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Why I'm less than infinitely hostile to cryptocurrency

152 points by jger15 4y ago

clacla778 4y ago
RadixDLT 4y ago
- bicijay 4y ago
Regnore 4y ago
> Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures! The issue that I have with this perspective is that it doesn't actually solve the underlying problem - it just kicks it down the road. As soon as crypto becomes big in a country with failed governments and banks, it's going to become the primary target of those same governments and banks.
- savanaly 4y ago
  In the article Scott anticipates this response and writes >Governments can take lots of actions against crypto. They can ban it. They can prevent banks from accepting it. They can search the blockchain to hunt down users. But governments take lots of actions against protests, tax evasion, and drugs, and those things still often succeed. The point isn’t that governments can’t ban a thing and send police after anyone who does it. The point is that there are only so many officers and detectives. If you make something too annoying to crush, the government will put in a half-hearted effort but mostly redirect resources elsewhere.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Regnore 4y ago
    This doesn't answer the concern, it just downplays it.
    - livueta 4y ago
      Well, consider the distribution of global btc hashrate by country over time: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map Editorialized: https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-returns-as-2nd-top-bitcoin-mining-hub-despite-the-crypto-ban https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-returns-as-2nd-top-bitc... Even a fairly authoritarian society with strong incentives to crush cryptocurrencies (https://www.marketplace.org/2021/05/20/chinas-crackdown-on-cryptocurrency-is-likely-a-way-to-maintain-economic-control-experts-say/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/05/20/chinas-crackdown-on-c...) wasn't able to get hashrate, much less usage, to anywhere close to zero. I guess I'm curious: what levers do you figure Western societies could deploy that'd be more effective than the Chinese approach? From my perspective, this state of affairs is a decent existence proof that fully eliminating cryptocurrency use is difficult even with access to authoritarian methods. nb: above links don't include 2022 data and I couldn't quickly find that, so if that data affects the quality of the above argument I'd appreciate the correction
    - yosame 4y ago
      I like a lot of Scott 's writings, but this is a bad habit of his. If there's a point that contradicts his own, he'll pretend to address it while actually just skipping over it/downplay it's relevance.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    "Governments can ban things but it frequently doesn't work" works directly against the idea that crypto is providing any value - because the argument it does starts with "governments can ban X but cryptocurrency will save us!" You can't have it both ways: if cryptocurrency is the be all and end all of avoiding government censure of other activities, why would it not be a high priority to crush it compared to those other things? If it is not, then is it all that useful?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The issue is it’s reliance on the somewhat centralized internet access which is controllable by governments. Mesh and satellites might reduce this. Maybe even ham radio. You don’t need to send much data to send a crypto transaction so sending it using an audio modem on a low frequency is probably fine. There are also crypto notes being developed which is an interesting development.
pr337h4m 4y ago
Crypto's only real use case is economic freedom. Everything else is just garnishing.
- pr337h4m 4y ago
  In both senses: "food that is added to a plate for decoration," as well as "material applied to an object to achieve or assist camouflage." https://www.thefreedictionary.com/garnishing https://www.thefreedictionary.com/garnishing
xg15 4y ago
As someone who is not in the "rationalist" crowd (and has no interest to be), could someone explain their weird vocabulary to me? You pretty much know you're reading a rationalist if they use phrases like "less wrong", "mildly opinionated" or now "less than infinite". Is there some reasoning behind those phrases? Rejecting the null hypothesis as a way of life? Why not just say "why I'm still bullish on crypto even though everyone says the opposite"?
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  If you're in SV-adjacent circles, lots of people are throatily anti-crypto, to the point where they start seeing red when you mention crypto, and pelt crypto with the same anti arguments repeated ad nauseum. There are influencers who have sprung up whose entire claim to fame has been their negative coverage of crypto (a mirror to the shady crypto influencers shilling their shitcoins). It's not a big leap to see that as "infinitely hostile". So the title is just "I'm not 'infinitely hostile'". Also, "bullish" is generally a financial term, and in this case may refer to "price go up" which doesn't seem to be the intent of the article. The article is stressing usecases not price.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I have not observed this “seeing red” at all. What I have observed, many times over, is “one side” needing to feel like the “other side” is seeing red. “Triggered.” “Tilted.” “Trolled.” “Got ‘em.” Etc. Very common, not limited to any one subculture.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      There's so many HN posts about crypto with crazy long comment trees, there's no need to litigate this here. Primary sources are plenty.
      - Waterluvian 4y ago
        Indeed. It’s very easy to project upon text comments whatever emotion you interpret. Another well-known phenomenon. It’s why so many people find things like Slack to be so problematic for nuanced conversation.
idoh 4y ago
Having done some amount of business in Ukraine, I can attest to how hard it is to move money into that country. Crypto really solves that use case, provided that there's some trading inside the country as well as flowing in.
- brazed_blotch 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, could you give a few examples of the difficulties you experienced?
  - idoh 4y ago
    I wasn't super involved, but they (the office in Ukraine) liked getting USD and people who visited would often carry an envelope with cash in it when traveling for business trips from the US to there. There was some other thing with using US based debit cards over there, apparently it was an easier flow to fill up the US accounts and have them use it over there than to do a bank to bank transfer.
    - ourmandave 4y ago
      All that's US dollars, I assume. Unless you're talking Centre's USD coins. What about the crypto side of it?
      - idoh 4y ago
        Yeah, paper currency. It was important for the bills to be crisp, otherwise they'd trade at a ~10% discount. I don't know how crypto has changed things, I don't do anything related to Ukraine anymore.
        coffeebeqn 4y ago
        That was the same in monte negro with euros. They only accepted crisp euros even though I had brought those from an actual EU country - they wouldn’t accept them. And that was their “official” currency
ypeterholmes 4y ago
Fantastic piece. The space program analogy is particularly apt. People say crypto is a worse way to replace functions that already exist, like the space program inventing a pen, say. But the fact the pen can work in space is actually rather important. The fact that decentralized systems can't be shut down or centrally manipulated, is also rather important.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Why is it important to have a pen in space?
  - Armisael16 4y ago
    Graphite flakes from pencils are very flammable and also conduct electricity just well enough to cause shorts.
  - caterama 4y ago
    To write with.
  - idoh 4y ago
    Other people covered it, but I happen to have a Fischer Space Pen on my desk right now so I'll take a shot. You don't want a pencil because bits can break off and make a mess, so you want a pen. The story with the Space Pen is that it has a pressurized cartridge so it works in space (I can't confirm whether other types of pens don't work). Somewhat off topic, the Space Pen was researched 100% with private funds and both the US and USSR space programs bought them retail, in contrast to some of the stories floating around the internet.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      Kind of interesting. But I guess I’m more so asking whether people need to do a lot of writing in space. I would assume no?
polygamous_bat 4y ago
