8 ms·

Cryptos can't fix societal, political or economic problems

24 points by shafyy 5y ago

nathias 5y ago
Criteria to get upvoted on hn: - be gainst crypto
ganzuul 5y ago
> I still can’t believe how so many (otherwise) smart people that I talk to try to justify that the blockchain or cryptos will make the world a better place. Well if you keep running into the same issues maybe you shouldn't be so sure of yourself.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  I only see new issues with crypto. Which one does it actually solve?
  - Guest42 5y ago
    I'd say it solves the what brands can sports venues extract the most marketing money from problem.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    Well, it does scare the bejesus out of establishment, which is not an easy thing to do ( https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-can-destabilize-nations-and-undermine-u-s-dollar-dominance-hillary-clinton-says-11637332449?mod=mw_latestnews https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-can-destabilize-nat... ). As a side rant, I get more and more tired of the fact that in US the establishment is compromised of REALLY old people and somehow they are in charge of technological landscape?
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      So that's a pro? Lol
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        I said it in jest, but in retrospect maybe yes.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Bioweapons also scare the bejesus out of "the establishment". Does that mean we should all be developing bioweapons?
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        I think you misunderstood the core issue of my concern. My concern is not with the device establishment is scared of. My concern is with the fact that people, who appear to making decision about those devices know little to nothing about them. Half of them wouldn't know how to change a font in a document and yet they want to decide the path technology takes? It really is an extension of the dilemma presented by Douglas Adams: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job"
        user-the-name 5y ago
        > I think you misunderstood the core issue of my concern. Did I? You yourself said that your complaint about people's knowledge was a "side rant". I didn't care about your side rant, I responded on the actual topic.
        A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        I re-read what I wrote. You are right. In my head the two were connected even though it was more of an afterthought and not part of the original argument. I apologize for that. Regarding bio-weapons, assuming we will not end this civilization some other way, I do think that knowledge is a dangerous thing, but how are bio-weapons different from cryptography, 3d printing or nuclear fission. In a more practical sense, do you not think households may end up having gene editing tech in their garage, the way some are mining crypto now? More to the point, establishment is only scared of things that undermine its power. Does that make crypto inherently a bad thing?
        5y ago
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      I have thought about your comment. And it's just a rant about ignoring crypto. Which has no actual value and use-case in a real economy where people need to spend money to keep people earning ( and spending) money. I actually agree with those "old folks" and I'm only 33.. you're comment only makes sense from a greedy standing concerning crypto, not any other tech. Additionally, your comment "in jest" is just immoral to 99% of the people. Yuk.
  - _djo_ 5y ago
    I'm sceptical of most of the claimed benefits of crypto but I have to admit that it seems useful for cross-border remittances, bypassing companies like Western Union who have traditionally charged unreasonable rates. Even with processing fees it's usually cheaper to do it via crypto.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Problem here is banking for the rural areas in poor countries. They don't have internet, so they have to travel far to get banking access and as such, they are unbanked. Claiming crypto is the solution is a fake dogma of the core issue.
      - _djo_ 5y ago
        The poor and unbanked in a number of developing countries are still able to use crypto for remittances, in some cases done through local trusted intermediaries who do have that access. Same as hawala brokers.
        NicoJuicy 5y ago
        Core problem is internet connectivity that enables easy banking.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      > it seems useful for cross-border remittances It seems useful for that, yes, but it turns out: It is not actually useful for that. The economics just do not work. Crypto can not support a one-way money flow, so it has to rely on middlemen for the reverse flow, and that ends up being at least as expensive as traditional ways of doing remittance. Many companies have tried to make this work, and they have all folded.
  - anonymoushn 5y ago
    International remittances in seconds for less than a penny
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Lately, the average bitcoin transaction fee has fluctuated between $24 and $31, according to data provider Bitinfocharts. February 2021
      - anonymoushn 5y ago
        Right. I don't recommend using Bitcoin for payments.
    - brabel 5y ago
