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I don't understand all the Crypto hate on this site. Since when have hackers become the luddites to new ways of finance?
by fasteddie31003 6y ago
I don't understand all the Crypto hate on this site. Since when have hackers become the luddites to new ways of finance?
- speedgoose 6y agoIt's more proof of work hate.
- fasteddie31003 6y agoThen can Etherium 2.0 get some love?
- prepend 6y ago“Hey there, you love the rich getting richer and a perpetual level of Uber rich controlling the financial system that is unbreakable? Then you’re going to love proof of stake.”
- fasteddie31003 6y agoWhy is that? The consensus mechanism only prevents a 51% attack?
- RhodoGSA 6y agoBecause the more money you have, the more money you make. That's why polkadot nominated proof of stake, which splits the rewards across validators equally to ensure even returns across the dot.
- whitepaint 6y agoAnyone can stake. Even if you don't have 32 ethers.
- prepend 6y agoPeople with more can stake more. Over time stakes will get bigger and bigger.
- dlubarov 6y agoWell, it's still fair in the sense that everyone has access to the same rate of return, if they choose to stake. (And in some modern PoS designs, staking nodes can be run with very little resources.) Consider a hypothetical blockchain where every account is subject to a tax of 10% per year, and the proceeds are burned. One might say that everyone is getting poorer, and the rich are getting poorer at a faster rate. But of course there's no real difference. If every account receives a 10% reward or a 10% tax, we all end up with the same share of the token supply at the end of the day.
- prepend 6y agoThe current minimum stake is $50k and will likely only get bigger over time as there’s more people willing to stake than need to be staked. So it’s already really exclusive as only a very few people have $50k available.
- dlubarov 6y agoEth2's design supports staking pools though, so it just takes ~$20 to participate, depending on the pool. Granted, some of the staking rewards go to the node operator, but it's a competitive market, so the difference should be comparable to the costs of operating a node. There are also some sharded PoS designs where staking can be done in a really lightweight manner -- the process can be mostly idle, and only sync when it's the user's turn to do something -- even on a mobile device.
- colinmhayes 6y agoThe rich get richer is a truism. Crypto can't change that, it would take a complete political revolution.
- prepend 6y agoGood point, the intent of my comment is that it accelerates and magnifies the rate the rich get richer. There are many things that don’t do that, and even reduce the amount that rich get richer.
- christiansakai 6y agoThe rich has incentive to not fuck up the system in Proof of Stake.
- christiansakai 6y agoThis.
- paulgb 6y agoHN was one of the first sites on the crypto bandwagon in the early 2010s. I can't speak for everyone but it seems like a lot of us turned against PoW when the amount of energy waste became clear.
- lm28469 6y agoCryptos are purely a speculation vessel, they don't fix many of the problems they claim to fix and add tons of problems over other currencies I'm fine with cryptos as long as they're not pitched as something they're not
- fasteddie31003 6y agoFiat currency is fundamentally more speculative IMO because the value is more based on government trust that something not man-made.
- riffraff 6y agobut as repeated every time this comes up, the government trust is enough, because I can pay my taxes with it, which you can't do with my trust.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThat's not really what "speculative" means in this context. Fiat currency isn't speculative because companies hold it for the purpose of using it. No matter what dollars are based on, Tesla has to hold some in order to pay the bills. "Speculative" means that Tesla has no current plans to actually use their Bitcoin holdings; the only purpose of buying them was to bet that they'll go up.
- johnyzee 6y ago> the only purpose of buying them was to bet that they'll go up. Which seems a good bet, when the government is increasing the fiat money supply by 40% per year [1]. [1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4392716-in-october-money-supply-growth-remained-near-all-time-highs https://seekingalpha.com/article/4392716-in-october-money-su...
- robjan 6y agoYou could use that same argument for anything you can buy with dollars, including the metal used to mint them.
- api 6y agoIt's not new, and it's been through at least one hype cycle. HN likes novelty and dislikes last year's hype. It loves this year's hype though.
- hoseja 6y agoThey were probably too smart to buy into the obvious scam when it cost pennies.
- Fischinn 6y agoSince hackers can see climate change in action and don't think its smart to burn to a lot of energy for something which hasn't proven shit over its existence and still hasn't solved a real world problem. Besides buying drugs anonymosly through tor.
- whitepaint 6y agoYou should look into Ethereum.
- hfsp 6y agoHave fun staying poor.
- Fischinn 6y agohttps://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-plans-to-cut-its-absurd-energy-consumption-by-99-percent https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-plans-... Right now i can't get a graphics card because its much more efficient to use those chips for ethereum. In parallel i'm still quite happy with how my banking account works. So, why would i wanna look into Ethereum? Besides to wanna know why i can't get a graphics card?
- cwhiz 6y agoAround the time Tether became the crypto fed and everyone just shrugged. It’s a scam. Maybe it always was.
