7 ms·

Brad Feld: I Don't Hate Crypto

39 points by rmason 4y ago

fmajid 4y ago
So basically, "don't hate the sin, hate the sinners"?
rmason 4y ago
I think each generation has a development where they just suspend disbelief. Both Brad and I lived through the dot com era of the nineties. After experiencing the crash it's natural that you're a little skeptical going forward. I wanted crypto to be more than digital gold. I wanted to believe that it was the future of money but there were too many hustlers and wavy hand explanations for me. They want me to invest my crypto to which they would pay me 7% interest. If you ask how it was it being invested you're told they were buying bitcoin in one part of the world and selling it in another. How is that any different an explanation than Ponzi's who took dollars funds that would then be converted into Spanish pesetas to use to purchase International Postal Reply Coupons which would be sent to the U.S. to be redeemed in U.S. postage stamps which could then be sold for dollars?
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > They want me to invest my crypto to which they would pay me 7% interest. If you ask how it was it being invested you're told they were buying bitcoin in one part of the world and selling it in another. Nigerian princes keep telling me they are in dire trouble and I need to pay them while they are in exile, I don't think this internet or email thing is going to work out. For being a tech based, and entrepreneurial no less, forum I struggle to think the average age of most in this space isn't some 70 year old boomer most times given how many lazy conclusions get thrown around here. If you really are foolish enough to give your money to scammers on the promise of 'guaranteed' returns regardless of market conditions, that says more about you ten the tech they are using to achieve said grift. > How is that any different an explanation than Ponzi's SBF, Do Kwon ELison et al... are all Ivy League educated, and just as reputable as Madoff or any other pump and dumper using an ICO or alt promising the same thing: something that cannot and will not exist, guaranteed returns. In short, most alts are BS and don't need to exist, and anyone with a cursory understanding of fintech can see that; that doesn't mean the tech itself isn't valuable and doesn't have many use-cases that may not apply you specifically. > And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything... Ive been around sine YC was ran by Sam Altman and thought to be the King maker of the valley startup scene, who then joined open AI and subsequently pitched WolrdCoin that required biometrics in return of some tokens 'to save the World' but is now the darling of SV because of ChatGPT. I'd respect your arguments if they were at all cognizant of some basic premises, not least of which include being able to see the hypocrisy in these pointless analysis. I'm not a crypto bro, I guess I'm a BTC maxi according to the jargon, but the truth is that it has been understood that a fool and their money are soon parted long before the computer ever came to existence and to attribute all of Society's ills to something most don't even comprehend, as in cant tell te difference between Bitcoin the network and bitcoin the token, let alone the underlying mechanics that solved something thought to be impossible in Computer Science (Byzantine General's problem) then what is their really left to be said?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- wslh 4y ago
  I think many of the fundamentals are completely wrong. A basic question is if you trust more in a zillion of unknown nodes were really few unknown ones run and decide on the protocol or will you trust more a few well known actors who at the end will be accountable by a legal system, assuming it is a good one. For example, was a cryptocurrency like Libra from FB where nodes were known actors less secure than a stable coin run by just one shady actor? If a few Bitcoin miners want to stop the show they can. Also Bitcoin is not trustless in the sense there are very few people who can modify or incorporate new features to the node. The lie is in the trustless word as if it would be run by a God. The spirit of a P2P financial infrastructure is fine, the question is if this one is the solution. BTW, I work in the field. I think I will never see the number of frauds and shady people I found in this space. I talked with many of the people appearing in the news now, and more will appear. If you ask me a number of things that I find interesting about the field, one is the security analysis of code. There are many interesting things to learn in this space that can be extrapolated. Another is cryptography and fault tolerance areas that are moving forward thanks all of this, a third one is that I expect DeFi could bring more new financial ideas to play that frauds.
  - pfraze 4y ago
    I've found that question about bitcoin protocol governance rather interesting, wrote a bit about it here: https://paulfrazee.medium.com/the-rules-to-make-the-rules-be0c3b9d92b6 https://paulfrazee.medium.com/the-rules-to-make-the-rules-be... In summary, after a fair bit of research-from-home and talking to a couple of people deeply in the bitcoin space, I'm still not sure who really holds the reigns.
  - saurik 4y ago
