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It seems there is nothing good that came out of crypto so far. Carbon emissions, waste of money on the mining facilities, GPUs wasted, production capacity for s

It seems there is nothing good that came out of crypto so far. Carbon emissions, waste of money on the mining facilities, GPUs wasted, production capacity for silicon wasted. And what is a result so far? Financial scams, crypto extortion schemes, bot nets, black market and drug market currency, exchange failures. A lot of negatives and literally nothing on the positive side. And now this dystopian Worldcoin scheme.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Perhaps soaking up the supply of GPUs has delayed the AI singularity, if only marginally?
- pavlov 3y ago
  Turns out Satoshi was a time traveler who tried to distract humanity from building AIs for at least a decade longer, in order to prevent the extinction of mankind that happened in his timeline. The last remaining human scientists spent their final years hiding from AI patrols, devising a viral idea that could be implemented on 2010 technology and that would suck up the maximum amount of programmer brainpower and silicon resources without delivering any progress towards AI. Cryptocurrency was the solution they came up with. A man who looks surprisingly like Bruce Willis was sent back to seed the idea…
  - hollerith 3y ago
    It is sad that they couldn't think of a way to distract investors that didn't encourage investment in GPU technology.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Alternatively, the enormous increase in GPU production for crypto seems to have translated directly into enormous gains in AI right around the time that crypto hype imploded. For a while there all the dumped mining GPUs were super cheap, and GPU manufacturers had scaled up their manufacturing capabilities to be able to easily meet increased demand as AI ramped up. It's possible AI would have developed more slowly had we not had so many GPUs lying around and nothing to use them for.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Its a good medium for grey and "benevolent" black market transactions, like inhalers and other drugs without a prescription. ... And maybe private blockchains are a useful data structure for some niches? This is a pretty weak devil's advocate argument though.
iLoveOncall 3y ago
Blockchain is just a shitty technology and people need to start to realize that it is absolutely useless. An ecosystem built on top of a entirely rotten core will be rotten.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  Blockchains per se are just a signed distributed data structure though. I don't like cryptocurrencies and all the greedy hype. Just wanting to say that blockchains still might be useful data structures for some use cases.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    Just wanting to say that blockchains still might be useful data structures for some use cases. There's some company that publishes a blockchain checksum in a tiny ad in the New York Times every day. I don't remember what they're securing, but that is the method it uses to make sure the code is distributed widely without anyone being able to tamper with it.
ivanstegic 3y ago
Can anyone name at least one positive effect Crypto has had?
- buzzert 3y ago
  Can anyone name at least one positive effect Money has had?
  - capitalsigma 3y ago
    Money allows for economic specialization, leading to greater productivity. You don't build an economy that produces cell phones when you're stuck bartering goats for wheat.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      I feel like this is not answering the spirit of their question. What is bad about Crypto which isn't some nth-order effect of Money? - When a layperson is scammed out of their Crypto the problem is that they lost Money because they used Money to buy the Crypto. (Yes, given the current ecosystem it is easier for my grandmother to be convinced to transfer all of her Crypto such that she can't get it back but that's bad because she's losing Money.) - People are incentivized to run machines which "mine" Crypto -- but otherwise do nothing externally useful while also causing other negative externalities such as carbon emissions -- because the Crypto can be sold for Money.
  - romafirst3 3y ago
    Sure. I can walk into a shop anywhere in the world and exchange money (in the local currency) for goods.
  - munk-a 3y ago
    It allows me to farm something that I harvest in the fall and buy fish in the spring. There are a plethora of other examples but common mediums of exchange are essential to allow specialization and the society we live in.
- 3y ago
arcticbull 3y ago
The only benefit - if you believe that the quantity of people willing to commit crimes is constant - is that it has concentrated the criminality into a parallel ecosystem and out of the primary economy. Basically a walled garden for criminals to steal from each other. If you believe in induced demand of criminality well, bad news there too.
- georgyo 3y ago
  It definitely emboldened criminal behavior, especially things like ransomware.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  That's easily falsified, because you can trade bitcoin for good, services, and currency which is... things around it. And you can also extort bitcoin from victims. So criminals are not isolated in any way. Their transactions are less visible and trackable. But that's not a benefit. It's the very thing that's permitting them to get organized at scale, and then take on other less anonymous systems. Like topple governments, buy politicians, have their own military like in Mexico, and so on.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  ??? The local drug dealers don't trade w/ crypto.
- za_creature 3y ago
  With no opinion on whether this is a good thing or not, the blockchain as described by the original author(s) does allow (as long as the hash function holds up and there's financial incentive to crunch the numbers) proof of public delivery of a message, thus negating the need for notaries.
BasedAnon 3y ago
>It seems there is nothing good that came out of crypto so far I think evading taxes and sanctions is pretty good actually
block_dagger 3y ago
Literally nothing on the positive side is a weak position. Bitcoin has provided many positive things for many users, and blockchain/consensus has many promising applications beyond finance. WorldCoin’s main pitch is not financial, but based on proving human identity in a world full of AI fakery. But that’s a different discussion.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > Bitcoin has provided many positive things for many users, and blockchain/consensus has many promising applications beyond finance. Sorry but no it hasn’t; and no it doesn’t. 15 years now and nothing concrete for many reasons that have been eloquently expounded on many times. If that changes let me know.
  - staplers 3y ago
    About $1,000,000,000,000 opposes your viewpoint.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    It sounds like you're lucky to have access to a reasonable banking system. Lots of people in the world don't, and in some (not all, but some) of those situations Bitcoin and similar projects have been useful to many people.
