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Ask HN: Why doesn’t HN have quality discussion around crypto?

• cebert 4y ago
  I think most of the HN community is intelligent enough to realize crypto is currently overhyped and speculative.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gregjor 4y ago
  Maybe the right type of people, as you say, have expressed their opinion on HN. You not agreeing with the consensus here doesn't imply the participants can't have a "quality discussion," whatever that means. HN doesn't have high-quality discussions about the merits of Amway or astrology either.
  • hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    > HN doesn't have high-quality discussions about the merits of Amway or astrology either. Frankly, I think we could[0][1], but only once in a few years - definitely not every week. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13075535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13075535 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27166637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27166637
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bombcar 4y ago
  Because the mathematical models are relatively well understood, and the use of actual distributed currency like Monero is known. Almost everything else is a get rich quick scam or a bad application for a distributed concensus protocol.
  • drpixie 4y ago
    It's still rather common for people running "blockchain" projects to completely misunderstand the both their project's requirements and what is provided by a blockchain. I can point to a couple of large public projects using blockchain so provide nothing more than a centralised DB. Disappointing but as an aside, both projects are failing (wildly over budget, wildly over time, and no realistic prospect of being completed in the current direction) :(
• eucryphia 4y ago
  I'm hoping someone will chime in with a link to some 'quality' discussion on 'crypto'. We used to speculate on the value of Tulips, but we still want them in our gardens.
  • x86x87 4y ago
    Classic. Tulips! Now we need to bring in how mucj energy we spend mining bitcoin and we're done. People confidently will tell you all the reasons why crypto is bad but will not for a second stop to question how out current finacial system is working or even if it's working.
    • simondotau 4y ago
      Our current financial system is obviously working. You might not like or agree with the outcomes of capitalism or certain capitalist economies, but the mechanism of currency transfer isn’t what defines them.
      • x86x87 4y ago
        It's obviously working if you say so. No point in questioning it. We have all the ingredinents for a post-scarcity world but you still have people starving, no access to clean water, no healthcare, heck a large amount of people are experiencing the modern version of slavery, but yeah! Isn't capitalism wonderful? And working!
        • simondotau 4y ago
          If you think the various mechanisms of transacting fiat money don’t work, then I literally don’t know what you’re talking about. As for the rest of it, that’s exactly my point. Crypto is still capitalism. Or are you suggesting that moving from fiat currency to crypto will solve the failures of capitalism? I’d be fascinated to hear why you think that. Perhaps you are conflating a switch to crypto with a switch away from governments, taxes, employment contracts, etc? That’s certainly an opinion, but then it isn’t actually crypto which is the operative solution.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  To smart, creative, and most of all honest people, crypto = death. A "quality discussion" around crypto by definition means excluding grifters such as Paris Hilton and Jimmy Kimmel. It's a whole new level of greed. It used to be people just wanted to get rich. Blockheads seem to feel grievously wounded because some group of people (gamers, pet owners, classic car enthusiasts, etc.) has some money and they won't rest until they have it all.
  • x86x87 4y ago
    That's a blanket statememt if I've ever seen any. So if you like crypto you must not be very smart or honest. /s Crypto has its uses. Blockchain tech is here to stay.
    • dogecoinbase 4y ago
      What are the uses?
      • simondotau 4y ago
        Memes, mostly. (As they say on Reddit, username checks out. Haha. <ducks>)
• superchroma 4y ago
  Crypto is a scam propped up by criminals and price manipulators, both seeking profits at the expense of idiots. It has achieved nothing it promised, defrauded a lot of honest investors and made a lot of undeserving people unreasonably rich. Everybody involved in creating a cryptocurrency should be in prison. Due to the existence of crypto/real currency exchange and the casual participation of whales who dwarf the community of real users, it is completely and utterly vulnerable to real world economic trends, rendering it useless as any kind of hedge. It has demonstrated time and time and time and time again that it is ludicrously vulnerable to exploitation in a thousand different dimensions even the most fiendishly clever people can't predict, and has wasted a spectacular amount of power for no real return. It has led to a disgusting and desperate financialization of anything and everything that has social relevance, to try and smear even a smidgen of that relevance on crypto itself, as it desperately searches for a use-case to justify itself, and it has created a generation of grifters who clog our content spaces with nonsense information about it. Truly a great pox of our time.
