Bitcoin is destroying the environment while providing no real decentralization since most people don't run their own clients. Other shitcoins are either outright scams or vulnerable to client forks like when Vitaly stole 150 million dollars.
After not actually solving currency, cryptobros moved to selling random pixels and now want to make the web an even worse place.
Not everyone wants that.
> What's the author trying to get out of making something like this?
You'd be surprised, but not everyone is trying to run a get-rich-quick scheme.
- Crypto is destroying the planet (it's not). A lot of people get irrationally mad about anything that causes any damage to the environment these days. Climate change is an incredibly important issue but the activism side of it is filled with a lot of crazy people and they've latched on to 'crypto' as bad when most don't know a thing about it.
- Jealousy. A lot of people got very lucky and very rich through crypto. They have so much ETH that can spend the equivalent of a persons expected lifetime earnings on a picture of a monkey. That's infuriating to a lot of people so much so they'll create websites that lack truth and nuance just to feel better about themselves.
It's understandable, but it's sad. Instead of HN being full of posts with people trying out new tech for the fun of it, we get endless miserable tirades from people trying to suck the joy out of life.
The word “equivalent” is doing a lot of work here; because if what you purchased was the nominal “rights” to a URL that may or may not 404 at any moment, you haven’t done anything worthy of jealousy.
Also, at the risk of breaking the HN rules on allegations of astroturfing: the whole narrative of “regular joes got super rich off this” is as turfy as it gets. I’ve looked at wallet balances, I understand a handful of these people exist. But I’ve never met one, and I doubt you have either. Some people win the lottery, too; I’m not losing sleep over it.
Maybe I'm not explaining it clearly enough. The jealousy isn't that you've been rich enough to buy a picture of a monkey. It's that you have so much 'money' that you can spend it on something so stupid and not even care. And the fact that you've gotten that money by doing something so seemingly stupid and worthless in the first place. That's pretty infuriating for a lot of people.
I also didn't mention 'regular joes'.
Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
Why do people need to be quiet for you? There's plenty of media I don't want to read and I don't read it. I don't try to silence it because it upsets me.
>> everything ever built by that scene needs to somehow make or cost money in some form or another, and that's a telling sign for me.
Making money directly by creating or building something was the norm until we started paying for it with our data. Paying for things directly and compensating creators doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
>> Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
I don't deny it but it's much more nuanced than that. As a society we do A LOT of unnecessary things which contribute to global warming and we don't get upset about them. Get off your computer. Stop watching TV. Stop using electricity. We could all get upset at each other or we could work towards solutions that solve the problem and allow us to maintain our current lifestyles with only minor modifications. The people screaming that crypto causes climate change are the same people who think the trees they're planting are the solution to it. In reality it's a much more complex problem that's going to be solved by the people that are too busy working on the possible solutions to waste time screaming. It's not black and white.