I work for a large provider in the VCS/CI space. While I appreciate the varied opinions in the comments here on the perceived usefulness of Crypto, I think folks outside of the space simply do not understand how much time is being spent combating the issue.
If we, for example, had a team of 20 working on our CI offering, we would have re-allocated at least 50% of them to work full-time on combating the miners. And this trend is not slowing, it is only accelerating.
One week, we may have a breakthrough and find some common heuristic in running binaries that identify _this weeks_ miners, but next week they will have figured out that we have figured it out and make the requisite changes. It's something akin to the early days of anti-virus software, but given the 2021 scale of the internet, the iterations are moving at warp speed in comparison.
If you care nothing of the environmental impact (IMO you should), then take a second and ask yourself what your life as a creator of _things_ be like with no free access to CI tooling? I guaranty you that changes to the free tier of ALL CI services are on the way, and I heavily suspect that when that happens, the miners will take over any service offering paid CI where the return outweighs the price. This will lead to an escalation of pricing such that side-project, FOSS, and anything less than large profitable software will be priced out of hosted CI and be forced into a different model.
Now let's take this to the extreme: What if you mined cryptocurrency by burning medicine? The more you burn, the richer you are. Clearly that's evil, as it rewards you for destroying the world.
In a perfect world you would mine cryptocurrency by making progress in peace on earth, good will towards man.
But if you can answer this: What useful resource, that's expensive to produce and has an environmental impact, do you want to incentivize destroying in order to further your greed?
Can you think of anything? Is it not by its very nature evil?
But consider even what happened under Imperial rule in India: Locals were rewarded for every dead snake they proved to the British. What happened? Obviously they started breeding snakes!
So now you have MORE snakes! You actually made the problem worse!
I wouldn't mind paying the dollar a month for the CPU-seconds I consume across all my 'free-tier' personal project CI pipelines, if that were an option.
There just doesn't seem to be a vendor offering something in-between "enterprise CI/CD solution" and "free"; it probably costs more to track that kind of usage than it would be worth to bill?
You can't win this by being reactive. It's the same dynamic as with terrorism. No government can keep terrorism under control, if it just responds to terrorist attacks. You need special task force which infiltrates and basically terrorize terrorists, so that they don`t have time and resources to plan for new attacks. Same with mining, if all miners have to care about is just how to bypass your heuristics, they will always outnumber and outsmart you, but if they will also have to spend time to constantly patch their own code to keep blockchain and mining pools running, meanwhile maintaining consensus that mining shouldn't be dropped all together, to avoid constant proactive attacks on network, only then you stand a chance.
While this is somewhat true, the numbers are not on the side of the defenders here. With terrorist groups, the amount of people who would actually sign up to commit terrorist attacks or even associate with the groups (outside the countries that spawned them) tends to be fairly low. And you're probably not going to make much money, nor are there any real expectations that you could get rich since it's usually more ideological.
Starting up crypto miners, on the other hand, is a very low-risk endeavor. The worst that happens is you have to sign up for a VPN due to getting your IP banned. You probably won't make a ton of money (unless you do some major automation), but you will get something out of it that could dramatically increase in value, and it's probably small enough that it's literally not worth the time for affected companies to have their lawyers draft strongly worded letters, much less pursue you in court.
So, while law enforcement has a very limited number of terrorist groups to infiltrate, groups of crypto-scammers form and dissolve overnight, making it much more difficult to be proactive.
> Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency.
“Basically the same bridge” is such a hilarious oversimplification that it makes your blame of the Federal Reserve even more amusing. No, absolutely no improvements in engineering, materials, process, or design in sixty years. No added overhead for environmental studies and other regulations. It’s all the Fed.
Hacker News discussing economics is like arguing geopolitics with someone on peyote.
Some other differences between the new bridge and the old bridge that would account for higher cost:
- The new bridge is designed to handle a much larger capacity than the old one, which was built starting in 1952, when there were many fewer commuters from distant suburbs trying to get to the NYC area.
- The new bridge has a bicycle/pedestrian path.
- The new bridge had to be built while the old bridge was still standing. Its construction costs presumably included the demolition of the old bridge and the rerouting of the highway, first from the old bridge to the first completed span of the new bridge (which initially handled traffic in both directions), then to the second span when that was completed.
- The old bridge was designed with a a life-span of only 50 years, so it was built using cheaper materials. 50 years seems like a very short life-span for a bridge. For example, the Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883, is now well into its second century of operation (although it has undergone various renovations, it hasn't required demolition).
The thing is that "improvements in engineering, materials, process, or design" should make it cheaper, not more expensive. That's how it works in other industries.
Although I don't think it's fair to put all the blame on the Fed. The same thing has happened in the UK and many other places.
The reason the dollar is a currency is because of the existence of a force (in this case, the Fed) that can tamp down speculation and deflation. Cryptocurrency doesn't have this, and that is its central failing.
Deflation causes a positive feedback loop of reducing trade. If it's better to hoard currency so you can buy 10% more things next year, everyone starts hoarding currency and reducing trade, leading to suppliers dropping prices to encourage purchases, leading to further deflation, and so on. Trade grinds to a halt as everyone holds currency in anticipation of buying more later.
> If it's better to hoard currency so you can buy 10% more things next year, everyone starts hoarding currency
But they don't. Not if it's things they need now, like food, or want now: electronics have been deflationary for the last 70 years or so -- when you bought the device you typed your comment on, you knew full well that a year later you would get a better one for cheaper, and yet you didn't hoard your currency. Trade in electronics doesn't seem to be grinding to a halt.
Useless crap people don't actually need? Sure, that might suffer from deflation. But ideally the world economy wouldn't be founded on useless crap that people don't actually need.
Stake: Held some Bitcoin ca. 2011-2021, just enough to buy a nice (not fancy) apartment slightly below market price. Divested now. Miniscule amounts of Monero and Tezos, basically written off.
I would even argue that it's a good thing in our current environment that we don't facilitate trade for things that aren't needed. Much of the arguments of deflation seem to rely on an economy that has maintained high and ideally growing output, while we live in a world of resources being depleted due to inefficient use and failure to reign externalities.
And what do we do if someone has a large stake? Ignore their arguments? Should we do the same if they have no stake and are criticizing it? How much stake is enough, given a particular argument, to consider it on its own merits and not reject it based on cui bono? If someone doesn't disclose their stake, should we assume the worst, the best, the average? What if they're lying?
(I have no stake in anything crypto related, so hopefully my argument won't be dismissed. But maybe I'm lying.)
We factor in the degree of aligned incentives they have to their argument.
Oil companies can say 100% factual things about climate change too. You'd still put their arguments under more scrutiny than a non-profit panel of scientists.
That’s a revelation as mind blowing as noticing people against drugs tend not to consume them. Only crypto folks seem to think skin in the game is a prerequisite for criticism and objective discussion.
Do you need to own other humans to form an opinion on slavery? Do you need to eat meat to form an opinion on being a vegetarian? Do you need to be in Congress to opine on its dealings? Why is cryptocurrency any different?
I’m responding to your very clear subtext, by the way.
I can think of one counterargument to your list of people arguing for/against things they have a stake in...
Homosexuality.
It's such a common thing for people that are extremely vocal against homosexuality to end up being found having a same-sex affair, that I start to assume anybody who is extremely homophobic is actually just a deeply-closeted gay.
What a weird opinion to hold in a society totally dominated by incentive. Serving yourself is the entire point since we have structured nearly all of human existence around incentive instead of command. Discounting the argument that it would help the poor (objectively) because it helps the person making the suggestion is like being angry at the sky for being blue. The incentives produced the outcome and should in no way surprise you.