  • mikhael28 4y ago
    Preach.
• thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  Crypto / Blockchains are a bad idea: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI
• wmf 4y ago
  We had those discussions years ago and things just got worse since then. A lot of people have just snapped. Also, the structure of Hacker News is OK for discussing news but not big topics. Every thread starts over at zero.
• herendin 4y ago
  >it’s overloaded with mid to low value commentsi Because these types of comments take little effort to post, and to read People who could post an interesting technical comment about zero knowledge proofs or monetary theory will be discouraged, if the responses are low effort rants like "Crypto is a scam" or "Bitcoin will destroy fiat" So intelligent and informed people don't bother to join these discussions on HN any more
  • herendin 4y ago
    And now your question has been flag killed. Take that as a sign that the majority of this community do not want any more open discussion about this issue, and the site's administrators accept this consensus
• bdcravens 4y ago
  Even in crypto communities the level of discussion is low. Among proponents, it's mostly memes and proselytizing. I'm not sure when real money is on the line that objective, high-quality discussion is possible (or rather, the signal-to-noise ratio will always be low enough to be effectively zero)
  • PaulHoule 4y ago
    I would point to discussions on stock market message boards which are (almost entirely) crap even if the firms being discussed aren’t.
• addicted 4y ago
  What does one actually discuss about crypto. Blockchain is interesting but it’s been around for decades (it’s older than Bitcoin) and no one’s really come up with any good uses for it. There’s very few uses where the decentralized nature helps over a distributed but centrally owned DB. Cryptocurrencies could be interesting, but they don’t live up to any of their promises. The entire crypto currency space is going through the exact same scams and problems that regular currencies went through in the early 1900s, for which all these regulations that crypto was supposed to provide freedom from. But the entire industry is realizing the hard way that most of those regulations came about for a reason. Add those regulations back in and it’s not clear what purpose it serves. It’s very hard to discuss a technology with any sort of excitement when it’s rediscovering very well known century old problems. I suspect we will see a digital dollar (and digital versions of other major currencies) and that will be the end of all the other random crypto currencies. And it’s not even necessary for digital currencies to be built on a blockchain. NFTs. Well, we know NFTs are a scam because they aren’t even what they purport to be. They do not give you any sort of rights to whatever they are supposed to give you rights to. Any rights they do confer will only exist as long as they are enforced by real world legal and enforcement systems. At which point the distributed aspect is just superfluous. A centralized DB (several services could provide these DBs, so it would be a monopoly) will be much more efficient and simpler and effective. Smart contracts are highly dependent on oracles. You have to place your trust on the Oracle anyways. So if you’re doing that then why not just trust the entire process on a single entity? And besides, with properly signed legal contracts you also have backup enforcement through regular legal channels, as well as recourse if someone tries to break the contract. If your smart contract also depends on the legal system, again, it’s not clear what advantage it provides over a standard contract. There’s not much to discuss about crypto because there’s not much there. The entire argument in favor of crypto is “I bought this Dogecoin for $0.001 and now it’s worth $1000”. In over a decade of hype, and even longer since the technology itself existed, that’s almost the entire positive value proposition from crypto.
  • junofan 4y ago
    Lawyers aren’t cheap. Why not entertain alternatives?
• labrador 4y ago
  I see you are a HN veteran but maybe you took a break and didn't see all the discussions that were had around the turn of the year 2012/22. This one is about web3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208, but there were also many about crypto. Since the crash there's been nothing but scams and hacks, so until the industry shakes out and recovers, I think it won't be popular on HN
• pontifier 4y ago
  We've all dipped our toes in that water already. It's no fun to swim in sewage.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  > What are your thoughts? I think the camps have already been formed, and nobody is looking to switch sides. I agree with you that there isn't quality discussion around crypto, but I don't know where there is. There are good essays from time to time, but not good discussion on an open forum. Which is why I just click "hide" whenever I see a crypto story on HN, and it disappears from my feed, and I don't have to wade into the river of sewage the comments inevitably become.