    > were really few unknown ones run and decide on the protocol That's not how Bitcoin works: you and the party you are giving money to decide the protocol, not the miners. If these unknown miners are doing something different than what your clients allow then those miners aren't part of the same network as you.
    - bcrl 4y ago
      The protocol for interacting with an exchange to trade for fiat isn't decided by the protocol. You just don't get to find out if you've been scammed by trusting your exchange to do what it said it did until it's too late. Trust is still required, but there's no governance to back it up.
- henning 4y ago
  It's not digital gold because you can't copy and paste gold to make new, separate elements with identical properties. You cannot just easily alter the elemental chart the way someone can copy and paste a new shitcoin for their latest pump and dump. Bitcoin is not digital gold because there could always be a hard fork -- it's controlled by an unaccountable cabal of miners and whales and if they wanted to do so, it would happen.
  - sunshinerag 4y ago
    Sorry that is very poor understanding. No you cannot copy paste bitcoins(not sure what crypto is) into distinct pieces with identical properties. No, it is not trivially hard forkable compared to say the dollar or pound where the supply (a key property) is constantly adjusted by an unaccountable cabal of unelected bureaucrats whenever they fancy it.
    - henning 4y ago
      It is you who do not understand. You're conflating quantitative easing with cryptocurrency hard forks. Those are completely separate processes.
  - kayamon 4y ago
    The miners are prevented from forming a cabal to successfully hard-fork. This is loosely referred to as a 51% attack, but basically as long as there are two people in the world who disagree then Bitcoin will continue along its existing fair path.
- notch656c 4y ago
  Buying goods in one country and selling them at a premium in another is the basis of international commerce. If you can't turn a profit why export? the issue is there actually wasn't a low-risk arbitrage opportunity at such ridiculous (7%) annual premiums and at such scale, and even if there were it's not what they were doing. I'd go far as to say most the people gaining from these guaranteed high interest schemes probably knew they were fraud or part of nasty victim involved crime and then they got botthurt when they found out they weren't the smart ones and pulled out too late.
- jasmer 4y ago
  There's a very different thing in hoping/misunderstanding the value of a creation (.com bubble) and doing things which have obviously zero-sum game characteristics. A lot of crypto is de-facto scammy and much of it is designed that way. Far less so in the rest of the system.
nimbius 4y ago
I hate crypto because it had all the hallmarks of the fantasy futurism we read about in so many countless spellbound novels of sci-fi and wonder, but turned out to be an exhausting dichotomy of ponzi-scheme money laundering or regulatory shuck-and-jive bureaucratic hell. Its all-singing, all-dancing soulless cavalcade begat such horrorshows as the crypto.com sports arena, the FTX arena, and the desperate attempt by local government to disjoin itself from the nightmare of toxic branding or brace white-knuckled for a slow motion collapse to sweep their hastily cashed branding rights cheque into the dustbin of decisions that make the entire state look worse for existing. It also spawned things like the absolutely enigmatic "bitcoin ATM" found at only the seediest smoke shops and derelict drug stores. does it vend Bitcoin? is that giant coin with a B on it festooned in bright advertisement on the side a bitcoin? Why does it look like the lovechild of an 80s ATM and an airport check-in kiosk? The only thing this machine reliably did was ensure the freezer next to it was harder to open if you wanted to get a choco-taco. Dont get me started on the near dystopian comedy of KYC and so many hours spent snapping photos of yourself with a hand-written paper sign for Kraken to verify, or fiat conversions that for some reason cant involve your bank unless you will it to some third party swedish fintech nobody has heard of but will probably never remember once their founders yacht is found smouldering off the caymans. And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything
- the_snooze 4y ago
  >And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything It's a solution for everything! That's how you know little thought actually went into understanding any of the problems it purports to solve, or any of the people who have real problems that need to be addressed. I love how crypto-bros keep referring to the "early days" of the internet to excuse crypto's lack of practical application. I'm like, dude, even ARPANET had an easy-to-understand use case: share data and compute resources across various laboratories. It knew who and what it was for. Who is crypto for, exactly?
detrites 4y ago
Whatever your views on BTC, this is a strangely arbitrarily unfair application of only the negative side of speculative volatility. He could just as legitimately state that due to his early investment at $100/BTC, it effectively would take only $7.50 to pay out $1500 - a cost saving of 99.5% - the positive side of the relevant speculative volatility. Instead he chooses to complain of losing a trifling 1.3% of the $1500's value, due to what would be a latency involved in choosing to buy new BTC to make the transfer, instead of using what he already has.
- mjmsmith 4y ago