I was reading with an open mind until I got to the section header > Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams I mean, seriously? This is a month after the fallout of FTX, we have seen crypto projects in their net worths in Billions to get revealed as ponzi schemes in their purest meaning, and that's the best SA can offer up? > If you split $1000 and invested it equally in all the top crypto projects of 2015, you would now have $25,400. If you invested it in the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap of 2020, you would have $2,700. Stablecoins aren’t really an investment, but if you put it in the top stablecoins of 2020 anyway, you would have $964.30. Exchanges definitely aren’t an investment, but if you put your $1000 in the best crypto exchanges of 2020, I think it would all still be there (FTX wasn’t on the list; maybe it’s too new). This is tired shill-speak (consider what happened if you "invested" in 2021 instead), to the point where I doubt if Scott Alexander himself wrote this or if someone offered him a large but undisclosed sum to write it for him. Probably as a damage control to the EA circles, who have undoubtedly lost a lot of faith in crypto as a follow up to the FTX fallout.
- habitue 4y ago
  > I mean, seriously? From the article: > If you split $1000 and invested it equally in all the top crypto projects of 2015, you would now have $25,400. If you invested it in the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap of 2020, you would have $2,700. Stablecoins aren’t really an investment, but if you put it in the top stablecoins of 2020 anyway, you would have $964.30. Exchanges definitely aren’t an investment, but if you put your $1000 in the best crypto exchanges of 2020, I think it would all still be there (FTX wasn’t on the list; maybe it’s too new). Footnote 4: > The one big exception was FTX - I think people did think of it as one of the good ones, and would have included it in lists like these if it had been around a little earlier. But this is why I disagree with people who said it should have been “obvious” it was a scam - it was in a reference class where scams are actually very rare!
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    Your point being? If you search for the same query in 2021 as he does in 2020, you come up with FTX and Binance, both of which were decried to be sketchy at that time by skeptics. [1] My point is, you can always pick your time frames arbitrarily to make any case that you want, and I can make the opposite case by picking my favorite time frame. Seems really sketchy that ACX is committing to this level of fallacy. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/robinhood-coinbase-ftx-heres-whos-winning-the-crypto-trading-game-145331322.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/robinhood-coinbase-ftx-heres-...
giraffe_lady 4y ago
This is almost point for point the evaluations Golumbria makes in "the politics of bitcoin" except reframed positively and with some distance from the "cyberlibertarian" vocabulary he uses. Probably because alexander is a cyberlibertarian. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-of-bitcoin https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tomxor 4y ago
> everyone around you will chant in unison “PONZIS 100% SCAMS ZERO-LEGITIMATE-USE-CASES SPEEDRUNNING-THE-HISTORY-OF-FINANCIAL-FRAUD!” It’s really quite impressive. I didn't realise it had finally gotten to this point, I guess FTX was the final wake up call? I hope it's true because once hype is out of the picture so are the millions of vultures and it is once again possible to discern new and interesting ideas from the noise that saps our attention in this area.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  The worst thing that happened to crypto is that the line went up too much before it was ready. I’m sure there are a few legitimate business ideas in there but it’s still 99.9% hyped up garbage that everyone treats as a get rich scheme
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    A significant fraction of crypto applications cannot work at scale without privacy-protected transactions, and the first major privacy smart contract on Ethereum - Tornado Cash - was just made illegal to use for Americans by the OFAC. The criminalization of privacy-protected financial transactions is the biggest risk that crypto faces AFAICS. The need for law enforcement authorities to achieve Total Information Awareness over all private financial transactions stands opposed to a vision of ubiquitous electronic cash, with decentralized and peer-to-peer electronic transactions.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      There is GNU Taler but whenever you see it being talked about on hacker news you will find comments that border on conspiracy theory even though when you look at the technical design of GNU Taler it offers more privacy than Bitcoin or Ethereum. Apparently providing both privacy to buyers and following AML and income reporting laws at the same time is crossing some line because "the government is always wrong". It is kind of like following the law is frowned upon in the cryptocurrency space which is why any competitor that can actually follow the law must be nipped in the bud. I don't believe crypto users care about privacy except maybe when they use Montero.
_zllx 4y ago
I felt like I was in crazy town, trying to tell people that crypto is actually something that helps many people, always getting shot down with absurd dogma like "crypto has no use cases" or "gordon goner racist NFTs". People believed everything they heard from a blog (you know the one) set up specifically to discredit this entire class of technology by associating every dumb thing with its image as a whole. I've been Bitcoin-literate since I was a pre-teen (I'm early 20s now) and felt trapped. Bitcoin maximalists made me hopeful that at least Bitcoin specifically would be socially acceptable, but honestly they've got it wrong too. I was very delighted today to see Scott stick up for the concrete use cases that are out there. Vitalik Buterin seems fairly respected in the same space as ACX.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  It's the curse of influencers and it's not specific to crypto. Influencers identify a vibe that works with their followers and lean into it, exploiting it for views and shares. Most of the time the vibe is only tangentially related to a much more complicated reality. But complicated reality is boring and vibes are fun, so influencers convince their followers that the vibe is true and the followers become galvanized along the vibe. I've seen so many people quote a Youtuber as their source for a belief that it's crazy. Even when the primary sources are available. But that's the age we live in.
  - _zllx 4y ago
    Realistically I think you're right; I probably have my conspiracy cap on too tight, but it's too perfect to me that the group of people who will soon need crypto the most are being socially incentivized to reject it now. I might have struck a nerve with the anti-crypto vibe enjoyers.
    - FabHK 4y ago
      > the group of people who will soon need crypto the most And who might that be?
      - 4y ago
foul 4y ago
I LOVE that disclaimer thumbnail.
bawolff 4y ago
Wtf is this graph where countries are rated between 0 and 1? This seems lying with statistics territory. That said, i agree with the author that original bitcoin works well enough in places where modern banking is dysfunctional. Its everything in the crypto world after that point i have a problem with. I also agree that most crypto projects more err on the side of really really stupid and not outright steal your money (although that exists too). Basically, i agree with all the authors premises and still think crypto is on the whole terrible. I suppose the issue is that the author is arguing against a very weak strawman - nobody is literally infinitely against crypto.
- ianferrel 4y ago
  It's explained in the graph text. It's per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity, scaled so the country with the most usage by that metric is 1. So, like individual Indians use 37% as much cryptocurrency as individual Vietnamese (adjusted for PPP). It's a good way to show comparatively where cryptocurrencies seem to have some utility as measured by the fraction of an individual's financial power.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    But that is potentially wildly misleading given the author's position. You have no sense of magnitude. For example if vietnam had a single crypto user, and nobody else in the world used it at all, you would have a similar skewed graph, but clearly it wouldn't demonstrate utility.
    - ianferrel 4y ago
      Such a graph could be misleading, and I agree that there's no information about magnitude. But I don't think it's actually misleading in this case, and we have other information available that clarifies that there is not a single Vietnamese cryptocurrency user in the world (and, I guess, 0.37 of an Indian user...?). There is a measurably large amount of cryptocurrency activity in the world, but most of our (or at least my) awareness of it is as a western techno-futurist/financial/cryptobro phenomenon. This graph is really useful in demonstrating that that's not a very accurate view. It would be very bad if it were the only datum on cryptocurrency the reader had. But that's not the audience of this article.
