6 ms·

This is great... easier rails into hard money (crypto).

Nursie 5y ago
Just no. Hard money is not desirable. Whatever comes out of this "the country's money supply should be determined by some cryptobros" is not going to be the result.
- casi18 5y ago
  I get the "anti-crypto-bro" sentiments, but Ive trusted the FOSS/linux communities for long enough to have open and auditable tech and clear decision making, it might not be perfect but it is a lot more transparent than my government. I'd pick the crypto-communities and thousands of people gaming them to design better mechanisms for the everyday people to use, than a few politicians and the banks that are bribing them.
  - RichEO 5y ago
    I think you might be over estimating the overlap between the FOSS/Linux community and the crytobro community - at least as it exists in 2021
    - casi18 5y ago
      I think HN repeatedly underestimates the overlap of these communities. FOSS ideology is critical in pretty much all crypto/defi projects.I can probably pick any dev in the space and they'll most likely be running linux. HN refuses to change its collective position it settled on a decade ago. It seems people here got stuck on some abstract projections of "crypto-capitalism-cruelty" and refuse to admit there might be something interesting going on. Where did the "move fast and break things" people, the "disrupt the institutions" people, and the hackers go? crypto. Or should we only be working on sass startups to reformat pdfs. is that what we're allowed to work on? everything else is a moral sin? Utterly Bizarre.
      - arberx 5y ago
        Preach!
      - Nursie 5y ago
        The problem with that is that there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting going on, beyond speculative hyper-capitalism. All the problems crypto was going to solve were illusory, or crypto was not a useful tool in solving them. Instead we’ve had years and years of hype and bubbles and solution-looking-for-a-problem but nothing much of any practical value. “Move fast and break things” now has a bad rap too in much of society - it turns out not everyone wants their things broken, and some of that stuff was useful. The world is not as in-love with the output of Silicon Valley startups as it used to be, having seen some of them play out.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Monero is very close to the original cryptocurrency dream. Private, anonymous, fast transactions, low fees, mineable by CPUs, can be and actually is used as a currency.
- bitcoinmonger 5y ago
  Agreed. The money supply should be flexible to help alleviate the effects of inevitable financial crashes. This of course devalues the savings of the average person when this happens, but it's the only way to recover from mistakes like the mortgage bubble.
  - razius 5y ago
    Mortgage bubbles don't appear out of thin air, it's a debt bubble. Why does a saver have to pay for debtors?
  - dools 5y ago
    Inflation is almost never caused by government spending. It’s caused by regulatory policy that allows, for example, bubbles in real estate or by external shocks like oil and so on. The whole “fiscal policy will debase the currency” thing is blown way out of proportion. I should also point out that there are much better financial instruments than cash to hold long term savings and they’re being made ever more accessible. The benefit of a government supplied digital currency is a payment system that isn’t run for profit.
  - ObserverNeutral 5y ago
    > Agreed. The money supply should be flexible to help alleviate the effects of inevitable financial crashes. In reality, you either do it in secret...or it makes the crash even worse because people would be even more risk averse because they see the government using these non conventional tool...hence "it must be pretty bad, better save some more" QE is the quintessential example of this. The only American who benefitted from QE was Bernanke, so he got to be hailed as a hero and now everybody genuflects to him and uses his "playbook".
    - laurencerowe 5y ago
      > QE is the quintessential example of this. The only American who benefitted from QE was Bernanke, so he got to be hailed as a hero and now everybody genuflects to him and uses his "playbook". The US came out of the 2008 Great Recession much better than the Eurozone due to its ability to borrow cheaply as a result of QE. The Eurozone was hamstrung by the ECB's inability to act similarly and the 2012 agreement to allow the ECB to purchase "unlimited" amounts of bonds saved the currency.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
This just shows that blockchain is a good technology. But that bitcoin is just an implementation waiting to become obsolete.
- disruptalot 5y ago
  I've been hearing this for 10 years straight. Thus far the only successful examples of Blockchain technology have been based on digital currencies and Bitcoin has done nothing but continue it's success. On the other hand, there is not one example of "Blockchain technology" put to work on anything that needed it.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    We use blockchain at work ( not by me). It's not because you haven't seen it in public, that it isn't used. Also: https://www.fnality.org/home https://www.fnality.org/home which the bank of england ( mentioned in the article) is a member of to settle between banks. I also wouldn't see bitcoin as a success. No one that i know of uses it in daily life ( except some being hyped by it and HODL'ing it)
    - disruptalot 5y ago
      "Blockchain" is close to useless unless it is coupled with being public, permissionless, borderless among other things. The companies that jumped on this "Blockchain" "DLT" nonsense bandwagon to this day do not understand any of the fundamentals. Just using a distributed ledger does not provide any benefits that they try to borrow from likes of Bitcoin. Distributed ledgers have existed for decades. Anyone that holds bitcoin is using it everyday as a store of value. It's unnecessary to go into all the reasons Bitcoin makes sense in this thread, plenty of resource out there. Suffice to say that by any measure, market determined or otherwise, Bitcoin's usage has constantly (or even exponentially) increased since inception. Either this hoard of people are getting more and more wrong every year, or perhaps you're looking at it from the wrong angle.
  - casi18 5y ago
    I now barely use my bank account, i get paid in dai, i pay others in dai. occasionally i have to move dai into fiat for bills. hopefully these central bank digital currencies help bridge that last step. i love it because i can write programs to move my money around. I can stream payments with https://sablier.finance https://sablier.finance i can lend and borrow with https://aave.com https://aave.com I get paid universal basic income each hour from https://www.proofofhumanity.id https://www.proofofhumanity.id I use https://yearn.finance/ https://yearn.finance/ and https://app.pooltogether.com/ https://app.pooltogether.com/ as my savings accounts. I can take a loan against my collateral with https://alchemix.fi/ https://alchemix.fi/ to buy things irl. I have a https://monolith.xyz/ https://monolith.xyz/ visa card to pay for things with my crypto (until bridges arrive). I can organise with others in https://app.daohaus.club/ https://app.daohaus.club/ and vote in https://snapshot.org/ https://snapshot.org/ At what point have we satisfied your criteria for making something useful and successful? I use it everyday, it works great for me. (all of the above is just a small set of projects on ethereum)

