10 ms·

'People were sucked into schemes': Inside Molly White’s campaign against crypto

96 points by labrador 4y ago

kumarvvr 4y ago
The general populace was sold the idea that crypto is "investing", when in reality it is an overly complicated, asset-less, currency trading system, with questionable value and questionable stability.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  For a lot of every-day "investors", it's not even currency trading, not as far as I understand currency trading tactics (that said, there's definitely very smart people trading cryptocurrencies like regular currencies) It often feels like it's just "number go higher" gambling, à la 1987 stock "investing".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ggm 4y ago
  With ponzi qualities and market manipulation to force massive speculative gain by an inner core. I leveraged $200 to $650 in BTC a couple of years back and quit to buy a Pixel 1. It felt like gambling. Never going back.
- rwmj 4y ago
  It's like investing in gold, if anyone could invent new elements.
  - beberlei 4y ago
    Except you need to convince no one gold is valuable given it was used as currency and jewelry for thousands of years. Cant use bitcoin to signify a marriage
    - smt88 4y ago
      Gold isn't intrinsically valuable as currency or jewelry. Those are cultural attachments that can disappear. It is, however, intrinsically valuable because of its many medical and electronic applications, which means its value can never theoretically reach zero (unlike a crypto token).
      - CPLX 4y ago
        People always say that. But the fact that gold was considered incredibly valuable by literally every civilization for thousands of years makes it a lot more durable than, like the English language, or books. I mean like when the Europeans arrived in pre-Colombian America looking for gold, the people they encountered also had it as a major cultural attachment too, without any coordination whatsoever. I’m not sure there’s a better definition of intrinsic value than that.
        smt88 4y ago
        I gave a better definition of intrinsic value in the second paragraph: it has unique applications for extremely important categories of goods. I agree it's not a coincidence that most societies valued gold, even without contact with each other. But that's also because of its elemental qualities. Silver and most other shiny metals will tarnish. A lot of metals are difficult to shape into jewelry or stamped coins. And other metals are denser and heavier, making them hard to transport. Gold is better than other metals for coins and jewelry for many reasons. That doesn't mean its current price is 0% cultural or that that cultural element is permanent. I agree it's likely going to last for as long as society does, but I don't think that's a guarantee inherent to gold as a metal.
        pezezin 4y ago
        > And other metals are denser and heavier, making them hard to transport. Gold is the 8-th densest chemical element, and by far the densest element know to mankind until the discovery of platinum and tungsten (slightly less dense, but very close) in the 18th century. I don't have a source for this, but I suspect that part of its popularity was because being so dense made it impossible to counterfeit. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements (sort the list by density)
  - smt88 4y ago
    And also if the elements had no industrial or cultural utility.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  There are two very important advances that cryptocurrency bring to money in the digital age: 1) digital signatures to enable transactions without exposing secrets like credit card or account numbers 2) block chains to ensure the integrity of the entire system These are both critical for moving to a sound monetary system that does not rely on trusting institutions that operate in a legacy paradigm.
  - andreskytt 4y ago
    This is not what happens. Trust is moved from institutions to code and math. General public has no chance to evaluate the trustworthiness of either while there is a mechanism to certify the first and not the latter.
    - ilaksh 4y ago
      That's what I thought I was saying.
  - Vanit 4y ago
    "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."
  - Scaevolus 4y ago
    EMV/tap to pay doesn't expose credit card or account numbers. This is sufficient for most user's banking needs. Bank ledgers generally provide better integrity for people than blockchains, because they allow fraud remediation. The two primary advantage of cryptocurrencies in my view is semi-anonymous payments for grey/black market transactions, and international money transfers.
  - jimbob45 4y ago
    I agree that those are both significant advances but having transactions and wallets reside on exchanges nullifies those benefits entirely. The fear early on was that you’d never be able to achieve mass-adoption due to the upfront cost of setting up a wallet and waiting on transactions. Despite crypto’s popularity today, that fear has never truly been overcome.