kokanee 4y ago
1) The author is arguing against skeptics who are "infinitely hostile" to crypto because it consists of "100% scams". I don't think many skeptics believe crypto is 100% scams. Most skeptics would say that the use cases are overstated and the incentives to pump-and-dump are so high that an unacceptable rate of scams was inevitable. If you're going to write an article to refute skeptics, refute the actual argument. 2) The author strongly implies that skeptics are skeptical because they have fallen for scams (by "clicking on spam emails"). Insulting the intelligence of your opponent is also not a compelling way to refute an argument. I have always been skeptical, I have never been scammed, and I don't think I'm unique. 3) The author's research found that the scam rate "seemed low." Molly White is probably the person working harder than any other to track this scam rate, and her "grift counter" currently reports losses of over $12 billion. https://web3isgoinggreat.com https://web3isgoinggreat.com
- mattdesl 4y ago
  $12B over several years sounds like a lot until you realize how much volume is in the crypto market - $179B in 24 hours according to one source! https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272903/cryptocurrency-trade-volume/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272903/cryptocurrency-t...
  - vkou 4y ago
    I own a dog. You own a cat. I say my dog is worth a million dollars. You say your cat is worth a million dollars. I trade you my dog for your cat. Then we trade them back. We've just created 2 million dollars of daily trade volume, err, economic activity. When looking at value stolen by scammers, what matters is not the daily trade volume, what matters is how much money was put into the ecosystem [1], and what fraction of it was stolen. [1] Which is a lot less than 180B/day.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hailwren 4y ago
      > what fraction of it was stolen This is the rub. If you’re using mcap and mark-to-market rates for total value stolen, it’s completely reasonable to use the same rate to evaluate the size of the system.
wantsanagent 4y ago
It's true that inefficient code can get the job done, and if that code is getting the job done where nothing else is that's great. But the strange disconnect among crypto apologists is that somehow the massive inherent inefficiencies are a good thing and central to its effectiveness. Novelty-mania derived popularity is central to its uptake but that's a far cry from "the tech is the source of value."
TheBrokenRail 4y ago
I came into this article expecting to disagree with it... but the author actually makes a lot of good points. It's nice to see an acknowledgment that crypto is simultaneously useful (and actually pretty cool) but also not a magic solution to all the world's problems. (It does get a bit annoying hearing "we're going to reinvent the wheel BUT WITH CRYPTO!" for the 10th time.) This was pretty well encapsulated in two paragraphs: > In the same way, everything about the crypto economy is worse than the regular economy. The only excuse is that it’s decentralized. This means you can use it for all of those cool things - sending remittances, circumventing corrupt banking systems, resisting authoritarian governments - that are hard to do with regular money. Of course subjecting yourself to a difficult constraint is going to be harder than not doing that! > If nothing’s wrong with your country’s financial or political system, then you don’t need crypto. If you use crypto anyway, it will be worse than your regular financial system, because it’s trading off many things you need (efficiency, speed, safety, the good kinds of regulation) for something you don’t need (avoiding the bad kinds of regulation). I still think NFTs are silly though.
- cwillu 4y ago
  I suspect the author agrees: “if people wanted, this could be an NFT, since that technology excels in producing meaningless certificates.”
- abenga 4y ago
  Speaking as a Kenyan, I see it pretty high in the list of users of cryptocurrency, but it has one of the most accessible and inclusive financial systems in the world (mobile (fiat) money). Everyone I know/interact with has a mobile money wallet and uses it from day to day for real financial transactions. Everyone I do know that is active in the crypto world is speculating in search of out-sized investment return. One country (Trinidad and Tobago) where I speak to a friend who is often complaining about dollar shortages and government-imposed forex controls is not on the list. I don't think cryptocurrencies are currently being used to solve the problems the article is assuming it does as much as the article's thesis suggests.
  - FabHK 4y ago
alephaleph 4y ago
I’m surprised how little I hate this piece; cryptocurrency is much more palatable when it’s claiming to be the tor of money and not the future of money. But I think it downplays the extent to which the latter claim is harmful, and just how inescapable it was over the past few years. Lots of average Joes saw a superbowl ad, put their money into a large, well-respected exchange that didn’t promise impossible returns, and lost everything! I had a nontechy relative call and ask me how she should go about selling her (literal traditional paint-on-canvas) paintings as NFTs! For a little bit there it seemed like there might be enough momentum for cryptocurrency to become too-big-to-fail before skeptics even had time to object. It also underplays the extent to which the kind of cryptocurrency stuff techies react negatively to is still explicitly or implicitly boosting that vision. Cryptocurrency as the tor of money is reasonable but also not something that for-profit companies have much incentive to be involved with. But next time I see a project whose target market are those living in countries with completely nonfunctional financial systems, people trying to escape authoritarian governments, or sex workers, I’ll think twice before being negative.
- nfw2 4y ago
  If blockchain bulls were only claiming it to be the future of money, that would already be a huge improvement to the full claim implied by “web3” — which is that it will be the future of the entire internet
- livueta 4y ago
  My local NPR station aired a story a few months ago about a local "NFT museum" that was 100% uncritical boosterism. IIRC, it featured a conversation with people affiliated with the NFT org (and nobody to provide counterpoints, and nobody with any significant amount of technical nous to point out the clear bullshit a la Moxie's thing[1]) that painted NFTs as the future of all art. The combination of the apparent veracity of the source with the absolute lack of nuance in the story was pretty striking; I think that was the only time in a lifetime of listening to public radio that I submitted a complaint about something I'd heard. It really felt like journalistic malpractice, although I guess I'm not sure how much blame to apportion to evil lying techbros vs. credulous underinformed journalists. Anyway, a few days later I had to explain the whole situation to an artist friend who'd heard the story and wanted in. Argh. --- [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
anm89 4y ago
The part that's confusing to me is why this is even controversial or interesting. It seems like a huge number of people who are educated enough to know better really struggle to come to any viewpoint between it's 100% a scam and it's the solution to all of mankind's problems.
mihaic 4y ago
When scams and manias become widespread, it doesn't matter if you personally don't fall for them, if enough of the people around you and pension fund managers fall for them. I'm also not saying "ban all crypto", but make it a lot harder to pump in money from the clueless masses. When my Uber driver is shilling shitcoins, crypto is in need of more regulation, and then we can figure out what to do next.
palata 4y ago
> Remember the story of that special astronaut pen that cost $1 million? We already have pens on earth, for like $0.10, and they work better! This is a myth. Those pens were not that expensive, they were made for use-cases on Earth and happened to be used in space, and they actually work better than the $0.10. > In the same way, everything about the crypto economy is worse than the regular economy. Good that they realize that. > The only excuse is that it’s decentralized. Except it's not. Not really. I'm surprised they did not go on with "the other excuse is that it removes trust", to which I would have answered: "Nope, it doesn't". So yeah, it's worse, except in countries that have bigger problems (corruption, unstable political system, no banks). Ever thought that maybe it would be worth fixing the bigger problem, rather than trying something that is worse?
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  If you live in Venezuela, crypto works for you now. Fixing all the world's corrupt and dysfunctional governments won't happen tomorrow
