- Cryptocurrency market is a scam.[0]
- It spends inordinate amount of electrical energy that can be better spent maintaining existing bank/credit card infrastructure [1]
- It's a scam[2]
- It contributed to overall graphics card shortage [3]
- It has another scam (NFT) growing on top of an existing one [4]
Have I mentioned it's a scam?
What irks me the most is people are acting as if crypto currency is real/usable or a sane solution for a problem it can't dream of solving.
It feels a bit like yelling "King is naked", but the rest of the populace is "No, it's just spider silk.", and "Would they waste all that effort to just make nothing?"
[0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2022/01/09/an-anatomy-of-bitcoin...
[1] https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/22620464/tether-backing-cryptocurre...
[3] https://medium.com/geekculture/cryptocurrency-graphics-card-...
[4] Just use your brain for 5 min and realize that NFTs don't work.
Nothing says low-effort group think than the claim that "NFTs don't work". It is a certificate of authenticity (we know those work as the art world has been using them to sell intangible art for decades) in a spreadsheet (we know spreadsheets work). There is literally nothing there that could possible "not work".
NFTs are based on crypto currency - a scam.
* You get a mined crypto, one with body that's essentially a fancy IOU.
- Alarm bells begin to ring. Who enforces the IOU? The anarchist collective?
* You download the funny art, by clicking the link.
- Air sirens start to blast. How do you know link is secure? Could someone else already got there and download the picture? Is there a way to limit the download number. If no, they can't guarantee a single owner. If yes, can you authenticate. What if link expired? Etc.
* You proudly display your art. Someone right click and save as. They now have your art for $0. Or for hell they might steal your real asset or even the NFT used to verify you own it.
- What is your recourse? Who will believe you own right to online pictures? What court considers NFTs real asset?
* You proudly display your art. Someone right click and save as. They now have your art for $0.
Is this any different from owning a picture now, in the sense that pictures have always been a bundle of bits, which you could freely share across the interwebs since around 1995? People still buy pictures because there's some sensation in "owning" something. You can copy-and-paste a picture without legitimately "owning" it, but you've been able to do that since ~1995.
I don't buy art, so perhaps I shouldn't be the one speculating about these things. Maybe I buy CDs? But those have nice posters and concept drawings -- it feels premium.
I think NFTs lead one to ask what it means to own media in an age where the physical cost of media is $0.
Or for hell they might steal your real asset or even the NFT used to verify you own it.
- What is your recourse?
This is a serious objection. Maybe there's some mechanism you can build on top to deal with it. But that mechanism would be a human court, and we're back to where we started.
I agree. Lots of people push back on this point saying it's overblown, and without delving into those weeds I think it's fair to say the energy use is significant enough that people are getting cancer and dying from it somewhere.
That's before you consider the increased demand for GPUs which in turn leads to increased demand in rare earth materials, which in turn are often mined in awful conditions that also kill people. Including kids, who are mining in some cases.[0]
However, all of that considered—I think there's even more damage done by the frenzied adoption of this technology from a sociological perspective, and the prevailing attitudes towards it. It's hard to fully elucidate, but a good description might be that of western society having its head selfishly stuck up its own asshole.
There's many arguments against this line of reasoning, one might say free societies are inherently inefficient and that trying new things often comes at a cost. That said, I view this more as a deleterious social contagion with little point, fueled by a sort of faux-intellectual buying frenzy that social media is all too good at serving as a conduit for.
Then you look at social media itself, its deleterious effects across the entire sociological spectrum, chipping away at any semblance of attention (and thus critical thinking) that people once had—in addition to skyrocketing demand for devices, with carriers and device manufacturers playing right along in the form of planned obsolescence of perfectly good hardware—and you quickly realize this shit's rotten to the core.
I think it's reasonable to view the NFT craze as a second-order effect of modern information platforms failing on a fundamental level. They are bullshit-reinforcing systems.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/c...
To go off on a slight tangent and play devil's advocate with my prior post that's now past its edit window:
I suppose there's the argument human beings have always been bad at resisting the influence of trends driven by information—however dubious. Propaganda in the 20th century being a great example of this. The internet as it exists today is a sort of hive mind that not only amplifies this dynamic, but injects a good measure of chaos and turbulence into the mix. That leads to a great deal of uncertainty, and in turn a distortion of each person's individual perception of reality.
