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This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent powe

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. It does not seem like that anymore.

adhoc_slime 4y ago
To be fair, the article talks about none of that and focuses on the high-level traders perspective. I'd bet that a write up of the process of the merge would be a huge hit on HN.
- aliqot 4y ago
  I want to have the same faith as you, but I've been here since y2, and it has seldom been positive. I get it, I'm in the same field of research and can't stand what traders have done to the industry. 0. In the beginning we had no legitimacy, so we courted regulators and current financial types in as a means of legitimacy by proxy. 1. Those financial types and regulators who had open minds joined, shenanigans ensued, and we saw a replaying of all the dirty tricks that were outlawed in traditional markets like front-running. 2. Then fast forward to where we are now; industry types who came in early are making a killing and funding legislation like New York's BitLicense, which pushes toward centralization by outlawing participation for 'unaccreddited' types like the nerds who built this whole shindig. For folks like me who just want to build distributed systems and tackle issues like consensus, it's hard to be taken seriously, because we're all just trying to do our work but we're trapped in this casino where there's starting to be more pinky rings than poker chips and it's only getting worse.
seydor 4y ago
But this is the opposite of hacking. Feels like turning ETH to a political system. Soon you ll have the "republican party of ETH" forming. Those are natural self-organized outcomes when groups of humans are trusted with power.
- svnt 4y ago
  It’s moved the participation mainstream for sure. No longer do people need to hoard electronics and build asics. The power dynamics were always there, though, just obscured by additional requirements of some level of technical competence.
  - seydor 4y ago
    and some actual physical friction which prevents some kinds of very quick reaction to current events
- ryyr 4y ago
  ethereum is a political system, it exists to recreate the present arrangement with dlt and the extra niceties that it gives those in power. excuse the paranoia. anyway, definitely an achievement in my book
bertman 4y ago
Well, the whole crypto/fin tech space is such a rotten cesspool of scammers and blowhards that it's becoming very difficult to take anything they do and say seriously.
- viscanti 4y ago
  The ETH core team who pulled off a very ambitious migration to POS might be different than the run of the mill scammers who are involved with crypto. Seems weird to group them all together when they appear to be very different.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    The coreteam actively support building a platform which is to 90% or somused by scammers. They might be technically curious and not be scammers themselves, but this is a bit like Wernher von Braun's Statement that he is just building the rockets for the Nazis and makes them manoverable, what payload is loaded and where they are aimed at is "not my [his] department"
dylkil 4y ago
the servile class learned how to program
- ouid 4y ago
  i have as much of a problem with wealth inequality as you do, but wealthy people have as much of an advantage playing the crypto game as they do the regular game, because its just a market.
- periphrasis 4y ago
  Imagine thinking securities fraud is the profession of the superior man: instead, he is merely a slave to his desires, namely greed, debasing himself in order to vainly feed the insatiable beast inside. Truly pitiable and truly servile.
smoldesu 4y ago
This is still a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. We just don't accept Monopoly Money as compensation for work rendered.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  I accepted that Monopoly money ten years ago for work rendered. Glad I did.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Hey, if you don't mind your per-diem being less liquid than your stock options, go for it. Thinking pragmatically about the future of cryptocurrency though, I'd reckon it's safer to bet on the US dollar than Bitcoin bouncing back.
    - coffeeblack 4y ago
      I sold a couple of Bitcoins years ago at 200$ because I thought it wouldn’t bounce back. Guess I keep what’s left until Bitcoin hits a million.
- wkrsz 4y ago
  One can be critical about cryptocurrencies as currencies, investment or speculative assets and be curious by how the merge was performed.
- jimcavel888 4y ago
- drawnwren 4y ago
  I mean, 1 —- HN is largely populated by big tech coders who decided selling out the entire world population for a mid $100ks salary from the surveillance state sounds like a good deal. But 2, there are liquid markets for crypto. So, while you might feel good typing out how you value crypto —- it simply doesn’t matter. Put your money where your mouth is. Short it.
sbf501 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
RunSet 4y ago