      I can get that with https://wise.com/ https://wise.com/ which integrates well with banks and therefore is my favourite solution for that. How does crypto compare to this?
      - anonymoushn 5y ago
        Hello, that's great that your selection of countries and banks work well with Wise. For me, moving about $10,000 (the maximum allowed by Wise) from the US to Japan through Wise takes about 5 days, costs like $70, and requires me to take a phone call at 2 in the morning from my US bank.
        NicoJuicy 5y ago
        You can up those limits. Those are typically risk factors concerning fraud. Which is a feature. And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.
        anonymoushn 5y ago
        > You can up those limits. You can't. That's a hard cap imposed by Wise for all transfers into Japan. > And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too. Nobody proposed using bitcoin. Maybe you mean the worst fee tiers on US exchanges like Coinbase? I pay 1.5bps taker fees and receive maker rebates at my primary exchange. My primary exchange and one of my Japanese banks also provide extremely competitive OTC forex rates which I cannot currently use because my primary exchange does not have fiat withdrawals in Japan and because Wise is not willing to send dollars to my Japanese bank (I wonder why).
  - oleganza 5y ago
    Speaking only for Bitcoin, that's a leverage against state monopoly on money issuance. Regardless of the church you subscribe to (deflationary spiral of death VS austrian hard money libertopia), the fact remains that people: - want to save value for later, - want it to be liquid, - want it to be secure Govs' monopoly on money and ad-hoc issuance policy does not make fiat currencies a good fit. Physical gold is hard to secure, transport and partially liquidate. Gold certs and all sorts of funds are subject to counterparty risk that we begin with (see the history full of abuses in that realm). Real estate is expensive, comes with high taxes and is very far from being liquid. Bitcoin solves all these issues because it's far more liquid and easier to secure than gold or real estate. That creates a leverage against how much gov could inflate their money supply or tax other assets: they more they do, the more value flows out into Bitcoin. Today Bitcoin is a tiny slice of the pie, but in the future it may be very visible and offer real competition and make all the people who do not even use Bitcoin find themselves in a more stable fiat environment as a result.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Decentralization is not secure from fraud. Crypto shows the unpreparedness of the masses and platforms: Eg. https://rekt.news https://rekt.news And personally, i didn't see any non-tech folk know the concept of an offline wallet. "Save value for later" just abolishes everything that has been learned to increase consumption and drive economics from the last 100 years. It's a negative growth driver for the country, if you applaud that, i think that's insane.
      - oleganza 5y ago
        That's an orthogonal issue. There are plenty of non-crypto investment scams (ask your local VC), phishing etc. Some part of the population will always be robbed or scammed, regardless of the name of your country, inflation rate or what currency you use to pay the bills. Crypto may be higher on radar because there's lure of high returns because market is expanding rapidly, and, as in any bubble, some things will pop and some people will hold the bag. Just like with dotcom bubble or california gold rush. PS. Even though California rush left most people without much direct profit, the indirect profit was that California was populated, infrastructure developed and it became an important part of the global economy, and as a free state was one more place where people could move to build a better future for themselves, even if they were not directly interested in the gold itself.
abbassi 5y ago
The source of main problems (including rearmament, hunger and wars) are systemic problems in Marxian sense. That is, while humanity as a species have the technical and material conditions of solving most of the problems (hunger, most of diseases) and this is called "productive forces" (i.e. the social production in the global scale) in Marxian terminology, the "production relations" (i.e. the private ownership of the means of the production) impeding these productive forces. So, we have the anarchy in the global market. We have tensions between big groups and states. The capitalism, especially in its maturity phase called imperialism (articulated scientifically and clarity by Lenin), is not efficient enough anymore. Don't talk about USSR and China or Cuba, since in reality they were and are all state capitalism. Go back and read Marx, Engles and Lenin, not cheap talk by academic so-called Marxists or radical chic gauche buddies.
salamandersauce 5y ago
Of course not. They've been creating new societal, political and economic problems instead. It's a problem that more energy is wasted on fantasy gold than some decently sized countries. It's certainly messed with GPU sales and creates more e-waste as parts are pushed to the limit 24/7 and need to be replaced more often than they were originally designed. And now companies like GitHub have to deal with scammers trying to abuse free services to mine crypto and consumers have to watch out that the free app they downloaded won't mine crypto in the background using their power and hardware to do it.
