33 ms·

10 years of whatever this has been

• sweetbitter 5y ago
  Why does Hacker News so studiously dismiss the innovations that other projects such as Monero, Nano, Ethereum or the so-called 'Proof of Stake' chains have made in favor of trashing Bitcoin, as if Bitcoin were all there is to cryptocurrencies? Most of Bitcoin's (technological) problems have already been solved.
  • habosa 5y ago
    Because Bitcoin is still the center of the crypto universe. As the price of bitcoin goes up and down, so does the entire scene. Some people like it that way, others don't. But it's definitely the situation we're in.
• BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
  That was magnificent sketch of a part of the world gone mad.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Ok but, bank account go wheeeeeee
• chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
  While there are certainly good arguments against bitcoin/blockchain, this article comes off as rambling and incoherent.
• causi 5y ago
  Also, it’s now obvious that use of bitcoin (and related blockchains) for payments is almost entirely scams and illegal stuff. [citation needed]
• ajlburke 5y ago
  I liked his point near the end of the article comparing blockchains to XML - overcomplicated and oversold and added to too many things due to marketing and consultant hype. The obvious next question he didn't ask is, what is the JSON of blockchain? The one that's more flexible and efficient and ends up actually becoming ubiquitous? Maybe it hasn't appeared yet? Maybe it shouldn't? I don't know, but the comparison is just waiting for that followup.
  • discodave 5y ago
    This quote is [chefs kiss]: > Here's a metaphor. Blockchains today are like… XML in the early 2000s. A long-burning overcomplicated trash fire that a bunch of large, cash-rich, unscrupulous, consultant-filled mega-organizations foisted on us for years and years, that we all now pretend we weren’t dumb enough to fall for. Remember SOAP? Remember when we tried to make HTML4 into XHTML? Ew, no. To answer your question, here are some suggestions for what might be the JSON of blockchain: * Git - Cryptographic hashing, Merkle trees, and distributed architecture (pre-GitHub) to record a history of events. * Databases (SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL) - Have been running the entire fincancial system for several decades. * Credit cards - ubiquitous electronica payments "Credit card was the most used payment method in the United States in 2020, with 38 percent of point of sale payments being made by credit card." - statista.com * Apple/Samsung/Google Pay & friends.
• rektide 5y ago
  a more perfect counterpost could not be made to "crypto.com arena". fucking amazing. avery's always just spot on but this one counts for a lot. grady booch had a good thread in the possible value of blockchains today, contrasting against what they do get used for (but holding the punches). i feel like some basic certificate transparency logs probably fulfill of these objectives. or the former linux foundation sponsored project publictimestamp.org, in many cases, for attestation. https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1461122915286487042 https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1461122915286487042 or how about xboxer phil spencer, saying NFT game plans "feel more exploitive than about entertainment". https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/xbox-boss-phil-spencer-says-nft-game-plans-feel-more-exploitive-than-about-entertainment/ https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/xbox-boss-phil-spen... i do hope some good decentralized identity can emerge. but right now it seems to cost $500 to register a ENS domain and another bundle to update it. figuring out what data the world ought all keep is a question, a real one, and one the invisible hand of the market seems basically useless at helping us prioritize & sort. what we're doing is pointless in extreme.
  • musicale 5y ago
    > xboxer phil spencer, saying NFT game plans "feel more exploitive than about entertainment Perhaps if NFTs granted in-game assets then they might have more tangible value outside of speculation and money laundering.
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  Or "why I totes wasn't wrong last time guys, for real."
  • chris_wot 5y ago
    Well, on most of his points, he wasn't.
    • fastball 5y ago
      When your thesis is "bitcoin will fail for these reasons" and Bitcoin doesn't fail, your reasons are not correct.
      • lelanthran 5y ago
        > When your thesis is "bitcoin will fail for these reasons" and Bitcoin doesn't fail, your reasons are not correct. Unless there was a time-limit on the prediction, your assertion is incorrect. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", after all.
      • chris_wot 5y ago
        Define failure.
        • sweetbitter 5y ago
          Failure in the context of a crypto-currency is when it fails to act as a trustless form of p2p money for those who use it + does not increase in adoption by users. Neither of those things are true.
          • betwixthewires 5y ago
            Not who you're replying to (I'm a little higher in the thread) but I will take a stab at it. The goalposts get moved a lot. Not by anyone in particular. The term "trustless" was not really in use until around the time of the ethereum launch. The goal of bitcoin was always only a digital cash system that has no central record keeper. It is currently a functioning, although inefficient, implementation of that concept. To a broader point though, I say it often, you don't get to decide how the tools you build get used. Trying to do so is an exercise in frustration. Even if bitcoin were to never be used as intended, for it to be a success, it only needs to be used for something. The main thing bitcoin (the network and codebase) did IMO is spur innovation into user generated currencies (and financial assets). Bitcoin itself is not that great, but some specific cryptocurrencies are wonderful. There are some emergent properties of these types of networks (they fork instead of evolve is pertinent to my point) that were not anticipated before they were live, and bitcoin can be viewed as a sort of prototype network that helped show us how to build and manage these things. For that, it is also a success, although I wouldn't dream of using bitcoin specifically to pay my bills, as it exists today. There are plenty of other currencies though that I would use to pay my bills, for various reasons.
• stickfigure 5y ago
  XML is still relevant, useful, and better than YAML for most of YAML's use cases. The rest of his arguments, meh, whatever. I'm guessing in another 10 years he'll write another post exactly like this. XML and BTC will still both have a place in the world.
  • jholman 5y ago
    YAML is better than XML for some things (human-readable config files), worse than XML for others (everything else?). But XML is always bad (though always bearable, barely). Surely you didn't mean to imply that there are no other options?
  • baq 5y ago
    yes, YAML is exactly what's missing in this thread /s
• kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Combine a really neat data structure with the possibility of becoming a billionaire, and it’s no surprise that programmers are entranced.
