Re:Ask HN: How aware are you about building decentralised so...
by codetrotter on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @12:48PM
(#27751039)
Agreed. And I think that those of us who truly believe in cryptocurrency are not really interested in the USD/your-flavor-of-cryptocurrency exchange price. Yet that is exactly the main thing that almost everyone who cares about cryptocurrency seems to care about. And sure, making money would be nice so I can’t directly blame them. But if you are really really into cryptocurrency then you should be dreaming of a future where we can sell and buy services and products for cryptocurrency and where we can pay our taxes in cryptocurrency directly, and where we never have to exchange our cryptocurrency into fiat again. That is the real end goal of cryptocurrencies.
Because as of today cryptocurrency has not yet reached the point where it makes sense for most merchants to accept payment in cryptocurrency. Because we are still paying other people and entities and the government in fiat and the exchange rates are fluctuating wildly.
And also furthermore in agreement with what you are saying, a lot of the fairweather supporters will be like let’s put this and that on the blockchain, and yet those people have no real understanding of the trade-offs that come with choosing to do so.
Thirdly something that I find annoying is when someone describes proof-of-work as “solving difficult maths problems”. A cryptographic hash is computationally expensive to find a collision for unless it is flawed, true. But the mathematics behind for example SHA-256 are not really “difficult”. It’s just time-consuming. And it has the property of being fast to verify. But to me when someone describes it as solving difficult maths problems it seems probable that they don’t really know at all what is being done.
Because as of today cryptocurrency has not yet reached the point where it makes sense for most merchants to accept payment in cryptocurrency. Because we are still paying other people and entities and the government in fiat and the exchange rates are fluctuating wildly.
And also furthermore in agreement with what you are saying, a lot of the fairweather supporters will be like let’s put this and that on the blockchain, and yet those people have no real understanding of the trade-offs that come with choosing to do so.
Thirdly something that I find annoying is when someone describes proof-of-work as “solving difficult maths problems”. A cryptographic hash is computationally expensive to find a collision for unless it is flawed, true. But the mathematics behind for example SHA-256 are not really “difficult”. It’s just time-consuming. And it has the property of being fast to verify. But to me when someone describes it as solving difficult maths problems it seems probable that they don’t really know at all what is being done.