There's also the argument that good things may arise from the muck of the current technological landscape. I don't doubt this—there's strong historical precedent here as well—that said, things like the NFT craze represent more of a perverse evolutionary outcropping from our current hive mind structure, which is itself corrupted in so many ways. With any luck, hopefully the rotten bits collapse and fall off in due time.
And just because most people here agree that anonymous internet users breathlessly shilling cryptocurrency get-rich-quick pyramid schemes here are scammers, doesn't mean it's groupthink. It's simply, objectively, and obviously true, and it's all the irrefutable evidence of scams and crimes like the subject of this discussion that cause most people here to believe the truth, not "groupthink".
It's not groupthink to believe 1+1=2, and casually dismiss anyone who says otherwise.
If you want to wag your accusatory "groupthink" finger at people causing actual tangible damage to the environment and economy, while lying, shilling, pumping and dumping, ripping people off, committing crimes, and laundering money with NFTs and cryptocurrency, then point it at the cryptocurrency shills parroting bullshit talking points. They're the ones all thinking and talking the same, and generating all the hype.
How come the “counter” comments are far more common on HN than the low-effort shilling?
Case in point: For an archetypical example that proves my point, take a look at notorious "SPAM KING" and crypto scammer Richard Heart's posting history and ten pages of google search results, who repeatedly tries to shill his PoS get-rich-quick pyramid schemes here. And heeeeee's baaaaack. So go take the effort to reply to HIS posts, not mine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RichardHeart
https://www.google.com/search?q=SPAM+KING+Richard+J+Schueler...
I've put quite some effort into researching who he really is (his actual name is Richard J Schueler, which he changed to obscure his sordid history) and what he's done in the past (he's the winner of the "Golden Pump Award" for "Best New Scam" for "HEX", and I discovered that he's one of the first people in the world to be successfully sued for online spam, specifically the Viagra spam scheme that he ran from Panama, which he lost, under his previous name "Richard J Schueler"), and I looked into his latest racket that he's been pushing here on HN and many other places (HEX), and I've put in the effort to reply to his posts and write up the facts, with lots of links and quotes as proof, and ask him point-blank straightforward questions that he was afraid to answer, to inform other people about him, and give him a chance to explain his side of the story, which he failed to do.
So did I put enough effort into replying to him, with enough links and quotes to satisfy your curiosity and thirst for proof? Is that high enough effort for you or not? Or now is that TOO MUCH effort in your opinion? Or do you actually think I OWE him even more of my time and effort replying to his frequent and fraudulent shilling and dodging questions?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27224524
>[...] Richard J Schueler, it's true that you're a biased shill, but there are many other very legitimate reasons not to listen to anything you say, such as the fact that you falsely claim that proof of stake is a proven successful replacement for proof of work. And also the following reasons, based on your own words, that I will cite and link to, and the fact that you refuse to address them and answer simple straightforward questions, and repeat things like "Dodge, dodge" instead.
Confronting Richard Heart of HEX - SPAM KING and Crypto Scammer
https://www.cointelligence.com/content/confronting-richard-h...
>[...]
So why don't YOU take your own advice, put your shitcoin where your mouth is, and show us exactly what a high effort reply to cryptocurrency shilling (that's also not too much effort) would look like, instead of showering us with so many low effort whiney uninformative bullshit defenses of cryptocurrency shills, and petulantly complaining about other people's low effort replies to them?
SHOW don't TELL. The ball's in your court. Or is that not how you roll, because you're actually just yet another tone policing concern troll, hiding behind a pseudonym, who will simply "Dodge, Dodge" and create another sock-puppet account after you've burnt this one, rosndo?
This is a myth. Commenters on HN are good at disguising emotional arguments as reasoned arguments. That's not to say that people don't apply logic here--they certainly do--but don't be fooled into thinking that HN comments are relatively emotionless.
The idiom, "the truth hurts," means that hearing the unvarnished truth makes one experience sadness or other such negative emotions. You are replying to one such truthful comment.
Like stop and think. A peer-to-peer money log with no real world guarantees.
I see it happening from both sides (pro/against), but always around cryptocurrencies.