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The End of My Crypto Explorations

32 points by kretaceous 4y ago

mccorrinall 4y ago
Yea, who would have thought that you don’t want to build a venture on top of a currency. There is no other use case in blockchain than transferring wealth plus some quality of life features like time locks, multi signatures etc.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  it seems he missed how those quality of life features are viable businesses on their own there are plenty of services taking a cut from people trying to use this multisender.app - pay/airdrop multiple people, thats it. team.finance - broadcast to your community that you locked your tokens, instead of just saying so. they solve a problem, they collect a cut from volume of transactions, they aren’t sitting in business development meetings around San Francisco because that’s reserved for grifters so its easy to see how OP missed that
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I think OP was perfectly willing to acknowledge these other use cases: > Crypto speculation is a vast and fast-growing market, while other use cases are small. Simply put, cryptocurrency has turned itself into a side-pot for disillusioned and desperate investors. The 'dream' that you're being sold is the same one we pondered 10 years ago - if we add enough bureaucracy, a democratically-controlled currency is feasible! Time has proven this wrong. Every attempt at making the '15th competing standard' ends the same way. Nobody is putting their money in cryptocurrency, and arbitrary architectural rehashes like the Ethereum Merge isn't going to drive adoption.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      I think crypto pundit narratives are absolutely worth criticizing and making fun of I can also observe that outside of crypto, speculation is a vast and fast-growing market, while other use cases are small in comparison. Financial services is a big sector, servicing an even bigger pile of assets, led by an even bigger notional value of synthetic assets and derivatives. and every other sector is smaller. so the outcome in the crypto space not only fits one of the original narratives of crypto, it also makes no sense how uninterested, alongside disillusioned, people hold crypto to a separate impossible higher standard.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Crypto isn't necessarily held to a 'higher standard', though. Not a single cryptocurrency is required to be audited by independent parties to confirm that there isn't deliberate wrongdoing. There are no encryption or privacy standards to be held to, cryptocurrency doesn't have ISO-compliance checks or even a concept of red-team/blue-team. On an individual basis, these features might seem desirable. At a higher level (eg. the financial services sector), every last one of these is a deal-breaker. There isn't a CFO on the planet that wouldn't laugh you out of the room for suggesting crypto as a replacement for Western Union. Pretty much the only advantage it holds over TradFin is transparency, which isn't a direct upgrade. Distributing a main ledger encourages rampant speculation, which leaves most cryptocurrencies as awful stores of value. The outcome of the crypto space is as-expected, IMO - any deregulated sector will inevitably be a race-to-the-bottom. I too like to argue in good-faith for the benefits of cryptocurrency, but comparing it to the dollar is like complaining that your orange doesn't taste like an apple. Cryptocurrency simply cannot exist as a suitable substitute for a state-backed currency without abandoning everything that makes it unique.
        yieldcrv 4y ago
        these are strawman arguments, that I think can all be talked about individually, and this is all for you to pick apart one dream you heard about replacing state backed currency. This is one of the narratives I was referring to as worth making fun of. so can you try rewinding and responding again, putting that particular thing aside and responding to the ways people use the amount of speculation in crypto to ignore the amount of speculation in the parallel economy? It functions accurately to power a permissionless economy, rampant speculation is because humans are in both. That means it’s working as a platform. Regarding what dream or narrative that is from: There were threads where people talking with Satoshi realized contracts and derivatives could be executed on chain and even collateralized with the cryptocurrency, and this has happened and will continue.
        Ferret7446 4y ago
        In practice, the most popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have been audited by more independent parties than almost any other software. No auditor would have passed up the opportunity to be the one who discovered a major hole in Bitcoin.
- mhluongo 4y ago
  Name systems. Decentralized forex. Censorship resistant voting.
  - fsh 4y ago
    The first two require centralized governance to function, so putting it on a blockchain is useless. Voting requires anonymity, so putting it on a blockchain is dangerous.
    - mhluongo 4y ago
      Neither of those require centralized governance (see Handshake, see Uniswap v2) and you can get anonymous voting on-chain as long as you have a registry of voting weight (see a variety of ZKPs). It amazes me that on this forum for technologists, so few are familiar with the technology... and still try to tear down crypto so passionately.
      - fsh 4y ago
        It amazes me that crypto-fanboys simply refuse to think through the failure modes of their toy projects. If you put your domains or your money on the blockchain, and you lose your keys, your domains or your money are gone with no recourse. This makes it obviously unusable in practice (keys get stolen all the time), and the only solution is centralized governance. This is fundamentally the oracle problem, and adding more and more layers of bullshit complexity won't fix it. Some ZKP-Voodoo may provide weak anonymity (the votes are not immediately obvious), but the voter can still prove to a third party who he or she voted for. Obviously this makes it vulnerable to vote buying and voter intimidation.
