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People seem to see new developments as black boxes that you can't analyze. Like they see something new and ask themselves "will it work?" and then say it will w

People seem to see new developments as black boxes that you can't analyze. Like they see something new and ask themselves "will it work?" and then say it will work or not based on whether the last thing worked... with zero nuance. Let's try to analyze crypto on its own as an example: yes, crypto was a new frontier in money supply, but what makes it critically different? And are these critical differences actually desired? Crypto was critically different in that it would decentralize the financial system. Was it desired? Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations? No one could figure it out. So if crypto was trying to sell something that no one really wanted, how the heck could it work? ...then it crashed... because there was no centralized control. It's not like we haven't had this happen in history already.

netsharc 4y ago
> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations? So far the crypto orgs have called a centralized institution called law enforcement...
- Rantenki 4y ago
  That doesn't return your money to you like the credit card though. The irreversibility 'feature' of most cryptocurrencies makes it really hard to recover funds stolen through fraud... I guess that is a desirable feature for anybody performing fraud though.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Of the things that make cryptocurrency something I want to avoid, the irreversibility part is the biggest problem.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Nothing is ever irreversible, it's just a question of how expensive it is to make the database writes. Ethereum forked the whole currency to undo a write (the DAO hack) and if the legal system can find a hacker they can make them reverse their transaction. …But having someone with admin access over the network and can fix mistakes is just a lot cheaper than refusing to build that in for ideological reasons.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Most (but not all) things in life are technically reversible. But some things are so difficult or expensive to reverse that they are effectively irreversible nonetheless.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      I'm guessing you avoid cash for the same reason?
  - chii 4y ago
    if you can locate the physical person who stole your crypto, you can always use the rubber hose method of returning your money. I bet it works.
- panarky 4y ago
  VR doesn't need to replace social media for it to be useful. AI doesn't need to replace doctors for it to be useful. Crypto doesn't need to replace your credit card for it to be useful. If none of these things are useful to you, that's fine, other people find them useful and that's okay. Think "and" instead of "or".
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
    I agree. VR will have killer apps in particular domains, but that doesn’t mean it will be used by everyone all of the time. For example, I work in ocean mapping where we have large amounts of point cloud data that need occasional manual editing/QAQC in an environment that matches the dimensionality of the data. My colleagues are working on some very interesting VR point cloud editing tools [1]. [1] https://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/projects/point_clouds/ https://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/projects/point_clouds/
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I agree! But that's not how any of those things are being sold.
_glass 4y ago
I think crypto is great for anonymous digital markets. It would be great to disrupt the financial industry, but that's a really big thing. For the markets, I think NFTs is a really good use case. That's a way for artists to have digital galleries, receiving international payments, work can get traded, all independent of the marketplace itself. No company behind that. Books, audio content, ..., and so on are also easily the target of a next generation. I don't believe in this tokenization of physical goods, because then you have a company behind creating the link between token and good. But for purely virtual goods, I think it is great.
- tomcam 4y ago
  In a Blockchain world, how was there anonymity with crypto? I’m guessing the answer is that not all crypto is on blockchain, but I actually have no clue.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Monera supposedly is untraceable somehow. And you can do things with passing private keys and mixers even on bitcoin.
    - astrange 4y ago
      You have to analyze the entire system including what they use the untraceable currency for. Someone's sent you a billion dollars in Monero the IRS doesn't know you have - okay. But now when you use it to buy a mansion, won't that be obvious?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Thats basic money laundering and HSBC is ready to help you.
      - PretzelPirate 4y ago
        The desire to have untraceable money isn't always because you're trying to do something illegal or immoral. Privacy is important to people, and that even extends to privacy from your government. You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime. If you do buy a mansion with unreported billions and you're buying from a reputable buyer, then you'd expect the government to know about that sale, but if you're stock piling assets in case you need to flee from your government to survive, having anonymous money that's easy to transport is valuable.
philwelch 4y ago
Crypto would be extremely useful if it were wholeheartedly adopted by the government of a medium-sized country. The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat; the problem is that no one pays their taxes in it so no one uses it as a real currency. Likewise, NFT’s could be used to implement property titles if a government ever agreed to enforce them. Then things like smart contracts and whatnot start to look a lot more interesting. The problem is that the entire crypto economy is a fake play-money ecosystem with no power over physical reality.
- philwelch 4y ago
  This went from +2 to -1 overnight, and I'm not complaining; I'm just curious if I got downvoted by the crypto haters or by the crypto supporters. Such is the risk of expressing a nuanced opinion on Hacker News I suppose.
  - nly 4y ago
    The thing you're missing is there are no incentives for a sovereign nation to give up the ability to mint their own currency and control its supply (monetary policy).
    - philwelch 4y ago
      There’s a reason I said “medium-sized country”. The US, EU, and apparently now China wouldn’t be interested because they are world reserve currencies, or aspire to be in China’s case. On the other hand, you could probably make a case to voters for cryptocurrency to replace something utterly dysfunctional like the Argentine peso. Crypto doesn’t really do much for a country with functioning and trustworthy governing institutions, but not every country has that.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are just as fiat as any other currency, including the gold standard.
gspencley 4y ago
> Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). Interestingly, there is a well respected school of thought in economics that pins the blame for the boom/bust cycle on artificially manipulating interest rates via that exact centralization. > When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. I'm not really sure how that is an example of "centralization." A private lender with whom you've entered into a loan agreement does not control the supply of the currency. They could just as easily be lending you gold or bread. I'm no cyrpto fanboy ... couldn't really care less about it ... but in theory there is no reason that a bank couldn't lend you Bitcoins or something. If there is a problem with the currency that's going to bite you regardless of what the currency is. I think the strongest case for crypto was using it as a hedge against inflation. Inflation being an increase in the supply of fiat currency. Something that, whether you subscribe to the "Mises school" of economics or not, is irrefutably caused by the central bank creating new currency out of thin air, thus diluting the purchasing power of the existing money in circulation. I propose that that is "irrefutable" because, in order to debunk it, you would have to demonstrate that the law of supply and demand is false and/or that currency is not a commodity subject to the same "rules" as every other.
- thrashh 4y ago
  I don’t disagree that the boom/bust cycle could be created by centralization, but I also don’t care I suppose. I mean, there’s no perfect solution out there so a boom/bust is a reasonably mild price. A large reason why crypto, at least in the current implementations, can provide decentralization is by removing discretion from any authority and making transactions permanent. That’s in contrast to our current money system, because it’s merely numbers that ultimately can be manipulated by central authorities and accessible by law enforcement, that ultimately means that transactions are not truly permanent and that allows us to repair mistakes after the fact, a feature not really afforded by crypto. It’s a very helpful feature. I also consider a consistent amount of inflation an important feature of any successful economy. Without inflation, I would be incentivized to hold my money whenever I expect deflation, which is terrible because it’s basically me hoarding value from society. Runaway inflation is absolutely disastrous and I don’t see how crypto could have been considered a hedge against it if its entire value is backed purely by speculative demand. Contrast that to the USD or other currency where that is backed by the full faith and credit of a government. Obviously that is meaningless of we’re talking about, say, Argentina but the US has successfully been the same, largely dependable, and boring government for 245 years and through earning a reputation with time that the USD can be treated as a reserve currency.