- Closi 6y ago> I don't understand all the Crypto hate on this site. Since when have hackers become the luddites to new ways of finance? For me, it's because nobody can explain what the value offering of Bitcoin is - mainly the question 'what can I actualy do with a bitcoin?'. It's a bad currency because it is slow to exchange and costs lots of money to exchange - I can't use it to buy my coffee in the morning. It's a bad non-speculative asset, because it can't produce anything to deliver returns. But it's performed well as a highly-speculative asset - i.e. it's good because its value is rising. But other than the fact it's price is going up, what's good about it? Like where are the funamentals? If it's price was stable, why would people want to hold it? Is it's value just that it's value is rising? And if the answer to the question 'what can i do with a bitcoin?' is 'Wait until it is valuable, and then you can turn it into a currency you can actually spend' then it's not actually fulfilling what it set out to achieve.
- bsaul 6y agoI made a bet with a friend based on that same reasoning two years ago, i know owe him. I believe the problem with market price in general is that there's no way to correctly evaluate if a price is "rational" or not. There are so many things plain wrong with the current state of the economy (from central banks monetary policies, to inflation, to interest rates) that i don't even consider bitcoin to be anything special anymore. It all looks like a degenerate monster agonizing, making all kind of weird sounds and shapes while going down.
- Closi 6y agoI think the bet with your friend was sensible - but it does show the problem with bubbles, which is you can never predict when they go pop :) I've got no idea if it will pop in 1 day or in 50 years, but I think I've just got to stick to my guns that the fundamentals aren't there. And maybe I'll loose a lot of money compared to investing, but again, you never know where you are in the bubble cycle!
- DennisP 6y agoIf another cryptocurrency fixed the scaling problem so it could be used as a currency, would you have a different view?
- jcranmer 6y agoIn recent times, it seems that the reaction to cryptocurrencies here has mostly settled into either greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread or this-is-pure-snake-oil camps, with no one really adopting a neutral view, and it's hard for me to say which view is heavily dominant on Hacker News. Speaking as someone who tends towards the latter camp, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies feel to me a lot more like a solution in search of a problem. It's been around for over a decade, and yet the only financial niches it seems to have occupied is drying up the supplies of GPUs and providing a speculative bubble. Actually using it for end-user transactions seems to have gone down from a peak several years ago, and acting as a settlement layer is a use case that everyone talks about but has never actually come about.
- tryonenow 6y agoI don't think those with neutral perspectives have much incentive to comment.
- 3solarmasses 6y agoIt's because 98% of the people on here haven't actually used DeFi. The most they've done is bought and sold a little btc or eth on coinbase. The ah-ha moments come from real use.
- Hamuko 6y agoI'd say the fastest way of making someone have a bad view of Bitcoin is to make them buy something with Bitcoin. I've actually had to buy Bitcoin in order to pay for something that was about $20. Talk about a hassle and fees upon fees.
- heckerhut 6y agoCompletely unrelated to what the parent was saying.
- qqn 6y agoI've paid tuition twice abroad. Once it took days, multiple forex/bank accounts, and had several annoying surprise fees. The second was in BTC and was settled in five minutes, directly. It's been said before but the experience is a lot like writing an email versus a letter.
- brandmeyer 6y agoWould you like to take out fixed interest rate loan, payed out over the next 5 years, which is priced and scheduled in BTC? Because it sounds like an absolute horror show for every party in the transaction to me. Unless you can make long-term transactions and payment schedules with it, then its not a good currency.
- fasteddie31003 6y agoIn crypto you can make smart contracts based on stable coins that emulate a fixed interest loan.
- sireat 6y agoMany of us have been around crypto for a long time (meaning since 2010-2011) and have not seen any progress in positive terms. Most of crypto growth has been pure speculation/ crypto2crytpo related services/morally questionable uses. Positives * ... Sort of positive/sort of negative: Evading capital controls Being your own bank.. Big Negatives: * POW energy use - huge one * POS stakeholder issue * Hard to use for Joe Sixpack * Promotes speculation for speculation's sake(I'd say 90%+) * Instead of Central Reserve Bank you have very shady stablecoins run by select few individuals - ahem Tether and not only Tether Maybe someone can educate me on benefits of DeFi for a regular human being?
- hfsp 6y agoDefi is a scam. Have you calculated the energy costs of the current system, when yelling "huge" energy use? Have you considered the wasted energy of a government halving a fiat currency holder's purchasing power in a year or less?
- pelliphant 6y agoWhat are the positive sides of "Evading capital controls"? Also, does POS here mean "piece of shit"?
- sireat 6y agoWell, if the government is truly repressive evading capital controls can be considered a good thing. I am still convinced that most people willingly holding Tether are trying to avoid paying taxes and skirt KYC. That is the only sane explanation for this insanity.
- intothev01d 6y agoRight? Back in 2016/2017 it seemed more open. There was discussion about technology. I remember quite a bit about Bitcoin and blockchain, Ethereum, smart contract platforms etc. There's been a lot of technical innovation in these areas. Ethereum has a real product in DeFi nowadays and there's been some really amazing technical achievements. With Ethereum's move to PoS it will put the argument of energy consumption behind us and then the merits of having a distributed worldwide computation system might get talked about again. I don't get the hate now. Maybe people are just holding backs and are bitter about it
- p0nce 6y agoI'm tired of always hearing from Crypto. It's just money, and it doesn't solve any problem. It's beyond boring honestly.
