> I keep saying this, but:

Please don't do this here. We want curious conversation, not repetitive talking points.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a serious problem with all threads on this topic.

I can't speak for the parent comment but I've had the same problem myself in discussing this. I would actually love to have to stop repeating myself, but the crypto CEOs keep also repeating the same marketing lines over and over again with reckless abandon and then a new group of people reads it and pops up the next day asking the same questions. Sometimes I can even directly map some comments to a series of tweets from a CEO just by searching and it's really frustrating. Dan, you should know this as well as anyone: it's easy for some startup to dump out unverified claims all over the internet. It takes continued and constant effort to refute those claims. So what can we do here? It feels like the amount of hype that's (still) happening is inherently not conducive to good discussion.

If both sides are just repeating the same points, then there's no diff, and if there's no diff then it's off topic for this site. Diffs are what's interesting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Then ban positive promotion of crypto, as a whole.

You can't, because you want a site that values free speech. But any site that values free speech is going to have to repeatedly answer the same basic questions on Crypto and Communism. It's going to have to repeatedly say "No, we're not trying to censor you because of chosen group X that claims to be innate, we're banning you because of actual crimes you have committed"

It's fine to argue about crimes in the sense of whether they should be illegal and whether people have actually committed them. At some point, you need to acknowledge that criminals will continue to argue their points, and that you either need to ban them or acknowledge that the same arguments will be repeated against them.

You're making some incorrect assumptions here. The kind of site we want is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The sort version is we want curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. That rules out excessive repetition, among other things.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

This is a website where everyone gets some of their compensation in lottery tickets at a smaller company selling a service to a larger ad conglomerate with fraudulent conversion metrics, or they get paid half theyre comp in easily convertible shares at the larger ad conglomerate with fraudulent conversion metrics

I really cant spot a reason to treat “crypto” differently

The similarity being that there is just other aspects of these projects and technology to focus on, that can be interesting

If you think a submission is bad you can flag it. You can also mail the mods if you think it needs more than that. That can actually reduce the incidence of bad submissions, railing against them repetitively in every thread just feeds them.

I agree. It has been flagged. It has been marked flagged. It has been re-added to the front page. If Dang wants people to stop arguing about it, then the flag moderation framework needs to stop putting crypto back on the front page. That may well involve banning people who are otherwise good commenters, like when China issues come up.

I suggest we stick to the technical aspects and what ideas people have for using the technology. it rather than veering off into money and fraud, which are highly charged topics. I'm genuinely curious about how this new tech will change things.

How can you possibly discuss Bitcoin without the topics of money and fraud ?

It's intrinsic to what Bitcoin is.

Money, sure. Fraud? No. That is too broad of a topic to require its inclusion with BTC. Almost every scam/phish/SPAM I receive is USD-desiring. And you are aware of this yet insist BTC is the main fraud coin.

The mapping is the other way around. That most fraud requests USD is indisputable, but looking at it the other way, a disproportionate amount of the movement of Crypto (incl. bitcoin) is fraud-related compared to traditional currencies [assuming we define fraud separately from corruption.]

This disproportionate share may be less than it appears when you take into account all of the things that Crypto is typically not used for, but the fact remains that there are daily stories about even large Crypto proponents being defrauded.

That this fraudulant activity is enabled by the underlying mechanics (i.e. the decentralization and lack of a verifying authority [i.e. the primary draw of Crypto afaik]) of the platform is worthy of being brought up when discussing the technological merits of the platform.

Yes one of BTC's main features _and_ biggest issue is: decentralization. Reminds me of when people go full libertarian and suggest no government intervention whatsoever, and then someone suggests they move to the governmentless land of Somalia that is anything but freedom and paradise.

With great power comes great responsibility; decentralization is a loaded gun. Use at your own risk!

10 years. Constant discussion. Unbelievable hype. Yet nothing has fundamentally changed. At this point, I’m tired of waiting, and I simply assume blockchain tech will never change anything.

Ok, thanks. I get what you mean, but English language diffs can easily be falsified with a thesaurus :) A better analogy might be that every comment should be like a unique algorithm, or something along those lines.

A diff of word meaning, not a diff of word choice.

It's like a discussion on abortion. There are fundamental disagreements that have little to do with technologoy. Everybody keeps repeating their conclusions and predictions, only time will tell who is right.

Then you might as well ban blockchain related posts until something in that space gains some kind of relevance, because until that point, the only thing we can really discuss is how nothing in the blockchain space has produced a compelling product yet.

I've never seen you make such a comment on an account that repeats pro crypto nonsense.

It's not as if we're tracking that, but I'm sure I have. It's all equally tedious, and the principle applies regardless of polarity.

Some talking points get repetitive because the scams are so common.

It is a problem indeed. We do not want the same: 'crypto is scam', 'ban all of crypto', 'no use case', or 'it's early days', 'adoption is round the corner' and 'it will take over the current system' etc sort of responses that have been recycled from other critics and maximalists and parroted here.

Given this keeps happening, the fact is, there are no new arguments from both those totally for and those totally against it and they keep having to repeat themselves or at worst their arguments are not in good faith and they are not attacking the best representation of it in each crypto-related thread.

I'm lead to believe that in all these threads, it isn't 100% going to get destroyed no matter how upset and angry the anti-crypto folks are or how much they want it to, but it is neither going to take over the world as well; a narrative made by the delusional and aggressive pro-crypto folks. Both of them will be very disappointed in their utopian goals.

Posts like this one only confirm this, and both maximalists and the critics are giving very narrow extreme responses which sounds like both of them are trying to boost replies and clickbait.

Either way, it is inevitably going to get regulated and crypto will continue to survive with 90% of the meme coins and useless projects dead and with the rest of the useful ones being here to stay.

> We want curious conversation

Up to a certain point I guess. There’s never nothing new under the sun regarding blockchains: they’re useless. Curiosity doesn’t change that.

I don't disagree with your points but dang is the super duper moderator. I don't think he's going back to 4chan or Reddit...

What country do you live in? Because I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year.

When you say “in 10 years” when did that 10 year time frame start and end? Are talking about the 1960s or the 1990s? Because most people I knew didn’t start using the internet regularly until the mid to late 90s or about 30 or so years after it’s inception. 10 years is still pretty early in terms of adoption. I know people who still have never used email…

I hear this a lot. I want details:

- Which countries?

- What portion of the population are benefiting from crypto? Is it a tiny portion of nerds or has it become more mainstream now?

- With the crash in cryptocurrency over the last few months are these people in those countries still glad that they used this, or are they regretting it?

I don't doubt that there exist individuals in countries with high inflation who have befitted from the crypto boom. I want more than just anecdotes about individuals: I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.

Argentina. 100% of annual inflation. People use crypto everyday to get money in and out of the economy.

Argentina does look like the most interesting country to dig deeper into here.

As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press.

Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789

It does note that: "So far it is the preserve of a minority - largely a young, male, tech-savvy, and relatively affluent population. It's tech workers, not farmers, who are being paid in Bitcoin."

That story is also from April. I'd like to see updated coverage now that the crypto market has crashed. How many people in Argentina got burned badly by that?

> now that the crypto market has crashed.

I don't understand this "crypto market has crashed" narrativ. Ether is +60% in the last month... It's crypto. It never really crashs. A crypto crash would be something like -99.99%. Everything else is business as usual.

This is absolutely true - binance plus stablecoins is how the economy works there.

That seems obvious to me that they absolutely don't want crypto. If it's stablecoins they're after then what they really want is USD, so badly that they'll use whatever shady unregulated crypto bank sells it to them.

They will use crypto because it’s far more difficult to censor. The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth, but this is becoming a lot harder and will continue to be ever harder.

I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges. Or if the government is really nasty, shut down the national internet.

And if you think they could set up a satellite connection and a mesh net in response to this, they could also use that kind of setup to transact strictly in USD, with an offshore bank. No crypto required.