That’s why people who act selflessly are notable. You’ve got this backwards. Selflessness is notable. Selfishness is par until all of Maslow’s is handed to you free of charge. Noticing someone is advocating for an improvement to their situation, even disingenuously, is equally pointless with that in mind.
People do things in their interest because that’s how we have built human civilizations that pay any respect to the concept of freedom. If the suggestion benefits others, maybe go with it? Or build a civilization where everyone can be selfless all the time and have no self-serving motives; that sounds pretty great until you get to the “how to direct an economy” part of the equation.
> What a weird opinion to hold in a society totally dominated by incentive.
Not totally, no. We are social animals. Also look at people who vote against their own financial benefit. I do.
But also it's not as direct. If I pay some more in taxes (along with everyone else) the idea is that I'll get to live in a better society. Something I could not otherwise buy.
> Discounting the argument that it would help the poor (objectively)
That's not what I said. I said take it into consideration. You're being hyperbolic.
In real life I want to reduce inequality because it's the right thing to do. If you don't believe that you can say that it's because I want to reduce the risk of me personally being victim of crime, and inequality breeds crime.
Are you honestly unaware of the concept of "conflict of interest"?
I'll throw you back another name: Occam. If you are arguing lowering taxes, because of a complicated Goldberg machine of an explanation on how it'll help the poor, maybe after having considered it all I'll find the explanation "and you'll gain $100k a year from it" to be a more plausible reason, and I'll be less likely to take the parts of the Rube Goldberg machine I didn't understand, or am hesitant about, at your word.
It's common etiquette and sometimes a legal requirement to declare an interest in stocks if you are recommending them. If someone owns the stock you kind of assume they are pitching it rather than giving an unbiased opinion.
How is that indicative of destruction? If someone really believes that inflation is destruction they can hold one of the many assets that are protected against inflation, such as stocks, inflation-adjusted bonds, real estate or gold. Why is cryptocurrency supposedly the only solution here?
If we look at Lightning, it enables a full implementation of the 402 response code flow, which would allow for decentralized identity and payments in the use of machine learning networks for a wide variety of AI based systems. One such use case may end up being the "killer" use case for crypto and may make up for the speculative phase we're in now.
No I don't think it's poor form. If we had a forum full of people talking about how great Facebook is, and when forced to disclose their $FB holdings, realize everyone is holding $100,000+ of $FB, we might realize we have skin in the game to talk it up instead of objectively evaluating it.
Big difference in incentives between $10 and $100,000.
Image you were in a forum with people who claimed to believe that Facebook was great, but none of them had invested in it. Wouldn't that make you doubt the sincerity of their position?
It'd be a bad idea to only listen to opinions from people who won't put their money where their mouth is. If anything, objectively analysing something is much more important to those who have stake than those who do not.
Your comment is funny because in many countries all people that talk in a national assembly need to disclose their stakes. So yes I can imagine it, because a lot of parliaments work exactly like that.
And I am not sure what "both ways" means but of course you have to disclose if you have taken a short position in the matter.
You don’t have to. However, TFA explicitly asked you for this discussion. You’re free to join the thousands of other discussions where there’s no ask to disclose stake. There’s value in one that does.
I haven’t made a case either for or against crypto either way in this thread, except to state that I have some crypto.
There might be value in a discussion that asks for disclosure. I’m not sure this discussion is working as intended though, judging the amounts of disclosures in the comments. Just an observation.
The most alarming thing to me is how effective cryptocurrencies are in drawing out the inner greed of most people. It's created an obsession of quick wealth among a lot of otherwise normal people, hijacking their rationality and further propagating the viral nature of it. If you take a look at many of the online communities for cryptocurrencies online you'll notice a lot of disturbing behavior that's very cult-like.
I'm not even sure why there's still a pretense of innovation behind most coins these days - every time I hear or see any new fad of cryptocurrency I can already smell the greed from miles away, and the smell is unbearably intense. More recently there's been lots of obvious scams going around social media where bad actors are hacking accounts and replacing them with content shilling their coins and scamming people into sending them coins. When this shit starts invading your personal feeds you know things have started to get really bad.
Cryptocurrency has an edge over other assets due to its inherent nature - it's much easier to employ sophistry and obfuscation by technology to sell it to people. Even well-educated people are vulnerable because it appeals to their sense of curiosity and has enough of a foundation to be viable.
People see the impact and success of technology in their lives. They start looking into cryptocurrencies and go "Wow, this must be revolutionary! This will eventually become as big as the internet!" Most don't care about the practicality or details, just that technology is a winner and that's where they should put their eggs into. And the ones that do care are probably so engrossed and invested into it that they're no longer rational about it.
Once people are invested it's in their best interests to propagate their ideas so they can succeed, regardless if those ideas are actually beneficial or not. I'm no psychologist but I feel like this is instinctual on a human level, which is why I say peoples rationality can get "hijacked". Anecdotally, talking to those who are invested and seeing the ridiculous amounts of irrational goalposts and whataboutisms being thrown around just reinforces this even more for me.
> It's created an obsession of quick wealth among a lot of otherwise normal people
It's showing a demand for an asset that isn't linked to the central planning of government where they continually and arbitrarily inject as much extra currency as they want whenever they catastrophically mess up sovereign budgets.
That's not greed. It's an interest in safety from a drug-addict-like government that opens the floodgates on a whim.
If it were a hedge against inflation, it would behave like a hedge against inflation, and yet it shows no similar characteristics to preexisting inflation hedges? hmmmmm
Drew is right that proof of work mining is expensive and has serious negative externalities.
Drew is also right that cryptocurrency, via its growth, hype, and decentralized and self-sovereign nature, is often an ideal vehicle for certain kinds of criminal activity, including pump-and-dump fraud or ransomware.
Drew is right (perhaps indirectly) that many or most well-meaning crypto projects will end up losing money for most of their investors.
But, there's a lot more going on in crypto. At this point, if you think crypto is wholesale a scam, bad for the world, or a fad, you're simply misinformed.
As Drew observes, Bitcoin has a cost problem. For that reason, many crypto insiders think that BTC's reign as the #1 top crypto will come to an end within a few years.
In contrast to Bitcoin, the Ethereum community is actually building many useful things and will soon stop proof of work mining, replacing it with proof of stake. As a result, Ethereum earns enough actual revenue that ETH is expected to generate lots of cash, like a Buffet stock, in the coming decade.
Today, much of Ethereum's revenue is what we may call "reflexive" or insular, in that the revenue is related to cryptocurrency services or speculation. That might make Ethereum's apps appear to be "not useful" or "scams". However, I think it'd be a mistake to conclude that just because most early Ethereum apps are related to crypto, that they'll all be. Ethereum apps are increasingly connecting with the regular economy, and that's the primary growth opportunity.
Here I thought it was from portraying Ethereum as solving the problems with Bitcoin but hand waving past the part where that’s remained vaporware for years and making the same kind of unspecified claims about innovative useful things Bitcoin salespeople have been making for the last decade. It should be easy to point to something real if it is that different.
I did not learn anything from that post, it mostly read as an advertisement for ETH and the linked websites. If you are going to toute the actual legitimate use cases for blockchain, please name at least one.
That’s still a handwavy theoretical category of vaporware. Not one concrete example of a tangible application where “de-fi” replaced a previous technology with a better solution?