• anm89 5y ago
  What a crock. By his definitions succeeding is when everything goes perfectly right, 100% to plan, forever, according to every third party observer. By his definition all of FAANG (or whatever) are total failures. You could poke minor semantic holes in their accomplishments! CNBC lists bitcoin price next to the S&P. It's up infinity percent. There are regulated financial products. If asked at the time he would have unequivocally said those things would not have happened because bitcoin was going to fail because he was dead wrong. It would have been much braver and more respectable to just say "yeah, I really was wrong on that one"
  • School-Cotton 5y ago
    But Bitcoin hasn’t succeeded. It doesn’t allow you to do anything useful except (1) buy drugs on the internet, and (2) move money out of authoritarian countries, both of which he acknowledges in the article. The fact that a lot of people care about blockchains and are willing to make speculative bets on them doesn’t mean that the idea is actually useful for much. The FAANGs at least have made some real products, some of which some people find useful.
    • mitchdoogle 5y ago
      You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin (not just drugs). You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). It's immutable. Basically it does the things it's supposed to do. It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses. It is, without a doubt, successful.
      • School-Cotton 5y ago
        > You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff. A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”. > You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). This is also true of, for example, TransferWise. > It’s immutable This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug. > It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses. Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.
• fieryskiff11 5y ago
  >he doubled down
• rsync 5y ago
  "Nowadays if someone picks XML for a new design, we look at them like they’re from another planet." Wait, what ? I design and use scripts and tools in my personal data processing and in twilio, etc., that use XML ... XML isn't the christ child but ... it does seem useful and valuable.
  • recursive 5y ago
    Take out the namespaces, external entities, CDATA, and other cruft, and XML isnt tooo bad.
    • XorNot 5y ago
      Yeah but then you've ended up with weird JSON.
      • kome 5y ago
        People that dislike XML and like JSON are... weird. JSON is a verbose mess.
      • recursive 5y ago
        Weird JSON with schemas. To me, that sounds like a pretty good trade. I know there's a bunch of json-schema things, but none of them have the weight of a primary-source officially blessed schema system.
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    I’d take xml+xslt over helm every single time.
  • Flankk 5y ago
    People hate XML. Mostly because its association with SOAP. It's also not a great data format. Why would you want a data format that is hard for both computers and humans to read?
  • BarryMilo 5y ago
    XML is only bad if JSON exists
• ncraig 5y ago
  I enjoy this quote from the 2011 piece. If only someone had forced me to buy bitcoin then. Not exactly a USD- or CAD-style "screwing." I don't own any bitcoins. I don't particularly want to. If one day I have to own some for some reason, I will buy them at the market rate and get screwed, just as I do today with U.S. and Canadian dollars.
• mrb 5y ago
  «it’s now obvious that use of bitcoin (and related blockchains) for payments is almost entirely scams and illegal stuff» It is neither obvious, nor is there any data that suggests that is the case for Bitcoin. I suspect people who hold this opinion form it passively while reading the occasional flashy news headlines "Drug lord used Bitcoin!" and don't actually do any research. After all, news reporters write about what drives readership, and "Grocery merchant used Bitcoin" just doesn't quite get the same engagement. There are very few research papers that conclude a large percentage of Bitcoin's transaction is tied to illegal activity, for example [1] claims 46%. However they are fatally flawed: they fail to consider the amplifying effect of mixers/tumblers that, by design, create thousands of automated mixing transactions per original transaction. So 1 illegal transaction will look like 1000 transactions in their analysis... facepalm [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102645 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102645
  • clusterfish 5y ago
    If only demanding evidence of crimes would magically materialize said evidence. It is hidden by design, that's why it's used for illegal stuff on the first place, and why it wasn't banned yet (who needs to hide money more than politicians?). It's pretty obvious by the lack of legitimate activity. Nobody's buying pizzas for bitcoins. It's all about speculation and hiding your money from taxes.
    • kipchak 5y ago
      >Nobody's buying pizzas for bitcoins. Couldn't I buy a pizza with Bitcoin in El Salvador? https://seekingalpha.com/news/3738724-mcdonalds-starbucks-pizza-hut-accepting-bitcoin-in-el-salvador https://seekingalpha.com/news/3738724-mcdonalds-starbucks-pi...
      • catlikesshrimp 5y ago
        The Goverment is no longer promoting Chivo. The platform is allegedly cold now. People who originally installed it for the $30 sign up bonus (which is hefty) retired. Your link is from September. I am not going into the problems with the platform as I am not physically there. But this iteration of the project didn't take off. The government still invests in Bitcoin, which is another issue.
• revskill 5y ago
  Because i hate banking system, it's run by people which is flawed. All the verification, transfer should be done by machines. I don't need anyone from the banking system to "watch" how my money is used. It's not Bitcoin that succeeded, it's just the banking system run by human that failed. [Edited]: The point is, a banking system which is completely run by machine is all i need and trust. No human should be in the banking process.
  • Kbelicius 5y ago
    > All the verification, transfer should be done by machines. Those are done by machines, that human intervention is possible is a feature not a bug.
    • revskill 5y ago
      No, the process in real world is something like this: - You go to the bank - You write down something you must provide for someone to do the thing - You signed something with a pen - Then you talk to them something that they must listen carefully to. - Then you wait for them to do something in their machines. - Then ok, u got a SMS message to know that the transaction is confirmed.
      • Kbelicius 5y ago
        No, in this century it isn't. You pull out your phone and you are done with it.
        • int_19h 5y ago
          That very much depends on where you are.
      • crummy 5y ago
        what's your bank?
