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I mined Bitcoin in 2012, worked in crypto and mostly stopped doing other stuff a few years ago. I mostly don't touch, like or welcome meme shitcoins. I think N

I mined Bitcoin in 2012, worked in crypto and mostly stopped doing other stuff a few years ago. I mostly don't touch, like or welcome meme shitcoins. I think NFTs are as much a grift as ICOs were in 2017, etc. etc. I still love the tech. I still love the mindsets of the people I got to meet through crypto and while there is a lot of BS, there are also a lot of very smart people working to build things that give us a fighting chance to take back some of the control and privacy that we have surrendered to FAANG and co. So, criticize away. Or just shit on it if you want, which is what some of HN is really doing. It changes nothing. I for one am grateful for everything constructive being said, because it paves the way to a future I and many others are hopeful and excited about.

kubb 5y ago
To me the crypto anarchists seem a bit like gun enthusiasts in claiming that their passion will allow them to resist a corrupt government or powerful corporations. It doesn't end up happening, but I bet it makes your subculture feel more important than others.
- MildlySerious 5y ago
  > To me the crypto anarchists seem a bit like gun enthusiasts in claiming that their passion will allow them to resist a corrupt gobernment or powerful corporations, it just doesn't end up happening. If there is something I can recommend, it is not to define a "subculture", sector or movement by its most extreme outliers. Makes for a pretty bleak outlook on life. > I bet it makes your subculture feel more important than others though. That's how some people think no matter where you look, including startups and VC. I'm just having fun, but I don't feel particularly important. Yeah, thinking there is some good to be done, some meaning in the things you spend time on is part of what makes them fun, but I could find that in a dozen other industries, too.
- seibelj 5y ago
  I think it's been definitively proven that a group of ideologically devoted people can resist even the most powerful government. See Vietnam vs. USA and Afghanistan vs. Britain / USSR / USA. When people say gun enthusiasts (or privacy enthusiasts, or crypto enthusiasts, or any group) could never resist the government, it doesn't make any sense because we watched trillions of dollars spent by governments fail at exactly that.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Sure. But that requires those people to actually be ready to dedicate their lives to the fight. Currently, the US is the closest it's ever been to losing democracy, and the gun nuts are cheering on those who are destroying it. So not going to be expecting much out of them, I'm afraid.
    - chromatin 5y ago
      > and the gun nuts are cheering on those who are destroying it. Which gun nuts? Conservatives? Or the Trumpists? Maybe you mean the Libertarians? Or is it the John Brown Gun Club? Or maybe NFAC? "Gun nuts" is considerably more nuanced than presented.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        Most of the above? Surely you are aware of this.
  - kubb 5y ago
    That's not resisting the government, that's resisting a foreign invader. But if it's close enough that it lets you believe...
ShamelessC 5y ago
> I mined Bitcoin in 2012 You're the most reasonable crypto-enthusiast I think I've seen on this site but your position is tainted by this fact, for me. I saw in a sibling comment that you suggest people not judge sub-cultures for their outliers - fair enough. Can I at least express concern for them? These people are getting scammed. Full stop. Not nearly enough is being done about it from within the crypto community and even from outside of it.
- tata71 5y ago
  People with 200k in savings in any currency, and making less than .25%, are being scammed. People holding a currency which depreciates, and their cost of living increases, are being scammed.
  - howinteresting 5y ago
    Some degree of inflation is a really good thing for the health of an economy, as is the ability of central banks to create money as stimulus in hard times.
    - tata71 5y ago
      Is this highschool economics? You're ready to keep trusting the people government has put in charge of the money? (Private corps, via lobbying and central banks, more)
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    I don't know how to respond to these types of arguments. For now, here's a comment I made elsewhere on HN earlier today explaining why: > There are many crypto-enthusiasts for whom no level of rigor [counter to crypto] will ever satisfy them despite being obsessed with various "whitepapers" which are mostly marketing fluff. They endlessly defer to various whataboutism's until you find out they are taking an inherently political position (usually some sort of neo-libertarian) and hence the "merits" of the proposed currency _really_ only apply to people who are disenfranchised by existing economic systems. Usually, little is said of how to improve existing systems as that challenges the notion that the status quo is so flawed that it needs to be replaced wholesale. Any idea how to refute crypto to these folks?
jcpham2 5y ago
I started mining in 2011, blogged about how to do it with scripts as early as Ubuntu 8.04 Blog has since been wiped, most of my traffic was coming from China. I decided it was a bad idea to talk about money on the internet: see the first and second rule(s) of Fight Club. I should not enable mining bots with bash shell scripts on my blog. We share some thoughts. The NFT's only make sense to me if you are using them inside of some meta-realm as a form of validation. ICOs were scams and the memecoins are scams and the Youtubers shilling this stuff are scammers as far as I'm concerned. I watched a video the other day of MrBeast and some other Youtubers laughing about shilling cryptopunks. Pretty sad life if you ask me. If the market grows on its own and I didn't promote it or shill it, does that not mean it's legitimate? I thought Ethereum was a pre-mine scam at first (kinda still do) but the market has spoken and all of these cryptos are just big pools of liquidity to swim in now. ETH has enabled and built some wild things like AAVE and AMM's but it's difficult to understand the value proposition in 2021/2022 - other than just big pools of liquidity. I think L2 scaling on Ethereum has huge potential. I stayed off-market until 2017 and then I had to pay a few years worth of salary in taxes to the government because I got jiggy with the first ATH in 2017 as the knife was falling. 2021 has been interesting. A decade into this crypto thing, very little has stopped it. It's difficult to stop an idea once the genie is out of the bottle. Yes, I believe Proof of Work is a race to the bottom; but it might just be the thing that fairly and accurately prices energy usage one day. I ran 16 GPUs sucking down nearly 3kW around the clock for ~24 months and then I had to shut down the operation because difficulty and I could no longer afford the electricity. Am I destroying the planet? I don't know. I'm retired from proof of work mining. I'm a staker now ;-)
- MildlySerious 5y ago
  > I thought Ethereum was a pre-mine scam at first (kinda still do) This hits home. I really refused to acknowledge Ethereum for a long time, because I thought smart contracts and their need for oracles were stupid. Shifting around trust, instead of eliminating it. Security by obscurity, but for trust, is how I thought of it. I agree with and share the sentiment of the rest you're saying also. Bitcoin and PoW generally are no longer interesting or useful to me, but I also feel sometimes like I haven't really warmed up to the rest of the sector yet. I only mined with my desktop GPU. While I considered it, I never took the plunge and scaled up - instead I just bought more Bitcoin and sat on them for a little while, before I transitioned to other coins and tokens completely.