I'll take that as “no”, then. I mean, you're the salesguy popping into the thread to say we should all buy in to something, you might need a better pitch if you want to get rich that way.
I never said you should buy anything. And certainly never in my life have I tried to sell a crypto. Why would I? I enjoy discussing how crypto is going to change the world because I genuinely believe it will. A move away from everything being centralized is a good thing in my opinion.
edit: just to add on - would you call somebody who was excited about the Internet in 1995 a salesman? Just because I have an easy time seeing where crypto is heading and am excited about it should not be considered "salesman" behavior.
It was a sarcastic reply to the request the poster made of me but I guess that humor was lost on you. Why on earth would I spend the time and effort to write up a well sourced research paper to satisfy some random request on hacker news?
0.0037sats is currently US$0.00000197. We have a deal but I'll transfer another currency since the transaction fee is several orders of magnitude greater than your quoted price.
This is simply wrong. I frequently see comments on comment downvoting causing a reconsideration and reopening of closed discussions, resulting in discussion value.
Whether this was achieved or not in this case is debatable, but that doesn't nullify the base premise. (OTOH, quoting forum rules is almost universally boring. ;))
Today, two of the most promising app ecosystems are
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Here's a community favorite 3rd party leaderboard for DeFi apps https://defipulse.com/
- Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are popularly known as digital collectibles, but may represent any kind of non-fungible property. We can see some of the top digital collectibles here https://dappradar.com/nft . But, there is a lot more to NFTs than just collectibles or art. For example, the Ethereum Name System (ENS) uses NFTs to represent domain name ownership https://ens.domains
Another interesting Ethereum use case is https://www.eco.com/ . Eco is a mobile app that's a cash wallet and payment method. Eco is a competitor of Venmo, Cash App, Visa, and Apple Pay. Eco is not a crypto app, there's no tokens or anything like that. Instead, Eco is like if you took Venmo, added Apple Pay to it, and then completely cut out the banks by using the USDC stablecoin backboned onto ethereum to connect to an industry group of financial services that have also cut out banks, and in return Eco is able to offer their customers 5% APR and 5% cash back, because of the savings from cutting out the banks and other middlemen.
If you are interested to dip your toe into the ethereum pond, here's a great weekly newsletter that's aimed at developers
I think there is a place for crypto, and I say that begrudgingly, ‘cuz ego, since I’ve been calling it all Tulips since a Bitcoin was $8.
The biggest reason why Bitcoin works, and other established coins work, is because of demand from the developing world. If you don’t have reliable banks or governments then Cryptos are at least as good or better than your local banks because even if it collapses you can still access it. For a lot of countries with unstable governments and banking system this is the differentiator. Bitcoin will never be a “currency” but a long-term “store of value” seems quite likely.
It’s pretty clear to me now, long term, Musk knows/thinks that the energy used by the coins’ networks will be free from renewable sources.
I don’t think cryptocurrency is an abject disaster. I think it’s something with a lot of potential to do good and a lot of potential to do bad. I can agree we’re just gonna have to wait to see...
From my reading it looks like the "developing world" use case is pure propaganda.
E.g. someone investigated the "bitcoin in venezuela!" claim. Actually going there and tracking down use. Turns out it was a bitcoin investor who went to venezuela to do a transaction for the sole purpose of screaming "bitcoin in venezuela" to pump up the price.
It may be true. But the last stories saying the same thing were pure lies. My bayesean values are calibrated accordingly and I won't just take it at face value.
Hello. I'm from Argentina. I retired before turning 50 thanks to crytpo. Now I'm really thinking to leave this place after my daughter turns 18. It's not proganda.
> From my reading it looks like the "developing world" use case is pure propaganda.
From my perspective, it is not propaganda but it is my opinion. I didn’t come to the conclusion through any scientific rigor, but rather through observation. I have seen a spike in crypto discussion over the past year or two by, my obviously small sample, of thought leaders and entrepreneurs in primarily in Africa. The talk isn’t ever of get rich quick schemes, but instead focuses on generating long-term family wealth. It’s pretty inspiring to be honest. Investing in general moves your focus (or should) away from the now and to the future. For a lot of folks, myself included, a “future” never seemed possible. Maybe it’s silly but I started taking better care of myself once I started investing recently. I’m lucky, I live in the USA, I make decent money and have easy access via apps like Robinhood. What if I only had access to brokers who aren’t regulated or require deposits well exceeding anything I’ve ever saved? Truly, it pains me to say, but crypto markets are maturing and while they may not be stable compared to traditional 1st word financial markets they’re a lot better than many other alternatives.
Lastly please don’t see this as a recommendation to buy crypto. I wouldn’t unless you just wanna show off your diamond hands. Fwiw, I have to date ever owned exactly zero Bitcoin and only have a few lite coins mined years back (all of which have still not paid back the costs, but are close... Amazon or Tesla would’ve returned better in my case). I might not find it useful myself but it’s pretty hard to deny a lot of other people do find it useful.
Oh yeah, I saw some documentary about bitcoin in Africa. It was so sad. This woman standing in basically a muddy hut, stirring some soup, and saying how she put everything into bitcoin because they say it always goes up. She had no idea what it is.
Someone basically tricked her into buying lottery tickets. (who knows, maybe it'll work out just fine)
That's not even close to "using bitcoin". To a rounding error nobody is actually using bitcoin (even less the other cryptocurrencies, since it's even more rare to be able to), except to commit crimes.
It's really unfortunate that rent-seekers (may have) ruined blockchain as a technology. The fundamental problem IMO is that the most useful applications have no speculative potential, and structuring blockchain applications in a way that creates speculative potential seems to inherently reduce their usefulness.
Decentralized currency on the blockchain? Great! But a currency's much more useful if its value is stable, so if you want to maximize its usefulness (assuming you don't want to tie its value to an existing currency, as existing "stablecoins" do) you probably need a mechanism to increase or decrease the money supply in response to changes in demand. Poof, there goes the speculative potential.
Or consider another potential use case that I've thought about a lot, raising funding for co-ops: it's hard for a startup to raise capital without issuing equity, and decentralizing that process could create realistic alternatives to the stock corporation ownership structure for big nonfinancial organizations. Or similarly, as an example that might be more familiar or important to folks on HN, it would make a lot of sense as a decentralized funding mechanism for FOSS development. (Yes, there have been attempts to do this, which I won't link here.) But no one's content to just build a protocol that lets people put (say) ETH in a pot to fund business investment or software features and then let others claim that ETH in exchange for implementing the stuff. No, you have to create your own DecentralizedFundingToken with a structure that's contrived to create speculative potential to reward "early adopters" and then do an ICO.
I currently own no cryptocurrencies. I owned <$10k in Bitcoin between 2011 and ~2014 (no, not at mtgox).
It's in it's infancy. In two decades we will know what it means to us as mankind.
Cars were also dangerous, unregulated, expensive and excessively polluting. It got a lot better on all these points, and not all due to the cars: some of it was a mind shift that mankind had to make.
But cars had value. They have value. They had value from day 1.
Cryptocurrencies just don't. It's all smoke and mirrors, where everything would be better without the blockchain. Without irreversibility. Without everything about it.
There are whole books about how terrible and useless it is.
And please do what the article said: How much of your own money is dependent on you selling the lie of cryptocurrency or smart contract to the next level in this multi level marketing?
I sold my BTC when it was at $15k, because I felt disgusted in participating in this super-immoral going-nowhere-moral tech, so my balance is 0.
I made a profit, sure, but regret touching it at all.
> Same will hold true for cryptocurrency.
