It's hilarious how HN is consistently wrong, even on tech-heavy subjects. No bright minds popping up here tbh. You can glean some interesting stuff from this. The hive mind was wrong on dropbox, seemingly wrong on this, and they are likely wrong on blockchain today.
For most people this has little value. The centralised banking model is cost efficient and for most people trust isn't an issue. The modern world runs on trust.
Also if I want to trade anonymously there is always cash ( as least for now ), which is a simple, well understood, near universally accepted mechanism.
There are niches where decentralized banking is useful - but they are niches - and many of them are associated with dubious activity.
On top of that the current tech plaforms simply don't scale - the cost of replacing simple trusted parties with technology is huge.
Not to mention NFTs, but it seems impossible to convince the HN crowd that there is a real art market in them, with real buyers and real artists using it. Any attempt to demonstrate this is met with wild leaps of logic - it's wash trading, it's not big enough, it's all a scam. I point to Beeple, Wes Cockx, DeeWay sales and all they tell me is it must all be a fraud. I show them markets with vibrant activity - Versum, FXhash, Foundation - and all I get is repetitions of memes around how NFTs are dead.
Successful scams have customers - the presence of people putting in money isn't a defining trait.
However I do think it's a bit harsh to call these things a scam - I mean take the art market itself - value is entirely subjective - doesn't mean it's a scam ( though scamming things happen in the normal art market to try and inflation prices ).
The question you have to ask yourself is:
Are you buying the NFT as an investment - because you think other people will value it, or are you spending the money because you are quite happy to own that thing forever and never sell - ie the value is to you.
I'd argue if you are doing the former you are more likely to be 'scammed' than the latter.
It shows that there is groupthink at play and that the overall HN commentary on subjects, even when they should know better (tech), is not particularly correct.
Being wrong once is one thing, but HN commentary seems consistently wrong on a whole litany of topics. The biggest source of bad hot takes seems to be something new/different. HN seems to be consistently conservative.
It’s a shame because I used to think that i would gain some insight on future trends from the fact that a lot of the people who comment here are in tech, but now I’m not so convinced.
That's because it is hard to discern what is shilling and what is a real / expert opinion. Shilling happens here on HN, like it does on every social media platform / discussion forum. It doesn't help that we can't call out suspected shilling on HN as it is against the rule. But that rule makes sense because suspicion is not proof, and it would just bring down the quality of discussion here if everyone of us accuses the other of shilling :). (And as someone once pointed out to me, sometimes these shillings are not necessarily from the marketing team but from employees and shareholders here, who have a vested interest in seeing the company do well.)
i think that's harsh. why would you even expect an aggregate sentiment of hn to indicate where to invest one's money. on the other hand it might be worth pointing out that y combinator supports plenty of blockchain projects