> I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges.

You are correct. First thing that National Bank of Ukraine did when the war started is they banned buying foreign currency electronically (theoretically people could still buy actual physical foreign currency, but nobody would sell except for very high markup), transferring money outside of Ukraine, and _any kind of so-called quasi-cash operations_ including buying cryptocurrencies or transferring money to exchanges. And paying salaries in anything but national currency is of course illegal. So tech-savvy folks could still try to find local who owns crypto and would sell it for cash, but for regular people crypto doesn't offer any respite.

So the 20 million immigrants from Ukraine left their crypto in Ukraine, because the National Bank of Ukraine said so?

A lot of poor countries with socialist / corrupt governments like Argentina rely extensively on informal money transmitter networks as well as money remittances. Exporters earn hard currency which is stolen by the central bank and converted into disgustingly inflated fiat, and then politically favorited importers get access to whatever hard currency hasn’t been looted outright by politicians. Small people have to get dollars other ways.

Stablecoins are acquired in less-authoritarian countries and then sent to people in Argentina and other socialist / corrupt countries. They then circulate among the people just like paper dollars do. As this black market grows it is very difficult to shut it down.

Anything is possible but I think it’s more likely the socialists try to adapt to this new world rather than shut down the internet. It will be interesting to see what new theft they come up with.

Ok, you can think that, but there's still no explanation here as to why they can't do it. You should read some other comments further down in the thread, like this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32292222

If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.

It’s a bit of a leap to go from “sure we steal your money and everyone is poor” to “hey we are going back 20 years and stopping all communication”. I think it’s a bridge too far outside of North Korea. Even China has a die hard and widespread crypto base despite their “banning” of exchanges and their great firewall. I worked previously on tech to get around it (rapidly cycling domains that are registered often and flip when the neutral list blocks a domain temporarily) and that was so normal people didn’t have to get one of the easy-to-find VPNs.

If crypto skeptics on HN were right then crypto would have died during one of the prior busts like beanie babies did. But it has an ideology underpinning it (Austrian economics and individual freedom) that keeps it growing.

While there are many who get in for a quick flip there is a large, possibly the majority, who see it as a movement rather than a get quick rich scam. This is why it doesn’t die.

It's partially the ideology but also the fact that as a very weak fiat currency everyone who bought in early has no way to cash out unless they can convince other people to buy their tokens instead of something else. All of those VCs, early adopters, etc. have a massive financial incentive both to talk it up constantly and create pump-and-dump schemes around things like NFTs because the alternative is walking away from the money they initially spent. The sums in question will pay for a lot of promotion and human psychology tells us there will be plenty of people hoping they can promote it back up to what they think it's worth based on paper profits they didn't realize in the past. I'd expect even more volatility as the major players quietly cash out.

I am friends with people with tens of millions of dollars in crypto and they aren't cashing out. If you listened to people on HN none of them would have stuck by their investment. Crypto is a multi-generational project.

And some people like NFTs just like they enjoy baseball and Pokemon cards - it's for collecting, except they can also be used programmatically in software. NFTs are for entertainment.

I think you are just woefully misinformed and know essentially nothing about what is going on here, but the HN karma is pretty nice.

> The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth

Do you have evidence for that? While the Argentinian economy is struggling, and the government has defaulted in the past few years, I don’t know of widespread, illegal government theft of private citizens’ assets. The opposite seems true: they want people to get richer in exports, so they get more in taxes.

Is your argument that taxation is theft? They do need taxation in order not to default again.

And those people who circumvent the censorship are faithful in their tax reports?

No, they are not. They are abusing cryptocurrency (the correct term, no matter how often you use 'crypto') to commit tax fraud. Which makes the government even more inefficient as it already is.

Any proof? Have you personally seen and used it?

Seeing as you’re the CTO of a nft company you clearly have bias.

I’ve been in this space for a long time, know a lot of people. Lebanon is another country that is heavily using crypto. You will see a lot of countries with corrupt governments and central banks become bottom-up crypto centric, but this won’t be reported for a long time until suddenly the NYT will release an article and only then it is “actually” happening.

Here’s an informative episode on a podcast if you actually care https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bitcoin-standard-p...

The summary of that podcast episode says:

> Thomas Semaan is an ex-student of Saifedean who has been active in the Lebanese bitcoin scene. He joins us to tell us about the Lebanese fiat crisis, how bitcoin has helped him and other bitcoiners, and compare its effectiveness to political activism and delusions of reform.

This is the problem. Obviously bitcoin is of use and interest to bitcoiners. What we're trying to understand is if regular, non-bitcoiners are getting value from it on a large scale.

Is crypto in Argentina and Lebanon something that has a real impact on regular people who are not deeply involved in the technology?

This is why I only believe it when a publication like the BBC or the NYT cover it: crypto incentivizes people who hold it to boost it, so it's very hard to trust stories that don't come from news sources with strong conflict of interest policies and a long standing reputation for journalistic integrity.

That podcast is called "The Bitcoin Standard"!

I don't have time to listen to this podcast (I'll read a transcript if you have it) but just to respond to your comment: I've never seen the question of what happens after a society becomes "bottom-up crypto centric" get addressed. You have a country where the central bank is suddenly not doing anything, tax fraud is rampant, and the local currency is now further on the brink of collapse. All the citizens' money is effectively being funneled away into entities operating as foreign banks. The government is forced to accept crypto to avoid insolvency and now makes it so you have to pay your taxes in it. If they're still corrupt they'll force people to follow the same regressive restrictions again, and no one will be able to do anything about it because the blockchain is all public. How is this going to help anything? I'm trying not to be bleak here but the idea here seems to be disregarding any hope of reasonable reform.

I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil. Politicians have been able to steal from common people via inflation for a century while the rich are easily protected.

This is a long topic but to summarize I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto. If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.

Of course I’m a minority but like all movements crypto is selling something to average people but the grand plan is only understood by a minority. Countries like Argentina have been basket cases for decades despite endless bailouts and IMF shenanigans. It’s time for something new that I believe is a valuable experiment with clear theoretic and ideological underpinnings that couldn’t possibly be worse than the socialist nightmare destroying billions of common people.

>I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto

I described a situation where this wouldn't happen though.

>If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.

I'm sorry, this seems contradictory. I thought the possibility of this was already discarded when the idea of reform was thrown out. The assumption with the "bottom-up" idea seems to be that the government will always stay corrupt. If you take that approach then can't you see how this probably will end up like another failed bailout where nothing changes? Effectively all that's happening is more foreign money is being dumped into the system, except now it's just coming from offshore crypto speculators instead of from other governments. Try to look at this from a macro view.

Just my opinion: Crypto is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of fraud and scams in crypto, and other bad things like ransomware, are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of crypto doesn't actually stop a government from collecting taxes anyway.

Just my opinion: Central banking is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of inflation and corruption in central banking, and other bad things like telling society to stop using energy to "sAvE tHe PlaNeT" and be cold all winter (while I seriously doubt the rich politicians are keeping their thermostats low!), are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of central banking doesn't actually stop the individual from revolting anyway.

> I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil.

The problem is that your alternative has proven to be worse.

But also, lets assume that everyone in Argentinia is going to convert all of their currency into cryptocurrency.

What kind of repercussions is this going to have?

Well, for one, the currency in which people get paid is still the Argentinian one, not a cryptocurrency. Keep that one in mind, because its going to be affected by the rest.

What is going to happen next is massive tax fraud. People are not going to pay taxes over their belongings (you might agree with that as 'libertarian' but its going to hurt the government income for sure). This is going to result in a weaker government, and a weaker coin.

With a weaker government and a weaker coin, people get less value out of their currency. Remember that the people were paid in the national currency? Its worth less now. And also, what is going to happen when the government runs weaker? More crime, less public health, outsourcing to private entities, and defacto you will get something akin to some libertarian paradise where the top on the pyramid can actually survive and have opportunities, while the rest ends up on the bottom of cannon fodder.