- MattDemers 4y ago
  It sucks, because there ARE crypto projects that have interesting applications, but the entire conversations about them online are about how much money the community can be making, or the disappointment that they aren't making as much as they'd like to. You can't actually talk about the project, because once it gets too big it's just a farm for speculators. The devs don't give a shit because their project getting buzz boosts their coin's value, but it also means the project itself stops mattering.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > there ARE crypto projects that have interesting applications Name some. Some that can't be better done with an sqlite database running on a Raspberry Pi.
    - shriphani 4y ago
      - Ethereum's PKI allowed an e2ee messenger app to be built w/o a phone number https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1575248197454135296 https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1575248197454135296
      - api 4y ago
        Why do you need cryptocurrency for that? Just make a p2p app and trade public keys. The only reason Signal uses phone numbers is convenience in locating people and restoring accounts.
        shriphani 4y ago
        the pki does make life easy - ethereum address as a global unique id + seed phrase around for recovery + integrate this thing with the rest of the ethereum ecosystem (e.g. other apps can require ownership of an account on this app by looking for a signed message on chain)
    - marshmallowmad 4y ago
      Do you trust a single Rasperry Pi over a secured blockchain? If so, I think we can agree to disagree.
- avereveard 4y ago
  > an overly complicated, asset-less, currency trading system, with questionable value and questionable stability. robber barons 2.0
AceJohnny2 4y ago
Offtopic: I detest that "crypto" is now a shorthand for cryptocurrency instead of crypotography.
- userbinator 4y ago
  It could be worse; I've heard "Bitcoins" used in the same way.
  - dingaling 4y ago
    At least that identifies the relevant namespace. Imagine if people said 'mints' to refer to fiat currency. Then we'd have to work out if someone was taking about sweets ( candy ) or currency. In that context calling them all 'dollars' would help eliminate ambiguity.
- Kiro 4y ago
  Why would it be a shorthand for cryptography instead of cryptococcosis? There are many words starting with crypto, but cryptocurrency is the most popular one.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Crypto is short for cryptozoology, obviously. But to actually answer your question, it is because the crypto in cryptocurrency itself is short for cryptography. But a lot of stuff in the “crypto” space (NFTs, ERC20 tokens, etc.) don’t even have any cryptography associated with them anymore.
    - seattle_spring 4y ago
      Crypto has and will always refer to cryptobiotic soil[1] in my world. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust
  - bombolo 4y ago
    Because the crypto in cryptcoins stands for cryptography.
Animats 4y ago
“the most impressive innovation we have seen with crypto has been in separating average people from their money.” That seems about right. It's just amazing how many crypto scams there are. White's site has a new big ripoff almost every day. You can go back and read the web sites of some of those crypto companies selling to consumers. They deliberately misrepresented the risk. In some cases they out and out lied, claiming FDIC insurance they didn't have. As for Web3, that's a mess. None of the NFT metaverses are any good. Most of them don't even exist, to the point that you can log in. Many of them promised to go live in Q2-Q4 2022. We're there. Many of those guys are going to have serious trouble with the SEC, which is now hammering about one crypto business a week. Of the ones that work, Decentraland has about 600 concurrent users, and in a day, about 30 of them do a transaction. The others are even smaller. $4 billion market cap. Right.
- prox 4y ago
  I remember how many people were still cheerleading it up to a year ago. Folks would have been better off reading “Black Swan” by Nicholas Taleb and save some money.
  - ak_111 4y ago
    The irony is that Taleb was a big promoter of bitcoin for many years, and even wrote the forward for the first edition of "The bitcoin standard" praising it for being anti-fragile and a black swan event that mainstream financial experts will fail to understand. Around 2020 he fell out with some of the btc community due to their covid stance (he was and is very anti-anti-lockdowns and anti-anti-vaxers). Since then he gradually moved first to btc skeptic then to a major anti-btc figure.
    - gexla 4y ago
      He seems anti BTC Twitter. BTC isn't a scam.
      - worik 4y ago
        > BTC isn't a scam. Is it not? I think "scam" fits well. Unless buying illegal things on the Internet - but BTC is not anonymous, so even then
jasmer 4y ago
