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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 w

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?
- vore 4y ago
  If the assets are ultimately real world things, you're still going to need a lawyer if someone comes after them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
x86x87 4y ago
I hate to break it to you but most dollars are already digital. Also, the problem with the dollar is noy the dollar itself but how it is managed. Most people don't get this but money is literally made up, printed out of thin air. Irresponsible central banks and policies made to serve the 1% mean that we are all f'ed in the long term. Nobody talks about the unbanked that now have a way to transacy, about economies where the whole currency collapsed and bitcoin provides a lifeline, about businesses in the 3rd world that now are on the map, about how visa and mastercard call literally wipe your business out of existence, about businesses - like sex work - that live on the fringes of the financial world. It's all abstract here on our high horses
- doubleunplussed 4y ago
  Good luck actually using a currency that does not have its quantity controlled by a central bank 'printing it out of thin air'. This is a feature, not a bug.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    People are using it. Yes, we did a wonderful job "controlling" the quantity. 10% inflation is transitory /s
    - doubleunplussed 4y ago
      This but unironically. By the standards of the wild swings in CPI that we would have if denominated in any non-stablecoin cryptocurrency, the US's current inflation is brief and insignificant.
- simondotau 4y ago
  Yes, when commerce comes into conflict with legislated morality, people will seek workarounds and accept inferior alternatives. I’m not sure why you think that’s an argument in favour of crypto. Unless perhaps you think that the solution to bad government is to ignore it and hope it goes away?
eyegor 4y ago
You're forgetting the only real claim of the bitcoin paper that spawned the industry: an append only transaction ledger with tokens that are near guaranteed to be legitimate. If you look at the stock market mess that happened in the past couple of years, there's a clear benefit to a traceable ledger. Of course the big players in the finance industry have chosen to be secretive because it benefits them, so I'm not sure why they would agree to use one.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  But of course, the stock market also requires a huge number of transactions. Crypto hasn't found a good L1 solution to this that doesn't require immense amounts of energy and once you move to L2 you start losing the traceability guarantees. While the stock market shenanigans have generated a lot of noise I don't see a good enough argument for crypto to warrant the pain of a switch. Note also that if we have the political will to force wall street to be held accountable more centralized systems can achieve our goal with a much smaller cost.
brutusborn 4y ago
What is their to discuss in the context of HN? A few off the top of my head: Design of new coins, new whitepapers Algorithms used and their implementations Hardware use and related economics Comparison to electronic fiat systems I think it's pretty silly to say "there's not much there" for a forum full of technical people.
- bruce511 4y ago
  In the sense that "stuff is happening in the world of crypto" there is a lot to discuss. In the context that its all moving deck-chairs on the titanic, there's not much new to say. On the one hand you can get all excited about the mechanics of crypto, on the other the lack of any actual utility - or progress on the utility of it is like an elephant in the room. The titanic won't sink in this case, but equally it doesn't appear to be going anywhere. Sure it _could_ go somewhere maybe, and sure just sailing around can be its own pleasure, but it's devouring investments with no clear (legal) use case.
drpixie 4y ago
And to the original question "Why doesn’t HN have quality discussion around crypto?". The hacker news readership loves technology, loves anything new (not that crypto is really new), is protective of their latest enthusiasm, and is very quick to stomp on critical comments. We tend towards pointless yelling and cherry picking, rather than nuanced discussion. I guess it's partly the nature of the medium and partly the audience.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  > We tend towards pointless yelling and cherry picking, rather than nuanced discussion. Interesting to see your perspective - I see exactly the opposite, and that's why I engage in discussion on HN rather than Reddit.
Canada 4y ago
> Blockchain is interesting but it’s been around for decades (it’s older than Bitcoin) It's dismissive comments like this that do a lot of the degrading of the quality of any cryptocurrency conversation here. There wasn't anything like Bitcoin before Bitcoin. Love it, hate it, or indifferent to it, the consensus introduced by Satoshi was completely novel and has enabled a system behavior that was not possible before. I think what is ultimately behind the poor quality of discussion here is that too many participants are passionate about the social implications one way or the other, and so we always get a big flame war over those aspects where nothing new is said.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  You can't disagree with the parent that blockchain is older than Bitcoin as it predates it by a few decades. However, you are right that what Satoshi did was novel: he used distributed blockchain for a digital currency. But again, outside of tech circles, nobody cared for almost a decade. I know as I personally mined some Bitcoins and then I lost the wallet with a broken hardrive but I didn't care. Only later, when "investors" entered the game, BTC became a mainstream phenomenon.
  - Canada 4y ago
    Did you mean that I can or can't disagree that blockchains are older than Bitcoin? Would you agree that various things that use cryptography or merkle trees including git, certificate transparency, including hashes in logs to prevent tampering, or someone posting a hash in the New York Times a long time ago, are NOT "blockchain" in the sense that Satoshi used it in his whitepaper? Am I mistaken in my belief that the first time the word "blockchain" was used was in the Bitcoin whitepaper itself? As you did, I saw Bitcoin very early, and wrote it off because I didn't think it would go anywhere. I was wrong. The fact that it's still here more than 10 years later and it's worth so much is proof enough that Bitcoin and/or subsequent systems that are blockchains as Satoshi defined them actually do "matter" and that I was wrong to think it didn't back then.
    - orwin 4y ago
PaulHoule 4y ago
I would trace the rot back further. I would point to this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) as the father of financialization and currencies as we know them. The aftermath is talked about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... (Maybe the best book ever written about crypto) and the financial instability from using these methods to finance a cold war with England was a major reason for why France doesn't have royalty anymore.

