Crypto "expert" here. We will have a catastrophic crash, it's normal and natural. But, the tech is here to stay and is 100x better than existing solutions. Crypto is changing the world, one crash at a time :)
The only practical differences in the tech is that it wastes more power, has no insurance, has no fraud remediation, and has no safeguard against volatility. I guess the potential anonymity too, but that's only really a practical benefit if making an illegal transaction.
The only time I can ever see a cryptocurrency being worth it is if you do not have any central authority you can trust. If we ever get to the point where you can't trust the courts to somewhat reasonably protect your money, then I think we have worse problems. Especially since you wouldn't have any physical protection from the legal system.
I can protect my own money, thank you. I do not need a nanny.
Anonymity might seem redundant to you and other people who "have nothing to hide". However, in a slightly more dystopian reality -e.g. when we are forced to use CBDCs- the government might choose to block you from using your hard earned money because you posted a criticism of the president on twitter.
> the government might choose to block you from using your hard earned money because you posted a criticism of the president on twitter
Um, I don't really see how cryptocurrencies are going to help you much when that same government just tosses you in jail instead. In fact, there are governments in our present reality that will throw people in jail for saying the wrong thing on twitter, so that really isn't an outrageous thing to imagine.
I'm sure the government would love to throw Edward Snowden in jail, but he is out of their reach. They would love to shut down Wikileaks and Sci-Hub too. On the other hand, governments can very easily weaponize financial services to deny people the ability to send individuals and organizations money - which is how Wikileaks found itself digitally embargoed by Visa, PayPal and Mastercard. Not so with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies can also provide anonymity to financial donors who would otherwise be targeted themselves for sending money to a party like Wikileaks.
Yes, cryptocurrencies are good if you want to finance illegal activity. However, since the vast majority of people are unable or unwilling to become international fugitives like Snowden, cryptocurrencies aren't especially useful as a way to post freely on twitter while retain your money against seizure by a hypothetical dystopian government.
You're assuming that financial censorship primarily targets illegal activity - it doesn't. The vast majority of financial censorship targets legal activity and persons, businesses and corporations who have not been charged by any government with any crime. And it's done by corporations pursuing political interests.
That's a long way from the claim that started this chain:
> in a slightly more dystopian reality -e.g. when we are forced to use CBDCs- the government might choose to block you from using your hard earned money because you posted a criticism of the president on twitter.
> I can protect my own money, thank you. I do not need a nanny
I love when people out themselves as having never worked on anything significant. Yeah, sure, for your pocket change, I'm sure you can reasonably protect it. For any significant transaction, I want the ability to reclaim my money if the other side turns out to be fraudulent.
> people out themselves as having never worked on anything significant
I really don't understand how you jumped to this condescending conclusion.
> the other side turns out to be fraudulent
Crypto is not here to protect you from falling victim to fraud. It is here to replace a faulty and completely outdated financial infrastructure. The same laws against criminals apply whether they use crypto or not.
> I really don't understand how you jumped to this condescending conclusion.
If you believe that financial regulations are the "nanny", you probably only have a child-like understanding of things. In that case, condescension is warranted. It means you don't have the experience needed to comment seriously on the topic.
> It is here to replace a faulty and completely outdated financial infrastructure
Yet it performs worse in every measurable metric. How many transactions per second can Bitcoin sustain? Four, lmao.
> The same laws against criminals apply whether they use crypto or not.
One does not need to be a criminal for proper regulations to apply. Again, this is the immaturity of people commenting.
Edit: after posting the below, I took a closer look at your commenting history and was shocked to see how frequently and how badly you've been breaking the site guidelines. That's definitely not ok, so I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
----
I'm late to this, but can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN and stop breaking the site guidelines? You did so extremely badly in this thread. "I love when people out themselves as having never worked on anything significant" is a bannable offense just by itself. No more of that, please.
I don't want to ban you, but we need you to post in the intended spirit of the site. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules going forward, we'd appreciate it.
@dang this is a pathetic response. HN encourages garbage comments and posts, but doesn't allow anyone to follow up. You think you're creating a safe space for discussion, but really you're creating an echo chamber of bad information.
The harm that bad information causes is incalculable, so no, I won't stop commenting on stupid posts. Perhaps you need to evaluate your responsibility to the world at large, and your role in supporting disinformation.
If someone believes that banking regulations are the "nanny", they shouldn't be allowed to comment on adult topics. Sorry not sorry.
Does it matter to you that you do more harm than my flames?