  - palata 4y ago
    Ok, let's pretend that cryptocurrencies are a quick and cheap solution for those countries: after all, we only invested 15 years and trillions into them, that would clearly not be remotely enough to help some of the world's dysfunctional governments. /s
    - Georgelemental 4y ago
      Some problems can't be fixed by just throwing money at them. In fact, giving corrupt nations more money tends to make them more corrupt, not less
      - palata 4y ago
        We agree on that. Throwing cryptocurrency solutions at those problems doesn't seem to solve them either, though. But they create other problems that crypto-enthusiasts like to ignore.
palata 4y ago
One use-case is a HUGE success for cryptocurrencies: ransomware. But sure, let's defend a system that is "worse than traditional finance", because it's "sort of decentralised" (traditional banks are sort of decentralised too, to be honest), even though that creates big problems like ransomware.
- jugg1es 4y ago
  Crypto is #3 on the greatest innovations in the ransomware space behind computers and the internet.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  Whose "traditional finance"? The point of this article is that (Developed functional country finance) >> (Crypto) >> (Venezuela et al finance).
  - palata 4y ago
    Precisely. So one could ask whether finance is the root problem in those countries or not (e.g. if the problem is a corrupt government, maybe fix that first) and if it is, one may wonder why it should be replaced by cryptocurrencies (which until now haven't fixed much) instead of improving the traditional finance.
    - Georgelemental 4y ago
      You can't just snap your fingers and tada, government corruption solved, utopia achieved. Imperfect solution now > perfect solution in the infinitely far future
      - palata 4y ago
        > You can't just snap your fingers and tada, government corruption solved, utopia achieved. No, but you could legitimately wonder what 15 years and the money that was invested in cryptocurrencies could have done to help solve the root problems, instead of marginally helping a few people while enabling scam and ransomware. Do you have an idea how much money could be stolen from governments thanks to cryptocurrencies? North Korea is pretty good at this. Counter-productive solution now < perfect solution in the infinitely far future, IMO.
shawndrost 4y ago
Can anyone link to a clean writeup of one crypto app or use case (ex speculation/laundering) with strong PMF, on track to win a decent market? Honest question. This writeup cites remittances, but last time I looked into it, crypto was a) a minor player in remittance markets, and b) is growing slower than many incumbents and new entrants, so that feels like a weak example. I haven't looked into banking in Vietnam, but I would guess there is a similar story (ie crypto is a niche, not on track to serve any sizable portion of unbanked Vietnamese customers, weaker success than several non-crypto mobile apps). I'm in the market for a nice writeup on some market where crypto is actually winning.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  Not related to money/finances, but I wrote about Farcaster here which uses blockchain as a decentralized namespace registry for a social media protocol: https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1dFMIY3NjzImJ7PE https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
- latchkey 4y ago
  American who spent 2016-2020 in Vietnam. Banking is atrocious there. Imagine only having about $1500 worth of FDIC insurance and the banks regularly go belly up because of corruption and making bad investments in property. Crypto is big in Vietnam, entirely as a cultural thing. They love games and they love finding creative ways to make money. They really got scammed well in the ICO days. DeFi didn't get big because they were still butt hurt from ICO days and because well, they don't understand the concepts in DeFi. Collateralized loans and providing liquidity just went over most people's heads. That said, there are a lot of unbanked people there. Women in the north still put gold fillings in their teeth to store wealth "safely". They also have great inexpensive 4/5G everywhere and smart phones. There is a huge younger generation. Most people use cash and the largest paper(plastic) note there is about $22, which makes larger purchases a struggle. It is ripe for innovation and digital P2P payments. The huge blocker is the government, which will need to be in control of all of this. Otherwise it'll all be black market dealing.
deleted 4y ago
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friend_and_foe 4y ago
I think the large reason so many SV types are hostile to it is because it's making their jobs much more complex with little evident payoff. And they're also probably tired of hearing those guys in the office give them advice only to begin going through a divorce over money issues a year later. > And a lot of them say things like “our democracy is in danger” or “this could be our last free election ever”. If you really think January 6 was a close call, where do you think we’d be if Trump had succeeded? ... If Nancy Pelosi’s text messages are any guide, Democrats have joined libertarians in the “actually pretty worried about the government becoming an oppressive dictatorship” club. I don’t think they can say with a straight face that there’s no chance that we ever get fascists who use financial repression as a tool of control. This is a very, very good point. It's like the "you don't need a gun you have the police... The police are killing people for fun" thing, it's always the same people saying both these things. If you really believe that America is on the precipice of fascism, you should want a way out of that repression. In most cases I believe it is cognitive dissonance, but in cases where I'm being asked for donations I'm convinced that this disconnect is deliberate and malicious.
danbruc 4y ago
Global Crypto Adoption Index. Normalized to the interval zero to one. The linked source, not a single absolute number. And even the relative numbers are all change over time or difference between countries. Nothing remotely useful like a fraction of GDP or whatever would be a useful reference. All people in Vietnam together could transact one dollar in crypto currencies per year or they could do everything in crypto currencies and not use old school money at all, you could not tell the difference from the charts and tables.
faizmokhtar 4y ago
I find it weird when westerners used developing world in SEA countries as a use case for cryptocurrency due to terrible banking systems or poor access to bank. We have instantaneous online banking systems and for the unbanked they can simply register for an e-wallets.
Geee 4y ago
Please replace the word "crypto" with "Bitcoin". These arguments are valid only for Bitcoin. If you're new to the space and vocabulary, "crypto" as a category doesn't include Bitcoin. The word is meant to distract from Bitcoin and is in itself a scam. There's no value in creating competing cryptocurrencies. There's no reason why the world needs another Bitcoin. All these scammers do is they fabricate a reason why they should exist, a project, a team, a foundation, and a "genius" person on top to give it a face. All this is just a facade to fabricate demand for their private money which they printed for themselves. This is why crypto is a scam.
Elizabeth01477 4y ago
Elizabeth01477 4y ago
KronisLV 4y ago
Aside from the subject matter of the article itself, this caught my attention: > I ended up using four articles for this experiment: > Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015 > Top Stablecoins Of 2020 > Best Crypto Exchanges Of 2020 > Biggest Cryptocurrencies By Market Cap Of 2020 > …which between them described 54 different crypto projects1. Looking back at these from our position in late 2022 Wouldn't a time scale of 10 to 20 years be better to gauge the trustworthiness of something like this? And if that's not possible due to crypto being new, aren't all of these points kind of moot and guessing at best, in regards to absolute claims, not niche use cases? Would you use a bank that opened just a year or two ago and consider putting a significant part of your money there? Would you use a framework or an operating system, or a language that is a year or two old? I guess it depends on one's risk tolerance and the desire to take advantage of perceived benefits (or just speculate, in the case of crypto). Though my risk tolerance is lower than that and I'd be late to the crypto "party" in particular, personally.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I've still not read a good explanation of how bitcoin and/or crypto actually help work around authoritarian government. Is it just small scale enough that no one has passed specific laws against it? I don't see how it helps once they do?
clacla778 4y ago

