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HN hates crypto because the people making the most money are charismatic and risk-takers, which is the antithetical to the corporate engineer personality
by jiveturkey42 4y ago
HN hates crypto because the people making the most money are charismatic and risk-takers, which is the antithetical to the corporate engineer personality
- api 4y agoHN hates crypto because the perception at least is that people making money in crypto are just gambling and/or riding a Ponzi scheme bubble. HN likes people who make money by actually creating value. HN also tends to hate conventional fiat currency based financial capitalism for the same reason.
- beezlewax 4y agoCoinbase and their ilk are banks. They've centralized the decentralized. It is hilarious.
- meltyness 4y agoPerhaps this is the new university, we're not a post-idea economy, and once unleashed, commodity software is immutable. Like the calculus, the crypto banks will unleash their ideas and vanish leaving only what is understood good and true.
- AISnakeOil 4y agoExactly, there's no difference between Coinbase and Bank of America.
- tylersmith 4y agoThey have not centralized things that were previously decentralized. They've created new centralized things that provide services at the edges of the decentralized stuff.
- TylerE 4y agoI dunno if you can really call VC exit worship as 'creating value'.
- api 4y agoThere's a fair amount of skepticism around here toward sky-high valuations. Find any article on Softbank.
- likeabbas 4y agoI don't speak for all of hacker news, but I don't like current cryptocurrencies because something can't both be a currency and a speculative investment. Currencies need to be stable enough to use for transactions. I get pissed off every time I try to buy something with a cryptocurrency but the price of it has dropped before any exchange allows me to us it to withdraw it into my own wallet. Also, crypto currencies are not decentralized. The developers can issue however many coins they want, and give themselves as much of that as they want. I believe we will see this with Bitcoin at some point. At least when a democratic government controls a currency, the people have some sort of control in that process (by voting politicians out if they do corrupt things).
- lostmsu 4y ago> Currencies need to be stable enough to use for transactions. That is true for most people as playing a full game of economic chess with real stakes against a strong opponent that is the market during every purchase is really hard, but I think in general that's absolutely not a requirement. E.g. the entities who can do that will.
- likeabbas 4y agoYou wrote a lot of words to not say anything at all
- lostmsu 4y agoOn one hand I did not attempt to simplify the statement for easy reading. On the other hand your comment just supports the point, that common folk can't be bothered to think hard, and therefore are adamant to use volatile currencies, but currencies are not only used by common folk.
- likeabbas 4y agoYou’re so up your own ass it’s ridiculous. I understand the Chord protocol which all p2p systems are based on far better than you understand currencies it seems. Currencies need to be stable for economies to build on them. When currencies are unstable, you get countries like Venezuela. Even if the currency is increasing in price, it becomes unstable for transactions because no one will want to spend the currency which means businesses will not receive money needed to sustain the economy. This is why currencies need to be relatively stable.
- blitzar 4y ago> making the most money are charismatic and risk-takers SBF was worth $100 billion for a while there - guess that makes him the sexiest most charismatic risk-taker out there.
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- lawtalkinghuman 4y agoI mean, he pitched an app where one could "buy everything from a bitcoin to a banana" while simltaneously playing League of Legends and got $213 million from Sequoia Capital. That's pretty baller.
- blitzar 4y agoOr Sequoia Capital are dumb ...