        mhluongo 4y ago
        Hm, by that logic we shouldn't ever do cryptography at all I guess? I mean keys get lost all the time, what's the point? On ZKPs... seriously, you're calling cutting edge advances in cryptography "voodoo"? Do you not realize how anti-intellectual that is? There are plenty of proofs for truly anon voting, without auditability if that's what you so desire. More protocols include it than not because it turns out people want to be able to audit elections! The difference in this system is users have to volunteer the information, rather than rely on an election operator.
- rvz 4y ago
  I know right? Just like how Skiff has being using other blockchain projects such as ENS domains as well as decentralized P2P software like IPFS to help build their product offering. [0] Perhaps they found a use case for it. [0] https://skiff.com https://skiff.com
  - mccorrinall 4y ago
    After checking their github repos I’m only seeing a web mail client with metamask for auth instead of user password. It’s using a normal graphql api. Very decentral. I guess web3.0 only requires a „login with metamask“-button now. Oh, and about the cool, very decentral drive on IPFS thing: the drive is still only on a single server, pinned by a single server. That’s how IPFS works. It it would work otherwise and they didn’t have to actually pay their storage bills, they wouldn’t limit the storage to a mediocre 10GB less-than-gdrive shit tier.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      Sign in with private/public keypair instead of Google auth or per-site auth is a pretty incredible advancement of authentication on the web. IPFS does not need to be single drive. The user has the option to self host. The original platform also can go insolvent and the user can pin through another service.
      - mccorrinall 4y ago
        Check out webauthn, it’s awesome!
alakep 4y ago
The best theory I have heard for why crypto is so popular besides gambling is that it is fun to think about. True engineers love working in crypto since it feels cutting edge and is more advanced than other technologies. This might continue even after pump and dump, but will no longer be lucrative.
- Nursie 4y ago
  I think the word might be "complicated" rather than advanced. (edit: see also "nerd sniping")
- boardwaalk 4y ago
  I think good engineers (critical thinkers + goal-oriented problem solvers) usually give up and find a better tool (i.e. without an blockchain) for the job after not too long. There is similarly no shortage of “architecture astronauts,” and whether the greed fuels the use of the wrong tool or vice versa — it probably doesn’t matter in the end.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    >I think good engineers (critical thinkers + goal-oriented problem solvers) usually give up and find a better tool Say it one more time for the people in the back! A lot of us are still refining/discussing the same core concepts, cryptography, distributed systems, disbursement, consensus, just in different fields without the 'coin' component attached. A lot of this tech in crypto was nothing new (blockchain, proof of work, hashing, distributed databases), but the combination of them presented new and interesting hurdles to overcome. As time passed we saw new utility for these concepts to solve other interesting problems, but the entire time being a researcher in the cryptoasset space has felt like trying to be a 'serious engineer' while your cubicle is located in a casino floor. You can't make a commit or push a draft paper without it being a market-moving action, that is a social element that a lot of industry theory just doesn't have nailed down yet, and as engineers can be very stressful. Most of us just want to solve problems and build cool things, but its hard to create novel solutions at financial gunpoint.
- bertman 4y ago
Aulig 4y ago
I've sold all of my crypto for a while because it just felt like gambling. Recently I listened to the rational reminder podcast [0], where they dug up some studies that basically show that people investing in crypto think they have high financial literacy but are measurably financially illiterate. Note that the bar for financial literacy really isn't high, they discuss that in the podcast too. That really cemented my opinion about crypto. [0] [The Rational Reminder Podcast] The Expected Returns of Financial Literacy (EP.217) https://podcastaddict.com/episode/144952992 https://podcastaddict.com/episode/144952992 Relevant part starts at 17:40
drakythe 4y ago
Up front: I hate crypto. I think it is stupid and any use case it has can be solved much more efficiently with existing tools. To me this blog reads like post-breakup copium. Dude just spent two years of his life and who knows how much money trying to find a market, only to realize there isn’t one. But he is sure someone else will find it! The technology is good! No it isn’t. And no they won’t. Admit when you are wrong and serve as a lesson to others.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I hate cryptocurrency too, but claiming that P2P technologies aren't good or don't fix problems is pretty laughable. Programs like Bittorrent and Soulseek have left media corporations quaking in their boots for decades. Cryptocurrency, despite all of it's shortcomings, is insanely resistant technology and even the most despised shitcoins will probably outlive your youngest living relatives. It's fine to loathe it, but the underpinnings of P2P technology are absolutely phenomenal, and increasingly relevant in a world where protocol trumps products. The real conundrum of cryptocurrency is that the technology is awesome, but the social implications of ripping the safety rails off the free market is so dire that only a disillusioned nerd could advocate for it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - drakythe 4y ago
    Peer to peer tech isn’t exclusive to cryptocurrency shenanigans. Neither is cryptography. I don’t hate these technologies. I don’t think they are useless. Quite the opposite. But the cryptocurrency/blockchain “stack” is a solution in search of a problem. I personally believe any good use case for this stack will be so hyper specific you’ll need to pay others to run copies of he ledger so you can have the consensus mechanism. But then you run into privacy issues and are better off duplicating your standard DB to some audited write only instance.