        • 5y ago
• ngngngng 5y ago
  I'm surprised at how much the comments are defending Bitcoin. Maybe the author is being a bit harsh to defend his past article, but I agree with him overall. I have exactly 1 use for Bitcoin. Putting dollars into it, and hoping I get more dollars out. That's it. I'm never going to use it for anything besides that. Why would I? I'm not buying drugs, or fleeing authoritarian regimes.
  • koonsolo 5y ago
    > Putting dollars into it, and hoping I get more dollars out. So you mean as a hedge against inflation? That is exactly the usecase of Bitcoin right now. Other cryptocurrencies go for other usecases, but for bitcoin, that is it.
    • markdestouches 5y ago
      No, he means asset price speculation. The inflation argument that is so often brought up seems ridiculous to me. Inflation ensures sufficient demand. Modern economy will collapse if the global rate goes negative.
      • koonsolo 5y ago
        The use case is really "Bitcoin is a better gold".
        • rob001 5y ago
          Except it's not? Especially a fully insured and physically backed ETC fund with low fees.
          • paulgb 5y ago
            Gold is also one of 118 boxes on the periodic table. It pre-existed humans and has been something people valued for millennia. Bitcoin is an imaginary thing someone made up ten years ago that we all just collectively decided to value. Or at least, some of us did, in the hopes that the rest of us would come aboard and they’d be rich.
• seibelj 5y ago
  Most people didn’t predict Bitcoin and blockchain would succeed. Being someone who said it would fail doesn’t make you special, interesting, or unique because that is the standard line that 99%+ who heard about Bitcoin thought. Yet it’s here and successful, and at a minimum it’s going to help people in countries with corrupt central banks like Lebanon to get some modicum of stability.
• 4monthsaway 5y ago
  Some interesting comparisons in there. There sure is a lot of cult-like behavior coming out of the cryptosphere, I wonder if/when that aspect will stop. The underlying tech has great potential, the scammy gambling cult part--not so much.
• kriops 5y ago
  The fact that blockchains are used by criminals is definitive proof that it improves upon traditional financial infrastructure also in legitimate use cases where trust is an issue. I.e., blockchains are an indisputable success from a technological point of view. The fact that criminals use tools, such as bolt cutters, cars and computers, doesn't mean that the tools are evil. Criminals are evil! Punish criminals for engaging in criminal activities, don't punish morally upstanding citizens for enjoying the liberty afforded them by virtue of their humanity. There, two simple points that 99% of bitcoin "critiques" fail to address.
  • nathanvanfleet 5y ago
    Maybe we should centralize authority to stop criminal actors from using these tools
    • kriops 5y ago
      Sir, do you have a licence for the computer you used to type that comment?
    • maccolgan 5y ago
      Is this sarcasm? I can't tell.
  • slyall 5y ago
    Trust isn't the reason that criminals use blockchains. They would happily transfer money the same way normal businesses do. They use blockchain cause they are locked out of the normal banking infrastructure. For the same reason normal people don't use blockchain to transfer money. They are able to use the banking system or Venmo or whatever. Using a blockchain is more complicated and usually more expensive than the alternatives.
    • koonsolo 5y ago
      Nano has 0 fees and instant transactions. It's hard for any other alternative to do better.
• jgrant27 5y ago
  Clueless. Doesn't know the difference between Bitcoin(Proof of work) and "Crypto" shit coins (proof of stake) which are not in any way decentralized. Bitcoin has had a greater than 10^5 times return on investment in 10 years. This technology is a first for the human race in being a fair and decentralized form of money and store of value. Not to mention that fiat currency(e.g. the US dollar) is by far the most used store of profits in organized crime and this includes international banks that pay minor fines for laundering billions in illegal profits.
  • sweetbitter 5y ago
    Blah blah blah no one cares about profiteering. Not against crypto-currencies, but present coherent arguments or take your sour attitude elsewhere.
• jschrf 5y ago
  I think this article kind of misses the point. The best thing that came out of Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin itself, it's that it's the progenitor and catalyst to more useful and interesting things like DeFi, smart contracts, distributed governance, and all sorts of ideas and future tech. Simply saying that Bitcoin is garbage and should fail is a bit like looking back at the tree of life at some goopy half fish, half land creature, and saying "look at this crappy thing, I hope it fails".
  • wmf 5y ago
    You could apply very similar analysis to DeFi, smart contracts, etc. In practice they appear to be second-order gambling systems for people who find L1 gambling not exciting enough.
    • ash 5y ago
      What's L1?
      • kharak 5y ago
        L1 = Layer 1. Example of how I understand it with gold: L1 is gold itself. L2 would be currencies with gold backing. L3 would be bank / credit card services based on that currency. Bitcoin: L1 is Bitcoin itself. L2 are certain technologies, like the Lightning Network, that allow for bundling of transactions. L3 would be service providers who use L1 and L2 Bitcoin technologies in the background. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
• petermelias 5y ago
  I sold my BTC from 2011 in the (what felt "big" at the time) run-up end of 2017, before it crashed in 2018. Me at the time: "nailed it. knew this was hype and surfed it beautifully. looking forward to never thinking about crypto again." Me now: "blew it. didn't even realize what 'mainstream' could mean." What this taught me is that hype can come in waves, and the next one might be bigger and the timing unknown. This article is great because it outlines all the different reasons why the hype of crypto has kept growing. It has so much controversy, is pretty generic, and nobody can really make sense of it. So it just keeps getting bigger because it is driving everyone nuts until they either: A) get it out of their system and move on because honestly, dollars work B) get rich off it and stop caring because they're rich now (probably converted a good amount to USD ;) C) don't get rich off it but could have / wished they had and spend time hating it until something distracts them towards a healthier life D) use it for practical purposes (aka crime) and then eventually get caught and have to wait out a sentence until they can get back in In my opinion, it is the very fact that it has defied so many predictions (while confirming others) that both explains its persistence, and leads to the author wanting to encore his prior post in the context of the _current_ wave of crypto hype.
