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From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat. I think

From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat. I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value. I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data transactions. I think it's interesting that I can send Nano to someone instantly and without any gas fees while still using blockchains. It would be nice if this technology was given a larger purpose, but I think any possibility of that quickly went out the window once someone realized they could get rich. I understand and agree with a lot of the hate crypto gets and a significant amount of the use cases are nothing more than pipe dreams (or just outright scams,) but from a theory perspective I can't help but think it's at least a little bit fascinating to see people try to apply data structures this way.

acchow 4y ago
100% agree. I was a big believer in the usefulness of crypto before all the "HODL" and "investment" mentality took over. Its value as a currency is eroded with the dramatic price fluctuations.
- HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
  [dead]
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Well yeah, the US government couldn't stand having an actual currency to compete with so they relabeled all of crypto as investements. Suddenly all of those rules, tax implications, etc are more important than the tech itself.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    We just watched FTX implode and fleece thousands of people, including many of their own investors. Plenty of other exchanges and currencies tanking hard the last few months, too. These regulations exist for a reason, and it's why actual investments work. If you think they're a bad idea then I have a bridge in the Bahamas to sell you...
status200 4y ago
It brings a tear to my eye when i read through well crafted ERC proposals [0] and then remember these developers are awash in a sea of scammers, blind hatred, vitriolic ignorance, and of course the traditional systems that fight against any sort of distributed ecosystem that they cannot control. [0] https://eips.ethereum.org/erc https://eips.ethereum.org/erc
- bb88 4y ago
  It bring more of a tear to my eye when hard earned dollars are lost by incompetence or mismanagement -- crypto or otherwise. > blind hatred I assure you -- The hatred you see is not blind -- especially not after the collapse of FTX. Most of it has cause. And there are vitriolic ignoramuses on both sides.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jjtheblunt 4y ago
> while still using blockchains because i don't know you, is that the part that makes you say you think it's neat? i personally resonate with your last paragraph: i also feel that it's definitely interesting exploring the possibilities of the ideas, with reserved contemplative enthusiasm.
- alexambarch 4y ago
  In my haste I guess I didn't make this clear enough, sorry. By "blockchains" I was trying to emphasize the fact in Nano that we are talking about many blockchains as opposed to one main chain. Every account has its own blockchain which all get connected via a DAG that they call a block lattice. The interesting part of this to me back when I was investing in 2017 was that I previously didn't think it was possible to get instant, feeless transactions on a blockchain due to the fact that transactions on the chain still had to be verified somehow.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    that's interesting...thanks for explaining
klntsky 4y ago
> Nano > Instead [of miner fees], participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees. Is this a 1st April joke?
- alttab 4y ago
  Sadly, XRB (Raiblocks, formally) was designed that way. Instant, fee-less. Problem was, there were races and some bugs, which caused a lot of reconciliation problems for exchanges that listed it. It dropped after 2017, and AFAIK, is essentially a dead coin.
- tim333 4y ago
  People being well meaning and helping out does exist. I minority maybe but not zero.
redm 4y ago
"From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat." I'm holding crypto because I think it's neat, but I'm also holding it because there's little I can do with it... i.e., lack of general utility, yet.
IanCal 4y ago
There's definitely a lot that's interesting to me in it. It's a tricky programming environment, which I find personally fun, but it's an entirely public global database with stored procedures and custom row level security. Every stored procedure can call others written by anyone and there's a strong direct push towards open interfaces and interoperability. Unfortunately one of the easiest things to make with it is a new "currency" because it fits so well with the security model.
piperswe 4y ago
I'm in the same camp. I think a bunch of distributed technologies (like Ethereum) are really neat from a technical perspective and fun to tinker with, but I don't live under any delusion that the global financial system will ever build itself on top of anything that even somewhat resembles the cryptocurrencies we see today. I remember years ago it felt like the community was mostly comprised of people with our perspective, but that feeling has basically disappeared.
- noman-land 4y ago
  We need to continue to seek each other out. Finance people swarmed this space like locusts but they aren't who makes it special. It's the p2p ethos that makes it special.
  - bb88 4y ago
    I think the crypto folks should just stop doing whatever they're doing now. What they need to do instead is to talk to regulators. If crypto 2.0 ain't regulated, people aren't gonna use it.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      People are using it, today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cinquemb 4y ago
