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The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto, and as someone deeply involved in the space, these long threads of complaints and diatribes are difficult t

The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto, and as someone deeply involved in the space, these long threads of complaints and diatribes are difficult to handle. Everyone is missing so much context. Ethereum gas prices are astronomical because there's unprecedented demand to use the network: NFT art and collectibles are exploding (NBA TopShot, Foundation, SuperRare, Rarible, OpenSea, etc.) at the same time DeFi applications (Uniswap, Compound, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc.) are at all time highs. This is the time, in my mind, that it's most exciting to work in crypto, and on Ethereum: demand has been proven and has been sustained (every block full for 1+ year). The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills.

cblconfederate 6y ago
Tech has major entrenched interests in maintening the financial status quo
Retric 6y ago
HN seems wildly pro crypto compared to most places. It’s like Tesla which isn’t universally supported, but still gets a lot more coverage than Ford. People do bring up quite reasonable objections like environmental costs, but it stories get a lot of upvotes and suggesting many people are strong supporters.
- keithtom 6y ago
  Re environmental costs, I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system or an equivalent; that is, how much to warm all the offices, the computers and servers, the transportation costs of cars & planes for all the employees. Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental cost.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Comparing the banking sector to crypto is wildly optimistic. Crypto is still smaller than just the Gold market both in number of transactions and total stored value of 9.4 trillion. Gold transactions, mining, and storage still produces significantly less CO2 while also being useful in industry. That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    The banking system _exists_. It's what powers all our daily transactions. It's what has been tried and tested for hundreds of years, and got regulated. Even if Ethereum or coin-of-the-week takes off, this existing banking system will not go away. What you're doing is a well known crypto-lover tactic to distract from the fact that cryptocurrencies are an ecological catastrophe. Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still is today.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      I strongly disagree with this loaded characterization of mining as "waste". Converting power into value is the opposite of waste, and that's not even addressing the network security that it provides. Mining provides useful work. If you don't like cryptocurrency, fine, but don't pretend that no value is being created or that no purpose exists. Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used for any purpose.
      - Retric 6y ago
        The issue isn’t the useful product of light or a functional crypto system, the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center. This should be obvious when you consider proof of work systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different externalities. Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would become roughly equivalent. PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million dollars of ASIC’s.
        Karunamon 6y ago
        the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center. ..which in the case of the average crypto, is overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that's not counting the value of every transaction included in that block. A block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and 13K transactions. There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even factoring in negative environmental externalities (which in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most people think given their proximity to renewable, hence cheap, energy.) It is, objectively speaking, not a waste.
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    The banking system does a lot of other things than transaction processing. Mortgages, loans commercial banking, trade finance, acquisition financing etc are 95% of what banks do, and cryptocoins won't replace them in any way. Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    This whataboutism ignores the logic of the question: the banking system is not incentivized to burn power. You would expect each node to try to minimize their input costs to maximize returns. For a given unit of compute, putting in more energy does not increase profits for any participant in the traditional banking system. This isn’t the case for cryptocurrencies, so they are asked a fair question.
    - svachalek 6y ago
      This isn't the case for Proof of Work cryptocurrencies. Many newer networks are moving away from the POW model.
      - shuckles 6y ago
        There might be an answer to the original question. I was pointing out, “But what about banks!?” is simply not a good one, and why it isn’t.
  - TomSwirly 6y ago
    > I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system I immediately found this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bitcoin-mining-worth-the-environmental-cost https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit... "One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card," Another way to look at it: Bitcoin uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity: https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consumes-more-electricity-than-entire-countries https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consum... With that, Bitcoin does about 300,000 transactions a day. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b... But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions alone - 3000 times as much. So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity as the entire planet produces. --- These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think, "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."
cbdumas 6y ago
What do you see as the killer use case for crypto currency/blockchain/smart contracts, etc.? I mined a few Eth in the very early days, and hung onto it until selling recently. I sold because I couldn't convince myself they had any value not based on the "greater fool theory". Was I wrong?
- pacoWebConsult 6y ago
  One, IMO, is a provably fair casino (Blackjack, Poker, etc.) that is decentralized and unregulatable.
- akudha 6y ago