  • gwern 5y ago
    > Me now: "blew it. didn't even realize what 'mainstream' could mean." Exponentials are a helluva drug. Even here on HN people don't feel exponents, power laws, and related growth in their bones. Whether it's Moore's law or experience cost curves or smartphone adoption... It's entirely possible for something to double or more in a year. The other day I noticed Tesla's forecast for manufacturing cars in 2021, I think. At a quick estimate, they're going to make more cars this year than they've made total in their entire history up to somewhere around 2020. Think about that: all the Teslas you've seen driving around already, well, next year, there's going to be twice as many, and then the year after that...? No wonder the Tesla stock price has shot up so much the past few years, as it becomes clear "they're gonna make it", and competitors like Ford are crashing their own electric truck programs or like Toyota are now out doing outrageous things like propagandizing about how awesome gasoline engines are & how actually the future is hydrogen.
    • 5y ago
• intrasight 5y ago
  If I could go back 20 years and write a sci-fi story about crypto eating the financial world during a global pandemic. Wow, what a great story that would have been.
• cyphertruck 5y ago
  Bitcoin’s goal was a censorship resistant form of P2P electronic cash. (Don’t get hung up on those terms- they are terms of art.) It has completely succeeded in that. In a decade it has never been successfully censored, it remains viable P2P cash and in fact has scaled in capability dramatically. Now you can trustlessly transfer $1k from one phone to another in milliseconds across the globe at effectively no cost. That is the best cash ever. And no government or corporation can censor it like they did to Wikileaks. A side effect of its security approach is the coin limit which has created scarcity and a virtuous cycle whereby early adopters gain relative wealth that helps fund continuing development. Bitcoin has completely succeeded on its own terms, far beyond its intended scope. It is now in the early stages of remaking the world in its own image. I know that likely few of you can see that, but it is already a national currency, and soon the trickle of adoption will become a flood as bitcoin incentivizes a speculative attack on the dollar and every other fiat currency. In the process it will destroy the funding mechanism that has kept the world at war for a century, and massively increased poverty. War is over. If you want it. Maas theft of poor peoples savings via inflation is over. With Bitcoin. PS: Blockchain/NFTs/Ethereum and every other shitcoin are scams. Beware.
  • larsiusprime 5y ago
    If by "milliseconds" you mean "15 minutes" and by "no cost" you mean "23 dollars"
    • errantmind 5y ago
      No, they didn't mean that. It is nearly free and instant to send with BTC's Lighting Network.
  • mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Inflation keeps poor people from dying of starvation. No one spends with deflating currency because one can always purchase more with it next year. Except when enough people have this thought and the economy stops and you get the Great Depression.
  • montzark 5y ago
• voz_ 5y ago
  So, I'm just a guy, been a software engineer most of my life, from age 7 or so when dad first showed me how to punch some commands in DOS. Probably like many of you here. So, when you read what I am about to write, please don't attack me, please read it with an inquisitive, truth seeking perspective. I come in peace, if even you don't like what I am about to say. When I first got into tech, the technology amazed me, not the problems it solved. The tech was enough, it was not a means to an end, it just was. As I got older, and started owning projects, managing teams, etc, I realized that technology should be in service of something, not just a thing to exist in and of itself. So, how does that relate to this? One question I have constantly asked, and never gotten an answer to - What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve? What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer. inb4 payments: Payments has been the closest answer, but then you realize that payments infra is bogged down by regulation, not by technology, and that any technology that goes to replace existing tech will get regulated down into the same place.
  • gassius 5y ago
    I would say this, as someone who was deep into Bitcoin until 2012 or so, got out but still use it ocasionally as payment method. For me, coming from a country ravaged by corrupt politicians, that controlled the Central Bank, and destroyed the country with years of hyperinflation, among other tools of destruction, the biggest problem Bitcoin seems to solve is Economic Dependency on Public Policy
  • AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    > "So, how does that relate to this? One question I have constantly asked, and never gotten an answer to - What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve? What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault
  • FpUser 5y ago
    >"I realized that technology should be in service of something, not just a thing to exist in and of itself." While for me technology is just a tool to help me make what I want I do realize one can just practice / enjoy it as an art form. Nothing is wrong with it.
• anonymoushn 5y ago
  I wonder if any other system will ever be as good as SPL USDC for international remittances. As soon as people in any country can wire money to any other country without making any phone calls or paying more than a penny, let me know. To be clear, I operate a business, and we accept payments and pay bills this way. We would like to pay more of our bills this way!
• azth 5y ago
  > If you like bitcoin, you must think the gold standard was a good idea. Yes, it was. > Because people really, really, really want it to. Exactly. People are sick of government induced inflation, and the government devaluing people's hard work at a whim to pay for their debts they go into through incompetence. Since the government won't go back to the gold standard, the people are taking things into their hands.
  • stopping 5y ago
    Inflation is a safety net. Inflation prevents populations from fearfully (or speculatively) hoarding money. When a population collectively decides to hoard money, demand for goods and services tanks, jobs are cut in response, and so on in a vicious cycle until the entire economy grinds to a halt. Such a situation is extremely difficult to recover from without government monetary policy to stimulate demand.
    • keymone 5y ago
      this is only valid for growth-above-all capitalist outlook. nothing is wrong with "hoarding" money, in non-biased language it's also called saving for retirement, yet your capitalist overlords created a view of reality where nothing good ever happens if their investments don't grow steadily. but for that to happen - money has to lose value steadily. don't be a slave to your capitalist overlords. you can save yourself by just rejecting their view, way easier than what slaves of the past had to do.
    • sweetbitter 5y ago
      Fine then, there are inflationary cryptocurrencies for you to choose from as well.
    • godDLL 5y ago
      Show, don't tell.