  - danaris 4y ago
    There's a big difference between saying cryptocurrency (or, more broadly, blockchain) doesn't solve real-life problems and saying P2P systems don't solve real-life problems. You appear to be attacking a strawman.
roenxi 4y ago
With the recent Ethereum PoW -> PoS move, I suspect there isn't much profit to be had for anyone except large ASIC farms, so my prediction is a bunch of people are currently discovering the crypto is too corporate for them. As for the substance of the complaints, yes any unregulated international industry is going to be an ongoing scam. That won't change. We've seen what proud names like HSBC or any other international banking corporation gets up to - law means little, crooked schemes are common. Take away the government choke-point and all the classic schemes will come back. But people are sorely underestimating how much long term good is going to get driven by this market. It is always going to be one step from collapse, and in 20 years we're going to do a compare and contrast to traditional international banking and discover crypto is just better. Bitcoin has so far weathered rising interest rates far better than I predicted and is looking like quite an acceptable asset for a diversified portfolio. The next crisis is upon us and the governments of the world are going to start haircutting accounts if inflation isn't robbing people of enough money. International capital flows are at risk with all this strife breaking out. They can't stop crypto, at this point it is clearly here to stay. It is going to be transformative and probably for the better. No-one likes capitalism either and look how much wealth that ended up creating - people only stopped complaining after the wealth creation dismantled and humiliated all the competition. The use cases for crypto is circumventing regulation and sure all the authoritarians can complain, but it'll be an embarrassment to see how much wealth that will create in time. Bad luck if you want tight government control on who I can send money to, it isn't technically feasible any more. You'll have to physically stop me.
- kuratkull 4y ago
  What do you think capitalism means? You say nobody likes it, but also that it's what creates all the wealth we have... How are those two ideas compatible?
  - roenxi 4y ago
    The people with the capital get to make decisions based on owning capital. > You say nobody likes it, but also that it's what creates all the wealth we have... How are those two ideas compatible? Why would they be incompatible? "nobody" is exaggerating but look at the protests against the 1%, general criticism of the existence of billionaires general efforts to move decision making from capitalists to government agencies (include trends in tax policy and government spending) and background complaints about how society is too materialist. Entire governments started out by killing all the capitalists they could find (China & Russia spring to mind, I doubt they are alone). In any major industry you'll find people mounting active campaigns to try and neuter the capitalists - even sometimes in food where I'd think by now people should have learned the lesson that the alternatives don't work. You don't have to go very far to find someone who objects to the idea of making any given decision based on who has the most money. People by and large seem to find the whole idea distasteful. In my opinion rather similar to how they dislike the idea that burning energy to prove wealth.
pavlov 4y ago
Even the ideologues are jumping off the crypto ship now? The author admits that he couldn’t find any worthwhile products or use cases in crypto, but continues to believe in it because he’s a “fan of Hayek and Von Mises” and the “ideas we read in The Sovereign Individual [..] are worth fighting for.” It’s no different from 1970s intellectuals who felt that, sure, the Soviet Union had some problems, but it would eventually work out because “I’m a fan of Marx” and “the ideas in the Communist Manifesto are worth fighting for.” Cryptocurrencies are only tertiarily a technology project. The essence is the combination of entirely theoretical ideology and confidence tricks. And that’s what makes crypto so similar to a Scientology-style cult.
photochemsyn 4y ago
> "As a fan of Hayek and Von Mises, I was fascinated by the idea of a currency free from the government's manipulation." Monetary systems are so crucial to modern civilization that if you do set up a 'government-independent currency' then whoever has the most control over that monetary system themselves becomes a kind of de facto government. This is seen in historical studies of black-market currency systems, where things like a bottle of rum or a kilo of cocaine became effective measures of exchange (leading to the rise of organized crime in the USA in the 1920s, or the rise of drug cartels in Latin America from the 1970s onwards, which acted in reality as alternative government systems). So, who controls bitcoin? This article points to whales and mining pools: https://cryptobriefing.com/who-controls-bitcoin-guide-btc-stakeholders/ https://cryptobriefing.com/who-controls-bitcoin-guide-btc-st... Money after all is a social phenomenon, and only has value because people agree it has value - although that is as true for $USD and gold as it is for bitcoin. This then raises the question of who controls those monetary systems (hint: the control system in all cases is not at all democratic in nature). Probably the optimal global currency system (if you value stability) is the basket-of-currencies approach, in which the $USD loses its supremacy and monetary values are tied to the average values of the basket. This requires some understanding of how global central banking operates, and for that there's no better source than Nomi Prin's Collusion: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204933-collusion https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204933-collusion