  I have the same question too. Beyond speculation/greed, what are real world use cases of blockchain that can't be done with existing/mature tech? Nano seems nice for instant fee-less transfer. Other than that?
  - splintercell 6y ago
    Take for instance, my cousin's husband in India, who currently holds a bunch of black money in either INR or in gold, can buy stablecoins such as DAI, then park it in various DeFi solutions to earn a nice return on it. So not only he is gaining an exposure in Dollar instead of a highly inflationary currency like INR, he is also able to make it work instead of burying it in a bag until he needs it. Before you start with the morality of the situation, just ignore that. You wanted to see a real use case, and I am telling you about it. As it turns out, not everyone shares your moral code, or lives in the similar legal system which allows them the similar property rights. Replace that person with a Venezuelan whose currency is completely destroyed and Venezuelan Americans are trying to provide their families with money.
    - akudha 6y ago
      Ok, that makes sense. I need to read up on DeFi, don't know much about it.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
albntomat0 6y ago
As an outsider missing context, what are the answers to the following? They are all valid questions that come up every time, and aren't well answered, given my research into them. - Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable, given the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently? - Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and speculation) worth the valuation? - If Tether collapses, due to the reports of its sketchiness, what will the shock to cryptocurrency, broadly speaking, be?
- cryptograthor 6y ago
  1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-stake-pos.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-stake-pos.asp Yes, proof of stake is exactly that. 2. Read the above comment and search some of those companies 3. Binance props Tether up, so the largest Centralized exchange may suffer dramatically, but a Tether collapse would likely drive users into better stablecoin projects like USDC and DAI, being generally good for the space
- parliament32 6y ago
  - Is there anything actually wrong with PoW? It's fun to say it's "wasted" electricity, but we "waste" more power, resources, and man-hours in other trivialities (eg. video games) without really caring. - Read the whitepaper of whichever crypto you're asking about. The answer is "it depends", because each one exists to fill a different niche. - Nobody really cares about Tether, so probably nothing.
  - drcode 6y ago
    A failure of tether would certainly cause a ton of market volatility, but there's enough tether substitutes for the markets to adjust pretty quickly. Sure, the failure might freeze a lot of funds and depress market caps a bit in the process.
    - parliament32 6y ago
      Personally I doubt it. Look at the market volumes -- everyone who wants to trade shitcoins just does it with BTC pairs, and most of the big boy exchanges support USD-BTC directly.. tether was a good idea when exchanges didn't want to mess with USD but that's not really the case anymore.
chaostheory 6y ago
I'm going to agree https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 The only surprise is that HN is still a terrible place to discuss crypto. Not many posters or commenters seem to have much knowledge, which is strange for HN
- chowells 6y ago
  Maybe somehow they simultaneously have plenty of knowledge and don't agree with you. So in the spirit of education - what amazing things are there about ethereum or Bitcoin that will change my mind about their intrinsic value that I don't already know? (My current opinion is that the intrinsic value of PoW systems is negative due to low actual utility and very high cost.)
  - rudderz 6y ago
    What's the intrinsic value of USD? It's a garbage pre-mined token that's continually debased at the behest of a cabal of rich bankers so they can purchase real assets and consolidate the world's wealth. The petrodollar isn't exactly efficient either, considering the costs of the military industrial complex. Every year the USD is worth less. Every year BTC is worth more. Hope that helps.
    - chowells 6y ago
      Nope. That's the sort of argument that makes your position weaker. You see, USD has a government that asserts it is legal tender for all debts within its borders and military power to back up those assertions. These are the sort of real-world constraints that you can't just ignore. Attempting to do so makes me less charitable towards other assertions you might make. You come across as an idealist talking about their perfect dream world, not someone describing reality. Now don't get me wrong - it's important to have a perfect dream world. If you aren't working towards something, what are you doing? But at the same time, you have to accept that "this system is perfect, if you also change these thousand other things" is not compelling to someone who doesn't share your idea of utopia. To convince someone like me, you have to explain how the system improves the world as it exists now.
samvher 6y ago
I feel like the general tendency on HN (and my personal feeling about the subject) is one of interest in the tech and applications, but a feeling that the hype is bigger than the truth. The ideas that Ethereum is innovative, that there are lots of possibilities in cryptocurrencies/blockchain, that at the moment the scene has major environmental issues, and that the current high valuations are unjustified, to my mind can all be true at the same time.
- jcrubino 6y ago
  The key innovation and premise behind Ethereum was to use a virtual machine to enable smart contracts on blockchains. Now virtual machine interpreters for blockchains is common if not standard. Tough to imagine Ethereum failing any promises based on that premise.
- trident5000 6y ago
  Blockchain dapps can potentially threaten HN jobs so its not exactly a hit on here.
jordanmarshall 6y ago
Help me understand the appeal of NFT art. I love digital art, but I don't see the appeal of spending money to get the token certifying you as the owner. The image/work is still out there and can be viewed/downloaded by other people. You don't even control it, unless the artist agrees to send you all of the files and delete them on his or her system. Your name doesn't even appear next to the piece when people look at it. Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Why do people buy originals rather than prints, often at a 10x markup? Why do they get certified dog breeds rather than mutts from the animal shelter? Why do people pay for skins and unique items in video games? Why will people spend $300K on a college degree when the coursework itself is available for free on the Internet? A lot of times, people just want a limited-supply token from a third-party saying "yes, I paid for this, and that distinguishes me from the hoi polloi who got it for free".