This lady is doing important work; her comments are thoughtful, balanced, not overtly cynical or vindictive, not hyperbolic, stated fairly plainly. I don't sense she's trying to get super famous from being an antagonist. Refreshing.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Jup. And every post is short, to the point and links it sources at the end. I find this really refreshing in contrast to the avalanche of SEO optimized "Let's start with the history of money in 6000 BC" spam. This respects both our, mine and her, limited lifetimes.
- c0mptonFP 4y ago
  She's doing everything in her power to become famous/viral. Look at the amount of work she puts into SEO and her own Wikipedia page. She's a Wikipedia editor that edits her own page. Can't get more self-absorbed than that.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > Look at the amount of work she puts into her own Wikipedia page. She's a Wikipedia editor that edits her own page. What you are saying is verifiably wrong, as you can see yourself that she has not edited her own page even once: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Molly_White_(writer)&action=history&offset=&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Molly_White_(writ... (her username is GorillaWarfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare)
    - c0mptonFP 4y ago
      AFAICS the edit history goes back to May 2022, however the site has existed long before that. Not convinced
- mw888 4y ago
  They are in the article - their actual website is clearly vindictive and even brags about being SEO optimized to tru p other Web3 queries. Let’s at least be self aware.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
abetusk 4y ago
People have really short memories. Circa 2000, there was a website called "fuckedcompany.com" [0] that chronicled the failing dot-coms of that era, after the dot-com bubble "burst". The website encapsulated the glee that people felt at pointing out what they considered stupid dot-com ideas and internet companies that failed to capitalize on what many people consider over-hyped promises. There were a lot of stupid ideas during the 2000 dot-com. There were also a lot of companies and founders that started their companies during this time that are stalwarts of the internet and general computing industry. There are a lot of bad ideas in the cryptocurrency space. There also might be a lot of good ideas. I would urge people to be a little more circumspect about cryptocurrency technologies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
- lkrubner 4y ago
  Except by 2000 there were hundreds of Web companies that had become real companies. It was obvious that Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon would survive the downturn of 2000-2001. While there were many bad ideas, there were obviously many good ideas that had become real businesses. And this was just 7 years after Congress had change the law to allow commercial activity on the Internet. By contrast, Bitcoin is almost 15 years old, but in all this time, no one has been able to find a large-scale use for crypto, other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity.
  - tromp 4y ago
    > other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity. Speculation is the main use. How is that criminal?
    - potatototoo99 4y ago
      Speculation with false pretenses, just with the purpose of defrauding investors is criminal.
htkibar 4y ago
This is extremely pessimistic. Same comment could have been made ages ago about internet businesses as well. The issue is that there is significant amount of money in the space, relatively little regulation making it attractive to scammers. It will be solved. I sincerely hope people stop investing in things because it is crypto. However, investing in a good project with decent chance for the future will bring along a healthy ecosystem; coupled with a bit more of a decent regulation around it.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  I can't understand why people keep comparing internet and blockchain. Nobody would compare a heavily constrained MySQL and the Internet, why it is any different for blockchain? It's at most that, a (bad) piece of software that allows you to store data in a convoluted way. It's not a business, not a business model, not a revenue source, it's a piece of technology.
  - jakupovic 4y ago
    It is a different level business can be done at. Compare business before telephone/fax, contracts had to be signed in person. With internet we can sign remotely, but we still need to trust each other that we are who we say we are. With blockchain we don't trust anyone anything and can prove everything.