kubb 5y ago

To me the crypto anarchists seem a bit like gun enthusiasts in claiming that their passion will allow them to resist a corrupt government or powerful corporations. It doesn't end up happening, but I bet it makes your subculture feel more important than others.

MildlySerious 5y ago
> To me the crypto anarchists seem a bit like gun enthusiasts in claiming that their passion will allow them to resist a corrupt gobernment or powerful corporations, it just doesn't end up happening. If there is something I can recommend, it is not to define a "subculture", sector or movement by its most extreme outliers. Makes for a pretty bleak outlook on life. > I bet it makes your subculture feel more important than others though. That's how some people think no matter where you look, including startups and VC. I'm just having fun, but I don't feel particularly important. Yeah, thinking there is some good to be done, some meaning in the things you spend time on is part of what makes them fun, but I could find that in a dozen other industries, too.
seibelj 5y ago
I think it's been definitively proven that a group of ideologically devoted people can resist even the most powerful government. See Vietnam vs. USA and Afghanistan vs. Britain / USSR / USA. When people say gun enthusiasts (or privacy enthusiasts, or crypto enthusiasts, or any group) could never resist the government, it doesn't make any sense because we watched trillions of dollars spent by governments fail at exactly that.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Sure. But that requires those people to actually be ready to dedicate their lives to the fight. Currently, the US is the closest it's ever been to losing democracy, and the gun nuts are cheering on those who are destroying it. So not going to be expecting much out of them, I'm afraid.
  - chromatin 5y ago
    > and the gun nuts are cheering on those who are destroying it. Which gun nuts? Conservatives? Or the Trumpists? Maybe you mean the Libertarians? Or is it the John Brown Gun Club? Or maybe NFAC? "Gun nuts" is considerably more nuanced than presented.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Most of the above? Surely you are aware of this.
- kubb 5y ago
  That's not resisting the government, that's resisting a foreign invader. But if it's close enough that it lets you believe...

