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Imho it stems from a lack of understanding and faith in the financial services industry, probably exacerbated by the financial crisis. A large % of people now

• qwerty456127 5y ago
  "I will never own a home" is not the only reason. The whole financial system is "fuck you this and fuck you that, incl. when you least expect and depend the most, and we won't tell you why". Yesterday here were news about PayPal terminating an account without explanation again (by the way, even when they don't ban you, their verification and customer services are a disaster anyway). This bullshit has to stop. Every person on Earth (even those with questionable reputation or even convicted felons) should be able to wire/accept some reasonable amounts of money (I don't advocate letting terrorists make million-dollar deals) freely, no questions asked, like in cash. It's a basic thing in today world, like eating and shitting.
  • southerntofu 5y ago
    Maybe if we would question why we (don't) need money in the first place, and why people turn to terrorism, we wouldn't have problems in the first place. Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of. In the meantime, i agree it's a reasonable expectation that people can exchange money freely with the caveat that there should be taxes. As much as i hate taxes because they will fund police terrorizing my neighborhood, big corporations for their next nature-destroying megaproject, and cameras everywhere in the big cities, they are important as long as we live in a capitalist system to ensure we have basic public services. A system like GNU/Taler is really interesting because it promises buyer's secrecy while retaining public accounting for receivers so that they can be subject to taxes. Cash is better of course as anonymity is guaranteed on both sides, and that's precisely why the chief scammers are pushing for the abolition of cash... so much of informal economy/solidarity would disappear overnight i'm having nightmares over it.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      > Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of. Are there sufficient people interested in cleaning toilets, dealing with the mentally ill/infirm, working in crawl spaces and attics, working on a farm an hour plus from everything?
      • e_proxus 5y ago
        For a good (for some definitions of good) extra paycheck, I guess many would do more work. Want to buy a cool car? Do some cleaning on the side.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          The person I responded to was asking why compensation was needed at all for any task.
      • southerntofu 5y ago
        > Are there sufficient people interested in ... ? There's people interested in caring for others and/or growing food on the countryside. Cleaning toilets is a task nobody does by pleasure but i don't see a reason there should be a specific class in society handling undesired tasks for the others. Why can't we take turns doing what HAS TO be done? I've lived in communities for about two decades now and it's never ever crossed our mind we should designate someone to clean the toilets for others. I'm happy to do it every now and then if you're happy to do the same.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          > Why can't we take turns doing what HAS TO be done? What happens when someone does not take their turn?
          • southerntofu 5y ago
  • dajohnson89 5y ago
    what if the terrorists broke up 1mil into 1000 $1000-transfers?
    • EarlKing 5y ago
      That would result in the filing of a Suspicious Activity Report because the breakdown looks like it was done precisely to avoid the reporting threshold.
      • snypher 5y ago
        ...or the bank launders over $10 bullion, pays a $700m fine and everyone walks away free.
        • SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
          Not possible. How could Some Bank get away with such a Crime with no repercussions?
          • BLKNSLVR 5y ago
            Is that sarcasm? Aaaaah, I get what you did there! Took me a minute or two, during which time I was finding examples of How Some Bank Crime... https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-230696/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/outrageo... https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-vast-sums-of-dirty-money-after-paying-record-laundering-fine/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-examines-hsbcs-881-million-money-laundering-scandal-2018-02-21 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa... But also: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-24/westpac-money-laundering-austrac-fine-explained/12696746 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-24/westpac-money-launder... https://www.austrac.gov.au/austrac-and-cba-agree-700m-penalty https://www.austrac.gov.au/austrac-and-cba-agree-700m-penalt...
            • 5y ago
  • cma 5y ago
    > Yesterday here were news about PayPal terminating an account without explanation again In the past few weeks crypto has shut down energy infrastructure, meat processing, and a major ferry service. It's also burning 1% of the world's electricity and rapidly growing.
    • nkrisc 5y ago
      I'm very cynical about cryptocurrency but that's a stretch. Criminals did that damage to companies and infrastructure, and they would do it without cryptocurrency if it was worth it. I guess dollars sell drugs to kids too and fuel murder for hire.