  - potta_coffee 6y ago
    A digital mcguffin doesn't have the properties of a unique painting on a canvas.
- megameter 6y ago
  NFTs are not easy to understand, but sit within the intersection of these two questions: 1. What is the value of art? 2. What is the value of money? When we look for analogues, they're of the industrial era, things about intellectual property, branding, merchandise etc. This is a way of directly speculating on an idea. Is it a good idea? If so, then other people will want it, right? Then, the token must have value. There are no gatekeepers or enforcers to say otherwise. We have barely begun to grasp what that means.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  NFT art seems like the dumbest/faddiest/scammiest idea to come out of the crypto sure yet, and not just because the art market is super faddy and maybe scammy already. I know artists that think this is going to be their ticket. But it was never the lack of crypto that kept them from making money. It was the lack of any consumer value to their art. There are two ways to make money as an artist: you either make a few, huge pieces that sell to very rich people (making your yearly bank on one or two pieces), or you make a huge number of easily reproduceable pieces that sell to the general populace. The difficulty in both is not the creation of the pieces. It's the marketing and sales pipeline. Both rely on selling a purchaser a narrative on what the art will mean to them. Exclusivity in the former, worldliness in the latter. If you can't crack that marketing problem, you're going to ask equally zero pieces as NFT than as any other medium. And if you can crack that marketing problem, selling it as NFT does nothing for you as the artist.
megameter 6y ago
Yep, this is it. There has been a graduation from toy to tool. And...there is also rising demand for lower overheads to get the same functionality, which means there is serious competition for good tech now. If BTC and ETH are examples of "worse is better", there are some Right Things just around the corner.
PretzelPirate 6y ago
I kind of agree with what I interpret the article as saying - It was fun to work in the Ethereum space when people where there to have fun and there wasn’t so much money involved. It’s certainly not fun to contribute to Geth nowadays when every bug can have huge consequences, and the community constantly demands more performance so they can have lower costs. Peter was very clear about the burnout this causes. You can simplify that to - It’s fun to work on things when there isn’t pressure to work on them. I’ve run into this multiple times in my life, including in the blockchain space, but it isn’t really anything specific to Ethereum. Though I do feel like the author has a limited view and is attributing this to be something Ethereum specific.
- bordercases 6y ago
  Not really something to be disappointed by, considering that money would eventually have to be involved in fintech?
trident5000 6y ago
HN doesnt like blockchain because its disrupting their jobs.
dorkwood 6y ago
> The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills. I'm part of a community that's currently being overtaken by the crypto art craze, and I'm still convinced it's "all for a quick buck". The crypto art economy seems to be driven by "collectors" who will drop thousands of dollars on anyone who can get them more exposure. People who have no followers and aren't tweeting about NFTs every day generally don't get their art bought. Some of these kids who made $10,000 off a png then feel some social pressure to put some of that money back into the community, so they purchase more crypto art with the proceeds. Some collectors openly advertise their ongoing bids on social media. They want people to see that they're dropping big money on art. If it was a true art collector, wouldn't they not want to be outbid? Wouldn't they be hoping that there were as few people in the auction as possible? None of it smells right to me.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good A lot of people buy art not because they like looking at it, but because they want everyone to know that they have lots of money to drop on worthless art purchases. This motivation is reinforced if a.) everybody knows how much money they're dropping on art purchases and b.) the price keeps going up, yet they still win the bid. They want the price to go up, since a higher price just signifies how baller they are.
  - ChainOfFools 6y ago
    How does anyone know that they aren't already connected to the seller, and just passing 10,000 dollars from one wallet address they own, to another they also own, to create the appearance of a sale? You get the same veblen bragging rights, the artist (assuming they are not simply your own alter ego) gets a visibility boost and nobody is going to be motivated enough to go digging around the custody trail to prove this was a sham. This sleight of hand (in a slightly modified form) is standard operating procedure for inflating the value of ICO offerings (and by extension, crypto as a whole); I don't see why people wouldn't do it for NFTs, with the same motivations at work.
dTal 6y ago
>The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto Are we really allowing blockchains to annex the word "crypto"? "Crypto" is "cryptography". HN is not "anti-crypto", it is staunchly pro-encryption.
TomSwirly 6y ago
It's been ten years. The killer app for crypto is just one thing - crime. Money laundering, tax evasion, purchasing contraband. And yes, people have made a lot of money on pure speculation too. That's not an application. Until we see some actual real-world uses for crypto - full-time, serious uses, not someone buying a pizza as a demo - that aren't crime, we have every logical reason to be desperately skeptical of this overhyped technology.
treelovinhippie 6y ago
If you joined the Ethereum community in 2014-2016, topics like DeFi and NFT were not in the discussions. These things are pure speculative bullshit imported wholesale from the established financial system. The point of Ethereum was to build an open world computer, to decentralize power, to build collective intelligence, and to supersede the corrupt global financial system with non-speculative economic models that served the needs of humanity and the planet.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Tech has major entrenched interests in maintening the financial status quo