YCombinator just funded arguably the worst startup in history, Skip the Interview. Maybe you could do with a little dissension?
> If you believe that financial regulations are the "nanny", you probably only have a child-like understanding of things
Have you heard of the term "accredited investor"? That's 100% a "nanny" regulation that excludes poorer people from opportunities.
> Yet it performs worse in every measurable metric.
You jump to arbitrary conclusions. You probably did the same when it comes to Bitcoin that's why you say factually wrong things like in the comment. For example, do you understand what near-instant settlement means?
> One does not need to be a criminal for proper regulations to apply.
Comments like this make me believe that Crypto still has a ways to run up because most people still do not understand it yet - or at least not the full breadth of stuff that is happening in the industry.
I feel like if you look at the last 20 years and don't fall on knees at the Church of Fiat, then you have no idea what you're talking about. Crypto doesn't solve any urgent problems and is contributing to climate change as a bonus. Who is making use of crypto right now except crypto speculators and money launderers?
If you remain skeptical, that's fair. The good news is, Ethereum is reaching adulthood this year by switching to proof of stake and launching the web of layer-2 networks. Within another three years or so, the "actual applications" will become so ubiquitous as to be impossible to ignore.
I've tried to remain open minded for a long time on this issue, but honestly that list still looks really bad. At a glance, all the top companies seem to only be useful for coin trading/borrowing/lending/financialization.
Do you have any example of a use case with traction that serves a need not created by the existence of the cryptocurrency market itself?
For example, Eco is a non-crypto app that seeks to compete with CashApp, Venmo, and Apple Pay.
Although Eco is a fully non-crypto app, it is built on top of crypto rails.
Eco offers its users greater savings rates than traditional banks by using crypto to literally cut out the middlemen.
As well, Eco accounts are not FDIC insured-- but, I think that's a temporary downside of the current regulatory landscape. It seems like there's no reason why Eco accounts couldn't be FDIC insured in the future. Happily, the benefit of cutting out the middlemen is forever.
I think that's fair because right now, most or almost all crypto apps are circular.
Yet, I have found it useful to try and separate the fundamental innovations from the current set of assets being manipulated.
Here is a partial list of fundamental crypto innovations:
- non-custodial wallets in general to protect people from predatory institutions or governments
- smart contracts that always do what they say they'll do
- inherent global jurisdiction of blockchains, ie. borderless
- vastly reduced transaction costs to stand up and operate new, networked financial instruments and other kinds of digital asset systems (property registries, etc.)
The fact that these innovations are currently majority operated on dog money, Bitcoin, ETH, etc. is a temporary characteristic of this early stage of crypto's growth.
In the future, these same innovations will operate on everything in the economy.
For example, Tesla stock (backed by custodially-held physical shares, not synthetics) has been available on Solana for some time.
> non-custodial wallets in general to protect people from predatory institutions or governments
You can do that now by hiding money in your mattress. In both cases, it's not on you to protect your money, and a lot of people who are tech savvy have been failing to do so. Regular folks are going to get robbed often.
> smart contracts that always do what they say they'll do
Except when they don't, because they have a bug, and all the money is stolen.
> inherent global jurisdiction of blockchains, ie. borderless
This is only true if you are able to spend the money as cryptocurrency. Once you try converting that into fiat, you start hitting those borders really quickly.
> vastly reduced transaction costs
Except that the transaction costs are higher, on average, and especially so if you consider the fees for converting from fiat, and back to fiat.
> Tesla stock (backed by custodially-held physical shares, not synthetics) has been available on Solana for some time
Sure, but a financial institute is holding those shares. You could cut the middle-man here (the cryptocurrency) and just use the financial institution.
Thanks for that link. I've been long on BTC since the beginning, and I fully love the concept of crypto.
But busy with work (and I sold my startup 2 years ago) I went completely dark on the Crypto world. Now I'm trying to catch up with it and both DeFi and everything Layer 2 seem to be the future.
Which part? Could you say more? If you make a comment like this, I feel like it should be obvious what you mean, but it isn't at all obvious to me in this case.
There's a large subset of the talented people on HN that were wrong about crypto years ago-- they couldn't see that the casino and the innovation are, unfortunately, inseparable-- and many now cling to their original incorrect points of view, even as crypto is clearly changing the world like the internet did in the 90s and mobile in the 00s.
I have been full-time in crypto for years. I could write you a 10,000-word essay on crypto's promising use cases. But, I believe that you, and many others on HN, don't want to hear it.
