8 ms·

Andreessen on Crypto

36 points by smitty1e 5y ago

darkerside 5y ago
For everybody saying cryptocurrency has no use, you must not remember how much trouble society had envisioning the uses for the very internet upon which we are now posting. Here's an example of a use case recently gaining ground. https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133086367751 https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133... I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems foolish and short-sighted to imagine we are certain that there are no legitimate uses for crypto.
- arcturus17 5y ago
  The internet took like a year to take off since it became commercially available. It took the world by storm once people could connect to it, and viable and useful ideas and applications (browsers, search engines, eCommerce, filesharing, etc) proliferated at breakneck speed.
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    It might feel like this but it is anything but true. Prodigy was available in the early 90s and the age of 286 computers. AOL and compuserve were available very early too and for years their uses were email, online encyclopedias, looking up jpegs and eventually chat rooms. Lots of people saw no need for it in the dialup days. It took a decade for the first cable connections to become available. Right now cryptocurrencies have taken off to an extent. Everyone knows about them but the eco system is a giant mess.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - arcturus17 5y ago
      > It might feel like this but it is anything but true. Prodigy was available in the early 90s and the age of 286 computers. Amazon was launched in 94. My dad was buying books from Barnes and Noble and Amazon and having them sent internationally around 96. By the end of the 90s the internet had 250M users carrying out all kinds of activities, including commercial. The comparison with crypto just does not stand its ground. It's been 13 years and counting and there is barely anything to show for it except a lucky few people riding Lambos. [1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm
      - CyberDildonics 5y ago
        8 years ago I was buying from tigerdirect, newegg and overstock. Bitcoin being crippled to only a few transactions per second for the entire world set things back a good amount which was probably a big part of the point in doing it. https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/crypto-users-pass-100-million-boomers-gen-x-bitcoin-btc-ethereum-2021-2-1030122720 https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/crypto-u...
  - phpsuks 5y ago
    I think the way Crypto bulls sell this analogy is flawed. Internet had no competition from any other industry. It was nothing like anything that ever existed. In terms of Internet's development itself, we went from dial up to optical fibers. People in 21st century who use internet have no idea about pains of dial up connection. Crypto is replacing something that has existed for centuries - the financial system. The financial system being challenged has itself kept up with changing tech, albeit slower than expected. This system is corrupted, exploitative and doesn't provide equal opportunities to all who use it. Crypto has to better the existing system by making things better. But the main point is, crypto itself is the next evolution of financial industry. Internet was a new industry of its own.
    - captn3m0 5y ago
      The mobile phone industry was also deeply entrenched back in 2007, it still got disrupted wildly within a few years with the iPhone. If Crypto is so revolutionary, it should have resulted in radical changes within the entrenched financial industry. All we've seen is regression (Stripe supported bitcoins from 2014[0]-2018[1] for eg). [0]: https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective [1]: https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support
      - techbrobane 5y ago
        >All we've seen is regression That's what happens when you only look at Stripe. smh. Pretty sure every major financial institution is buying crypto because it's obviously superior to the dying and corrupt printer and fax system.
    - darkerside 5y ago
      The internet was a communications medium, and not an industry. When it became big enough, it spawned an industry of Big Tech companies. Crypto in this example is the new financial medium. The industry that could be birthed perhaps doesn't exist yet.
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    There's also the fact that product-lifecycles have become incredibly short these days. Airlines took 68 years to get to 50M users, Mobile Phones 12 years, the Internet took 7 years, and Pokemon Go got there in 19 days[0]. We're at 12 years of Crypto and "a tech of the future" is now an increasingly difficult proposition to make as we're nowhere near real usecases. [0]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-hit-50-million-users/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-hi...
    - darkerside 5y ago
      Cherrypicked examples. How long did SpaceX take to land a rocket on Mars? Edit: Also, no response to the SSO use case I shared??
  - darkerside 5y ago
