which in practice only increases it from 1 MB to around 1.4 MB.) And none of these limits have been tested or examined by those who oppose it. The claim is, it seems, that the current limit is perfect. Or that hard forks are "too dangerous", despite coins like Ehereum, Monero and Bitcoin Cash proving that to be false again and again. And Bitcoin also had an emergency hard fork fix (which never split the chain) when they fixed the recent infinite inflation bug. Oh and they've had a hard fork once before too. Also with storage being so cheap it's not a valid argument. Time to propagate blocks between miners is the biggest, with initial sync coming in at a distant second.
  - BubRoss 7y ago

iamaelephant 7y ago

They're all Ponzi schemes.

behringer 7y ago
What's all ponzi schemes?

m3kw9 7y ago

Finally, the correct name for an ICO.

tom812 7y ago

This article is a total misleading piece of information. The code of the HEX token smart contract is publicly accessible and one can clearly see it implements the logic of a CD (certificate of deposit), you only need javascript knowledge to verify that. https://etherscan.io/address/0x2b591e99afe9f32eaa6214f7b7629768c40eeb39?__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=6c62c0c1ff88063aecf8bbe033e221e734811546-1576689550-0-Ae25k10o-gxjaLKM8MUigIeBK2kc1juIy2YHsF_PzXTWYnIaCPX2N5Sbu1UxBlEvufmbUqIjLg1xq63pf20CG4qWrME79dKuzgK-OC-T-TIjgCQPSBw4PV25rrwHMX5ptdyEPArpFcRFZp25C_HIDYu4Tw71l6Sf07fCkkxNd2ryf6xeTBKJDPL4VidzL9sXEwpPoeSfGl0Cv2O9oHHX25r7DMb60y2GH-PWuNVcxozQ858TTEmlRNZU7sm9nny1QDVbuScmRJAGp0tpb5ypOC-ANrnsr1Rp7n-7FXKwqRRp5aQqLVHubuqdByDGV_BkfN4dEIH6REUCcZQruXCtVvZbsoQK73MNwOVz5i1wdOz6grGka7Rl-QvPlKuA7Ql81JCce6sBlxf0fAT-134h6HzXJ5w7kRmqky1ez0YmM5Qr66SrcMgFaM2AmJMXZCMdHA#code https://etherscan.io/address/0x2b591e99afe9f32eaa6214f7b7629... The initial airdrop amounts are totally arbitrary though, with a founder getting more than everyone else. But that doesn't make something a ponzi scheme. To qualify as a ponzi scheme you need to directly use newcomers investment money as return for old investors. There is absolutely no line of code in the contract that does this.

draw_down 7y ago

Dang, they’re tarnishing Bitcoin’s impeccable reputation!