So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens.
I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded systems. Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me. The author saying the “silent majority tech people” know its a scam is such nonsense to my experience. Every tech person I know thinks either A) its neat/super cool, or B) they don’t know anything about it besides memes.
Sure there are tons of misinformation, scams, and bullshit going on. That’s everywhere and is not special to crypto.
I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property.
All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat stuff.
(sidenote, I actually think piracy is pretty neat, but it was too good an analogy to pass up)
Remittances seems like one of the true benefits of cryptocurrency... but that's why I'd like to know what amount of usage is actually that and what is, let's say non-beneficial.
Some of them opt out of more environmentally unfriendly stuff like Ethereum for sure
Personally I've developed systems for paying for everyday things like your bus fare or phone bill using crypto in a country where there's a hell of a lot less confidence in fiat (Brazil) -- hell check out the history of the Brazilian Real if you want an idea of what real candycorn money looks like
Personally I just feel a hell of a lot of privileged bullshit out of people arguing that crypto is some good for nothing shit. Yeah sure great try living in a country where your government is fucked. We truly don't live in some francis fukuyama neoliberal fantasy world where we can trust stuff like traditional financial markets which have gone and failed us in the non english speaking world time and time again. I welcome any and all alternatives
Wow, you can actually pay your bus fare and phone bills in Brazil with crypto? That sounds either very impressive or totally unbelievable.
I could not find anything on Google, so if someone could you link/cite to some actually used examples (I guess apps or utility website?) that would be very helpful. Sincere thanks.
My experience as a Brazilian is that I've never seen anyone using cryptocurrencies in real life. On the other hand, the government's new instant payments system (Pix), allows anyone with a mobile phone to easily make small payments. In less than one year since launch it's already ubiquitous.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=comprar%20passagem%20d...
plenty of options now wow so hard to find
You're buying a number on a blockchain somewhere in the hope someone else will want it for more money, that's it.
Yeah, I think it's safe to say that the primary use of cryptocurrency nowadays is as either casino chips or a money laundering mechanism. The economics no longer make any sense for anyone else.
It’s like arguing the most popular restaurant is so crowded, no one goes there anymore.
And of course new sectors that are not established can seem like snake oil, simply because they are new industries.
The internet has steamrollered many industries and fundamentally changed the way they work.
Manufacturing, Music, Politics and now The final big boss, money.
It will take another ten years for this industry to mature. But in amongst the sham and drudgery we have the first non-violent system of currencies.
Isn't that a "they laughed at Galileo" argument?
They thought the Internet was snake oil. They thought Napster was snake oil. They thought BitTorrent was snake oil. ... but they also thought Pixelon was snake oil.
So, yeh, early adopters may often be driven by the seedy side of culture.
But it doesn't negate the value of the technology. Yes, piracy is neat and useful, but illegal. But was the benefit of piracy that you got free stuff? Or was it that it was an easier system than any other at the time?
Counterpoint: most "tech people" I know — including people who have worked in crypto — both know about it and also think it's a scam.
If someone only knows crypto from stories in mainstream press or cable news, they’d probably incorrectly assume “tech people” are almost universally for it.
I think everyone is talking past each other, because no one's exactly defining what the "scam" is, so you're talking about different things.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that, say, deep in the BitCoin code there is some algorithm giving Satoshi Nakamoto a dollar for evert transaction.
On the other hand, I believe that the vast majority of buyers are buying simply because they hope that someone else will buy at a higher price tomorrow, or next year.
This causes everyone to cheer-lead about how everyone else needs to buy or HODL, because they simply want to drive the price up.
For me, personally, I'd say this is what I'd call a "scam," in the sense that a MLM company is a "scam": that the motivation of the majority of people extolling the virtues of buying crypto tends to be simply personal enrichment.
I fall into the latter camp. I don’t begrudge the former. I just don’t think it’ll last and have little taste for speculating.
What is interesting about distributed ledger consensus via proof of work only remains interesting when there's a disconnect between the economy and good government. If your government is corrupt, or your economy is corrupt, you want the two to be disconnected. The problem is that the latter - corrupt economies - dominate over the former.
If you have a functioning government, you can use the legal system to enforce contracts, and then ledgers don't need to use proof of work. If you don't have a functioning government, or you can't let the legal system look at your contracts, then blockchain starts to look interesting.
The first economist says, "Look at that $20 bill."
The second says, "That can't really be a $20 bill lying there, because if it were, someone would have picked it up already."