152 points by jger15 4y ago

clacla778 4y ago

RadixDLT 4y ago

bicijay 4y ago

Regnore 4y ago

> Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures! The issue that I have with this perspective is that it doesn't actually solve the underlying problem - it just kicks it down the road. As soon as crypto becomes big in a country with failed governments and banks, it's going to become the primary target of those same governments and banks.

savanaly 4y ago
In the article Scott anticipates this response and writes >Governments can take lots of actions against crypto. They can ban it. They can prevent banks from accepting it. They can search the blockchain to hunt down users. But governments take lots of actions against protests, tax evasion, and drugs, and those things still often succeed. The point isn’t that governments can’t ban a thing and send police after anyone who does it. The point is that there are only so many officers and detectives. If you make something too annoying to crush, the government will put in a half-hearted effort but mostly redirect resources elsewhere.
- deleted 4y ago
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- Regnore 4y ago
  This doesn't answer the concern, it just downplays it.
  - livueta 4y ago
    Well, consider the distribution of global btc hashrate by country over time: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map Editorialized: https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-returns-as-2nd-top-bitcoin-mining-hub-despite-the-crypto-ban https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-returns-as-2nd-top-bitc... Even a fairly authoritarian society with strong incentives to crush cryptocurrencies (https://www.marketplace.org/2021/05/20/chinas-crackdown-on-cryptocurrency-is-likely-a-way-to-maintain-economic-control-experts-say/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/05/20/chinas-crackdown-on-c...) wasn't able to get hashrate, much less usage, to anywhere close to zero. I guess I'm curious: what levers do you figure Western societies could deploy that'd be more effective than the Chinese approach? From my perspective, this state of affairs is a decent existence proof that fully eliminating cryptocurrency use is difficult even with access to authoritarian methods. nb: above links don't include 2022 data and I couldn't quickly find that, so if that data affects the quality of the above argument I'd appreciate the correction
  - yosame 4y ago
    I like a lot of Scott 's writings, but this is a bad habit of his. If there's a point that contradicts his own, he'll pretend to address it while actually just skipping over it/downplay it's relevance.
- XorNot 4y ago
  "Governments can ban things but it frequently doesn't work" works directly against the idea that crypto is providing any value - because the argument it does starts with "governments can ban X but cryptocurrency will save us!" You can't have it both ways: if cryptocurrency is the be all and end all of avoiding government censure of other activities, why would it not be a high priority to crush it compared to those other things? If it is not, then is it all that useful?
quickthrower2 4y ago
The issue is it’s reliance on the somewhat centralized internet access which is controllable by governments. Mesh and satellites might reduce this. Maybe even ham radio. You don’t need to send much data to send a crypto transaction so sending it using an audio modem on a low frequency is probably fine. There are also crypto notes being developed which is an interesting development.

pr337h4m 4y ago

Crypto's only real use case is economic freedom. Everything else is just garnishing.

pr337h4m 4y ago
In both senses: "food that is added to a plate for decoration," as well as "material applied to an object to achieve or assist camouflage." https://www.thefreedictionary.com/garnishing https://www.thefreedictionary.com/garnishing

xg15 4y ago

As someone who is not in the "rationalist" crowd (and has no interest to be), could someone explain their weird vocabulary to me? You pretty much know you're reading a rationalist if they use phrases like "less wrong", "mildly opinionated" or now "less than infinite". Is there some reasoning behind those phrases? Rejecting the null hypothesis as a way of life? Why not just say "why I'm still bullish on crypto even though everyone says the opposite"?

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
If you're in SV-adjacent circles, lots of people are throatily anti-crypto, to the point where they start seeing red when you mention crypto, and pelt crypto with the same anti arguments repeated ad nauseum. There are influencers who have sprung up whose entire claim to fame has been their negative coverage of crypto (a mirror to the shady crypto influencers shilling their shitcoins). It's not a big leap to see that as "infinitely hostile". So the title is just "I'm not 'infinitely hostile'". Also, "bullish" is generally a financial term, and in this case may refer to "price go up" which doesn't seem to be the intent of the article. The article is stressing usecases not price.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I have not observed this “seeing red” at all. What I have observed, many times over, is “one side” needing to feel like the “other side” is seeing red. “Triggered.” “Tilted.” “Trolled.” “Got ‘em.” Etc. Very common, not limited to any one subculture.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    There's so many HN posts about crypto with crazy long comment trees, there's no need to litigate this here. Primary sources are plenty.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Indeed. It’s very easy to project upon text comments whatever emotion you interpret. Another well-known phenomenon. It’s why so many people find things like Slack to be so problematic for nuanced conversation.

idoh 4y ago

Having done some amount of business in Ukraine, I can attest to how hard it is to move money into that country. Crypto really solves that use case, provided that there's some trading inside the country as well as flowing in.

brazed_blotch 4y ago
Out of curiosity, could you give a few examples of the difficulties you experienced?
- idoh 4y ago
  I wasn't super involved, but they (the office in Ukraine) liked getting USD and people who visited would often carry an envelope with cash in it when traveling for business trips from the US to there. There was some other thing with using US based debit cards over there, apparently it was an easier flow to fill up the US accounts and have them use it over there than to do a bank to bank transfer.
  - ourmandave 4y ago
    All that's US dollars, I assume. Unless you're talking Centre's USD coins. What about the crypto side of it?
    - idoh 4y ago
      Yeah, paper currency. It was important for the bills to be crisp, otherwise they'd trade at a ~10% discount. I don't know how crypto has changed things, I don't do anything related to Ukraine anymore.
      - coffeebeqn 4y ago
        That was the same in monte negro with euros. They only accepted crisp euros even though I had brought those from an actual EU country - they wouldn’t accept them. And that was their “official” currency

ypeterholmes 4y ago

Fantastic piece. The space program analogy is particularly apt. People say crypto is a worse way to replace functions that already exist, like the space program inventing a pen, say. But the fact the pen can work in space is actually rather important. The fact that decentralized systems can't be shut down or centrally manipulated, is also rather important.

oneoff786 4y ago
Why is it important to have a pen in space?
- Armisael16 4y ago
  Graphite flakes from pencils are very flammable and also conduct electricity just well enough to cause shorts.
- caterama 4y ago
  To write with.
- idoh 4y ago
  Other people covered it, but I happen to have a Fischer Space Pen on my desk right now so I'll take a shot. You don't want a pencil because bits can break off and make a mess, so you want a pen. The story with the Space Pen is that it has a pressurized cartridge so it works in space (I can't confirm whether other types of pens don't work). Somewhat off topic, the Space Pen was researched 100% with private funds and both the US and USSR space programs bought them retail, in contrast to some of the stories floating around the internet.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Kind of interesting. But I guess I’m more so asking whether people need to do a lot of writing in space. I would assume no?

