Please keep such low-effort hyperbole off HN. It's just so unnecessary and contributes so little.
[some group you dislike uses thing everyone has access to] is just not a useful statement.
What do we do now, ban all crypto currencies to force 'Terrorists' back into using cash?
Has terrorism gone up since cryptocurrencies came around?
Did Bin Laden have access to crypto?
I'm not even a big fan of cryptocurrencies and think that the environmental impact of BTC is a heck of a lot worse than 'terrorists' possibly, potentially using it.
But I just don't understand what you were trying to achieve by throwing such an incendiary statement into the discussion with so little evidence to back it up.
What's the point of starting your comment by unnecessarily painting this entire community with such a broad brush and dismissing the nuanced opinions on cryptocurrencies found here? What does it add? It just makes me more skeptical of whatever you're about to say, to the point where I barely feel like it's worth reading.
> Translation: Running an electronic Bitcoin mining army is fine even if it provides no meaningful benefits beyond military spending.
No. I never said that. When did I say that. I never said that? I get very bored by people that try to put words in my mouth. Hackernews (this isn't my first account here) is like this. It is horrifically boring.
> Please come up with better rebuttals. Here is a freebie:
It is a perfectly fine rebuttal. At the moment the only reason anyone is buying crypto is because they think it is going to be worth more in the future. Most aren't buying it for transactions at the moment. If you can somehow so that is false, please do so otherwise don't be an asshat.
God I hate this site. It is little better than reddit these days.
The argument on crypto has happened on HN countless times - no point in rehashing it. Obviously I hold a negative opinion. My point is that young people do stupid shit.
> crypto is a solution to a problem we apparently don't really have
Crypto allows for decentralized money that one can self-custody and send/receive without going through any centralized government/bank authority or middleman. If you can't even admit this most basic use case of crypto, then either (1) you know nothing about the thing you are criticizing (2) you have an agenda.
> not an indicator of HN losing quality.
You are case in point to HN losing quality.
How about instead of commenting on stuff you know absolutely nothing about, take a second to actually do some research and learn about what you're criticizing. You're at best wasting other peoples' time, at worst spreading misinformation.
> Spoken like someone talking about immigration who knows only what they've seen on Fox News.
What sort of character attack is this? Answer the main point.
> You're so unbelievably short sighted about a tech innovation.
Am I? Or is the current stage of Bitcoin and Ethereum not fit for mass adoption, Exchanges crashing all the time when the prices rise.
Ridiculous fees for swapping these tokens. Chia, a supposedly energy efficient alternative to bitcoin, destroying SSD's with their very own way (Proof of Time and Space) NFTs, which are burning the environment and definitely not energy efficient.
And why are we celebrating VCs getting involved in every new private token sale? You know how this ends.
This has happened before with the coins mentioned in this article [0] and more recently Internet Computer [1] which the price fell 75% since launching.
Does this really need to go on?
> There's more to crypto than bitcoin & greed is an unsolvable issue in humanity, not a crypto bug.
So you're admitting there is absolutely no point to crypto then, why do you think crypto will solve anything existing fiat money can't. Discuss.
> Crypto continues to help nobody and achieve nothing in the real world
Crypto posts on HN seem to be a hotbed for these sorts of hyperbolic, wholly unsubstantiated and objectively false comments. I wish i understood what the motivation was for these sorts of replies.
> In short, the crypto hate is a reaction to the crypto hype.
Actually, as someone who was very interested in Bitcoin in the early days of 2011-2012, I disagree. If anything, the hate on HN was even greater back then, way before Bitcoin became hyped. So many people were convinced it was a pyramid scheme. It was clear to anyone familiar with the Bitcoin community back then that there were a lot of highly technical, talented people, and very few scammers. But most of HN reflexively despised Bitcoin.
In fact, Bitcoin on HN is actually a lot less hated now, which tells me it has little to do with the hype, and that something else was going on.
Bear in mind that I disassociated myself from Bitcoin once the scammers, con-men, and get-rich-quick types infiltrated the community around 2013 and 2014. But even back in 2011, there was a very high number of HNers who seemed personally affronted by the very idea that money was a social agreement. They seemed to believe that money was some kind of official, government activity, end of story. And that anyone who believed otherwise was an evil heretic, to be ridiculed.
> I have very little sympathy for people who profited from the hype, delivered approximately nothing of use to the rest of the world, and now have a sad that there are consequences.
> It really makes me reconsider the group-think on hacker news.
This is pretty bad when it comes to crypto topics. A lot of the crypto ecosystem is toxic and gross. Schemes, scams, marketing fluff, and meme bro attitudes galore. BUT, if you can bear to pay attention and cut through the noise, there are some pretty incredible innovations occurring in crypto, gaming, and defi. HN is very dismissive on these topics. It feels to me this community dates itself when crypto topics come up, reminding me more of my grandma at thanksgiving than young innovative technophiles.
> I don't know what it is about crypto that makes HN commentators want to make the most ridiculous, put-downy statements without evidence to back it up.
HN has many people who understand how technology work and a smaller but still large number of people who understand economics. Cryptocurrency has a few people like that but also a ton of get-rich-quick types who think their best work is making random claims until someone buys whatever they’re selling. We’re a decade and a half into that, with billions of dollars of real money pumped in and almost no benefit outside of some early investors being able to cash out before the inevitable dip.
At this point, the onus is on anyone promoting cryptocurrencies to show up front why they’re different than their waves of predecessors. One big challenge here is the inherent conflict of interest: unlike other things which have come in and out of popularity, someone who tries cryptocurrency but realizes it’s not really useful to them doesn’t have an option for getting out without a financial loss which doesn’t involve finding a buyer for something they know isn’t really worth the price. If you backed MongoDB a decade ago, you can just switch to Postgres without either eating a loss or finding someone to buy your old Mongo server.