Just no. Hard money is not desirable. Whatever comes out of this "the country's money supply should be determined by some cryptobros" is not going to be the result.

casi18 5y ago
I get the "anti-crypto-bro" sentiments, but Ive trusted the FOSS/linux communities for long enough to have open and auditable tech and clear decision making, it might not be perfect but it is a lot more transparent than my government. I'd pick the crypto-communities and thousands of people gaming them to design better mechanisms for the everyday people to use, than a few politicians and the banks that are bribing them.
- RichEO 5y ago
  I think you might be over estimating the overlap between the FOSS/Linux community and the crytobro community - at least as it exists in 2021
  - casi18 5y ago
    I think HN repeatedly underestimates the overlap of these communities. FOSS ideology is critical in pretty much all crypto/defi projects.I can probably pick any dev in the space and they'll most likely be running linux. HN refuses to change its collective position it settled on a decade ago. It seems people here got stuck on some abstract projections of "crypto-capitalism-cruelty" and refuse to admit there might be something interesting going on. Where did the "move fast and break things" people, the "disrupt the institutions" people, and the hackers go? crypto. Or should we only be working on sass startups to reformat pdfs. is that what we're allowed to work on? everything else is a moral sin? Utterly Bizarre.
    - arberx 5y ago
      Preach!
    - Nursie 5y ago
      The problem with that is that there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting going on, beyond speculative hyper-capitalism. All the problems crypto was going to solve were illusory, or crypto was not a useful tool in solving them. Instead we’ve had years and years of hype and bubbles and solution-looking-for-a-problem but nothing much of any practical value. “Move fast and break things” now has a bad rap too in much of society - it turns out not everyone wants their things broken, and some of that stuff was useful. The world is not as in-love with the output of Silicon Valley startups as it used to be, having seen some of them play out.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Monero is very close to the original cryptocurrency dream. Private, anonymous, fast transactions, low fees, mineable by CPUs, can be and actually is used as a currency.
bitcoinmonger 5y ago
Agreed. The money supply should be flexible to help alleviate the effects of inevitable financial crashes. This of course devalues the savings of the average person when this happens, but it's the only way to recover from mistakes like the mortgage bubble.
- razius 5y ago
  Mortgage bubbles don't appear out of thin air, it's a debt bubble. Why does a saver have to pay for debtors?
- dools 5y ago
  Inflation is almost never caused by government spending. It’s caused by regulatory policy that allows, for example, bubbles in real estate or by external shocks like oil and so on. The whole “fiscal policy will debase the currency” thing is blown way out of proportion. I should also point out that there are much better financial instruments than cash to hold long term savings and they’re being made ever more accessible. The benefit of a government supplied digital currency is a payment system that isn’t run for profit.
- ObserverNeutral 5y ago
  > Agreed. The money supply should be flexible to help alleviate the effects of inevitable financial crashes. In reality, you either do it in secret...or it makes the crash even worse because people would be even more risk averse because they see the government using these non conventional tool...hence "it must be pretty bad, better save some more" QE is the quintessential example of this. The only American who benefitted from QE was Bernanke, so he got to be hailed as a hero and now everybody genuflects to him and uses his "playbook".
  - laurencerowe 5y ago
    > QE is the quintessential example of this. The only American who benefitted from QE was Bernanke, so he got to be hailed as a hero and now everybody genuflects to him and uses his "playbook". The US came out of the 2008 Great Recession much better than the Eurozone due to its ability to borrow cheaply as a result of QE. The Eurozone was hamstrung by the ECB's inability to act similarly and the 2012 agreement to allow the ECB to purchase "unlimited" amounts of bonds saved the currency.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