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      These conversations are so tiresome. Transaction fees have spiked in the past to like $60 direct plus $200 in energy wasted. The GDP per capita in the worst-off African countries is like $200. You think they should spend 6 months of GDP per capita to make each transaction just because a lot of people are trying to make payments? Even today it's like 1% of GDP per capita per transaction in direct fees. It's inadequate for a large flea market or a midsize Costco let alone a global payments network for the underserved. Onboarding everyone onto Lightning would take 75 years and trillions of dollars in fees, plus the entire block reward. Not to mention the worst off are the most affected by volatility, and this thing flails around like a balloon you forgot to tie off. And 'similar projects' just get hacked or rugged constantly. Honestly how dare anyone recommend a system like this to the most vulnerable? They're much better served by something like M-PESA. The reality of the situation is that only the people in wealthy countries are in a position to, and can afford to, speculate on this silliness. Those people are already adequately served. The vulnerable deserve real solutions and this is at best and most charitably a distraction from their development.
cyrillite 3y ago
Directly? Not a lot. Indirectly, it kickstarted global CBDCs research, blockchain-integration research across major financial institutions, tokenisation efforts, etc. Would all these things have happened anyway? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know if blockchains in the form we got them were necessary, but they surely are this possible world’s ignition. Will this all be beneficial in the long run? TBD. But, the story isn’t over yet. Crypto was possibly a net fuck up though
- ozr 3y ago
  > Indirectly, it kickstarted global CBDCs research, blockchain-integration research across major financial institutions, tokenisation efforts, etc. These are also all negatives. Profound wastes of time.
- notatoad 3y ago
  >Indirectly, it kickstarted global CBDCs research, blockchain-integration research across major financial institutions, tokenisation efforts, etc. none of those things are things. research into more crypto is not a benefit of crypto. it's just crypto.
- takeda 3y ago
  Had that research being something valuable, you would have a point, but as of now crypto just led to more crypto. That's not a benefit.
skybrian 3y ago
A side effect of Bitcoin is a huge amount of wasted electricity. (Though not always. "Stranded" electrical power would have gone unused anyway.) A side effect of Worldcoin seems to be sending money to people in African countries. If that were the only real-world effect, that's pretty good! It's unintentional charity work. The retina scan ensures that the money will be widely distributed. The question is, what do people actually lose by getting a retina scan? It sounds creepy, sure, but it seems they're unharmed? What can Worldcoin even do with a hash of a retina scan for some random person?
philbert101 3y ago
This is the reason why there is a significant movement within the bitcoin community to separate it away from everything else in the “crypto” space. For those who makes no distinction and hold a similar view, maybe the Pineapple Fund is a good starting point to learn why “bitcoin is not crypto, and crypto is not bitcoin”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Fund
rvz 3y ago
> Carbon emissions, waste of money on the mining facilities, GPUs wasted, production capacity for silicon wasted. Crypto already has efficient alternatives for their consensus operations, as demonstrated by Ethereum which moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and cut its footprint by 99%, which shows it is already possible and works today. AI (Deep Learning) on the other hand has none available today and continues to waste resources, water, money and electricity over fine-tuning, training, and inference. [0] All to create hallucinating chatbots and broken models that cannot reason or explain themselves and have to be retrained or tweaked because its creators know that they cannot be trusted. It seems like the field of Deep Learning still hasn't innovated to reduce its own resource hungriness and footprint yet requires more compute wastage with no efficient alternative in sight for their operations. EDIT: Of course when you can't refute a point like the one I just made, why not censor it instead? [0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...
andrepd 3y ago
Tbh you could say the same about many other sectors of activity (like advertising), even in finance itself (like HFT).
- munk-a 3y ago
  The statement "at least we're not as immoral as advertisers" is... gosh, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel at that point.
sneak 3y ago
This is demonstrably untrue. Perhaps subjectively you think cryptocurrency is a net loss, but even the harshest critics cannot objectively agree with "nothing good". Millions of dollars of donations have been raised and donated to charities (across borders!) using cryptocurrencies, for one thing. There are many other good things that have come about as a result of it, but falsifying your "nothing" argument only takes one pin to pop.
- uoaei 3y ago
  It wasn't "crypto" per se that enabled those donations, since those donations could have been just as easily sent and received without crypto, ergo it can't be said that that outcome is attributable to crypto.
  - sneak 3y ago
    I would not have been able to donate to Wikileaks by any other method than the one I used; Visa and MC had already voluntarily sanctioned/frozen them before anyone was charged with any crime. I am also aware of people inside Russia who recently donated to the Ukranian war effort. This again seems to be otherwise an impossibility. Your claim seems to me to be incorrect. It's okay to not like crypto or to think that it's overall a net bad thing; it's not okay to spread factual inaccuracies. It has 100% enabled things that were not possible before. That's a fact, not an opinion.
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      I would not have been able to donate to Wikileaks by any other method than the one I used What was stopping you from putting cash in an envelope? In a lot of ways, that's even safer than crypto. Untraceable and with no fees for tech bro middlemen.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
tkz1312 3y ago
[dead]
dongping 3y ago
The crypto scams highlight the consequences of lacking regulation. Incorporating lessons from a century of financial turmoil could make crypto viable (implementing laws and regulations as code), though potentially less attractive to those seeking an alternative.
cortic 3y ago
The freedom to buy remotely without an unelected body controlling your purchases. Generous investments in energy infrastructure, much of it in renewables. Investment in GPU technology and infrastructure. Even the bad stuff like crime, in places where the law is brutally unjust crypto is a good tool to get around it. And blaming crypto for carbon emissions is like blaming Tesla for carbon emissions because a recharge comes from coal plants. Its our responsibility to structure renewables as the cheapest, so industry (including crypto) invest in them. How many stories on here about payment processors, or even banks freezing accounts for arbitrary or no reasons? Crypto is one of the few options around this. There are countless countries where it has been useful for political reasons, helping people in war zones, or to bypass unjust sanctions. So you have not had use from crypto means its useless to everyone? Its like; The YEN has been of no value to me so nothing good must have ever come of it...

