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I think some of your premises are wrong. I don't think cryptocurrencies are especially divisive on HN. It's like a lot of other topics - a lot of different peop

by edanm 5y ago

I think some of your premises are wrong. I don't think cryptocurrencies are especially divisive on HN. It's like a lot of other topics - a lot of different people with a lot of different feelings, some of them more strongly than others. It's not surprising that when something is new, there is a lot of curiosity around it that is different 12 years later, when it's just part of our world, and many of the "questions" have been "answered". In addition, cryptocurrencies just happen to also have an incredible amount of real-world impact in way other technologies don't. E.g. debates on AI - not even AGI, just plain old AI, and have there been any real new breakthroughs lately, etc, also have a lot of disagreements. But while that impacts grant money and investment in some technologies, it doesn't also directly translate into billion-dollar markets and potential fraud, etc. You also have to separate "cryptocurrencies" to a few underlying actual topics that people disagree about: 1. Whether actual cryptocurrencies, e.g. bitcoin, are a good investment. 2. Whether actual cryptocurrencies are good for the world, or whether they enable fraud/scams/etc. 3. Whether actual cryptocurrencies can achieve, are achieving, or should achieve their original goals or any newer goals (e.g. replace fiat completely). 4. Whether the blockchain technology itself is interesting at all, or is it only interesting for cryptocurrencies. (This point is especially relevant in a forum of founders, given the massive amounts of creating and investment in blockchain-related startups.)

Applejinx 5y ago
I think it's especially divisive because the only way to further it is with increasingly ingenious, sophisticated argument. This doesn't come down to simple concepts: it's hypotheticals, projections, a call to imagine what COULD be, and a great deal of pressure to buy into one or another predicted outcome. This becomes like a game. It's a logic puzzle. How do you construct an unanswerable argument that produces your desired result? It's much less interesting to go 'well, wait and see, things will doubtless become more obvious as this progresses'. Under some circumstances, the ONLY way to establish a currency that actively supplants and destroys all fiat currency, displacing governments and replacing their control with only market pressures enacted through completely liquid and untrammeled flow of capital… is to ram it through with such desperate haste that it's too big to fail by the time it's recognized as a threat by those controlling governments. To topple governments and replace all their control with anarchy governed by only market pressures, the ungovernable replacement currency has to be so huge that the pressure of committed capital ITSELF is more powerful than any government. This is a big, dramatic 'ask'. Whether it's wrecking the world and ruining the environment is a whole separate question. Arguably the bigger question is, 'SHOULD there be a currency that allows the pressure of purely capital to overthrow this or any government?' Especially since by design it is NOT a hierarchical power structure, but distributed and impossible for anyone to control… does that produce desirable results? Mind you, if you get that and THEN find out it's possible for the system to be controlled anyway, you're pretty thoroughly hosed… you have to trust very much that the system put in place to overthrow all governments, truly represents a distributed and ungovernable system. Otherwise, you just overthrew all governments in order to hand all power over to somebody that you don't know who it is.

by edanm 5y ago

Applejinx 5y ago

I think it's especially divisive because the only way to further it is with increasingly ingenious, sophisticated argument. This doesn't come down to simple concepts: it's hypotheticals, projections, a call to imagine what COULD be, and a great deal of pressure to buy into one or another predicted outcome. This becomes like a game. It's a logic puzzle. How do you construct an unanswerable argument that produces your desired result? It's much less interesting to go 'well, wait and see, things will doubtless become more obvious as this progresses'. Under some circumstances, the ONLY way to establish a currency that actively supplants and destroys all fiat currency, displacing governments and replacing their control with only market pressures enacted through completely liquid and untrammeled flow of capital… is to ram it through with such desperate haste that it's too big to fail by the time it's recognized as a threat by those controlling governments. To topple governments and replace all their control with anarchy governed by only market pressures, the ungovernable replacement currency has to be so huge that the pressure of committed capital ITSELF is more powerful than any government. This is a big, dramatic 'ask'. Whether it's wrecking the world and ruining the environment is a whole separate question. Arguably the bigger question is, 'SHOULD there be a currency that allows the pressure of purely capital to overthrow this or any government?' Especially since by design it is NOT a hierarchical power structure, but distributed and impossible for anyone to control… does that produce desirable results? Mind you, if you get that and THEN find out it's possible for the system to be controlled anyway, you're pretty thoroughly hosed… you have to trust very much that the system put in place to overthrow all governments, truly represents a distributed and ungovernable system. Otherwise, you just overthrew all governments in order to hand all power over to somebody that you don't know who it is.