Retric 6y ago

HN seems wildly pro crypto compared to most places. It’s like Tesla which isn’t universally supported, but still gets a lot more coverage than Ford. People do bring up quite reasonable objections like environmental costs, but it stories get a lot of upvotes and suggesting many people are strong supporters.

keithtom 6y ago
Re environmental costs, I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system or an equivalent; that is, how much to warm all the offices, the computers and servers, the transportation costs of cars & planes for all the employees. Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental cost.
- Retric 6y ago
  Comparing the banking sector to crypto is wildly optimistic. Crypto is still smaller than just the Gold market both in number of transactions and total stored value of 9.4 trillion. Gold transactions, mining, and storage still produces significantly less CO2 while also being useful in industry. That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  The banking system _exists_. It's what powers all our daily transactions. It's what has been tried and tested for hundreds of years, and got regulated. Even if Ethereum or coin-of-the-week takes off, this existing banking system will not go away. What you're doing is a well known crypto-lover tactic to distract from the fact that cryptocurrencies are an ecological catastrophe. Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still is today.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    I strongly disagree with this loaded characterization of mining as "waste". Converting power into value is the opposite of waste, and that's not even addressing the network security that it provides. Mining provides useful work. If you don't like cryptocurrency, fine, but don't pretend that no value is being created or that no purpose exists. Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used for any purpose.
    - Retric 6y ago
      The issue isn’t the useful product of light or a functional crypto system, the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center. This should be obvious when you consider proof of work systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different externalities. Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would become roughly equivalent. PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million dollars of ASIC’s.
      - Karunamon 6y ago
        the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center. ..which in the case of the average crypto, is overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that's not counting the value of every transaction included in that block. A block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and 13K transactions. There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even factoring in negative environmental externalities (which in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most people think given their proximity to renewable, hence cheap, energy.) It is, objectively speaking, not a waste.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  The banking system does a lot of other things than transaction processing. Mortgages, loans commercial banking, trade finance, acquisition financing etc are 95% of what banks do, and cryptocoins won't replace them in any way. Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.
- shuckles 6y ago
  This whataboutism ignores the logic of the question: the banking system is not incentivized to burn power. You would expect each node to try to minimize their input costs to maximize returns. For a given unit of compute, putting in more energy does not increase profits for any participant in the traditional banking system. This isn’t the case for cryptocurrencies, so they are asked a fair question.
  - svachalek 6y ago
    This isn't the case for Proof of Work cryptocurrencies. Many newer networks are moving away from the POW model.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      There might be an answer to the original question. I was pointing out, “But what about banks!?” is simply not a good one, and why it isn’t.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  > I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system I immediately found this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bitcoin-mining-worth-the-environmental-cost https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit... "One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card," Another way to look at it: Bitcoin uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity: https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consumes-more-electricity-than-entire-countries https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consum... With that, Bitcoin does about 300,000 transactions a day. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b... But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions alone - 3000 times as much. So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity as the entire planet produces. --- These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think, "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."