  • kall 5y ago
    The hardest working people are living paycheck to paycheck. Inflation, as long as it doesn‘t go hyper, is not a major concern. The only thing normal inflation seriously devalues is resting on your hard work for way to long.
• arciini 5y ago
  > That’s because I forgot one essential reason bitcoin has survived: > Because people really, really, really want it to. My impression is that Bitcoin (and crypto) is now a religion. It's tied to a lot of people's identities. That's to say, a group of people think of themselves as crypto people and are proud of it, just as someone might be a Christian and proud of it or a Golden State Warriors fan and proud of it. While I've personally used crypto and found it useful, it doesn't really matter what the environmental impacts are or how useful it is to a large swath of those interested in crypto. As long as there's a plausible argument for why crypto is good, it's enough for the believers to continue believing. Not only that, crypto is and will continue to be cool and rich. As long as people like Tom Brady and Fortune 500 companies are talking about buying and selling crypto, it's a religion that will continue growing. By acknowledging this, I realized that I should move past dismissing the religion, but rather think about how I should engage with it. Imagine I've never watched American football but a lot of people I know are really into it. I then need to think: Is it a cool community that I should join? Is it something that's not for me but that I should try to understand? Or is it something that's so bad that I should try to stigmatize it? I think the right response for me is closest to the second option, but I'm not sure yet. [edited to remove some earlier, more divisive comments that I didn't intend to make]
  • dools 5y ago
    It’s also tied inextricably to Austro-libertarianism and I think that’s no accident. My wild conspiracy theory is that the founders of blockchain are cashed up libertarians who created it to promote libertarian economics (which overwhelmingly benefit the cashed up among us)
    • wmf 5y ago
      Yeah, one side effect of Bitcoin is that it created 1000x more believers in crackpot Austrian economics. This may end up legitimizing some bad economics.
      • oceanghost 5y ago
        Austrian economics aren't crackpot, they're just outdated. Their view of the world was the correct when human labor was the most valued thing in the world. Austrian views on inflation have been proved several times over. Austrian views on the value of labor are a disaster. They're entirely unable to imagine our current labor market where a substantial amount of the work is done by machines. Human Action was written in 1949. Imagine how different the world must have been back then. My iPhone can recognize the contents of pictures such that I can search them-- in 1949 that would have required an office building some storage cabinets, logistics, and a personal secretary or two. Now nobody, not even Apple can tell you how that works.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Oh boy did OP make a big mistake: "Also, it’s now obvious that use of bitcoin (and related blockchains) for payments is almost entirely scams and illegal stuff." When I say this, I typically get a landslide of people claiming they send infinite monies to their impoverished family members in ____ foreign country because the USA limits / regulates / taxes transfers over US$10k. Do you see the implication? This means they are sending more than US$10k in BTC. Think about that for a split second. How dumb does this person feel sending $10,000 in BTC to a family member a few years ago, as now it it is worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, which means their family members are crazy rich and they are not. Assuming their target family even has the infrastructure to convert BTC to their local currency of said impoverished nation. But what do I know. OP also missed a heavy part of the analogy to XML: people didn't gamble with their life savings by using XML.
  • sweetbitter 5y ago
    But they didn't send more than that. They sent the exact amount of BTC that equates to $10,000.
  • wmf 5y ago
    Maybe this is too obvious to mention, but people send money to their impoverished family because the family needs that money now, not in a decade. Of course your family didn't "hodl" and become rich.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      My point is: that narrative is a heartstring-pulling load of B.S.
• unobatbayar 5y ago
  It starts with one of the most interesting story ever and it just flips itself with all the bashing of bitcoin. Just my take.
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Forgdt this pontification. The answer is to ride the wave and get rich!
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  There's a news cycle to the blockchain that everyone wants to be a part of to appear smart whether they know anything about a topic or not. Notice how the majority of critics never talk about any deep use-cases for the technology and instead choose to make up that it's only ever used by criminals. This is because they don't actually know anything about the technology. It's just more status signalling for clicks mixed together with a bunch of regurgitated arguments made a million times before. Enjoy the traffic bump op before fading back into obscurity. Meanwhile, the countless people in the know who actually matter are going to keep building on this "failing" technology.
• kmonsen 5y ago
  I read quite a bit about what the author wrote at google and worked with people that had worked with him. I only heard good things and he seems very smart. He wrote some articles that I remember was obviously wrong, and maybe this is one of them. That was usually when it was outside of his domain knowledge. Of course I could only recognize it when it was an area where I had a lot more local knowledge. I think very smart people sometimes overestimate how well they understand things they have not thought much about and underestimate domain knowledge. I think the same as him about crypto, but I also think I don’t know the domain very well and could very easily be wrong.
• deleted 5y ago
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• CallMeJim 5y ago
  From the 2010 article: > The current financial system is slow, and tedious, and old, and in many ways actually broken or flawed. But one thing we know is that it's resilient. One single mathematical error will not send the whole thing into a tailspin. With bitcoin, it will. 9 months later, this article was released, titled "The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash". https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/feb/12/black-scholes-equation-credit-crunch https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/feb/12/black-schole... Lol!
• deleted 5y ago
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• silentsea90 5y ago
  I always marvel at how fellow technologists and engineers on HN don't grok the significance of Bitcoin, while people from all walks of life on crypto Twitter truly understand Bitcoin's impact. This post and the comments section is proof.
• keymone 5y ago
  how do you call people that can't admit they were wrong in face of clear evidence and must write pages of re-defining what it meant to be right in the first place?