- conorpp 5y ago
  Good points as to why we should move away from proof of work blockchains.
dandanua 5y ago
In 99% of cases, people who pretend they are solving the "global money problem", in fact, are solving their personal money problem.
mapehe 5y ago
I wrote essentially the same post yesterday. The interest in crypto is directly proportional to the BTC/USD rate. I don't see real innovation compared to 2016 when very few people talked about this stuff. The single thing that has changed is the price.
- 0x64 5y ago
  On Ethereum: - The rise of decentralized finance. - Ownership through NFTs (I personally love ENS [1]). - Truly decentralized proof-of-stake ready for prime time, pending only the merging of the PoW network into the PoS network that launched a year ago [2]. - Predictable gas fees with EIP-1559, including a variable block size. - A bunch of layer-2 scaling solutions live, including optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge rollups, validium solutions, and plasma solutions [3]. - Private transactions on zero-knowledge L2 chains with shielded transactions [4]. [1] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [2] https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/ [3] https://l2beat.com/ https://l2beat.com/ [4] https://zk.money/ https://zk.money/
- conorpp 5y ago
  You could also say that the BTC/USD rate is proportional to the amount of interest...
RandomWorker 5y ago
True I started playing with bitcoin when it was 60 euro. That was 100% of my savings at the time. Sold it for a pretty penny 110 euros. Back then it was hard to buy and even worse to sell. I didn’t have the time or money to follow it. But thinking v back I could have just kept trading, or hold it. But you know life.. I still think it’s a fun technology. But really it’s gotten out of hand. I could generate a tenth or a hundredth of a bit coin on my laptop in a month, now even with a crazy rig dedicated sucking eltricity it takes way longer. You need to join at team etc. it’s the problem of the commons, energy is finite but not priced right. Do we keep using more resources here to support something that really isn’t democratized at all or do I put my time money energy into things that make peoples lives better. All the best to those that made more money than me, but I fear if bitcoin keep using more resources we all just sit around working to keep a money system running. (Exponentials are difficult to comprehend but I suggest every bitcoin owner plot the amount of energy that goes into bitcoin year over year.) Money should facilitate commerce, it’s shouldn’t be this hard or unstable. Some coins have solved this energy and trading issue but the value isn’t stable. I’ll step back in once we have a stable/energy efficient fast transfer of money. I though Ethereum was going to be the one but it wasn’t. I’ll keep my eyes open web3 sure ain’t it.
reedf1 5y ago
It's gonna fix everything - misguided. It doesn't fix anything - also misguided. There is a shocking lack of people with medium opinions on crypto.
- me_me_me 5y ago
  Those people don't care to voice their opinions strongly. I own bitcoin, but as an investment opportunity and solution to inflation and possible market crash. Next crash will have investors buying crypto instead swiss franks. BTC will not be money, ever. It will not replace money as, inflation and fiat currency manipulation by central banks are features. And those features in right hands can be very useful to tip economy in the right way. Countries inflate money to pay up foreign debt or stimulate their exports etc. If BTC or other similar crypto became global money those tools will become unavailable. No nation will willingly give up that control without any benefit in return. I am also luke-warm on the environmental damage crypto is causing, its not black and white issue, but I fully support proof of stake. There are argument crypto mining stimulates and drives demand for renewable. But also I want to be able to buy new GPU for price lower than a price of 10yrs old car. Crypto has a lot of gray area topics, sadly as with politics its mostly discussed only in black and white terms.
nathias 5y ago
Yes, technology has, does and will fix societal, political and economic problems and make new ones. Crypto has a lot of revolutionary improvements for everyone (transparency, immutability, security, anonymity, digital ownership, different types of possible property and cooperation). So what good does it do to the farmer? Maybe he doesn't have to pay that much tax to the feudal lords, maybe he doesn't have to sell his plot to Bill and instead makes a DAO with his farmer friends to keep his land ... Maybe he can even vote for a party that would promote the use of crypto and run govermental transactions over a public ledger to reduce corruption, maybe one where a more direct digital democracy would be implemented with a multitude of different consensus types and protocols ...
0x64 5y ago
It's interesting how the discussion is always so incredibly black and white. Crypto doesn't have to fix every major problem in three separate categories for it to be relevant, or whatever HN typically proclaims crypto to not be. All it has to do is improve things and challenge the status quo. The fact that I'm in complete control of things in that one little corner of the internet is enough for me to be excited about the future of things. Who cares if crypto doesn't literally uproot global democracies and cause every fiat currency worldwide to collapse?