    The internet did not take a year to take off. AOL for DOS was released in 1991, and the dot com bust want for another decade. I guess it depends what you mean by "take off", but I'm old enough to remember that in the late 90s, the internet was very poorly understood by most people, and while experts predicted it would be the engine of our economy eventually, your average person couldn't see it.
    - arcturus17 5y ago
      My dad in Spain, which was an internet backwater back in the day, was buying books from Barnes & Noble circa 96. I was downloading songs off Napster around 98. The dot com bust, which was around 99/00, was a build-up of huge economic expectations around the internet indeed. Granted that this bubble was mostly caused supply-side (many companies barely had users), but the internet as a whole had millions and millions of users, ~250M circa 99 [1], carrying out all sorts of activities. Whether most end-users were aware of its true potential is irrelevant - the comparison to crypto, both in terms of timelines (13 years and counting with few applications to show for it) and usefulness, is preposterous. [1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm
- Tesl 5y ago
  I am so unbelievably sick of hearing this from bitcoiners. It just isn't true. At all. There is zero comparison to be made between crypto and the early Internet, its incredibly dishonest.
  - faitswulff 5y ago
    Email was immediately useful.
  - tim333 5y ago
    The bit that it's hard to foresee all the uses might have some truth. Like tiktok - I didn't see that coming. Or crypto itself which kind of depends on the internet.
luma 5y ago
White a pile of horse manure. Big Tech is run by stinkin' liberals which is why they aren't pushing cryptocurrencies? Here's an alternative hypothesis: cryptocurrencies have thus far proven to be good for nothing at all and, as a result, technology companies looking to create actual value have avoided crypto until some value can be found. It's not some liberal plot that cryptocurrencies are mostly usable as a way to separate the gullible from their money.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  This seems silly. Is Coinbase not part of “big tech”? It’s literally a $50 billion tech company.
  - luma 5y ago
    Per the article, Andresseen doesn't seem to think so.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    So far the only mass use-case for crypto has been speculation, so the only success story being Coinbase is fitting.
    - colesantiago 5y ago
      > So far the only mass use-case for crypto has been speculation... so you can't send crypto to another person? i'm confused. to downvoters: When you say the mass use case, you mean everyone is using crypto to scam each other? So there is absolutely no other good usecase for crypto and we should ban it completely?
      - bradleyjg 5y ago
        So there is absolutely no other good usecase for crypto and we should ban it completely? I don’t think we should ban everything that has no valid use case. Maybe someone will come up with one eventually. For now, it’s all get rich quick all the time.
techbrobane 5y ago
This is an ahistorical and backwards analogy. Historically the left/right political divide goes back to the French revolution where the rights side of their parliament supported the monarchy and the left opposed. From this perspective AI would seem more centralized, authoritarian, and right-wing, while open networks are more democratic, distributed, and left-wing.
- TiberiusC 5y ago
  In the US, higher small business tax rates are championed solely by the left. This fact is more accurate in characterizing left/right centralized authoritarianism than tech metaphors ever could.
  - luma 5y ago
    Is there someone out there campaigning on "increase taxes on small business"? I think this is a strawman, "tax the rich" doesn't mean "tax the corner baker".
    - TiberiusC 5y ago
      the corner baker is a llc last I checked
      - luma 5y ago
        Meaning? You do realize corporate taxes are also marginal, yes?
        TiberiusC 5y ago
        Marginal for you, but not for the baker. Unless you too think 21%(+ about 9% in Cali) isn’t marginal. That doesn’t include all the misc taxes which push your overall rate of doing business closer to 50%. That’s just the llc(baker) rate
    - jhauris 5y ago
ciupicri 5y ago
Could someone edit the title and replace "crypto" with "cryptocurrencies"?
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  They're synonymous, and crypto is the colloquial term.
  - nixpulvis 5y ago
    They are only synonyms to coinheads.
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      I don't own any crypto and barely keep up with the happenings in the ecosystem. Cryptocurrency is just more commonly talked about than cryptography.
      - nixpulvis 5y ago
        Well... for a site like HN where people do regularly talk about actual cryptography, I'd argue it's the wrong term. Calling cryptocurrencies crypto is like calling an MLM gig a job.
      - diroussel 5y ago
        Yet cryptography is far more widely used.
    - tim333 5y ago
      Dictionary has 1) a person who secretly supports or adheres to a group, party, or belief. 2) cryptocurrency. 3) cryptography. obvs the perceived meaning of words depends on context. You can't really just declare 3) is the only true meaning.
      - nixpulvis 5y ago