> The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. Indeed. If someone claimed that Ethereum is a scam and Vitalik Buterin is a scammer I would need them to substantiate that claim. https://teddit.net/r/Bitcoin/comments/x0i8ts/just_traded_all_my_eth2_for_btc/im8j35n/?context=10 https://teddit.net/r/Bitcoin/comments/x0i8ts/just_traded_all...
- krferriter 4y ago
  Unfortunately all the NFT scams (most of which were run on top of ethereum) and smaller coins/networks created and promoted solely for pump-and-dump schemes (not ethereum) got conflated in some people's heads with everything else in the cryptocurrency space and now they think it is all just a scam that doesn't do anything besides trick people into losing money.
  - vsareto 4y ago
    If you want a majority of people using your thing, perception is important. - Governments were pretty late to the party with regulations/law enforcement because they understandably didn't know if it was serious. This meant your average person who lost in a scam probably had no justice. - The volume of scams made it seem that all of this was normal - best case was you did some research that found out before you put money in. This is partly because of governments but also there's no central authority from the crypto side to say what is safe and what isn't. "Buyer beware" with an every day currency/payment system doesn't really do you any favors in terms of adoption. - People lost substantial real money to complicated technical issues on top of the scams - All of this meant you had to do your research to fundamentally use the thing safely, which turned it more into an investing chore than payment convenience. So it's actually pretty reasonable if someone has this impression
svnt 4y ago
The audience here probably holds a disproportionate amount of newly less-profitable GPUs. PoS has been the clear future for better than five years and huge credit to the ETH team for making this happen.
- ruune 4y ago
  People here are largely anti crypto, not anti Proof of stake
kranke155 4y ago
I’ve given up on HN understating crypto before they mint some Giga unicorn and everyone understand where the future is. The hive mind here is dangerously anti crypto. It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. It’s basically become a forum for your average developer. I’d bet a lot of folk who don’t understand crypto at all are web developers or something where innovation is a new JavaScript framework. Not saying anything bad about that, but people here don’t seem to have innovation in mind. I mean r/Ethereum on Reddit is better than HN to discuss these topics. It’s just wrong. HN has become counter futurism.
- paldepind2 4y ago
  You complain that HN is a hive mind and suggest that r/Ethereum is a better place?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mratsim 4y ago
  > a forum for your average developer The average developer doesn't use Rust
- longtimelistnr 4y ago
  Laughable to suggest that everyone is wrong (except you of course) and that not worshipping crypto makes you an “average developer”
  - kranke155 4y ago
    That’s not what I said (of course). Multiple others in this thread decry the same thing. And you can be a great developer and still misunderstand crypto. But I really struggle to see how you can be a great innovator and fail to see cryptos potential at this point.
- simonw 4y ago
  > It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. Help me understand where that wealth comes from. Because as far as I can see the only wealth that gets generated is from people who got in earlier selling their bags to people who got in later.
majinuub 4y ago
This article can give you some insight as to why HN reacts the way it does: https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitcoin https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitco...
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  I just want to check in and make sure you understand that the fundamental principle of how a Con Game works is that the mark thinks they know something that no one else knows.
brightball 4y ago
Ethereum has always seemed like the only real effort towards accomplishing the goals that were set out for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Everything else...literally everything else in the space appears to be pump and dump, get rich quick scams: ICOs, NFTs, new coins appearing constantly, etc. Kudos to Ethereum for pulling off the merge. There's a lot of people heavily invested in mining that this move threatens and they're going to scream about it. IMO Eth2 is the future core of everything in the web3 space.
JeremyNT 4y ago
So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed by this? It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised, no matter how clever they are.
- OccamsMirror 4y ago
  - DangMeatSlurper 4y ago
  - tirpen 4y ago
    Virtues are generally more impressive than a cynical mockery of virtues at least.
- mratsim 4y ago