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  It might have to. If it only turns out to be useful in a couple of minor use cases, the value will crash and the ensuing destruction might wipe out those minor uses.
retrac 5y ago
> Cryptos can’t fix societal, political or economocial problems. In fact, most technology can’t. This reminds me of something Richard Feynman said, I can't remember exactly so I will have to paraphrase. Politicians and even the general public come to engineers and scientists for answers to the world's problems like world hunger. But as he pointed out, we already have the technologies to feed, house and provide the other basics for every person on Earth. And we have for over a century. These aren't scientific or engineering problems. We're just not using solutions we already have because we don't like them. These are political problems and cannot and will not be solved with a magic technological bullet. (Though more technologies might make it easier to solve if and when we decide politically to do so.)
- joshspankit 5y ago
  Reminds me of when parents come to me and ask “what’s the best app to restrict my teenager from accessing certain things on the internet?”. It’s not a technology problem, it’s a parenting problem.
joshspankit 5y ago
The main thing that the author missed (imo) is that the blockchain classifies as a genuine invention because it’s the first time in our history that we have had the technology for a completely trustworthy ledger. To me, that is the intrinsic value. Not it’s use as a bank-free currency, or it’s ability to run smart contracts (though I think those could permanently change copyright for the better), but because we can have an undeniable and uncorrupted chain of custody.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Completely trustworthy, because it has to be patched multiple times to fix security bugs. /s There is no such thing. The ledger number does not come with any other warranty than amount of PC time used to compute it. It does not guarantee value, it does bot guarantee your transaction has fully proceeded, only that a specific amount of other number has been transferred.
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    I’m confused by your pushback. Can you walk me through it?
    - AstralStorm 5y ago
      Multiple blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum had to be forked to avoid perpetuating the state caused by exploited bugs or for other reasons. This implies that the state before the fork is untrustworthy, doesn't it?
      - joshspankit 5y ago
        So here’s my position on that: For the longest time I thought “when they crack the encryption, BTC will instantly turn to value-less dust” and so therefore thought it was limited to being of short-term use BUT the technology does not matter in a sense. Because the chain of ownership is clear and transparent, BTC (and other blockchains) could switch technology in an instant and still maintain the record of value. Through this lens, I’m not at all concerned about bugs or forks because we’ve reached a point where the majority of the network is focused on the absolute correctness of the ledger. Everything else might as well be a mosquito on the highway.
joshspankit 5y ago
Let’s just pretend that a democratic people decides to mandate that all governmental spending must be on a viewable blockchain, including the purchases of politicians. To me, it feels like that might solve corruption almost overnight.
m00dy 5y ago
We can provide banking service to 8 billion people on this planet. It is obvious that we can't do that with traditional banking we have. It is just not scaling. Price of cryptos are speculative but the underlying technology a.k.a blockchain which gives users ownership over certain digital assets is here to stay.
- azth 5y ago
  Plus, no reason that the major cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Eth) won't become stable over time as things become more mature. Secondly, many of these articles seem not to mention that the major crytpocurrencies are a way out of government money printing. That's a huge plus for some of us. We now have a proper deflationary currency that is not affected by interest backed debt (which is a major sin in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, that's over 50% of the world's population), and that the government is not able to devalue by printing more money at a whim.
- pintxo 5y ago
  Why would traditional banking not scale to 8b people?
  - m00dy 5y ago
    Because, generating public/private key pairs for 8 billion people will/is taking a lot less time then average time that is taken for onboarding/kyc procedure of each bank that exists in each nation state.
    - pintxo 5y ago
      Is "it takes more time" a fundamental reason why we could not scale traditional banking to 8b people? I am not convinced.
      - m00dy 5y ago
        I don't care.
conorpp 5y ago
Some problems I am excited about cryptocurrency fixing: - Sending money across borders. - Decentralized exchanges that actually charge fair fees, unlike the centralized exchanges of today. - Allowing more people to purchase goods online that previously had to no way to. - Providing stable rates of return for your crypto based savings account (e.g. via staking). - Lowering interest rates on loans by cutting out the middlemen.
akacia 5y ago
Cryptos make rich richer.

