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E2E privacy has a lot of uses. Crypto has none. It’s just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams. Any use it may have can only possibly reveal itself af

E2E privacy has a lot of uses. Crypto has none. It’s just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams. Any use it may have can only possibly reveal itself after the crypto asset bubble/scams die. So even if you’re a crypto enthusiast, you should be in favor of this whole disastrous phase for crypto ending so you can try again and actually make it useful this time. Since crypto has become a completely speculation driven asset it’s become useless for anything other than buying and stuffing under the mattress. Any value crypto may add to the world will only happen once that dynamic is eliminated.

tatertots1234 4y ago
Your post is so perfectly in line with the blanket dismissal and absolutist attitude of the letter that you could pass as one of the authors. Crypto has its uses. Crypto also has lots of scams. Crypto bubble popping will not destroy the scams; these are endemic to any semi decentralized system, see email spam and robocalls. We can do much more to regulate, moderate, and improve the tech for better consumer protection and usability, which is one thing the letter calls for.
- hnthrow1010 4y ago
  >Crypto has its uses. No, this is wrong. By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. The technology fundamentally doesn't enable anything else, if you take that out it's just a really niche and inefficient distributed database. You may be suggesting that some companies have been able to build useful things on top of a blockchain. That might be true but out of all the examples you gave, they're useful in spite of cryptocurrency, not because of it. The exercise for crypto builders now becomes how to separate the useful parts from the ponzi tokens and build just those.
  - tatertots1234 4y ago
    > By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. And the earth is flat, and I refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary. A simple example of crypto being useful is as a timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger of cryptographically signed messages. That is one use case for it besides gambling, ergo your statement is easily refuted. I presume you will move the goalposts, though.
    - anon2020dot00 4y ago
      Don't you get tired of the endless recycling of pro and con crypto arguments? It's the same thing every time ad-infinitum.
      - tatertots1234 4y ago
        Yep, every time crypto is on the front page you have nocoiners and web3 pumpers making the same ridiculous blanket statements, and then some people in between trying to discern the reality of the situation.
        hnthrow1010 4y ago
        The reality of the situation is that blockchains are a mostly useless and inefficient datastructure that by and large don't solve any real problems. I find it insulting that I can't say this without someone labeling me a "nocoiner." Yes you can make money with them, that isn't the point. Sometimes an algorithm can just be bad. If you can't look at an algorithm objectively, maybe consider that you're not trying to discern the reality of the situation?
        kybernetikos 4y ago
        'blockchains' (the ecosystems generally, not the datastructure specifically which wasn't the innovative part) solve the problem of arbitrary, mutually unknown individuals making transactions about things of value. They're pretty much the only way we know to solve that problem. Of course, humans have been around a long time and had to manage before the bitcoin white paper, so most problems where the best solution involved arbitrary, mutually unknown individuals making transactions about things of value have either been ignored and are considered 'not that important' or have been solved 'better' through the creation of trusted third parties (which doesn't solve the problem for truly arbitrary participants, just moves it), or just forcing the risk onto others who previously had no choice but to accept it. This point of view is mainly just because society has had thousands of years being built around a constraint that the publication of the bitcoin whitepaper removed, and it takes a certain amount of imagination to see the possibilities. When you think about blockchains, you should be imagining what they enable: nonpermissioned (so even foreigners in war zones, or the homeless can take part), access to an international network that allows cross-party transactions dealing in hetrogenous kinds of goods. The network is by default API enabled and compatible (so I can write a smart contract that uses other smart contracts). It uses modern cryptography (unlike many Banks). Because it allows transactions across organisations and assets, things like flash loans where a loan can be made at zero risk to the lender (because the capital must be returned in the same transaction) are possible, something that is entirely impossible in traditional finance. They enable immediate transactional settlement, which is also hard in traditional finance (how do we swap something so that at no point one party has to take on the risk of the other party not delivering?). They enable groups of people that don't know each other to pool their money. This was impossible in the past without a trusted governing body that would incur costs and therefore need to take a cut. In finance, the main strategy up to now has been to register a corporation with multiple governments, spend lots of money on large marble buildings and conservative (i.e. non-innovative) smartly dressed staff for hundreds of years in order to give a sense of solidity and trustworthiness. Sure, it works, but that's what's really inefficient.
- faddypaddy34 4y ago
  I see a lot that crypto has it's uses. Please explain like I am 5 what some of the best ones are.
  - throwaway15492 4y ago
    [dead]
logicalmonster 4y ago
> Crypto has none. Posts on HN about some payment provider robbing somebody blind and destroying their life's work are a common occurrence here. We're not too far gone from wrong-think protesters in Canada having their bank accounts seized by the government. But crypto has no use case. Gotcha.
helloworld11 4y ago
>E2E privacy has a lot of uses. ZCrypto has none. >It’s just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams. T his just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority. Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum? Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people. How fucking tedious to see so many on a so-called hacker site shit so repetitively and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike. It's not hard to verify how exaggerated or just worng some of these dismissive claims are.