      I've had long convo's with people at ISDA about decentralized derivatives on chain and risk/collateral management systems. SEC/CTFC (and their analogs in other jurisdictions) are better off enjoying their revolving door at GS/DB/JPM/etc
ninepoints 4y ago
> I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value. I find this "value proposition" highly dubious. You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM. Distributed compute on its own doesn't confer any points as a "store of value." The nature of the compute needs to be something that can be done strictly in the blockchain domain, and as we've seen, the result is a system that's easy to manipulate by spinning up new shitcoins, insider trading, wash trades, and worse - not to mention the loss of privacy given how effective on-chain analysis is. The features that make up a cryptocurrency make it decidedly unsuitable as the basis of a modern financial system. Some of the underlying principles are "neat," but that's as far as the tech goes for me.
- alexambarch 4y ago
  > You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself to make those changes is a digital token is what I find interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the fact that people arguably care about the state of this system is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    What does this state hold exactly?
    - alexambarch 4y ago
      What entity an ENS record is registered to, who owns what JPEG, who sent who some Ether... Ethereum is one big state machine so that state holds everything.
      - 4y ago
jjk166 4y ago
Give it a few years, the scammers will move on to greener pastures and the nerds will keep tinkering. I remember people acting the same way about ecommerce in the early 00s.
- outside1234 4y ago
  What we have learned from other financial markets is that scammers will only move on when there is regulation.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    Which markets did you learn that from?
  - koolba 4y ago
    Not just regulation, you need actual enforcement with a high enough likelihood of consequence. Just look at telephone wire scams. They’re clearly illegal, but if there’s no teeth to prosecute then they’ll keep on coming.
antupis 4y ago
I think Etherium has real chanse to be the SSO provider of the internet value proposition is just too good vs current big providers.
j0hnyl 4y ago
You are not the only person, there are DOZENS of us!
at-fates-hands 4y ago
>> I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat. I'm here with you. Put $100 bucks in last year and have been tinkering here and there. Unfortunately my $100 is now worth $23, but I'm going to hold it and keep tinkering and wait for everything to sort of pan out. I still see the potential, but am exploring what else I can do with it.
- rideontime 4y ago
  What have you done with it?
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat. I also think a lot of the distributed systems work and technological achievements are neat. But I don't have to hold crypto to appreciate it, or even to use it. It's trivially easy to log in to an exchange and buy crypto whenever I might need it to do something. The concept of holding (or HODLing) isn't related to the underlying technology. It's a speculative investment. I also hold a token amount of crypto from back when I was playing around with the neatness of it, but it's just that: A token amount. You don't need to invest in it or make the number in your wallet go to an arbitrarily high number to experiment with the technology.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data transactions. Every time I read about Iota I get stuck on the reinventing of the wheel that is trits/trytes[1]. [1] https://iota-news.com/iota-tutorial-trit-and-tryte/ https://iota-news.com/iota-tutorial-trit-and-tryte/
jon-wood 4y ago
I’m genuinely curious to hear this from someone who’s clearly more in that world than I am - is anyone at all using Ethereum’s distributed nodes to do calculations for anything that isn’t some sort of abstract financial instrument? I ask because people constantly seem to tout the fact you can build anything with blockchains, and they’ll change the world, but I’ve never seen anything actually useful made with it beyond the dubiously valuable ability to transfer currency around the place.
- noman-land 4y ago
  ENS is my go to example for something novel and useful that Ethereum enables. Instantly propagating private key based DNS. https://ens.domains https://ens.domains
noman-land 4y ago
I'm with you on this. The overfinancialization of this tech bums me out hard. I stay away from conversations where people use words like bearish and bullish or talk about prices and gains and losses. That shit is so boring and uncreative I want to cry. I like peer to peer tech with no gatekeepers and no intermediaries. I like encryption and the ability to control how my data is used. I don't like the corporate cloud and I don't like gambling.
EGreg 4y ago
