Then exercise some personal responsibility and caution. Keep your passwords carefully and don't trust certain crypto insitutions. The crypto world is indeed loaded with cases of fraud, but underneath that, here is a system of systems that lets people who do indeed get locked out of conventional financial systems send and receive funds without the permission of a central regulatory authority or some dysfunctional, corrupt political control mechanism, It doesn't always work at that, but it offers one strong further alternative. Also, how is it upending the lives of billions of people? The two things you compare at the end are not directly related and definitely not in a causative way. Wanting a further means of avoiding being a victim of dumb banking accidents doesn't make you culpable in whatever defects crypto has.
It's not just the rampantly emotional and repetivie crypto hate on HN that's absurd, it's also the sheer narrow follishness of so many of the arguments that's rather galling.
Your sputtering rage and denial of the obvious is pretty illustrative of my point about crypto's toxicity and cultish obsessiveness.
Do you have any NFTs or ICOs or shitcoin rug pull scams you want to shill, or are you finally too embarrassed to do that in public under your own account because of the toxicity of crypto?
Why don't you prove it's not toxic by telling us how much and why you love and recommend crypto yourself, and explaining what it's actually good for?
I have waded into crypto twice. Both times I have lost access and the funds are gone. I don't care what happens with Bitcoin, I'm staying away from it.
Author here. It's hardly ruining my business, it's just a nuisance. I have long denounced cryptocurrencies since well before this incident, including on HN:
The only thing you might be guilty of is minimizing it.
I figured if I was doubtful, other people might be doubtful. Rather than have you be dismissed, it seemed to me that confirming your post was the prudent thing to do.
I was pretty shocked. That's fodder for a whole HN link and thread. I really figured you were blowing it out of proportion. Nope... Hell, the list of complaints goes on and on.
I'm reminded of when drones were gaining in popularity and people, notably on Slashdot, were saying all the things they were doing and how nobody could stop them. I told them that is how you end up with draconian regulations. I was moderated quite heavily in the downward direction. Fast forward a few years and they are complaining about draconian regulations.
Which is to say you're right. They are going to end up coming down on this, and coming down on this hard. I'm sure some rebels will say it can't be prevented, but laws don't work like that. They don't prevent anything. They'll just make cryptocurrency illegal, use and possession, and selectively prosecute the offenders.
That's worst case scenario, I guess. They may just regulate ICOs heavily and stop the regular person from investing. I doubt that will bother the wealthy and established players much. Even better, they'll be doing it 'for your own protection.' Those sound bites will appeal to the masses.
By the way, this is one of those times I wish an HN poster had been wrong.
You are misconstruing what I wrote, which is that it's not my problem. I don't care what happens to their money, just as I don't think anyone should care what happens to mine. Although, sure, I wish ill on anyone who is using crypto to scam others.
Were you planning on sharing your gains with me? No, right?
Oh f** off. You know what’s even more damaging? Social networks impact on democracy in Western countries. Data mining from big tech and the impact on an individuals right to privacy. Making systems deliberately addictive which is highly likely to be related to the rise in mental health issues.
Bad crypto projects will die out. Maybe the tech will work for some use cases, like Visas work in the space, maybe it won’t. Crusading against a technology that you probably don’t understand entirely is frustrating to read, flame-war inducing, and repetitive on HN. Everyone understands that it’s like marmite, you either really like it or really hate it, but there are far more important things to take a moral stance against than blockchain tech. I wish we’d all just move on and talk about other things.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you don't get into cryptocurrency work to make the world a better place. Or rather, those that do should not be trusted around secure code. /snark
LOL what about the amounts the banks and bankers stole from us in the last decade and a half? Why don't you complain about that also? I'm sure it dwarfs whatever scammers have stolen in crypto. But you guys hate that you missed your chance. But it's never too late. You can still invest. It's not over yet.
You can't teach me anything at all about the world of crypto, believe me. I'm one of the MtGox creditors, and that has been going on for 10 years now
If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.
Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.
It’s a tech site; there’s a whole tech industry devoted to what is basically securities fraud, and it’s annoying. I work in smart contracts trying to build an ambitious global network, so I’m not exactly some Luddite afraid of the future.
If I read an article about people artificially inflating the price of something in a pump and dump scheme, I pattern match that to crypto. I’m tired of hearing about it, too, but I to stop hearing about it because someone regulated the fraudsters out of business, not because defrauding unsophisticated people became a norm we don’t criticize.
My favorite things about crypto is how it is always your fault.
Use an exchange and get ripped off? Your fault, dummy.
Go it on your own and fail to maintain perfect security or backups, and you lose your wallet? Not our problem, moron.
Be one of the 0.0000000000000001% of crypto users who actually want to exchange it for goods and services and you get ripped off and want a refund? LOL pound sand, loser.
Some flaw in the implementation of the protocol is discovered and shit hits the fan? Haha you should have been on XYZcoin, idiot!
Sure, I'll take it a step further. Any storage of your money that doesn't involve you fully controlling your own keys is stupid because it is literally antithetical to the entire purpose of crypto. If you want to let someone else hold on to your money for yield, great. Use something already established, ensured, and proven. But not crypto.
Not your keys, not your crypto. How many times must it be said?
Those poor hapless cryptocurrencies, wrongfully accused of murder. I implore my fellow HN participants to please consider the feelings of cryptocurrencies before engaging in vigilante justice against them.
Seriously, maybe some of the criticism of cryptocurrencies here is over the top, but it is not even remotely comparable to what reddit has done.
If you’re not willing to send money to an address because you’re afraid of the repercussions, you’re being censored.
I worked on crypto for many years and over time I realized meaningful problems were better solved by building trust, not running away from it. Further, tech can’t replace trust: humans own the network, not the other way around.
The problem at hand here is social engineering. Your cryptocurrency scheme (and, to be clear, this is your own scheme you're promoting here) is not a solution to social engineering.
It's not just the rampantly emotional and repetivie crypto hate on HN that's absurd, it's also the sheer narrow follishness of so many of the arguments that's rather galling.
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