zcw100 5y ago
So says the guy with a gigantic stake in cryptocurrencies. Screw him for making my choice of technology a political statement or making technology simply an extension of a political view. I think this says more about Andreessen than it does about technology. Andreessen is pushing cryptocurrencies and his motivation is clearly political.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  The nature of the cryptocurrency beast, with its endless land rushes, is that participants are constantly incented to act like shady penny stock boosters. There may be some true believers in there but it’s impossible to tell with all the chaff.
dandanua 5y ago
> we can now, in theory, build Internet native contracts, loans, insurance, title to real world assets, unique digital goods (known as non-fungible tokens or NFTs), online corporate structures (such as digital autonomous organizations or DAOs), and on and on. I'm so tired of this stupid mantra that crypto-addicts keep repeating. 1. You can't put real world events into a blockchain in a decentralized manner. In no fckn way. How are you gonna put a result of a sports event into a blockchain? By mining what? It's ridiculous. It always should be an oracle, authority, company, government, etc, i.e. a centralized trusted entity. 2. Loans. Yeah, loans to anonymous entities that can just transfer money to another wallet without any possibility of reversal. 3. Digital ownership. It's nothing without a possibility of a forceful defense of this ownership. You bought a house on a blockchain, but previous owners don't want to leave. What are you gonna do? Call Satoshi?
- heyidioturwrong 5y ago
  You talk very confidently about something you don't seem to know much about. 1. >You can't put real world events on blockchain Yes you absolutely can, look into decentralized oracle projects like Chainlink or Augur for more info. 2. Loans already exist fully onchain, look into Aave and Compound. Loans are overcollatoralized so 'credit' of address doesn't matter. They haven't figured out undercollatoralized loans yet, but it's just a matter of time before we get propor decentralized identity, which will open opportunities for credit creation on chain. 3. As for titles to realestate, its just a matter of time before goverments recognize deeds held on chain as legitimate, and then that problem is solved.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Never look to people like Andreesen or Thiel for political advice. Do they think that giant companies are run in a decentralized manner in any way? Walmart, Target, Delta, Southwest, Google, Facebook, etc, are all plagued by “central planning”, and resemble the USSR more than they resemble any right-libertarian ideal. Never mind the fact that the word libertarian referred to left-libertarians until right-libertarians coopted it in the 60s. Left-libertarianism predates right-libertarianism by a century Also, it’s rich for Thiel to talk about decentralization when he used his money and power to support Trump, the most authoritarian President in a while. Cut a right-libertarian, and a fascist bleeds.
timdaub 5y ago
I think it's pretty ignorant from both Thiel and Andreessen to put cryptocurrency and AI on the political spectrum. And generally I doubt the usefulness in classifying things into right and left. At the polar ends of each are people that have conflicting norms on how the world should work. These usually arise once again through ignorance as a norm carries the expectation to be accepted by everyone. To someone that has worked in the tech of cryptocurrency, all I'm saying is that I'm not particularily interested in the left/right drama. Let's hope it never catches on. In my opinion these narratives are just created because somehow they'll serve Thiel and Andreessen to run a more specific story that they can use to increase their wealth.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  I agree it would be nice, I think right/left is not so much a set of ideologies as an advertising campaign that has taken on a life of its own. That said, I think one feature of that campaign is that every party will have to have a position on things affecting the population, crypto eventually being one of those.
- diroussel 5y ago
  It's also a very strange characterisation of left and right wing. In the UK centralisation is thought to be right wing, and consensus is considered left wing.
lottin 5y ago
TLDR version: "crypto" will turn everything upside down somehow, but we will have to wait at least 30 years to see it.
nixpulvis 5y ago
> — the ability for many untrusted participants in a network to establish consistency and trust. This is something the Internet has never had, but now it does, and I think it will take 30 years to work through all of the things we can do as a result. Wow, when you put it like that, it's amazing that I can shop, bank, and safely talk with my friends and family online. Pretty much all my messages are encrypted and/or checksummed (as necessary) and I still have to trust all the hardware and software on top to do it's job, just like anything else. How does "Crypto" change this?
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  you don't have to trust the vendor, the bank, or the social media company.
  - aborsy 5y ago
