> And there's something about crypto though where the proponents almost revel in other's ignorance. I've had a hard time deciding whether the proponents really understand it (and all of its nuances) or if pretending you understand it in fact part of the game.
You are projecting your insecurity - don't focus on the assholes. Most people actually being productive in the blockchain space want you to learn. You are right to think there are lots of marketers/sellers who don't understand what is going on. Listen to the engineers who are talking about the details on discord and on their blogs, not the idiots on Twitter trying pump their bags.
> In order to play the crypto game you have to learn this absurd set of rules.
This is true - people who are playing the crypto game are trying to invent new rules for how society should operate. This is why some things that happen in the crypto world seem incredibly stupid or useless. People are working with different fundamental assumptions.
> I don't understand crypto (didn't understand derivatives either). I have worried that my ignorance will cost me in investing — that people smarter than me are going to make bank while I'm derp-derping with my index funds.
There are two sides to crypto. There is the technology side (blockchains, cryptography, consensus) and there is the finance side, the financial products on the blockchain. If you're an engineer you'll easily understand the technology side but there's no way around spending a significant amount of time learning about (traditional) finance to understand how exchanges, derivatives, market making, monetary policy, loans, leverage, and so on work. All of the same ideas apply to crypto.
This "absurd set of rules" mostly applies to the technology side, not the finance side. If you strip out all the marketing, the financial products you find on the blockchain are no different from the products you find in traditional financial institutions, with maybe a few exceptions like AMMs or stablecoins.
My experience has been that the people who understand crypto and who are successful are NOT the people who understand technology, but mostly the people who come from a finance background and can pattern-match their experience to crypto.
>but some people here can't talk objectively about crypto for some reason.
To the contrary: It's the crypto people who can't talk objectively about blockchains, because every single "invention" they come up with has some kind of money-making scheme attached to it. There's very little talk of blockchains without the crypto tokens attached, because a blockchain without that is just an ordinary boring old distributed database, and that isn't fun to them. Every time I try to talk about that among a group of crypto enthusiasts, I either get ignored or the conversation fizzles. Even you're doing the thing where you assume that someone must not want to talk about it because they missed out on the opportunity to make money. That whole mentality is toxic and illustrates the ponzi-like nature of the scheme; those who got in first can make a lot of money from cashing out early, everyone else will get stuck holding the bag.
> He does not understand crypto & is trying to sell his competing product.
This is the repeated refrain of crypto believers. "You just don't get it." And yet when I ask someone to explain it to me (not the technology, the economics) I get hand-waving, self-contradicting promises (e.g. universal identity + resistance to censorship), and appeals to greed ("you must like being poor").
When faced with this, I'm often reminded of Richard Feynman's oft-cited belief that "if you can't explain it to an undergrad student, you don't really understand it". So my conclusion is that either nobody understands cryptocurrency economics and thus no one has been able to sufficiently explain it or the explanations I've heard are complete and accurate - i.e. I do understand it, and it's an emperor with no clothes.
> The only reason I know anything about crypto is I assumed I was wrong about it and read a bunch.
You know what is so grating about this conversation?
Every comment you wrote shows your knowledge is incomplete and based on only what you heard/read, and yet you talk like you know all the theory and therefore you can prove how it doesn't work in practice. When presented with new information that shows how you are wrong, you double down on your theoretical framework instead of looking at what people are have ACTUALLY ACHIEVED, empirically.
You end up sounding like someone who studied a bit of aerodynamics and then goes to believe they can teach birds how to fly. Or worse, you see a beetle flying in your face and start claiming "this is physically impossible, it's not real!"
Please, don't be those people who can not do anything useful with their life and end up just shitting or doubting on the works of others.
> They don't have the background in math, in coding, in economics
And for those of us that do have backgrounds in every one of these fields, we notice the abuse of formal industry terms with crypto-exclusive definitions that weaken the economic structure or flat out fabricate fantasy.
Cryptocurrencies are a great idea for a more mature civilization. We are not that civilization.
It isn't about being technical. It is about explaining why rather than what. If I started talking about cuckoo hashing before explaining that I was providing an associative container, it'd read weird. Similarly, one can fully understand the technical jargon and still come away from that material with "but why".
> Get on board or get out of the way
See, this is the stuff that makes every else get aggravated by cryptocurrency startup culture.
> Of course there will be people who try to scam others into it. But how is this different from anything else in life?
Because unlike everything else, crypto has been designed from the ground up such that society is unable to rectify the bad elements.
> Again, I don't see anyone "marketing" for it. People should understand what they're working with before selling their houses and "investing it" in bitcoin ffs. If they do that then they're dumb!