Not everyone is focused on "number go up". Some teams actually care about making distributed systems that serve communities around the world, and prefer to see people not have to trust centralized middlemen. Blockchains are not the best infrastructure for this, but they're good enough (Polygon Edge for instance), for many applications: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications Having said that, blockchains are going to go the way of mainframes and vacuum tubes eventually. Here is the roadmap of what has to happen for Web3 (smart contracts) to go mainstream: https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf I see a lot of use cases for it. Unfortunately many activists on HN love to comment how useless smart contracts are, while also silently downvoting any comments that disagree with that position. I think the profit motive really did derail a lot of Web3 -- but also the same can be said for Web2, it's just that VCs were the only ones who could invest (until the JOBS act, at least). So Web2 got stuck in near-monopolies, buying up competition, and extracting rents, while completely dominating our public forums. It didn't have to be this way. Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down Microsoft's $1M offer in high school, and put his software online for free. Even after he coded facemash and facebook, he was going to build a decentralized, open source file sharing system called Wirehog -- but then Sean Parker and Peter Thiel "put a bullet in that thing"[1]. They killed Mark Z's decentralized visions and turned him from an open source bro who loves hacking things together into a corporate golden boy who loves acqui-hiring competition (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus[2] etc.) and then trying to turn them into corporate teams, until they bounce when their golden handcuffs vest (founders of those companies). The people who did this to Zuck were themselves peculiar. Sean Parker himself used to be for open sharing (Napster) but rentseeking corporations in that sphere (RIAA, MPAA) sued and destroyed it. He learned a lesson and started Plaxo, and other VC-backed companies to basically lock up people's data in giant centralized server farms. It was he who told Zuck to basically cut out the decentralized open nonsense. And Peter Thiel with Clarion Capital had a far more radical vision: Competition is for losers! Build a monopoly.[3]. The result in our society is that Big Tech oligopolies have totally captured Web2 and own all our public forums. Elon and Zuck own our largest public forums and messengers. TikTok, WeChat and others have had a meteoric rise but they are even more closely tied with the government of China than FB and Twitter are with the US government. You'd think We the People should have an open source alternative. But HN loves Web2 and hates Web3. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Open-source_softw... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
That was my view on it back in the early 2010's when Bitcoin was just taking off. Back then, the only people interested in it were either geeks looking at this new weird thing, or drug dealers. And frankly, the drug dealing was "healthy" for the ecosystem as whole: because people were actually using it as a medium of exchange, there was a dampening force opposing changes in value, and so while it was volatile compared to real currency, it was nothing like it is today. Frankly, the fact that the takedown of the Silk Road didn't kill the entire market is still surprising to me. I'm not sure at what point the speculation bubble started, because I had well and proper lost interest at that point, but the idea that people willingly were/are pouring money into an system that has fundamentally broken its own economics is baffling to me. Transactions take too long and cost too much for it to be useful as a means of exchange, and if everybody is going through big exchanges than the anonymity factor doesn't exist either. Long story short, it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. If we could stop wasting the carbon footprint of a mid-sized country now to prop up an ecosystem of scams and baseless speculation now, that would be great.
- m348e912 4y ago
  So many good points made in your post. It makes me think of what could have been if bitcoin remained a layer of exchange. I had high hopes for bitcoin cash, but even that has had it's own challenges. (although it does work pretty well)
- plsbenice34 4y ago
  Silk Road had no impact because more markets opened up immediately, and Monero solved the anonymity/cost/time factor
knorker 4y ago
You're not the only one. It's just that's i recognized this "neat" feeling for what it was: the same one I got when I went to Vegas and won actual cash from the games. I didn't truly know that seductive feeling until then, the feeling that will ruin you. I didn't like that I liked it. And that feeling i got LARPing with cryptocurrencies too.
lucasgonze 4y ago
Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I agree that this technology is really neat. I love the creative computer science. I think this may be the ultimate driving force behind krypto. It's inspiring. It has poetry and romance. It's weird and intriguing. Those are not pointless things! The money of course resonates a lot more for most people, which is why all that weirdness has mainly been applied to fleecing suckers.
Zuiii 4y ago
You're definitely not alone. Despite costing me more thanks to binance's ridiculous "fees", I go out of my way to buy crypto to just to spend on services and charities that accept it - thanks mullvad, gandi*, fsf, and many more! I plan to continue doing this as long as even a single org continues to accept it. Payments don't need to go through a centralized and unaccountable processor anymore and, given the track records of the likes of visa and paypal, I argue they shouldn't. It's one thing for them to follow the law, but to destroy livelihoods of many people or to deny transferring money when both the sender and the receiver are in agreement for arbitrary subjective reasons is simply unacceptable. May those who accept crypto continue to prosper. * I haven't been able to pay gandi yet because they require me to use their weird payments platform, but I'd happily start paying them in crypto once they drop this silly requirement.
plsbenice34 4y ago
What does this have to do with the article? Seems like an issue to me that any 'crypto' content on HN largely leads to pages full of barely-relevant diatribe.