    You still have to trust your hardware, software and surrounding tech (phone, computer, etc), produced by central authorities (lawful companies implementing government laws).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - nixpulvis 5y ago
    Really!? How!?
  - DSingularity 5y ago
    The conservative vs liberal angle is interesting but it just feels so contrived. So far the only thing cryptocurrencies was used for was to speculate on value of tokens and digital currencies. And my conclusion from that case-study is that cryptocurrency as a whole is a system unworthy of trust. Who owns BTC/ETH?
  - lottin 5y ago
    So cryptocurrencies allow you to buy something from someone you don't trust? How does that work?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lowkey 5y ago
From the article, the use case discussed is distributed consensus. With cryptocurrencies we as society have the option of a new way of organizing labor and capital to achieve a goal. Instead of kings, politicians, corporate owners or middlemen - we have the opportunity to build systems based on the idea of rules without rulers. Bitcoin eliminates the need for central bankers to control the money supply. Ethereum replaces armies of lawyers and beaurocrats with smart contract code. In the future crypto might allow you to build Ubercoin so we can have a distributed ride-sharing platform without a central entity in the middle. These new distributed consensus mechanisms eliminate the weaknesses of traditional approaches which rely on fallible human leaders who can be corrupted replacing them with code and incentives. This allows for emergent properties such as censorship resistant money that can be transmitted quickly and irrevocably over the internet. These are novel and innovative use cases powered by the most important invention of the 21at century.
- mypastself 5y ago
  How does real-life information enter a smart contract, and how do you make sure all sides make good on their dues?
  - lowkey 5y ago
    One option today is Chainlink which uses a host of oracles to achieve distributed consensus on real-world prices, weather or other signals.
    - mypastself 5y ago
      And how would Chainlink prove that a particular side of a contract has, say, delivered a particular item or performed a particar service and the other party’s funds must be released?
      - lowkey 5y ago
        Chainlink hasn’t solved for every external blockchain integration - I never claimed they did. Chainlink simply provides a distributed consensus mechanism for getting real world observations in a robust and difficult to manipulate way, onto a blockchain.
jyu 5y ago
The world and society at large has seen an erosion of trust. For the naysayers, ask yourself: - do you trust your government more or less than your parents - do you trust the mainstream media more or less than your parents - do you trust big companies to do the right thing more or less than your parents As we culturally become less trusting, we need different tools to organize and determine value. Protocols that enable decentralized, distributed consensus helps build those tools. Adoption of these protocols, independent of cryptocurrency mania, is bound to happen.
- lottin 5y ago
  There cannot be economy without trust. There cannot be society. You wouldn't be able to function normally. Imagine walking past a stranger and not having a reasonable expectation that that they won't punch you in the face.
- tim333 5y ago
  Rating services seem to help. If my hotel gets 9/10 on the site it's usually good. Crypto on the other hand seems mostly ponzi scam.
  - bathtub365 5y ago
    I’m frequently suspicious of the veracity of ratings online.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  I believe open source software is now the most trusted segment of society. (Prior to a few years ago, I’d say peer reviewed science, but the replication crisis has not been kind to its image.) Most people in the know probably trust Linus and the kernel team far more than the intelligence team or Vitalik more than Janet Yellen or Postgres more than Oracle or Wikipedia more than Harvard. To that extent there’s going to be a major push, where practically feasible, to replace existing institutions with open software and protocols. Trust is more efficient, and trusted entities will long-term outcompete untrusted. The technology doesn’t yet exist, but if you could replace JP Morgan with a DAO, how does JP Morgan not watch its business crumble. Why would any stakeholder choose to trust an opaque bank over an open protocol?
ceilingcorner 5y ago
Thiel said that “if AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.” He didn’t say “right vs. left” and Andreessen is misquoting him, either deliberately or on purpose.
rvieira 5y ago
> Peter Thiel has made the characteristically sweeping observation that AI is in some sense a left wing idea — centralized machines making top-down decisions — but crypto is a right wing idea — many distributed agents, humans and bots, making bottom-up decisions. I enjoy philosophical discussions as much as the next person, but this kind of sweeping postmodern categorical generalisations just smell like a new Sokal affair.
joelbondurant 5y ago
The left gets so angry over any hint totalitarian Government is a failed religion.