polygamous_bat 4y ago

I was reading with an open mind until I got to the section header > Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams I mean, seriously? This is a month after the fallout of FTX, we have seen crypto projects in their net worths in Billions to get revealed as ponzi schemes in their purest meaning, and that's the best SA can offer up? > If you split $1000 and invested it equally in all the top crypto projects of 2015, you would now have $25,400. If you invested it in the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap of 2020, you would have $2,700. Stablecoins aren’t really an investment, but if you put it in the top stablecoins of 2020 anyway, you would have $964.30. Exchanges definitely aren’t an investment, but if you put your $1000 in the best crypto exchanges of 2020, I think it would all still be there (FTX wasn’t on the list; maybe it’s too new). This is tired shill-speak (consider what happened if you "invested" in 2021 instead), to the point where I doubt if Scott Alexander himself wrote this or if someone offered him a large but undisclosed sum to write it for him. Probably as a damage control to the EA circles, who have undoubtedly lost a lot of faith in crypto as a follow up to the FTX fallout.

habitue 4y ago
> I mean, seriously? From the article: > If you split $1000 and invested it equally in all the top crypto projects of 2015, you would now have $25,400. If you invested it in the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap of 2020, you would have $2,700. Stablecoins aren’t really an investment, but if you put it in the top stablecoins of 2020 anyway, you would have $964.30. Exchanges definitely aren’t an investment, but if you put your $1000 in the best crypto exchanges of 2020, I think it would all still be there (FTX wasn’t on the list; maybe it’s too new). Footnote 4: > The one big exception was FTX - I think people did think of it as one of the good ones, and would have included it in lists like these if it had been around a little earlier. But this is why I disagree with people who said it should have been “obvious” it was a scam - it was in a reference class where scams are actually very rare!
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  Your point being? If you search for the same query in 2021 as he does in 2020, you come up with FTX and Binance, both of which were decried to be sketchy at that time by skeptics. [1] My point is, you can always pick your time frames arbitrarily to make any case that you want, and I can make the opposite case by picking my favorite time frame. Seems really sketchy that ACX is committing to this level of fallacy. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/robinhood-coinbase-ftx-heres-whos-winning-the-crypto-trading-game-145331322.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/robinhood-coinbase-ftx-heres-...

giraffe_lady 4y ago

This is almost point for point the evaluations Golumbria makes in "the politics of bitcoin" except reframed positively and with some distance from the "cyberlibertarian" vocabulary he uses. Probably because alexander is a cyberlibertarian. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-of-bitcoin https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-...

deleted 4y ago
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tomxor 4y ago

> everyone around you will chant in unison “PONZIS 100% SCAMS ZERO-LEGITIMATE-USE-CASES SPEEDRUNNING-THE-HISTORY-OF-FINANCIAL-FRAUD!” It’s really quite impressive. I didn't realise it had finally gotten to this point, I guess FTX was the final wake up call? I hope it's true because once hype is out of the picture so are the millions of vultures and it is once again possible to discern new and interesting ideas from the noise that saps our attention in this area.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
The worst thing that happened to crypto is that the line went up too much before it was ready. I’m sure there are a few legitimate business ideas in there but it’s still 99.9% hyped up garbage that everyone treats as a get rich scheme
- ETH_start 4y ago
  A significant fraction of crypto applications cannot work at scale without privacy-protected transactions, and the first major privacy smart contract on Ethereum - Tornado Cash - was just made illegal to use for Americans by the OFAC. The criminalization of privacy-protected financial transactions is the biggest risk that crypto faces AFAICS. The need for law enforcement authorities to achieve Total Information Awareness over all private financial transactions stands opposed to a vision of ubiquitous electronic cash, with decentralized and peer-to-peer electronic transactions.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    There is GNU Taler but whenever you see it being talked about on hacker news you will find comments that border on conspiracy theory even though when you look at the technical design of GNU Taler it offers more privacy than Bitcoin or Ethereum. Apparently providing both privacy to buyers and following AML and income reporting laws at the same time is crossing some line because "the government is always wrong". It is kind of like following the law is frowned upon in the cryptocurrency space which is why any competitor that can actually follow the law must be nipped in the bud. I don't believe crypto users care about privacy except maybe when they use Montero.

_zllx 4y ago

I felt like I was in crazy town, trying to tell people that crypto is actually something that helps many people, always getting shot down with absurd dogma like "crypto has no use cases" or "gordon goner racist NFTs". People believed everything they heard from a blog (you know the one) set up specifically to discredit this entire class of technology by associating every dumb thing with its image as a whole. I've been Bitcoin-literate since I was a pre-teen (I'm early 20s now) and felt trapped. Bitcoin maximalists made me hopeful that at least Bitcoin specifically would be socially acceptable, but honestly they've got it wrong too. I was very delighted today to see Scott stick up for the concrete use cases that are out there. Vitalik Buterin seems fairly respected in the same space as ACX.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
It's the curse of influencers and it's not specific to crypto. Influencers identify a vibe that works with their followers and lean into it, exploiting it for views and shares. Most of the time the vibe is only tangentially related to a much more complicated reality. But complicated reality is boring and vibes are fun, so influencers convince their followers that the vibe is true and the followers become galvanized along the vibe. I've seen so many people quote a Youtuber as their source for a belief that it's crazy. Even when the primary sources are available. But that's the age we live in.
- _zllx 4y ago
  Realistically I think you're right; I probably have my conspiracy cap on too tight, but it's too perfect to me that the group of people who will soon need crypto the most are being socially incentivized to reject it now. I might have struck a nerve with the anti-crypto vibe enjoyers.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    > the group of people who will soon need crypto the most And who might that be?
    - 4y ago

foul 4y ago

I LOVE that disclaimer thumbnail.

bawolff 4y ago

Wtf is this graph where countries are rated between 0 and 1? This seems lying with statistics territory. That said, i agree with the author that original bitcoin works well enough in places where modern banking is dysfunctional. Its everything in the crypto world after that point i have a problem with. I also agree that most crypto projects more err on the side of really really stupid and not outright steal your money (although that exists too). Basically, i agree with all the authors premises and still think crypto is on the whole terrible. I suppose the issue is that the author is arguing against a very weak strawman - nobody is literally infinitely against crypto.

ianferrel 4y ago
It's explained in the graph text. It's per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity, scaled so the country with the most usage by that metric is 1. So, like individual Indians use 37% as much cryptocurrency as individual Vietnamese (adjusted for PPP). It's a good way to show comparatively where cryptocurrencies seem to have some utility as measured by the fraction of an individual's financial power.
- bawolff 4y ago
  But that is potentially wildly misleading given the author's position. You have no sense of magnitude. For example if vietnam had a single crypto user, and nobody else in the world used it at all, you would have a similar skewed graph, but clearly it wouldn't demonstrate utility.
  - ianferrel 4y ago
    Such a graph could be misleading, and I agree that there's no information about magnitude. But I don't think it's actually misleading in this case, and we have other information available that clarifies that there is not a single Vietnamese cryptocurrency user in the world (and, I guess, 0.37 of an Indian user...?). There is a measurably large amount of cryptocurrency activity in the world, but most of our (or at least my) awareness of it is as a western techno-futurist/financial/cryptobro phenomenon. This graph is really useful in demonstrating that that's not a very accurate view. It would be very bad if it were the only datum on cryptocurrency the reader had. But that's not the audience of this article.