acchow 4y ago

100% agree. I was a big believer in the usefulness of crypto before all the "HODL" and "investment" mentality took over. Its value as a currency is eroded with the dramatic price fluctuations.

HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
[dead]
calvinmorrison 4y ago
Well yeah, the US government couldn't stand having an actual currency to compete with so they relabeled all of crypto as investements. Suddenly all of those rules, tax implications, etc are more important than the tech itself.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  We just watched FTX implode and fleece thousands of people, including many of their own investors. Plenty of other exchanges and currencies tanking hard the last few months, too. These regulations exist for a reason, and it's why actual investments work. If you think they're a bad idea then I have a bridge in the Bahamas to sell you...

status200 4y ago

It brings a tear to my eye when i read through well crafted ERC proposals [0] and then remember these developers are awash in a sea of scammers, blind hatred, vitriolic ignorance, and of course the traditional systems that fight against any sort of distributed ecosystem that they cannot control. [0] https://eips.ethereum.org/erc https://eips.ethereum.org/erc

bb88 4y ago
It bring more of a tear to my eye when hard earned dollars are lost by incompetence or mismanagement -- crypto or otherwise. > blind hatred I assure you -- The hatred you see is not blind -- especially not after the collapse of FTX. Most of it has cause. And there are vitriolic ignoramuses on both sides.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jjtheblunt 4y ago

> while still using blockchains because i don't know you, is that the part that makes you say you think it's neat? i personally resonate with your last paragraph: i also feel that it's definitely interesting exploring the possibilities of the ideas, with reserved contemplative enthusiasm.

alexambarch 4y ago
In my haste I guess I didn't make this clear enough, sorry. By "blockchains" I was trying to emphasize the fact in Nano that we are talking about many blockchains as opposed to one main chain. Every account has its own blockchain which all get connected via a DAG that they call a block lattice. The interesting part of this to me back when I was investing in 2017 was that I previously didn't think it was possible to get instant, feeless transactions on a blockchain due to the fact that transactions on the chain still had to be verified somehow.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  that's interesting...thanks for explaining

klntsky 4y ago

> Nano > Instead [of miner fees], participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees. Is this a 1st April joke?

alttab 4y ago
Sadly, XRB (Raiblocks, formally) was designed that way. Instant, fee-less. Problem was, there were races and some bugs, which caused a lot of reconciliation problems for exchanges that listed it. It dropped after 2017, and AFAIK, is essentially a dead coin.
tim333 4y ago
People being well meaning and helping out does exist. I minority maybe but not zero.

redm 4y ago

"From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat." I'm holding crypto because I think it's neat, but I'm also holding it because there's little I can do with it... i.e., lack of general utility, yet.

IanCal 4y ago

There's definitely a lot that's interesting to me in it. It's a tricky programming environment, which I find personally fun, but it's an entirely public global database with stored procedures and custom row level security. Every stored procedure can call others written by anyone and there's a strong direct push towards open interfaces and interoperability. Unfortunately one of the easiest things to make with it is a new "currency" because it fits so well with the security model.

piperswe 4y ago

I'm in the same camp. I think a bunch of distributed technologies (like Ethereum) are really neat from a technical perspective and fun to tinker with, but I don't live under any delusion that the global financial system will ever build itself on top of anything that even somewhat resembles the cryptocurrencies we see today. I remember years ago it felt like the community was mostly comprised of people with our perspective, but that feeling has basically disappeared.

noman-land 4y ago
We need to continue to seek each other out. Finance people swarmed this space like locusts but they aren't who makes it special. It's the p2p ethos that makes it special.
- bb88 4y ago
  I think the crypto folks should just stop doing whatever they're doing now. What they need to do instead is to talk to regulators. If crypto 2.0 ain't regulated, people aren't gonna use it.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    People are using it, today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cinquemb 4y ago
    I've had long convo's with people at ISDA about decentralized derivatives on chain and risk/collateral management systems. SEC/CTFC (and their analogs in other jurisdictions) are better off enjoying their revolving door at GS/DB/JPM/etc

ninepoints 4y ago

> I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value. I find this "value proposition" highly dubious. You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM. Distributed compute on its own doesn't confer any points as a "store of value." The nature of the compute needs to be something that can be done strictly in the blockchain domain, and as we've seen, the result is a system that's easy to manipulate by spinning up new shitcoins, insider trading, wash trades, and worse - not to mention the loss of privacy given how effective on-chain analysis is. The features that make up a cryptocurrency make it decidedly unsuitable as the basis of a modern financial system. Some of the underlying principles are "neat," but that's as far as the tech goes for me.

