7 ms·

First comment of any bitcoin thread on HN is always something like this, generally negative and a bit grumpy.

by zadler 2y ago

fer 2y ago
Just for the last 5-10 years. Before, BTC was cool.
- ohashi 2y ago
  Because there was naive optimism about it as a technology?
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Because 10+ years ago it was being used as a cool currency you could generate with your desktop GPU and buy steam games with. Now there doesn’t seem to be any use case other than hoping it goes up higher, and enabling crime.
  - ozgrakkurt 2y ago
    I understand you disagree with the whole thing but blockchain has a lot of uses already. Most obvious ones are storing money or investment and transferring money. It factually works amazing for these. Assuming you believe in capitalism, people won’t put such enormous amounts of money on something if it has no use. Speculation also applies to stocks in the same way, there is no world where nvidia should be priced like this but people have some view on it and it effects the price. Same idea with blockchain, there are already use cases and it is expanding constantly. Also there is a ton of investment going into research of development of it, there is no reason why people shouldn’t invest in it by buying coins, it is factually a good investment so far if you are able to hold for long periods of time
    - throw0101d 2y ago
      > I understand you disagree with the whole thing but blockchain has a lot of uses already. Not really. NIST has a good blockchain explainer with a handy flowchart that has questions you should ask to see if blockchain is a useful solution: * PNG flowchart: https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-technology/images-media/dlt-need.png https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut... * https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-technology https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-t... * https://www.nist.gov/blockchain https://www.nist.gov/blockchain And other things are probably a better fit for the majority of people's needs.
      - ozgrakkurt 2y ago
        Stats mean nothing when I use it every month for my savings and salary. As many people already do. I can also send money between countries very easily and cheap. I understand this can be just as easily done with banking system in more developed countries but blockchain is much better other parts of the world
api 2y ago
HN is full of engineers, founders, etc. who kind of resent that there’s a large class of people who got rich doing nothing and creating no value. I get it but I’d say if you’re mad about Bitcoiners you should be a lot more angry about much of the financial industry and property speculators, two other huge groups that get rich without creating much value (or even by creating negative value). There's a lot of value-free getting rich lately. People call it "late stage capitalism," but that frames capitalism as the villain when in fact it's a symptom of capitalism having created so much wealth we don't know what to do with it. The problem is that we're allocating it in incredibly dysfunctional ridiculous ways. I think what we're seeing is the symptoms of an early-stage post-scarcity society in denial. The dysfunction arises from our clinging to scarcity-era puritanical ideas that only those who do a lot of work or do miraculous things "deserve" wealth. So we create all kinds of elaborate games and then convince ourselves that the winners of those games are somehow superhuman or superior in some Calvinist sense when they really just won a video game. In a post-scarcity society baseline levels of wealth become like oxygen in the atmosphere. You don't "deserve" it. It's just there. We are not quite post-scarcity yet, but we're close enough that craziness like $100k Bitcoin is possible. A few more key innovations will do it. Another order of magnitude drop in solar/battery prices and/or successful demonstration of a net-positive fusion power plant will do it. Embodied AIs that can do factory jobs will get us pretty far too, making the cost of manufactured goods almost equal to the cost of raw material inputs and energy inputs.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  As person with both a finance and economics degrees, bitcoin is a successful fraud. I can list out how they use bitcoin private definitions for standard financial terms, how they do not disclose those differences in conversations with financial professionals using the standard terms and their definitions, and the bitcoin community itself is composed of people that expect someone else did the homework to validate this, but no one did. I did, it's not there. Bitcoin is a fraud designed to trap smart people that trust other smart people, who do not do their homework.
  - bondarchuk 2y ago
    Please do (unironically).
mppm 2y ago
But do you actually disagree? Has the Crypto Revolution to date produced anything other than financial speculation and a slight warming of the Earth's surface?
- kreetx 2y ago
  In addition to speculation, with longer time horizon people anywhere in the world can retain the value of what they earn by buying bitcoin with it. Also, mining it can make otherwise not cost-effective power plants cost-effective by buying the excess energy.
- zadler 2y ago
  Sure. Millions of people in the third world use crypto for payments. There's also Polymarket, very much recognized within the mainstream. And generally, crypto will continue to spawn new digital infrastructures in a sovereign space.
throw0101d 2y ago
> First comment of any bitcoin thread on HN is always something like this, generally negative and a bit grumpy. And not entirely wrong. Bitcoin is now just a commodity play: it doesn't have to be rational to make money. Humans assign "value" to all sort of arbitrary things: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
^ Typical second comment.

