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Svennek said it well, there is not much of interest left to discuss, the remaining ambiguities are up to taste, not novelty. The only interesting things are tal

Svennek said it well, there is not much of interest left to discuss, the remaining ambiguities are up to taste, not novelty. The only interesting things are talking about whether decentralisation is a value in and off itself without e.g. equity and whether people actually inherently care about it. But those are charged topics, also because people who are all in on crypto have a material interest in pushing the idea that YES it is and YES they will. So you can't have that remaining interesting conversation in a detached manner. (In my analysis the no-coiners have much less to lose in this and so are able to have more detached conversation because if it turns out that people really go for decentralisation we can still hop on board, we won't get rich anymore but we won't drop much either - it is naive to assume that systems which wield material power and are intricately tied to the foundation for the private property rights crypto builds its use cases on would simply collapse. The same way we had banks and commodity billionaires before microsoft and google, we will have old wealth smoothly migrating into the new system - otherwise the old wealth wouldn't adopt it).

reginold 5y ago
This seems like such a bizarre take to me. It's like saying in 1960 that everything to discuss about computers is up to taste not novely. I see an entire world coming to life across thousands of different blockchains. So much of it is experimental, mistakes, catastrophically bad. But other parts will succeed and define the future. The recent push around DAOs is fascinating, a way to delegate voting and decision making, an experiment that will fail endlessly until it doesn't. Edit: However, that doesn't mean this conversation should be forced on the HN community over and over again. That's not right, and that's not the nature of curiosity.
- igorkraw 5y ago
  I'm down to discuss application of distributed technologies and various consensus mechanisms for concrete use cases. But cryptocurrency has been debated to death and now needs to prove itself. DAOs without currency would be interesting to talk about, DAOs with currency is just Feudalism redone - and feudalism isn't an interesting technology to me personally. Edit: I'm also down to discuss interesting cryptocurrency project with clear and theses, not just "change the world". I'd be interested in a federated Cryptocurrency that is meant to be easily "self hosted" in small communities and has a mechanism to convert between these communities according to rules/exchange rate set by each community - with the final consensus mechanism rooted in the social sphere. I'd be interested in discussing cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate once received, to test the idea of inflation driving investment. Thinking about it, there's lots of interesting discussions to have, but nobody is having them. I guess I need to modify my statement to saying that the discussions that people in the cryptocurrency community want to have are boring because they are all rooted in the "anarcho"-capitalist perspective and that angle has run out of interesting things (in my eyes)
  - reginold 5y ago
    [Oh shoot, did you edit your parent reply later on? Wondering if my above reply was meant for another message.] Re: "DAOs with currency is just feudalism redone" - I like the way you put this. There does seem to be this kind of land grab where giving ownership somehow changes everything. Re: Self-hosted currencies in small communities - this one I'm less curious about so am wondering what you see in it. Would the 15,000 cryptocurrencies in existence today start to meet this criteria of different currencies across many different communities? Re: Cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate - also interesting to think about. Kind of like having a digital tomato or something, it must be used before it molds. I've heard Dogecoin has a high issuance rate, I wonder if that would apply. My sense is it's hard to disconnect from everything else though, and if I had a bunch of rotting tomatoes I would convert them to something more stable (tomato sauce, or trade them for money) unless I had immediate utility for tomatoes. Re: your above point about nocoiners having more of a disconnected view, agreed. Curious what you think of my comment here on this, speculating that as more of the world becomes a financial instrument, it gets harder and harder to be a nocoiner. In that case we must figure out how to be curious while having/talking our book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297148 Like I said, would love to find a place for more discussions like this with you, more distance than the "to the moon", but less technical than an https://ethresear.ch https://ethresear.ch.
    - igorkraw 5y ago
      no, i didn't edit the first one, maybe you meant to reply to svennek. communitycoins: these are interesting because they'd be small-people-fiat, giving tiny communities the possibility to bootstrap mini-economies and then linking into some federated system according to some rules and based on people vouching for them. notably, they'd be the inverse of todays crypto- nonanonymous, consensus based on trust. re decaying currencies: yeah, but then you'd need to buy an explicit store of value, and especially if money decays fast, whoever sells that to you will need to get rid of it again. but i think this one would be an experiment in money the same way gopher and gemini are experiments in hypertext Re your comment: I think it doesn't quite hold, because I can buy shares in the VT index and can then talk about it without needing to hype it - the underlying value is highly independent of people's opinions because everyone eats,shits and dies and so needs the commodities and services provided by the underlying companies (in the long run). I think it is only the most hype-dependent securities like cryptocurrency and Tesla where the underlying is questionable and so bag holders feel the need to defend their investment quite literally (note to all the true believers in either:relax, I said questionable, not nonexistent, if I'm wrong with my opinion you can pay someone to laugh at me later) Honestly, I think it needs to be specialises forums or side threads like this, any crypto community will be overrun by the moonboys and libertarians too quickly.