With cryptocurrency, there's no such thing as accountability or paying your taxes. Such libertarian dreams are going to have the effect that the government becomes weakened and eventually you get that survival of the fittest in an unhealthy way. Without accountability and without taxes you'll get more corruption, not less. If you want an example of that, just look at Russia.

Meanwhile, all of these people are heavily dependent on? On what you think? Exchanges. Which, as proven by Mt. Gox, are not always going to be pure in their effort. So spare me the independence bullshit.

Centralized banking works, as long as there's accountability. You reach accountability by rule of law, by regulations. Cryptocurrencies try to avoid these, but neglects the reasons these were enacted in the first place. They're a massive step backwards in that regard.

> I’ve been in this space for a long time, know a lot of people. Lebanon is another country that is heavily using crypto

Every country uses cryptography.

Afghanistan, from a reputed source like Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/crypto-currency-afghanistan- idUSL8N2QU39A

> I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.

Why? What if there is not widespread trend and it is only anecdotes? Why should every new technology be "widely adopted or bust" instead of simply being a new interesting tech which a hacker can tinker with just because? Blockchains, NFTs and smart contracts are far more interesting than yet another iteration of a web framework or yet another way to track user data.

Because if it's a widespread trend affecting real people then it's interesting to me. If it's a small group of bitcoin nerds doing what bitcoin nerds do but in another country then it's not.

I want to see evidence that the benefits of blockchains etc are outweighing the very obvious harms they are causing.

What are the "very obvious" harms?

A genuine one I am concerned about is the energy consumption of Proof of Work chains. But the tide is shifting towards Proof of Stake, with Ethereum network achieving 2 significant milestones towards that recently (Ropsten, Sepolia) and a third penultimate one (Goerli) planned in the week of Aug 6th. So the main chain's transition towards Proof of Stake is likely to happen in September and Ethereum's energy consumption drops 99% or even more.

Other purported disadvantages (gambling, sucking in capital and brains etc etc) are totally non-obvious and highly debatable.

At least Argentina, venezuela, turkey, lebanon, pakistan and probably sri lanka by now.

Half of the world currencies has done worse than crypto even on small time scales.

As of the last month, crypto and certain shady exchanges were the only (known to me) way to send money to Russia.

El Salvador uses it as a government enforced national currency. I struggle to understand how people still make the claim that it's useless or that it's niche - it's a recognized and enforced national currency now, not some neat project.

Who's using it? How many people did more than get that free starter wallet and cash out? How many transactions happen daily? How many businesses would notice if Bitcoin dropped off the planet tomorrow?

(Hint: the fact that people were rioting in the streets to _avoid_ it suggests the answer is not many)

Is bitcoin an investment or a currency? I don't think it can be both.

If the value of bitcoin as speculative asset is going to rise, then it is best to not spend it, but to hoard it. If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?

If it is a currency then it needs to have a stable value. If the value stabilizes, then no one will want to invest in it. Since it does not have any "real" commodity value it would then death spiral. I don't know how you square this circle.

I agree that bitcoin needs to decide whether to be an investment or a commodity of exchange.

> If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?

When people need something more than bitcoin, they'll trade for it. Food, shelter, medicine, etc. People will certainly trade for these things. But maybe they'll pass on replacing a phone that's only 2 years old or getting an xbox or 6 pack of beer.

It's fascinating to me that people say currency can't be deflationary or people will hoard it. You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money? People act like the economy will stop, but no matter how deflationary a currency is, people will still trade it for needs like food and shelter.

>You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money?

The problem with this kind of system: It's not just about saving. What's actually happening is those who have saved more are accumulating even more money by doing nothing, and everyone else who needs to spend it to buy food and shelter is suddenly losing more and more of their money. When it starts happening at a faster rate than the economy is producing actual value then you hit hyperdeflation and the economy spirals.

Hmm. What if we had a central committee mandated to target 2% deflation? Just the right amount of saving, not too much.

That would be disastrous for anyone who has a debt to repay.

Is there not an entire currency speculation market? [0]

> When speculative investing involves the purchase of a foreign currency, it is known as currency speculation. In this scenario, an investor buys a currency in an effort to later sell that currency at an appreciated rate, as opposed to an investor who buys a currency in order to pay for an import or to finance a foreign investment.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/speculation.asp

Sure, I get the idea of currency speculation. You can speculate on anything including currency. The problem is when you try to make currency out of a speculative asset. In this case of bitcoin the value is highly volatile, so you would not want to use it as a national currency. I do know that bitcoin was originally envisioned as a currency, but most people are using it as an investment. You also have not addressed the issues I presented.

I don't think it's reasonable to think about it in such a simplistic way.

BTC has been subject to massive swings. Just looking at CoinDesk, it was easy to find a time where it doubled in value in less than a month. Why would any reasonable person spend that sort asset?

I think the dynamics of the market are as important as the technical features that some digital currency has.

But for the average crypto investor who isn't a whale and isn't insider trading on the whales, the dynamics of the market are effectively just random. This isn't like a stock where you can objectively look at the company, compare it to other companies and understand how it derives profit. It can't work either as a currency or as a reliable investment.

The failure of crypto to actually take off in El Salvador is pretty well documented at this point I think.

It's not enforced. It is legal tender, but the US dollar is still their currency, last I heard.

What a convenient source of liquidity for the various drug cartels in El Salvador who need to launder their money.

Yes, so convenient that over a decade after its inception, still well over 95% of the black market operates in fiat instead.

Why would they use a public, transparent ledger to launder money?

Lower counterparty risk, and harder to confiscate. Money can sit in a crypto wallet and be used for illicit transactions until favorable circumstances allow conversion out of btc. You can’t do that with cash in a bank.

With the amount of shady alt coins and defunct btc exchanges separating authentic vs bogus transactions is even tougher for regulators.

There are many ways to launder money.

What a staggeringly uninformed comment.

If you invested in bitcoin ten years ago, you are happy.

I invested in bitcoin five years ago and I an happy.

Ukrainians are heavily invested in crypto and consider crypto (at a governmental level) to be a significant contribution to their efforts in maintaining their sovereignty.

It's tiresome waiting for the unimaginative and uninsightful to open their eyes

I’ve heard people say this but when I’ve asked people from places like Venezuela they use dollars not bitcoin. Even places with not so good local currency will gladly accept Euros or Dollars instead.

The irony is even those deal in bitcoin, they have to quickly convert to USD now for fear of further drop. Their entire operation involve in converting their cheap electricity (vastly subsidized by their government) to USD with bitcoin as intermediary. And when ask, they only tell the story of their intermediary bitcoin as though as they really by potato eoth bitcoin at their local wet market.

"they use dollars not bitcoin" for their daily purchases. But how are they storing the money they have. Are they depositing dollars in a bank? How did they get the dollars? Are they banked at all?

They can't take a bitcoin out of their wallet and pay for something at their local store. They can't use their bitcoin like a credit card.

If you looked at my daily spending habits, you'd say "that guy doesn't have any crypto or stocks, look, he buys everything with a debit card which takes fiat currency out of his back account".

You can't see crypto with your eyes, but look at blockchain activity, and ask people what the source of their currency is.

Obviously it's a TINY TEENSY bit that is held in crypto. I'm not suggesting it is a majority. Crypto is hard to work with for the average person, it's volatile, and scary, but so was trading on the internet in the early days. Trust isn't there, the paypal of crypto does not yet exist.

Could have had similar effect by holding any other currency that isn’t equally hyper inflating. Like the USD

Sadly many countries have currency controls that prevent that.

… and that means that if cryptocurrencies ever see notable adoption, those same currency controls will be expanded to cover it. There's this popular mythology that cryptocurrencies are immune to regulation but in reality it's just that most countries don't spend time regulating things which aren't widely used. If that changes, cryptocurrencies are perfect for those governments to enforce since the public ledgers provide an easily-audited track record of all of your activity to compare with what you reported.

