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Can someone explain to me why HN is so anti-crypto?

cr3ative 5y ago
Have you seen crypto?
ramraj07 5y ago
It’s not that HN is anti crypto, it’s that most (if not all) smart people are. The only smart people that are pro crypto are ones trying to sell shovels in the gold rush (like Elon or Dorsey). It’s ironic you’re asking this question in a thread about news proving how stupid crypto is to begin with.
- bko 5y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    Post modernist retort kudos
    - 7sidedmarble 5y ago
      > Post modernist retort kudos That's not what post modernism is
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        This is a post-modernist thread.
- joshxyz 5y ago
  quite a bold assumption most are smart here. most people here are experts on a subject matter or two but we should still take their stances on crypto (and other industries) with caution. maybe they dont just understand it at all, too. and its a lot, wrapping your head around all the defi fiasco alone is mentally challenging as hell, haha.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
joshxyz 5y ago
honestly? boomers, lol but every once in a while great discussions pop up here, vitalik buterin himself even posts here sometimes, also that guy from coinbase etc
Taek 5y ago
It used to be very strange to me, but honestly think the answer is that a large number of HN community members are - somewhat ironically - very closed minded. Once you start to think in that framework you see it everywhere, and it goes all the way back to the original DropBox thread where some guy said "this is stupid you could just combine FTP with SVN". Of course that doesn't apply to everyone, and perhaps not even them majority, but certainly at least the majority that shows up in crypto threads. HN members tend to be very smart, very technical, and very confident, all of which combine into this ugly blind spot to creative/unusual forms of technical innovation. Crypto in particular is good at sitting right in the center of that blind spot. This explanation has made more sense to me than anything else I've seen, you'll have to decide for yourself if you agree with it.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  > creative/unusual forms of technical innovation Crypto has been around for quite a few years already. How is everyone still close minded? Maybe the issue is that crypto has several problems that are consistently ignored by the community and crypto products keep on underdelivering on their promises. In the end, it all boils down to one fact: the differentiating feature of blockchain is decentralization. That's mainly it. However, the crypto community keeps on promising changes and improvements in areas that don't have anything to do with decentralization without any actual arguments, ignoring what is the reality of those issues.
- adwn 5y ago
  > a large number of HN community members are - somewhat ironically - very closed minded The other side of that coin – excessive open-mindedness – however, leads to being susceptible to cults, snake oil salesmen, and hyped up technologies. Crypto currencies, in particular, frequently tick all three boxes. Skepticism is generally a good thing, and so far crypto currency proponents have failed to refute the arguments of sceptics.
  - Taek 5y ago
    The Internet also failed to refute the arguments of skeptics until one day it didn't fail and now several of the largest companies in the world are entirely Internet based and providing indisputable value. Cryptocurrency offers new primitives that are unavailable in any other system known to man. It takes time to build up a backbone of technology that can take these new primitives and get them to the point where they can compete with established trillion dollar industries, but it is happening, and it's starting to happen very rapidly. It's certainly true that crypto is full of snake oil salesmen, overhyped technologies, and culty communities. But the presence of those things doesn't change the fact that the technology is real, and that it can do things at a fundamental level that no other technology can do.
nadam 5y ago
I was thinking about this a lot. I used to think that most HN users are very smart, but the crypto discussions here are extremely dumb full of misconceptions and hatred. For example yesterday there was an article upvoted and vehemently discussed here, but anyone having a basic understanding of crypto would know that the article was total garbage (and full of hatred). It was like someone with primary-school mathematics knowledge hating on mathematicians and wanting to reform modern mathematics with his 'idea'. I think it has to do with a misconception about how much effort you have to put in to have a good understanding on crypto. If we are speaking about topics like high mathematics, most people realise that their knowledge is not enough to have a meaningful opinion on the cutting-edge. For some reason people on HN treat crypto like politics: almost everyone has a strong opinion without much knowledge. Crypto is a much deeper subject than how it is treated on HN. You need to have not just technical knowledge (like understanding why a proof-of-stake algorithm has no vulnerability is VERY hard), but also very deep knowledge of the philosophy of value/money/trust. For example any substantial interview with Vitalik Buterin discusses the topics in a much deeper way than it is treated on HN. TL;DR: People are reasonably smart here but extremely uneducated on crypto, and for some reason they think that they are informed enough to have a strong opinion.
- jstx1 5y ago
  It's also possible that some people understand all of this and still don't think that crypto is a good idea, or that it has worked out well in practice, or that it does anything meaningful.
  - nadam 5y ago
    Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics today.
    - 5y ago
sireat 5y ago
There are many here who have seen crypto to overpromise and underdeliver for over 10 years. PS Mined some BTC in 2011 and some LTC in 2012-2013. The original promise (per Satoshi) was that it could be used as electronic money. That goalpost was moved onto other currencies and sidechains and regular public acceptance has been low. Most of crypto activity is related to other crypto(see Ethereum, see DeFi). All of the "cool" stuff happening in crypto seems to be dealing with other crypto... It is useless to non-crypto people. The only somewhat useful moral use case are remittances to unstable countries. The rest of crypto is just bad bad stuff: scams, ransomware, large scale capital transfers by bad actors(tax evaders being the least evil). I am in a business(high rate of CC fraud) where I would really benefit from an easy onramp for non crypto users. PSS Last not least, POW and the horrible incentives going along with it is a serious issue as well. POS remains unproven in the field.
bob33212 5y ago