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      > It is a different level business can be done at. With blockchain we don't trust anyone anything and can prove everything. No. Anything that is not produced directly on the blockchain cannot be trusted and is not provable. With "proving who you say you are", you cannot prove anything, since you need an off-chain verification saying "Yep this guy is jakupovic because I can see it on his ID". All you can prove on the blockchain is that someone that has access to the address f9c979ebe8cda1f345b has signed a contract. This doesn't tell you that jakupovic signed, because there is no way to prove on chain that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is owned by jakupovic. Similarly, there is no on chain way to prove that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is NOT owned by jakupovic. Before you bring up having the private key, having the private key means nothing more than "I have the private key". It doesn't mean that the key is really yours, and it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have the key. ----- People have been conned in believing that "This business is using blockchain" is a viable basis for investing into said business. But everyone would laugh if someone said "You should invest in this business because it's using MySQL". "We use blockchain" is as much a selling point as "We use Swagger". If you believe otherwise, you have been conned.
DeathArrow 4y ago
>she feared crypto was going to wreak — not just on the startups and investors rushing into the field, but also people betting their life savings on tokens they’d barely researched after hearing about them online Sorry to sound rude, but if you bet all your savings on something you saw online, something you've barely searched, than you can fall a victim to any scam you come across, online or offline. You can become a victim by investing in something at the bad time, in a bad way, so being a victim is mostly your fault.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  When people make money, it's because they're smarter than the average bear, they called it right, they worked hard finding that investment etc. When they lose money, it's all a scam, they were cheated, someone fooled them. I don't know why we, as a society, listen to whining like this. But people lap it up. We should just require a big red disclaimer saying "your money is at risk" and let people do what they want (and I'd do the same for shares and bonds and gold and anything else really).
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Uhhh well that’s exactly what crypto “skeptics” are asking for. Disclosure requirements that bring the risk in line with the accessibility of these “exotic instruments” to the general public, and penalties to compel compliance with those requirements.
    - mw888 4y ago
      It’s a failure of culture, not legality. All crypto is open source, if it isn’t then it truly doesn’t deserve the title. Apathy on the part of investors to allow so much privilege to founders in the form of token distribution and outright control over the protocol are as unsustainable as they are preventable. The law can come in and add friction to corruption, along with everything else, but it is only by returning to the culture in which crypto was founded that you will get anything of value - regulations or not.
DeathArrow 4y ago
I don't believe in self appointed prophets fight for something or against something. I disbelief them the more they don't have any proven expertise in the domain. The media goes the other way around as they love hype.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > I disbelief them the more they don't have any proven expertise in the domain. So you must believe her a lot, given that she is a senior software engineer that dedicates a large part of her time to cryptocurrencies.
  - mw888 4y ago
    HN is proof itself that Software Engineering isn’t a prerequisite for expertise in the space. It’s like a construction worker talking about architecture. The expertise relevant in blockchain are economics/game-theory and cryptography - software engineering is to cryptocurrency what typing is to writing.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      It's funny though, that people who are learned at economics tend to write it off as zero-sum nonsense as well. At which point they are told they don't understand the technology.
      - notacoward 4y ago
        It's kind of like that trick where you tell X that their task will be the next priority after you're done with Y, and you tell Y that their task will the the next priority after you're done with X, when in fact you're making no progress on either and quite likely don't even intend to. It kind of works too, sometimes ... until X and Y talk to each other and they both realize you're full of crap. Gatekeeping doesn't work so well when people can see it's all gates and nothing in the middle, but some people are so addicted to it that they try anyway.
newday1 4y ago
gingerlime 4y ago
For those who appreciate a fair degree of skepticism and critical thinking, I would also recommend the Crypto Critics corner podcast, as well as the broader focused Griftonomics from Jackson Palmer (of Dogecoin fame). A lot of their stuff is way over my head in terms of financial regulations and lingo, but very sobering even without getting too far into the weeds.
DanteEvan 4y ago