• zimablue 5y ago
  The most defensible / widespread use-case of getting money out of an oppressive regime strikes hollow to me as a lefty. Most people in an oppressive regime don't have the problem of moving large amounts of money around. And it only helps you with "temporarily store it somewhere with a wildly deviating value", how does that help when you need to get it BACK into your hands and actually spend it? The real exploitation for 99% of the population isn't someone currency-manipulating your fortunes, it's being a de facto wage slave because we live in a system that decides at birth that you're a slave and 1% of people aren't. Crypto doesn't help you with that, ironically it makes it worse because it helps the kleptocracy move their money. That's who has a use for anonymous money, and they're normally robbing the locals. See: the Panama Papers, Russia
  • godDLL 5y ago
    I've been thinking, how does one get free of the wage slavery situation, where I'm at? Where I'm at I can't own land, only lease it from the govt for a specific purpose. A guy I know ended up paying back-fines for not actually making use of some chunk he leased. The real estate development investment sector is full of horror stories, some from people I know personally. Last year and this, many small businesses did not survive "stay home" messaging, but owe full year's worth of insurance and forward taxes non the less. How do you accumulate wealth, exactly? Everything you could own depreciates faster and faster with time. There's no way to keep your money. You can make some money by speculating on the uneven depreciation rates of things. Bitcoin (not other crypto) is specifically a thing one can own for 10 years, and get rid of at some point in the future presumably not having half or two-thirds of it's value gone by then. And I don't own any. I'm the one-man shop who's business got owned by the govt messaging and now owes them.
    • js8 5y ago
      > I've been thinking, how does one get free of the wage slavery situation, where I'm at? Class solidarity and non-violent action. Look at history of 20th century, before neoliberalism took hold. > How do you accumulate wealth, exactly? Impossible to do en masse with private capital, since it is by and large ability to command other people. You can increase public goods, this is the wealth that (the society owning it) can increase and benefit from. People will have to re-learn the lesson not to be so selfish.
• timdaub 5y ago
  IMO, what should gain more relevancy as a discussion point is why this community has gone fully toxic when discussing Bitcoin or Crypto. Clearly, both the people for and against present their comments in a way that doesn't fairly represent the other side of the "coin". I think we'd all be better of relaxing a bit more when it comes to that topic.
• Osiris 5y ago
  There are a lot of comments on here about crypto only being useful for criminal activity. The UN estimates that $1.6 TRILLION is laundered each year. The entire market cap of BTC is around $1.1 trillion. If crypto wasn't around, fraud and scams would still exist. The fact is that significantly more crime involves fist currency than crypto. Cash is far harder to track than crypto, so using crypto in crime is actually more dangerous because of the ability of exchanges to track transactions and blacklist accounts.
  • acatton 5y ago
    You're presenting statistics in a biased way which fits your narrative. It's very common to hear "most of the illegal transactions are still in dollar". But that's a biased way to see it. If USD represents $100T of transactions amongst which $1T of transactions are for illegal activities, this means only 1% of the transactions are illegal. On the other side, if crypto represents $1T of transactions amongst which $500M are illegal, this means 50% of transactions are illegal. In absolute, in this example, most illegal transactions are in USD, but crypto is much much more likely to be used for illegal transactions, therefore showing that it has little/less use for legal transactions.
• madsbuch 5y ago
  I really see bitcoin as a step to something quite a bit more ambitious: Algorithmic governance. It seems like this article only concerns bitcoins, which would appear a bit narrow. Crypto currencies are a large area. And in my opinion, we should not call it crypto currencies as much as crypto economies. when these are not merely niche markets, they will constitute full economies, with the result of constituting governance. Eventually we are done adding the tech words like algorithmic or crypto, and we merely call it economy or governance. All this is still quite far out, but probably closer than we relize.
• jl6 5y ago
  >> The whole technological basis is flawed. >> The weak link is not SHA256, it’s the rest of the cryptosystem. > Yes, in multitudes. > We’ve seen forked chains, theft, mysteriously reversed transactions, 51% attacks. Really? This feels overstated. The core software has been remarkably (some might say unreasonably and implausibly) solid. The software is supposed to be a pile of amateur C++! It would be so easy for something like a trivial buffer overflow bug to break block validation and unravel the whole system. But it hasn’t happened after ten years and a multi-billion-dollar bug bounty available. Why is it so good?
  • spopejoy 5y ago
    Because of said $$$ bug bounty. There have been countless mitigations since launch. The biggest one for me is they nerfed (locked down) Bitcoin script for security reasons, which reduced it's utility for anything but transferring BTC. Granted, it's inability to scale would have made that true anyway, but the resulting inability to have smart contracts on Bitcoin might be one reason arguments for scaling it with bigger blocks have failed to win: if all it does is move a coin, why bother changing the block size etc when you have Lightning etc.
• nostrademons 5y ago
  It's interesting, the original article is one giant Appeal to Consequences fallacy. The arguments are structured like "If Bitcoin succeeds, X will happen, and X is bad, therefore Bitcoin will fail" or alternatively "Bitcoin undoes policy Y, policy Y was a good thing, therefore Bitcoin is bad and will fail." And then the epilogue here finally acknowledges that yup, all the bad stuff did happen, and yet Bitcoin still succeeded, and the future will probably involve more bad stuff but that's the way it goes. I feel like one marker of maturity is understanding that not everything true is going to be good, and not everything that we want is something we're going to get. So many timely debates take the form of an Appeal to Consequences fallacy. "Hyperinflation would be bad for everyone, therefore the government will not allow hyperinflation to happen" - ignoring that the government may not have the mechanisms to stop it once it begins. "If it's too late to do anything about global warming, we're all fucked anyway, so let's proceed on the assumption that it's not too late" - ignoring that "we're all fucked anyway" may mean many different things and some of them might be significantly more pleasant than others. "America is a great country, so it can't possibly collapse", ignoring that many once-great countries have collapsed before. I found my predictions got significantly more accurate, though significantly less comforting, when I realized that good doesn't always win out in the end.
  • catlikesshrimp 5y ago
    Don't share your predictions in the real world, then. Normal people want to hear good news, even if they are false. Or bad news they find outrageous or catastrophic and that they feel empowered to fight.