  Isn't the point that the volatility makes it undesirable for any use other than speculation?
  - detrites 4y ago
    So why then would he choose to speculatively buy more crypto when he doesn't have to? It comes across as contrived. Is it really just to make that same point that's already been made ad nauseam? Yes, it's quite volatile - we know - we've known for fourteen years. If you don't like that part but still want to use crypto for some reason: maybe a potential cost-saving in some case, or just to feel "cool" - use a stable coin. AIUI, that's what they're for.
    - borski 4y ago
      > So why then would he choose to speculatively buy more crypto when he doesn't have to? Because he’s an investor, and some speculation is part of his job. Exploring the space (and even making money in it) does not mean one can’t be a skeptic. He’s not making a moral argument; he’s making one about whether or not it has any actual value outside speculative investing. You don’t have to agree with him to understand it is a valid view of the space.
jt2190 4y ago
Right now it feels like the main unsolved problem is creating a “medium of exchange” that is also a “store of value” and at the same time has a very stable price. (Unlike, say, BTC which has been wildly volatile for a while now.) Without price stability the price of the tokens become something that can be speculated on, which brings the problem of hoarding/speculating at the expense of exchanging. (Stablecoins are a short-term answer, of course, but that seems to bring with it a whole host of other issues.)
- jasmer 4y ago
  There is no such thing as a 'stable price'. That's the rub. I think what you mean is 'stable next to some other asset'. Like USD. Ok, but if they are marked to USD, and you want them to be marked to USD, you have to do a lot of manipulation to keep them well marked ... it's basically an extension of USD! You are amplifying the power of fiat! But if you don't want to be 'tied' to USD, well, who is going to sell their goods in USD, and then constantly be re-pricing in BTC? Nobody. The answer at the corner store is: "if you want to use BTC to buy milk then convert them to USD first and buy the dam milk". Businesses in Canada used to keep USD on hand for USD visitors just as a matter of pragmatism, because cash is a pain, but if you can flip back and forth now without a lot of transaction cost, then we don't need that. So there's no point really in using BTC as a 'currency' because everyone is going to rationally adopt the currency of the local economy for purposes of 'stability'. If they don't want to hold dollars, then put their money in a choice of other assets. When they need to interact with another economy, they need the currency for that economy and so they need to trade for those foreign dollars. There's just no way around it and I don't think that BTC has any role to play in it.
  - rafaelero 4y ago
    You know that there are people in the world that don't use dollar as their local currency on a daily basis, right? So 90% of the world already have to think about how their assets are being priced in dollars while still using their local currency. But I do agree that volatility is partly an artificial problem, because once you start pricing things in BTC, it will immediately stop being so volatile.
nathias 4y ago
I really don't get this anti-speculation sentiment, it seems really disingeniousa as it only becomes a problem when it becomes accessible to all. People seem to be very okay with speculation when done by billionaires, banks and wallstreet professionals, shareholders etc. but when poor people get a chance to do it, then it's a problem.
- acdha 4y ago
  The difference is that I don’t buy groceries using stock share certificates. Nobody objects to people buying stocks speculatively as evidenced by the constant marketing of brokerage accounts but there are rules which the cryptocurrency world has generally resisted, and there’s an inherent conflict between the two purposes of having a medium of exchange also be used for speculation.
- daveguy 4y ago
  The anti-speculation comes more from the tulip factor than the "just for billionaires" factor. Crypto is touted as currency. If you're going to have a stable currency it can't be easily subjected to the mania of tulip futures.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  So far token "industry" looks like billionaires and wallstreet professionals plus some actual dotcom era criminals, are actively scamming poor people of their money using fearmongering end of the world narratives. I find it hard to empathize with these people.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  Given that the privileged groups you mention are those who control the narrative, it's an unfortunate but entirely predictable outcome that the narrative pushed from above is absorbed by the bottom and then also pushed upwards akin to osmosis. What's humorously ironic is that the criticism of speculation is the criticism of exactly what 'the people' have chosen to do. As someone else said 'don't hate the sin, hate the sinners'.
antihero 4y ago
Tech is an amplifier for people and people under this form of capitalism are distinctively desperate corrupt pieces of shit.
breck 4y ago
