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This is totally an aside, but Im not into crypto and have a fairly negative connotation with it but I don’t necessarily think crypto is bullshit. I think the pr

• pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Agreed with all of the above, but crypto !== bitcoin, and bitcoin is basically one of the few last holdouts using Proof of Work consensus at this point. I don't know if it will ever be displaced because there are so many irrational people in the space, but whatever happens with crypto, I hope consensus mechanisms that aren't energy-hungry displace proof of work.
• VHRanger 4y ago
  Bitcoin's power consumption isn't a "tradeoff". It's just as centralized as proof of stake systems. Bitcoin's power consumption is just appealing to the religious aspect of the network : if we changed it, it would go against the original design. Even though it burns 1% of world energy consumption for that stupidity.
• sethd 4y ago
  It doesn't solve a real problem, it solves an academic problem. I believe this is why a lot of people fall for the blockchain trap, it's interesting on an academic level, so they come to the conclusion that there must be value in there in there somewhere.
  • deweller 4y ago
    It might not solve a real problem that you have, but it does solve the following real problem: How do you create a shared transaction ledger without a central point of failure and control?
    • fauxpause_ 4y ago
      That is a question, not a problem.
    • sethd 4y ago
      > How do you create a shared transaction ledger without a central point of failure and control? How is this not exactly what I was referring to? (solving an academic problem rather than a real world problem)
    • kelseyfrog 4y ago
      I'm walking through my last 30 years on thus planet and that thought hasn't ever entered my mind. What were you doing in your life that prompted that desire to express itself?
      • darkerside 4y ago
        How many people thought a centralized VCS was just fine, and why would you even need distributed features?
        • kelseyfrog 4y ago
          That would be a good argument, except this is a thread about crypto and doing a Humpty Dumptyism that we're actually talking about VCS doesn't really make the point. I'm not getting baited into a discussion about how crypto-currencies and DVCS are abstractly the same thing and should be treated as such.
        • toast0 4y ago
          Very few people use the distributed features of git. It's almost always centralized at a corporate repository, a git forge, or there's not actually any collaboration. It's almost always pull from my branch on the centralized repo, not pull from my repo at this unrelated host.
• Hoasi 4y ago
  > Not really that useful at the moment (and maybe never will be)? Yes. One of the only valid points of crypto is separating money from the government. However, its proponents emphasize obscure benefits that make it look more obtuse than it should. As they stand, cryptocurrencies, in the eye of the general public, look either like a Ponzi scheme, free money, or too convoluted to bother, as they solve nothing other technologies don't solve already.
  • nradov 4y ago
    How is separating money from government a valid point? Money is inextricably bound up with fundamental governmental issues including a monopoly over violence and the ability to levy taxes. Cryptocurrency might have some temporary utility for people physically stuck inside failed states like Venezuela but those situations are by nature unlikely to persist long term.
    • Hoasi 4y ago
      > How is separating money from government a valid point? Money is inextricably bound up with fundamental governmental issues including a monopoly over violence and the ability to levy taxes. It looks like you've just answered your question right there.
      • CRConrad 4y ago
        > > How is separating money from government a valid point? Money is inextricably bound up with fundamental governmental issues including a monopoly over violence and the ability to levy taxes. > It looks like you've just answered your question right there. Eh... Yes, indeed they did. Only, not in the way it appears you thought they did: Look up the word “inextricably”. Yup, money can't be separated from government – if it could be, whoever now ran money in stead of the old government would in effect be the new government. Hard to say if even trying is more evil than stupid or the other way around, vut that doesn't matter much, now does it?
• nivenkos 4y ago
  The real issue with cryptocurrency is that it's not scaleable. If they had some magic way of handling transactions so every node didn't need to keep all history, and nodes could be sharded in a hierarchy like DNS, etc. transactions times were near-instant and almost-free, etc. then it'd be a lot more useful.
  • rybosworld 4y ago
    > The real issue with cryptocurrency is that it's not scaleable. This is very outdated commentary. Cryptocurrency's get better at scaling every year. Bitcoin was the first, so naturally it is the slowest. Transactions per second (TPS) is around 5. Ethereum, which released a few years after Bitcoin is around 30 TPS. There are newer crypto's like Loopring that can currently do 500 TPS. Ethereum 2.0, is aiming for 100,000 TPS. If they meet this goal, they'll be capable of more TPS than Visa.
    • cableshaft 4y ago
      And Solana has already proven to handle up to at least 8,453 TPS[1]. There might be others that can get higher, not sure. [1]: https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-all-time-high/ https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-al...
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  I don't think using a refrigerator to crush a fly is bullshit. Is it too difficult to do by yourself? Yes. Will it damage your floor? Yes. Will it damage the refrigerator? Yes. But I don’t think it’s bullshit because it does solve a real problem - killing the fly.
  • glofish 4y ago
    It is bullshit because it only works in theory, the big refrigerator will crush the tiny fly ... in reality the fly escapes with ease the bullshit part refers to just that, pretending that the refrigerator could be an appropriate good solution, when in fact can't actually even perform the task
    • AlbertCory 4y ago
      nitpicky. would you prefer an insect that can't fly away?