There are two distinct pieces. One piece is the technology and white paper behind Bitcoin. Most engineers on HN think that is very impressive and a legitimate technological achievement. The other piece is a reaction to the pro crypto crowd who are making claims about how amazing crypto is and why it is the future. Most of these people have a large financial interest in moving the price of various coins up. The use cases so far 10 years into this are buying drugs and ransomware and the price going up. Another example "Smart Contracts" are supposed to be this amazing technology for changing the world, but as you see here they have some significant downsides that the pro crypto people seem to either ignore or not understand. It isn't just HN folks who feel this way. One of the smartest and most accomplished AI engineers alive today had this to say. https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1401267972044328961 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1401267972044328961
acjohnson55 5y ago
Skepticism is maybe the definitive cultural trait of this site. And I think a lot of folks see gaps and hype in the cryptocurrency narrative. There is much to be skeptical of at every level of engagement.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
It is wasteful, it is often pitched as solutions to problems that it is poorly suited to solve, it is often defended by people with a vested financial interest in seeing it go up, it is often defended by people who seem pretty darn paranoid and insane by common standards in regards to anarchist beliefs or some variant, it's often poorly defined or vaporware on top of a non crypto solution, it's increasingly reinventing existing systems but worse, it's often debated by people who don't understand it, and in general its constantly showing weaknesses like this article where you get splits of "Working as intended as that's bad", "Working as intended and that's good", "Not working as intended and unsolveable", and "Not working as intended but solveable with x framework."
baq 5y ago
we look and apply common sense to what we see. e.g. why is a pixelated horse worth $10k? the least worrisome conclusion is that it's a tax optimization thing.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Most HN users are wealthy devs or they want to be wealthy devs or startup founders. They have no need for crypto and it threatens where their money is stored- equities and the traditional banking system. The “hackers” traded their soul for money. It’s really no different than a wealthy old man hating crypto. He has no need for it, he doesn’t want others to use it to get past him. He sees no problem with the current wealth inequality because he is at the top.
- jshen 5y ago
  Anyone that thinks that crypto is somehow going to help fix inequality is delusional. If crypto isn’t a complete dud, which I think is likely, it will increase inequality.
- rank0 5y ago
  Crypto inequality is FAR worse than the traditional finance system, both in power and capital. A very small number of people control the protocols, network nodes, and hold the tokens themselves. The 100 richest ETH wallets own 25% of mined ETH. Many of those wallets are probably owned by the same person/organization. Switching to PoS will make inequality even worse. Some critics are definitely jelly about not hitting the crypto-lottery...but crypto is not a solution for wealth inequality.
wil421 5y ago
Personally I see it as trying to recreate the banking and financial systems without all the lessons learned from hundreds of years. Not to to mention anything dealing with money that isn’t reversible or doesn’t have a clear method for recourse is not something I want to put my money into.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Can someone explain to me why HN is so anti-crypto? Short answer: Crypto has been touted as a primarily technological advancement (blockchain!) while the primary use case for most crypto proponents is simply getting rich (flipping coins or spreading "HODL" encouragement). Imagine if Venmo had launched with the requirement that all Venmo transactions had to be performed with VENMOCOIN instead of dollars. To transact on the Venmo platform, you had to buy some of this VENMOCOIN from the founders or early adopters, funneling your real money to them in exchange for tokens you could use on the Venmo platform. The VENMOCOIN early adopters really, really want you to use Venmo so the price of their VENMOCOIN goes up, so every online discussion gets filled with people talking about how amazing Venmo is and how it's the way of the future and everyone should buy as much VENMOCOIN as possible. Sound ridiculous, right? That's more or less what the crypto discussions have become: People pretend to talk about technology but it's really about getting rich by flipping coins and pumping their value.
mrtksn 5y ago
It happened outside of the SV bubble.
jshen 5y ago
It hasn’t solved any real problem that a regular database doesn’t solve better and more efficiently.
seph-reed 5y ago
IMO, impatience/bitterness. A lot of people got sold on the idea that big change was coming, then it didn't. Now crypto is in a gross stage, and while it clearly has some future, many people would rather point out how far away that future may still be. Some with far more certainty of it never happening than others.
Jasper_ 5y ago
The most significant thing it's done is send other people's money to hackers. Why should I be impressed by that?
rsynnott 5y ago
As a very long-term crypto-sceptic, I remember thinking this place was absurdly naive and pro-crypto early on. However, after a decade of, largely, pointlessness, it's not surprising that attitudes have changed. My impression is that most of the pro-crypto communities are rather new; most people involved just haven't been disillusioned yet.
Bayart 5y ago
Despite the relatively high level of education here, collectively the community can be extremely doctrinal or knee-jerky on a number of subjects. Most articles that mention crypto bring a cohort of « Ponzi scheme » and « destructive mining » posts, when you'd expect somebody writing a lengthy post on the economics of energy were it to follow the established conventions of the site. I think the overly trashy environment of the crypto space made it an acceptable target for behaviour that's otherwise seen as childish and unacceptable when it comes to other subjects.
8note 5y ago
It's a solution looking for a problem. As such, it imposes bad tradeoffs that a fit to form solution wouldn't have. Lack of methods to handle fraud and abuse is the one hilighted in this thread.
Geee 5y ago
I think it's simply because lots of people on HN didn't buy any and now they think that they've missed the boat. They're angry because "stupid" people got rich on it. HNers like to think that they're smarter than everyone else and missing the boat hurts their ego. Although that isn't true and it's never too late to buy bitcoin. Another reason is that most people on HN don't realize that there are roughly two sets of people in crypto. There are bitcoiners and then there are all the shitcoiners and scammers (who talk about use cases, ICOs, NFTs etc.). It's ok to hate all the scammers, but bitcoiners should be left out of it, because they're totally different set of people.
stevage 5y ago
Because it is not useful for anything, causes immense damage, and many of the people that promote it are crooks.