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Why do you write $USD instead of USD?
- eldenwrong 4y ago
  Lol. Whales and miners control Bitcoin? Love that 2016 FUD
- pjc50 4y ago
  > basket-of-currencies approach Return of the Special Drawing Right!
dudebrooo 4y ago
This is my favorite fake, no details article to indirectly defend the ultimate of all ultimates of temporal power - the money printing press. OK BRO! GOOD BYE!
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Well looks like my timing is off. Despite never touching crypto up until now, I feel it finally has a solid use case. ETH’s merge along with the existence of L2 networks means it can put western Union out of business for international same party (sending money to yourself) money transfers, The KYC on both sides not withstanding. Hell even NFTs —- the clearest feverdream tinted scam —- had a use case after all: tokens for securitizing and allowing speculation in membership networks (see Gary V coin). Sure someone could have just made a much less wasteful self-hostable/SaaS secret club membership app but NFTs seem to have found exactly one use case as a membership mechanism du jour which enables speculation (importantly, giving people a way to profit from their early “investment” in one creator or another). At the risk of stoking the ire of HN, does anyone still think crypto does not have a use case? There are a lot of things it is not and has not turned out to be, but IMO the biggest issue was needlessly destroying the earth and that seems to be all but solved now. Of course, FedNOW may prove to make crypto for money transfers an even worse option relatively but… I think we may be at the start of an actual crypto boom (where there is actually Utility underpinning ETH’s value) Another thing I find quite exciting is the idea of trading shares via a blockchain. While obviously becoming a financial exchange is a key choke point for innovation because of the requirements, I can imagine a shadow network based on settlements of contract negotiated with blockchain with small trusted networks of investors. All you need is to request the stock certificates and you can actually sign them over (let’s consider this an unorthodox “settlement”). Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)
- rchaud 4y ago
  I've been hearing the Western Union usurper argument since 2010. I doubt any of the people making those arguments actually use those services. There's an ease of use aspect to it that crypto boosters simply cannot understand, because they are used to dealing with a dizzying array of exchanges, cold wallets and nonsensical alphanumeric strings, and think that this is the UX that regular people will accept.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    I absolutely agree it’s not ready for regular people to use. > I've been hearing the Western Union usurper argument since 2010. I doubt any of the people making those arguments actually use those services. I know you weren’t talking about me but I’ve actually used western Union, and while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant nor pain free experience either. Wise is EXCELLENT though. More importantly, money exchangers and check caching places extract a TREMENDOUS toll on people who are forced to use them, and the prospect that could change is actually pretty good. Up until now the main issue was the wastefulness and lack of scale/purpose fit of blockchain. It seems like ETH is poised to solve those things where BTC was stuck due to the interests of miners. There are problems, but it really does feel like blockchain might have just finished it’s infancy (the scam era, let’s say). Maybe I should publish something longer form on this. I had something written then chose to self censor
rchaud 4y ago
> The unfortunate truth is that the current crypto killer feature is the creation of a global, permissionless, gigantic casino of worthless digital assets. This is quite far from the ideas of decentralization, privacy, and unstoppable digital assets we read in The Sovereign Individual. This neatly encapsulates the often tragic distinction between ideology and real-world human behaviour. You want a currency free of state intervention, you got it. That the majority of the market chose to leverage that for building casinos is the purest essence of that freedom. Ideology-based financial systems that rely on actors 'doing the right thing', with no regulations to incentivize/coerce such behaviour, will usually fail to achieve its own stated objectives.
jqpabc123 4y ago
Some everday street smarts applied to crypto. The fact that blockchain is a super interesting accounting method is completely lost on the average consumer who just wants to buy food and pay bills. If crypto can't do this, it's not real currency. And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt. And the speculation game is a lot like playing the lottery. Everyone can't win and if you aren't a loser yet it's only because you haven't been playing long enough.
- svnt 4y ago
  > And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt. This statement has validity but I don’t think it implies what you seem to think it does. That the continual creation of new currencies is not a globally sustainable process does not mean we should not experiment with their creation. It also does not preclude a handful of them that support valid and important if not revolutionary use cases. This is just an early phase.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    This is just an early phase. Yeah, that's probably it.
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m3kw9 4y ago
I don’t hate crypto but I find the people over hyping it disgusting. I still have yet meet a use case other than transferring value, which is something I also haven’t found a need for myself. That’s your crypto progress for those saying “we are still early”.
zeroclip 4y ago
BTC bro timing his exit with the ETH merge? Good riddance. Things are only starting to get interesting this year, hopefully this trend of BTC maxis leaving crypto will give more room for the actual engineering and cryptography to grow. See: Farcaster, MPC, SSLE, DVT, light clients, ZKPs.