netsharc 4y ago

> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations? So far the crypto orgs have called a centralized institution called law enforcement...

Rantenki 4y ago
That doesn't return your money to you like the credit card though. The irreversibility 'feature' of most cryptocurrencies makes it really hard to recover funds stolen through fraud... I guess that is a desirable feature for anybody performing fraud though.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Of the things that make cryptocurrency something I want to avoid, the irreversibility part is the biggest problem.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Nothing is ever irreversible, it's just a question of how expensive it is to make the database writes. Ethereum forked the whole currency to undo a write (the DAO hack) and if the legal system can find a hacker they can make them reverse their transaction. …But having someone with admin access over the network and can fix mistakes is just a lot cheaper than refusing to build that in for ideological reasons.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Most (but not all) things in life are technically reversible. But some things are so difficult or expensive to reverse that they are effectively irreversible nonetheless.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    I'm guessing you avoid cash for the same reason?
- chii 4y ago
  if you can locate the physical person who stole your crypto, you can always use the rubber hose method of returning your money. I bet it works.
panarky 4y ago
VR doesn't need to replace social media for it to be useful. AI doesn't need to replace doctors for it to be useful. Crypto doesn't need to replace your credit card for it to be useful. If none of these things are useful to you, that's fine, other people find them useful and that's okay. Think "and" instead of "or".
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  I agree. VR will have killer apps in particular domains, but that doesn’t mean it will be used by everyone all of the time. For example, I work in ocean mapping where we have large amounts of point cloud data that need occasional manual editing/QAQC in an environment that matches the dimensionality of the data. My colleagues are working on some very interesting VR point cloud editing tools [1]. [1] https://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/projects/point_clouds/ https://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/projects/point_clouds/
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I agree! But that's not how any of those things are being sold.

