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A bit off-topic, but the fact that criminals asked for help mining, instead of money or crypto-money, just gave me an epiphany: The whole internet is showing t

• SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  It's what happens when you throw a pyramid scheme into something - just like with pyramid/mlm schemes in real life, suddenly everything is about optimizing for the scheme. Every conversation becomes a sales pitch.
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  I'm sure many people would agree with your diagnosis. What's the treatment, though?
  • danaris 5y ago
    Ban crypto mining. Outlaw exchanging cryptocurrencies (directly) to USD (and other fiat currencies, but USD is the big one for now).
    • brightball 5y ago
      It seems like it’s happening indirectly. I keep hearing stories about places like Coinbase not converting dirty Bitcoin that’s been associated with illegal activity. Eventually, it seems like this will apply to all of it.
      • kelseyfrog 5y ago
        How much would it cost to purposefully contaminate a significant portion of Bitcoin? Just, you know, for reasons.
    • searchableguy 5y ago
      I don't think banning fiat conversion would stop this. There are bonds and stable currency issued peg to the defi or crypto world. It would reduce the value but it's unstoppable. See fei: https://fei.money/ https://fei.money/ Proof of work or hardware intensive proofs are only used in a few crypto currency so this is a very blunt response in regards to banning exchange.
      • anthony_r 5y ago
        Have you seen what happened in the finance world with respect to Russia recently? Feels to me like it is perfectly possible with the right Zeitgeist. Pretty much all the on/off ramps for Russian money are gone at the moment.
        • searchableguy 5y ago
          Which I acknowledge above. You can ban exchange to fiat but it will only reduce value, not completely eliminate it as there are protocols which derive value from defi ecosystem itself. I.e people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat. The stability is maintained by the defi collateral and shared acceptance. So you would have to ban everyone to accept crypto currency and so on as payment but that is very catastrophic decision with large implications. It also doesn't help crypto completely eliminates centralized authorities when moving across borders.
  • throwaway5371 5y ago
    artificial limits, on bandwidth and energy could be one way to both foster innovation and decrease resource usage
    • carapace 5y ago
      We just saw that those artificial limits (Lite Hash Rate) fostered the "innovation" of hackers attacking Nvidia, eh?
  • kinnth 5y ago
    Although I agree that post crypto incentives have changed. It's a bit much to say that it's "completely changed the digital universe" this group is targeting the primary developer of GPU mining. In terms of the ask, I think they are being much cleverer than dumb money as unlocking the GPU mining further could create new areas of economic power, i.e ebay old gpus or push NVIDIA to design a specific crypto gpu? Either way capitalism is what's driving the team.
  • veganhouseDJ 5y ago
    Time. Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market. The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is going to be tough to take out. That is looking like the peak of the everything bubble from COVID. The get rich narrative can only hold for so long until the reality that crypto is a set of volatile currency no one really uses and has been massively over mined for years now sets in.
    • dorgo 5y ago
      How do you define bear market for crypto? -90% is just another year (or even month) in crypto space.
      • danaris 5y ago
        I mean, I'd define it, much like any other bear market, as a sustained downward trend in the market.
    • thebean11 5y ago
      2017 wasn't a real bear market? It dropped like 95% and stayed at 50% to 80% below peak for a couple of years..
  • veganhouseDJ 5y ago
    Time. Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market. The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is going to be tough to take out. That is looking like the peak of the everything bubble from COVID. The get rich narrative can only hold for so long until the reality that crypto is a set of volatile currency no one really uses and has been massively over mined for years now sets in. Time will make crypto boring like every other currency/commodity. No one gets all excited about corn futures.
  • 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    I think the most straightforward thing would be to regulate mining operations as money transmitters and smart contracts as derivatives. Several jurisdictions have made noises about doing this; it seems to be more a matter of political will than any fundamental difficulty.
• z3c0 5y ago
  I agree with you overall - this does appear to be another resource curse - but I want to point out that the culprits in this matter are the companies that bottleneck the overly-abundant resources for profit (so Nvidia and Google), not the users who attempt to bleed constrained value through that bottleneck. Nvidia used their near-monopolistic power over the graphics card market in an attempt to globally limit the hash rate of mining. I doubt their intent was as altruistic as they spun it either - it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel, to circumvent the limits in each single GPU. I find that to be more concerning than some hackers demanding that they stop.
  • brightball 5y ago
    I’m not sure Google can be blamed for the bottleneck since user behavior says that people will only look through so many search results before moving on. That’s not abundance since no matter how many results Google shows the people problem will remain. Advertisers and marketers fighting for top positions are where the real curse comes from IMO.
  • bigcheesegs 5y ago
    > it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel This is very obviously wrong. The economics of crypto mining are almost entirely dominated by power cost. Nvidia's decision here simply means they will use other hardware, not more of the LHR hardware. Nvidia already can't make enough GPUs to satisfy demand. Why would they try to increase undesirable demand (which is going away soon anyway, at least for ETH).
    • z3c0 5y ago
      If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but it does not change my point that a single company being able to bottleneck a resource is problematic.
      • lukeschlather 5y ago
        The resources are bottlenecked due to the chip shortage, which happened because the entire automotive industry mis-forecast demand for the pandemic. All the GPU manufacturers have the same problem: they don't want to build GPU production lines for a market that is going away. The problem isn't Nvidia, it's proof of work, which will bottleneck as many resources as it can by design. This is what happens when you try and build a planetary messaging system with inefficiency as a design goal.