I agree there are a lot of speculators. I don’t encourage anyone to invest in crypto. I encourage people to use it. Use it instead of Venmo next time you need to pay a friend. Use it to pay a contractor in a different country. Use it to buy a domain. It’s gotten so much better now. Still has a ways to go and there are many ways to burn yourself, but it saves me a lot of time each day. If you do a lot of financial transactions and pay a lot of people, you save so much time because you don’t have to deal with endless amounts of false positive security alerts and hours on hold with customer service, and you dont Have to create accounts for your accountant etc., just send them a list of wallet IDs and they can download all the transactions off the chain.
- deleted 4y ago
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SkipperCat 4y ago
Its OK to hate things that are riddled with Ponzi schemes.
- sunshinerag 4y ago
  Like the asset bubbles and the constant booms and crashes of the dollar and pound.
tehjoker 4y ago
the problem bitcoin is solving is a social problem. people don't feel they have control over their lives so they run to some fancy techno babble to try to get rich and escape poverty or emulate rich assholes. consider maybe banding together for political action instead to serve the people abd bring prosperity and happiness to everyone, even the poor instead of trying to screw each other over in a hypercapitalist hellscape.
- sunshinerag 4y ago
  Yes it is a social problem. By political action you mean waving placards at protests.? As opposed to building something that brings back control to those who want it?
XorNot 4y ago
The primary quality of cryptocurrencies is that they reveal how little most people know about why money has value. This isn't something people have ever had to think about, except when someone comes along with cryptocurrency and says "this is going to be the money of the future" and they have to interrogate that argument.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > The primary quality of cryptocurrencies is that they reveal how little most people know about why money has value. Well... What do people in Venezuela know about why money has value? They just came out straight out of six years of hyper-inflation (that is: for six years they experienced 50% inflation per month). Turkey: 88% inflation in 2022. Iran: 52% inflation in 2022. Lebanon: even more than that. People in these countries may know very little about why money has value but it looks like the elite governing them don't have that much clue either if you ask me.
Marazan 4y ago
I want to assure everyone that I do hate cryptocurrency.
- glasss 4y ago
  Thanks I was about to reach out to you to confirm.
- sunshinerag 4y ago
  Me too. Fine with Bitcoin
woodruffw 4y ago
I will grant the author that it’s very difficult to hate (an excessive dimension reduction of “have strong reasons to be opposed to”) the things that personally enrich you.
joshlemer 4y ago
Tangential crypto question: I wonder why there hasn't been a rise of gray/black market corporations, with their stock sold on a blockchain, with shareholder votes implemented on blockchain, allowing for international, anonymous crowd-directed public corporations? I mean, at the very least why wouldn't the black market have started to move in this direction?
- pharmakom 4y ago
  How do the shareholders control the operation without recourse to the legal system?
  - joshlemer 4y ago
    Probably a mechanism where the shareholders could vote to fire/replace the CEO (and therefor lock them out of issuing more shares, or spending money on behalf of the corporation) at regular intervals.
    - filleokus 4y ago
      Hmm, would that be enough? Consider a darknet marketplace. We start some kind of DAO/smart contract, where people put in crypto to get shares, which are used to fund the creation of the marketplace. Let's assume it get's built, the DAO could transfer funds incrementally with votes on the progress or something. The profit generated from the ads are then deposited back in to the DAO, with a portion going to the voted CEO and the rest to the shareholders. But what hinders the "management" of the marketplace, who controls the servers, to just stop transferring funds back in? The CEO could be replaced in the contract, but as long as you control the servers, that doesn't matter, right?
      - joshlemer 4y ago
        Well, I guess if it were to be more like a real world corporation, the shareholders would elect a board, which selects a CEO. If the board goes rogue with the some of the private AWS keys, or other company assets, past the point where the shareholders vote to replace them, then I would imagine the shareholders would want to elect board members who would take action to re-secure the physical assets, possibly via extralegal means. For some assets, one could also imagine a smart contract that automatically expires control of the asset as soon as the CEO/board is changed. By the way, not that I am endorsing this as good for society, though it's interesting, and I could just see this being a beneficial innovation for black/gray market firms.
glasss 4y ago
I hate "crypto", which is whatever your first thought was when reading that word. The scams, the shitcoins, the culture, the ignorance of the people who swear they aren't ignorant, the obsession of getting rich, the arrogance, etc. I don't hate cryptocurrencies as a concept and technology. I'm excited to see where it lead eventually, but it needs to shed all the baggage that it currently has.
- ssss11 4y ago
  I think of it like this: every revolutionary change like this starts with a Wild West. We’ll drop the baggage…. It just may take some time.