cbdumas 6y ago

What do you see as the killer use case for crypto currency/blockchain/smart contracts, etc.? I mined a few Eth in the very early days, and hung onto it until selling recently. I sold because I couldn't convince myself they had any value not based on the "greater fool theory". Was I wrong?

pacoWebConsult 6y ago
One, IMO, is a provably fair casino (Blackjack, Poker, etc.) that is decentralized and unregulatable.
akudha 6y ago
I have the same question too. Beyond speculation/greed, what are real world use cases of blockchain that can't be done with existing/mature tech? Nano seems nice for instant fee-less transfer. Other than that?
- splintercell 6y ago
  Take for instance, my cousin's husband in India, who currently holds a bunch of black money in either INR or in gold, can buy stablecoins such as DAI, then park it in various DeFi solutions to earn a nice return on it. So not only he is gaining an exposure in Dollar instead of a highly inflationary currency like INR, he is also able to make it work instead of burying it in a bag until he needs it. Before you start with the morality of the situation, just ignore that. You wanted to see a real use case, and I am telling you about it. As it turns out, not everyone shares your moral code, or lives in the similar legal system which allows them the similar property rights. Replace that person with a Venezuelan whose currency is completely destroyed and Venezuelan Americans are trying to provide their families with money.
  - akudha 6y ago
    Ok, that makes sense. I need to read up on DeFi, don't know much about it.
rawtxapp 6y ago

albntomat0 6y ago

As an outsider missing context, what are the answers to the following? They are all valid questions that come up every time, and aren't well answered, given my research into them. - Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable, given the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently? - Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and speculation) worth the valuation? - If Tether collapses, due to the reports of its sketchiness, what will the shock to cryptocurrency, broadly speaking, be?

cryptograthor 6y ago
1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-stake-pos.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-stake-pos.asp Yes, proof of stake is exactly that. 2. Read the above comment and search some of those companies 3. Binance props Tether up, so the largest Centralized exchange may suffer dramatically, but a Tether collapse would likely drive users into better stablecoin projects like USDC and DAI, being generally good for the space
parliament32 6y ago
- Is there anything actually wrong with PoW? It's fun to say it's "wasted" electricity, but we "waste" more power, resources, and man-hours in other trivialities (eg. video games) without really caring. - Read the whitepaper of whichever crypto you're asking about. The answer is "it depends", because each one exists to fill a different niche. - Nobody really cares about Tether, so probably nothing.
- drcode 6y ago
  A failure of tether would certainly cause a ton of market volatility, but there's enough tether substitutes for the markets to adjust pretty quickly. Sure, the failure might freeze a lot of funds and depress market caps a bit in the process.
  - parliament32 6y ago
    Personally I doubt it. Look at the market volumes -- everyone who wants to trade shitcoins just does it with BTC pairs, and most of the big boy exchanges support USD-BTC directly.. tether was a good idea when exchanges didn't want to mess with USD but that's not really the case anymore.