• rchaud 4y ago
  > The disconnect comes from crypto people misjudging the world. The operative word here is "people". People are better judges of what other people want. And what people want is to make a quick profit in cryptobucks, and convert it into something they can buy real things with, preferably without a lot of transaction fees. Crypto does not understand this, because it is a rigid top-down system that only works on the assumption that there is no fiat off-ramp, and crypto is the only currency being used. But that's not reality; in reality, people would not care about crypto if they didn't think it would make them rich in 'real money' terms.
• ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  Crypto, at least as someone who once hoped at a cyberpunk future (for reasons), had one and only one thing to do: kill the middle-men: banks, payment processors, credit/debit card operators, SWIFT, and so forth. I want to send money to someone: I should be able to do so (i) instantly (message passing at light speed), (ii) at 0 cost (price of electricity), and (iii) without asking anyone for permission. Crypto failed miserably to achieve this. Furthermore, it has allied (or been rallied) with the "enemy"; crypto enthusiasts regard it as "good for Bitcoin"™ when banks announce investment in the crypto space. It is now a project unable to dream a future for itself beyond "hodl".
  • mrbombastic 4y ago
    I am a crypto skeptic but some of the pegged cryptos have come close to solving that use case.* A lot of money changers in Argentina will accept USDT which you can send from anywhere in the world. Of course you can’t get rich off speculatively trading a pegged currency so it largely goes unnoticed. Obvious caveats: sketchy backing of these currencies, legality of all that, but it is already being used for that purpose. A US government backed coin could effectively kill credit cards and money orders but they no doubt also want some form of KYC to make sure you aren’t funding ISIS or whatever. Of course that is anathema to crypto bros who hold decentralization above all else.
    • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      Sure, at least one major benefit of KYC (which is also completely broken with crypto) is the "Undo button". Plenty of times you need to phone a bank and they will sometimes, begrudgingly, press the Undo button. What's Mr. Nakamoto's number if something goes wrong in a crypto transaction?
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    To give credit where it’s due, crypto spurred the Fed to launch FedNOW.
    • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
• dang 4y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35538174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35538174.
• DonHopkins 4y ago
  > it does solve a real problem - verifying transactions independently Yeah, but who actually needs that "problem" solved? Money launderers? Drug dealers? Scam artists? Adolescent boys whacking off to Ayn Rand books in their mother's basement?
  • dkirill 4y ago
    People not privileged enough to have access to western banking
    • rrdharan 4y ago
      Yet somehow sophisticated and well informed enough to keep their keys secure and not get scammed.
      • dkirill 4y ago
        I don’t understand your point. Are you implying that people don’t have access to western finance because they are not sophisticated enough? If you don’t luck into being born with good citizenship lots of things you might take for granted are inaccessible. It has nothing to do with level of sophistication
        • jeromegv 4y ago
          The point is that people who were the most impacted of the fall of FTX and all those others exchanges are actually people in developing countries that lost ALL their savings. It was perhaps a few thousands dollar for people in the western world, an alternative way to do some investing, but lots of people in countries with bad financial systems (lets say Argentina or Venezuela) tried to use crypto as their stable banking system and it failed them miserably and now lost almost everything. So while in theory crypto offers that alternative that should be better than those shitty countries economic policies, in practice, this gave them something worse than their local bank. Yes Yes, you can use a hardware wallet and would have avoided all of that, the reality is that a very high percentage of people were just using the tools offered to them and didn't think it was all a giant fraud.
• pid-1 4y ago
  > But I don’t think it’s bullshit because it does solve a real problem - verifying transactions independently. But of course there are trade offs with this, such as bitcoin’s power consumption. The disconnect comes from crypto people misjudging the world. The current financial system simply isn’t so bad to require all the weird trade offs of crypto. If the current financial system stopped working and for some reason we needed to actually use Bitcoin to pay stuff, it would not be possible. Cryptocurrencies don't scale, because the way they work is extremely inefficient.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    When you say it would not be possible, do you mean that it couldn’t handle the volume? That hardly means it’s worthless. And I already granted it’s worth less than the current financial system. So I believe we’re in agreement.
  • incrudible 4y ago
    We would not use Bitcoin for ordinary transactions, at least not Layer 1. That would be the equivalent of transporting your money in an armored truck. There is plenty of ways to scale with Layer 2, but Layer 1 fees on Bitcoin Cash or other smaller cryptos are currently so low that this is not necessary.
    • throwway120385 4y ago
      So what you're saying is we will have some kind of central system, like a bank, that issues Bitcoin, and then a bunch of spoke systems that issue currency based on the value of the Bitcoin holdings? How is that different from what we do now?
      • ericd 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure that's not at all what he's saying, he's just saying that the existing bitcoin network would serve as a net settlement layer for L2 systems, which handle the much higher volume of everyday transactions. My understanding is that net settlement between banks is much less frequent than the capacity of BTC. Lightning (an L2 system on Bitcoin) is essentially a system of peer to peer exchange of signed BTC transactions, which supersede previous ones, but don't get committed to the main net. In that way, you can keep a running tab between counterparties with effectively no marginal cost until one of you decides to close the tab by committing it.