24 points by shafyy 5y ago

Criteria to get upvoted on hn: - be gainst crypto

> I still can’t believe how so many (otherwise) smart people that I talk to try to justify that the blockchain or cryptos will make the world a better place. Well if you keep running into the same issues maybe you shouldn't be so sure of yourself.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
I only see new issues with crypto. Which one does it actually solve?
- Guest42 5y ago
  I'd say it solves the what brands can sports venues extract the most marketing money from problem.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  Well, it does scare the bejesus out of establishment, which is not an easy thing to do ( https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-can-destabilize-nations-and-undermine-u-s-dollar-dominance-hillary-clinton-says-11637332449?mod=mw_latestnews https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-can-destabilize-nat... ). As a side rant, I get more and more tired of the fact that in US the establishment is compromised of REALLY old people and somehow they are in charge of technological landscape?
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    So that's a pro? Lol
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
      I said it in jest, but in retrospect maybe yes.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Bioweapons also scare the bejesus out of "the establishment". Does that mean we should all be developing bioweapons?
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
      I think you misunderstood the core issue of my concern. My concern is not with the device establishment is scared of. My concern is with the fact that people, who appear to making decision about those devices know little to nothing about them. Half of them wouldn't know how to change a font in a document and yet they want to decide the path technology takes? It really is an extension of the dilemma presented by Douglas Adams: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job"
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        > I think you misunderstood the core issue of my concern. Did I? You yourself said that your complaint about people's knowledge was a "side rant". I didn't care about your side rant, I responded on the actual topic.
        A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        I re-read what I wrote. You are right. In my head the two were connected even though it was more of an afterthought and not part of the original argument. I apologize for that. Regarding bio-weapons, assuming we will not end this civilization some other way, I do think that knowledge is a dangerous thing, but how are bio-weapons different from cryptography, 3d printing or nuclear fission. In a more practical sense, do you not think households may end up having gene editing tech in their garage, the way some are mining crypto now? More to the point, establishment is only scared of things that undermine its power. Does that make crypto inherently a bad thing?
        5y ago
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    I have thought about your comment. And it's just a rant about ignoring crypto. Which has no actual value and use-case in a real economy where people need to spend money to keep people earning ( and spending) money. I actually agree with those "old folks" and I'm only 33.. you're comment only makes sense from a greedy standing concerning crypto, not any other tech. Additionally, your comment "in jest" is just immoral to 99% of the people. Yuk.
- _djo_ 5y ago
  I'm sceptical of most of the claimed benefits of crypto but I have to admit that it seems useful for cross-border remittances, bypassing companies like Western Union who have traditionally charged unreasonable rates. Even with processing fees it's usually cheaper to do it via crypto.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Problem here is banking for the rural areas in poor countries. They don't have internet, so they have to travel far to get banking access and as such, they are unbanked. Claiming crypto is the solution is a fake dogma of the core issue.
    - _djo_ 5y ago
      The poor and unbanked in a number of developing countries are still able to use crypto for remittances, in some cases done through local trusted intermediaries who do have that access. Same as hawala brokers.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        Core problem is internet connectivity that enables easy banking.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    > it seems useful for cross-border remittances It seems useful for that, yes, but it turns out: It is not actually useful for that. The economics just do not work. Crypto can not support a one-way money flow, so it has to rely on middlemen for the reverse flow, and that ends up being at least as expensive as traditional ways of doing remittance. Many companies have tried to make this work, and they have all folded.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  International remittances in seconds for less than a penny
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Lately, the average bitcoin transaction fee has fluctuated between $24 and $31, according to data provider Bitinfocharts. February 2021
    - anonymoushn 5y ago
      Right. I don't recommend using Bitcoin for payments.
  - brabel 5y ago
    I can get that with https://wise.com/ https://wise.com/ which integrates well with banks and therefore is my favourite solution for that. How does crypto compare to this?
    - anonymoushn 5y ago
      Hello, that's great that your selection of countries and banks work well with Wise. For me, moving about $10,000 (the maximum allowed by Wise) from the US to Japan through Wise takes about 5 days, costs like $70, and requires me to take a phone call at 2 in the morning from my US bank.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        You can up those limits. Those are typically risk factors concerning fraud. Which is a feature. And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.
        anonymoushn 5y ago
        > You can up those limits. You can't. That's a hard cap imposed by Wise for all transfers into Japan. > And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too. Nobody proposed using bitcoin. Maybe you mean the worst fee tiers on US exchanges like Coinbase? I pay 1.5bps taker fees and receive maker rebates at my primary exchange. My primary exchange and one of my Japanese banks also provide extremely competitive OTC forex rates which I cannot currently use because my primary exchange does not have fiat withdrawals in Japan and because Wise is not willing to send dollars to my Japanese bank (I wonder why).
- oleganza 5y ago
  Speaking only for Bitcoin, that's a leverage against state monopoly on money issuance. Regardless of the church you subscribe to (deflationary spiral of death VS austrian hard money libertopia), the fact remains that people: - want to save value for later, - want it to be liquid, - want it to be secure Govs' monopoly on money and ad-hoc issuance policy does not make fiat currencies a good fit. Physical gold is hard to secure, transport and partially liquidate. Gold certs and all sorts of funds are subject to counterparty risk that we begin with (see the history full of abuses in that realm). Real estate is expensive, comes with high taxes and is very far from being liquid. Bitcoin solves all these issues because it's far more liquid and easier to secure than gold or real estate. That creates a leverage against how much gov could inflate their money supply or tax other assets: they more they do, the more value flows out into Bitcoin. Today Bitcoin is a tiny slice of the pie, but in the future it may be very visible and offer real competition and make all the people who do not even use Bitcoin find themselves in a more stable fiat environment as a result.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Decentralization is not secure from fraud. Crypto shows the unpreparedness of the masses and platforms: Eg. https://rekt.news https://rekt.news And personally, i didn't see any non-tech folk know the concept of an offline wallet. "Save value for later" just abolishes everything that has been learned to increase consumption and drive economics from the last 100 years. It's a negative growth driver for the country, if you applaud that, i think that's insane.
    - oleganza 5y ago
      That's an orthogonal issue. There are plenty of non-crypto investment scams (ask your local VC), phishing etc. Some part of the population will always be robbed or scammed, regardless of the name of your country, inflation rate or what currency you use to pay the bills. Crypto may be higher on radar because there's lure of high returns because market is expanding rapidly, and, as in any bubble, some things will pop and some people will hold the bag. Just like with dotcom bubble or california gold rush. PS. Even though California rush left most people without much direct profit, the indirect profit was that California was populated, infrastructure developed and it became an important part of the global economy, and as a free state was one more place where people could move to build a better future for themselves, even if they were not directly interested in the gold itself.

