Cryptos have become more like a cult than actual tech. Don't get me wrong, some of them are legitimate but try pointing out their deficiencies in their communities and you'll get attacked from all angles. Most people involved in crypto aren't there for the tech, they only care about money they are making from it.
That's very true, but a huge percentage of people recently in the cryptocurrency space are only there to make money. Not many truly care about the technology.
This is the norm in tech, theres a lot of people who do tech only to make money, the amount of people i've personally met who are all about crypto is very high.
Almost every competent and experienced developer I know thinks most crypto stuff (such as NFTs for example) is bogus. Out of the people that I know that ARE into crypto, most of them are recent bootcamp grads or not very experienced (but somewhat techie).
Anecdotal, I know. But, I think if you look around at the respectable people in the tech field, you will see that most of them are staying away from crypto for a variety of reasons.
I for one am surprised by the negative sentiment only because the tech industry seems to be all about it. I don’t see the problem it is trying to fix. Crypto by is terrible as a currency, transactions are slow and damn can they cost a lot. And the currency itself fluctuates a lot. It’s not really decentralized, it’s not really anonymous and it can be manipulated. There seems to be no end to people hyping crypto and NFTs, because if I get you to buy in my money may go up. But what exactly am I buying? Sounds like you just need a sucker and I may or may not make money, but since you made up this currency and a small number of people own the lion’s share I guess you all get rich. My take is that the tech industry has just created a new way to become even richer by making some confusing product to prey off everyone. Maybe that wasn’t the initial plan but it sure looks like that’s how it’s shaking out.
Crypto is a system of perfect logic built on the foundation of a few flawed assumptions.
Relying on YouTube videos that anyone can create is highly suspect and should be easily recognized as a logical discrepancy/potential fallacy by otherwise intelligent technical people.
The fact that it is not points out a huge hole in their education, reasoning and thinking process. It is the end result of being highly trained but poorly educated in my opinion. Quite simply, many crypto cultists failed to grasp the overall limits of their own knowledge and control and paid a heavy price for it.
Crypto is nothing but a speculative vehicle for making money. People of high intelligence (which represents most members of Hackernews) recognize this, although depending on what their vested interests are, they may or may not reveal that publicly.
In general, if you happen to have a large stake in crypto or are depending on crypto to make you significant returns, you are more likely to be pro-crypto.
If you have no stake, it’s likely because you never saw a point to cryptocurrency and never invested, so you will likely be anti-crypto or neutral at best.
The technobabble of blockchain tech does not work on highly tech-literate people of Hackernews, we know this is basically useless technology in its current form. At it’s peak it would essentially be nothing more than a globally distributed database anyone could read from or write to. But inherently this has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.
It would be a red flag IMO if hackernews was pro-crypto.
Crypto may have its usage but the coins themselves aren’t worth very much and the market does not value them very much. Why? Only maybe 3% of crypto buyers understand the technology, understand the boom/bust cycles, and essentially understand what exactly it is they are buying. The other 97% are irrational actors. They are common people who hopped onto the craze after the wild media frenzy, heard from their colleagues about a magic coin that exponentially increases in value, poor and lower middle class from other countries who really don’t understand it, and the tech pseudo crypto literate community who repeat the similar phrases: the technology is legit, but some coins are overvalued, alt coins are useless but etherum and btc are useful, crypto is like the dot com bubble and a few coins will survive and turn into the next tech behemoths. I belong to this latter group though my ego might think otherwise.
In my eyes the valuation is due to the volatility from the 97% of irrational actors, many who pump and dump, and the big players who can do sketch actions with little oversight. This is not an investment class I feel confident in purchasing if it’s almost completely irrational. I am at the mercy of others and chaos and long term these factors will likely converge to a significant loss for me. The one hope being that there comes to be significant value unknown to us now but comes in the future.
So you generally find commenters here to be smart and knowledgeable about tech topics, but you feel that crypto is the exception...
Is it also possible that you're just wrong about crypto?
Most of the people I know who are very enthusiastic about it also deeply misunderstand the technology and also some basic economics (e.g. deflationary vs. inflationary assets).
I think HN users get angry because the crypto space is a neverending parade of people getting tricked by pump-and-dump, wealthy elites, etc.
Recently, a friend was gushing about Dfinity and telling me I'm basically stupid for not seeing the promise of it... and now we find out it was a scam and the technology is just tokenized, centralized AWS.
When this happens often enough, it can be upsetting. It feels like being a doctor having to talk to antivaxxers over and over again.
I disagree on why people are into crypto, at least based on my own experience as a vendor (https://blog.shodan.io/accepting-crypto-a-vendor-perspective...) and every time there's a survey about why they're in crypto on Reddit. Most of them are in it for the speculation and to get rich. I'm sure there's a small contingent of Bitcoin users that are truly in it for the concept but most of them see it as their lottery ticket to get rich.
My theory is that crypto breaks the hacker ethos. Crypto is about money, including all of the dark and unsavoury parts of it. The largest decriers I have seen are usually technologists. The average punter doesn't really seem to care that much.
You have to understand that tech people possess no qualifications to see the abstract value crypto brings. “Bitcoin is just public key cryptography and hashing, it’s not that clever!”
Crypto is a technology, but the innovation innate in it is economic in nature, not technical. This misconception leads to a whole cohort of tech people who knew about Bitcoin, never bought, and now have to rationalize as those less technically literate than them are more and more starting to believe and starting to profit.
They should not have this expectation to understand crypto, anymore than an economist should be expected to understand what makes online banking secure, but everyone (including themselves) puts that expectation on them, causing them to rationalize by claiming that crypto is all a scam and completely useless. The more they try and understand it technically, the less they see what’s important.
I just feel most people who are obsessed with crypto that I’ve come across in my personal life are some of the least financially responsible/educated people I’ve ever met
that and r/bitcoin comment sections are very delusional cult to me
I think you’re being too literal. There are lots of tech people who quietly feel this way — just look at the comments here. The point is that they shouldn’t be so quiet about it.
If someone only knows crypto from stories in mainstream press or cable news, they’d probably incorrectly assume “tech people” are almost universally for it.
Of course “tech” isn’t a monolith, and neither is “crypto”. Many people into Bitcoin or crypto don’t appreciate being lumped into the very long tail of scams that are an inherent byproduct of permissionless money.
It would be a bit like pre-internet engineers dismissing the internet because it’s the world’s best porn distribution mechanism.
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