I don't really agree with the original post and I don't buy into the "purely digital world" argument. I'm excited about crypto for different reasons. But a few thoughts:
> So then the question becomes, what is the value of <insert coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or efficiency. Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk tech merits. But nobody to date has been able to convince me that it has any real value. There are no armies or economies validating it.
Why are stocks without dividends worth anything? Companies have earnings. Many protocols have earnings as well, and they are built on top of Ethereum, which provides the security layer. What do you mean by "real value"?
> Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I have faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring our awful inflation)
10k denominated in what? I think ignoring inflation is an example of why people care. You only trust your cash because you trust the US government, which may be reasonable, but people in other parts of the world don't trust their government with monetary policies, e.g. [0]. Imagine inflation gets worse, the EU needs bailout, or we have WW3, and the the US government says "Sorry, you're no longer allow to buy gold or move your assets abroad, you need to buy our bad government bonds" - stuff like this has happened before, in many countries. And you can't do anything about it other than watching your savings crumble. Crypto gives you optionality. A government-independent monetary ecosystem. Nobody can lock you out. I trust the "Ethereum government" more than most centralized governments due to the transparency, global footprint, and aligned incentives. I can hold my savings in a USD-backed stablecoin as long as I believe in the US government's monetary policy. If that changes, I can swap into something else in a matter of seconds, and I don't need permission from any government to do so.
My experience has been that the value people see in crypto is directly inversely proportional to how much they believe in their government and whether they have experienced governments being malicious due to misaligned incentives. Most middle-aged people in the US don't fall into this category - they have never experienced war or malicious governments because they were lucky being born at just the right time and place and enjoyed nothing but prosperity. Convincing them about crypto is hard.
>My experience has been that the value people see in crypto is directly inversely proportional to how much they believe in their government
That's an interesting thesis and 'feels' true, but I have a hard time reconciling HN's (seeming) indie ethos with it's cryptoskepticism if that's the overriding factor. Have you any theories to explain the seeming disconnect?
I don't think HN can be considered indie these days. It was 10+ years ago. Now it's as mainstream as it gets. You rarely see something here that's not an echo chamber or the same as mainstream tech media. Just a result a of tech/startups being a lot more mainstream now than they were 15 years ago when HN launched.
I think many of the more "indie communities" are now assembling in Discord, subreddits, etc.
I'm also somewhat surprised at the extreme crypto hate on HN, but I'd attribute that to demographics. I do think that quite a large number of HN users are middle-aged Americans significantly above middle class. They probably started using it when they were early 20s interested in tech/startups and YC, which means they're now ~35-40 and have probably made a decent amount of money in tech. And that demographic doesn't really benefit from crypto for the reasons above...
> So then the question becomes, what is the value of <insert coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or efficiency. Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk tech merits. But nobody to date has been able to convince me that it has any real value. There are no armies or economies validating it.
Why are stocks without dividends worth anything? Companies have earnings. Many protocols have earnings as well, and they are built on top of Ethereum, which provides the security layer. What do you mean by "real value"?
> Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I have faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring our awful inflation)
10k denominated in what? I think ignoring inflation is an example of why people care. You only trust your cash because you trust the US government, which may be reasonable, but people in other parts of the world don't trust their government with monetary policies, e.g. [0]. Imagine inflation gets worse, the EU needs bailout, or we have WW3, and the the US government says "Sorry, you're no longer allow to buy gold or move your assets abroad, you need to buy our bad government bonds" - stuff like this has happened before, in many countries. And you can't do anything about it other than watching your savings crumble. Crypto gives you optionality. A government-independent monetary ecosystem. Nobody can lock you out. I trust the "Ethereum government" more than most centralized governments due to the transparency, global footprint, and aligned incentives. I can hold my savings in a USD-backed stablecoin as long as I believe in the US government's monetary policy. If that changes, I can swap into something else in a matter of seconds, and I don't need permission from any government to do so.
My experience has been that the value people see in crypto is directly inversely proportional to how much they believe in their government and whether they have experienced governments being malicious due to misaligned incentives. Most middle-aged people in the US don't fall into this category - they have never experienced war or malicious governments because they were lucky being born at just the right time and place and enjoyed nothing but prosperity. Convincing them about crypto is hard.
[0] https://devonzuegel.com/post/inside-argentina-s-currency-exc...