That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.

Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.

>>There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.

I feel that's a geek dream far outside of reality we live in.

Making it illegal to adopt or trade Crypto is possible and feasible. If your employer doesn't pay you in crypto,your landlord and bank and grocery store and public transport and health services don't take Crypto, then you're basically limited to the black market. Which tends to work well enough without complications of Crypto.

People envisioning dystopian future that needs Crypto, severely underestimate the ability of that dystopian future to prevent Crypto. Basically, their imagination of dystopian future is limited and naive. Humans can get bad and nasty and societies can get scary and Crypto is not the way out of such for ordinary citizens. Paper money, maybe. But Crypto requires so much equipment through so many telltales with so many ways for regular humans to reveal themselves accidentally that it's a totalitarian regimes' wet dream.

I'd rather die and be tourtured for using bitcoin than suffer under someone else's dystopian wet dream.

I think that's a bold claim from somebody who has not been tortured, whose friends and family have not been threatened for their personal actions, and who has not actually lived in a dystopian dictatorship (but possibly gets kicks out of fantasizing and "preparing" for one).

Worried about dystopian future? Go out and vote, run for a city Councillor, participate in your local school board, educate and spread awareness. Be a political activist. Engage others, be persuasive and empathetic. Promote understanding and openness and getting along. Be the change you want to be - open dialogue with neighbors, fellow parents at school, teachers, city service people - instill the habit and values of open society. Bitcoin is not going to prevent the dystopian future or save you from it, and your noble death on the altar of bitcoin will not move the needle for anybody else.

They can absolutely prevent you from using it to buy milk at your local grocery store. In practice having bitcoin is no help if you can't convert it into something else. The regulation won't happen at on the blockchain. It will happen at the grocery store, car lot, or any other place you do business. That is plenty enough regulation to make it a nightmare to use in practice.

I don't buy milk from grocery stores. I use lightning to buy from my local farmer.

Enforcing it is trivial for a sovereign nation that issues it's own currency and collects taxes in that currency.

Just as we've seen; they can regulate the on/off ramps between local currency and crypto.

If you've got a method to turn meaningful amounts of BTC into USD without being subject to KYC regulations; then the US government is probably already building a federal money laundering case against it.

Why is it still in use in China then? How are nodes and miners still operating there.

You give evil too much credit.

What? If you think a government can’t enforce crypto bans, then you haven’t thought about it very much. MITM certs to snoop all internet traffic, tying all devices to real identities as a prerequisite for internet access, making it a crime for merchants to accept any payment but the national currency, etc, etc.

Unless you already had some BTC or onramp set up somewhere outside the country, they can make it hard to onramp(buying BTC ). You could also buy direct from someone but that is impractical. And then you have off-ramp to deal with once you need the cash

90% of coins are mined already in circulation.

I do not need to buy cash since I buy what I can with lightning, which is in no way impractical for me.

> There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.

As long as you still need fiat currency to buy regular goods -- or pay taxes -- entities can make it difficult for you to use cryptocurrencies. If you have to convert cryptocurrencies into something real-world in order to live, governments can make that difficult for you.

I am just not convinced that we will get to a place where you can live solely (or nearly solely) in a cryptocurrency world, without needing fiat.

> That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.

This is a common marketing claim which doesn't hold up if you think about it even a little. It's like saying that no entity can prevent you from saying something because you define “prevent” as whether there's a cop following you around ready to punch you if you open your mouth — almost all real-world censorship happens after the fact or relying on third-parties, and Bitcoin is no different in that regard.

Bitcoin can trivially be blocked or tracked at the network level. If you have a hostile government, consider the risks of connecting to a well-known network if they've banned it.

If Bitcoin is not completely banned, a government can require everyone to report transactions for taxation or other purposes. That means that your ability to evade punishment for a transaction comes down to whether all of your earning and spending can be done outside of the country without leaving a trace of that network activity, and that you and everyone you make transactions with will never be compromised (think about how would you know?) or cooperate with the authorities (businesses will share their records because they have a legal presence which can't ignore local laws). Similarly, if you want to actually spend that money you have to be extremely stealthy to avoid the authorities wondering how you're spending more money than you appear to make, hope that someone you know never develops a grudge or is coerced to tell the authorities that you're, say, living lavishly on your trips outside the country, etc.

If _any_ of those points aren't true for you, Bitcoin is not safe to use — especially because the public ledger gives the authorities a huge data source of all of your historic activity so you have to consider not just whether they're watching you at the time of an illicit transaction (as is the case with cash) but also whether you or the the other party will at any point in the future have your wallet IDs leaked.

(Yes, I've heard of tumblers. Ask yourself who in this situation is going to risk being charged as an accomplice to the worst crime anyone else using that tumbler is involved with — or whether the police are running the tumbler to get criminals to self-identify their intent to do something illicit.)

The underlying concept to understand here is that sovereign states control their territory. If you live under an abusive government, you are only safe to evade their rules to the extent that the government is weak — if so, just use USD like everyone else. If not, all of the options are risky and there's no magical thinking about technology which is going to materially change that … but almost all of it opens up new avenues for fatal mistakes which are hard to recognize until after the fact.

I'm not reporting shit. They will have to physically track me down.

Even then they cannot seize it, and a transaction script is already in place to send to a trusted address if no spend within a certain time.

I don't give a fuck about living lavishly. I will be living free or dead.

This is like thinking that you can avoid paying taxes if you do all of your work using cash, except using something more easily traced by the authorities. You might think it sounds bold as internet tough-guy talk but increasingly it just means you're self-isolating as increasing fractions of the economy are unavailable to you. Since real businesses don't use Bitcoin, you're either going to lock yourself out of normal life or have all of this information at exchanges where the authorities set legal requirements.

The problem with this is the fringe libertarian fantasy of thinking that you can be a society of one. It's not just you reporting transactions but everyone you do business with, and these things chain — e.g. maybe you can do work under the table for a while but then you want to buy things like cars or houses and your lack of visible income catches up with you, or someone you do business with gets caught and opts for a lower sentence by identifying their partners. The level of risk and lifestyle restrictions mean this isn't appealing for most people, especially given the entirely philosophical benefits.

So what happens when the government just blocks all Bitcoin nodes so there is no way to connect to the network and broadcast transactions?

What if they just turn off the external internet?

They can prevent it. It doesn’t matter if you can get around it. When no stores take it it’s worthless to you.

> What if they just turn off the external internet?

No government is capable of this. Even North Korea has people smuggling phones over the border. A single cell or satellite connection that can sustain 2-3 KB/s is all you need to keep the rest of the country connected.

Okay, now think about this a bit further. Bitcoin is banned in your country and it's extremely risky to make a network connection to either the Bitcoin network, the client applications (better hope you disabled automatic updates and telemetry…), or industry sites.

How are you paying for that sat-phone? That's expensive, so you need real money and amounts of it which are beyond, say, the average North Korean. If you have a way to launder that money and conceal it, why do you need Bitcoin?

What are you doing to get Bitcoin? Again, you need hard currency which the average North Korean doesn't have access to.

Who are you using those Bitcoin to transact with? Nobody in country can use it legitimately so you're restricted to the black market and very riskily exposed since your full history is available to the government if they ever identify you or someone you're doing business with. It's much safer to use a suitcase of foreign currency since in that case you're at least only at risk for the amount of cash the police find on you at the time you're busted.

I was just responding to the specific question I quoted. More broadly I agree with you that it's a risky idea to immortalize your criminal activity on a public, immutable ledger.

Since it is public, what is my address?

Tell me the last 5 lightning transactions I made.

If your devices are compromised or you ever make a mistake, you can identify yourself.

Even if your opsec is perfect, any transaction partner can identify you.