That's too bad, because you guys grew up on sci-fi and rigor, and now you're ignoring that crypto is both rigorously successful and cypherpunk sci-fi come to life.
It’s pathetic because you’re just writing nonsense and can’t even describe anything practically productive about crypto. None.
By the way, I could ALSO write you 10,000 word salad about how commonly found stones can solve the wrongs in modern finance. That doesn’t say anything about common stones. It just says modern finance is FLAWED.
You are not showing yourself to be a person that it is worthwhile for this person to waste time on. There are other people in this thread with your point of view but who are commenting in good faith, rather than in bad faith like you are.
That is one kind of bad faith argument but there are others. In this case it is asserting that something is some adjective ("pathetic"), getting a response, and then just reasserting the same thing without responding to the response.
It was a bit brusque. I think that's the word you're looking for. If that's what bad faith means to you (which still seems a stretch of the definition so you can get the guidelines invoked and win the internet) then both sides of the discussion are guilty of this.
On the other side of the aisle, we have people pointing out that there aren't any interesting dApps, with the reply being:
"Sure there are! Here's a list dApps that are just more layers on moving cryptocurrency!"
That's only interesting if you assume the blockchain is valuable and interesting. This is a circular argument. Do you have anything better?
"Sure do! Here's a list dApps that are just more layers on moving cryptocurrency! Register on this site to hear me talk about NFTs!"
Is that "bad faith" too? I don't think so. There's a divide though, and it's a tiresome one. Some of us think the emperor has no clothes. Others think they are the best clothes ever. We probably all need our eyes checked.
There's a difference between "pointing out that there aren't any interesting dApps" and saying "This is just pathetic". The former is a reasonable point to make while the latter is a bad faith insult.
Instead of the thinly veiled ad hominem of trying to paint the user as a troll by crying "bad faith! bad faith!" Why didn't you provide some killer examples instead? This omission is as frequent as it is telling.
I am widely published inside the crypto industry on twitter and on a few podcasts over the years. For example, here is an episode on the many present & future uses of NFTs (episode requires a free Real Vision crypto account)
No, they were exactly right. In ten years, cryptocurrencies have produced nothing of value except speculation. This is like saying the Dutch that didn't sell their homes to buy into the tulip bulb craze were wrong. Sure, people have made huge gains, like all ponzi schemes generate. Most are bagholders, though.
> even as crypto is clearly changing the world like the internet did in the 90s and mobile in the 00s.
Crypto hasn't changed a single thing about the world. There is not a single popular thing backed by crypto. Every example you gave in this thread was either weak, like that DeFi Pulse link, or just straight not even using crypto, like Eco.
When you as an expert can't even identify a popular product using crypto at it's core, it doesn't speak very highly.
> I have been full-time in crypto for years. I could write you a 10,000-word essay on crypto's promising use cases. But, I believe that you, and many others on HN, don't want to hear it.
I am an actual cryptographer and would love to read world salad like that.
> That's too bad, because you guys grew up on sci-fi and rigor, and now you're ignoring that crypto is both rigorously successful and cypherpunk sci-fi come to life.
Stop. Libertarian dorks that don't understand the history of finance is hardly the sci-fi we want.
I've responded to several commenters who say this with my real world examples, the most notable of which are paying people in Venezuela to do work for me when most mainstream forms of monetary exchange are nearly impossible in/out of that country.
Venezuelan here. You're exaggerating the use of bitcoin in Venezuela. You might have paid some people with it but on the streets you use and want USD. Zelle, PayPal or USD in cash. No one wants another volatile currency, we've had enough of those.
I have not heard of that to be honest. What does happen is you might settle change with random stuff. Say you buy groceries for $8.50. You might pay half with a transfer in bolivares (local currency) and the rest with a $5 bill. Then they'll give you back a chocolate and a bar of soap as change as they might not have enough. It's bizarre
I am, uh, paying two contractors in Venezuela in cryptocurrency (not BTC) by their request. Not sure how I'm exaggerating it. Unless you think I'm only paying one contractor, I guess.
Why would that matter? Do you believe that you aren't transacting with USD when you buy something using the VISA network? Or with apple pay? Or a check?
There is a vast market for efficient, fast, and affordable methods of transferring money/wealth across political boundaries. Blockchain/crypto seems to be filling that niche for many people, myself included, without "speculation and crime" being a factor. There is no "remittance app" for it because you can do it with your pick of various widely available crypto coins and exchanges.