By this logic you could start kicking puppies, because "eventually something good will come out of kicking puppies", and just as baseless reasoning.
> But cars had value. They have value. They had value from day 1.
This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful. You saw that immediately and the true costs only became more apparent years later.
Cryptocurrency is as if Robert Moses had redesigned NYC around pet rock warehousing on the theory that someone would later find a use for them, and the warehouses needed to burn coal continuously.
> This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful.
Well, no, not really.
While cars do have non-zero usefulness, the reason we rebuilt the world around them was because of car manufacturer lobbying, not because of some shared revelation about their value to society.
There's some truth to that but the main point was simply that anyone who bought a car, especially earlier on, saw immediate benefits. Later on they might have reconsidered if they learned how traffic jams work, saw the effects of pollution or injuries, etc. but by then they were most likely financially invested with major commitments to an automobile-based lifestyle.
That's the problem with these kind of things: the early adopters see benefits but probably not the costs, that convinces other people to join them, and it quickly reaches the point where the easiest/most profitable is to continue down that path. If you're the average suburban homeowner, you might hate the effect that sitting in traffic has on your health and time but if you can't afford to live next to the office you're probably going to treat it as inevitable since dramatic changes affect your property values.
No argument here: in the second decade, the only cash-positive usage is convincing other people to buy them. That’s a long time to have nothing to show despite such massive cash flow into the system.
TBL transformed the world in a few years for a tiny fraction of the cost despite much higher barriers to adoption.
There is no cash flow "into the system". Its a forever repeated nonsense idea. If you exchange fiat or maybe gold for fiat there is no cash flow into anything its just an exchange. Crypto to crypto or to fiat is exactly the same. No cash goes anywhere other than to the seller.
(obviously ignoring fees and such but they also dont go into anything its just paying someone for providing a service)
If you look at crypto as the huge trading space and you dont see it produce anything is simply because its not supposed to. You look at the space that just exchanges stuff.
If you look at a grocery store and you dont see anything produced you are right. The store is just where people exchange stuff. Its not where value is created or where you would find innovation in producing something.
What do you think happened to all of the money from VCs, big consulting companies, etc. which was spent on blockchain services? How many people have received a full-time paycheck for years for the express purpose of building something worth using?
Your grocery store analogy illustrates why there are so many skeptics: I don't have to ask people whether they use a grocery store because they have food on their shelves and there's a steady stream of people entering and leaving the store. Blockchain systems, on the other hand, are never mentioned other than by people who have a vested interest in selling the system rather than doing anything with it. People say they're going shopping to buy something for dinner, but it's extremely hard to find someone saying they're buying cryptocurrency because there's something it helps them do faster/better/cheaper rather than just hoping they'll be able to sell the same token to someone else for more than they paid for it.
Where do you see how much VC money was spend in the crypt space?
No one really knows, that's the whole point. People see BTC being worth 60k and exchanges having billion of trade volume. All of that is a useless indicator of how much money is actually spend to solve a problem or at least try to solve one.
I'm certain millions of dollars has been spend and probably nothing or not much came out of it so far but there is no metric and nothing to compare it to so how can people come to the conclusion that too much was spend for too little return? I assume they look at hype and trading and all that and this is what leads to the concision. Whether the conclusion is wrong or not, we dont know but the reasoning is wrong.
Even trough there is nothing to compare it to, a huge junk of VC money is spend for things that eventually fail to give return. Its part of the game. And any sane person would agree that if it fails people stop to put more money in for the same ideas. So how do people think that VC are just stupid and shovel money in stuff for 10 years and counting with no return? Maybe just maybe this is not really the case and there is tremendous change coming for the way financial system work. Its just not something that happens quickly and it certainly not some ETF or anything the public talks about because they see numbers in $ value. That's just people playing around with what these systems allow them to make. Its like the chain-mails or ascii-art and all that stuff that hardly anyone could see as solving any problem but then again e-mail did solve a problem even trough the tech was (/is) horribly bad.
>Blockchain systems, on the other hand, are never mentioned other than by people who have a vested interest in selling the system rather than doing anything with it.
You dont hear people talk about how crypto helps them because it does not for the most part. They don't use it. Its also for the most part not meant to be used by them (the end user).
They may use a product that's build on top of it some day. Or even already do [1] without knowing.
DLTs are just global distributed databases where everyone can verify the state and rules. We have no clue what kind of problems this can solve but its probably not solving much of peoples everyday problems or if so only indirectly without them knowingly using the system. Just like most people never notices that they use TCP/IP. TCP/IP was once a very stupid idea if you would have tired to tell people what it is. They would have told you that phones already work and that TCP/IP at that time would not even allow you to make a phone call. Why would you encode some tiny messages to send over a wire if you could just call the other side instead.
One of the end-user focused ideas that may become reality in the next years is web monetization [2] where your browser steams fraction of cents while you watch anything on the web. Maybe its payed content only or may it removes the ads if you pay.
The idea itself is old (subscriptions). But subscriptions do not scale. No one wants subscription for every website and online service. If you could pay them directly as you use, it would work for all who implement this. No prepaid or monthly billing. Pay as you use or donate as you use. This stuff is pioneered by "crypto people" because it relies on p2p value transfer. The current way we move value can not handle micropayment. You can not stream fraction of cents to someone if everything has to go to a third party first and that third party has to find a way to get the money to the recipient who may or may not be a customer of them. Its slow expensive or completely impossible due to d incompatible jurisdictions and such stuff. Its kinda works like phones did once and it should move on to work like the internet does.
The US government has been using cryptocurrencies to deliver aid direct to Venezuelans, for whom previously traditionally bank-wired funds were been pilfered by local (government-controlled) banks.
The aspect of direct "peer to peer" electronic cash, coupled with plausible deniability of ownership and no need for trusted parties, are tremendously positive characteristics in poor, corrupt and developing nations where everyday crypto adoption is running high.
There is nothing else available to solve many of these problems, hence Bitcoin and others filling the void.
There are many other potential positives too, but to say there are none - even right now - is ill-informed.
I'm not doubting you, but do you have a better source than a cryptocurrency news site?
Also, the US government sending cryptocurrency to South America honestly doesn't sound like a definite positive. Even recently, the US doesn't have a great track record with their interventions in that region of the world.
Regardless of a given view on the politics of this particular intervention, accepting the intervention occurs at all, also accepts crypto's utility for this purpose of circumventing systemic centralised corruption, which was the point of the example.
I sold at the peak of a bubble, so I can be happy about that. Sure, it's higher now, but I also don't invest in payday loan companies for the same reason. I hear it's very profitable too, but it's just too evil.
> Is US dollar moral? Is it not also "smoke-and-mirrors"
US Dollar and other "real" currencies are and can be used for payments and transactions (money in exchange for goods, services etc.). Cryptocurrencies are only converted to/from other currencies to make profits based on speculation.
Disclaimer: I don't know world global finance, I don't know much about economics, I hold several cryptocurrencies. I am fantastically unqualified to actually make this post.
I was curious about this comment, because I know FOREX is a massive market. According to [1] the daily volume of FOREX in USD is $6.1 trillion. According to [2], the average 'consumer unit' (ugh... I guess that means 'person'?) in the US spends about $63k per year. Let me know if my maths or methodology here is wrong because, and I cannot stress this enough, I am a moron acting in good faith but a moron nonetheless... (63 000 / 365) * 330 000 000 (the US population) = 56958904109.6, or $57bn. That's a lot but it's only (conveniently) about 1% of the volume of the FOREX market. Which means what, the vast majority of USD changing hands is in the form of 'converted to/from other currencies to make profits based on speculation'?