ShamelessC 5y ago

> I mined Bitcoin in 2012 You're the most reasonable crypto-enthusiast I think I've seen on this site but your position is tainted by this fact, for me. I saw in a sibling comment that you suggest people not judge sub-cultures for their outliers - fair enough. Can I at least express concern for them? These people are getting scammed. Full stop. Not nearly enough is being done about it from within the crypto community and even from outside of it.

tata71 5y ago
People with 200k in savings in any currency, and making less than .25%, are being scammed. People holding a currency which depreciates, and their cost of living increases, are being scammed.
- howinteresting 5y ago
  Some degree of inflation is a really good thing for the health of an economy, as is the ability of central banks to create money as stimulus in hard times.
  - tata71 5y ago
    Is this highschool economics? You're ready to keep trusting the people government has put in charge of the money? (Private corps, via lobbying and central banks, more)
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  I don't know how to respond to these types of arguments. For now, here's a comment I made elsewhere on HN earlier today explaining why: > There are many crypto-enthusiasts for whom no level of rigor [counter to crypto] will ever satisfy them despite being obsessed with various "whitepapers" which are mostly marketing fluff. They endlessly defer to various whataboutism's until you find out they are taking an inherently political position (usually some sort of neo-libertarian) and hence the "merits" of the proposed currency _really_ only apply to people who are disenfranchised by existing economic systems. Usually, little is said of how to improve existing systems as that challenges the notion that the status quo is so flawed that it needs to be replaced wholesale. Any idea how to refute crypto to these folks?

jcpham2 5y ago

I started mining in 2011, blogged about how to do it with scripts as early as Ubuntu 8.04 Blog has since been wiped, most of my traffic was coming from China. I decided it was a bad idea to talk about money on the internet: see the first and second rule(s) of Fight Club. I should not enable mining bots with bash shell scripts on my blog. We share some thoughts. The NFT's only make sense to me if you are using them inside of some meta-realm as a form of validation. ICOs were scams and the memecoins are scams and the Youtubers shilling this stuff are scammers as far as I'm concerned. I watched a video the other day of MrBeast and some other Youtubers laughing about shilling cryptopunks. Pretty sad life if you ask me. If the market grows on its own and I didn't promote it or shill it, does that not mean it's legitimate? I thought Ethereum was a pre-mine scam at first (kinda still do) but the market has spoken and all of these cryptos are just big pools of liquidity to swim in now. ETH has enabled and built some wild things like AAVE and AMM's but it's difficult to understand the value proposition in 2021/2022 - other than just big pools of liquidity. I think L2 scaling on Ethereum has huge potential. I stayed off-market until 2017 and then I had to pay a few years worth of salary in taxes to the government because I got jiggy with the first ATH in 2017 as the knife was falling. 2021 has been interesting. A decade into this crypto thing, very little has stopped it. It's difficult to stop an idea once the genie is out of the bottle. Yes, I believe Proof of Work is a race to the bottom; but it might just be the thing that fairly and accurately prices energy usage one day. I ran 16 GPUs sucking down nearly 3kW around the clock for ~24 months and then I had to shut down the operation because difficulty and I could no longer afford the electricity. Am I destroying the planet? I don't know. I'm retired from proof of work mining. I'm a staker now ;-)

MildlySerious 5y ago
> I thought Ethereum was a pre-mine scam at first (kinda still do) This hits home. I really refused to acknowledge Ethereum for a long time, because I thought smart contracts and their need for oracles were stupid. Shifting around trust, instead of eliminating it. Security by obscurity, but for trust, is how I thought of it. I agree with and share the sentiment of the rest you're saying also. Bitcoin and PoW generally are no longer interesting or useful to me, but I also feel sometimes like I haven't really warmed up to the rest of the sector yet. I only mined with my desktop GPU. While I considered it, I never took the plunge and scaled up - instead I just bought more Bitcoin and sat on them for a little while, before I transitioned to other coins and tokens completely.