abbassi 5y ago

The source of main problems (including rearmament, hunger and wars) are systemic problems in Marxian sense. That is, while humanity as a species have the technical and material conditions of solving most of the problems (hunger, most of diseases) and this is called "productive forces" (i.e. the social production in the global scale) in Marxian terminology, the "production relations" (i.e. the private ownership of the means of the production) impeding these productive forces. So, we have the anarchy in the global market. We have tensions between big groups and states. The capitalism, especially in its maturity phase called imperialism (articulated scientifically and clarity by Lenin), is not efficient enough anymore. Don't talk about USSR and China or Cuba, since in reality they were and are all state capitalism. Go back and read Marx, Engles and Lenin, not cheap talk by academic so-called Marxists or radical chic gauche buddies.

salamandersauce 5y ago

Of course not. They've been creating new societal, political and economic problems instead. It's a problem that more energy is wasted on fantasy gold than some decently sized countries. It's certainly messed with GPU sales and creates more e-waste as parts are pushed to the limit 24/7 and need to be replaced more often than they were originally designed. And now companies like GitHub have to deal with scammers trying to abuse free services to mine crypto and consumers have to watch out that the free app they downloaded won't mine crypto in the background using their power and hardware to do it.

conorpp 5y ago
Good points as to why we should move away from proof of work blockchains.

dandanua 5y ago

In 99% of cases, people who pretend they are solving the "global money problem", in fact, are solving their personal money problem.

mapehe 5y ago

I wrote essentially the same post yesterday. The interest in crypto is directly proportional to the BTC/USD rate. I don't see real innovation compared to 2016 when very few people talked about this stuff. The single thing that has changed is the price.