Again, please let me know if my methodology is broken, my sources are shit, whatever.
I think one would have to factor in how much of the population is actually personally involved in that, the rich hold a large majority of all the money and wealth [1] and the amounts of money they move are lightyears away from the amount of money an "average" person uses for everything their daily life encompasses.
A rich person can move more money than whole towns combined. We are left with the question: Which one does better reflect the "actual" usage of money? 2-3 rich people doing speculations or thousands of "regular" people (living expenses, entertainment, work supplies etc.) with way less money?
Compared to that there is the problem that something like bitcoin is actively harmful towards practical usage due to the extremely high transaction cost, slow transactions, volatility, absolute lack of privacy, extremely high energy cost (that already surpasses whole countries with only very few people using it).
> Is it not also "smoke-and-mirrors" by your definition since it's just paper that we all believe has value?
USD is backed by the mostly aligned incentives of the whole world in general, and the biggest company in the world in particular, and by the largest military might and nuclear arsenal, ultimately.
USD is paper and bits we believe has value. BTC is bits that most people believe doesn't have value. And that everyone knows will never displace USD because (see above) won't allow it.
Raaa-haaaight. Next time you don't believe USD has value you'll skip picking up that $100 bill on the street. When you get robbed you'll laugh and give the robber your worthless USD and say "good luck using this for anything!".
>> BTC is bits that most people believe doesn't have value.
I'm not a crypto supporter, but I'd say that he is right there. If _you_ found private key to a wallet with 1 BTC somewhere, would you leave it be? Even if you can't buy a coffee with it, the exchangability for USD is real.
Yes. For one thing you can buy stuff with it because it is legal tender for all debts. For another thing the value is mostly the same from day to day. You're not going to go buy bread today and have it be 10% more expensive than it was yesterday, or 30% less expensive next week.
Cryptocurrencies are not currencies. Bitcoin might be priced at $63,000 today (or $48,000 or 53,000 or oops 30,000 tomorrow?) but it's worth is $0.
Hmm… taking your question at face value. Can you be more specific?
Is there value in nonreversibility? No, that "feature" has negative value, and it's the reason people trust credit cards.
Value in anonymity? Not at this scale, no. On net that feature just is not workable in a society built on anything other than libertarian-anarchy. And most people actually want a structured society, not fiefdoms.
Take KYC and AML laws, for example. What percentage of people do you think would say we should abolish them, if you explain what they are, and what they are for.
Open Source? The functioning of our traditional economy is pretty open in its working. It's complex, yes. But you are welcome to understand it, and participate in the process.
The "code" that the economy works on is legal code. I think where I disagree with you is that computer code is inherently more suitable. I say that as a professional programmer, who's been programming for decades.
Here's the thing: "The programs" was never the problem.
I can illustrate this best with smart contracts. They're a solution to a non-problem, while making the actual problem much worse. Contract disputes mainly come from disagreements about what the contract means, and errors in codifying intention as text.
Ability to enforce was never the biggest problem. Never. And by forcing the enforcement by using a smart contract it's actually making the problem worse, where "that's not what I meant". Yes, the default action in a real contract, without contextual evidence, is to take the wording of a contract literally (and oxford commas matter). But if there is other evidence, then yes a court will take that into account. Do you not want that? Do you honestly want a maliciously injected underhanded bug in a contract to be enforced, with no recourse?
I think the problem with your question is that people who ask it don't actually know what they're asking.
In the libertarian-anarchist utopia based on this infrastructure the enforcement methods are beyond the reach of the police. So what do you do when someone robs you? When someone uses a bug in a smart contract to take your house?
Just as a reminder (from someone who admittedly knows little about cryptocurrencies aside from this): BTC and other cryptocurrencies are not anonymous. They are, at the most, pseudonymous, and because of their very nature, the trail linking whatever online identity you used to make the transaction lives forever on the blockchain.
I'm here talking about the goals, not the implementation. So what you're saying is a bit off topic. But yes some cryptocurrencies actually are anonymous, as I understand it. E.g. Monero.
Crypto miners buy a slab of silicon, plug it in, and its profitable. If this weren't the case, no one would mine it. Cryptocurrency is a fungus; either it will die, or it will eat up as much electricity & high-powered silicon as miners can get their hands on, diverting both from more economically interesting and productive applications. If I have one or two computers; that's enough. I don't need anymore. There is never "enough" computers for miners; they will always want more, because more electricity & computers means more money.
This is not theoretical. This is happening. Its destroying any service which dares to offer free tiers of generic compute. Its had a significant impact on a global silicon shortage the likes of which we've never seen, impacting products from graphics cards and work computers to cars and defense hardware.
That's it; there's no other correct opinion, only incorrect ones. If you support cryptocurrency, you support the environmental collapse of our planet. We don't need it; its die-hard supporters are either profit-motivated or have nothing beyond a grade-school understanding of historical macroeconomic trends and the broad, undeniably negative impact immutable currencies like Gold & Silver had on the average person's standard of living during economic downturns.
A lot of people are not comfortable with the fact that a secretive club of bankers can produce more of these at will, and give them to who they like. The moral hazard here is off the charts, and it's too much to expect that they won't keep producing more and more until it's worthless as has happened to every fiat currency in history. See the current prices of stocks, bonds, real estate, and education for examples, and yes even the current crypto market.
Crypto may not be the answer, personally I'm sure Bitcoin is not. But the problem is real.
Bitcoin does not solve this problem at all, since 71% of the global hashrate is concentrated in China [1]. Instead of a currently controlled by central bankers, you get a currency which can be controlled at any moment by a totalitarian government which currently attempts to expand its territory using military means.
Ironically this is also why gold-backed currencies are not an acceptable replacement for dollars either - just substitute China with Australia (which is of course politically a far more benign country than China, but you're still outsourcing control of your currency).
The problem of currency stability is real, but crypto is not a solution at all.
The answer to that concern is introducing and voting for policies that make the control of the global financial system more transparent and accountable, not introducing a new form of speculative commodity the (unintentionally-aptly-named) mining of which is, even now, contributing materially to global climate change that will, if left unchecked, devastate human civilization as we know it.
Cryptocurrency invents value out of nothing. It's a scam, a fraud, a ponzi scheme, and nothing more than counterfeit money. And it should be treated as such by the governments of the world.
Cars are still extremely dangerous and are have caused massive damage to the planet, cars also solved significant and real problems and did so without waiting decades.
Cryptocurrency has had plenty of time to find a legitimate use and has completely failed. It is not a functional currency and it does not solve any real problems for non-criminals.
Not only does it waste energy and computing resources, it has helped fund a significant amount of the digital threats that the average person will encounter.
I would argue cars are still mostly a disaster. They're not good for the environment, they partitioned neighboorhoods, they're very dangerous (the biggest non-disease killer of younger people before drugs), and they're another thing poor people end up having to buy and owe payments on every month.
I’m not sure I’d go that far but there might be more to it than you think: they’re directly one of the most common causes of death and lowered quality of life, and indirectly contribute to multiple others (carcinogens, respiratory diseases, everything related to lack of exercise and unhealthy eating, etc. both directly from usage and indirectly from suburbanization), a significant source of financial pressure for many people, and a non-trivial climate change contributor.
"they’re directly one of the most common causes of ... lowered quality of life" - what is the basis of this statement? It seems like a manifest absurdity.