The problem with the public ledger is that it is, well, public and permanent — maybe you're able to fly under the radar for years, but then your records turn up in an exchange's data breech or an investigation into the services you're using to launder real money, etc. and then your full history is revealed detailing exactly how much money you weren't paying in taxes.

Why? A bitcoin node is a network service so unless you have your own communication infrastructure it can definitely be controlled.

You obviously have never suffered in a country with stringent exchange controls.

Are you stating that you actually have, or speculating that bitcoin must help such people?

Both. I do quite a bit of offshoring in Central and South America (and elsewhere). If I make payment to contractors in Colombia for example, the recipients have severe restrictions on spending that money outside their country if it is in USD or pesos. Hence crypto.

This does not even address the huge number of "unbanked" people in the US who have to pay a fortune in fees for their payments to family back "home" - crypto offers them a much cheaper alternative. They don't care what the crypto is worth as it gets spent again back "home" as a currency, not as an investment.

Crypto isn't helping there, that's just another form of regulatory arbitrage. If you're exchanging the crypto for USD or pesos anyway then what you're doing is still probably illegal.

I'm just paying independent contractors with crypto. How could that possibly be illegal? What the contractor does with the crypto is not under my control.

But if you could pay them in USD or pesos, you would? Can't you see how the government would take an issue with that, the very same issue that they have with USD or pesos?

It is not me as the remitter that is regulated. It is the contractor receiving the payment that is restricted on what they do with it in their foreign country. My understanding is that most of the countries involved have severe restrictions on hard/fiat currency transfers but not (yet) on crypto currencies.

Get out of your bubble. Countries with hyper inflation do not allow you to exchange for another currency obviously.

There's something I've been curious about for a long time.

If your country's currency is in a state of hyperinflation and you want to buy crypto to shield yourself from it, who's your counterparty? Who is willing to sell you that crypto and expose themselves to that inflation, and how are they able to do so profitably?

If you want to buy food or a house or anything you need the local currency. There is always some demand

Like a sibling poster, I hear this a lot too, but I don't see it as all that significant. Or, rather, these are excellent uses, but Bitcoin is a terrible way to accomplish this -- it's just a huge shame that there may not be better options.

An actual currency should have a stable value. Bitcoin will never have a stable value (at least not while it is popular) due to speculation. People who believe Bitcoin is a safer store of value than their country's fiat currency are in dire, dire straits indeed.

I do absolutely agree that people should be free from fear that their currency of choice/necessity should be safe from the possibility of 100-1000% inflation per year, but I wish we could do better than Bitcoin, of all things, as a "solution".

Increased popularity was supposed to make it more stable. Which indeed seems to have happened, with each boom/crash less extreme than the previous one ?

> I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year.

Countries with hyperinflation lend to not have a ton of assets. Even if this were a use-case, it doesn't seem to justify anywhere near the valuation of BTC or other crypto.

And why on earth you would you use BTC as opposed to a stable-coin in that case?

Because stablecoins - aren't ?

(Well, maybe in the medium term, I guess this can fit some use cases, but the illusion of stability still seems to be a concern ?)

There are a lot of much better assets to buy as an inflation hedge.

If you live in a wealthy country, yes, but if you have limited bank access and consequently likely a country with unstable fiat, which assets would you suggest are more stable for long term holding? Certainly not physical assets, as people without banking access aren't likely to have vaults or some way to protect something like gold.

Usually in stone (buildings/sheds), farmland, or readily usable goods that keep well/provide value (rice, dry beans, generator, fridge).

Sucks if you need to run though. But usually if you're wealthy in an unwealthy/poorly banked country and can't leave for some reason, you keep your assets in the place you'd run to if you really had to.

all of those things are fine and good, but they aren't something you can easily put your savings into - you have to save up to buy most of that stuff, and you can't just horde physical items without necessary storage and protection. Further for some people these things all pose substantially more risk than bitcoin. If someone burns your sheds down or salts your farmland because you can't payoff the local rebels, you risk losing everything, with bitcoin, having poor timing on exiting the market is risky, but certainly not 100% wealth loss risk and that's without even considering the aspect that memorizing a wallets secret phrase is the only upkeep you need to hold bitcoin. All of those physical assets bear some form of time/energy to maintain/upkeep and as you mention have a strong downside of making you immobile.

I'm not saying everyone should store their savings in bitcoin, but I am saying it serves a very real, potentially life changing purpose for some people and that shouldn't be discounted.

That has nothing to do with bitcoin specifically though. What you're describing is either someone using another currency or using some kind of digital payment system. It doesn't have to be cryptos.

the only digital currencies that exist for people who don't have access to banks is crypto, I believe.

Holding physical cash is just asking to have your life savings stolen in places that are poor enough to not have bank access.

Crypto is not about investing, its about payments. "Almost 25% of US Cross-Border Remittance Senders Use Crypto" [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32291999

Cool, but the grandparent was specifically talking about inflation hedging, not about payments.

Regardless, the article you link does not actually claim what the title says it claims:

> PYMNTS research reveals that many consumers (24%) see the option to send funds in cryptocurrency as a key motivator in choosing a payment services provider (PSP), in fact.

That does not mean 24% of cross-border payments are made in cryptocurrencies. It means that 24% of people think that it's important that their payments provider supports cryptocurrency as an option (and says nothing about whether or not they exercise that option, or even have an account with such a provider).

Also, even if this were true, that does not mean you are correct in stating that cryptocurrencies are about payments. It's pretty clear that far, far more people use them for investing speculation.

> the grandparent was specifically talking about inflation hedging, not about payments

Their assertion:

> There are a lot of much better assets to buy as an inflation hedge

.. was in indirect response to a parent comment:

> Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.

I think clarifying that there is a material population of crypto users who use Bitcoin as a currency not an investment is material in this context?

My understanding, and I haven't been there in a while, but apparently Argentinians were using Bitcoin and other crypto's to store currency because the government had made it difficult to trade US dollars for Argentinian pesos. Even when I was there, a grey market existed for trading dollars. The gov't tried to keep very tight controls on exchange of currency.

However, recently Argentina has banned banks from converting crypto to pesos.

So, I think we can say that it was happening enough that the gov't took action. If it wasn't happening at all, they wouldn't have done anything.

Very few people here in Argentina actually hedged against inflation with cryptocurrency, it's always USD, EUR, precious metals or high-ticket items (like guns). Regarding the subset of people that actually engages with cryptocurrency, most of them are in it to make a buck, not prevent their money from losing value. Similar story for some Venezuelan folks i know.

To be fair, cryptocurrency as a way for transferring money is excellent; people here move money with Bitcoin, which can be immediately converted into foreign fiat, avoiding the absurd exchange rates and taxes the government imposes. In my opinion that is something that could be done with any black/grey market tool for transferring value, and as I see it, currently cryptocurrency is filling that niche because of network effects, not because of its inherent properties.

Not if you want to transfer value to the other side of the world..? (which admittedly is quite a niche use case)

There's a ton of people in those countries offering financial services that consist of triangulating operations inside and out of the country.

Within the crazy insanity that's the system, it does end up working out somehow.

I literally meant countries far enough that most physical ways to do so are prohibitive.

Bitcoin is flying all over the place. Why wouldn’t they just use US dollars like every unstable economy has used for the past hundred years?

I just don’t buy this at all.

I'm as skeptical of Bitcoin as anyone, but this is not a very good argument. You'd come to the same conclusion if you evaluated the state of aviation in 1900 or photography in 1820. Even the Internet was useless to the average person in 1982 (13 years in).

Those had immediate, obvious value which were held back by the technology: every military in the world wanted flight (remember those Civil War hot air balloons?), as well as things like postal services, etc. There was zero question that as soon as the technology was functionally available, people would buy it. Similarly, the earliest photographs had unquestionable demand but were held back by the technology — again, zero question that people would buy it as soon as that matured.