  > used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... https://decrypt.co/66411/cia-bitcoin-surveillance https://decrypt.co/66411/cia-bitcoin-surveillance > Michael Morell, who was previously the CIA’s acting director, said in ‘An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Use in Illicit Finance’ that “blockchain technology is a powerful but underutilized forensic tool for governments to identify illicit activity and bring criminals to justice.” > Tracking illicit Bitcoin transactions is therefore easier than tracing illegal funds moved across borders using “traditional banking transactions” and “far easier” than trying to follow cash, according to the report. > One source in the report was quoted saying that “if all criminals used blockchain, we could wipe out illicit financial activity.” TL;DR cash is a better tool for crime according to an ex CIA director
- jliptzin 4y ago
  Cash is still best for illicit activities
root_axis 4y ago
Cryptocurrency jumped the shark long ago and this comment section is a reflection of that. Claiming that people aren't real hackers because they don't uncritically slurp up cryptocurrency hype isn't doing your cause any favors.
- usehackernews 4y ago
  This isn’t crypto “hype.” It’s not going to impact the price of Ethereum. At least it’s not hype in my opinion. It’s just an impressive engineering feat. Given crypto isn’t going to die tomorrow, it’s good to see Ethereum has sunset the combustion engine for the EV (Proof of Work -> Proof of Stake). Even if you hate Ethereum, reducing electricity usage of the network by 90%+ is admirable.
  - lottin 4y ago
    Not wasting electricity is absolutely good news for the environment. At the same time, they were wasting electricity before... so I don't know about admirable, they've stopped doing something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      I'm curious, what are your thoughts on these neural net AI art generation tools like DallE and GPT? You seem to have strong opinions on what "legitimate" uses of electricity are, and they given that an entire economic ecosystem is apparently not legitimate, is making art? How about playing video games?
      - lottin 4y ago
        It depends... can the same outcome be achieved by using 99.5% less electricity? If it can, then it means 99.5% of the electricity consumed by this activity is being wasted, and that is a fact. Otherwise, it becomes a matter of opinion. Do I think casinos are a waste of space and energy? Sure, but this is just an opinion based on my personal preferences. I understand people have different preferences.
the_gastropod 4y ago
> Permanent power savings the scale of a country I don't know if you ever argued against that massive energy footprint as "FUD". But I do find it pretty hilarious to see a crypto proponent now use that as a positive. "We're not wasting country-sized amounts of electricity anymore!" FWIW, I don't think most crypto-critics (yours truly included) argue that it's not technically interesting. We argue that it's tech in search of a (mostly) non-existent problem, that has a whole host of very negative externalities.
wyager 4y ago
> Permanent power savings the scale of a country. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
resters 4y ago
HN has been oddly prejudiced against crypto. Sure there is a ton of hype, but there are some extremely interesting ideas and some incredible innovation taking place. This is what happens when startups become cool and the people who would have otherwise gotten an MBA and tried to find work at a major bank are now the ones on HN.
soulofmischief 4y ago
Hacker News is an amazing place filled with visionaries and world-class thinkers. Until you bring up crypto.
rco8786 4y ago
It was an amazing feat to do. But the question of “so what?” remains unanswered.
overtonwhy 4y ago
Over a Russian cryptocoin? Weird spot to draw the line. Ethereum Classic is still running with billions of USD in market cap after the last fork that happened years ago. Why does anyone think this fork is anything except another way for the controllers to cash out before their scam bubble pops?
Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
> This was originally a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. It does not seem like that anymore. There has to be a goal insight, otherwise it's just technical virtuosism for the sake of nothing. Nobody likes technical virtuosism for the sake of nothing otherwise guitar players who can play at 2000 bpm would dominate the billboard. Blockchain is not a young technology it was conceived in 1996, almost 30 years later the usecase it's still obscure, except the only usecase has been to create a casino in disguise. Making regular daily tasks less painful is a goal which if it was ever there has been abandoned post the first BTC run from 1$ to 127$
jarboot 4y ago
HN is also a forum launched in 2007 and likely skews older and more financially conservative
ews 4y ago
Hacker News has a serious mob mentality with regards to crypto. Some loud voices decides it was a "scam" years ago and would not get out of their high horse despite the evidence, and despite incredible technical feats like the merge. It was never the place to have an intelligent conversation about pros/cons and it will never be.