It makes more sense if you don't trim the quote. Cars directly cause a large number of injuries and fatalities every year, and that's mostly premature — people who had decades of healthy life ahead of them until a vehicle incident, as opposed to someone in their 80s who died of cancer before heart disease got them.
I included lower quality of life because while safety and medical improvements have reduced the number of people dying (although trucks & SUVs have reversed that trend for people who aren't inside cars) it's common to hear people who didn't die but have a significant downward spiral after an accident: whiplash, back injury, inactivity, problems with chronic pain (a common path into opioid addiction) and becoming less active to the point of having health impacts. In the U.S. this is especially likely to put severe financial strain on people and their families because health care is tied to work and many of the long-term effects make it harder to work while insurance settlements are often not enough to cover more than a short time out and there are many reports about the difficulties of getting things like chronic pain taken seriously in court or by doctors (if you lose an arm, nobody argues that it happened — if your back hurts in a non-obvious way, you might be accused of faking it to get money or drugs, especially if you weren't starting from a high social status).
OK, that makes more sense. However, your comment does not take into consideration the benefits from cars, which should be considered to accurately assess their overall effect on quality of life.
On top of all this, it could be macro-economically destabilizing and lead to disastrous results. Even Douglas Adams tried to warn us 40 years ago: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html
This is really a complaint against Proof of Work based consensus protocols.
"Cryptocurrency" is also kind of a dumb term. Everyone seems to still think this is about creating new currencies. Really we are talking about tokens that represent some component of a system. Yes that is general because the base for experimentation with tokens is absurdly vast. God we need to move beyond thinking about Bitcoin! Really this article is saying "Fuck Bitcoin" and well, I'd agree with that at this point.
> Everything else is just either incidental, or propaganda.
After seeing a few of your replies on this thread I'd like to comment on this: what I see is someone who's using their own personal beliefs as justification on why something isn't useful, failing to understand others have their own beliefs and situations that make the technology useful to them.
For me, and others, there is a deep value in a decentralized, fault tolerant, fast, global, user controlled, immutable ledger of payments and store of value. You might argue that we have existing centralized solutions to these problems, which you believe are better, but that doesn't invalidate the inherit value I (and others) attribute to such a system. Being able to transact across the world in seconds for less than a bank wire and without a central authority is useful. Yes a centralized authority like PayPal can do it faster and with less resources, no that doesn't mean the decentralized method is useless.
Holdings: 5% of my net worth in various proof of stake coins, hoping to recoup money I lost to inflation not playing the equities game so I can afford a home.
> The multi-level marketing ponzi scheme things would still be present.
Yes, there are scams. But even in 2017 ICO days these were easy to spot - wailing and teeth nashing over ICO scams was dumb then and still is now.
> Yes, but "crypto" means something else.
I'm sorry but words mean what people who use them want them to mean in order to communicate ideas between them. Meanings evolve and words are co-opted and probably people should get over that.
> It's not. It's about greed and creating money for yourself. Currencies are just more direct.
I guess I can agree if what you mean by greed I replace with self-interest based mechanism design. I don't believe this needs to be zero sum, though. Maybe we'd differ on that.
Capitalism is about rewarding people for creating value. It's the best economic theory ever invented, because it aligns your goals with the goals of everyone else.
Bitcoin speculation does not create value.
The stock market does (e.g. see research on potato and onion futures).
"Cryptocurrency is the multilevel marketing of tech"
It's rare I see such a massive amount of hype, complexity, computation, articles, blather, bullshit, etc deconstructed so powerfully with a simple phrase.
Crypto, gig working, social media, HFT, and ad tech are all symptoms of late-stage capitalism - perfectly neutral technical ideas that are completely unworkable in our current sociopolitical and economic structures.
Surely everyone would agree that putting our collective intelligence into 100-year timeframes for lifting all of humanity would be a great boon.. .
And yet we're stuck in Black Mirror world of fraud, exploitation, misinformation, "eff you, got mine" shenanigans.
Really exhausting as someone who grew up with a twinkle in his eye about changing the world through technology.
So it seems Drew is biased here, he is biased because his service is being used by thieves to make money.
My tainted opinion: I think the criticisms of Proof-of-Work are totally justified here. There are perverse incentives for "miners" to execute work in the cheapest way they can, whether that is JS miners, bot farms, abuse of free services, hacked AWS accounts, abusing favorable tenancy conditions etc. and even if the miner isn't downright stealing, there's a good chance they are operating in an environment where the cheapest electricity isn't going to be exactly "green" either.
Practically all of these mining efforts are not done out of some kind of altruistic, utopian goal of shutting down central bankers, but are simply done to make money.
What I think is unfair of Drew is to categorize cryptocurrency as a whole as an abject disaster, when in his own article he writes "attempts at reform, like proof-of-stake, are viciously blocked". Well proof-of-stake still falls under the cryptocurrency banner, doesn't it? Perhaps it's better to say that cryptocurrency is facing an identity crisis.
My opinions on proof-of-storage: I always expected that the price of these coins would naturally level out because you'd have to remain competitive with the likes of Backblaze or S3. I don't know enough about the incentive structures of Proof-of-Storage coins, but if there are incentives to have empty spinning rust then these are the wrong incentives and I'd say those protocols are likely broken. Rewards should be heavily slashed if there's wasted storage (ie. empty storage), so as to disincentivize miners from over-provisioning hardware (hoarding disks).
Disclosure:
I'm currently holding roughly a pay check each of Harmony ONE and Polkadot and have a small, locked stake in ETH2. All of these projects are Proof-of-Stake.
I also own pocket change amounts of Stellar Lumens which are used between myself and a friend to keep track of who's paid for lunch. As I understand it, the Stellar consensus protocol is not computationally intensive when compared to Proof-of-Work.
>So it seems Drew is biased here, he is biased because his service is being used by thieves to make money.
Thieves using my service to make money is what pushed me over the edge into writing this piece, but I have a well-documented history of criticising cryptocurrencies. Here are some examples on HN:
You're asking people to document their own bias, so I think it is only fair to point out yours.
Do you believe that cryptocurrency as a whole is an abject disaster? Do you support efforts to reform consensus with alternatives to Proof-of-Work (eg. Proof-of-Stake, Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance, etc.) or do you think cryptocurrency is a lost cause?
>I think I have been pretty open with my own perspective in TFA.
Perspective and bias are two different things.
>I addressed both of these in TFA, too.
No you didn't, or I wouldn't have asked. You mention proof-of-stake in passing. You also seem to continue to conflate proof-of-work with cryptocurrency in general.
You seem uninterested in discussing these topics further than what you've laid out in your article, which is totally fine. Thanks for taking the time to write and share.
> I always expected that the price of these coins would naturally level out because you'd have to remain competitive with the likes of Backblaze or S3.
Backblaze and S3 cannot conjure storage space out of thin air. If proof-of-storage coins make hard drives more expensive, that also increases the capex for those services and thus their prices. In the end, they're just shitting on everyone's lawn, no matter if you're using your own purchased disks or storage-as-a-service.
Stake: I hold EUR and have never held crypto"currencies".
I've heard a lot about proof-of-stake as being a lesser drain on energy per unit of mining, but I'm still very unclear on—well, many things about PoS, actually, but one in particular stands out:
How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?
My understanding of cryptocurrencies and blockchains is still fairly limited, but I'm struggling to see how any system that allows for conversion of computing resources into a saleable commodity can avoid that problem, whether or not it finds a way to avoid the "electricity-consumption-to-money" pipeline.
>How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?