They walk on.
Ha ha ha. That would only be possible with a government issued digital currency. Any private company running a "stablecoin" is guaranteed fraudulent. Can't be legit.
I once bought donuts from a food truck with BTC and the donuts were good but the payment process was really slow.
How would a merchant of physical goods even know about something like Celo, whatever that is?
Tether is one stablecoin, and arguably the worst example since it is literally the one coin every coiner will agree with you is a bad stablecoin. Do a deep dive on MakerDAO's DAI instead.
> Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me
Which I took as an implication that you didn’t see Tether as a deeply troubling or a scam
Tethers management is the problem - obfuscation and using other crypto as collateral instead of just USD.
It's just that widely available, totally unregulated financial instruments will always be primarily used to run ponzi schemes, pump and dumps and meaningless speculation (meaningless in that speculators are largely just speculating based on what other speculators might do).
https://iota.stackexchange.com/questions/8/why-does-iota-use...
Tether smells extremely fishy and seems to be used for a huge amount of trade volume on BTC and other cryptocurrencies.
Hi there. I've published a few papers in top conferences on BTC and ETH. I don't own a cent of crypto and believe that a lot of it is a very bad idea.
I find it endlessly frustrating when people insist that the only way to disagree with enthusiasts is to be ignorant.
No, the scam part is the idea that crypto is going replace fiat and as such will be worth many times more in the future than it is now.
I'd also be very, very surprised if there wasn't price manipulation going on with crypto trading.
But while his claim is true, in a Boolean sense, I don't know what exactly we're supposed to conclude about the world based on it. This isn't a ratio I've ever seen talked about before.
I'm guessing they're insinuating that the size of the feds balance sheet is somehow related to inflation, which it is only in a fairly loose sense.
So, what's left? I know you can still make money with it if you joined earlier and you're lucky. Same with a MLM, but at least those don't waste so much energy nor ruin the GPU markets.
- Instant loans without paperwork or credit agencies, algorithmically collateralized
- Micropayments to websites you visit rather than ads
- Electronic payments that can remain private if participants are smart. Much better privacy protections than electronic payment options like Visa/Paypal.
- Truly democratic governance protocols in which important decisions can be voted on in real-time by participants with skin in the game.
- The ability for a code itself, not associated with a human, to earn and hold money.
- Algorithmically enforced contracts that are more resilient to bribes and other forms of subversion compared to traditional court systems.
In the case of Bitcoin, originally, every Bitcoin holder would also be able to mine with their own computer and receive transaction fees. This has since changed, so now it's only the miners with specific equipment that benefit from the transaction fees.
This is embarrasing. I will give you more info in case you are geniunely wrong and not playing dumb.
This is the last mined BTC block: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/00000000000000000001d85...
The fees collected for transactions is 0.15 BTC and the mining reward is 6.25 BTC. Mining rewards will continue declining and some day the only value of mining will be those fees, but until now they have been largely irrelevant to the point that some miners just mined empty block because it was simpler from a technical standpoint, and it was becoming a problem because it just generated congestion in the network: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/why-do-some-bitcoin-min...
So you may think it's a scam for other reasons, but your point about mining fees being the driving of the pyramid, ponzi or whatever, is completely wrong.
Judging by how quickly Tesla stopped accepting Bitcoin, I would say he definitely knows.
Beyond answering questions from friends and family & reading r/Buttcoin for entertainment, I just don't want to spend time debating the issue with the occasional enthusiast.
Doubt it. He's another Libertarian and certainly hates the existing system.
Importantly though, it's not an either/or. Capitalism is problematic and cryptocurrency is problematic. Both can be true at the same time.
Additionally, there is no "silent majority" in tech that think it is a scam; the author has invented this.
It's not supposed to. No need for a permanent ledger to store cheap day-to-day transactions.
Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp.
If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions.
Because they don't know crypto. At all.
You're right that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are always generating new work and coming up with new ideas. Actually, they do this a lot more easily than other domains, because the fact that their entire field is a scam means there are a lot fewer of those pesky roadblocks like "the idea not actually accomplishing the thing you think it does" to contend with.
The fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency projects rest on one of a few obviously-false premises. Like "systems that require every participant to store the entire history of transactions forever scale well", or "people in the real world want every transaction they make to be completely irreversible", or "digital legers are guaranteed to accurately track the state of real-world objects". If you dismiss these, you can dismiss all the projects that depend on them without needing to know the difference between a MerkleCat and a SatoshKitty.