This just shows that blockchain is a good technology. But that bitcoin is just an implementation waiting to become obsolete.

disruptalot 5y ago
I've been hearing this for 10 years straight. Thus far the only successful examples of Blockchain technology have been based on digital currencies and Bitcoin has done nothing but continue it's success. On the other hand, there is not one example of "Blockchain technology" put to work on anything that needed it.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  We use blockchain at work ( not by me). It's not because you haven't seen it in public, that it isn't used. Also: https://www.fnality.org/home https://www.fnality.org/home which the bank of england ( mentioned in the article) is a member of to settle between banks. I also wouldn't see bitcoin as a success. No one that i know of uses it in daily life ( except some being hyped by it and HODL'ing it)
  - disruptalot 5y ago
    "Blockchain" is close to useless unless it is coupled with being public, permissionless, borderless among other things. The companies that jumped on this "Blockchain" "DLT" nonsense bandwagon to this day do not understand any of the fundamentals. Just using a distributed ledger does not provide any benefits that they try to borrow from likes of Bitcoin. Distributed ledgers have existed for decades. Anyone that holds bitcoin is using it everyday as a store of value. It's unnecessary to go into all the reasons Bitcoin makes sense in this thread, plenty of resource out there. Suffice to say that by any measure, market determined or otherwise, Bitcoin's usage has constantly (or even exponentially) increased since inception. Either this hoard of people are getting more and more wrong every year, or perhaps you're looking at it from the wrong angle.
- casi18 5y ago
  I now barely use my bank account, i get paid in dai, i pay others in dai. occasionally i have to move dai into fiat for bills. hopefully these central bank digital currencies help bridge that last step. i love it because i can write programs to move my money around. I can stream payments with https://sablier.finance https://sablier.finance i can lend and borrow with https://aave.com https://aave.com I get paid universal basic income each hour from https://www.proofofhumanity.id https://www.proofofhumanity.id I use https://yearn.finance/ https://yearn.finance/ and https://app.pooltogether.com/ https://app.pooltogether.com/ as my savings accounts. I can take a loan against my collateral with https://alchemix.fi/ https://alchemix.fi/ to buy things irl. I have a https://monolith.xyz/ https://monolith.xyz/ visa card to pay for things with my crypto (until bridges arrive). I can organise with others in https://app.daohaus.club/ https://app.daohaus.club/ and vote in https://snapshot.org/ https://snapshot.org/ At what point have we satisfied your criteria for making something useful and successful? I use it everyday, it works great for me. (all of the above is just a small set of projects on ethereum)