Have you seen crypto?

It’s not that HN is anti crypto, it’s that most (if not all) smart people are. The only smart people that are pro crypto are ones trying to sell shovels in the gold rush (like Elon or Dorsey). It’s ironic you’re asking this question in a thread about news proving how stupid crypto is to begin with.

bko 5y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/
- ramraj07 5y ago
  Post modernist retort kudos
  - 7sidedmarble 5y ago
    > Post modernist retort kudos That's not what post modernism is
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      This is a post-modernist thread.
joshxyz 5y ago
quite a bold assumption most are smart here. most people here are experts on a subject matter or two but we should still take their stances on crypto (and other industries) with caution. maybe they dont just understand it at all, too. and its a lot, wrapping your head around all the defi fiasco alone is mentally challenging as hell, haha.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

joshxyz 5y ago

honestly? boomers, lol but every once in a while great discussions pop up here, vitalik buterin himself even posts here sometimes, also that guy from coinbase etc

Taek 5y ago

It used to be very strange to me, but honestly think the answer is that a large number of HN community members are - somewhat ironically - very closed minded. Once you start to think in that framework you see it everywhere, and it goes all the way back to the original DropBox thread where some guy said "this is stupid you could just combine FTP with SVN". Of course that doesn't apply to everyone, and perhaps not even them majority, but certainly at least the majority that shows up in crypto threads. HN members tend to be very smart, very technical, and very confident, all of which combine into this ugly blind spot to creative/unusual forms of technical innovation. Crypto in particular is good at sitting right in the center of that blind spot. This explanation has made more sense to me than anything else I've seen, you'll have to decide for yourself if you agree with it.