39 points by rmason 4y ago

So basically, "don't hate the sin, hate the sinners"?

I think each generation has a development where they just suspend disbelief. Both Brad and I lived through the dot com era of the nineties. After experiencing the crash it's natural that you're a little skeptical going forward. I wanted crypto to be more than digital gold. I wanted to believe that it was the future of money but there were too many hustlers and wavy hand explanations for me. They want me to invest my crypto to which they would pay me 7% interest. If you ask how it was it being invested you're told they were buying bitcoin in one part of the world and selling it in another. How is that any different an explanation than Ponzi's who took dollars funds that would then be converted into Spanish pesetas to use to purchase International Postal Reply Coupons which would be sent to the U.S. to be redeemed in U.S. postage stamps which could then be sold for dollars?

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> They want me to invest my crypto to which they would pay me 7% interest. If you ask how it was it being invested you're told they were buying bitcoin in one part of the world and selling it in another. Nigerian princes keep telling me they are in dire trouble and I need to pay them while they are in exile, I don't think this internet or email thing is going to work out. For being a tech based, and entrepreneurial no less, forum I struggle to think the average age of most in this space isn't some 70 year old boomer most times given how many lazy conclusions get thrown around here. If you really are foolish enough to give your money to scammers on the promise of 'guaranteed' returns regardless of market conditions, that says more about you ten the tech they are using to achieve said grift. > How is that any different an explanation than Ponzi's SBF, Do Kwon ELison et al... are all Ivy League educated, and just as reputable as Madoff or any other pump and dumper using an ICO or alt promising the same thing: something that cannot and will not exist, guaranteed returns. In short, most alts are BS and don't need to exist, and anyone with a cursory understanding of fintech can see that; that doesn't mean the tech itself isn't valuable and doesn't have many use-cases that may not apply you specifically. > And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything... Ive been around sine YC was ran by Sam Altman and thought to be the King maker of the valley startup scene, who then joined open AI and subsequently pitched WolrdCoin that required biometrics in return of some tokens 'to save the World' but is now the darling of SV because of ChatGPT. I'd respect your arguments if they were at all cognizant of some basic premises, not least of which include being able to see the hypocrisy in these pointless analysis. I'm not a crypto bro, I guess I'm a BTC maxi according to the jargon, but the truth is that it has been understood that a fool and their money are soon parted long before the computer ever came to existence and to attribute all of Society's ills to something most don't even comprehend, as in cant tell te difference between Bitcoin the network and bitcoin the token, let alone the underlying mechanics that solved something thought to be impossible in Computer Science (Byzantine General's problem) then what is their really left to be said?
- deleted 4y ago
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wslh 4y ago
I think many of the fundamentals are completely wrong. A basic question is if you trust more in a zillion of unknown nodes were really few unknown ones run and decide on the protocol or will you trust more a few well known actors who at the end will be accountable by a legal system, assuming it is a good one. For example, was a cryptocurrency like Libra from FB where nodes were known actors less secure than a stable coin run by just one shady actor? If a few Bitcoin miners want to stop the show they can. Also Bitcoin is not trustless in the sense there are very few people who can modify or incorporate new features to the node. The lie is in the trustless word as if it would be run by a God. The spirit of a P2P financial infrastructure is fine, the question is if this one is the solution. BTW, I work in the field. I think I will never see the number of frauds and shady people I found in this space. I talked with many of the people appearing in the news now, and more will appear. If you ask me a number of things that I find interesting about the field, one is the security analysis of code. There are many interesting things to learn in this space that can be extrapolated. Another is cryptography and fault tolerance areas that are moving forward thanks all of this, a third one is that I expect DeFi could bring more new financial ideas to play that frauds.
- pfraze 4y ago
  I've found that question about bitcoin protocol governance rather interesting, wrote a bit about it here: https://paulfrazee.medium.com/the-rules-to-make-the-rules-be0c3b9d92b6 https://paulfrazee.medium.com/the-rules-to-make-the-rules-be... In summary, after a fair bit of research-from-home and talking to a couple of people deeply in the bitcoin space, I'm still not sure who really holds the reigns.
- saurik 4y ago
  > were really few unknown ones run and decide on the protocol That's not how Bitcoin works: you and the party you are giving money to decide the protocol, not the miners. If these unknown miners are doing something different than what your clients allow then those miners aren't part of the same network as you.
  - bcrl 4y ago
    The protocol for interacting with an exchange to trade for fiat isn't decided by the protocol. You just don't get to find out if you've been scammed by trusting your exchange to do what it said it did until it's too late. Trust is still required, but there's no governance to back it up.
henning 4y ago
It's not digital gold because you can't copy and paste gold to make new, separate elements with identical properties. You cannot just easily alter the elemental chart the way someone can copy and paste a new shitcoin for their latest pump and dump. Bitcoin is not digital gold because there could always be a hard fork -- it's controlled by an unaccountable cabal of miners and whales and if they wanted to do so, it would happen.
- sunshinerag 4y ago
  Sorry that is very poor understanding. No you cannot copy paste bitcoins(not sure what crypto is) into distinct pieces with identical properties. No, it is not trivially hard forkable compared to say the dollar or pound where the supply (a key property) is constantly adjusted by an unaccountable cabal of unelected bureaucrats whenever they fancy it.
  - henning 4y ago
    It is you who do not understand. You're conflating quantitative easing with cryptocurrency hard forks. Those are completely separate processes.
- kayamon 4y ago
  The miners are prevented from forming a cabal to successfully hard-fork. This is loosely referred to as a 51% attack, but basically as long as there are two people in the world who disagree then Bitcoin will continue along its existing fair path.
notch656c 4y ago
Buying goods in one country and selling them at a premium in another is the basis of international commerce. If you can't turn a profit why export? the issue is there actually wasn't a low-risk arbitrage opportunity at such ridiculous (7%) annual premiums and at such scale, and even if there were it's not what they were doing. I'd go far as to say most the people gaining from these guaranteed high interest schemes probably knew they were fraud or part of nasty victim involved crime and then they got botthurt when they found out they weren't the smart ones and pulled out too late.
jasmer 4y ago
There's a very different thing in hoping/misunderstanding the value of a creation (.com bubble) and doing things which have obviously zero-sum game characteristics. A lot of crypto is de-facto scammy and much of it is designed that way. Far less so in the rest of the system.