- fasteddie31003 6y agoLook into smart contracts. If you find the possibilities of smart contracts boring, I'd like to hear what makes you excited about the future? My lawyer friend who makes derivative contracts mind got blown away by the possibilities of smart contracts replacing every derivative contract he writes.
- p0nce 6y agoIt's a neat idea that I don't want to hear about more than once a year, at most.
- pelliphant 6y agoI'm a crypto hater, I consider bitcoin to be a pyramid scheme. And also, I think that it is a positive thing that an institution that I can influence (government) is in control of deciding how transactions work. This might also be a cultural thing, since I'm scandinavian, and "we" generally consider government regulation as something necessary.
- fasteddie31003 6y agoTo some aspect every asset is part pyramid scheme.
- pelliphant 6y agoOk, but if I rephrase it as: I consider bitcoin to be more of a pyramid scheme then your average asset.
- xerxespoy 6y agoAfter 12 years and billions invested in its pyramid, the numbers appear to suggest it's also a much sounder investment than your average asset: https://www.casebitcoin.com/images/stories/charliebilello_returns_btc.png https://www.casebitcoin.com/images/stories/charliebilello_re... Another way to look at Bitcoins meteoric rise over the past ten years is as a catastrophic crash in value of the assets it (and currencies like it) may be in the process of replacing.
- qqii 6y agoAs a counter to being a pyramid scheme, we've seen the 4 year moving average price of bitcoin continue to trend upwards. That's more than 10 years and the price hasn't collapsed. Bitcoin governance is performed through mining pools signaling their opinion on proposals, we saw this with segwit and larger block sizes. As a relevant example Ethereum currently is going through a proposal and one pool has been vocal in being against it, another vocally for it. As a result miners have moved their hashrate accordingly. At these kind of scales I don't see how it's that much different form government. The rules are different, the norms are different but governance exists.
- Hamuko 6y agoJust because it's new doesn't make it good or valuable. If I was looking for a new way of finance, I'd prefer it to not be a massive electricity sink.
- zionic 6y agoIt would appear the corpo mercs have outnumbered the hackers for some time.
- pelliphant 6y agoAm I a "corpo merc" since I don't like crypto currency? What does that even mean?
- MrMan 6y agocorpo mercs are greedy opportunists HN is full of them pretending to be hackers, and who play upon hackers' collective sense of self to peddle investment schemes
- pelliphant 6y agopeddle investment schemses, that sounds like cryptocurrency proponents to me...
- agloeregrets 6y agoCrypto at this point makes zero sense as any future of finance. It doesn't work. It's pretty much vaporware that has been hyped to the point that people didn't realize it will never work mass-scale as is. The hype drove early holders to massive income (like an MLM scheme) but ledger uses so much massive energy and power to process transactions that it is HORRIBLE for planet earth. Like running Crypo on the global scale would involve power use on the scale of multiple first world countries combined that would get worse and worse as hardware limitations hit. In a few years of mass-scale use Cryto would use more power than pretty much planet earth. The only solution to this is developments in Eth. but thats still far off and has its own downsides.
- charcircuit 6y agoIf everyone on earth used Bitcoin the energy use would not go up. What would go up would be transaction fees because bitcoin only can process like 4 transactions every second. Proof of work is not the only trustless consensus algorithm and there are already plenty of projects on varieties of proof of stake.
- agloeregrets 6y agoHa, I don't think you understand what you are saying. Okay, so what would happen if say transaction volume was 1000x current? how expensive would fees be? What would have to happen to make the hashrate go up so those fees are cheaper than credit card transactions (~2%) let alone ACH (Free)? Whats the point of bitcoin if buying a $3 coffee comes with $2 in fees too and the transaction takes 8 days? It would seem you would need much more more and faster mining equipment to keep the fee low, right? Bitcoin at current scale couldn't possibly run mass scale daily transactions as rates are WAY too slow and price variation is too high. You would have to scale mining as well, which seems a bit obvious to lead to massive global power use. the PoS work seems promising but has ZERO traction anywhere right now and has its own massive dangers, right now the entire market is basically the Gamestock drama but everyone seriously belives and thinks that this will be the future of money like as if the people investing in $GME were thinking Gamestop may just put walmart out of business.
- shortandsweet 6y agoWhat do you expect? A bunch of kool-aid drinkers? Good hackers have a healthy skepticism to most things. Sign of intelligent thinking to ask questions.
- cblconfederate 6y agoHackers?
- Ekaros 6y agoI just don't see crypto as any better than current fiat system I use. Including horrible players like PayPal... I trust my bank more than I trust any online wallet or exchange... And on other hand I know that I might be able to fix issues with my bank account. Not so much with lost keys or miss typed destination address and so on... Actually, bit-flips of addresses could be wonderful unrecoverable mess...
- hollerith 6y agoHaving joined Team Technology, we would be disloyal if we are against any technology? Is that your view?