32 points by kretaceous 4y ago

Yea, who would have thought that you don’t want to build a venture on top of a currency. There is no other use case in blockchain than transferring wealth plus some quality of life features like time locks, multi signatures etc.

yieldcrv 4y ago
it seems he missed how those quality of life features are viable businesses on their own there are plenty of services taking a cut from people trying to use this multisender.app - pay/airdrop multiple people, thats it. team.finance - broadcast to your community that you locked your tokens, instead of just saying so. they solve a problem, they collect a cut from volume of transactions, they aren’t sitting in business development meetings around San Francisco because that’s reserved for grifters so its easy to see how OP missed that
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I think OP was perfectly willing to acknowledge these other use cases: > Crypto speculation is a vast and fast-growing market, while other use cases are small. Simply put, cryptocurrency has turned itself into a side-pot for disillusioned and desperate investors. The 'dream' that you're being sold is the same one we pondered 10 years ago - if we add enough bureaucracy, a democratically-controlled currency is feasible! Time has proven this wrong. Every attempt at making the '15th competing standard' ends the same way. Nobody is putting their money in cryptocurrency, and arbitrary architectural rehashes like the Ethereum Merge isn't going to drive adoption.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    I think crypto pundit narratives are absolutely worth criticizing and making fun of I can also observe that outside of crypto, speculation is a vast and fast-growing market, while other use cases are small in comparison. Financial services is a big sector, servicing an even bigger pile of assets, led by an even bigger notional value of synthetic assets and derivatives. and every other sector is smaller. so the outcome in the crypto space not only fits one of the original narratives of crypto, it also makes no sense how uninterested, alongside disillusioned, people hold crypto to a separate impossible higher standard.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Crypto isn't necessarily held to a 'higher standard', though. Not a single cryptocurrency is required to be audited by independent parties to confirm that there isn't deliberate wrongdoing. There are no encryption or privacy standards to be held to, cryptocurrency doesn't have ISO-compliance checks or even a concept of red-team/blue-team. On an individual basis, these features might seem desirable. At a higher level (eg. the financial services sector), every last one of these is a deal-breaker. There isn't a CFO on the planet that wouldn't laugh you out of the room for suggesting crypto as a replacement for Western Union. Pretty much the only advantage it holds over TradFin is transparency, which isn't a direct upgrade. Distributing a main ledger encourages rampant speculation, which leaves most cryptocurrencies as awful stores of value. The outcome of the crypto space is as-expected, IMO - any deregulated sector will inevitably be a race-to-the-bottom. I too like to argue in good-faith for the benefits of cryptocurrency, but comparing it to the dollar is like complaining that your orange doesn't taste like an apple. Cryptocurrency simply cannot exist as a suitable substitute for a state-backed currency without abandoning everything that makes it unique.
      - yieldcrv 4y ago
        these are strawman arguments, that I think can all be talked about individually, and this is all for you to pick apart one dream you heard about replacing state backed currency. This is one of the narratives I was referring to as worth making fun of. so can you try rewinding and responding again, putting that particular thing aside and responding to the ways people use the amount of speculation in crypto to ignore the amount of speculation in the parallel economy? It functions accurately to power a permissionless economy, rampant speculation is because humans are in both. That means it’s working as a platform. Regarding what dream or narrative that is from: There were threads where people talking with Satoshi realized contracts and derivatives could be executed on chain and even collateralized with the cryptocurrency, and this has happened and will continue.
      - Ferret7446 4y ago
        In practice, the most popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have been audited by more independent parties than almost any other software. No auditor would have passed up the opportunity to be the one who discovered a major hole in Bitcoin.
mhluongo 4y ago
Name systems. Decentralized forex. Censorship resistant voting.
- fsh 4y ago
  The first two require centralized governance to function, so putting it on a blockchain is useless. Voting requires anonymity, so putting it on a blockchain is dangerous.
  - mhluongo 4y ago
    Neither of those require centralized governance (see Handshake, see Uniswap v2) and you can get anonymous voting on-chain as long as you have a registry of voting weight (see a variety of ZKPs). It amazes me that on this forum for technologists, so few are familiar with the technology... and still try to tear down crypto so passionately.
    - fsh 4y ago
      It amazes me that crypto-fanboys simply refuse to think through the failure modes of their toy projects. If you put your domains or your money on the blockchain, and you lose your keys, your domains or your money are gone with no recourse. This makes it obviously unusable in practice (keys get stolen all the time), and the only solution is centralized governance. This is fundamentally the oracle problem, and adding more and more layers of bullshit complexity won't fix it. Some ZKP-Voodoo may provide weak anonymity (the votes are not immediately obvious), but the voter can still prove to a third party who he or she voted for. Obviously this makes it vulnerable to vote buying and voter intimidation.
      - mhluongo 4y ago
        Hm, by that logic we shouldn't ever do cryptography at all I guess? I mean keys get lost all the time, what's the point? On ZKPs... seriously, you're calling cutting edge advances in cryptography "voodoo"? Do you not realize how anti-intellectual that is? There are plenty of proofs for truly anon voting, without auditability if that's what you so desire. More protocols include it than not because it turns out people want to be able to audit elections! The difference in this system is users have to volunteer the information, rather than rely on an election operator.
rvz 4y ago
I know right? Just like how Skiff has being using other blockchain projects such as ENS domains as well as decentralized P2P software like IPFS to help build their product offering. [0] Perhaps they found a use case for it. [0] https://skiff.com https://skiff.com
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  After checking their github repos I’m only seeing a web mail client with metamask for auth instead of user password. It’s using a normal graphql api. Very decentral. I guess web3.0 only requires a „login with metamask“-button now. Oh, and about the cool, very decentral drive on IPFS thing: the drive is still only on a single server, pinned by a single server. That’s how IPFS works. It it would work otherwise and they didn’t have to actually pay their storage bills, they wouldn’t limit the storage to a mediocre 10GB less-than-gdrive shit tier.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    Sign in with private/public keypair instead of Google auth or per-site auth is a pretty incredible advancement of authentication on the web. IPFS does not need to be single drive. The user has the option to self host. The original platform also can go insolvent and the user can pin through another service.
    - mccorrinall 4y ago
      Check out webauthn, it’s awesome!

