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Crypto is an evolving technology. Why is HN so bitter towards it? I find it strange that everyone here simply dismisses it as a worthless concept. What brand-ne

Crypto is an evolving technology. Why is HN so bitter towards it? I find it strange that everyone here simply dismisses it as a worthless concept. What brand-new, experimental technologies with open-source development have ever been perfect from the get-go? What other technology today provides rapid exchange of unlimited amounts of value, instantly? What other technology today can do so in a censorship-resistant manner? ACH and wire transfer take way longer to settle. The same goes for PayPal, Venmo, and CashApp to hit your bank. Zelle works, only sometimes. All solutions are centralized, proprietary, and KYC. There is no way for the average person or small community to exchange value without being at the mercy of a big bank. What we have with crypto is a way to exchange actual value in a decentralized, democratic manner in anywhere from <5 seconds to just a few minutes (depending on your currency). We also have a way to recreate many financial concepts with smart contracts. This could be a huge win for humanity - the democratization of finance, banking the unbanked, and bringing financial privacy and power back to the individual. And sure, crypto has an energy problem today. A lot of cryptos are solving this. This is a temporary, intermediate problem. In the meantime, I guarantee you that plenty of things that provide less benefit to humanity but consume more energy. Again, I don’t know where everyone suddenly decided that crypto has to be perfect today. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Crypto is very much in its infancy and a ton of work is being done at the protocol level across all cryptocurrencies every day.

matzab 5y ago
As always when there is hype, there will be an equal (or even larger) and opposite counter-hype. Both are rather tiresome.
user-the-name 5y ago
It has been "evolving" for 12 years. iPhones have been around for about as long as cryptocurrency has. This is a million years in tech. They are still absolute unusable junk with a million problems. It's not early days, it's the twilight of a failing technology.
- xvector 5y ago
  In each of those 12 years there has been significant work at the protocol level. You forget that these are mostly volunteers working on these projects. > It's not early days, it's the twilight of a failing technology. This would be true if there was no active development, but development has only been increasing in pace year by year.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    What is that development going to achieve now, that it hasn't managed in twelve whole years?
    - xvector 5y ago
      Clearly there have been massive strides in twelve years. Crypto of twelve years ago was nothing like crypto today. Today, you have anonymity, you have fast and feeless transactions, etc. You haven’t made your expectations for crypto clear, to be honest, so it’s difficult to understand why you think it has failed when it is rapidly improving even today.
simias 5y ago
11 years of evolution and counting, and still nothing to show for it besides the now habitual pump-and-dump cycle. If cryptocurrencies are so good at transferring money what's stopping them from replacing existing solutions? Literal billions have been poured in the tech and it still fails to reach any significant adoption outside of get-rich-quick schemes. In 2017 during the previous bubble I asked people on this forum how long it'd be before cryptocurrencies actually delivered on that mythical "tech" and we'd get actual mainstream real world applications. A couple of people replied that it would take a year or two. Can I get an update on that?
- xvector 5y ago
  > 11 years of evolution and counting, and still nothing to show for it besides the now habitual pump-and-dump cycle What, precisely, are you looking for cryptocurrencies to “show” you? Transactions work today. Plenty of people use them for exchanging actual value, quickly and anonymously (or pseudonymously) across the world. > If cryptocurrencies are so good at transferring money what's stopping them from replacing existing solutions? Why would the financial industry do anything to encourage the adoption of crypto? It strips them of their power. They rely on you keeping and sending money with them - the democratized platform of cryptocurrencies are a potential threat. > Literal billions have been poured in the tech Sorry, billions have been poured into a worthless speculative market. The developers are not receiving billions, they are still volunteers. And yet there has been a massive amount of development in the crypto space over the past 12 years. NANO enabling instant transactions, XMR allowing for privacy, etc. > how long it'd be before cryptocurrencies actually delivered on that mythical "tech" and we'd get actual mainstream real world applications […] Can I get an update on that? I ask again, what exactly are you looking for? In terms of real-world usage, well, crypto has been used for years. Drug/Darknet markets, for one. Ransomware for another. These are stress-tests for any currency and prove that crypto can work to exchange value in a real market setting. Further adoption is really up to people, and it will likely happen anyways as the technology improves. A lot of work has been done, but there is a long way to go.
  - jlokier 5y ago
    > The developers are not receiving billions, they are still volunteers. This has not been true for some years. There's been a lot of ICO money, and some of it is used to pay full time developers.
llaolleh 5y ago
Hacker news is extremely anti crypto. I wonder if many folks actually made a peer to peer crypto transaction without an exchange, sat down, and thought about the implications. It didn't click for me until I did it. Once you think about the implications of that it is fucking amazing.We need it. Generate a bank account with code, no bs paperwork or going through bank clerk. Then immediately send store of value to that account, or anyone in the world. Check it on a node(you can host the checker YOURSELF, or anyone you trust) within the hour, and the transaction is set in stone. Irreversible. If I want to give cash to my favorite niece, I don't need to go get permission from a bank. I hand it to her. So why is it so hard to understand that as a citizen of the information age, we all need to have the equivalent option of direct transfers with minimal meddling? Many arguments against cryptocurrencies are weak - they're not unsolvable problems. Slow transaction times arguments could be analogous to slow computer times in the 90s. Better tech and algorithms will patch it. Volatility in the long term can be solved with higher adoption since the supply is tiny relative to the dollar. Or a clever incentive scheme like dai. Security screw ups are due to people not being educated and not having separate devices. Intuitive devices for security have not been made and it will take time. Transaction irreversibly can be solved when stores build on top of the blockchain platforms. Or escrows.Satoshi hints at this on the FIRST page of the bitcoin white paper. Smart contracts requiring good faith from people to run it? Sure, but it's still better and more automated compared to the systems we have now. At the end of the day, robots in the future are not going to interface with multiple shitty bank apis that take 5 business days to settle entrenched by tech debt running shitty Java code. They're going to go through one of new universal platforms that have attributes like Ethereum. So the question is - which horse do we back???
- Nursie 5y ago
  > Generate a bank account with code, no bs paperwork or going through bank clerk. Not useful to most people > the transaction is set in stone. Irreversible. An anti-feature. > we all need to have the equivalent option of direct transfers with minimal meddling? We have direct transfers, and nobody has ever stopped one of mine. You're trying to find a revolution in things most people don't care about, at all. Non-solutions for non-problems. > Better tech and algorithms will patch it. Demonstrably untrue - BTC is still king, and the market follows it slavishly. The BTC community (miners, big exchanges and developers, not users) has demonstrated that they aren't interested in change, by continuing to limit transaction throughput, sticking with PoW etc. The users have demonstrated they don't care either, by continuing to support BTC over others. It's speculation and brand recognition, not tech, that people are interested in. > Security screw ups are due to people not being educated Which they never will be en-mass, making a system with irreversible transactions a poor choice for widespread use. Smart contracts are a joke, and have unsolvable problems when it comes to interfacing with anything that happens outside of a blockchain. They are effectively database triggers, not a revolution. At the end of the day, robots in the future are more likely to talk to standardised central bank APIs or standardised retail bank APIs.
jcpham2 5y ago
> Why is HN so bitter towards it? I find it strange that everyone here simply dismisses it as a worthless concept. What brand-new, experimental technologies with open-source development have ever been perfect from the get-go? I don't know personally, but burning time on the internet just to type out words and try to convince other people of your opinions - this does not speak to me. I put my money in play and that speaks volumes.
ejanus 5y ago
Thanks so much, you read my mind.
mekster 5y ago
When money is involved seeing millionaires pop up on every bubble, people lose being honest and just lick the wound of missing it out on their own by finding out the worse side of things. The technology has a future and more applications may come out from more evolved concepts and so far the security seems to be holding well and there's very little to be bitter about.