mcpackieh 3y ago

Perhaps soaking up the supply of GPUs has delayed the AI singularity, if only marginally?

pavlov 3y ago
Turns out Satoshi was a time traveler who tried to distract humanity from building AIs for at least a decade longer, in order to prevent the extinction of mankind that happened in his timeline. The last remaining human scientists spent their final years hiding from AI patrols, devising a viral idea that could be implemented on 2010 technology and that would suck up the maximum amount of programmer brainpower and silicon resources without delivering any progress towards AI. Cryptocurrency was the solution they came up with. A man who looks surprisingly like Bruce Willis was sent back to seed the idea…
- hollerith 3y ago
  It is sad that they couldn't think of a way to distract investors that didn't encourage investment in GPU technology.
lolinder 3y ago
Alternatively, the enormous increase in GPU production for crypto seems to have translated directly into enormous gains in AI right around the time that crypto hype imploded. For a while there all the dumped mining GPUs were super cheap, and GPU manufacturers had scaled up their manufacturing capabilities to be able to easily meet increased demand as AI ramped up. It's possible AI would have developed more slowly had we not had so many GPUs lying around and nothing to use them for.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Its a good medium for grey and "benevolent" black market transactions, like inhalers and other drugs without a prescription. ... And maybe private blockchains are a useful data structure for some niches? This is a pretty weak devil's advocate argument though.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

Blockchain is just a shitty technology and people need to start to realize that it is absolutely useless. An ecosystem built on top of a entirely rotten core will be rotten.

moritzwarhier 3y ago
Blockchains per se are just a signed distributed data structure though. I don't like cryptocurrencies and all the greedy hype. Just wanting to say that blockchains still might be useful data structures for some use cases.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Just wanting to say that blockchains still might be useful data structures for some use cases. There's some company that publishes a blockchain checksum in a tiny ad in the New York Times every day. I don't remember what they're securing, but that is the method it uses to make sure the code is distributed widely without anyone being able to tamper with it.

ivanstegic 3y ago

Can anyone name at least one positive effect Crypto has had?