96 points by labrador 4y ago

The general populace was sold the idea that crypto is "investing", when in reality it is an overly complicated, asset-less, currency trading system, with questionable value and questionable stability.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
For a lot of every-day "investors", it's not even currency trading, not as far as I understand currency trading tactics (that said, there's definitely very smart people trading cryptocurrencies like regular currencies) It often feels like it's just "number go higher" gambling, à la 1987 stock "investing".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ggm 4y ago
With ponzi qualities and market manipulation to force massive speculative gain by an inner core. I leveraged $200 to $650 in BTC a couple of years back and quit to buy a Pixel 1. It felt like gambling. Never going back.
rwmj 4y ago
It's like investing in gold, if anyone could invent new elements.
- beberlei 4y ago
  Except you need to convince no one gold is valuable given it was used as currency and jewelry for thousands of years. Cant use bitcoin to signify a marriage
  - smt88 4y ago
    Gold isn't intrinsically valuable as currency or jewelry. Those are cultural attachments that can disappear. It is, however, intrinsically valuable because of its many medical and electronic applications, which means its value can never theoretically reach zero (unlike a crypto token).
    - CPLX 4y ago
      People always say that. But the fact that gold was considered incredibly valuable by literally every civilization for thousands of years makes it a lot more durable than, like the English language, or books. I mean like when the Europeans arrived in pre-Colombian America looking for gold, the people they encountered also had it as a major cultural attachment too, without any coordination whatsoever. I’m not sure there’s a better definition of intrinsic value than that.
      - smt88 4y ago
        I gave a better definition of intrinsic value in the second paragraph: it has unique applications for extremely important categories of goods. I agree it's not a coincidence that most societies valued gold, even without contact with each other. But that's also because of its elemental qualities. Silver and most other shiny metals will tarnish. A lot of metals are difficult to shape into jewelry or stamped coins. And other metals are denser and heavier, making them hard to transport. Gold is better than other metals for coins and jewelry for many reasons. That doesn't mean its current price is 0% cultural or that that cultural element is permanent. I agree it's likely going to last for as long as society does, but I don't think that's a guarantee inherent to gold as a metal.
        pezezin 4y ago
        > And other metals are denser and heavier, making them hard to transport. Gold is the 8-th densest chemical element, and by far the densest element know to mankind until the discovery of platinum and tungsten (slightly less dense, but very close) in the 18th century. I don't have a source for this, but I suspect that part of its popularity was because being so dense made it impossible to counterfeit. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements (sort the list by density)
- smt88 4y ago
  And also if the elements had no industrial or cultural utility.
ilaksh 4y ago
There are two very important advances that cryptocurrency bring to money in the digital age: 1) digital signatures to enable transactions without exposing secrets like credit card or account numbers 2) block chains to ensure the integrity of the entire system These are both critical for moving to a sound monetary system that does not rely on trusting institutions that operate in a legacy paradigm.
- andreskytt 4y ago
  This is not what happens. Trust is moved from institutions to code and math. General public has no chance to evaluate the trustworthiness of either while there is a mechanism to certify the first and not the latter.
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    That's what I thought I was saying.
- Vanit 4y ago
  "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."
- Scaevolus 4y ago
  EMV/tap to pay doesn't expose credit card or account numbers. This is sufficient for most user's banking needs. Bank ledgers generally provide better integrity for people than blockchains, because they allow fraud remediation. The two primary advantage of cryptocurrencies in my view is semi-anonymous payments for grey/black market transactions, and international money transfers.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  I agree that those are both significant advances but having transactions and wallets reside on exchanges nullifies those benefits entirely. The fear early on was that you’d never be able to achieve mass-adoption due to the upfront cost of setting up a wallet and waiting on transactions. Despite crypto’s popularity today, that fear has never truly been overcome.
MattDemers 4y ago
It sucks, because there ARE crypto projects that have interesting applications, but the entire conversations about them online are about how much money the community can be making, or the disappointment that they aren't making as much as they'd like to. You can't actually talk about the project, because once it gets too big it's just a farm for speculators. The devs don't give a shit because their project getting buzz boosts their coin's value, but it also means the project itself stops mattering.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > there ARE crypto projects that have interesting applications Name some. Some that can't be better done with an sqlite database running on a Raspberry Pi.
  - shriphani 4y ago
    - Ethereum's PKI allowed an e2ee messenger app to be built w/o a phone number https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1575248197454135296 https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1575248197454135296
    - api 4y ago
      Why do you need cryptocurrency for that? Just make a p2p app and trade public keys. The only reason Signal uses phone numbers is convenience in locating people and restoring accounts.
      - shriphani 4y ago
        the pki does make life easy - ethereum address as a global unique id + seed phrase around for recovery + integrate this thing with the rest of the ethereum ecosystem (e.g. other apps can require ownership of an account on this app by looking for a signed message on chain)
  - marshmallowmad 4y ago
    Do you trust a single Rasperry Pi over a secured blockchain? If so, I think we can agree to disagree.
avereveard 4y ago
> an overly complicated, asset-less, currency trading system, with questionable value and questionable stability. robber barons 2.0

AceJohnny2 4y ago

Offtopic: I detest that "crypto" is now a shorthand for cryptocurrency instead of crypotography.

userbinator 4y ago
It could be worse; I've heard "Bitcoins" used in the same way.
- dingaling 4y ago
  At least that identifies the relevant namespace. Imagine if people said 'mints' to refer to fiat currency. Then we'd have to work out if someone was taking about sweets ( candy ) or currency. In that context calling them all 'dollars' would help eliminate ambiguity.
Kiro 4y ago
Why would it be a shorthand for cryptography instead of cryptococcosis? There are many words starting with crypto, but cryptocurrency is the most popular one.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Crypto is short for cryptozoology, obviously. But to actually answer your question, it is because the crypto in cryptocurrency itself is short for cryptography. But a lot of stuff in the “crypto” space (NFTs, ERC20 tokens, etc.) don’t even have any cryptography associated with them anymore.
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    Crypto has and will always refer to cryptobiotic soil[1] in my world. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust
- bombolo 4y ago
  Because the crypto in cryptcoins stands for cryptography.