Have you heard of mina?
Tragedy of the commons is fully evident in the bitcoin block size debacle.
More like, everything old is new again. Nicholas Weaver called it "speedrunning 500 years of bad economic history".
It really doesn't. But that is a convenient way to dismiss criticism from everyone who isn't a crypto insider (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the people who spend that much time on it will necessarily be bought into it, the people who are critical will have given up caring about it at some point so will never have the necessary "credentials" to talk about it).
Not a very good way to convince me of cryptocurrencies' greatness by saying 'oh its too complicated to understand, but trust me its big'.
i'm not very into crypto - and everytime i look it feels like another speculative bubble but this time the speculators are even more hyped.
There are non-technical heuristics that we can all employ, through our knowledge of history and sociology, that allow us to identify late stage bubbles (and the pyramids and ponzis that accompany them).
I don’t have a taxi driver but I do have taxi driver equivalents in my life that are currently giving me all the signals I need.
I'd reckon that the average HN cryptocurrency skeptic would do better than the average person who's actually invested in crypto.
This is always how cryptocoin nuts argue.
Do you really need to go through all the history of the system in order to be convinced of the latest state?
What are the different ways to decide who should be the next person that gets to choose the next block of transactions?
Can you hide the amount you’re sending? What about the recipient? Or your own identity?
Can you transfer bitcoin into ethereum or more generally one cryptocurrency into another?
Is it possible to send funds to a recognizable shortname instead of an hexadecimal string?
Are there ways to protect your funds with several keys instead of a single one?
- No
- Another google search for "bitcoin + <your question>"
- "Yes" for literally the rest of the questions.
This wasn't an exam, this was basically an advertisement for "look what cool things you can do with this"
If I got any wrong, whatever. I have literally never researched bitcoin or blockchain. If I got them right, well... nice try on the exam I guess.
Answer to question three is not restricted to Bitcoin. There are many other systems, e.g. Proof of stake (POS).
I have several friends that worked in the industry professionally, for one of the few exchanges that takes KYC and such seriously.
None of them continue to work in that industry. One of them found it to be a net negative on their resume. None of them hold cryptocurrency.
There are many of us that are in fact informed, and have come to the same conclusion: this is internet tulips, and the music is going to stop some day.
Because they don't know Sciento-resonant-homepathics. At all.
Both repeat the same memes to each other in a self-reenforcing echo chamber. The underlying link is to political consensus. Leftist-socialist Twitter is eager to say that socialism is good because Bitcoin is bad. Trumpist-conservativist Twitter loves to say that Bitcoin is good because Joe Biden is bad. Nihilistic crypto permabulls are so hyped up that they jump into every thread to defend their favorites and their negativity is usually limited to the dismissive "sorry you want to be poor".
It never really goes anywhere. Someone comes up with a new crypto narrative - adoption, value, environmental impacts, human interest - and it's all you hear about for the next month. If you try to find good information you are presented with an opaque wall of obvious scams, not as obvious scams, and people who believe or do not believe in them.
There is interesting stuff going on, but the people studying it carefully are so hard to find through all the noise now.
It's easier when there's a bear market.
The thing is, regular money is, from a certain perspective, also a "scam". A lot of the financial system is effectively make-believe, with massive conflicts of interest at every corner and dynamics that keep working because everyone believes they should - until, for one reason or another, they stop believing, and then you have 2008.
Crypto is just another big mountain of make-believe systems (and getting bigger with every new contraption), but it is so young that the games of pretend are still very visible; and the key actors in crypto are different from the key actors in regular finance, which means it gets a bad rap from the latter. But if it can survive long enough (say, 30 or 40 years), people will just stop pointing out the "scam" and will go along with it, because "why not? If it works, it works".
I'm not aware of any non-government-backed fiat currency which has gained widespread use in the history of humanity. And in fact all of the fiat currencies I know of originated as representative money.
Bitcoin is not widely accepted in exchange for things of values, and I see no reason to believe that will ever change. Being able to spend it is the "killer app" of cryptocurrencies, and none of them have actually implemented it, despite many, many attempts.
Bitcoin in its current form should not be seen as a payment currency, instead as digital gold. A new asset class similar to actual gold/silver, real estate, stocks, etc.
Something to put part of your wealth in, hoping it appreciates over time. And as Bitcoin appreciates over time so well so far (12 years of 200% appreciation per year on average), it doesn't really make sense to spend Bitcoin. It is deflationary by design.