alakep 4y ago

The best theory I have heard for why crypto is so popular besides gambling is that it is fun to think about. True engineers love working in crypto since it feels cutting edge and is more advanced than other technologies. This might continue even after pump and dump, but will no longer be lucrative.

Nursie 4y ago
I think the word might be "complicated" rather than advanced. (edit: see also "nerd sniping")
boardwaalk 4y ago
I think good engineers (critical thinkers + goal-oriented problem solvers) usually give up and find a better tool (i.e. without an blockchain) for the job after not too long. There is similarly no shortage of “architecture astronauts,” and whether the greed fuels the use of the wrong tool or vice versa — it probably doesn’t matter in the end.
- aliqot 4y ago
  >I think good engineers (critical thinkers + goal-oriented problem solvers) usually give up and find a better tool Say it one more time for the people in the back! A lot of us are still refining/discussing the same core concepts, cryptography, distributed systems, disbursement, consensus, just in different fields without the 'coin' component attached. A lot of this tech in crypto was nothing new (blockchain, proof of work, hashing, distributed databases), but the combination of them presented new and interesting hurdles to overcome. As time passed we saw new utility for these concepts to solve other interesting problems, but the entire time being a researcher in the cryptoasset space has felt like trying to be a 'serious engineer' while your cubicle is located in a casino floor. You can't make a commit or push a draft paper without it being a market-moving action, that is a social element that a lot of industry theory just doesn't have nailed down yet, and as engineers can be very stressful. Most of us just want to solve problems and build cool things, but its hard to create novel solutions at financial gunpoint.
bertman 4y ago

Aulig 4y ago

I've sold all of my crypto for a while because it just felt like gambling. Recently I listened to the rational reminder podcast [0], where they dug up some studies that basically show that people investing in crypto think they have high financial literacy but are measurably financially illiterate. Note that the bar for financial literacy really isn't high, they discuss that in the podcast too. That really cemented my opinion about crypto. [0] [The Rational Reminder Podcast] The Expected Returns of Financial Literacy (EP.217) https://podcastaddict.com/episode/144952992 https://podcastaddict.com/episode/144952992 Relevant part starts at 17:40

drakythe 4y ago

Up front: I hate crypto. I think it is stupid and any use case it has can be solved much more efficiently with existing tools. To me this blog reads like post-breakup copium. Dude just spent two years of his life and who knows how much money trying to find a market, only to realize there isn’t one. But he is sure someone else will find it! The technology is good! No it isn’t. And no they won’t. Admit when you are wrong and serve as a lesson to others.

smoldesu 4y ago
I hate cryptocurrency too, but claiming that P2P technologies aren't good or don't fix problems is pretty laughable. Programs like Bittorrent and Soulseek have left media corporations quaking in their boots for decades. Cryptocurrency, despite all of it's shortcomings, is insanely resistant technology and even the most despised shitcoins will probably outlive your youngest living relatives. It's fine to loathe it, but the underpinnings of P2P technology are absolutely phenomenal, and increasingly relevant in a world where protocol trumps products. The real conundrum of cryptocurrency is that the technology is awesome, but the social implications of ripping the safety rails off the free market is so dire that only a disillusioned nerd could advocate for it.
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- drakythe 4y ago
  Peer to peer tech isn’t exclusive to cryptocurrency shenanigans. Neither is cryptography. I don’t hate these technologies. I don’t think they are useless. Quite the opposite. But the cryptocurrency/blockchain “stack” is a solution in search of a problem. I personally believe any good use case for this stack will be so hyper specific you’ll need to pay others to run copies of he ledger so you can have the consensus mechanism. But then you run into privacy issues and are better off duplicating your standard DB to some audited write only instance.
- danaris 4y ago
  There's a big difference between saying cryptocurrency (or, more broadly, blockchain) doesn't solve real-life problems and saying P2P systems don't solve real-life problems. You appear to be attacking a strawman.