Finally, the Internet was useful by 1982 — there's a reason why universities, governments, etc. all jumped online and agencies like NSF were funding this to support other research, not just development of TCP/IP, by then. The other big trend to keep in mind are the BBS scene and especially online services like CompuServe (which was already 13 years old by 1982) which had profitable businesses selling access to people who found it was useful to have in their lives for many reasons not related to developing or selling computer networking. Again, there was zero question of demand: computer hardware was expensive and networking was positively usurious but it was clear that growth would accelerate as soon as that changed because normal people found it useful for various parts of their lives.

Cryptocurrencies are different: since these systems rely on the now-pervasive web, most people on the planet have had access immediately. What hasn't happened yet is most of them having a reason to bother with it. Speculation has been the biggest driver but buy-and-hold is toxic to developing a useful currency and few people have built a business or life which depends on it except for gambling like that.

In 1998 I wanted to buy a router ( or a modem ) to connect my computer to the internet. I was asked questions like: why internet? What for? what do you gain from it? Nothing was obvious.

I don’t know where that was but it’s at least a decade late for the United States - by 1998, Amazon was profitable in multiple markets (that year they reported $610M in revenue) and a ton of other companies, non-profits, and government agencies were seeing plenty of traffic. Here’s a list even earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...

In 1998, I was working for a web design business which had a mix of startups and established companies (a couple of F100s and some F500s, as well as smaller local companies). None of those were “web” companies - they sold things like pet supplies or knives, offered financial services, did biomedical research, etc. but what they all had in common was that they benefited from being on the web because their customers were moving there and they could offer them a better experience and/or lower costs this way.

That still hasn’t happened for cryptocurrencies despite a much larger potential customer base, lower barriers to entry, and twice as much time. If Bitcoin abruptly halted today, almost no businesses outside of the field would even notice and the few who did would mostly be removing the least used payment option on their site. That’s the difference: there’s been just as much marketing, the same level of squandering VC money on Super Bowl ads and stadium naming rights, etc. but there doesn’t seem to be anything more than that sizzle this time.

Bitcoin and crypto has an immediate, obvious value that was previously held back by technology. Similar to the rest of the examples you've listed.

We live in an age where we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this.

Crypto does not bypass in any way the ability for a company to charge me a subscription instead of offering me an option to buy something outright.

If you keep money in the bank. You don't own it, the bank does. You need permission to access it and are limited on what you are allowed to use it for.

If you keep cash or gold in a safe place. You are only allowed to keep a certain amount. It can be seized at will.

Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.

We do not own any of these things without the requirement of having to trust a person, a comp ay or a government.

Blockchain technology allows us to own anything that can be documented on a ledger. Indefinitely. Trustlessly.

> Trustlessly

With cryptocurrencies, you need to trust:

* The exchanges (and other ramps for getting useful money into the system and out of the system)

* The developers of the chain

* The developers of the smart contracts

* The developers of wallets

* The miners

* The internet providers

* The hardware manufacturers

* The government (yes, they could punish usage of cryptocurrencies hard if they wanted to)

> Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.

Which can all be lost or stolen easily without a central authority and a judicial system. Do not underestimate the power of phishing, especially if it is directed towards specific people.

> With cryptocurrencies, you need to trust: * The exchanges (and other ramps for getting useful money into the system and out of the system)

Decentralized Finance, Protocols and Apps do not require trust.

The frontend and backend of every protocol you are expected to use is open source. Things can only go wrong, without the fault of your own if you use something closed-source or custodial.

Cryptocurrency allows you to take responsibility.

> Which can all be lost or stolen easily without a central authority and a judicial system. Do not underestimate the power of phishing, especially if it is directed towards specific people.

Blockchain gives the world the ability to not rely on the local central authority. Your data will not be edited, removed, lost, stolen or damaged either.

You can write up a contract, leasing me your land for 99 years, on paper, with a witness and kept a copy with the local central authority. This can go well, until it goes wrong.

In 99 years, my estate may refuse to give the land back to you without proof of the paper it was written on. We could claim the paper is a fake. The local central authority can be bias, corrupt or dissolved. Which many authorities are.

If you used blockchain instead of paper. The contract remains unchanged, and ready to read at any time, until the very last computer on this planet is turned off.

> Decentralized Finance, Protocols and Apps do not require trust.

> The frontend and backend of every protocol you are expected to use is open source. Things can only go wrong, without the fault of your own if you use something closed-source or custodial.

Are you seriously claiming that something cannot have bugs because it's open source? That nobody will use an oracle or otherwise have outside dependencies?

In reality, these systems do require trust. Most people do not have the skills to audit everything they use — even if, as we've seen so many times in the cryptocurrency world, they incorrectly believe they do — and the people who do have those skills wouldn't have time to audit everything they touch if these systems ever see widespread adoption. Everyone using them is trusting other parties at multiple levels, and there's no way to avoid that for most transactions.

> Cryptocurrency allows you to take responsibility.

Less misleadingly, cryptocurrency requires you to take responsibility for everything. This is not a feature for the vast majority of people because it's a large amount of highly-skilled work which you're required to do constantly as things update and the failure mode is that you're now penniless.

> Blockchain gives the world the ability to not rely on the local central authority. Your data will not be edited, removed, lost, stolen or damaged either.

This is pure naivety. If the blockchain says I own a house and the men with guns say you do, guess who wins? If your government is corrupt, the blockchain won’t help. If your government is not corrupt, the extra cost and risk from using a blockchain aren’t buying you anything.

At most, this problem needs PKI to register claims but the current system works well and all of the failure modes are things which blockchains either don't help with or make worse (“Someone hacked grandpa's phone. Now they own his house and a bunch of nerds on the internet said it's his fault and there's nothing he can do.”).

Sure the contract remains unchanged, but who will enforce the contract? In 99 years, will there be any authority that recognizes the blockchain contract? The "biased, corrupt or dissolved" local central authority could choose not to recognize the blockchain contract and then your estate would still not give the land back.

All of those things you list ultimately do require trust.

A trustless ledger documenting that I own the land my house is on, doesn't make me any safer against a government determined to steal my land.

A car lease ultimately requires me to trust that the leasing company is going to abide by their contractual obligations, just as they are trusting that I will abide by mine, and the contract enumerates what happens if either party fails to uphold their obligations, which is ultimately enforced by the court system. A ledger doesn't really change any of that.

etc.

My bank is FDIC insured, so up to $250,000 is guaranteed to come back to me unless the US Government fails, and then the blockchain would probably not work either.

Also, how can crypto not be seized at will? If they want to take your hardware wallet, they can just keep that just the same. Not to mention getting people to give over the keys if it is kept in a centralized exchange, which a lot of people are.

Wills, deeds, leases etc... are worthless on their own, with or without a blockchain. Sure they can be documented on a blockchain, but the blockchain has no ability to enforce the documents in the real world. If your ownership for somethings is on the blockchain, and someone steals it, then proof of ownership does not matter if there are not government agents with guns willing to enforce your ownership. Libertarians always believe this weird non-aggression principle, as if someone with more guns would respect your rights to property. Civil forfeiture only works because the government has the most guns.

A ledger is only useful if the money it points to is actually useful.

>> "we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this."

Serious question, what/where does this apply to? I get NFTs for digital authenticity, but PKI solves this too. How does one "own nothing without blockchain" when we have property deeds, automobile titles, jewelry and fine art certificates of authenticity all without blockchain? Your comment comes off as a solution looking for a problem.

All of those things requires us to trust somebody, which is a glaring single point of failure in the system. Things can go wrong.

When any of these deeds, titles or certificates are lost, burnt or stolen. You have to rely on an outside body to keep a backup safe for you.

Blockchain allows us to be super efficient too. Which is a perk. Rather than the need of waiting for someone to certify, deliver, inspect, notify, return, process. Depending on the industry, this could take years. Blockchain tech allows everyone to see the validity of a claim in real time.