adhoc_slime 4y ago

To be fair, the article talks about none of that and focuses on the high-level traders perspective. I'd bet that a write up of the process of the merge would be a huge hit on HN.

aliqot 4y ago
I want to have the same faith as you, but I've been here since y2, and it has seldom been positive. I get it, I'm in the same field of research and can't stand what traders have done to the industry. 0. In the beginning we had no legitimacy, so we courted regulators and current financial types in as a means of legitimacy by proxy. 1. Those financial types and regulators who had open minds joined, shenanigans ensued, and we saw a replaying of all the dirty tricks that were outlawed in traditional markets like front-running. 2. Then fast forward to where we are now; industry types who came in early are making a killing and funding legislation like New York's BitLicense, which pushes toward centralization by outlawing participation for 'unaccreddited' types like the nerds who built this whole shindig. For folks like me who just want to build distributed systems and tackle issues like consensus, it's hard to be taken seriously, because we're all just trying to do our work but we're trapped in this casino where there's starting to be more pinky rings than poker chips and it's only getting worse.

seydor 4y ago

But this is the opposite of hacking. Feels like turning ETH to a political system. Soon you ll have the "republican party of ETH" forming. Those are natural self-organized outcomes when groups of humans are trusted with power.

svnt 4y ago
It’s moved the participation mainstream for sure. No longer do people need to hoard electronics and build asics. The power dynamics were always there, though, just obscured by additional requirements of some level of technical competence.
- seydor 4y ago
  and some actual physical friction which prevents some kinds of very quick reaction to current events
ryyr 4y ago
ethereum is a political system, it exists to recreate the present arrangement with dlt and the extra niceties that it gives those in power. excuse the paranoia. anyway, definitely an achievement in my book

bertman 4y ago

Well, the whole crypto/fin tech space is such a rotten cesspool of scammers and blowhards that it's becoming very difficult to take anything they do and say seriously.

viscanti 4y ago
The ETH core team who pulled off a very ambitious migration to POS might be different than the run of the mill scammers who are involved with crypto. Seems weird to group them all together when they appear to be very different.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  The coreteam actively support building a platform which is to 90% or somused by scammers. They might be technically curious and not be scammers themselves, but this is a bit like Wernher von Braun's Statement that he is just building the rockets for the Nazis and makes them manoverable, what payload is loaded and where they are aimed at is "not my [his] department"

dylkil 4y ago

the servile class learned how to program

ouid 4y ago
i have as much of a problem with wealth inequality as you do, but wealthy people have as much of an advantage playing the crypto game as they do the regular game, because its just a market.
periphrasis 4y ago
Imagine thinking securities fraud is the profession of the superior man: instead, he is merely a slave to his desires, namely greed, debasing himself in order to vainly feed the insatiable beast inside. Truly pitiable and truly servile.

smoldesu 4y ago

This is still a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. We just don't accept Monopoly Money as compensation for work rendered.

coffeeblack 4y ago
I accepted that Monopoly money ten years ago for work rendered. Glad I did.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Hey, if you don't mind your per-diem being less liquid than your stock options, go for it. Thinking pragmatically about the future of cryptocurrency though, I'd reckon it's safer to bet on the US dollar than Bitcoin bouncing back.
  - coffeeblack 4y ago
    I sold a couple of Bitcoins years ago at 200$ because I thought it wouldn’t bounce back. Guess I keep what’s left until Bitcoin hits a million.
wkrsz 4y ago
One can be critical about cryptocurrencies as currencies, investment or speculative assets and be curious by how the merge was performed.
jimcavel888 4y ago
drawnwren 4y ago
I mean, 1 —- HN is largely populated by big tech coders who decided selling out the entire world population for a mid $100ks salary from the surveillance state sounds like a good deal. But 2, there are liquid markets for crypto. So, while you might feel good typing out how you value crypto —- it simply doesn’t matter. Put your money where your mouth is. Short it.