kokanee 4y ago

1) The author is arguing against skeptics who are "infinitely hostile" to crypto because it consists of "100% scams". I don't think many skeptics believe crypto is 100% scams. Most skeptics would say that the use cases are overstated and the incentives to pump-and-dump are so high that an unacceptable rate of scams was inevitable. If you're going to write an article to refute skeptics, refute the actual argument. 2) The author strongly implies that skeptics are skeptical because they have fallen for scams (by "clicking on spam emails"). Insulting the intelligence of your opponent is also not a compelling way to refute an argument. I have always been skeptical, I have never been scammed, and I don't think I'm unique. 3) The author's research found that the scam rate "seemed low." Molly White is probably the person working harder than any other to track this scam rate, and her "grift counter" currently reports losses of over $12 billion. https://web3isgoinggreat.com https://web3isgoinggreat.com

mattdesl 4y ago
$12B over several years sounds like a lot until you realize how much volume is in the crypto market - $179B in 24 hours according to one source! https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272903/cryptocurrency-trade-volume/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272903/cryptocurrency-t...
- vkou 4y ago
  I own a dog. You own a cat. I say my dog is worth a million dollars. You say your cat is worth a million dollars. I trade you my dog for your cat. Then we trade them back. We've just created 2 million dollars of daily trade volume, err, economic activity. When looking at value stolen by scammers, what matters is not the daily trade volume, what matters is how much money was put into the ecosystem [1], and what fraction of it was stolen. [1] Which is a lot less than 180B/day.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hailwren 4y ago
    > what fraction of it was stolen This is the rub. If you’re using mcap and mark-to-market rates for total value stolen, it’s completely reasonable to use the same rate to evaluate the size of the system.

wantsanagent 4y ago

It's true that inefficient code can get the job done, and if that code is getting the job done where nothing else is that's great. But the strange disconnect among crypto apologists is that somehow the massive inherent inefficiencies are a good thing and central to its effectiveness. Novelty-mania derived popularity is central to its uptake but that's a far cry from "the tech is the source of value."

TheBrokenRail 4y ago

I came into this article expecting to disagree with it... but the author actually makes a lot of good points. It's nice to see an acknowledgment that crypto is simultaneously useful (and actually pretty cool) but also not a magic solution to all the world's problems. (It does get a bit annoying hearing "we're going to reinvent the wheel BUT WITH CRYPTO!" for the 10th time.) This was pretty well encapsulated in two paragraphs: > In the same way, everything about the crypto economy is worse than the regular economy. The only excuse is that it’s decentralized. This means you can use it for all of those cool things - sending remittances, circumventing corrupt banking systems, resisting authoritarian governments - that are hard to do with regular money. Of course subjecting yourself to a difficult constraint is going to be harder than not doing that! > If nothing’s wrong with your country’s financial or political system, then you don’t need crypto. If you use crypto anyway, it will be worse than your regular financial system, because it’s trading off many things you need (efficiency, speed, safety, the good kinds of regulation) for something you don’t need (avoiding the bad kinds of regulation). I still think NFTs are silly though.

cwillu 4y ago
I suspect the author agrees: “if people wanted, this could be an NFT, since that technology excels in producing meaningless certificates.”
abenga 4y ago
Speaking as a Kenyan, I see it pretty high in the list of users of cryptocurrency, but it has one of the most accessible and inclusive financial systems in the world (mobile (fiat) money). Everyone I know/interact with has a mobile money wallet and uses it from day to day for real financial transactions. Everyone I do know that is active in the crypto world is speculating in search of out-sized investment return. One country (Trinidad and Tobago) where I speak to a friend who is often complaining about dollar shortages and government-imposed forex controls is not on the list. I don't think cryptocurrencies are currently being used to solve the problems the article is assuming it does as much as the article's thesis suggests.
- FabHK 4y ago

alephaleph 4y ago

I’m surprised how little I hate this piece; cryptocurrency is much more palatable when it’s claiming to be the tor of money and not the future of money. But I think it downplays the extent to which the latter claim is harmful, and just how inescapable it was over the past few years. Lots of average Joes saw a superbowl ad, put their money into a large, well-respected exchange that didn’t promise impossible returns, and lost everything! I had a nontechy relative call and ask me how she should go about selling her (literal traditional paint-on-canvas) paintings as NFTs! For a little bit there it seemed like there might be enough momentum for cryptocurrency to become too-big-to-fail before skeptics even had time to object. It also underplays the extent to which the kind of cryptocurrency stuff techies react negatively to is still explicitly or implicitly boosting that vision. Cryptocurrency as the tor of money is reasonable but also not something that for-profit companies have much incentive to be involved with. But next time I see a project whose target market are those living in countries with completely nonfunctional financial systems, people trying to escape authoritarian governments, or sex workers, I’ll think twice before being negative.

nfw2 4y ago
If blockchain bulls were only claiming it to be the future of money, that would already be a huge improvement to the full claim implied by “web3” — which is that it will be the future of the entire internet
livueta 4y ago
My local NPR station aired a story a few months ago about a local "NFT museum" that was 100% uncritical boosterism. IIRC, it featured a conversation with people affiliated with the NFT org (and nobody to provide counterpoints, and nobody with any significant amount of technical nous to point out the clear bullshit a la Moxie's thing[1]) that painted NFTs as the future of all art. The combination of the apparent veracity of the source with the absolute lack of nuance in the story was pretty striking; I think that was the only time in a lifetime of listening to public radio that I submitted a complaint about something I'd heard. It really felt like journalistic malpractice, although I guess I'm not sure how much blame to apportion to evil lying techbros vs. credulous underinformed journalists. Anyway, a few days later I had to explain the whole situation to an artist friend who'd heard the story and wanted in. Argh. --- [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

anm89 4y ago

The part that's confusing to me is why this is even controversial or interesting. It seems like a huge number of people who are educated enough to know better really struggle to come to any viewpoint between it's 100% a scam and it's the solution to all of mankind's problems.

mihaic 4y ago

When scams and manias become widespread, it doesn't matter if you personally don't fall for them, if enough of the people around you and pension fund managers fall for them. I'm also not saying "ban all crypto", but make it a lot harder to pump in money from the clueless masses. When my Uber driver is shilling shitcoins, crypto is in need of more regulation, and then we can figure out what to do next.

palata 4y ago

> Remember the story of that special astronaut pen that cost $1 million? We already have pens on earth, for like $0.10, and they work better! This is a myth. Those pens were not that expensive, they were made for use-cases on Earth and happened to be used in space, and they actually work better than the $0.10. > In the same way, everything about the crypto economy is worse than the regular economy. Good that they realize that. > The only excuse is that it’s decentralized. Except it's not. Not really. I'm surprised they did not go on with "the other excuse is that it removes trust", to which I would have answered: "Nope, it doesn't". So yeah, it's worse, except in countries that have bigger problems (corruption, unstable political system, no banks). Ever thought that maybe it would be worth fixing the bigger problem, rather than trying something that is worse?