matzab 5y ago

As always when there is hype, there will be an equal (or even larger) and opposite counter-hype. Both are rather tiresome.

user-the-name 5y ago

It has been "evolving" for 12 years. iPhones have been around for about as long as cryptocurrency has. This is a million years in tech. They are still absolute unusable junk with a million problems. It's not early days, it's the twilight of a failing technology.

xvector 5y ago
In each of those 12 years there has been significant work at the protocol level. You forget that these are mostly volunteers working on these projects. > It's not early days, it's the twilight of a failing technology. This would be true if there was no active development, but development has only been increasing in pace year by year.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  What is that development going to achieve now, that it hasn't managed in twelve whole years?
  - xvector 5y ago
    Clearly there have been massive strides in twelve years. Crypto of twelve years ago was nothing like crypto today. Today, you have anonymity, you have fast and feeless transactions, etc. You haven’t made your expectations for crypto clear, to be honest, so it’s difficult to understand why you think it has failed when it is rapidly improving even today.

simias 5y ago

11 years of evolution and counting, and still nothing to show for it besides the now habitual pump-and-dump cycle. If cryptocurrencies are so good at transferring money what's stopping them from replacing existing solutions? Literal billions have been poured in the tech and it still fails to reach any significant adoption outside of get-rich-quick schemes. In 2017 during the previous bubble I asked people on this forum how long it'd be before cryptocurrencies actually delivered on that mythical "tech" and we'd get actual mainstream real world applications. A couple of people replied that it would take a year or two. Can I get an update on that?