I guess the point here is that you could effectively stake on a Raspberry Pi with a 256GB SD card for the next 5 years or so, and you don't need more Raspberry Pis or SD cards to stake higher amounts. The main limiting factor is typically you need to be a full-node, which means syncing the entire blockchain.
If that's not really green enough for you, you can also do delegated staking. One person could run a staking service on their Raspberry Pi for 1,000 people, etc.
...Can you expand on that a little further? I don't really understand what it means "to stake" in this context, or why more RPis (or other compute resources) wouldn't let you mine more/faster.
Or if you have a link to a good resource for explaining how proof-of-stake works in a way that would clarify this, that would also be fantastic.
> more RPis (or other compute resources) wouldn't let you mine more/faster.
Essentially, because there is no computationally intensive work being done. Proof-of-Stake is kind of like saying:
"I have 100 of these coins staked in the network that I can't spend, because of my faith in the network, I'd like to validate this other transaction of 10 coins, the network should award me with 1 coin for validating this transaction because I'm being a good validator.".
Another validator has an incentive to prove that those validations are invalid, because if they do, they get the reward instead, and usually an additional fee.
"Not so fast, I have a copy of this ledger as well, and I can see that this transaction could not be possible. I also have 1000 coins staked, so the network should trust me even more than it trusts you! Not only should I get the reward instead, but we should all agree that you'll get no more rewards in future until you clean up your act."
The rest of the validators, along with their stake, then essentially vote on who wins the dispute. All of this is not computationally expensive. The person staking 1000 coins and the person staking 100 coins can do so both on the same hardware, but yet one of them has more "voting" power on the network, and can net more rewards by having more validation throughput.
That's all very over-simplified, but I think it covers the basics.
If you don't mind, then, can you explain what does allow for staking more coins at a time? That is, if I wanted to increase my rate of mining by 100x in a PoS system, how would I do it?
That's simple, you just stake more coins. Staking rewards go back into the stake, so it is compounding (ie. you stake 100, get a reward of 1, you are now staking 101). As long as you don't unstake, your stake will grow over time.
If you want to stake more coins than you have, then you need to acquire coins by other means (ie. buy them off someone who doesn't want to stake them).
Stakers also have an incentive to trade some of their rewards instead of re-staking them, because they want the network to get utilised rather than simply be 100% staked.
> How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?
It absolutely wouldn't - as we see from Proof-of-Space trashing the hard disk market recently.
I respect his opinion (especially if his biggest exposure to it was through CI abuse to mine Monero and other CPU-based PoW crypto, I won't even deny that's an extremely shitty situation many service providers have had to deal with these past months more than ever), even if I disagree with it.
It's not difficult to be negative on crypto when it personally brings you nothing but grief. Our point of views are unequivocally tainted by our personal experiences; I'm sure had I been born in a reasonably free country, with competent social structures and the means to actually own the fruits of my labor, I'd probably hold a different view on the entire ecosystem: I'd see nothing but grifters and scammers polluting the planet while taking advantage of gullible fools.
And as the article says, I'll disclose my stake (Even if I see it as pretty spiteful): I sold off the majority of BTC I had when it touched $60k but most of it is in stablecoins, so I'm still part of the ecosystem. A considerable part of my net worth is in cryptocurrency I've been slowly accruing over the years, converting however much I could save up in local currency to a minority in cold hard cash and the rest in crypto, and it wouldn't have been possible for me to save up otherwise. Yes, I am in one of those so-called "isolated examples of failed national economies" that maybe aren't nearly as isolated nor as uncommon as he seems to allude to.
I generally agree. I do have a question, though. Would it be this bad without the marketplaces? I had a sliver of hope for a small period of time that bitcoin would truly replace fiat currencies. And that ethereum could replace law. Both have failed to achieve their goal. Is it society’s fault or has the tech always been pointless? Are there meatspace things society could do like e.g. ban using dirty energy for mining, ban proof of work, some [thing] about regulating exchanges, etc.?
You underestimated both the number of problems solved and effort put into making those solutions. Law and Currency are extremely complex institutions that solve complex interlocking problems.
Replacing either one completely is probably impossible and any change to them will probably have to be iterative improvement, not replacement.
It's a rhetorical tool that quickly highlights the absurdity of pointing out actual harm experienced makes the subject un-objective.
Would you prefer an example of 50 companies being hacked, them advocating for better cybersecurity measures everywhere, and someone pointing out they're now un-objective and should be dismissed? That this doesn't indicate anything about how cybersecurity measures are needed?
I also find it hilarious that you're accusing me of playing "bingo" while half your argument is:
"logical fallacy", "strawman", "appeal to emotion", and "poisoning the well" in quick succession.
Although I'm hoping it's just good sarcasm if it's impossible to distinguish.
Rhetorical tool? No it's a logical fallacy because you are misrepresenting the argument made by the OP in an attempt to attack it and you're confusing the deaths of family members with a little bit of lost revenue.
Here's a better analogy for you.
This post may as well be talking about how household electricity is the worst invention of the 19th century because of how inefficient long distance DC power transmission is.
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:
Are there actual PoS systems in the wild that don’t pretty directly tie themselves to PoW systems?
In my mind, the people who make this pitch that we shouldn’t blame crypto, we should blame proof-of-work sound a lot like Elon telling me that Tesla will be Level 5 any day now. Yea, it would rock if we could suddenly have the perfect thing, but I don’t see any evidence that PoW is actually being replaced by PoS for real world transactions.
If you're genuinely asking this question, it really depends on what you mean by "tied to PoW systems".
Currently the three largest PoS networks that I know of are Polkadot/Kusama, Harmony and Fantom. They are functional insofar as being EVM compatible. Theoretically anything running on ETH could be ran on these networks.
Stellar Lumens is an example of something which does not use PoW, it uses FBA which is considered much more efficient than PoW (and possibly certain PoS systems too).
Certainly, almost all crypto assets right now are tied to PoW systems in that their value is somewhat propped up by a general interest in crypto, of which the large majority (in terms of market cap) is currently Proof-of-Work based (BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, DOGE, XMR, etc.)
I suspect we will see a natural shift towards PoS alternatives as they are much cheaper to run and entry into these other markets is cost prohibitive.
We should also see a huge shift in value if/when ETH2 is released (which some estimate could still be several years away).
The elephant in the room will be BTC. It remains to be seen if people will still consider BTC to be a store of value in the crypto world, akin to gold bullion in traditional markets. Certainly many people holding it would like you to think so.
> The industry has been setting up informal working groups to pool knowledge of mitigations, communicate when our platforms are being leveraged against one another, and cumulatively wasting thousands of hours of engineering time implementing measures to deal with this abuse, and responding as attackers find new ways to circumvent them.
Does anyone know how to get in contact with these informal working groups?
Out of interest, do you hold any proof of stake currencies? I despise the externalities of proof of work, so interested in whether proof of stake is in a useful place yet.
I dont, but I probably will soon dude to an airdrop. Although not quiet sure if it counts as PoS because its does not run on PoS its just uses staking for some stuff.
Anyway my mininga statement was more of a joke because people would not trow gold into the rant about mining but are fine adding all other coins that have no mining at all.
Also not big fan of PoS as it has some of the same unwanted properties. So I dont intend to buy any PoS coins. I prefer FBA.
some fair arguments here... but this is exactly the same kind of vibe most people emitted when i went to CS grad school in the early 90s. everyone was like, 'oh msft is so evil. they suck.' and i just didn't understand. in reality msft put compute in front of everyone and created an insane amount of opportunity. this sounds like a 'get off my lawn' broad attitude and maybe a better approach is to be open to some of the innovation that is getting put down here.