36 points by smitty1e 5y ago

For everybody saying cryptocurrency has no use, you must not remember how much trouble society had envisioning the uses for the very internet upon which we are now posting. Here's an example of a use case recently gaining ground. https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133086367751 https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133... I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems foolish and short-sighted to imagine we are certain that there are no legitimate uses for crypto.

arcturus17 5y ago
The internet took like a year to take off since it became commercially available. It took the world by storm once people could connect to it, and viable and useful ideas and applications (browsers, search engines, eCommerce, filesharing, etc) proliferated at breakneck speed.
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  It might feel like this but it is anything but true. Prodigy was available in the early 90s and the age of 286 computers. AOL and compuserve were available very early too and for years their uses were email, online encyclopedias, looking up jpegs and eventually chat rooms. Lots of people saw no need for it in the dialup days. It took a decade for the first cable connections to become available. Right now cryptocurrencies have taken off to an extent. Everyone knows about them but the eco system is a giant mess.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - arcturus17 5y ago
    > It might feel like this but it is anything but true. Prodigy was available in the early 90s and the age of 286 computers. Amazon was launched in 94. My dad was buying books from Barnes and Noble and Amazon and having them sent internationally around 96. By the end of the 90s the internet had 250M users carrying out all kinds of activities, including commercial. The comparison with crypto just does not stand its ground. It's been 13 years and counting and there is barely anything to show for it except a lucky few people riding Lambos. [1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm
    - CyberDildonics 5y ago
      8 years ago I was buying from tigerdirect, newegg and overstock. Bitcoin being crippled to only a few transactions per second for the entire world set things back a good amount which was probably a big part of the point in doing it. https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/crypto-users-pass-100-million-boomers-gen-x-bitcoin-btc-ethereum-2021-2-1030122720 https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/crypto-u...
- phpsuks 5y ago
  I think the way Crypto bulls sell this analogy is flawed. Internet had no competition from any other industry. It was nothing like anything that ever existed. In terms of Internet's development itself, we went from dial up to optical fibers. People in 21st century who use internet have no idea about pains of dial up connection. Crypto is replacing something that has existed for centuries - the financial system. The financial system being challenged has itself kept up with changing tech, albeit slower than expected. This system is corrupted, exploitative and doesn't provide equal opportunities to all who use it. Crypto has to better the existing system by making things better. But the main point is, crypto itself is the next evolution of financial industry. Internet was a new industry of its own.
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    The mobile phone industry was also deeply entrenched back in 2007, it still got disrupted wildly within a few years with the iPhone. If Crypto is so revolutionary, it should have resulted in radical changes within the entrenched financial industry. All we've seen is regression (Stripe supported bitcoins from 2014[0]-2018[1] for eg). [0]: https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective [1]: https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support
    - techbrobane 5y ago
      >All we've seen is regression That's what happens when you only look at Stripe. smh. Pretty sure every major financial institution is buying crypto because it's obviously superior to the dying and corrupt printer and fax system.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    The internet was a communications medium, and not an industry. When it became big enough, it spawned an industry of Big Tech companies. Crypto in this example is the new financial medium. The industry that could be birthed perhaps doesn't exist yet.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  There's also the fact that product-lifecycles have become incredibly short these days. Airlines took 68 years to get to 50M users, Mobile Phones 12 years, the Internet took 7 years, and Pokemon Go got there in 19 days[0]. We're at 12 years of Crypto and "a tech of the future" is now an increasingly difficult proposition to make as we're nowhere near real usecases. [0]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-hit-50-million-users/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-hi...
  - darkerside 5y ago
    Cherrypicked examples. How long did SpaceX take to land a rocket on Mars? Edit: Also, no response to the SSO use case I shared??
- darkerside 5y ago
  The internet did not take a year to take off. AOL for DOS was released in 1991, and the dot com bust want for another decade. I guess it depends what you mean by "take off", but I'm old enough to remember that in the late 90s, the internet was very poorly understood by most people, and while experts predicted it would be the engine of our economy eventually, your average person couldn't see it.
  - arcturus17 5y ago
    My dad in Spain, which was an internet backwater back in the day, was buying books from Barnes & Noble circa 96. I was downloading songs off Napster around 98. The dot com bust, which was around 99/00, was a build-up of huge economic expectations around the internet indeed. Granted that this bubble was mostly caused supply-side (many companies barely had users), but the internet as a whole had millions and millions of users, ~250M circa 99 [1], carrying out all sorts of activities. Whether most end-users were aware of its true potential is irrelevant - the comparison to crypto, both in terms of timelines (13 years and counting with few applications to show for it) and usefulness, is preposterous. [1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm
Tesl 5y ago
I am so unbelievably sick of hearing this from bitcoiners. It just isn't true. At all. There is zero comparison to be made between crypto and the early Internet, its incredibly dishonest.
- faitswulff 5y ago
  Email was immediately useful.
- tim333 5y ago
  The bit that it's hard to foresee all the uses might have some truth. Like tiktok - I didn't see that coming. Or crypto itself which kind of depends on the internet.