roenxi 4y ago

With the recent Ethereum PoW -> PoS move, I suspect there isn't much profit to be had for anyone except large ASIC farms, so my prediction is a bunch of people are currently discovering the crypto is too corporate for them. As for the substance of the complaints, yes any unregulated international industry is going to be an ongoing scam. That won't change. We've seen what proud names like HSBC or any other international banking corporation gets up to - law means little, crooked schemes are common. Take away the government choke-point and all the classic schemes will come back. But people are sorely underestimating how much long term good is going to get driven by this market. It is always going to be one step from collapse, and in 20 years we're going to do a compare and contrast to traditional international banking and discover crypto is just better. Bitcoin has so far weathered rising interest rates far better than I predicted and is looking like quite an acceptable asset for a diversified portfolio. The next crisis is upon us and the governments of the world are going to start haircutting accounts if inflation isn't robbing people of enough money. International capital flows are at risk with all this strife breaking out. They can't stop crypto, at this point it is clearly here to stay. It is going to be transformative and probably for the better. No-one likes capitalism either and look how much wealth that ended up creating - people only stopped complaining after the wealth creation dismantled and humiliated all the competition. The use cases for crypto is circumventing regulation and sure all the authoritarians can complain, but it'll be an embarrassment to see how much wealth that will create in time. Bad luck if you want tight government control on who I can send money to, it isn't technically feasible any more. You'll have to physically stop me.

kuratkull 4y ago
What do you think capitalism means? You say nobody likes it, but also that it's what creates all the wealth we have... How are those two ideas compatible?
- roenxi 4y ago
  The people with the capital get to make decisions based on owning capital. > You say nobody likes it, but also that it's what creates all the wealth we have... How are those two ideas compatible? Why would they be incompatible? "nobody" is exaggerating but look at the protests against the 1%, general criticism of the existence of billionaires general efforts to move decision making from capitalists to government agencies (include trends in tax policy and government spending) and background complaints about how society is too materialist. Entire governments started out by killing all the capitalists they could find (China & Russia spring to mind, I doubt they are alone). In any major industry you'll find people mounting active campaigns to try and neuter the capitalists - even sometimes in food where I'd think by now people should have learned the lesson that the alternatives don't work. You don't have to go very far to find someone who objects to the idea of making any given decision based on who has the most money. People by and large seem to find the whole idea distasteful. In my opinion rather similar to how they dislike the idea that burning energy to prove wealth.

pavlov 4y ago

Even the ideologues are jumping off the crypto ship now? The author admits that he couldn’t find any worthwhile products or use cases in crypto, but continues to believe in it because he’s a “fan of Hayek and Von Mises” and the “ideas we read in The Sovereign Individual [..] are worth fighting for.” It’s no different from 1970s intellectuals who felt that, sure, the Soviet Union had some problems, but it would eventually work out because “I’m a fan of Marx” and “the ideas in the Communist Manifesto are worth fighting for.” Cryptocurrencies are only tertiarily a technology project. The essence is the combination of entirely theoretical ideology and confidence tricks. And that’s what makes crypto so similar to a Scientology-style cult.

photochemsyn 4y ago

> "As a fan of Hayek and Von Mises, I was fascinated by the idea of a currency free from the government's manipulation." Monetary systems are so crucial to modern civilization that if you do set up a 'government-independent currency' then whoever has the most control over that monetary system themselves becomes a kind of de facto government. This is seen in historical studies of black-market currency systems, where things like a bottle of rum or a kilo of cocaine became effective measures of exchange (leading to the rise of organized crime in the USA in the 1920s, or the rise of drug cartels in Latin America from the 1970s onwards, which acted in reality as alternative government systems). So, who controls bitcoin? This article points to whales and mining pools: https://cryptobriefing.com/who-controls-bitcoin-guide-btc-stakeholders/ https://cryptobriefing.com/who-controls-bitcoin-guide-btc-st... Money after all is a social phenomenon, and only has value because people agree it has value - although that is as true for $USD and gold as it is for bitcoin. This then raises the question of who controls those monetary systems (hint: the control system in all cases is not at all democratic in nature). Probably the optimal global currency system (if you value stability) is the basket-of-currencies approach, in which the $USD loses its supremacy and monetary values are tied to the average values of the basket. This requires some understanding of how global central banking operates, and for that there's no better source than Nomi Prin's Collusion: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204933-collusion https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204933-collusion

School-Cotton 4y ago
Why do you write $USD instead of USD?
eldenwrong 4y ago
Lol. Whales and miners control Bitcoin? Love that 2016 FUD
pjc50 4y ago
> basket-of-currencies approach Return of the Special Drawing Right!

dudebrooo 4y ago

This is my favorite fake, no details article to indirectly defend the ultimate of all ultimates of temporal power - the money printing press. OK BRO! GOOD BYE!