Bitcoin already is a killer "app" as such. An accessible way for anybody to preserve/grow wealth, a hedge against inflation and the lack of return on a normal savings account.
Your take on crypto for payments is needlessly pessimistic. It's inevitable, the winner just isn't clear yet.
Legal tender also only applies to paying public debts (i.e. taxes)... not paying a business.
Before the 1900s the vast majority of currencies were valued based on their precious metal content (gold or silver), not government fiat.
> you: Before the 1900s the vast majority of currencies were valued based on their precious metal content (gold or silver), not government fiat.
ORLY? I didn't know that. Oh wait I literally said it in the comment you replied to.
No, technically fiat money has value because it is accepted by a government to settle taxes. Which is why it loses value dramatically when a state collapses or otherwise becomes irrelevant to the local economy. Because traditionally the state itself was the issuer of such currency, already we have a massive conflict of interest at the very start: when the state pays out his own debts in its own currency, it's effectively asking his creditors to believe that currency has some value in the real world, while also telling them exactly how much that is supposed be. To "solve" this problem they invented central banks, which are supposed to keep governments away from the process of determining the actual value of a currency, if you believe that they are as independent as they proclaim. In the end, what matters is that enough people believe that certain arrangements are fair, and that the government will still be there tomorrow asking them for taxes. As long as that's true, one might well use the currency as a unit to settle private trades too, but that is a consequence of the original belief.
> I'm not aware of any non-government-backed fiat currency which has gained widespread use in the history of humanity
The key in this sentence is "widespread", which is something you can redefine pretty arbitrarily and hence move goalposts as required. In practice, other tokens have been used here and there, but in the end, what wins tends to be government-backed tokens for the simple reason that authorities will always enjoy a right to put you in prison if you don't settle your taxes in the currency they desire.
If you look at it from a technical perspective, any collapsed state where the local currency has been wiped out and internal trades are settled in USD or EUR (a pretty common occurrence), in practice is already using an non-government-backed token, something on which nobody in the local economy has any control. To these areas, it doesn't really matter that the USD will be accepted by the US Federal Government to settle taxes; they just need a unit, and since this unit is accepted at the fringes of their system, well, might as well use it internally too.
> Being able to spend it is the "killer app" of cryptocurrencies
No, being able to convert into other tokens at the fringes is the killer app. Which quite a few cryptocurrencies do have, although in an extremely fragile state. The longer they keep them up, though, the easier it gets, as more and more people believe that the underpinning arrangements are fair and exchanges will still be here tomorrow to exfiltrate value to prison-avoiding currencies.
Not true. There are quite a few places in the world where the de facto dominant currency is not the currency the local government requires for taxes, fees, etc.
In fact, the origin of using taxes + coinage goes back to a pragmatic way for ancient kings to not have to organize the logistics of feeding and housing a large army. Pay the soldiers in coin. Require citizens to pay a tax in the same coin. Boom, they self organize.
Money itself came about far earlier, and was independently invented in multiple places. The example most people look at is temple complexes in the Levant, where debt records came first, and currency second. It was an adaptation of earlier gift economy behavior to enable scaling to groups too large to have intrinsic social trust, and allowing for specialization of labor in building and maintaining the temples.
David Graeber's book will educate you about all this.
> There are quite a few places in the world where the de facto dominant currency is not the currency the local government requires
If you'd read the rest of my comment, you would have seen that I explicitly address this case. Instead you went for a pointless appeal to authority about thousand-year-old situations that don't matter to the current environment.
Let other people (non-tech or hybrid) comment on the idea. They have time to think about this.
Tech people can only help by explaining in understandable ways how blockchain/cryptocurrencies work. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on it.
Let’s keep the culture of not deriding ideas. We can’t predict human behavior or the future of it. Maybe something beautiful comes out of it, or maybe it accelerates global warming. I trust other disciplines to comment on that.
This is different from almost everything else, where advances in technology that increase efficiency are usually a direct benefit.
All this energy goes into what is essentially a lottery for miners. Except for 6 hashes per hour, all of the literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second get thrown away entirely, not even advancing the same miner, the same ASIC, towards one of the qualifying 6 hashes per hour.
> A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out
> [non-tech people] don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us
It is on us. I never realized this before today. I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. After all, Elon is so cute when he's enthusiastic! But yeah he probably knows it's a scam too, what was I thinking.