alexambarch 4y ago
> You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself to make those changes is a digital token is what I find interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the fact that people arguably care about the state of this system is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.
- yunohn 4y ago
  What does this state hold exactly?
  - alexambarch 4y ago
    What entity an ENS record is registered to, who owns what JPEG, who sent who some Ether... Ethereum is one big state machine so that state holds everything.
    - 4y ago

jjk166 4y ago

Give it a few years, the scammers will move on to greener pastures and the nerds will keep tinkering. I remember people acting the same way about ecommerce in the early 00s.

outside1234 4y ago
What we have learned from other financial markets is that scammers will only move on when there is regulation.
- jjk166 4y ago
  Which markets did you learn that from?
- koolba 4y ago
  Not just regulation, you need actual enforcement with a high enough likelihood of consequence. Just look at telephone wire scams. They’re clearly illegal, but if there’s no teeth to prosecute then they’ll keep on coming.

antupis 4y ago

I think Etherium has real chanse to be the SSO provider of the internet value proposition is just too good vs current big providers.

j0hnyl 4y ago

You are not the only person, there are DOZENS of us!

at-fates-hands 4y ago

>> I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat. I'm here with you. Put $100 bucks in last year and have been tinkering here and there. Unfortunately my $100 is now worth $23, but I'm going to hold it and keep tinkering and wait for everything to sort of pan out. I still see the potential, but am exploring what else I can do with it.

rideontime 4y ago
What have you done with it?

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat. I also think a lot of the distributed systems work and technological achievements are neat. But I don't have to hold crypto to appreciate it, or even to use it. It's trivially easy to log in to an exchange and buy crypto whenever I might need it to do something. The concept of holding (or HODLing) isn't related to the underlying technology. It's a speculative investment. I also hold a token amount of crypto from back when I was playing around with the neatness of it, but it's just that: A token amount. You don't need to invest in it or make the number in your wallet go to an arbitrarily high number to experiment with the technology.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data transactions. Every time I read about Iota I get stuck on the reinventing of the wheel that is trits/trytes[1]. [1] https://iota-news.com/iota-tutorial-trit-and-tryte/ https://iota-news.com/iota-tutorial-trit-and-tryte/

jon-wood 4y ago

I’m genuinely curious to hear this from someone who’s clearly more in that world than I am - is anyone at all using Ethereum’s distributed nodes to do calculations for anything that isn’t some sort of abstract financial instrument? I ask because people constantly seem to tout the fact you can build anything with blockchains, and they’ll change the world, but I’ve never seen anything actually useful made with it beyond the dubiously valuable ability to transfer currency around the place.

noman-land 4y ago
ENS is my go to example for something novel and useful that Ethereum enables. Instantly propagating private key based DNS. https://ens.domains https://ens.domains

noman-land 4y ago

I'm with you on this. The overfinancialization of this tech bums me out hard. I stay away from conversations where people use words like bearish and bullish or talk about prices and gains and losses. That shit is so boring and uncreative I want to cry. I like peer to peer tech with no gatekeepers and no intermediaries. I like encryption and the ability to control how my data is used. I don't like the corporate cloud and I don't like gambling.