nimbius 4y ago

I hate crypto because it had all the hallmarks of the fantasy futurism we read about in so many countless spellbound novels of sci-fi and wonder, but turned out to be an exhausting dichotomy of ponzi-scheme money laundering or regulatory shuck-and-jive bureaucratic hell. Its all-singing, all-dancing soulless cavalcade begat such horrorshows as the crypto.com sports arena, the FTX arena, and the desperate attempt by local government to disjoin itself from the nightmare of toxic branding or brace white-knuckled for a slow motion collapse to sweep their hastily cashed branding rights cheque into the dustbin of decisions that make the entire state look worse for existing. It also spawned things like the absolutely enigmatic "bitcoin ATM" found at only the seediest smoke shops and derelict drug stores. does it vend Bitcoin? is that giant coin with a B on it festooned in bright advertisement on the side a bitcoin? Why does it look like the lovechild of an 80s ATM and an airport check-in kiosk? The only thing this machine reliably did was ensure the freezer next to it was harder to open if you wanted to get a choco-taco. Dont get me started on the near dystopian comedy of KYC and so many hours spent snapping photos of yourself with a hand-written paper sign for Kraken to verify, or fiat conversions that for some reason cant involve your bank unless you will it to some third party swedish fintech nobody has heard of but will probably never remember once their founders yacht is found smouldering off the caymans. And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything

the_snooze 4y ago
>And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything It's a solution for everything! That's how you know little thought actually went into understanding any of the problems it purports to solve, or any of the people who have real problems that need to be addressed. I love how crypto-bros keep referring to the "early days" of the internet to excuse crypto's lack of practical application. I'm like, dude, even ARPANET had an easy-to-understand use case: share data and compute resources across various laboratories. It knew who and what it was for. Who is crypto for, exactly?

detrites 4y ago

Whatever your views on BTC, this is a strangely arbitrarily unfair application of only the negative side of speculative volatility. He could just as legitimately state that due to his early investment at $100/BTC, it effectively would take only $7.50 to pay out $1500 - a cost saving of 99.5% - the positive side of the relevant speculative volatility. Instead he chooses to complain of losing a trifling 1.3% of the $1500's value, due to what would be a latency involved in choosing to buy new BTC to make the transfer, instead of using what he already has.