• jason-phillips 5y ago
  > The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is not just about disrupting how money used to work, it is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with money. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free unix shell providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, had to shut down because now there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service. The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital resource curse brought on by advertising. Advertising changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with advertising. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free, non-monetized content providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, don't exist now because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.
  • seizethegdgap 5y ago
    You should read their second paragraph. Unless you were going for some kind of meta-joke/correction, in which case bravo.
    • seanw444 5y ago
      It was definitely a serious-toned joke. Bravo from me as well. I don't know how people navigate the web without an ad blocker anymore. Do people actually do that? it's unbearable. Slows pages down, clutters the actual content, wastes more battery on phones and laptops, generally rewards companies for spying on you... it's awful. Can we go back to when people weren't so lazy as to do everything in their power to not have to give their cash directly to someone? Sure, you don't have to hand your money to a content maker on YouTube anymore, for example, but I wonder how much the lifespan of your device is decreased by the added processing that comes from advertising, and how much that adds up in the end. You may as well just have paid them money directly in the first place. Apply that thought to any "free-but-only-because-it's-ad-ridden" software/service.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Both of your examples (cryptocurrency and paid linking) are indeed plagues on quality content, but I disagree that they’ve replaced quality content. They’re mostly examples of new business models that people have tried to use to generate new types of content and monetization in a crowded space. Sites like HN and commenters here aren’t trading links for money, we’re just sharing interesting content. The obvious paid advertisements (going from 0 votes to +20 votes in minutes despite obvious content marketing) get flagged away quickly for the most part. Crypto and “web3” especially has become a catch-all for people who want to catch a gold rush or have otherwise run out of ideas for traditional business success. The problem they’re discovering is that the average consumer has almost no interest in crypto unless it’s as a speculative investment to flip to someone else, which means the entire space is basically crypto people flipping things to each other and trying to convince new people to join in so they have more downstream people to flip their tokens too. But despite the constant efforts to flood our news feeds with crypto stories, most of us navigate the internet without cryptocurrencies or NFTs because they’re entirely unnecessary and you have to go out of your way to do anything with them. Since they bring no actual benefit, we just ignore it. And it’s fine.
• lmkg 5y ago
  That's a good way to summarize the problems that traditional game-devs foresee with NFT games. Game purchases are viewed as speculative investments rather than entertainment.
• 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  As Dan "FoldableHuman" Olson put it [1]: > The end goal of the crypto machine is the financialization of everything. Any benefits of digital uniqueness are a quirk, a necessary precondition of turning everything into stocks. [1] https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1465835083542061059 https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1465835083542061059
• jl2718 5y ago
  I have a dream of solving this with extreme-infungibility of a currency system. I’m sure every ancient civilization noticed this problem when the ease of trade that came with common currency resulted in the incentive to be conquered and taxed from a foreign land.
  • jessaustin 5y ago
    Those who had gold but no army, soon had neither. ISTM gold and other substances of "concentrated value" are inherently more dangerous than other things that ancient people could have stored, like lumber or grain.
• abecedarius 5y ago
  The resource curse is that natural resources go together with oppressive government: the former can promote the latter in that an oppressor needs some form of wealth to pay their minions/allies, and international sales of extracted resources are a source of wealth that makes fewer demands on widespread cooperation from the locals than does local development. How does this map to crypto? Who's the oppressive government we're getting more of? It's correct that crypto changes the economics, and I'd say that's a good thing. We've tried leaving economics out of our core means of cooperation online for a few decades, and we don't seem very happy with the feudal internet that that led to. Let's try expanding the range of ways of coordinate and to fund work, with e.g. https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/
• hemloc_io 5y ago
  Devils advocate here, but crypto does disrupt a free sharing economy that's on the internet and part of the magic of it. Yet maybe there are benefits in terms of making previously economically inviable things viable. People making passion projects are great, but at the end of the day they are creating value for people that's almost never reciprocated in other ways and tokenizing things lets them capture that value or add new value to what their selling. e.g. with NFTs right now you have three parties, the buyer -> who gets provenance ("ownership") the digital artist -> who makes more money off their art than was possible before because rarity is built into the price now. (Non-fungible, unlike selling prints tshirts etc.) everyone else -> who can still copy and share the work for free, as before. I feel like this should be a growth engine for digital artists, that has minimal impact on the general public, and everyone walks away happy with the transaction. (Putting aside scams b/c the market is unregulated, environmental concerns, etc. just talking economics.)
  • kawaiikouhai 5y ago
    Putting away the scams, environmental concerns, and lack of regulation is a big caveat though. They are an inherent cost to the crypto space that currently lack an immediate resolution (to my knowledge). How much "previously economically inviable things" are captured by NFTs and crypto anyways? I have not seen any potential usescases that outweigh even the inherent environmental cost of cryptocurrency.
• outside1234 5y ago
  Can we please just jump to the end and make it illegal to transfer Crypto to Fiat?
• Geee 5y ago
  The curse is crypto tokens and NFTs, not Bitcoin or proof-of-work. As we have seen, most of these tokens are just speculative schemes without connection to the underlying property. On the contrary, Bitcoin, as a seamless Internet-native currency, can actually help making the Internet better, by allowing easier and better ways to monetize content instead of relying on advertising. In the coming years, we'll see more Bitcoin-based services popping up.
• stuu99 5y ago