Georgelemental 4y ago
If you live in Venezuela, crypto works for you now. Fixing all the world's corrupt and dysfunctional governments won't happen tomorrow
- palata 4y ago
  Ok, let's pretend that cryptocurrencies are a quick and cheap solution for those countries: after all, we only invested 15 years and trillions into them, that would clearly not be remotely enough to help some of the world's dysfunctional governments. /s
  - Georgelemental 4y ago
    Some problems can't be fixed by just throwing money at them. In fact, giving corrupt nations more money tends to make them more corrupt, not less
    - palata 4y ago
      We agree on that. Throwing cryptocurrency solutions at those problems doesn't seem to solve them either, though. But they create other problems that crypto-enthusiasts like to ignore.

palata 4y ago

One use-case is a HUGE success for cryptocurrencies: ransomware. But sure, let's defend a system that is "worse than traditional finance", because it's "sort of decentralised" (traditional banks are sort of decentralised too, to be honest), even though that creates big problems like ransomware.

jugg1es 4y ago
Crypto is #3 on the greatest innovations in the ransomware space behind computers and the internet.
Georgelemental 4y ago
Whose "traditional finance"? The point of this article is that (Developed functional country finance) >> (Crypto) >> (Venezuela et al finance).
- palata 4y ago
  Precisely. So one could ask whether finance is the root problem in those countries or not (e.g. if the problem is a corrupt government, maybe fix that first) and if it is, one may wonder why it should be replaced by cryptocurrencies (which until now haven't fixed much) instead of improving the traditional finance.
  - Georgelemental 4y ago
    You can't just snap your fingers and tada, government corruption solved, utopia achieved. Imperfect solution now > perfect solution in the infinitely far future
    - palata 4y ago
      > You can't just snap your fingers and tada, government corruption solved, utopia achieved. No, but you could legitimately wonder what 15 years and the money that was invested in cryptocurrencies could have done to help solve the root problems, instead of marginally helping a few people while enabling scam and ransomware. Do you have an idea how much money could be stolen from governments thanks to cryptocurrencies? North Korea is pretty good at this. Counter-productive solution now < perfect solution in the infinitely far future, IMO.

shawndrost 4y ago

Can anyone link to a clean writeup of one crypto app or use case (ex speculation/laundering) with strong PMF, on track to win a decent market? Honest question. This writeup cites remittances, but last time I looked into it, crypto was a) a minor player in remittance markets, and b) is growing slower than many incumbents and new entrants, so that feels like a weak example. I haven't looked into banking in Vietnam, but I would guess there is a similar story (ie crypto is a niche, not on track to serve any sizable portion of unbanked Vietnamese customers, weaker success than several non-crypto mobile apps). I'm in the market for a nice writeup on some market where crypto is actually winning.

mattdesl 4y ago
Not related to money/finances, but I wrote about Farcaster here which uses blockchain as a decentralized namespace registry for a social media protocol: https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1dFMIY3NjzImJ7PE https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
latchkey 4y ago
American who spent 2016-2020 in Vietnam. Banking is atrocious there. Imagine only having about $1500 worth of FDIC insurance and the banks regularly go belly up because of corruption and making bad investments in property. Crypto is big in Vietnam, entirely as a cultural thing. They love games and they love finding creative ways to make money. They really got scammed well in the ICO days. DeFi didn't get big because they were still butt hurt from ICO days and because well, they don't understand the concepts in DeFi. Collateralized loans and providing liquidity just went over most people's heads. That said, there are a lot of unbanked people there. Women in the north still put gold fillings in their teeth to store wealth "safely". They also have great inexpensive 4/5G everywhere and smart phones. There is a huge younger generation. Most people use cash and the largest paper(plastic) note there is about $22, which makes larger purchases a struggle. It is ripe for innovation and digital P2P payments. The huge blocker is the government, which will need to be in control of all of this. Otherwise it'll all be black market dealing.

deleted 4y ago

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friend_and_foe 4y ago

I think the large reason so many SV types are hostile to it is because it's making their jobs much more complex with little evident payoff. And they're also probably tired of hearing those guys in the office give them advice only to begin going through a divorce over money issues a year later. > And a lot of them say things like “our democracy is in danger” or “this could be our last free election ever”. If you really think January 6 was a close call, where do you think we’d be if Trump had succeeded? ... If Nancy Pelosi’s text messages are any guide, Democrats have joined libertarians in the “actually pretty worried about the government becoming an oppressive dictatorship” club. I don’t think they can say with a straight face that there’s no chance that we ever get fascists who use financial repression as a tool of control. This is a very, very good point. It's like the "you don't need a gun you have the police... The police are killing people for fun" thing, it's always the same people saying both these things. If you really believe that America is on the precipice of fascism, you should want a way out of that repression. In most cases I believe it is cognitive dissonance, but in cases where I'm being asked for donations I'm convinced that this disconnect is deliberate and malicious.

danbruc 4y ago

Global Crypto Adoption Index. Normalized to the interval zero to one. The linked source, not a single absolute number. And even the relative numbers are all change over time or difference between countries. Nothing remotely useful like a fraction of GDP or whatever would be a useful reference. All people in Vietnam together could transact one dollar in crypto currencies per year or they could do everything in crypto currencies and not use old school money at all, you could not tell the difference from the charts and tables.

faizmokhtar 4y ago

I find it weird when westerners used developing world in SEA countries as a use case for cryptocurrency due to terrible banking systems or poor access to bank. We have instantaneous online banking systems and for the unbanked they can simply register for an e-wallets.

Geee 4y ago

Please replace the word "crypto" with "Bitcoin". These arguments are valid only for Bitcoin. If you're new to the space and vocabulary, "crypto" as a category doesn't include Bitcoin. The word is meant to distract from Bitcoin and is in itself a scam. There's no value in creating competing cryptocurrencies. There's no reason why the world needs another Bitcoin. All these scammers do is they fabricate a reason why they should exist, a project, a team, a foundation, and a "genius" person on top to give it a face. All this is just a facade to fabricate demand for their private money which they printed for themselves. This is why crypto is a scam.

Elizabeth01477 4y ago

KronisLV 4y ago

Aside from the subject matter of the article itself, this caught my attention: > I ended up using four articles for this experiment: > Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015 > Top Stablecoins Of 2020 > Best Crypto Exchanges Of 2020 > Biggest Cryptocurrencies By Market Cap Of 2020 > …which between them described 54 different crypto projects1. Looking back at these from our position in late 2022 Wouldn't a time scale of 10 to 20 years be better to gauge the trustworthiness of something like this? And if that's not possible due to crypto being new, aren't all of these points kind of moot and guessing at best, in regards to absolute claims, not niche use cases? Would you use a bank that opened just a year or two ago and consider putting a significant part of your money there? Would you use a framework or an operating system, or a language that is a year or two old? I guess it depends on one's risk tolerance and the desire to take advantage of perceived benefits (or just speculate, in the case of crypto). Though my risk tolerance is lower than that and I'd be late to the crypto "party" in particular, personally.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I've still not read a good explanation of how bitcoin and/or crypto actually help work around authoritarian government. Is it just small scale enough that no one has passed specific laws against it? I don't see how it helps once they do?

clacla778 4y ago