My family sold out family home a few years ago. It took 6 years of unnecessary admin work to get it sold. If we relied on blockchain tech, it would've been processed in a day.

The problem with blockchain implementation is that most of them still rely on us to trust someone. It is not implemented in the distributed self hosted way people think. The top hacker news submission about Web 3 (blockchain) points out that NFTs and other blockchain technologies are centralized and reliant on trusting someone in practice [1][2].

[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208

This is true. Many NFTs (not all) rely on trusting some random server. People are doing it, but it doesn't make it right. It's a bad business practice.

There are enough reliable methods to not rely on trusting some random server, but some money hungry developers cannot be asked to implement them.

Similar to how some websites do silly things, like storing plain-text passwords in their databases. People do it, but it doesn't make it right.

>If we relied on blockchain tech, it would've been processed in a day.

Why? This is an unsubstantiated claim. Blockchains still have an outside body that you're required to trust, several in fact. The most prominent one is the miners.

I can't tell what the admin issues with your sale were because you didn't mention them, but it seems like being able to see the validity of the claim wasn't the issue that took 6 years for lawyers to resolve. You can show them the validity in person on the day of the sale.

> a solution looking for a problem

This phrase pretty much sums up almost everything related to cryptocurrency/blockchain.

> We live in an age where we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this.

The first part is simply not true (ownership isn't exactly uncommon). Can you specify the problem more precisely and explain how blockchains solve this? I've been following the space since the day Satoshi's manifesto hit HN so please include as many details as possible.

You forgot to explain how

None of those cases, however, had anywhere near as much money put into them that early. It may be that, if blockchain technologies had grown in size much, much slower, that good uses would have been found. Regardless, once this much real money (and the resources of electricity, labor, technical expertise, etc. that they represent) have been invested into something, something impressive should have resulted by now.

How much of that money was based on capitalizing on an unregulated speculative investment market? Just because a lot of resources flow in the general direction of a technology doesn’t mean it wasn’t put to misguided use.

Oh, absolutely. I do think, however, that the very nature of trying to make a new currency (the first and still primary use case for blockchain) is almost inevitably going to have this problem.

Humans are pretty efficient at screwing each other over, particularly when money is involved. And any technology that allows humans to screw each other over more efficiently should have the deepest skepticism possible.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ has tracked $10B in losses due to grift. And that doesn't include the losses used to pay off ransomware.

Money laundering for good is still money laundering.

I love this interview where David Bowie tries to convince Jeremy Paxman of the value of the internet in 1999!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiK7s_0tGsg

Aviation, photography, and the internet required huge investments in developing and building new hardware and infrastructure. All of that is difficult and takes a lot of time. Bitcoin just requires some not-particularly-novel software, plus either commodity hardware or trivial-to-design custom hardware, plus a shit-ton of electricity to burn.

Actually, I don't think that's true. The military was using planes within a decade of 1900, and certainly a decade after the Kitty Hawk flight, they were installing machine guns on planes. They were proposing international legislation to limit the uses of aircraft in war because everyone saw how impactful it was going to be.

Photography and flying always had obvious practical applications. The problem was that the technology was not quite there yet. As far as I can tell, there isn't any obvious technological problem that's limiting the success of blockchain.

When the Internet was 10 years old the year was 1987.

In 1987, Usenet and email were already pretty great. (And that was all before the web!)

Also things like FTP and telnet had many applications, too. My grandfather is an electrical engineer and he talked about how cool it was that the company he worked for got online in the 1980s because it allowed them to get things like Fortran compiler updates or numerical libraries without having to wait for them to be shipped on floppies. My uncle used online services for his food industry business, stock trading, etc. then too.

In early 1987 the number of hosts passes 10,000 [1] Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter was released in October 1986 [2] Only in 1989 Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom join the Internet.

[1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest_I

Also one year later IRC was invented.

Killer app if ever there was one.

…and it was clearly adding value all over the place.

It wasn’t on the growth curve post-1992, but its value for technology companies and universities was not even a question.

People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and say it was also adding value all over the place. Decentralized storage exists, decentralized DNS exists, NFTs exist, remittances exist, and so on.

Is the value marginal next to what the web does today? Sure. But its more than enough value for people 50 years from now to get rose tinted glasses around, as many are doing in this thread concerning the early internet

People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and either say (a) crap, how did we ever get taken in by that, or (b) boy, howdy, do you remember how foolish those people were that thought this stuff was anything but a scam?

There is nothing that can be done on blockchain that cannot be done cheaper, faster, easier, and more securely without blockchain. Blockchain has negative value, and no matter where you measure the start of the Internet from, it had more positive externalities fourteen years on than anything blockchain will ever have, not least because so-called "blockchain" has an insurmountable set of negative externalities that would need to be overcome if a single real-world productive use could be found for it.

Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.

The web was the killer app built on the infrastructure of the internet. The blockchain ecosystem is still building it's infrastructure.

# 1970s: The Internet (US Research Institutions, ARPA, IETF, IEEE,)

TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher

# The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C)

HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types.

[No-crypto P2P]

# Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,)

Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate

# ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,)

Linked Data; RDF, RDFa

5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/

- Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW

# Web3 ("Zero-Trust")

SK: Secret Key

PK: Public Key

Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs.

(A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs)

(DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)

But it also probably isn't a great to compare Bitcoin to "the web." I'm not really aware of some prototype Bitcoin that had large scale and 30 years of development.

I'm also not sure why "the technology is in its infancy and doesn't give us great indications at if it is usable in the real world, but right now is full of scammers and fraud" isn't an acceptable position. Why does it have to either be the next great new thing or a grift? People grifting with new technology and taking advantage of the tech illiterate is pretty common.

Exactly, so then lightning is the better comparison, since it just a few years old and built on bitcoin, like the web was bult on tcp/ip.

What event you are counting from? The term "internet" was first used in 1974 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675) AFAIK, but the technology has been in development since 1960s.

But Al Gore didn't even take office until 1992.

Al Gore was first elected to congress in 1977.

That's why he had time to invent the internet! You can't do that while being busy with congressing and stuff.

I agree except "an staggering amount of crime". This has been studied a lot and there is no clear evidence of more crime than normal occurring just because of bitcoin

Why did ransomware explode after Bitcoin came along? Why is it (and Eth) the payment method everyone asks for?

Because it’s far far easier to use for ransomware and to hide your trail than any traditional bank transaction or money transfer.

Ransoms have been paid via Bank Wires, PayPal and other technologies for decades.

99% of internet based ransoms are still being paid via Bank Wires.

What evidence do you have for, "99% of internet based ransoms are being paid via Bank Wires"?

That would be decisive if it were true.

But I always thought that it is much easier to get ill-gotten gains out of BTC than out of the banking system.

Sounds pretty staggering,

Two Arrested for Alleged Conspiracy to Launder $4.5 Billion in Stolen Cryptocurrency

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...

Bitcoin has made it drastically easier to monetize a system once it’s been compromised

Internet (as ARPANET) has started at 1969. And before 1982 it wasn’t widely adopted. It’s pretty normal to be biased but fact checking is a must for this type of conversation.

Internet “invented” а 1969 and never was used widely till 1982. Neural networks was developed at 1980 but real applications started at 2011. Speech recognition showed at 1962 and still looks like “pretty new piece of tech” for humanity.

We have to admit, we are really slow in adopting tech.

The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

If there was a "super-centralized" network that already had major success (for example, imagine a world in which teletext or something was dominant before the internet) then the internet/web may have had a serious competitor. Instead, the internet was largely reverse-compatible with previous networks such as the phone network through dial-up.

Additionally, the latest wave of cryptocurrency hucksters have been selling their cryptocurrencies as a solution for a problem that cryptocurrency just does not solve. It is one thing to claim that they're wrong; it's another to claim that cryptocurrency has failed its original purpose entirely.

Of course it had to.

There were absolutely successful networks. AOL (America Online) was the biggest, while CompuServe was the older one.