reginold 5y ago

This seems like such a bizarre take to me. It's like saying in 1960 that everything to discuss about computers is up to taste not novely. I see an entire world coming to life across thousands of different blockchains. So much of it is experimental, mistakes, catastrophically bad. But other parts will succeed and define the future. The recent push around DAOs is fascinating, a way to delegate voting and decision making, an experiment that will fail endlessly until it doesn't. Edit: However, that doesn't mean this conversation should be forced on the HN community over and over again. That's not right, and that's not the nature of curiosity.

igorkraw 5y ago
I'm down to discuss application of distributed technologies and various consensus mechanisms for concrete use cases. But cryptocurrency has been debated to death and now needs to prove itself. DAOs without currency would be interesting to talk about, DAOs with currency is just Feudalism redone - and feudalism isn't an interesting technology to me personally. Edit: I'm also down to discuss interesting cryptocurrency project with clear and theses, not just "change the world". I'd be interested in a federated Cryptocurrency that is meant to be easily "self hosted" in small communities and has a mechanism to convert between these communities according to rules/exchange rate set by each community - with the final consensus mechanism rooted in the social sphere. I'd be interested in discussing cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate once received, to test the idea of inflation driving investment. Thinking about it, there's lots of interesting discussions to have, but nobody is having them. I guess I need to modify my statement to saying that the discussions that people in the cryptocurrency community want to have are boring because they are all rooted in the "anarcho"-capitalist perspective and that angle has run out of interesting things (in my eyes)
- reginold 5y ago
  [Oh shoot, did you edit your parent reply later on? Wondering if my above reply was meant for another message.] Re: "DAOs with currency is just feudalism redone" - I like the way you put this. There does seem to be this kind of land grab where giving ownership somehow changes everything. Re: Self-hosted currencies in small communities - this one I'm less curious about so am wondering what you see in it. Would the 15,000 cryptocurrencies in existence today start to meet this criteria of different currencies across many different communities? Re: Cryptocurrency with a built in decay rate - also interesting to think about. Kind of like having a digital tomato or something, it must be used before it molds. I've heard Dogecoin has a high issuance rate, I wonder if that would apply. My sense is it's hard to disconnect from everything else though, and if I had a bunch of rotting tomatoes I would convert them to something more stable (tomato sauce, or trade them for money) unless I had immediate utility for tomatoes. Re: your above point about nocoiners having more of a disconnected view, agreed. Curious what you think of my comment here on this, speculating that as more of the world becomes a financial instrument, it gets harder and harder to be a nocoiner. In that case we must figure out how to be curious while having/talking our book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297148 Like I said, would love to find a place for more discussions like this with you, more distance than the "to the moon", but less technical than an https://ethresear.ch https://ethresear.ch.
  - igorkraw 5y ago
    no, i didn't edit the first one, maybe you meant to reply to svennek. communitycoins: these are interesting because they'd be small-people-fiat, giving tiny communities the possibility to bootstrap mini-economies and then linking into some federated system according to some rules and based on people vouching for them. notably, they'd be the inverse of todays crypto- nonanonymous, consensus based on trust. re decaying currencies: yeah, but then you'd need to buy an explicit store of value, and especially if money decays fast, whoever sells that to you will need to get rid of it again. but i think this one would be an experiment in money the same way gopher and gemini are experiments in hypertext Re your comment: I think it doesn't quite hold, because I can buy shares in the VT index and can then talk about it without needing to hype it - the underlying value is highly independent of people's opinions because everyone eats,shits and dies and so needs the commodities and services provided by the underlying companies (in the long run). I think it is only the most hype-dependent securities like cryptocurrency and Tesla where the underlying is questionable and so bag holders feel the need to defend their investment quite literally (note to all the true believers in either:relax, I said questionable, not nonexistent, if I'm wrong with my opinion you can pay someone to laugh at me later) Honestly, I think it needs to be specialises forums or side threads like this, any crypto community will be overrun by the moonboys and libertarians too quickly.