_glass 4y ago

I think crypto is great for anonymous digital markets. It would be great to disrupt the financial industry, but that's a really big thing. For the markets, I think NFTs is a really good use case. That's a way for artists to have digital galleries, receiving international payments, work can get traded, all independent of the marketplace itself. No company behind that. Books, audio content, ..., and so on are also easily the target of a next generation. I don't believe in this tokenization of physical goods, because then you have a company behind creating the link between token and good. But for purely virtual goods, I think it is great.

tomcam 4y ago
In a Blockchain world, how was there anonymity with crypto? I’m guessing the answer is that not all crypto is on blockchain, but I actually have no clue.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Monera supposedly is untraceable somehow. And you can do things with passing private keys and mixers even on bitcoin.
  - astrange 4y ago
    You have to analyze the entire system including what they use the untraceable currency for. Someone's sent you a billion dollars in Monero the IRS doesn't know you have - okay. But now when you use it to buy a mansion, won't that be obvious?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Thats basic money laundering and HSBC is ready to help you.
    - PretzelPirate 4y ago
      The desire to have untraceable money isn't always because you're trying to do something illegal or immoral. Privacy is important to people, and that even extends to privacy from your government. You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime. If you do buy a mansion with unreported billions and you're buying from a reputable buyer, then you'd expect the government to know about that sale, but if you're stock piling assets in case you need to flee from your government to survive, having anonymous money that's easy to transport is valuable.

philwelch 4y ago

Crypto would be extremely useful if it were wholeheartedly adopted by the government of a medium-sized country. The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat; the problem is that no one pays their taxes in it so no one uses it as a real currency. Likewise, NFT’s could be used to implement property titles if a government ever agreed to enforce them. Then things like smart contracts and whatnot start to look a lot more interesting. The problem is that the entire crypto economy is a fake play-money ecosystem with no power over physical reality.

philwelch 4y ago
This went from +2 to -1 overnight, and I'm not complaining; I'm just curious if I got downvoted by the crypto haters or by the crypto supporters. Such is the risk of expressing a nuanced opinion on Hacker News I suppose.
- nly 4y ago
  The thing you're missing is there are no incentives for a sovereign nation to give up the ability to mint their own currency and control its supply (monetary policy).
  - philwelch 4y ago
    There’s a reason I said “medium-sized country”. The US, EU, and apparently now China wouldn’t be interested because they are world reserve currencies, or aspire to be in China’s case. On the other hand, you could probably make a case to voters for cryptocurrency to replace something utterly dysfunctional like the Argentine peso. Crypto doesn’t really do much for a country with functioning and trustworthy governing institutions, but not every country has that.
CRConrad 4y ago
> The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are just as fiat as any other currency, including the gold standard.

gspencley 4y ago

> Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). Interestingly, there is a well respected school of thought in economics that pins the blame for the boom/bust cycle on artificially manipulating interest rates via that exact centralization. > When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. I'm not really sure how that is an example of "centralization." A private lender with whom you've entered into a loan agreement does not control the supply of the currency. They could just as easily be lending you gold or bread. I'm no cyrpto fanboy ... couldn't really care less about it ... but in theory there is no reason that a bank couldn't lend you Bitcoins or something. If there is a problem with the currency that's going to bite you regardless of what the currency is. I think the strongest case for crypto was using it as a hedge against inflation. Inflation being an increase in the supply of fiat currency. Something that, whether you subscribe to the "Mises school" of economics or not, is irrefutably caused by the central bank creating new currency out of thin air, thus diluting the purchasing power of the existing money in circulation. I propose that that is "irrefutable" because, in order to debunk it, you would have to demonstrate that the law of supply and demand is false and/or that currency is not a commodity subject to the same "rules" as every other.

thrashh 4y ago
I don’t disagree that the boom/bust cycle could be created by centralization, but I also don’t care I suppose. I mean, there’s no perfect solution out there so a boom/bust is a reasonably mild price. A large reason why crypto, at least in the current implementations, can provide decentralization is by removing discretion from any authority and making transactions permanent. That’s in contrast to our current money system, because it’s merely numbers that ultimately can be manipulated by central authorities and accessible by law enforcement, that ultimately means that transactions are not truly permanent and that allows us to repair mistakes after the fact, a feature not really afforded by crypto. It’s a very helpful feature. I also consider a consistent amount of inflation an important feature of any successful economy. Without inflation, I would be incentivized to hold my money whenever I expect deflation, which is terrible because it’s basically me hoarding value from society. Runaway inflation is absolutely disastrous and I don’t see how crypto could have been considered a hedge against it if its entire value is backed purely by speculative demand. Contrast that to the USD or other currency where that is backed by the full faith and credit of a government. Obviously that is meaningless of we’re talking about, say, Argentina but the US has successfully been the same, largely dependable, and boring government for 245 years and through earning a reputation with time that the USD can be treated as a reserve currency.