Aaaand there it is. A slightly longer form of “DYOR”. If you go around evangelizing something that turns out to be damaging, you’re not absolved of all responsibility simply because you add “not investment advice”. If people who promote crypto really didn’t intend it as investment advice, they wouldn’t say anything. The whole point is that maybe other people will pump your bags. And if it all goes sideways, then you can always point at “not investment advice” because the vast majority of promoters and traders don’t understand the first thing about what a blockchain is, much less “tokenomics” or smart contract code (and exploits).
You may be an expert, and not in it to get rich quick. But you’re naive if you can’t see that the huge majority around you are in it for very different reasons.
> Same goes for tether, majority of those involved in crypto know what they are doing, and the pump-up effect it's had to crypto.
Not at all.
While those at the executive level have some awareness, the rank and file that I interact with at crypto companies barely understand the tech, and have no knowledge at all of the environment. It's flabbergasting.
> I can’t imagine why HN thinks crypto related stuff is bullshit /s
Because the vast majority of people doesn't understand anything about it. And most don't want to because they've already made up their mind. You just have to look at any thread about crypto and it's full of misinformation and idiotic takes from people who obviously have no idea what they're talking about. E.g. threads on some kind of centralized exchange scam that has with comments like "I thought crypto was decentralized" or "I thought blockchain solved this" - Everyone likes to have an opinion on crypto even when they're completely uninformed. Of course it doesn't help that 99% of crypto projects are scams, but that doesn't make the underlying protocol a scam.
AI doesn't really have that problem. You don't need to understand anything about how models work to use an LLM. AI also doesn't have payments built-in at the protocol layer, so it's much harder to scam people with AI. But crypto is fundamentally different. It doesn't have easy-to-understand apps that make you more productive like an LLM does. It's highly political and ideological and operates on a layer (banking) that most people have never had exposure to and don't think about in their daily lives.
> burning a ton of power for dubious results
You realize that pretty much all crypto projects are built on top of Ethereum or Ethereum L2s which barely burn any electricity, right? There are (nearly) no projects built on Bitcoin because well, you can't really build anything on Bitcoin.
> So, all I have been able to gather from all of this is that YC/HN remains incredibly ignorant of what Bitcoin and crypto avails, and will draw conclusions based more on that ignorance then take the time to actually look into what is actually taking place.
And yet, you people think crypto is seriously going to "catch on" for the average person? I'm sorry, but "you need a certain IQ to understand Rick and M- I mean crypto!" isn't going to magically make crypto useful at all. The fact that crypto people have to go into long tirades full of technical jargon just to answer the question "Why?" tells the whole story.
> I am not sure if the subscriber base is technically illiterate or users that hold a given coin have a strong incentive to dismiss any criticism.
Why not both?
Most of those crypto currencies smell like MLM schemes for people who scoff at housewives doing the same with physical products. Get rich fast at the expense of the late comers, you can do it! Start by getting your family and friends in it.
The old goals of making a decentralized money to fuel revolutions disappeared fast once the only users ended being pure criminals.
> Examples here are (again) the cryptocurrency scene which has been pretty good at othering critics as “no-coiners” or lately with the phrase “have fun staying poor”.
I’m somebody that spends a good deal of time thinking deeply on cryptocurrencies and the implications to society. I believe they a positive, revolutionary step in the right direction of human liberty. And I’ll gladly acknowledge that it’s still speculative until it’s not.
But crypto, like any other movement, attracts total scumbags. It’s unfortunate because people who speak negatively only serve to undermine their group - whether it’s crypto or a social cause group etc. and often they, themselves, are the insecure ignorant one that don’t even deeply understand what they’re fighting for.
> First, you gave to either understand the underlying technology, or someone you trust have to understand it sufficiently to be able to say "this is bullshit", or "this is a great novel idea that makes a lot of sense".
> Then you invest a bit of your really disposable income in it
Sorry, but I find it a bit funny that in your "winning strategy" you seem to invest on the second step regardless if you in the first step ended in the "this is bullshit" or not. (full disclosure, so far, every crypto thing I have seen has fallen to the "this is bullshit" bucket in my opinion. But I guess my "if it looks, walks and smells like bullshit, don't touch it with a ten foot pole" is not a winnig strategy.)
> There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities.
This is one of cases where the term "crypto" is genuinely confusing. I'd easily believe your claim if it were about cryptography, but I'm highly skeptical about it as applied to cryptocurrency.
I wouldn't be surprised if, when the final history of cryptocurrency is written, its main effects will be judged to have been scams and linguistic confusion.
You are projecting your insecurity - don't focus on the assholes. Most people actually being productive in the blockchain space want you to learn. You are right to think there are lots of marketers/sellers who don't understand what is going on. Listen to the engineers who are talking about the details on discord and on their blogs, not the idiots on Twitter trying pump their bags.
> In order to play the crypto game you have to learn this absurd set of rules.
This is true - people who are playing the crypto game are trying to invent new rules for how society should operate. This is why some things that happen in the crypto world seem incredibly stupid or useless. People are working with different fundamental assumptions.
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