luma 5y ago

White a pile of horse manure. Big Tech is run by stinkin' liberals which is why they aren't pushing cryptocurrencies? Here's an alternative hypothesis: cryptocurrencies have thus far proven to be good for nothing at all and, as a result, technology companies looking to create actual value have avoided crypto until some value can be found. It's not some liberal plot that cryptocurrencies are mostly usable as a way to separate the gullible from their money.

dcolkitt 5y ago
This seems silly. Is Coinbase not part of “big tech”? It’s literally a $50 billion tech company.
- luma 5y ago
  Per the article, Andresseen doesn't seem to think so.
- qeternity 5y ago
  So far the only mass use-case for crypto has been speculation, so the only success story being Coinbase is fitting.
  - colesantiago 5y ago
    > So far the only mass use-case for crypto has been speculation... so you can't send crypto to another person? i'm confused. to downvoters: When you say the mass use case, you mean everyone is using crypto to scam each other? So there is absolutely no other good usecase for crypto and we should ban it completely?
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      So there is absolutely no other good usecase for crypto and we should ban it completely? I don’t think we should ban everything that has no valid use case. Maybe someone will come up with one eventually. For now, it’s all get rich quick all the time.

techbrobane 5y ago

This is an ahistorical and backwards analogy. Historically the left/right political divide goes back to the French revolution where the rights side of their parliament supported the monarchy and the left opposed. From this perspective AI would seem more centralized, authoritarian, and right-wing, while open networks are more democratic, distributed, and left-wing.

TiberiusC 5y ago
In the US, higher small business tax rates are championed solely by the left. This fact is more accurate in characterizing left/right centralized authoritarianism than tech metaphors ever could.
- luma 5y ago
  Is there someone out there campaigning on "increase taxes on small business"? I think this is a strawman, "tax the rich" doesn't mean "tax the corner baker".
  - TiberiusC 5y ago
    the corner baker is a llc last I checked
    - luma 5y ago
      Meaning? You do realize corporate taxes are also marginal, yes?
      - TiberiusC 5y ago
        Marginal for you, but not for the baker. Unless you too think 21%(+ about 9% in Cali) isn’t marginal. That doesn’t include all the misc taxes which push your overall rate of doing business closer to 50%. That’s just the llc(baker) rate
  - jhauris 5y ago

ciupicri 5y ago

Could someone edit the title and replace "crypto" with "cryptocurrencies"?

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
They're synonymous, and crypto is the colloquial term.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  They are only synonyms to coinheads.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I don't own any crypto and barely keep up with the happenings in the ecosystem. Cryptocurrency is just more commonly talked about than cryptography.
    - nixpulvis 5y ago
      Well... for a site like HN where people do regularly talk about actual cryptography, I'd argue it's the wrong term. Calling cryptocurrencies crypto is like calling an MLM gig a job.
    - diroussel 5y ago
      Yet cryptography is far more widely used.
  - tim333 5y ago
    Dictionary has 1) a person who secretly supports or adheres to a group, party, or belief. 2) cryptocurrency. 3) cryptography. obvs the perceived meaning of words depends on context. You can't really just declare 3) is the only true meaning.
    - nixpulvis 5y ago

zcw100 5y ago

So says the guy with a gigantic stake in cryptocurrencies. Screw him for making my choice of technology a political statement or making technology simply an extension of a political view. I think this says more about Andreessen than it does about technology. Andreessen is pushing cryptocurrencies and his motivation is clearly political.