    • tim333 5y ago
      If you look at the front page of any newspaper there's quite a bit of doom and gloom and bad stuff. I'm not sure upbeat sells.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    There's a missing step in both directions: what is the policy response going to be? Bitcoin maximalists assume they can take over without firing a shot, seemingly ignoring what happened to both the online poker world and Liberty Reserve. Whereas the likely outcomes are "registered bitcoin" (you're obliged to tie all your transactions to KYC identities) or "offshore bitcoin" (you're obliged to firewall against US customers).
• ur-whale 5y ago
  From the article: > It's been ten years, and it all went pretty badly, so let me make a new prediction. Say what you want, being entirely wrong doesn't deter him from trying again. But then again, with nothing at stake but your already ruined reputation, that's an easy thing to do. His case would be a lot stronger if it was backed by something more tangible, like - oh, I don't know - a visible to all Bitcoin short bet on - oh, what could possibly let you implement that - a public blockchain.
• yread 5y ago
  There are some silver linings to the crypto explosion - imagine if the trillions of dollars went into the normal economy instead. OK some of it is probably illegal so it wouldn't but the rest would inflate stock prices and worse: nobody normal would be able to buy a house anywhere (and everyone suffers from that - some areas here are now to expensive for elementary school teachers, so they move away so schools don't have enough teachers).
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  If you want a global economy, you need gold. Gold is inconvenient though, so you need something better, bitcoin.
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  "We’ve seen forked chains, theft, mysteriously reversed transactions, 51% attacks." Citations? Forks are not actually a bug. Theft because of "cryptographic weakness" has not happened so far, afaik? Neither have reversed transactions, and I am not aware of successful 51% attacks on Bitcoin? I'm sorry but I don't think that author has a good understanding of Bitcoin. He has a point about government attacks. We don't really know yet what will happen if governments simply try to stomp out crypto. For sure market prices would take a hit at first, as they did when China tried to curb crypto.
  • Sammi 5y ago
    > He has a point about government attacks. We don't really know yet what will happen if governments simply try to stomp out crypto. For sure market prices would take a hit at first, as they did when China tried to curb crypto. We've just seen what happens when China banned it as you mention. The price took a dip and then recovered. It game theory. Classic Prisoners Dilemma. Everyone else just gets a higher incentive to use it when some part of the world is not allowed, because everyone else gets a higher advantage. Especially Americans will jump all over it if the communist ban it. That just completely legitimizes it for anti communist Americans.
    • ngc248 5y ago
      >>> Especially Americans will jump all over it if the communist ban it. That just completely legitimizes it for anti communist Americans. That may lead to an even worse outcome. The CCP may be able to do a 51% attack on BTC since a majority of the mining ops were in china.
• danielEM 5y ago
  Economy of turn on computer and get a bread/tesla/... for doing it. That what bitcoin is to me. People who 'produce' bitcoins get a VERY cheap meal for useless work. Almost like thiefs. The truth is that there is no free meals in real life and at the end someone will have to pay the price. And the wet dream of all wisely involved in BTC is that you'll pay that price.
• golergka 5y ago
  Why doesn't it mention the main reason people use Bitcoin: drugs?! Hydra, Russian drug marketplace, is the single most popular destination of Bitcoin across the whole network. And there's a whole generation of drug users who've never saw any other way of buying drugs at all. It's weird, the post and comments here are like intentionally blind to the whole thing.
• gillesjacobs 5y ago
  Ultimately it comes down to ideology as so many things, for some the lack of centralised control a cryptocurrency (should) bring is a desirable, mainly to libertarian-minded people, others focus on the downsides. Got to give points for OP to remain consistent, knowing of crypto in 2011 (but obviously not being knowledgeable) and not speculating takes some character.
• pipeline_peak 5y ago
  Whenever An HN link greets me with a plaintext blogpost, I get ready for a good old fashioned nutjob rant.
• johanneskanybal 5y ago
  When someone knows so little but has so many opinions and try to pass them off to others as truth it's hard to know where to start. A few points are valid or at least worth discussing but overall it's an uneducated rant.
• pezzana 5y ago
  I really like that story at the beginning. Unfortunately, the author uses it to construct a false analogy to Bitcoin. The same article could have been written about the Internet of 1999. And it would have been wrong for a lot of the same reasons. Here's what the author is missing: the reason that Bitcoin exists. It's not about the gold bugs, although they get the talking head appearances. Should inflation indeed prove "transitory," the Bitcoin exchange rate is getting taken to the woodshed. I suspect this will be the outcome because gold has performed so abysmally. Gold traders know for a fact that inflation is transitory, and they're putting their money on the outcome. Rather, Bitcoin is about censorship resistant money. That means that Bitcoin makes it hard for others to implement exclusionary rules that target specific individuals or groups. Contrast this with the government-controlled currencies, especially the US dollar. They have been weaponized and weaponized again. Against individuals for domestic law enforcement. Against other countries because the consequence of wars between big countries is so horrifying. All over the world, the call rings out to use money as a proxy for violence. Bitcoin and its censorship-resistant properties stand in the way of this Juggernaut. The author doesn't mention this once. And this is what the author misses. When the goldbugs fade into the rear-view mirror and the world wakes up to the possibility that printing money can cause deflation, what will be left of Bitcoin's value proposition is censorship resistance. And in this regard, there will be no other alternative.
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency is an incredibly powerful technology, in that it enables distributed consensus via a self-contained economic system. The challenge is separating the hype from the real value, as the space is deluged by speculators.