sbf501 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

RunSet 4y ago

> The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. Indeed. If someone claimed that Ethereum is a scam and Vitalik Buterin is a scammer I would need them to substantiate that claim. https://teddit.net/r/Bitcoin/comments/x0i8ts/just_traded_all_my_eth2_for_btc/im8j35n/?context=10 https://teddit.net/r/Bitcoin/comments/x0i8ts/just_traded_all...

krferriter 4y ago
Unfortunately all the NFT scams (most of which were run on top of ethereum) and smaller coins/networks created and promoted solely for pump-and-dump schemes (not ethereum) got conflated in some people's heads with everything else in the cryptocurrency space and now they think it is all just a scam that doesn't do anything besides trick people into losing money.
- vsareto 4y ago
  If you want a majority of people using your thing, perception is important. - Governments were pretty late to the party with regulations/law enforcement because they understandably didn't know if it was serious. This meant your average person who lost in a scam probably had no justice. - The volume of scams made it seem that all of this was normal - best case was you did some research that found out before you put money in. This is partly because of governments but also there's no central authority from the crypto side to say what is safe and what isn't. "Buyer beware" with an every day currency/payment system doesn't really do you any favors in terms of adoption. - People lost substantial real money to complicated technical issues on top of the scams - All of this meant you had to do your research to fundamentally use the thing safely, which turned it more into an investing chore than payment convenience. So it's actually pretty reasonable if someone has this impression

svnt 4y ago

The audience here probably holds a disproportionate amount of newly less-profitable GPUs. PoS has been the clear future for better than five years and huge credit to the ETH team for making this happen.

ruune 4y ago
People here are largely anti crypto, not anti Proof of stake

kranke155 4y ago

I’ve given up on HN understating crypto before they mint some Giga unicorn and everyone understand where the future is. The hive mind here is dangerously anti crypto. It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. It’s basically become a forum for your average developer. I’d bet a lot of folk who don’t understand crypto at all are web developers or something where innovation is a new JavaScript framework. Not saying anything bad about that, but people here don’t seem to have innovation in mind. I mean r/Ethereum on Reddit is better than HN to discuss these topics. It’s just wrong. HN has become counter futurism.

paldepind2 4y ago
You complain that HN is a hive mind and suggest that r/Ethereum is a better place?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mratsim 4y ago
> a forum for your average developer The average developer doesn't use Rust
longtimelistnr 4y ago
Laughable to suggest that everyone is wrong (except you of course) and that not worshipping crypto makes you an “average developer”
- kranke155 4y ago
  That’s not what I said (of course). Multiple others in this thread decry the same thing. And you can be a great developer and still misunderstand crypto. But I really struggle to see how you can be a great innovator and fail to see cryptos potential at this point.
simonw 4y ago
> It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. Help me understand where that wealth comes from. Because as far as I can see the only wealth that gets generated is from people who got in earlier selling their bags to people who got in later.

majinuub 4y ago

This article can give you some insight as to why HN reacts the way it does: https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitcoin https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitco...

VikingCoder 4y ago
I just want to check in and make sure you understand that the fundamental principle of how a Con Game works is that the mark thinks they know something that no one else knows.

brightball 4y ago

Ethereum has always seemed like the only real effort towards accomplishing the goals that were set out for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Everything else...literally everything else in the space appears to be pump and dump, get rich quick scams: ICOs, NFTs, new coins appearing constantly, etc. Kudos to Ethereum for pulling off the merge. There's a lot of people heavily invested in mining that this move threatens and they're going to scream about it. IMO Eth2 is the future core of everything in the web3 space.

JeremyNT 4y ago

So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed by this? It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised, no matter how clever they are.