This also leads me to your next sentence: for years, the claim was that cryptocurrency was going to transform the financial world and beyond. Sales guys went on at length about how you’d use blockchains to buy coffee and a ride to work, make sure the farmer who grew your coffee beans was organic, store your software licenses, record the deed to your house, etc. They couldn’t explain how any of that would work and dismissed criticism, and were especially upset if people said the only real use cases seemed to be illegal transactions. Now, in 2023 we’re back to the primary use being breaking laws, hoping that the government in question chooses not to monitor cryptocurrencies?
> Crypto is not mostly useless, it is just that people don't like the uses. crypto is absolutely massive for avoiding capital controls in countries with inflation, etc.
A variety of reasons. Some think that crypto is a socially pernicious bubble that’ll get people hurt. Others still have to deal with the ransomware attacks that are only viable with crypto. Most of us are pissed off that crypto comes along and keeps ruining the price of hardware we want to buy. The environmentally minded are angry about the energy usage. A lot of us are sick and tired of the naked scamming and the dumb ideas that get floated on the subject.
> I feel that if most HNers would just build a crypto business (DeFi, arbitrage, NFTs, tokenomics, etc.), they'd basically be overnight millionaires.
Obviously not. That’s just not how anything around money works. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Just because someone got rich off a thing doesn’t mean everyone will; after all some people got rich in pyramid schemes too, doesn’t make it a good idea.
Even when there is legitimately easy money to be made, the rush of people trying to exploit the opportunity usually drives the per person profits down to $0. If someone claims that there are easy, guaranteed millions to be made, your alarm bells should be going off.
Furthermore, even this tiny whiff of “you’re just jealous you didn’t make millions flipping NFTs” is an ugly look.
> This is the very definition of a shallow dismissal
Short and succinct is not the same as shallow.
> You are trying to insinuate that people who believe crypto is bad technology and bad for society, are doing the equivalent of arguing that the web is bad technology and bad for society.
I’m not insinuating anything, I’m explicitly saying that is the case.
> 1) the arguments against crypto are specific to crypto
“Crypto” is so broad, there’s no such thing as an argument specific to crypto. Are you saying all crypto-related data structures, protocols, and algorithms are de-facto bad for society (and thereby anything that stems from them)?
If so, that argument sounds blatantly absurd to me. And if not, then your argument is so non-specific it’s meaningless.
> * that so many people think crypto is either perfect or totally evil and admit no middle ground.
Such a strawman right in the leading hypothesis. What makes it so hard for you to face the actual criticism directed at crypto? Do you find it so indefensible that you prefer to avoid it altogether?
I'm not "terrified" of cryptocurrency. No, I won't buy guns or child porn with it, but probably drugs. And that's a good thing.
>I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve
I achieved exactly what I attempted: to reply to the parent[0] of my comment with my thoughts.
Do you suspect that I have some nefarious goal to destroy blockchains/cryptocurrencies through tongue-in-cheek replies on HN? If so, that seems a little paranoid. But I don't judge.
> What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?
> There is so much amazing technology being developed at the moment, which one would think is a main topic on a site for hackers.
The subject of cryptocurrencies transcend technology. It leaks into the realms to finance, economics, and politics - all of these being heavily subjective.
Beyond this, I think there's an exhaustion surrounding the topic. A lot of people have their ideas solidified, and this poison the well for discussion, which becomes stale and uninteresting.
> While the current top post on the frontpage is "Radios, how do they work?".
Eh, I can see how this may sparkle the interest of people here. I have only a vague idea of how a radio works in term of hardware, and a more in depth article explaining its inner workings may make for an interesting read. A lot more than cryptocurrency, for reasons mentioned before.
> Fine. However, there's a general anti-crypto stance here largely based on outdated mainstream narratives that if you truly would be literate about crypto, could only laugh at.
Can you be specific about the narratives you're seeing on here that you are laughing at?
>They are explicitly a product to facilitate money laundering
How is HN so consistently cryptophobic?
Imagine the reaction you’d get here suggesting say, E2EE is “explicitly a product for {crime}”. You’d be rightly mocked, but throw in crypto and it’s like 75% of the people here lose basic reasoning skills. I’d be less frustrated if it wasn’t so common.
> This is one of those scary things with a cryptocurrency based society that I worry about.
No, not really. It is the same kind of story as people putting all their money in a bag in a chimney to find out their family decided to finally lighten the mood by making a fire in long unused fireplace. It is an actual story about my neighbour when I was a kid.
People have been doing stupid things with money for thousands of years.
You can store crypto safely. It is essentially the same problem as storing encrypted backups. It has been solved.
As much as I hate cryptocurrency, I would actually be more at peace having lots of crypto than lots of stock on my account (if not for the fact that crypto is just a scam).
>I’m blown away by how anti-crypto this discussion is. I hadn’t realized how negative the prevailing sentiment is on Hacker News.
There was a dream that was crypto once upon a time. It is now exclusively the domain of organized crime, grifters, and every imaginable permutation of ne'er-do-well you can possibly scrape up on the web. The entire space sickens and disappoints me.
Please keep such low-effort hyperbole off HN. It's just so unnecessary and contributes so little.
[some group you dislike uses thing everyone has access to] is just not a useful statement.
What do we do now, ban all crypto currencies to force 'Terrorists' back into using cash?
Has terrorism gone up since cryptocurrencies came around? Did Bin Laden have access to crypto?
I'm not even a big fan of cryptocurrencies and think that the environmental impact of BTC is a heck of a lot worse than 'terrorists' possibly, potentially using it.
But I just don't understand what you were trying to achieve by throwing such an incendiary statement into the discussion with so little evidence to back it up.
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