junofan 4y ago

Lawyers aren’t cheap. Why not entertain alternatives?

vore 4y ago
If the assets are ultimately real world things, you're still going to need a lawyer if someone comes after them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

x86x87 4y ago

I hate to break it to you but most dollars are already digital. Also, the problem with the dollar is noy the dollar itself but how it is managed. Most people don't get this but money is literally made up, printed out of thin air. Irresponsible central banks and policies made to serve the 1% mean that we are all f'ed in the long term. Nobody talks about the unbanked that now have a way to transacy, about economies where the whole currency collapsed and bitcoin provides a lifeline, about businesses in the 3rd world that now are on the map, about how visa and mastercard call literally wipe your business out of existence, about businesses - like sex work - that live on the fringes of the financial world. It's all abstract here on our high horses

doubleunplussed 4y ago
Good luck actually using a currency that does not have its quantity controlled by a central bank 'printing it out of thin air'. This is a feature, not a bug.
- x86x87 4y ago
  People are using it. Yes, we did a wonderful job "controlling" the quantity. 10% inflation is transitory /s
  - doubleunplussed 4y ago
    This but unironically. By the standards of the wild swings in CPI that we would have if denominated in any non-stablecoin cryptocurrency, the US's current inflation is brief and insignificant.
simondotau 4y ago
Yes, when commerce comes into conflict with legislated morality, people will seek workarounds and accept inferior alternatives. I’m not sure why you think that’s an argument in favour of crypto. Unless perhaps you think that the solution to bad government is to ignore it and hope it goes away?

eyegor 4y ago

You're forgetting the only real claim of the bitcoin paper that spawned the industry: an append only transaction ledger with tokens that are near guaranteed to be legitimate. If you look at the stock market mess that happened in the past couple of years, there's a clear benefit to a traceable ledger. Of course the big players in the finance industry have chosen to be secretive because it benefits them, so I'm not sure why they would agree to use one.

Hermitian909 4y ago
But of course, the stock market also requires a huge number of transactions. Crypto hasn't found a good L1 solution to this that doesn't require immense amounts of energy and once you move to L2 you start losing the traceability guarantees. While the stock market shenanigans have generated a lot of noise I don't see a good enough argument for crypto to warrant the pain of a switch. Note also that if we have the political will to force wall street to be held accountable more centralized systems can achieve our goal with a much smaller cost.

brutusborn 4y ago

What is their to discuss in the context of HN? A few off the top of my head: Design of new coins, new whitepapers Algorithms used and their implementations Hardware use and related economics Comparison to electronic fiat systems I think it's pretty silly to say "there's not much there" for a forum full of technical people.

bruce511 4y ago
In the sense that "stuff is happening in the world of crypto" there is a lot to discuss. In the context that its all moving deck-chairs on the titanic, there's not much new to say. On the one hand you can get all excited about the mechanics of crypto, on the other the lack of any actual utility - or progress on the utility of it is like an elephant in the room. The titanic won't sink in this case, but equally it doesn't appear to be going anywhere. Sure it _could_ go somewhere maybe, and sure just sailing around can be its own pleasure, but it's devouring investments with no clear (legal) use case.

drpixie 4y ago

And to the original question "Why doesn’t HN have quality discussion around crypto?". The hacker news readership loves technology, loves anything new (not that crypto is really new), is protective of their latest enthusiasm, and is very quick to stomp on critical comments. We tend towards pointless yelling and cherry picking, rather than nuanced discussion. I guess it's partly the nature of the medium and partly the audience.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
> We tend towards pointless yelling and cherry picking, rather than nuanced discussion. Interesting to see your perspective - I see exactly the opposite, and that's why I engage in discussion on HN rather than Reddit.

Canada 4y ago

> Blockchain is interesting but it’s been around for decades (it’s older than Bitcoin) It's dismissive comments like this that do a lot of the degrading of the quality of any cryptocurrency conversation here. There wasn't anything like Bitcoin before Bitcoin. Love it, hate it, or indifferent to it, the consensus introduced by Satoshi was completely novel and has enabled a system behavior that was not possible before. I think what is ultimately behind the poor quality of discussion here is that too many participants are passionate about the social implications one way or the other, and so we always get a big flame war over those aspects where nothing new is said.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
You can't disagree with the parent that blockchain is older than Bitcoin as it predates it by a few decades. However, you are right that what Satoshi did was novel: he used distributed blockchain for a digital currency. But again, outside of tech circles, nobody cared for almost a decade. I know as I personally mined some Bitcoins and then I lost the wallet with a broken hardrive but I didn't care. Only later, when "investors" entered the game, BTC became a mainstream phenomenon.
- Canada 4y ago
  Did you mean that I can or can't disagree that blockchains are older than Bitcoin? Would you agree that various things that use cryptography or merkle trees including git, certificate transparency, including hashes in logs to prevent tampering, or someone posting a hash in the New York Times a long time ago, are NOT "blockchain" in the sense that Satoshi used it in his whitepaper? Am I mistaken in my belief that the first time the word "blockchain" was used was in the Bitcoin whitepaper itself? As you did, I saw Bitcoin very early, and wrote it off because I didn't think it would go anywhere. I was wrong. The fact that it's still here more than 10 years later and it's worth so much is proof enough that Bitcoin and/or subsequent systems that are blockchains as Satoshi defined them actually do "matter" and that I was wrong to think it didn't back then.
  - orwin 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago

I would trace the rot back further. I would point to this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) as the father of financialization and currencies as we know them. The aftermath is talked about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... (Maybe the best book ever written about crypto) and the financial instability from using these methods to finance a cold war with England was a major reason for why France doesn't have royalty anymore.