OccamsMirror 4y ago
- DangMeatSlurper 4y ago
- tirpen 4y ago
  Virtues are generally more impressive than a cynical mockery of virtues at least.
mratsim 4y ago
> used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... https://decrypt.co/66411/cia-bitcoin-surveillance https://decrypt.co/66411/cia-bitcoin-surveillance > Michael Morell, who was previously the CIA’s acting director, said in ‘An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Use in Illicit Finance’ that “blockchain technology is a powerful but underutilized forensic tool for governments to identify illicit activity and bring criminals to justice.” > Tracking illicit Bitcoin transactions is therefore easier than tracing illegal funds moved across borders using “traditional banking transactions” and “far easier” than trying to follow cash, according to the report. > One source in the report was quoted saying that “if all criminals used blockchain, we could wipe out illicit financial activity.” TL;DR cash is a better tool for crime according to an ex CIA director
jliptzin 4y ago
Cash is still best for illicit activities

root_axis 4y ago

Cryptocurrency jumped the shark long ago and this comment section is a reflection of that. Claiming that people aren't real hackers because they don't uncritically slurp up cryptocurrency hype isn't doing your cause any favors.

usehackernews 4y ago
This isn’t crypto “hype.” It’s not going to impact the price of Ethereum. At least it’s not hype in my opinion. It’s just an impressive engineering feat. Given crypto isn’t going to die tomorrow, it’s good to see Ethereum has sunset the combustion engine for the EV (Proof of Work -> Proof of Stake). Even if you hate Ethereum, reducing electricity usage of the network by 90%+ is admirable.
- lottin 4y ago
  Not wasting electricity is absolutely good news for the environment. At the same time, they were wasting electricity before... so I don't know about admirable, they've stopped doing something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    I'm curious, what are your thoughts on these neural net AI art generation tools like DallE and GPT? You seem to have strong opinions on what "legitimate" uses of electricity are, and they given that an entire economic ecosystem is apparently not legitimate, is making art? How about playing video games?
    - lottin 4y ago
      It depends... can the same outcome be achieved by using 99.5% less electricity? If it can, then it means 99.5% of the electricity consumed by this activity is being wasted, and that is a fact. Otherwise, it becomes a matter of opinion. Do I think casinos are a waste of space and energy? Sure, but this is just an opinion based on my personal preferences. I understand people have different preferences.

the_gastropod 4y ago

> Permanent power savings the scale of a country I don't know if you ever argued against that massive energy footprint as "FUD". But I do find it pretty hilarious to see a crypto proponent now use that as a positive. "We're not wasting country-sized amounts of electricity anymore!" FWIW, I don't think most crypto-critics (yours truly included) argue that it's not technically interesting. We argue that it's tech in search of a (mostly) non-existent problem, that has a whole host of very negative externalities.

wyager 4y ago

> Permanent power savings the scale of a country. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

resters 4y ago

HN has been oddly prejudiced against crypto. Sure there is a ton of hype, but there are some extremely interesting ideas and some incredible innovation taking place. This is what happens when startups become cool and the people who would have otherwise gotten an MBA and tried to find work at a major bank are now the ones on HN.

soulofmischief 4y ago

Hacker News is an amazing place filled with visionaries and world-class thinkers. Until you bring up crypto.

rco8786 4y ago

It was an amazing feat to do. But the question of “so what?” remains unanswered.

overtonwhy 4y ago

Over a Russian cryptocoin? Weird spot to draw the line. Ethereum Classic is still running with billions of USD in market cap after the last fork that happened years ago. Why does anyone think this fork is anything except another way for the controllers to cash out before their scam bubble pops?

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago

> This was originally a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. It does not seem like that anymore. There has to be a goal insight, otherwise it's just technical virtuosism for the sake of nothing. Nobody likes technical virtuosism for the sake of nothing otherwise guitar players who can play at 2000 bpm would dominate the billboard. Blockchain is not a young technology it was conceived in 1996, almost 30 years later the usecase it's still obscure, except the only usecase has been to create a casino in disguise. Making regular daily tasks less painful is a goal which if it was ever there has been abandoned post the first BTC run from 1$ to 127$

jarboot 4y ago

HN is also a forum launched in 2007 and likely skews older and more financially conservative

ews 4y ago

Hacker News has a serious mob mentality with regards to crypto. Some loud voices decides it was a "scam" years ago and would not get out of their high horse despite the evidence, and despite incredible technical feats like the merge. It was never the place to have an intelligent conversation about pros/cons and it will never be.