gjulianm 5y ago
> creative/unusual forms of technical innovation Crypto has been around for quite a few years already. How is everyone still close minded? Maybe the issue is that crypto has several problems that are consistently ignored by the community and crypto products keep on underdelivering on their promises. In the end, it all boils down to one fact: the differentiating feature of blockchain is decentralization. That's mainly it. However, the crypto community keeps on promising changes and improvements in areas that don't have anything to do with decentralization without any actual arguments, ignoring what is the reality of those issues.
adwn 5y ago
> a large number of HN community members are - somewhat ironically - very closed minded The other side of that coin – excessive open-mindedness – however, leads to being susceptible to cults, snake oil salesmen, and hyped up technologies. Crypto currencies, in particular, frequently tick all three boxes. Skepticism is generally a good thing, and so far crypto currency proponents have failed to refute the arguments of sceptics.
- Taek 5y ago
  The Internet also failed to refute the arguments of skeptics until one day it didn't fail and now several of the largest companies in the world are entirely Internet based and providing indisputable value. Cryptocurrency offers new primitives that are unavailable in any other system known to man. It takes time to build up a backbone of technology that can take these new primitives and get them to the point where they can compete with established trillion dollar industries, but it is happening, and it's starting to happen very rapidly. It's certainly true that crypto is full of snake oil salesmen, overhyped technologies, and culty communities. But the presence of those things doesn't change the fact that the technology is real, and that it can do things at a fundamental level that no other technology can do.

nadam 5y ago

I was thinking about this a lot. I used to think that most HN users are very smart, but the crypto discussions here are extremely dumb full of misconceptions and hatred. For example yesterday there was an article upvoted and vehemently discussed here, but anyone having a basic understanding of crypto would know that the article was total garbage (and full of hatred). It was like someone with primary-school mathematics knowledge hating on mathematicians and wanting to reform modern mathematics with his 'idea'. I think it has to do with a misconception about how much effort you have to put in to have a good understanding on crypto. If we are speaking about topics like high mathematics, most people realise that their knowledge is not enough to have a meaningful opinion on the cutting-edge. For some reason people on HN treat crypto like politics: almost everyone has a strong opinion without much knowledge. Crypto is a much deeper subject than how it is treated on HN. You need to have not just technical knowledge (like understanding why a proof-of-stake algorithm has no vulnerability is VERY hard), but also very deep knowledge of the philosophy of value/money/trust. For example any substantial interview with Vitalik Buterin discusses the topics in a much deeper way than it is treated on HN. TL;DR: People are reasonably smart here but extremely uneducated on crypto, and for some reason they think that they are informed enough to have a strong opinion.

jstx1 5y ago
It's also possible that some people understand all of this and still don't think that crypto is a good idea, or that it has worked out well in practice, or that it does anything meaningful.
- nadam 5y ago
  Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics today.
  - 5y ago

sireat 5y ago

There are many here who have seen crypto to overpromise and underdeliver for over 10 years. PS Mined some BTC in 2011 and some LTC in 2012-2013. The original promise (per Satoshi) was that it could be used as electronic money. That goalpost was moved onto other currencies and sidechains and regular public acceptance has been low. Most of crypto activity is related to other crypto(see Ethereum, see DeFi). All of the "cool" stuff happening in crypto seems to be dealing with other crypto... It is useless to non-crypto people. The only somewhat useful moral use case are remittances to unstable countries. The rest of crypto is just bad bad stuff: scams, ransomware, large scale capital transfers by bad actors(tax evaders being the least evil). I am in a business(high rate of CC fraud) where I would really benefit from an easy onramp for non crypto users. PSS Last not least, POW and the horrible incentives going along with it is a serious issue as well. POS remains unproven in the field.

bob33212 5y ago

There are two distinct pieces. One piece is the technology and white paper behind Bitcoin. Most engineers on HN think that is very impressive and a legitimate technological achievement. The other piece is a reaction to the pro crypto crowd who are making claims about how amazing crypto is and why it is the future. Most of these people have a large financial interest in moving the price of various coins up. The use cases so far 10 years into this are buying drugs and ransomware and the price going up. Another example "Smart Contracts" are supposed to be this amazing technology for changing the world, but as you see here they have some significant downsides that the pro crypto people seem to either ignore or not understand. It isn't just HN folks who feel this way. One of the smartest and most accomplished AI engineers alive today had this to say. https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1401267972044328961 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1401267972044328961

acjohnson55 5y ago

Skepticism is maybe the definitive cultural trait of this site. And I think a lot of folks see gaps and hype in the cryptocurrency narrative. There is much to be skeptical of at every level of engagement.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

It is wasteful, it is often pitched as solutions to problems that it is poorly suited to solve, it is often defended by people with a vested financial interest in seeing it go up, it is often defended by people who seem pretty darn paranoid and insane by common standards in regards to anarchist beliefs or some variant, it's often poorly defined or vaporware on top of a non crypto solution, it's increasingly reinventing existing systems but worse, it's often debated by people who don't understand it, and in general its constantly showing weaknesses like this article where you get splits of "Working as intended as that's bad", "Working as intended and that's good", "Not working as intended and unsolveable", and "Not working as intended but solveable with x framework."