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Well looks like my timing is off. Despite never touching crypto up until now, I feel it finally has a solid use case. ETH’s merge along with the existence of L2 networks means it can put western Union out of business for international same party (sending money to yourself) money transfers, The KYC on both sides not withstanding. Hell even NFTs —- the clearest feverdream tinted scam —- had a use case after all: tokens for securitizing and allowing speculation in membership networks (see Gary V coin). Sure someone could have just made a much less wasteful self-hostable/SaaS secret club membership app but NFTs seem to have found exactly one use case as a membership mechanism du jour which enables speculation (importantly, giving people a way to profit from their early “investment” in one creator or another). At the risk of stoking the ire of HN, does anyone still think crypto does not have a use case? There are a lot of things it is not and has not turned out to be, but IMO the biggest issue was needlessly destroying the earth and that seems to be all but solved now. Of course, FedNOW may prove to make crypto for money transfers an even worse option relatively but… I think we may be at the start of an actual crypto boom (where there is actually Utility underpinning ETH’s value) Another thing I find quite exciting is the idea of trading shares via a blockchain. While obviously becoming a financial exchange is a key choke point for innovation because of the requirements, I can imagine a shadow network based on settlements of contract negotiated with blockchain with small trusted networks of investors. All you need is to request the stock certificates and you can actually sign them over (let’s consider this an unorthodox “settlement”). Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)

rchaud 4y ago
I've been hearing the Western Union usurper argument since 2010. I doubt any of the people making those arguments actually use those services. There's an ease of use aspect to it that crypto boosters simply cannot understand, because they are used to dealing with a dizzying array of exchanges, cold wallets and nonsensical alphanumeric strings, and think that this is the UX that regular people will accept.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  I absolutely agree it’s not ready for regular people to use. > I've been hearing the Western Union usurper argument since 2010. I doubt any of the people making those arguments actually use those services. I know you weren’t talking about me but I’ve actually used western Union, and while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant nor pain free experience either. Wise is EXCELLENT though. More importantly, money exchangers and check caching places extract a TREMENDOUS toll on people who are forced to use them, and the prospect that could change is actually pretty good. Up until now the main issue was the wastefulness and lack of scale/purpose fit of blockchain. It seems like ETH is poised to solve those things where BTC was stuck due to the interests of miners. There are problems, but it really does feel like blockchain might have just finished it’s infancy (the scam era, let’s say). Maybe I should publish something longer form on this. I had something written then chose to self censor

rchaud 4y ago

> The unfortunate truth is that the current crypto killer feature is the creation of a global, permissionless, gigantic casino of worthless digital assets. This is quite far from the ideas of decentralization, privacy, and unstoppable digital assets we read in The Sovereign Individual. This neatly encapsulates the often tragic distinction between ideology and real-world human behaviour. You want a currency free of state intervention, you got it. That the majority of the market chose to leverage that for building casinos is the purest essence of that freedom. Ideology-based financial systems that rely on actors 'doing the right thing', with no regulations to incentivize/coerce such behaviour, will usually fail to achieve its own stated objectives.

jqpabc123 4y ago

Some everday street smarts applied to crypto. The fact that blockchain is a super interesting accounting method is completely lost on the average consumer who just wants to buy food and pay bills. If crypto can't do this, it's not real currency. And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt. And the speculation game is a lot like playing the lottery. Everyone can't win and if you aren't a loser yet it's only because you haven't been playing long enough.

svnt 4y ago
> And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt. This statement has validity but I don’t think it implies what you seem to think it does. That the continual creation of new currencies is not a globally sustainable process does not mean we should not experiment with their creation. It also does not preclude a handful of them that support valid and important if not revolutionary use cases. This is just an early phase.
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  This is just an early phase. Yeah, that's probably it.

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m3kw9 4y ago

I don’t hate crypto but I find the people over hyping it disgusting. I still have yet meet a use case other than transferring value, which is something I also haven’t found a need for myself. That’s your crypto progress for those saying “we are still early”.

zeroclip 4y ago

BTC bro timing his exit with the ETH merge? Good riddance. Things are only starting to get interesting this year, hopefully this trend of BTC maxis leaving crypto will give more room for the actual engineering and cryptography to grow. See: Farcaster, MPC, SSLE, DVT, light clients, ZKPs.