> In my view, a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of crypto often seems to elude the HN community. No. It eludes the crypto community. For every well-re

> In my view, a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of crypto often seems to elude the HN community. No. It eludes the crypto community. For every well-researched article pointing out flaws, there are exactly zero articles addressing any points in those articles. There's no end to "just join the discords and read up" though. > At the root of crypto are two technologies, 1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run Those chains are extremely expensive to run as evidenced by the absolutely dominant one. > 2) zero-knowledge proofs. These are not at the "root fo crypto". This is something tacked on to try and solve the 0.00001% of crypto's problems. > By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity No, no we don't. > it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history. The proof is in the pudding as it were. There's literally nothing in this "fundamental innovation" that can't be done better, faster, cheaper, and on a bigger scale with literally anything else. - Blockchains are distributed immutable ledgers, and there are very few (if any) useful applications for them - "programmatic chains" are the worlds slowest, most ineffecient and expensive VM that gets exploited every day because even people programming it don't understand the rules they are writing