baq 5y ago

we look and apply common sense to what we see. e.g. why is a pixelated horse worth $10k? the least worrisome conclusion is that it's a tax optimization thing.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

Most HN users are wealthy devs or they want to be wealthy devs or startup founders. They have no need for crypto and it threatens where their money is stored- equities and the traditional banking system. The “hackers” traded their soul for money. It’s really no different than a wealthy old man hating crypto. He has no need for it, he doesn’t want others to use it to get past him. He sees no problem with the current wealth inequality because he is at the top.

jshen 5y ago
Anyone that thinks that crypto is somehow going to help fix inequality is delusional. If crypto isn’t a complete dud, which I think is likely, it will increase inequality.
rank0 5y ago
Crypto inequality is FAR worse than the traditional finance system, both in power and capital. A very small number of people control the protocols, network nodes, and hold the tokens themselves. The 100 richest ETH wallets own 25% of mined ETH. Many of those wallets are probably owned by the same person/organization. Switching to PoS will make inequality even worse. Some critics are definitely jelly about not hitting the crypto-lottery...but crypto is not a solution for wealth inequality.

wil421 5y ago

Personally I see it as trying to recreate the banking and financial systems without all the lessons learned from hundreds of years. Not to to mention anything dealing with money that isn’t reversible or doesn’t have a clear method for recourse is not something I want to put my money into.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Can someone explain to me why HN is so anti-crypto? Short answer: Crypto has been touted as a primarily technological advancement (blockchain!) while the primary use case for most crypto proponents is simply getting rich (flipping coins or spreading "HODL" encouragement). Imagine if Venmo had launched with the requirement that all Venmo transactions had to be performed with VENMOCOIN instead of dollars. To transact on the Venmo platform, you had to buy some of this VENMOCOIN from the founders or early adopters, funneling your real money to them in exchange for tokens you could use on the Venmo platform. The VENMOCOIN early adopters really, really want you to use Venmo so the price of their VENMOCOIN goes up, so every online discussion gets filled with people talking about how amazing Venmo is and how it's the way of the future and everyone should buy as much VENMOCOIN as possible. Sound ridiculous, right? That's more or less what the crypto discussions have become: People pretend to talk about technology but it's really about getting rich by flipping coins and pumping their value.

mrtksn 5y ago

It happened outside of the SV bubble.

jshen 5y ago

It hasn’t solved any real problem that a regular database doesn’t solve better and more efficiently.

seph-reed 5y ago

IMO, impatience/bitterness. A lot of people got sold on the idea that big change was coming, then it didn't. Now crypto is in a gross stage, and while it clearly has some future, many people would rather point out how far away that future may still be. Some with far more certainty of it never happening than others.

Jasper_ 5y ago

The most significant thing it's done is send other people's money to hackers. Why should I be impressed by that?

rsynnott 5y ago

As a very long-term crypto-sceptic, I remember thinking this place was absurdly naive and pro-crypto early on. However, after a decade of, largely, pointlessness, it's not surprising that attitudes have changed. My impression is that most of the pro-crypto communities are rather new; most people involved just haven't been disillusioned yet.

Bayart 5y ago

Despite the relatively high level of education here, collectively the community can be extremely doctrinal or knee-jerky on a number of subjects. Most articles that mention crypto bring a cohort of « Ponzi scheme » and « destructive mining » posts, when you'd expect somebody writing a lengthy post on the economics of energy were it to follow the established conventions of the site. I think the overly trashy environment of the crypto space made it an acceptable target for behaviour that's otherwise seen as childish and unacceptable when it comes to other subjects.

8note 5y ago

It's a solution looking for a problem. As such, it imposes bad tradeoffs that a fit to form solution wouldn't have. Lack of methods to handle fraud and abuse is the one hilighted in this thread.

Geee 5y ago

I think it's simply because lots of people on HN didn't buy any and now they think that they've missed the boat. They're angry because "stupid" people got rich on it. HNers like to think that they're smarter than everyone else and missing the boat hurts their ego. Although that isn't true and it's never too late to buy bitcoin. Another reason is that most people on HN don't realize that there are roughly two sets of people in crypto. There are bitcoiners and then there are all the shitcoiners and scammers (who talk about use cases, ICOs, NFTs etc.). It's ok to hate all the scammers, but bitcoiners should be left out of it, because they're totally different set of people.

stevage 5y ago

Because it is not useful for anything, causes immense damage, and many of the people that promote it are crooks.