• soared 4y ago
  There are lists of topics on every platform where the same discussions are rehashed every time the topic is brought up. Crypto is one of those topics for HN, same with advertising. Reddit has a ton of them as well. I don’t use other platforms but I’m sure each sphere on Twitter has them, each Facebook group has them, etc. Simply groupthink/hive mind that HN is not immune to.
• viburnum 4y ago
  It’s basically money laundering and everyone involved should be in prison.
• Barrin92 4y ago
  >can’t seem to put together a single useful thread that is about crypto You will probably dismiss my reply as exactly the kind of comment you talk about, but the answer is simple. There is no useful discussion about crypto because there's nothing useful about crypto. That's why we keep going on circles. If countless of as you say smart, creative thinkers can't have a meaningful discussion about something, maybe the issue isn't the smart, creative, leading people, but the thing they can't seem to have anything to say about. It's a grift, it has no practical use other than crime or as a get-rich-quick scheme for disenfranchised zoomers and millennials who want to belong to the propertied class rather than actually work for a living. The usual retort is something like 'but the blockchain itself is revolutionary!', except that figuring out what it's good for is left as an exercise to the reader. People will of course consider this inflammatory but it's just calling a spade a spade and we'd be better served if people put their attention and time to discuss and learn about technology that serves real needs rather than inventing harebrained financial schemes that makes 1980s Japan look fiscally responsible in comparison.
  • mikhael28 4y ago
    Preach. You described this perfectly. A get-rich-quick scheme for disenfranchised zoomers - a modern Amway, if you know what that is. Everyone I know that is into Bitcoin, immediately tries to sell you on buying some. Which is a huge red flag for me - pyramid scheme vibes for sure. The one thing I will say, is that I paid a freelancer in Nigeria with some Bitcoin. It was their preferred payment method. That made my take a step back, and really take a second look after initially discounting it. However, after heavy research (running a Lightning node, taking a look at what the tech offered in 2022)... I was very disappointed in not just the tech itself, but the community. Shilling. Endless shilling.
• brudgers 4y ago
  There were interesting discussions of crypto currency a decade ago, because the idea was new. Sure it is still new even on the scale of modern history. But it’s not really news except in the way yesterday’s Dow Jones is news. Or the way corporate scandals are news. Or the way celebrity endorsements are news. And for me, I have already said the one interesting thing I have to say about it…so I won’t repeat it here because it can and will be taken as trolling by people with strong opinions. Anyway, threads are supposed to be intellectually interesting, and you want useful and between that and my repetitious opining there’s not much meat on the bone…unless pump and dump counts as meat. Good luck.
• lacker 4y ago
  I think there is interesting discussion on the technological crypto stories. Those just aren't the big stories in crypto right now! On HN right now the top crypto stories are: * Possible fraud from Celsius execs * Celsius leaked data * Binance got hacked * Crypto.com is doing less marketing These just aren't really technological stories. What intelligent stuff is there to say about it? It's just watching some company struggle because crypto is struggling. Compare to AI, where there have been a lot of real technological advances recently, and the discussion is generally quite engaged and interesting.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• DominoTree 4y ago
  This is bait.
• pfoof 4y ago
  The same reason why nobody wants to discuss Twitter or Minecraft: at first it was a cool geeky place to hang out until "normies" came and destroyed the party. Bitcoin from a promising way to bring freedom to the people became the symbol of greed, gambling and speculation.
  • sshine 4y ago
    > Bitcoin from a promising way to bring freedom to the people became the symbol of greed, gambling and speculation. That’s unfair! You can still buy drugs online with them. ;-)
• siddboots 4y ago
  I agree. The explosion of hype, the layers of scams, the idiocy of NFTs - all of it has put a bad taste in a lot of mouths, which is understandable, but unfortunate. It's unfortunate because distributed ledgers are so much fun to play with. Conceptually simple enough that you can build one from scratch in an afternoon; deep enough that, notwithstanding the hype, there remains a huge amount of room for ideas barely explored. Imagine if Hacker News could be a place that celebrated ideas like this for the love of hacking.