chaostheory 6y ago

I'm going to agree https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 The only surprise is that HN is still a terrible place to discuss crypto. Not many posters or commenters seem to have much knowledge, which is strange for HN

chowells 6y ago
Maybe somehow they simultaneously have plenty of knowledge and don't agree with you. So in the spirit of education - what amazing things are there about ethereum or Bitcoin that will change my mind about their intrinsic value that I don't already know? (My current opinion is that the intrinsic value of PoW systems is negative due to low actual utility and very high cost.)
- rudderz 6y ago
  What's the intrinsic value of USD? It's a garbage pre-mined token that's continually debased at the behest of a cabal of rich bankers so they can purchase real assets and consolidate the world's wealth. The petrodollar isn't exactly efficient either, considering the costs of the military industrial complex. Every year the USD is worth less. Every year BTC is worth more. Hope that helps.
  - chowells 6y ago
    Nope. That's the sort of argument that makes your position weaker. You see, USD has a government that asserts it is legal tender for all debts within its borders and military power to back up those assertions. These are the sort of real-world constraints that you can't just ignore. Attempting to do so makes me less charitable towards other assertions you might make. You come across as an idealist talking about their perfect dream world, not someone describing reality. Now don't get me wrong - it's important to have a perfect dream world. If you aren't working towards something, what are you doing? But at the same time, you have to accept that "this system is perfect, if you also change these thousand other things" is not compelling to someone who doesn't share your idea of utopia. To convince someone like me, you have to explain how the system improves the world as it exists now.

samvher 6y ago

I feel like the general tendency on HN (and my personal feeling about the subject) is one of interest in the tech and applications, but a feeling that the hype is bigger than the truth. The ideas that Ethereum is innovative, that there are lots of possibilities in cryptocurrencies/blockchain, that at the moment the scene has major environmental issues, and that the current high valuations are unjustified, to my mind can all be true at the same time.

jcrubino 6y ago
The key innovation and premise behind Ethereum was to use a virtual machine to enable smart contracts on blockchains. Now virtual machine interpreters for blockchains is common if not standard. Tough to imagine Ethereum failing any promises based on that premise.
trident5000 6y ago
Blockchain dapps can potentially threaten HN jobs so its not exactly a hit on here.

jordanmarshall 6y ago

Help me understand the appeal of NFT art. I love digital art, but I don't see the appeal of spending money to get the token certifying you as the owner. The image/work is still out there and can be viewed/downloaded by other people. You don't even control it, unless the artist agrees to send you all of the files and delete them on his or her system. Your name doesn't even appear next to the piece when people look at it. Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.

nostrademons 6y ago
Why do people buy originals rather than prints, often at a 10x markup? Why do they get certified dog breeds rather than mutts from the animal shelter? Why do people pay for skins and unique items in video games? Why will people spend $300K on a college degree when the coursework itself is available for free on the Internet? A lot of times, people just want a limited-supply token from a third-party saying "yes, I paid for this, and that distinguishes me from the hoi polloi who got it for free".
- potta_coffee 6y ago
  A digital mcguffin doesn't have the properties of a unique painting on a canvas.
megameter 6y ago
NFTs are not easy to understand, but sit within the intersection of these two questions: 1. What is the value of art? 2. What is the value of money? When we look for analogues, they're of the industrial era, things about intellectual property, branding, merchandise etc. This is a way of directly speculating on an idea. Is it a good idea? If so, then other people will want it, right? Then, the token must have value. There are no gatekeepers or enforcers to say otherwise. We have barely begun to grasp what that means.
moron4hire 6y ago
NFT art seems like the dumbest/faddiest/scammiest idea to come out of the crypto sure yet, and not just because the art market is super faddy and maybe scammy already. I know artists that think this is going to be their ticket. But it was never the lack of crypto that kept them from making money. It was the lack of any consumer value to their art. There are two ways to make money as an artist: you either make a few, huge pieces that sell to very rich people (making your yearly bank on one or two pieces), or you make a huge number of easily reproduceable pieces that sell to the general populace. The difficulty in both is not the creation of the pieces. It's the marketing and sales pipeline. Both rely on selling a purchaser a narrative on what the art will mean to them. Exclusivity in the former, worldliness in the latter. If you can't crack that marketing problem, you're going to ask equally zero pieces as NFT than as any other medium. And if you can crack that marketing problem, selling it as NFT does nothing for you as the artist.