EGreg 4y ago

Not everyone is focused on "number go up". Some teams actually care about making distributed systems that serve communities around the world, and prefer to see people not have to trust centralized middlemen. Blockchains are not the best infrastructure for this, but they're good enough (Polygon Edge for instance), for many applications: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications Having said that, blockchains are going to go the way of mainframes and vacuum tubes eventually. Here is the roadmap of what has to happen for Web3 (smart contracts) to go mainstream: https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf I see a lot of use cases for it. Unfortunately many activists on HN love to comment how useless smart contracts are, while also silently downvoting any comments that disagree with that position. I think the profit motive really did derail a lot of Web3 -- but also the same can be said for Web2, it's just that VCs were the only ones who could invest (until the JOBS act, at least). So Web2 got stuck in near-monopolies, buying up competition, and extracting rents, while completely dominating our public forums. It didn't have to be this way. Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down Microsoft's $1M offer in high school, and put his software online for free. Even after he coded facemash and facebook, he was going to build a decentralized, open source file sharing system called Wirehog -- but then Sean Parker and Peter Thiel "put a bullet in that thing"[1]. They killed Mark Z's decentralized visions and turned him from an open source bro who loves hacking things together into a corporate golden boy who loves acqui-hiring competition (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus[2] etc.) and then trying to turn them into corporate teams, until they bounce when their golden handcuffs vest (founders of those companies). The people who did this to Zuck were themselves peculiar. Sean Parker himself used to be for open sharing (Napster) but rentseeking corporations in that sphere (RIAA, MPAA) sued and destroyed it. He learned a lesson and started Plaxo, and other VC-backed companies to basically lock up people's data in giant centralized server farms. It was he who told Zuck to basically cut out the decentralized open nonsense. And Peter Thiel with Clarion Capital had a far more radical vision: Competition is for losers! Build a monopoly.[3]. The result in our society is that Big Tech oligopolies have totally captured Web2 and own all our public forums. Elon and Zuck own our largest public forums and messengers. TikTok, WeChat and others have had a meteoric rise but they are even more closely tied with the government of China than FB and Twitter are with the US government. You'd think We the People should have an open source alternative. But HN loves Web2 and hates Web3. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Open-source_softw... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

That was my view on it back in the early 2010's when Bitcoin was just taking off. Back then, the only people interested in it were either geeks looking at this new weird thing, or drug dealers. And frankly, the drug dealing was "healthy" for the ecosystem as whole: because people were actually using it as a medium of exchange, there was a dampening force opposing changes in value, and so while it was volatile compared to real currency, it was nothing like it is today. Frankly, the fact that the takedown of the Silk Road didn't kill the entire market is still surprising to me. I'm not sure at what point the speculation bubble started, because I had well and proper lost interest at that point, but the idea that people willingly were/are pouring money into an system that has fundamentally broken its own economics is baffling to me. Transactions take too long and cost too much for it to be useful as a means of exchange, and if everybody is going through big exchanges than the anonymity factor doesn't exist either. Long story short, it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. If we could stop wasting the carbon footprint of a mid-sized country now to prop up an ecosystem of scams and baseless speculation now, that would be great.

m348e912 4y ago
So many good points made in your post. It makes me think of what could have been if bitcoin remained a layer of exchange. I had high hopes for bitcoin cash, but even that has had it's own challenges. (although it does work pretty well)
plsbenice34 4y ago
Silk Road had no impact because more markets opened up immediately, and Monero solved the anonymity/cost/time factor

knorker 4y ago

You're not the only one. It's just that's i recognized this "neat" feeling for what it was: the same one I got when I went to Vegas and won actual cash from the games. I didn't truly know that seductive feeling until then, the feeling that will ruin you. I didn't like that I liked it. And that feeling i got LARPing with cryptocurrencies too.

lucasgonze 4y ago

Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I agree that this technology is really neat. I love the creative computer science. I think this may be the ultimate driving force behind krypto. It's inspiring. It has poetry and romance. It's weird and intriguing. Those are not pointless things! The money of course resonates a lot more for most people, which is why all that weirdness has mainly been applied to fleecing suckers.

Zuiii 4y ago

You're definitely not alone. Despite costing me more thanks to binance's ridiculous "fees", I go out of my way to buy crypto to just to spend on services and charities that accept it - thanks mullvad, gandi*, fsf, and many more! I plan to continue doing this as long as even a single org continues to accept it. Payments don't need to go through a centralized and unaccountable processor anymore and, given the track records of the likes of visa and paypal, I argue they shouldn't. It's one thing for them to follow the law, but to destroy livelihoods of many people or to deny transferring money when both the sender and the receiver are in agreement for arbitrary subjective reasons is simply unacceptable. May those who accept crypto continue to prosper. * I haven't been able to pay gandi yet because they require me to use their weird payments platform, but I'd happily start paying them in crypto once they drop this silly requirement.

plsbenice34 4y ago

What does this have to do with the article? Seems like an issue to me that any 'crypto' content on HN largely leads to pages full of barely-relevant diatribe.