bradleyjg 5y ago
The nature of the cryptocurrency beast, with its endless land rushes, is that participants are constantly incented to act like shady penny stock boosters. There may be some true believers in there but it’s impossible to tell with all the chaff.

dandanua 5y ago

> we can now, in theory, build Internet native contracts, loans, insurance, title to real world assets, unique digital goods (known as non-fungible tokens or NFTs), online corporate structures (such as digital autonomous organizations or DAOs), and on and on. I'm so tired of this stupid mantra that crypto-addicts keep repeating. 1. You can't put real world events into a blockchain in a decentralized manner. In no fckn way. How are you gonna put a result of a sports event into a blockchain? By mining what? It's ridiculous. It always should be an oracle, authority, company, government, etc, i.e. a centralized trusted entity. 2. Loans. Yeah, loans to anonymous entities that can just transfer money to another wallet without any possibility of reversal. 3. Digital ownership. It's nothing without a possibility of a forceful defense of this ownership. You bought a house on a blockchain, but previous owners don't want to leave. What are you gonna do? Call Satoshi?

heyidioturwrong 5y ago
You talk very confidently about something you don't seem to know much about. 1. >You can't put real world events on blockchain Yes you absolutely can, look into decentralized oracle projects like Chainlink or Augur for more info. 2. Loans already exist fully onchain, look into Aave and Compound. Loans are overcollatoralized so 'credit' of address doesn't matter. They haven't figured out undercollatoralized loans yet, but it's just a matter of time before we get propor decentralized identity, which will open opportunities for credit creation on chain. 3. As for titles to realestate, its just a matter of time before goverments recognize deeds held on chain as legitimate, and then that problem is solved.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago

Never look to people like Andreesen or Thiel for political advice. Do they think that giant companies are run in a decentralized manner in any way? Walmart, Target, Delta, Southwest, Google, Facebook, etc, are all plagued by “central planning”, and resemble the USSR more than they resemble any right-libertarian ideal. Never mind the fact that the word libertarian referred to left-libertarians until right-libertarians coopted it in the 60s. Left-libertarianism predates right-libertarianism by a century Also, it’s rich for Thiel to talk about decentralization when he used his money and power to support Trump, the most authoritarian President in a while. Cut a right-libertarian, and a fascist bleeds.

timdaub 5y ago

I think it's pretty ignorant from both Thiel and Andreessen to put cryptocurrency and AI on the political spectrum. And generally I doubt the usefulness in classifying things into right and left. At the polar ends of each are people that have conflicting norms on how the world should work. These usually arise once again through ignorance as a norm carries the expectation to be accepted by everyone. To someone that has worked in the tech of cryptocurrency, all I'm saying is that I'm not particularily interested in the left/right drama. Let's hope it never catches on. In my opinion these narratives are just created because somehow they'll serve Thiel and Andreessen to run a more specific story that they can use to increase their wealth.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
I agree it would be nice, I think right/left is not so much a set of ideologies as an advertising campaign that has taken on a life of its own. That said, I think one feature of that campaign is that every party will have to have a position on things affecting the population, crypto eventually being one of those.
diroussel 5y ago
It's also a very strange characterisation of left and right wing. In the UK centralisation is thought to be right wing, and consensus is considered left wing.

lottin 5y ago

TLDR version: "crypto" will turn everything upside down somehow, but we will have to wait at least 30 years to see it.

nixpulvis 5y ago

> — the ability for many untrusted participants in a network to establish consistency and trust. This is something the Internet has never had, but now it does, and I think it will take 30 years to work through all of the things we can do as a result. Wow, when you put it like that, it's amazing that I can shop, bank, and safely talk with my friends and family online. Pretty much all my messages are encrypted and/or checksummed (as necessary) and I still have to trust all the hardware and software on top to do it's job, just like anything else. How does "Crypto" change this?