• madmax108 4y ago
  I feel that HN as a whole, plays the role of cynic very often when it comes to tech discussions around new tech, especially since the community has a lot of folks who've seen the hype cycle way too many times (heck, I'm 30, and it's not odd to find folks on HN who've been coding since before I was even born!). However, I find this take refreshing compared to the perma-optimist VC/media hypetrain where everything is going "to the moon" until it isn't and then VCs and media walk away like nothing ever happened! Of course this does come back to bite sometimes eg. the infamous Dropbox launch post but by and large, the mainstream startup media + HN helps form very balanced opinions on topics. Crypto is one of those topics where the hypetrain was primarily driven by "number go up" mentality and as the hype on one side grew, HN and other tech-first communities doubled down in the other direction to maintain a semblance of balance. As the number has started going down, the laser eyes have disappeared, the calls for $100K BTC have died down, HN folks are also much less flame-baity in the discussions on the topic. The bone of contention remains that outside of tech utopias where "code is law", in real world, everyone has to deal with third parties, governments, corruption, the fed, market dynamics and what not. And the moment it hits the real world, crypto (rather the form it's taken today) broadly fails the smell test outside of speculation. Sure, there are likely applications possible and perhaps future iterations of existing ideas will prove more (for lack of a better word) useful, but it's like saying that just because a casino builds a good random number generator, it can now be called a R&D lab.
• mikhael28 4y ago
  Have you seen https://stacker.news https://stacker.news ? It's... not as good as HN. Literally 1/100th of the value add. Shilling. Endless shilling.
• throwaway0asd 4y ago
  Aside from criminal behavior there isn’t a valid practical need for cryptocurrencies. As a result discussions around this subject tend to be incredibly boring and instead tend to focus on aspirations of nontechnical greed. Such low quality subjects tend to attract depraved comments, otherwise there would be nothing left to talk about. Worse, people who should know better project all kinds of illusory aspirations upon cryptocurrency that either defy definition or amount to poorly formed illogical qualifiers. What quality of commentary should one expect from such quality subjects?
• valbaca 4y ago
  The Grift is over. The bubble popped and we’re all better off just letting crypto die.
• bulatb 4y ago
  There's a general pattern, not just with crypto. It happens all the time. Group A makes a bold claim. Group B thinks it over, finds issues, and comes back to A with objections they need to address for B to agree. A does not address them to B's satisfaction, or maybe just ignores them, and repeats the original claim. B objects again. A repeats the claim or adds new claims B also objects to. After a few rounds of this, B becomes exasperated and stops giving a compete rebuttal. The longer it goes on, the shorter and more flippant B's responses get. At some point B decides that A is acting in bad faith. Since their objections haven't been addressed, B starts to combat the claim. They reject it out of hand with no apparent effort to consider it, make aggressive counterclaims, and openly question A's motives. New members of A, who may have never made the claim before or heard the objections, see B's immediate hostility and think they never gave the claim a chance. Some elements of A encourage this misunderstanding and make new claims that B is biased. B sees this as further evidence of A's bad faith and starts to openly attack the group, not just their claims. A continues to say B is hostile and unfair, and also keeps making the claim. Eventually it's just a giant mess of different subgroups at different points in this cycle and no more discussion can happen. And the mess is hugely magnified if A or B or both are really full of bad-faith actors.
  • hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    I don't believe B is full of bad-faith actors, at least not in this case.
• rsynnott 4y ago
  > can’t seem to put together a single useful thread that is about crypto. There might be a reason for that. "Crypto" (in the cryptocurrency sense, not the cryptography sense) simply isn't particularly useful. I'm a fairly long-term crypto sceptic; I was pointing and laughing back before MtGox imploded. Back then, HackerNews was generally (and, I thought and still think) unreasonably positive on crypto. After a decade of, well, nothing much, that has changed, unsurprisingly. And crypto has gotten very _same-y_. There's a new type of scam along every year or so, of course, but nothing much interesting has happened in a long time. I'd argue that Ethereum, while a very bad idea, was at least worthy of a good bit of discussion, say, but the thousandth dubious use case for NFTs, not so much.