But... Microsoft _was_ evil. Their business practices were abhorrent, they fought tooth and nail to kill open source, they were insanely anti-competitive. A big reason they "won" is that they made it impossible for OEMs to compete in the market unless they sold every machine with a Windows license.
I believe your analogy is correct, but not in the way you intended.
No, he is unhappy that the service that he was giving for free - to help others - is being taken and used to support drug dealing and arms trading. I think his position is pretty unimpeachable.
Jfc, while cryptos exacerbate the climate issue, our climate problems are directly and completely a consequence of a bunch of inventions in the 19th and 20th century...
Yet burning gasoline like a deranged madman is apparently constitutionally protected in every country.
Infrastructure spending is literally dependent on the continued ability of peoples to transport themselves quicker by sacrificing their grandchildren’s future.
How did this complete brain fart become policy? It’s far, far more destructive than “cryptos”..
> This rant has been a long time coming and is probably one of the most justified expressions of anger I've written for this blog yet. However, it will probably be the last one.
You're free to disagree whatever you wish to, but from this to "I'm ashamed to share an industry". Hey man, who are you? Then I'm ashamed to share the web with you. It's fine to disagree/agree/comment, but I'm little bit triggered of your words.
TL;DR: "cryptocurrencies is evil", but you are not understanding that it's not the technology that is evil. Cryptocurrency is a tool, and as a tool, many aspects of it depend on the people that use it. Let's then rant about AI (that is used for military scopes, so must be evil!) and IoT (ahh those chips that can not be found!!1111! Crisis!).
You're not ranting about cryptocurrencies, you're ranting about attackers. I would personally remove your last words about "ashamed".
> For my part, I held <$10,000 USD worth of Bitcoin prior to 2016, plus small amounts of altcoins.
LOL ouch. Selling prior to 2016 must sting. It makes sense that somebody who made this mistake would be bitter.
This guys take of:
> It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere.
is so bad and off the mark and missing the reality that is it even worth a well-thought reply? This reminds me of people who would shit on the Internet in the 90's because of porn and scams and this and that. The Internet had and will always have negative components but it's worth fighting for because of all the good. Crypto and decentralization is exactly the same way and in many ways even more important.
off the top of my head: DeFi, NFT's, data storage, services for the bankless, decentralized metaverses, insurance, synthetics, music streaming, video streaming, social networks, DAO's, social money
I see plenty of value in many of those issues. Some appear to be just jargon or beg the question. I see zero evidence that cryptocurrency is necessary or even beneficial in solving any of those problems.
I don't think my, or any, national currency is secure forever, but neither is any cryptocurrency. Currently national currencies are, on average, far more stable and secure places to hold assets than any cryptocurrency.
If your national isn't as stable as you like, you can more easily use a different national currency. If your country has capital controls that prohibit this, then you are using cryptocurrency to break the law.
My contention is that so far the only use cases cryptocurrency has been successful in are illegal. If the legal restrictions in those areas were removed, cryptocurrency would no longer be useful there.
Did you expect 20% of all US dollars would have been created in 2020? 4x in the last 20 years. That doesn't sound stable to me. When your currency can be debased by 20% in a year, with no democratic process or recourse; 6 board members appointed by Presidents, serving 14 year terms, decide what the price of money is, and how much of it exists. Alternatively Bitcoin's supply schedule is transparent, auditable, open source, mathematically provable.
If your national isn't as stable as you like, you can more easily use a different national currency. If your country has capital controls that prohibit this, then you are using cryptocurrency to break the law.
And what happens when the ultimate reserve currency (USD) is broken? People flee to gold. Well, Bitcoin is digital gold; its more secure, cheaper to carry, has better supply stability. Your solution to escaping a sinking ship is essentially jumping into a more slowly sinking ship.
My contention is that so far the only use cases cryptocurrency has been successful in are illegal. If the legal restrictions in those areas were removed, cryptocurrency would no longer be useful there.
The use case for cryptocurrency is escaping government monopoly of money, returning a savings rate to individuals and institutions.
Yes, the current use case of cryptocurrency is breaking or avoiding the law, it has yet to find a use case outside that.
People who dump money into gold are idiots or speculators (or hedging larger positions.) I have lived with the ups and downs of the gold industry and it is very much not stable.
The US dollar has far more infrastructure and institutional support preventing it's collapse than bitcoin. Currently the collapse of the dollar would destroy the world economy to such an extent that I highly doubt the bitcoin network would survive intact.
Yes, the current use case of cryptocurrency is breaking or avoiding the law, it has yet to find a use case outside that.
If the law is your baseline standard for what is moral, then you should probably try a little harder and put some thought into whether or not cryptocurrencies deserve to actually be illegal. For the most part, it is not illegal to own or trade in cryptocurrencies in the developed world.
The US dollar has far more infrastructure and institutional support preventing it's collapse than bitcoin.
We've seen this attitude before. Too big to fail, FDIC insured, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, auto industry bailouts, airline industry bailouts, investment bank bailouts. Debt increases perpetually. Money creation increase perpetually. Mortgage rates going to 0. Treasury yields going negative.
Bitcoin is useful for illegal things because they are illegal, morality does not enter in to it. If those things became legal, bitcoin wouldn't be needed for them anymore.
If the US dollar fails in the near future, your bit coin will be mostly useless because the global system that generates wealth and handles logistics will have broken. People will be starving, bartering and looting. nobody will want to give you anything of value for some stupid worthless ones and zeros.
Bitcoin as a hedge against the collapse of the dollar is a ridiculous investment.
This is where your lack of knowledge in economics and trade really shows.
If the US dollar ends up hyperinflating, assets like gold, bitcoin, stocks, housing, etc. become very, very expensive. They become expensive because everyone seeks to escape USD into safety of assets that are inflation resistant.
So you have it backwards: people will give EVERYTHING of value to get those assets, because those are the only things they want to be paid in. They are the only things capable of storing value.
Its funny you think nobody will want to trade for "stupid worthless ones and zeroes", because today they trade for "stupid worthless paper with President's faces printed on them", and before that, they traded for "stupid worthless shiny yellow rocks".
If you have hyper inflation, all the prices are going up. However assets with little to no practical value and no long term proven track record of value will not be where people will go to seek safety.
Hard assets with long track records of value will beat bitcoin hands down.
You should not assume ignorance like that, it does not contribute to the conversation. You don't seem willing to make any actual arguments. You just post lists and links and demand payment when people ask you to explain what you are trying to say.
If we, for example, had a team of 20 working on our CI offering, we would have re-allocated at least 50% of them to work full-time on combating the miners. And this trend is not slowing, it is only accelerating.
One week, we may have a breakthrough and find some common heuristic in running binaries that identify _this weeks_ miners, but next week they will have figured out that we have figured it out and make the requisite changes. It's something akin to the early days of anti-virus software, but given the 2021 scale of the internet, the iterations are moving at warp speed in comparison.
If you care nothing of the environmental impact (IMO you should), then take a second and ask yourself what your life as a creator of _things_ be like with no free access to CI tooling? I guaranty you that changes to the free tier of ALL CI services are on the way, and I heavily suspect that when that happens, the miners will take over any service offering paid CI where the return outweighs the price. This will lead to an escalation of pricing such that side-project, FOSS, and anything less than large profitable software will be priced out of hosted CI and be forced into a different model.
Stake: No crypto stake of any kind