megameter 6y ago

Yep, this is it. There has been a graduation from toy to tool. And...there is also rising demand for lower overheads to get the same functionality, which means there is serious competition for good tech now. If BTC and ETH are examples of "worse is better", there are some Right Things just around the corner.

PretzelPirate 6y ago

I kind of agree with what I interpret the article as saying - It was fun to work in the Ethereum space when people where there to have fun and there wasn’t so much money involved. It’s certainly not fun to contribute to Geth nowadays when every bug can have huge consequences, and the community constantly demands more performance so they can have lower costs. Peter was very clear about the burnout this causes. You can simplify that to - It’s fun to work on things when there isn’t pressure to work on them. I’ve run into this multiple times in my life, including in the blockchain space, but it isn’t really anything specific to Ethereum. Though I do feel like the author has a limited view and is attributing this to be something Ethereum specific.

bordercases 6y ago
Not really something to be disappointed by, considering that money would eventually have to be involved in fintech?

trident5000 6y ago

HN doesnt like blockchain because its disrupting their jobs.

dorkwood 6y ago

> The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills. I'm part of a community that's currently being overtaken by the crypto art craze, and I'm still convinced it's "all for a quick buck". The crypto art economy seems to be driven by "collectors" who will drop thousands of dollars on anyone who can get them more exposure. People who have no followers and aren't tweeting about NFTs every day generally don't get their art bought. Some of these kids who made $10,000 off a png then feel some social pressure to put some of that money back into the community, so they purchase more crypto art with the proceeds. Some collectors openly advertise their ongoing bids on social media. They want people to see that they're dropping big money on art. If it was a true art collector, wouldn't they not want to be outbid? Wouldn't they be hoping that there were as few people in the auction as possible? None of it smells right to me.

nostrademons 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good A lot of people buy art not because they like looking at it, but because they want everyone to know that they have lots of money to drop on worthless art purchases. This motivation is reinforced if a.) everybody knows how much money they're dropping on art purchases and b.) the price keeps going up, yet they still win the bid. They want the price to go up, since a higher price just signifies how baller they are.
- ChainOfFools 6y ago
  How does anyone know that they aren't already connected to the seller, and just passing 10,000 dollars from one wallet address they own, to another they also own, to create the appearance of a sale? You get the same veblen bragging rights, the artist (assuming they are not simply your own alter ego) gets a visibility boost and nobody is going to be motivated enough to go digging around the custody trail to prove this was a sham. This sleight of hand (in a slightly modified form) is standard operating procedure for inflating the value of ICO offerings (and by extension, crypto as a whole); I don't see why people wouldn't do it for NFTs, with the same motivations at work.

dTal 6y ago

>The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto Are we really allowing blockchains to annex the word "crypto"? "Crypto" is "cryptography". HN is not "anti-crypto", it is staunchly pro-encryption.

TomSwirly 6y ago

It's been ten years. The killer app for crypto is just one thing - crime. Money laundering, tax evasion, purchasing contraband. And yes, people have made a lot of money on pure speculation too. That's not an application. Until we see some actual real-world uses for crypto - full-time, serious uses, not someone buying a pizza as a demo - that aren't crime, we have every logical reason to be desperately skeptical of this overhyped technology.

treelovinhippie 6y ago

If you joined the Ethereum community in 2014-2016, topics like DeFi and NFT were not in the discussions. These things are pure speculative bullshit imported wholesale from the established financial system. The point of Ethereum was to build an open world computer, to decentralize power, to build collective intelligence, and to supersede the corrupt global financial system with non-speculative economic models that served the needs of humanity and the planet.