buzzert 3y ago
Can anyone name at least one positive effect Money has had?
- capitalsigma 3y ago
  Money allows for economic specialization, leading to greater productivity. You don't build an economy that produces cell phones when you're stuck bartering goats for wheat.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    I feel like this is not answering the spirit of their question. What is bad about Crypto which isn't some nth-order effect of Money? - When a layperson is scammed out of their Crypto the problem is that they lost Money because they used Money to buy the Crypto. (Yes, given the current ecosystem it is easier for my grandmother to be convinced to transfer all of her Crypto such that she can't get it back but that's bad because she's losing Money.) - People are incentivized to run machines which "mine" Crypto -- but otherwise do nothing externally useful while also causing other negative externalities such as carbon emissions -- because the Crypto can be sold for Money.
- romafirst3 3y ago
  Sure. I can walk into a shop anywhere in the world and exchange money (in the local currency) for goods.
- munk-a 3y ago
  It allows me to farm something that I harvest in the fall and buy fish in the spring. There are a plethora of other examples but common mediums of exchange are essential to allow specialization and the society we live in.
3y ago

arcticbull 3y ago

The only benefit - if you believe that the quantity of people willing to commit crimes is constant - is that it has concentrated the criminality into a parallel ecosystem and out of the primary economy. Basically a walled garden for criminals to steal from each other. If you believe in induced demand of criminality well, bad news there too.

georgyo 3y ago
It definitely emboldened criminal behavior, especially things like ransomware.
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
That's easily falsified, because you can trade bitcoin for good, services, and currency which is... things around it. And you can also extort bitcoin from victims. So criminals are not isolated in any way. Their transactions are less visible and trackable. But that's not a benefit. It's the very thing that's permitting them to get organized at scale, and then take on other less anonymous systems. Like topple governments, buy politicians, have their own military like in Mexico, and so on.
moralestapia 3y ago
??? The local drug dealers don't trade w/ crypto.
za_creature 3y ago
With no opinion on whether this is a good thing or not, the blockchain as described by the original author(s) does allow (as long as the hash function holds up and there's financial incentive to crunch the numbers) proof of public delivery of a message, thus negating the need for notaries.

BasedAnon 3y ago

>It seems there is nothing good that came out of crypto so far I think evading taxes and sanctions is pretty good actually

block_dagger 3y ago

Literally nothing on the positive side is a weak position. Bitcoin has provided many positive things for many users, and blockchain/consensus has many promising applications beyond finance. WorldCoin’s main pitch is not financial, but based on proving human identity in a world full of AI fakery. But that’s a different discussion.

arcticbull 3y ago
> Bitcoin has provided many positive things for many users, and blockchain/consensus has many promising applications beyond finance. Sorry but no it hasn’t; and no it doesn’t. 15 years now and nothing concrete for many reasons that have been eloquently expounded on many times. If that changes let me know.
- staplers 3y ago
  About $1,000,000,000,000 opposes your viewpoint.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  It sounds like you're lucky to have access to a reasonable banking system. Lots of people in the world don't, and in some (not all, but some) of those situations Bitcoin and similar projects have been useful to many people.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    These conversations are so tiresome. Transaction fees have spiked in the past to like $60 direct plus $200 in energy wasted. The GDP per capita in the worst-off African countries is like $200. You think they should spend 6 months of GDP per capita to make each transaction just because a lot of people are trying to make payments? Even today it's like 1% of GDP per capita per transaction in direct fees. It's inadequate for a large flea market or a midsize Costco let alone a global payments network for the underserved. Onboarding everyone onto Lightning would take 75 years and trillions of dollars in fees, plus the entire block reward. Not to mention the worst off are the most affected by volatility, and this thing flails around like a balloon you forgot to tie off. And 'similar projects' just get hacked or rugged constantly. Honestly how dare anyone recommend a system like this to the most vulnerable? They're much better served by something like M-PESA. The reality of the situation is that only the people in wealthy countries are in a position to, and can afford to, speculate on this silliness. Those people are already adequately served. The vulnerable deserve real solutions and this is at best and most charitably a distraction from their development.

cyrillite 3y ago

Directly? Not a lot. Indirectly, it kickstarted global CBDCs research, blockchain-integration research across major financial institutions, tokenisation efforts, etc. Would all these things have happened anyway? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know if blockchains in the form we got them were necessary, but they surely are this possible world’s ignition. Will this all be beneficial in the long run? TBD. But, the story isn’t over yet. Crypto was possibly a net fuck up though

ozr 3y ago
> Indirectly, it kickstarted global CBDCs research, blockchain-integration research across major financial institutions, tokenisation efforts, etc. These are also all negatives. Profound wastes of time.
notatoad 3y ago
>Indirectly, it kickstarted global CBDCs research, blockchain-integration research across major financial institutions, tokenisation efforts, etc. none of those things are things. research into more crypto is not a benefit of crypto. it's just crypto.
takeda 3y ago
Had that research being something valuable, you would have a point, but as of now crypto just led to more crypto. That's not a benefit.