First comment of any bitcoin thread on HN is always something like this, generally negative and a bit grumpy.

by zadler 2y ago

First comment of any bitcoin thread on HN is always something like this, generally negative and a bit grumpy.

fer 2y ago

Just for the last 5-10 years. Before, BTC was cool.

ohashi 2y ago
Because there was naive optimism about it as a technology?
Gigachad 2y ago
Because 10+ years ago it was being used as a cool currency you could generate with your desktop GPU and buy steam games with. Now there doesn’t seem to be any use case other than hoping it goes up higher, and enabling crime.
- ozgrakkurt 2y ago
  I understand you disagree with the whole thing but blockchain has a lot of uses already. Most obvious ones are storing money or investment and transferring money. It factually works amazing for these. Assuming you believe in capitalism, people won’t put such enormous amounts of money on something if it has no use. Speculation also applies to stocks in the same way, there is no world where nvidia should be priced like this but people have some view on it and it effects the price. Same idea with blockchain, there are already use cases and it is expanding constantly. Also there is a ton of investment going into research of development of it, there is no reason why people shouldn’t invest in it by buying coins, it is factually a good investment so far if you are able to hold for long periods of time
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    > I understand you disagree with the whole thing but blockchain has a lot of uses already. Not really. NIST has a good blockchain explainer with a handy flowchart that has questions you should ask to see if blockchain is a useful solution: * PNG flowchart: https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-technology/images-media/dlt-need.png https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut... * https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-technology https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-t... * https://www.nist.gov/blockchain https://www.nist.gov/blockchain And other things are probably a better fit for the majority of people's needs.
    - ozgrakkurt 2y ago
      Stats mean nothing when I use it every month for my savings and salary. As many people already do. I can also send money between countries very easily and cheap. I understand this can be just as easily done with banking system in more developed countries but blockchain is much better other parts of the world

api 2y ago

HN is full of engineers, founders, etc. who kind of resent that there’s a large class of people who got rich doing nothing and creating no value. I get it but I’d say if you’re mad about Bitcoiners you should be a lot more angry about much of the financial industry and property speculators, two other huge groups that get rich without creating much value (or even by creating negative value). There's a lot of value-free getting rich lately. People call it "late stage capitalism," but that frames capitalism as the villain when in fact it's a symptom of capitalism having created so much wealth we don't know what to do with it. The problem is that we're allocating it in incredibly dysfunctional ridiculous ways. I think what we're seeing is the symptoms of an early-stage post-scarcity society in denial. The dysfunction arises from our clinging to scarcity-era puritanical ideas that only those who do a lot of work or do miraculous things "deserve" wealth. So we create all kinds of elaborate games and then convince ourselves that the winners of those games are somehow superhuman or superior in some Calvinist sense when they really just won a video game. In a post-scarcity society baseline levels of wealth become like oxygen in the atmosphere. You don't "deserve" it. It's just there. We are not quite post-scarcity yet, but we're close enough that craziness like $100k Bitcoin is possible. A few more key innovations will do it. Another order of magnitude drop in solar/battery prices and/or successful demonstration of a net-positive fusion power plant will do it. Embodied AIs that can do factory jobs will get us pretty far too, making the cost of manufactured goods almost equal to the cost of raw material inputs and energy inputs.

bsenftner 2y ago
As person with both a finance and economics degrees, bitcoin is a successful fraud. I can list out how they use bitcoin private definitions for standard financial terms, how they do not disclose those differences in conversations with financial professionals using the standard terms and their definitions, and the bitcoin community itself is composed of people that expect someone else did the homework to validate this, but no one did. I did, it's not there. Bitcoin is a fraud designed to trap smart people that trust other smart people, who do not do their homework.
- bondarchuk 2y ago
  Please do (unironically).

mppm 2y ago

But do you actually disagree? Has the Crypto Revolution to date produced anything other than financial speculation and a slight warming of the Earth's surface?

kreetx 2y ago
In addition to speculation, with longer time horizon people anywhere in the world can retain the value of what they earn by buying bitcoin with it. Also, mining it can make otherwise not cost-effective power plants cost-effective by buying the excess energy.
zadler 2y ago
Sure. Millions of people in the third world use crypto for payments. There's also Polymarket, very much recognized within the mainstream. And generally, crypto will continue to spawn new digital infrastructures in a sovereign space.

throw0101d 2y ago

> First comment of any bitcoin thread on HN is always something like this, generally negative and a bit grumpy. And not entirely wrong. Bitcoin is now just a commodity play: it doesn't have to be rational to make money. Humans assign "value" to all sort of arbitrary things: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

^ Typical second comment.