• helen___keller 5y ago
  Everyone's got 2c on bitcoin but here's mine: I don't consider the price of crypto when looking to see progress / success. Could you explain to somebody why Bitcoin is successful without mentioning that the price goes up, by talking only about the technology, product, and adoption? What if that person was unimpressed by Bitcoin 5 years ago, could you explain what changed in the last 5 years (again, not mentioning change in price) to change their opinion of bitcoin? AFAICT the main changes in Bitcoin in the past 5 years have been some incremental evolution of the technology that I'm not aware of changing the fundamental usage of the product in any way (SegWit, LN, and most recently Taproot). A note on blockchain proliferation: The author considers it a bad sign that there's an explosion in new blockchains. While I also consider it a bad sign for Bitcoin, I think it's a good thing for the ecosystem. My hope is that some day we'll have ubiquitous inter-chain protocols so, rather than obsessively hyping the coin/chain we're invested in, we can move all our digital assets and contracts to whatever blockchain offers the best technology, the best performance, and the lowest fees. This will allow for increased competition and evolution in the blockchain space. You can see the beginnings of this movement in some places, but it has a long way to go.
  • tim333 5y ago
    User growth. Many users: https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1356310219215699968 https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1356310219215699968
    • ac29 5y ago
      What a terrible chart. It has no Y-axis labeling and one of the trendlines they've drawn has the number of bitcoin users exceeding world population in a little over 5 years.
  • bko 5y ago
    > What if that person was unimpressed by Bitcoin 5 years ago, could you explain what changed in the last 5 years (again, not mentioning change in price) to change their opinion of bitcoin? More liquidity allows people to get their money of their home currency and evade capital controls. In places like Argentina you're forced to use and hold a currency that's depreciating 50% a year. You get one exchange rate, while foreigners get another. And to top it off you're not allowed to hold USD or another stable currency. Sure it would be great if they got rid of capital controls but that's not the reality and people in these countries have to live with it. This was telling from the article: >> Citizens moving money out of authoritarian regimes. This is, by definition, illegal, but is it a net benefit to society? I don’t know. Maybe sometimes. I don't know where the author is from but I am almost certain he doesn't live in an authoritarian regime with capital controls. To be so flippant about basic rights that people in developed countries have access to is really off-putting.
• tim333 5y ago
  The thing with decentralised cryptocurrency is it's money on the internet independent of government control. It's not going to disappear any more than photos on the internet or videos on the internet. Maybe you don't like videos or crypto currencies and and avoid or try to ban them but it only takes two people who do like them two exchange data over the internet for the things to continue. Maybe Bitcoin will go a bit like XML and become dated and replaced by a better format but something like blockchain based currency will go on.
  • haskellandchill 5y ago
    The key is the independence of control. I could set up internet money without using crypto techniques but I would be shut down for operating such a scheme. Is there a way to have no operator without using blockchain? In theory, but with such a setup you might as well use a blockchain because that is the exact problem it solves. However, if government wanted to it could stomp out crypto. As decentralized as it is it's still groups of people doing things, and very visibly. For as much as the crypto community is anti-government they've been treated very nicely by most governments.
• ghoward 5y ago
  I broadly agree with the author on Bitcoin, but I do not agree on what was said about the gold standard being bad. On August 15, 1971, Nixon removed the gold standard from the US dollar. Using unilateral government power, he managed to stop the system from completely imploding from shock. But...then what were the long-term effects? One of my favorite websites (except for language) is "What the ** Happened in 1971?" [1] It's a series of charts showing how until 1971, economic growth for everyone was about the same, including the poorest of society. After 1971, only the richest were seeing gains. So what happened? I'll tell you what happened: our currency was changed from the gold standard to a free-floating currency. The rich were able to invest in other things, like land and capital, but the rest of us had our savings wiped out. We also did not continue see the income gains that we had been getting up to that point. [1]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Edit: Added a mention about income gains that I forgot.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    That set of charts refers to income (a flow) not savings (a stock).
    • ghoward 5y ago
      I forgot to also mention income, but the last charts I looked at were about inflation, which wipes out savings.
  • api 5y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong. The way new money is distributed (via banks) definitely favors the rich, as does inflation assuming there is not sufficient upward pressure on wages for them to keep up. But I also always have to point out that a lot of things happened in the early 1970s: - We opened a lot of avenues for labor outsourcing and starting importing more finished goods. - Factory and office automation started ramping up as the information revolution really began. - The 1970s saw the beginning of the trend toward "neoliberal" style economics with lower taxes on the rich and less investment in social and infrastructure programs. - The Kennedy assassination, many other somewhat suspicious assassinations, the Vietnam war, etc. all started a process of erosion of public trust in US institutions. - Women joined the work force in droves. I completely support womens' right to do this, but I also have to point out the completely amoral mathematical supply and demand implications for the cost of labor. More minorities joining the workforce also counts. You could say that prior to this era racism and sexism created a white male labor cartel and that this cartel was broken. - Unions really started to get broken in the 1970s and have never really come back. I could keep going... IMHO most large scale social and economic movements have more than one cause. Back to inflation though, it's possible that inflationary economics became more harmful to the middle class when combined with the things above as many of the factors I listed made it hard for wages to keep up with inflation.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  I love the moniker that crypto is just an ever growing bug bounty :) Maybe it will work when GAI is writing perfect code… ie Bitcoin is 100 years too early, we don’t have perfect code or computers efficient enough to do proof of work without destroying the environment, we aren’t on 100% renewables, etc
  • kmmlng 5y ago
    > we don’t have perfect code or computers efficient enough to do proof of work Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the point of proof of work precisely that it takes resources to perform this work? I.e. it's not a bug, it's a feature.
    • snewman 5y ago
      It's a feature from the viewpoint of ensuring that the chain works at intended. It's a bug from the viewpoint of climate change. Or perhaps a better way of putting it: the fact that proof of work burns a lot of electricity is not a feature, the protocol does not directly rely on electricity being used; that part is a misfeature, aka bug.
• mbostleman 5y ago
  So Bitcoin is like XML or SOAP and therefore what we need is the crypto equivalent of JSON and REST for the whole endeavor to really reach its potential?