0x64 5y ago
On Ethereum: - The rise of decentralized finance. - Ownership through NFTs (I personally love ENS [1]). - Truly decentralized proof-of-stake ready for prime time, pending only the merging of the PoW network into the PoS network that launched a year ago [2]. - Predictable gas fees with EIP-1559, including a variable block size. - A bunch of layer-2 scaling solutions live, including optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge rollups, validium solutions, and plasma solutions [3]. - Private transactions on zero-knowledge L2 chains with shielded transactions [4]. [1] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [2] https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/ [3] https://l2beat.com/ https://l2beat.com/ [4] https://zk.money/ https://zk.money/
conorpp 5y ago
You could also say that the BTC/USD rate is proportional to the amount of interest...

RandomWorker 5y ago

True I started playing with bitcoin when it was 60 euro. That was 100% of my savings at the time. Sold it for a pretty penny 110 euros. Back then it was hard to buy and even worse to sell. I didn’t have the time or money to follow it. But thinking v back I could have just kept trading, or hold it. But you know life.. I still think it’s a fun technology. But really it’s gotten out of hand. I could generate a tenth or a hundredth of a bit coin on my laptop in a month, now even with a crazy rig dedicated sucking eltricity it takes way longer. You need to join at team etc. it’s the problem of the commons, energy is finite but not priced right. Do we keep using more resources here to support something that really isn’t democratized at all or do I put my time money energy into things that make peoples lives better. All the best to those that made more money than me, but I fear if bitcoin keep using more resources we all just sit around working to keep a money system running. (Exponentials are difficult to comprehend but I suggest every bitcoin owner plot the amount of energy that goes into bitcoin year over year.) Money should facilitate commerce, it’s shouldn’t be this hard or unstable. Some coins have solved this energy and trading issue but the value isn’t stable. I’ll step back in once we have a stable/energy efficient fast transfer of money. I though Ethereum was going to be the one but it wasn’t. I’ll keep my eyes open web3 sure ain’t it.

reedf1 5y ago

It's gonna fix everything - misguided. It doesn't fix anything - also misguided. There is a shocking lack of people with medium opinions on crypto.

me_me_me 5y ago
Those people don't care to voice their opinions strongly. I own bitcoin, but as an investment opportunity and solution to inflation and possible market crash. Next crash will have investors buying crypto instead swiss franks. BTC will not be money, ever. It will not replace money as, inflation and fiat currency manipulation by central banks are features. And those features in right hands can be very useful to tip economy in the right way. Countries inflate money to pay up foreign debt or stimulate their exports etc. If BTC or other similar crypto became global money those tools will become unavailable. No nation will willingly give up that control without any benefit in return. I am also luke-warm on the environmental damage crypto is causing, its not black and white issue, but I fully support proof of stake. There are argument crypto mining stimulates and drives demand for renewable. But also I want to be able to buy new GPU for price lower than a price of 10yrs old car. Crypto has a lot of gray area topics, sadly as with politics its mostly discussed only in black and white terms.

nathias 5y ago

Yes, technology has, does and will fix societal, political and economic problems and make new ones. Crypto has a lot of revolutionary improvements for everyone (transparency, immutability, security, anonymity, digital ownership, different types of possible property and cooperation). So what good does it do to the farmer? Maybe he doesn't have to pay that much tax to the feudal lords, maybe he doesn't have to sell his plot to Bill and instead makes a DAO with his farmer friends to keep his land ... Maybe he can even vote for a party that would promote the use of crypto and run govermental transactions over a public ledger to reduce corruption, maybe one where a more direct digital democracy would be implemented with a multitude of different consensus types and protocols ...