Animats 4y ago

“the most impressive innovation we have seen with crypto has been in separating average people from their money.” That seems about right. It's just amazing how many crypto scams there are. White's site has a new big ripoff almost every day. You can go back and read the web sites of some of those crypto companies selling to consumers. They deliberately misrepresented the risk. In some cases they out and out lied, claiming FDIC insurance they didn't have. As for Web3, that's a mess. None of the NFT metaverses are any good. Most of them don't even exist, to the point that you can log in. Many of them promised to go live in Q2-Q4 2022. We're there. Many of those guys are going to have serious trouble with the SEC, which is now hammering about one crypto business a week. Of the ones that work, Decentraland has about 600 concurrent users, and in a day, about 30 of them do a transaction. The others are even smaller. $4 billion market cap. Right.

prox 4y ago
I remember how many people were still cheerleading it up to a year ago. Folks would have been better off reading “Black Swan” by Nicholas Taleb and save some money.
- ak_111 4y ago
  The irony is that Taleb was a big promoter of bitcoin for many years, and even wrote the forward for the first edition of "The bitcoin standard" praising it for being anti-fragile and a black swan event that mainstream financial experts will fail to understand. Around 2020 he fell out with some of the btc community due to their covid stance (he was and is very anti-anti-lockdowns and anti-anti-vaxers). Since then he gradually moved first to btc skeptic then to a major anti-btc figure.
  - gexla 4y ago
    He seems anti BTC Twitter. BTC isn't a scam.
    - worik 4y ago
      > BTC isn't a scam. Is it not? I think "scam" fits well. Unless buying illegal things on the Internet - but BTC is not anonymous, so even then

jasmer 4y ago

This lady is doing important work; her comments are thoughtful, balanced, not overtly cynical or vindictive, not hyperbolic, stated fairly plainly. I don't sense she's trying to get super famous from being an antagonist. Refreshing.

arlcode 4y ago
Jup. And every post is short, to the point and links it sources at the end. I find this really refreshing in contrast to the avalanche of SEO optimized "Let's start with the history of money in 6000 BC" spam. This respects both our, mine and her, limited lifetimes.
c0mptonFP 4y ago
She's doing everything in her power to become famous/viral. Look at the amount of work she puts into SEO and her own Wikipedia page. She's a Wikipedia editor that edits her own page. Can't get more self-absorbed than that.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > Look at the amount of work she puts into her own Wikipedia page. She's a Wikipedia editor that edits her own page. What you are saying is verifiably wrong, as you can see yourself that she has not edited her own page even once: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Molly_White_(writer)&action=history&offset=&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Molly_White_(writ... (her username is GorillaWarfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare)
  - c0mptonFP 4y ago
    AFAICS the edit history goes back to May 2022, however the site has existed long before that. Not convinced
mw888 4y ago
They are in the article - their actual website is clearly vindictive and even brags about being SEO optimized to tru p other Web3 queries. Let’s at least be self aware.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

abetusk 4y ago

People have really short memories. Circa 2000, there was a website called "fuckedcompany.com" [0] that chronicled the failing dot-coms of that era, after the dot-com bubble "burst". The website encapsulated the glee that people felt at pointing out what they considered stupid dot-com ideas and internet companies that failed to capitalize on what many people consider over-hyped promises. There were a lot of stupid ideas during the 2000 dot-com. There were also a lot of companies and founders that started their companies during this time that are stalwarts of the internet and general computing industry. There are a lot of bad ideas in the cryptocurrency space. There also might be a lot of good ideas. I would urge people to be a little more circumspect about cryptocurrency technologies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

lkrubner 4y ago
Except by 2000 there were hundreds of Web companies that had become real companies. It was obvious that Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon would survive the downturn of 2000-2001. While there were many bad ideas, there were obviously many good ideas that had become real businesses. And this was just 7 years after Congress had change the law to allow commercial activity on the Internet. By contrast, Bitcoin is almost 15 years old, but in all this time, no one has been able to find a large-scale use for crypto, other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity.
- tromp 4y ago
  > other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity. Speculation is the main use. How is that criminal?
  - potatototoo99 4y ago
    Speculation with false pretenses, just with the purpose of defrauding investors is criminal.