mjmsmith 4y ago
Isn't the point that the volatility makes it undesirable for any use other than speculation?
- detrites 4y ago
  So why then would he choose to speculatively buy more crypto when he doesn't have to? It comes across as contrived. Is it really just to make that same point that's already been made ad nauseam? Yes, it's quite volatile - we know - we've known for fourteen years. If you don't like that part but still want to use crypto for some reason: maybe a potential cost-saving in some case, or just to feel "cool" - use a stable coin. AIUI, that's what they're for.
  - borski 4y ago
    > So why then would he choose to speculatively buy more crypto when he doesn't have to? Because he’s an investor, and some speculation is part of his job. Exploring the space (and even making money in it) does not mean one can’t be a skeptic. He’s not making a moral argument; he’s making one about whether or not it has any actual value outside speculative investing. You don’t have to agree with him to understand it is a valid view of the space.

jt2190 4y ago

Right now it feels like the main unsolved problem is creating a “medium of exchange” that is also a “store of value” and at the same time has a very stable price. (Unlike, say, BTC which has been wildly volatile for a while now.) Without price stability the price of the tokens become something that can be speculated on, which brings the problem of hoarding/speculating at the expense of exchanging. (Stablecoins are a short-term answer, of course, but that seems to bring with it a whole host of other issues.)

jasmer 4y ago
There is no such thing as a 'stable price'. That's the rub. I think what you mean is 'stable next to some other asset'. Like USD. Ok, but if they are marked to USD, and you want them to be marked to USD, you have to do a lot of manipulation to keep them well marked ... it's basically an extension of USD! You are amplifying the power of fiat! But if you don't want to be 'tied' to USD, well, who is going to sell their goods in USD, and then constantly be re-pricing in BTC? Nobody. The answer at the corner store is: "if you want to use BTC to buy milk then convert them to USD first and buy the dam milk". Businesses in Canada used to keep USD on hand for USD visitors just as a matter of pragmatism, because cash is a pain, but if you can flip back and forth now without a lot of transaction cost, then we don't need that. So there's no point really in using BTC as a 'currency' because everyone is going to rationally adopt the currency of the local economy for purposes of 'stability'. If they don't want to hold dollars, then put their money in a choice of other assets. When they need to interact with another economy, they need the currency for that economy and so they need to trade for those foreign dollars. There's just no way around it and I don't think that BTC has any role to play in it.
- rafaelero 4y ago
  You know that there are people in the world that don't use dollar as their local currency on a daily basis, right? So 90% of the world already have to think about how their assets are being priced in dollars while still using their local currency. But I do agree that volatility is partly an artificial problem, because once you start pricing things in BTC, it will immediately stop being so volatile.

nathias 4y ago

I really don't get this anti-speculation sentiment, it seems really disingeniousa as it only becomes a problem when it becomes accessible to all. People seem to be very okay with speculation when done by billionaires, banks and wallstreet professionals, shareholders etc. but when poor people get a chance to do it, then it's a problem.

acdha 4y ago
The difference is that I don’t buy groceries using stock share certificates. Nobody objects to people buying stocks speculatively as evidenced by the constant marketing of brokerage accounts but there are rules which the cryptocurrency world has generally resisted, and there’s an inherent conflict between the two purposes of having a medium of exchange also be used for speculation.
daveguy 4y ago
The anti-speculation comes more from the tulip factor than the "just for billionaires" factor. Crypto is touted as currency. If you're going to have a stable currency it can't be easily subjected to the mania of tulip futures.
Yizahi 4y ago
So far token "industry" looks like billionaires and wallstreet professionals plus some actual dotcom era criminals, are actively scamming poor people of their money using fearmongering end of the world narratives. I find it hard to empathize with these people.
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
Given that the privileged groups you mention are those who control the narrative, it's an unfortunate but entirely predictable outcome that the narrative pushed from above is absorbed by the bottom and then also pushed upwards akin to osmosis. What's humorously ironic is that the criticism of speculation is the criticism of exactly what 'the people' have chosen to do. As someone else said 'don't hate the sin, hate the sinners'.

antihero 4y ago

Tech is an amplifier for people and people under this form of capitalism are distinctively desperate corrupt pieces of shit.

breck 4y ago

I agree there are a lot of speculators. I don’t encourage anyone to invest in crypto. I encourage people to use it. Use it instead of Venmo next time you need to pay a friend. Use it to pay a contractor in a different country. Use it to buy a domain. It’s gotten so much better now. Still has a ways to go and there are many ways to burn yourself, but it saves me a lot of time each day. If you do a lot of financial transactions and pay a lot of people, you save so much time because you don’t have to deal with endless amounts of false positive security alerts and hours on hold with customer service, and you dont Have to create accounts for your accountant etc., just send them a list of wallet IDs and they can download all the transactions off the chain.