0x64 5y ago

It's interesting how the discussion is always so incredibly black and white. Crypto doesn't have to fix every major problem in three separate categories for it to be relevant, or whatever HN typically proclaims crypto to not be. All it has to do is improve things and challenge the status quo. The fact that I'm in complete control of things in that one little corner of the internet is enough for me to be excited about the future of things. Who cares if crypto doesn't literally uproot global democracies and cause every fiat currency worldwide to collapse?

bryanlarsen 5y ago
It might have to. If it only turns out to be useful in a couple of minor use cases, the value will crash and the ensuing destruction might wipe out those minor uses.

retrac 5y ago

> Cryptos can’t fix societal, political or economocial problems. In fact, most technology can’t. This reminds me of something Richard Feynman said, I can't remember exactly so I will have to paraphrase. Politicians and even the general public come to engineers and scientists for answers to the world's problems like world hunger. But as he pointed out, we already have the technologies to feed, house and provide the other basics for every person on Earth. And we have for over a century. These aren't scientific or engineering problems. We're just not using solutions we already have because we don't like them. These are political problems and cannot and will not be solved with a magic technological bullet. (Though more technologies might make it easier to solve if and when we decide politically to do so.)

joshspankit 5y ago
Reminds me of when parents come to me and ask “what’s the best app to restrict my teenager from accessing certain things on the internet?”. It’s not a technology problem, it’s a parenting problem.

joshspankit 5y ago

The main thing that the author missed (imo) is that the blockchain classifies as a genuine invention because it’s the first time in our history that we have had the technology for a completely trustworthy ledger. To me, that is the intrinsic value. Not it’s use as a bank-free currency, or it’s ability to run smart contracts (though I think those could permanently change copyright for the better), but because we can have an undeniable and uncorrupted chain of custody.

AstralStorm 5y ago
Completely trustworthy, because it has to be patched multiple times to fix security bugs. /s There is no such thing. The ledger number does not come with any other warranty than amount of PC time used to compute it. It does not guarantee value, it does bot guarantee your transaction has fully proceeded, only that a specific amount of other number has been transferred.
- joshspankit 5y ago
  I’m confused by your pushback. Can you walk me through it?
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Multiple blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum had to be forked to avoid perpetuating the state caused by exploited bugs or for other reasons. This implies that the state before the fork is untrustworthy, doesn't it?
    - joshspankit 5y ago
      So here’s my position on that: For the longest time I thought “when they crack the encryption, BTC will instantly turn to value-less dust” and so therefore thought it was limited to being of short-term use BUT the technology does not matter in a sense. Because the chain of ownership is clear and transparent, BTC (and other blockchains) could switch technology in an instant and still maintain the record of value. Through this lens, I’m not at all concerned about bugs or forks because we’ve reached a point where the majority of the network is focused on the absolute correctness of the ledger. Everything else might as well be a mosquito on the highway.

joshspankit 5y ago

Let’s just pretend that a democratic people decides to mandate that all governmental spending must be on a viewable blockchain, including the purchases of politicians. To me, it feels like that might solve corruption almost overnight.

m00dy 5y ago

We can provide banking service to 8 billion people on this planet. It is obvious that we can't do that with traditional banking we have. It is just not scaling. Price of cryptos are speculative but the underlying technology a.k.a blockchain which gives users ownership over certain digital assets is here to stay.

azth 5y ago
Plus, no reason that the major cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Eth) won't become stable over time as things become more mature. Secondly, many of these articles seem not to mention that the major crytpocurrencies are a way out of government money printing. That's a huge plus for some of us. We now have a proper deflationary currency that is not affected by interest backed debt (which is a major sin in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, that's over 50% of the world's population), and that the government is not able to devalue by printing more money at a whim.
pintxo 5y ago
Why would traditional banking not scale to 8b people?
- m00dy 5y ago
  Because, generating public/private key pairs for 8 billion people will/is taking a lot less time then average time that is taken for onboarding/kyc procedure of each bank that exists in each nation state.
  - pintxo 5y ago
    Is "it takes more time" a fundamental reason why we could not scale traditional banking to 8b people? I am not convinced.
    - m00dy 5y ago
      I don't care.

conorpp 5y ago

Some problems I am excited about cryptocurrency fixing: - Sending money across borders. - Decentralized exchanges that actually charge fair fees, unlike the centralized exchanges of today. - Allowing more people to purchase goods online that previously had to no way to. - Providing stable rates of return for your crypto based savings account (e.g. via staking). - Lowering interest rates on loans by cutting out the middlemen.

akacia 5y ago

Cryptos make rich richer.