skybrian 3y ago

A side effect of Bitcoin is a huge amount of wasted electricity. (Though not always. "Stranded" electrical power would have gone unused anyway.) A side effect of Worldcoin seems to be sending money to people in African countries. If that were the only real-world effect, that's pretty good! It's unintentional charity work. The retina scan ensures that the money will be widely distributed. The question is, what do people actually lose by getting a retina scan? It sounds creepy, sure, but it seems they're unharmed? What can Worldcoin even do with a hash of a retina scan for some random person?

philbert101 3y ago

This is the reason why there is a significant movement within the bitcoin community to separate it away from everything else in the “crypto” space. For those who makes no distinction and hold a similar view, maybe the Pineapple Fund is a good starting point to learn why “bitcoin is not crypto, and crypto is not bitcoin”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Fund

rvz 3y ago

> Carbon emissions, waste of money on the mining facilities, GPUs wasted, production capacity for silicon wasted. Crypto already has efficient alternatives for their consensus operations, as demonstrated by Ethereum which moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and cut its footprint by 99%, which shows it is already possible and works today. AI (Deep Learning) on the other hand has none available today and continues to waste resources, water, money and electricity over fine-tuning, training, and inference. [0] All to create hallucinating chatbots and broken models that cannot reason or explain themselves and have to be retrained or tweaked because its creators know that they cannot be trusted. It seems like the field of Deep Learning still hasn't innovated to reduce its own resource hungriness and footprint yet requires more compute wastage with no efficient alternative in sight for their operations. EDIT: Of course when you can't refute a point like the one I just made, why not censor it instead? [0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

andrepd 3y ago

Tbh you could say the same about many other sectors of activity (like advertising), even in finance itself (like HFT).

munk-a 3y ago
The statement "at least we're not as immoral as advertisers" is... gosh, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel at that point.

sneak 3y ago

This is demonstrably untrue. Perhaps subjectively you think cryptocurrency is a net loss, but even the harshest critics cannot objectively agree with "nothing good". Millions of dollars of donations have been raised and donated to charities (across borders!) using cryptocurrencies, for one thing. There are many other good things that have come about as a result of it, but falsifying your "nothing" argument only takes one pin to pop.

uoaei 3y ago
It wasn't "crypto" per se that enabled those donations, since those donations could have been just as easily sent and received without crypto, ergo it can't be said that that outcome is attributable to crypto.
- sneak 3y ago
  I would not have been able to donate to Wikileaks by any other method than the one I used; Visa and MC had already voluntarily sanctioned/frozen them before anyone was charged with any crime. I am also aware of people inside Russia who recently donated to the Ukranian war effort. This again seems to be otherwise an impossibility. Your claim seems to me to be incorrect. It's okay to not like crypto or to think that it's overall a net bad thing; it's not okay to spread factual inaccuracies. It has 100% enabled things that were not possible before. That's a fact, not an opinion.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    I would not have been able to donate to Wikileaks by any other method than the one I used What was stopping you from putting cash in an envelope? In a lot of ways, that's even safer than crypto. Untraceable and with no fees for tech bro middlemen.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

tkz1312 3y ago

[dead]

dongping 3y ago

The crypto scams highlight the consequences of lacking regulation. Incorporating lessons from a century of financial turmoil could make crypto viable (implementing laws and regulations as code), though potentially less attractive to those seeking an alternative.

cortic 3y ago

The freedom to buy remotely without an unelected body controlling your purchases. Generous investments in energy infrastructure, much of it in renewables. Investment in GPU technology and infrastructure. Even the bad stuff like crime, in places where the law is brutally unjust crypto is a good tool to get around it. And blaming crypto for carbon emissions is like blaming Tesla for carbon emissions because a recharge comes from coal plants. Its our responsibility to structure renewables as the cheapest, so industry (including crypto) invest in them. How many stories on here about payment processors, or even banks freezing accounts for arbitrary or no reasons? Crypto is one of the few options around this. There are countless countries where it has been useful for political reasons, helping people in war zones, or to bypass unjust sanctions. So you have not had use from crypto means its useless to everyone? Its like; The YEN has been of no value to me so nothing good must have ever come of it...