xvector 5y ago
> 11 years of evolution and counting, and still nothing to show for it besides the now habitual pump-and-dump cycle What, precisely, are you looking for cryptocurrencies to “show” you? Transactions work today. Plenty of people use them for exchanging actual value, quickly and anonymously (or pseudonymously) across the world. > If cryptocurrencies are so good at transferring money what's stopping them from replacing existing solutions? Why would the financial industry do anything to encourage the adoption of crypto? It strips them of their power. They rely on you keeping and sending money with them - the democratized platform of cryptocurrencies are a potential threat. > Literal billions have been poured in the tech Sorry, billions have been poured into a worthless speculative market. The developers are not receiving billions, they are still volunteers. And yet there has been a massive amount of development in the crypto space over the past 12 years. NANO enabling instant transactions, XMR allowing for privacy, etc. > how long it'd be before cryptocurrencies actually delivered on that mythical "tech" and we'd get actual mainstream real world applications […] Can I get an update on that? I ask again, what exactly are you looking for? In terms of real-world usage, well, crypto has been used for years. Drug/Darknet markets, for one. Ransomware for another. These are stress-tests for any currency and prove that crypto can work to exchange value in a real market setting. Further adoption is really up to people, and it will likely happen anyways as the technology improves. A lot of work has been done, but there is a long way to go.
- jlokier 5y ago
  > The developers are not receiving billions, they are still volunteers. This has not been true for some years. There's been a lot of ICO money, and some of it is used to pay full time developers.

llaolleh 5y ago

Hacker news is extremely anti crypto. I wonder if many folks actually made a peer to peer crypto transaction without an exchange, sat down, and thought about the implications. It didn't click for me until I did it. Once you think about the implications of that it is fucking amazing.We need it. Generate a bank account with code, no bs paperwork or going through bank clerk. Then immediately send store of value to that account, or anyone in the world. Check it on a node(you can host the checker YOURSELF, or anyone you trust) within the hour, and the transaction is set in stone. Irreversible. If I want to give cash to my favorite niece, I don't need to go get permission from a bank. I hand it to her. So why is it so hard to understand that as a citizen of the information age, we all need to have the equivalent option of direct transfers with minimal meddling? Many arguments against cryptocurrencies are weak - they're not unsolvable problems. Slow transaction times arguments could be analogous to slow computer times in the 90s. Better tech and algorithms will patch it. Volatility in the long term can be solved with higher adoption since the supply is tiny relative to the dollar. Or a clever incentive scheme like dai. Security screw ups are due to people not being educated and not having separate devices. Intuitive devices for security have not been made and it will take time. Transaction irreversibly can be solved when stores build on top of the blockchain platforms. Or escrows.Satoshi hints at this on the FIRST page of the bitcoin white paper. Smart contracts requiring good faith from people to run it? Sure, but it's still better and more automated compared to the systems we have now. At the end of the day, robots in the future are not going to interface with multiple shitty bank apis that take 5 business days to settle entrenched by tech debt running shitty Java code. They're going to go through one of new universal platforms that have attributes like Ethereum. So the question is - which horse do we back???

Nursie 5y ago
> Generate a bank account with code, no bs paperwork or going through bank clerk. Not useful to most people > the transaction is set in stone. Irreversible. An anti-feature. > we all need to have the equivalent option of direct transfers with minimal meddling? We have direct transfers, and nobody has ever stopped one of mine. You're trying to find a revolution in things most people don't care about, at all. Non-solutions for non-problems. > Better tech and algorithms will patch it. Demonstrably untrue - BTC is still king, and the market follows it slavishly. The BTC community (miners, big exchanges and developers, not users) has demonstrated that they aren't interested in change, by continuing to limit transaction throughput, sticking with PoW etc. The users have demonstrated they don't care either, by continuing to support BTC over others. It's speculation and brand recognition, not tech, that people are interested in. > Security screw ups are due to people not being educated Which they never will be en-mass, making a system with irreversible transactions a poor choice for widespread use. Smart contracts are a joke, and have unsolvable problems when it comes to interfacing with anything that happens outside of a blockchain. They are effectively database triggers, not a revolution. At the end of the day, robots in the future are more likely to talk to standardised central bank APIs or standardised retail bank APIs.

jcpham2 5y ago

> Why is HN so bitter towards it? I find it strange that everyone here simply dismisses it as a worthless concept. What brand-new, experimental technologies with open-source development have ever been perfect from the get-go? I don't know personally, but burning time on the internet just to type out words and try to convince other people of your opinions - this does not speak to me. I put my money in play and that speaks volumes.

ejanus 5y ago

Thanks so much, you read my mind.

mekster 5y ago

When money is involved seeing millionaires pop up on every bubble, people lose being honest and just lick the wound of missing it out on their own by finding out the worse side of things. The technology has a future and more applications may come out from more evolved concepts and so far the security seems to be holding well and there's very little to be bitter about.