tatertots1234 4y ago

Your post is so perfectly in line with the blanket dismissal and absolutist attitude of the letter that you could pass as one of the authors. Crypto has its uses. Crypto also has lots of scams. Crypto bubble popping will not destroy the scams; these are endemic to any semi decentralized system, see email spam and robocalls. We can do much more to regulate, moderate, and improve the tech for better consumer protection and usability, which is one thing the letter calls for.

hnthrow1010 4y ago
>Crypto has its uses. No, this is wrong. By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. The technology fundamentally doesn't enable anything else, if you take that out it's just a really niche and inefficient distributed database. You may be suggesting that some companies have been able to build useful things on top of a blockchain. That might be true but out of all the examples you gave, they're useful in spite of cryptocurrency, not because of it. The exercise for crypto builders now becomes how to separate the useful parts from the ponzi tokens and build just those.
- tatertots1234 4y ago
  > By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. And the earth is flat, and I refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary. A simple example of crypto being useful is as a timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger of cryptographically signed messages. That is one use case for it besides gambling, ergo your statement is easily refuted. I presume you will move the goalposts, though.
  - anon2020dot00 4y ago
    Don't you get tired of the endless recycling of pro and con crypto arguments? It's the same thing every time ad-infinitum.
    - tatertots1234 4y ago
      Yep, every time crypto is on the front page you have nocoiners and web3 pumpers making the same ridiculous blanket statements, and then some people in between trying to discern the reality of the situation.
      - hnthrow1010 4y ago
        The reality of the situation is that blockchains are a mostly useless and inefficient datastructure that by and large don't solve any real problems. I find it insulting that I can't say this without someone labeling me a "nocoiner." Yes you can make money with them, that isn't the point. Sometimes an algorithm can just be bad. If you can't look at an algorithm objectively, maybe consider that you're not trying to discern the reality of the situation?
        kybernetikos 4y ago
        'blockchains' (the ecosystems generally, not the datastructure specifically which wasn't the innovative part) solve the problem of arbitrary, mutually unknown individuals making transactions about things of value. They're pretty much the only way we know to solve that problem. Of course, humans have been around a long time and had to manage before the bitcoin white paper, so most problems where the best solution involved arbitrary, mutually unknown individuals making transactions about things of value have either been ignored and are considered 'not that important' or have been solved 'better' through the creation of trusted third parties (which doesn't solve the problem for truly arbitrary participants, just moves it), or just forcing the risk onto others who previously had no choice but to accept it. This point of view is mainly just because society has had thousands of years being built around a constraint that the publication of the bitcoin whitepaper removed, and it takes a certain amount of imagination to see the possibilities. When you think about blockchains, you should be imagining what they enable: nonpermissioned (so even foreigners in war zones, or the homeless can take part), access to an international network that allows cross-party transactions dealing in hetrogenous kinds of goods. The network is by default API enabled and compatible (so I can write a smart contract that uses other smart contracts). It uses modern cryptography (unlike many Banks). Because it allows transactions across organisations and assets, things like flash loans where a loan can be made at zero risk to the lender (because the capital must be returned in the same transaction) are possible, something that is entirely impossible in traditional finance. They enable immediate transactional settlement, which is also hard in traditional finance (how do we swap something so that at no point one party has to take on the risk of the other party not delivering?). They enable groups of people that don't know each other to pool their money. This was impossible in the past without a trusted governing body that would incur costs and therefore need to take a cut. In finance, the main strategy up to now has been to register a corporation with multiple governments, spend lots of money on large marble buildings and conservative (i.e. non-innovative) smartly dressed staff for hundreds of years in order to give a sense of solidity and trustworthiness. Sure, it works, but that's what's really inefficient.
faddypaddy34 4y ago
I see a lot that crypto has it's uses. Please explain like I am 5 what some of the best ones are.
- throwaway15492 4y ago
  [dead]

logicalmonster 4y ago

> Crypto has none. Posts on HN about some payment provider robbing somebody blind and destroying their life's work are a common occurrence here. We're not too far gone from wrong-think protesters in Canada having their bank accounts seized by the government. But crypto has no use case. Gotcha.

helloworld11 4y ago

>E2E privacy has a lot of uses. ZCrypto has none. >It’s just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams. T his just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority. Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum? Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people. How fucking tedious to see so many on a so-called hacker site shit so repetitively and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike. It's not hard to verify how exaggerated or just worng some of these dismissive claims are.