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SkipperCat 4y ago

Its OK to hate things that are riddled with Ponzi schemes.

sunshinerag 4y ago
Like the asset bubbles and the constant booms and crashes of the dollar and pound.

tehjoker 4y ago

the problem bitcoin is solving is a social problem. people don't feel they have control over their lives so they run to some fancy techno babble to try to get rich and escape poverty or emulate rich assholes. consider maybe banding together for political action instead to serve the people abd bring prosperity and happiness to everyone, even the poor instead of trying to screw each other over in a hypercapitalist hellscape.

sunshinerag 4y ago
Yes it is a social problem. By political action you mean waving placards at protests.? As opposed to building something that brings back control to those who want it?

XorNot 4y ago

The primary quality of cryptocurrencies is that they reveal how little most people know about why money has value. This isn't something people have ever had to think about, except when someone comes along with cryptocurrency and says "this is going to be the money of the future" and they have to interrogate that argument.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> The primary quality of cryptocurrencies is that they reveal how little most people know about why money has value. Well... What do people in Venezuela know about why money has value? They just came out straight out of six years of hyper-inflation (that is: for six years they experienced 50% inflation per month). Turkey: 88% inflation in 2022. Iran: 52% inflation in 2022. Lebanon: even more than that. People in these countries may know very little about why money has value but it looks like the elite governing them don't have that much clue either if you ask me.

Marazan 4y ago

I want to assure everyone that I do hate cryptocurrency.

glasss 4y ago
Thanks I was about to reach out to you to confirm.
sunshinerag 4y ago
Me too. Fine with Bitcoin

woodruffw 4y ago

I will grant the author that it’s very difficult to hate (an excessive dimension reduction of “have strong reasons to be opposed to”) the things that personally enrich you.

joshlemer 4y ago

Tangential crypto question: I wonder why there hasn't been a rise of gray/black market corporations, with their stock sold on a blockchain, with shareholder votes implemented on blockchain, allowing for international, anonymous crowd-directed public corporations? I mean, at the very least why wouldn't the black market have started to move in this direction?

pharmakom 4y ago
How do the shareholders control the operation without recourse to the legal system?
- joshlemer 4y ago
  Probably a mechanism where the shareholders could vote to fire/replace the CEO (and therefor lock them out of issuing more shares, or spending money on behalf of the corporation) at regular intervals.
  - filleokus 4y ago
    Hmm, would that be enough? Consider a darknet marketplace. We start some kind of DAO/smart contract, where people put in crypto to get shares, which are used to fund the creation of the marketplace. Let's assume it get's built, the DAO could transfer funds incrementally with votes on the progress or something. The profit generated from the ads are then deposited back in to the DAO, with a portion going to the voted CEO and the rest to the shareholders. But what hinders the "management" of the marketplace, who controls the servers, to just stop transferring funds back in? The CEO could be replaced in the contract, but as long as you control the servers, that doesn't matter, right?
    - joshlemer 4y ago
      Well, I guess if it were to be more like a real world corporation, the shareholders would elect a board, which selects a CEO. If the board goes rogue with the some of the private AWS keys, or other company assets, past the point where the shareholders vote to replace them, then I would imagine the shareholders would want to elect board members who would take action to re-secure the physical assets, possibly via extralegal means. For some assets, one could also imagine a smart contract that automatically expires control of the asset as soon as the CEO/board is changed. By the way, not that I am endorsing this as good for society, though it's interesting, and I could just see this being a beneficial innovation for black/gray market firms.

glasss 4y ago

I hate "crypto", which is whatever your first thought was when reading that word. The scams, the shitcoins, the culture, the ignorance of the people who swear they aren't ignorant, the obsession of getting rich, the arrogance, etc. I don't hate cryptocurrencies as a concept and technology. I'm excited to see where it lead eventually, but it needs to shed all the baggage that it currently has.

ssss11 4y ago
I think of it like this: every revolutionary change like this starts with a Wild West. We’ll drop the baggage…. It just may take some time.