      • cma 5y ago
        It's not the main things dollars have enabled though.
      • foobiekr 5y ago
        Anyone who doesn’t think cryptocurrency has facilitated monetizing cyberattacks needs to wake up. You can be pro-crypto and still acknowledge that the rise of ransomware has hone hand in hand with the ability to monetize it at dramatically lowered risk. This, in turn, broadened to scope of companies that were interesting to attack.
        • meiraleal 5y ago
          It of course facilitated, but if it didn't exist, online credit card payments would had facilitated the same way so crypto is not at fault. You can be against crypto and still acknowledge that the advocates of a tech/tool are not responsible nor turning a blind eye to the bad uses of it.
          • Nursie 5y ago
            This is nonsense, online credit card payments would not be able to facilitate multi-million dollar transactions and allow the proceeds to just disappear like that.
  • qwerty456127 5y ago
    By the way, perhaps cryptocurrencies may devaluate or even die out if a viable alternative letting everyone unconditionally and anonymously transfer and accept conventional amounts of money is introduced. Perhaps this may destroy the ransomware market which is about sending huge amounts of money in cryptocurrencies.
• southerntofu 5y ago
  > A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich. Yes, because that is the very definition of capitalism: people own, others work. That's the reason modern forms of slavery, colonization and patriarchal control were developed, historically. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism or Silvia Federici for some great perspectives on the control of births/sexuality, patriarchy of the wage and oppression of women under capitalism. > people are thinking "I will never own a home" A lot of people i meet from the younger generation don't care at all about owning a home. They feel concerned that the privileged elites are ruining the show for everyone and by the next decade we'll be more and more struggling for drinkable water and basic survival. Punks were derided for their "No future" stance, but it looks like the entire world has gone "No future" and just keeps fucking up as much as they can. Spending billions of KWh on blockchains so rich people can speculate on buying their own number (correct me if i'm wrong but to me a NFT is just a number) is just part of this. We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers. > After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting. The only interesting "dApp" i've seen so far is radicle.xyz, a decentralized forge built on top of git. Still i'm skeptical of tying money and financial incentives into my software development practices, but at least those folks (free software people) had the decency to make crypto-payments optional by adding opt-in Ethereum integration. Clever move.
  • yebyen 5y ago
    > Spending billions of KWh on blockchains so rich people can speculate on buying their own number (correct me if i'm wrong but to me a NFT is just a number) is just part of this. You say this as if numbers have no utility. Is an IP address "just a number"? What about a /8 cidr block? How much energy should we be allowed to spend to secure global address space and provide a secure implementation of identity for all people? This is one of the actual concrete uses of NFT tech, (see Urbit Azimuth.) > We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers. Good luck making a non-disposable world where nobody has domain over their own numbers or is allowed to have their own distinct and unique identity secured by a leading consensus protocol. I for one am glad that you and others of a like mind are not empowered to tell me or anyone else that I can't have my own number if I want it, or to secure it with as many megawatts and global collaborators as I can muster. Because you know what happens when private property is abolished? Spoiler, only the well connected and powerful will hold private property, and overall the scope and impact of inequality even broadens. Edit: I'm getting downvotes but not sure which part you disagree with! Have you ever lived in an area where private property was abolished? (They tried this in Lithuania and USSR and that's exactly how it turned out! When nobody is allowed to own resources, who decides how they are allocated?) "To each according to his need" sounds great until you get to see what an actual functional implementation of that looks like, and it turns out that Stalin is the one who is in charge of it all.
• WanderPanda 5y ago
  Is it lack of understanding of the financial industry or the opposite? I observe that through Bitcoin much more people have become interested in (austrian) economics. I think especially in times when everyone says that the problems e.g. central banks are “solving” are too complex to understand for 99.99% of the people, an uptrend in a much more simple theory (that is hence also more compatible with Occam’s razor) is a good thing.