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
you don't have to trust the vendor, the bank, or the social media company.
- aborsy 5y ago
  You still have to trust your hardware, software and surrounding tech (phone, computer, etc), produced by central authorities (lawful companies implementing government laws).
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- nixpulvis 5y ago
  Really!? How!?
- DSingularity 5y ago
  The conservative vs liberal angle is interesting but it just feels so contrived. So far the only thing cryptocurrencies was used for was to speculate on value of tokens and digital currencies. And my conclusion from that case-study is that cryptocurrency as a whole is a system unworthy of trust. Who owns BTC/ETH?
- lottin 5y ago
  So cryptocurrencies allow you to buy something from someone you don't trust? How does that work?

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lowkey 5y ago

From the article, the use case discussed is distributed consensus. With cryptocurrencies we as society have the option of a new way of organizing labor and capital to achieve a goal. Instead of kings, politicians, corporate owners or middlemen - we have the opportunity to build systems based on the idea of rules without rulers. Bitcoin eliminates the need for central bankers to control the money supply. Ethereum replaces armies of lawyers and beaurocrats with smart contract code. In the future crypto might allow you to build Ubercoin so we can have a distributed ride-sharing platform without a central entity in the middle. These new distributed consensus mechanisms eliminate the weaknesses of traditional approaches which rely on fallible human leaders who can be corrupted replacing them with code and incentives. This allows for emergent properties such as censorship resistant money that can be transmitted quickly and irrevocably over the internet. These are novel and innovative use cases powered by the most important invention of the 21at century.

mypastself 5y ago
How does real-life information enter a smart contract, and how do you make sure all sides make good on their dues?
- lowkey 5y ago
  One option today is Chainlink which uses a host of oracles to achieve distributed consensus on real-world prices, weather or other signals.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    And how would Chainlink prove that a particular side of a contract has, say, delivered a particular item or performed a particar service and the other party’s funds must be released?
    - lowkey 5y ago
      Chainlink hasn’t solved for every external blockchain integration - I never claimed they did. Chainlink simply provides a distributed consensus mechanism for getting real world observations in a robust and difficult to manipulate way, onto a blockchain.

jyu 5y ago

The world and society at large has seen an erosion of trust. For the naysayers, ask yourself: - do you trust your government more or less than your parents - do you trust the mainstream media more or less than your parents - do you trust big companies to do the right thing more or less than your parents As we culturally become less trusting, we need different tools to organize and determine value. Protocols that enable decentralized, distributed consensus helps build those tools. Adoption of these protocols, independent of cryptocurrency mania, is bound to happen.

lottin 5y ago
There cannot be economy without trust. There cannot be society. You wouldn't be able to function normally. Imagine walking past a stranger and not having a reasonable expectation that that they won't punch you in the face.
tim333 5y ago
Rating services seem to help. If my hotel gets 9/10 on the site it's usually good. Crypto on the other hand seems mostly ponzi scam.
- bathtub365 5y ago
  I’m frequently suspicious of the veracity of ratings online.
dcolkitt 5y ago
I believe open source software is now the most trusted segment of society. (Prior to a few years ago, I’d say peer reviewed science, but the replication crisis has not been kind to its image.) Most people in the know probably trust Linus and the kernel team far more than the intelligence team or Vitalik more than Janet Yellen or Postgres more than Oracle or Wikipedia more than Harvard. To that extent there’s going to be a major push, where practically feasible, to replace existing institutions with open software and protocols. Trust is more efficient, and trusted entities will long-term outcompete untrusted. The technology doesn’t yet exist, but if you could replace JP Morgan with a DAO, how does JP Morgan not watch its business crumble. Why would any stakeholder choose to trust an opaque bank over an open protocol?

ceilingcorner 5y ago

Thiel said that “if AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.” He didn’t say “right vs. left” and Andreessen is misquoting him, either deliberately or on purpose.

rvieira 5y ago

> Peter Thiel has made the characteristically sweeping observation that AI is in some sense a left wing idea — centralized machines making top-down decisions — but crypto is a right wing idea — many distributed agents, humans and bots, making bottom-up decisions. I enjoy philosophical discussions as much as the next person, but this kind of sweeping postmodern categorical generalisations just smell like a new Sokal affair.

joelbondurant 5y ago

The left gets so angry over any hint totalitarian Government is a failed religion.