htkibar 4y ago

This is extremely pessimistic. Same comment could have been made ages ago about internet businesses as well. The issue is that there is significant amount of money in the space, relatively little regulation making it attractive to scammers. It will be solved. I sincerely hope people stop investing in things because it is crypto. However, investing in a good project with decent chance for the future will bring along a healthy ecosystem; coupled with a bit more of a decent regulation around it.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
I can't understand why people keep comparing internet and blockchain. Nobody would compare a heavily constrained MySQL and the Internet, why it is any different for blockchain? It's at most that, a (bad) piece of software that allows you to store data in a convoluted way. It's not a business, not a business model, not a revenue source, it's a piece of technology.
- jakupovic 4y ago
  It is a different level business can be done at. Compare business before telephone/fax, contracts had to be signed in person. With internet we can sign remotely, but we still need to trust each other that we are who we say we are. With blockchain we don't trust anyone anything and can prove everything.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > It is a different level business can be done at. With blockchain we don't trust anyone anything and can prove everything. No. Anything that is not produced directly on the blockchain cannot be trusted and is not provable. With "proving who you say you are", you cannot prove anything, since you need an off-chain verification saying "Yep this guy is jakupovic because I can see it on his ID". All you can prove on the blockchain is that someone that has access to the address f9c979ebe8cda1f345b has signed a contract. This doesn't tell you that jakupovic signed, because there is no way to prove on chain that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is owned by jakupovic. Similarly, there is no on chain way to prove that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is NOT owned by jakupovic. Before you bring up having the private key, having the private key means nothing more than "I have the private key". It doesn't mean that the key is really yours, and it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have the key. ----- People have been conned in believing that "This business is using blockchain" is a viable basis for investing into said business. But everyone would laugh if someone said "You should invest in this business because it's using MySQL". "We use blockchain" is as much a selling point as "We use Swagger". If you believe otherwise, you have been conned.

DeathArrow 4y ago

>she feared crypto was going to wreak — not just on the startups and investors rushing into the field, but also people betting their life savings on tokens they’d barely researched after hearing about them online Sorry to sound rude, but if you bet all your savings on something you saw online, something you've barely searched, than you can fall a victim to any scam you come across, online or offline. You can become a victim by investing in something at the bad time, in a bad way, so being a victim is mostly your fault.

LatteLazy 4y ago
When people make money, it's because they're smarter than the average bear, they called it right, they worked hard finding that investment etc. When they lose money, it's all a scam, they were cheated, someone fooled them. I don't know why we, as a society, listen to whining like this. But people lap it up. We should just require a big red disclaimer saying "your money is at risk" and let people do what they want (and I'd do the same for shares and bonds and gold and anything else really).
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Uhhh well that’s exactly what crypto “skeptics” are asking for. Disclosure requirements that bring the risk in line with the accessibility of these “exotic instruments” to the general public, and penalties to compel compliance with those requirements.
  - mw888 4y ago
    It’s a failure of culture, not legality. All crypto is open source, if it isn’t then it truly doesn’t deserve the title. Apathy on the part of investors to allow so much privilege to founders in the form of token distribution and outright control over the protocol are as unsustainable as they are preventable. The law can come in and add friction to corruption, along with everything else, but it is only by returning to the culture in which crypto was founded that you will get anything of value - regulations or not.

DeathArrow 4y ago

I don't believe in self appointed prophets fight for something or against something. I disbelief them the more they don't have any proven expertise in the domain. The media goes the other way around as they love hype.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
> I disbelief them the more they don't have any proven expertise in the domain. So you must believe her a lot, given that she is a senior software engineer that dedicates a large part of her time to cryptocurrencies.
- mw888 4y ago
  HN is proof itself that Software Engineering isn’t a prerequisite for expertise in the space. It’s like a construction worker talking about architecture. The expertise relevant in blockchain are economics/game-theory and cryptography - software engineering is to cryptocurrency what typing is to writing.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    It's funny though, that people who are learned at economics tend to write it off as zero-sum nonsense as well. At which point they are told they don't understand the technology.
    - notacoward 4y ago
      It's kind of like that trick where you tell X that their task will be the next priority after you're done with Y, and you tell Y that their task will the the next priority after you're done with X, when in fact you're making no progress on either and quite likely don't even intend to. It kind of works too, sometimes ... until X and Y talk to each other and they both realize you're full of crap. Gatekeeping doesn't work so well when people can see it's all gates and nothing in the middle, but some people are so addicted to it that they try anyway.

newday1 4y ago

gingerlime 4y ago

For those who appreciate a fair degree of skepticism and critical thinking, I would also recommend the Crypto Critics corner podcast, as well as the broader focused Griftonomics from Jackson Palmer (of Dogecoin fame). A lot of their stuff is way over my head in terms of financial regulations and lingo, but very sobering even without getting too far into the weeds.

DanteEvan 4y ago