  • nly 5y ago
    For me the ultimate problem with deflationary currencies is that you get rewarded for doing nothing. Every year as keys to wallets are irreversibly lost, or the value of the real economy grows relative to the supply of BTC, your Bitcoin gets more and more valuable. Many Bitcoin hodlers actually have an expectation of becoming extremely wealthy, despite having done nothing for society, because they've been swept up in the speculative mania and volatility. Gold bugs don't generally have this expectation. Gold is no longer a broadly accepted currency, and even the most vocal of gold bugs are only expecting a 2x or 5x return in the next few decades, assuming the $ does collapse. They only preach an expectation that N bricks of gold, where N will buy a house today, will buy them a house 50 years from now. The attitude is one of wealth preservation rather than speculation. It's a reasonable expectation assuming the demand for and supply of Gold remains balanced.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      I would say it is even worse than doing nothing when one considers the environmental impact of mining BTC. These people have an expectation of reward for increasing energy usage and pollution in the world for basically no benefit to anyone but themselves.
    • lazerpants 5y ago
      Deflationary currencies shouldn't be an issue if real prices adjust at a similar pace. The theoretical problem with deflation is mostly that wages are sticky and you can't lower someone's pay very easily. But if everyone has the expectation of deflation it would probably work fine. Expectations about inflation/deflation are important drivers of these phenomena (not the only ones of course) and if we break the paradigm with cryptocurrencies then it's possible the stickiness problems of deflation could be solved.
• jollybean 5y ago
  I'm doubtful that barely rational populism is causing regular individuals to spend $1M on their favourite Baseball card NFT. NFT is mostly driven by the elite, with common people acting as useful idiots to them by talking, tweeting, watching SNL skits about it.
• K0balt 5y ago
  Definía sort of a system that feeds on itself, not a great model I think. Tokenizarion of real or digital items makes sense for many reasons though, the most basic of which is that it is a system of record keeping that is persistent, trusties, and programmatically immutable where immutability is needed. For digital items, tokenization can make sense from a data durability standpoint, since tokenized data can be stored on chain with its presentation context, for example an in game asset could be globally accessible and playable far into the future beyond where the game would otherwise be available. This and other potentially useful cases are mentioned in some medium articles at prufio.medium.com.
• StavrosK 5y ago
  > so the current generation is saying "Fine, I'm going to invent my own system... with Black Jack, and hookers!". This is extremely apt, because in the end they went "in fact, forget the system!" and realized you can just make money from the hype without actually building anything usable.
• tw04 5y ago
  >A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich. And what on earth makes them think cryptocurrency doesn't exist simply to make an elite minority rich? Just because it might be a different minority doesn't change the equation. And oh by the way, there is absolutely 0 government protections in the new system. Don't get me wrong, over the last 70 years a lot of the protections in existing financial institutions have been watered down, but I'll still take an FDIC backing on my bank account over: "oh no we got "hacked" and all of your wallets are gone, sorry about that!"
  • tachyonbeam 5y ago
    Same. I lost a small but nonzero amount when a fraudulent crypto exchange went bust. There's a reason FDIC protection exists. This is going to be unpopular, but the value proposition for cryptos isn't there yet IMO. It's either "get rich quick" or "buy drugs online". It really isn't "convenient way to transfer money" yet. I'd rather invest in companies that are actually doing something useful. The value of those seems generally less likely to evaporate overnight. Why would I want to own dogecoins when I can own shares of companies that are changing the world?
    • bgroat 5y ago
      You're forgetting the immense riches that can be made in cybercrime!
      • NoGravitas 5y ago
        The ransomware market has been booming lately.
  • spinny 5y ago
    oh no we got "hacked" only happens if you leave your crypto on an exchange. It's not yours until it's under your control
    • jonfw 5y ago
• ansible 5y ago
  > A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich. And that's because it is true. The vast majority of the financial services industry is designed to screw people over. The only thing an average citizen can do is let them skim off as little money as possible. Buy stocks in solid companies, and hold on to them for a long time. Index mutual funds with minimal administration overhead. Things like that where you can invest a portion of your life's savings without getting screwed over too bad.
  • koheripbal 5y ago
    > The vast majority of the financial services industry is designed to screw people over. I don't know where to begin with a comment like this. It's being so heavily reinforced by social media, but is so hyperbolically outside reality that I honestly don't know where to start. It's similar to saying that the vast majority of the medical industry only exists to make people sick. Do people die on the operating table? Sure. Do people contract illnesses in hospitals? Yes. Is the VAST MAJORITY of medicine DESIGNED to make people ill? Convincing someone who believes this is impossible, because it's such an extreme view it cannot possibly be based on logic or evidence. The financial system is a vast and complex. It's as old as the first Egyptian farmers. Do you honestly believe it was DESIGNED to screw over humanity since inception? Is it so impossible for you to imagine the utility of bank accounts? Futures contracts? Mortgages? Bonds? Stock Exchanges? Fiat money? If these are all just elaborate scams, why does every society on Earth use them since literally 3000 BC?
    • ansible 5y ago
      The most useful aspects of the financial industry are the most heavily regulated... by government. Banks have rules on what they can use the money in your savings account for. They have government backed insurance. Regular stocks are also heavily regulated. Financial reporting requirements, disclosures, auditing, etc. Why does all this regulation exist? Because people we getting screwed over, and it was bad enough the government had to step in. The mortgage industry was not heavily regulated enough, and what happened there? A large financial crash. And who got bailed out? The banks, many of whom were somewhat complicit and profiting off the situation. Who didn't get bailed out? The little people. This is still happening now. Most hedge funds, high frequency trading, the lure of day trading, and may other schemes exist to siphon off money from regular people. Think for a minute about the hedge fund manager who gets tens of millions in bonuses. Where does that money come from? Ultimately the companies and other investors. That money could have gone into higher wages for the workers, but instead is being funneled to a few elites. Since ancient times, the powerful have sought to retain and grow their own power. They use whatever means are available to them. It can be the use of force, but things have gotten more sophisticated.
• ww520 5y ago
  For dapp, I found the idea of doing asset swap pretty interesting. It’s like the interest swap or the currency swap but with crypto assets and tokens to form a swap pool that functions like a standalone exchange, which anybody can start using the crypto infrastructure. What crypto presents is the opportunity for lay people to take financial power from the finance establishment. I think that’s why people are so excited.
• Igelau 5y ago
  > After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting. This has been my issue with dApps as well. It's always "thing that does some stuff with ETH" which is only valuable and interesting if you already assume ETH is valuable and interesting. I guess most people make the leap of faith by putting money into them, but on sheer technical merit, dApps just aren't that interesting.
  • sjg1729 5y ago
    I agree in a lot of cases, but a couple months ago I saw a pretty interesting idea on HN: https://sarcophagus.io https://sarcophagus.io . While I think there are some issues with this protocol, it convinced me there are some pretty interesting problems that can be solved with new and unintuitive social/technical means with dApps. (un-disclaimer: not affiliated, not an owner, not a user)
    • Igelau 5y ago
      I really want this to be a shaggy dog spec that ends with a punchline in the FAQ. Q: Is this a pyramid scheme? A: No! It's a sarcophagus scheme!
• imtringued 5y ago
  "I will never own a home" going by reddit and certain message boards the sentiment is pretty much "if boomers are rentseeking with land and shiny rocks then I'll rent seek with money" Land in desirable locations is a scarce good and land owners extract an economic rent via rising land prices which makes housing unaffordable. That same dynamic exists with cryptocurrencies with a limited supply. You buy early and the value of the cryptocurrency rises as more people start using them. In both cases the hoarding instinct is drowning out productive activity. When land becomes too expensive you cannot afford to live on it. When Bitcoin becomes too expensive you cannot afford to pay with it. Of course this is under the assumption that you need a fixed amount of land and the equivalent to that would be that you also need a fixed amount of Bitcoin. The primary difference though is that with land people voluntarily decide to move there because the location is attractive. Cryptocurrencies aren't popular enough to justify choosing them over government currencies. People are buying cryptocurrencies because they are going up.