I remember (alas) consciously choosing not to invest in .com domain names in the mid-90's because I assumed both they and AOL room names (if that was the term?) would just be passing fads on the way to whatever better newer network would exist ten years later, with a newer name system.

The internet absolutely had to overcome America Online, at least in the US. (It helped that, early on, many/most people could access the internet via AOL, before local ISP's became widespread.)

> The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

It's hard to imagine how one could define the growth of the Internet as anything other than network effects - its value to end users has always been a function of how many end users there are, which is literally the definition of a network effect.

Edit: To expand a little, considering I don't know if you were aware of the early/mid 1990s, but in those days most people didn't have a computer at home, and in many places phone calls were charged per-minute. It was a significant thing to buy a PC and learn how to use it and pay a lot to go online.

>The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

This line of thinking is extremely dangerous, even moreso for something that's claiming to be a currency. This is the mentality that lead to these ponzi-like schemes; the promoters are prioritizing growth at all costs for the sole purpose of overcoming the network effects. Not because they actually built decent products.

Given the post ends with:

> And The Winner Is…

> Chainalysis helps the government track down tax evasion,darknet markets and CSAM providers & consumers.

This article agrees with you. It supports your argument. Because all of these dead projects have a vast amount of losers. People who invested in the cryptocurrency (as far as it ever was a currency), and who now own a useless pile of bits. The cherry on top is the main project which does make sense is one involving all the negative sides of cryptocurrencies in general, aiding law enforcement in their goal to combat crime involving cryptocurrencies.

The technology has promising applications. It's not clear that it's superior to existing alternatives (at least not enough that we're seeing many big moves to use it and publicize it's use).

The Internet took 30+ years, granted "the start of the Internet" could be debated.

Were we to do some word replacements Internet to radio, and Bitcoin to Internet your words would sound just as accurate following the dot-com bust.

I do think we can agree some of the early decisions have led to disastrous consequences (proof of work power consumption is concerning high).

I mean... it's a ledger with an incremental attestation mechanism. It's a subset of a Merkle Tree. That's about it. There are some deeply technocratic applications for such a thing, such as: slightly better chain-of-custody tracking, identifying regions of large datasets that have been modified, etc.

The idea was patented in 1979.

That's how old it actually is, and it's found its way into numerous useful things. However, exactly zero of them have been as revolutionary or transformative as say the automobile or the internet and are about a million more orders of magnitude short of all the promises made by people using it as a means to burn electricity to sustain a marketplace addicted to financialization instead of actual productivity.

Disclaimer: has dealt with Merkle Trees and cryptographic assurance in distributed database, global payments (root of trust & settlement), and safety-critical systems use cases.

I'm not sure the "8 million adults — who made online payments to friends or family in other countries used at least one kind of cryptocurrency" would agree with you. [0]

[0] https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...

This woefully-lacking-of-legit-citations article says nothing like what you are asserting it says.

I would not call the "survey of 2,079 respondents" by Stellar Development Foundation [0] "woefully-lacking-of-legit-citations".

[0] https://www.stellar.org/

Your provided link does not take me to any kind of survey results.

Regardless, I think it's safe to assume the Stellar Foundation polled their own users, and not a representative sample of the general population. "Cryptocurrency enthusiasts use cryptocurrency" is not exactly an interesting or surprising survey result.

The link includes an invitation to download the report leading to these survey results:

https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cro...

The survey results I saw, the important citations I didn’t see is how they extrapolated the results to represent anything more than the responses of 2,079 people that are interested in surveys about cryptocurrency and cross-border transactions. Therein lies the rub.

So what does this have to do with 8 million people?

If the survey was of 2,079 people, then how does this extrapolate to 8 million? They say 23% of the respondents represent 8 million people, but that does not mean that 8 million people actually used crypto.

Umm ... that was an exact quote from the article.

I think most people are rightfully skeptical of survey results where survey methodology is not disclosed.

Their disclosed survey methodology:

"The Cross-Border Remittances Report, a PYMNTS and Stellar Development Foundation collaboration, draws from a census-balanced survey of 2,079 U.S. consumers who made cross-border peer-to-peer payments, conducted between June 23 and July 12, 2021. Respondents were an average of 39 years old, and 41 percent were female. Also, 47 percent held college degrees and 48 percent earned more than $100,000 in annual income." [0]

[0] https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cro... (Page 25)

EDIT: BTW I have absolutely no affiliation with either PYMNTS or the Stellar Development Foundation.

There you go.

Not only crypto-skeptics can't be bothered to do basic research and even finish reading the entire PYMNTS article and click the 'Download report' link at the end of the article to see and verify the citations and methodology for themselves, instead they continue to pull out anecdotes, assumptions and at worse fallacies to deny reports like this one because 'all crypto bad', or 'all blockchain bad' nonsense. The decades of denial and ignorance from them is beyond pathetic.

What I am seeing here overall in this thread is a very extreme anti-crypto reaction, because the most vocal of all critics have lots books to sell them and they are certainly on a mission to totally stop all of crypto, blockchain and NFTs.

Good luck with that.

I read the whole thing, including the survey results summary, but nowhere do I see how a survey of 2,000 of their own subscribers can be magnified to “represent” three million people. That methodology is not mentioned anywhere that I can see. And while I am definitely not a statistician this seems like massaging the numbers to an extraordinary degree.

I certainly have no doubt that a portion of the 2,000 people surveyed, that are very-likely already interested in cryptocurrency, use cryptocurrency for cross-border transactions as they say they do. But that’s all the survey shows absent an explained methodology for extrapolating larger numbers from their pool.

Edit: clarity.

Whatever the audited data might be, there is a significant population of people in many countries around the world using crypto as a currency, not as an investment. At the end of the day, that may be its true value/demand. I have no doubt that regulators will do their best to make that more and more difficult, but the net effect of that seems to only enhance its value as a currency.

In 10 years for internet means the 1970s. At that time, vast majority of people had no idea such thing existed, and only a few of early researchers used it. For common people, adding value started around the early 90s, when the first commercial ISPs appeared. So, that's about 30 years of initial ramp-up. Let's see where the bitcoin will be in another 20 years. Noting that we already have commercial companies dealing with it - so if anything, the adoption is moving much faster.

I do see one use of Bitcoin - harvesting energy in remote places where the electricity transmission cost is prohibitively high. Cheap energy in remote places that have no chance of transmitted out for normal usage is converted to value in Bitcoin.

Or we could just burn it. In what way is bitcoin more valuable than smoke?

Same way people dig up oil, sell it for cash, and put it in the bank.

That's predicated on the idea that bitcoin has other uses.

Adding nodes to a linked list in the least efficient way possible to promote an mlm doesn't create any value.

And why exactly does this need to happen? Especially if it is dirty coal or gas generation?

Why does it have to the coal or gas? Why not geothermal, solar, wind, or tidal wave?

I am not a big blockchain proponent, quite contrary. But you forgot the function of (more or less) unregulated money movement. It is used that way by laypeople from China, Russia, Iran and other authoritarian/sanctioned countries.

DARPAnet did what in 10 years?

Where we are now as still deciding whether the equivalent of TCP/IP will be what to move forward with, and by that metric I am pretty impressed with the progress of the blockchain concept and sentiment coordination.

At roughly ~"10 years now" The dot com bubble burst shatterjng the 'internet' and the thousands of companies founded upon it.

I can only imagine you held the same beliefs then as now

> Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now.

So after 10 years, is Bitcoin the only one though?

> In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place.

The Internet? In the 1980s there were virtually little to no users. Until the Web came around in the 1990s so did the dotcom speculators and then after the crash, 90% of those internet startups died. Only then the survivors added value to it. Even Web 2.0 was seen as a 'scam' [0].

I'm sure you meant the web?

[0] https://www.wired.com/2005/10/web-2-0-cracks-start-to-show/

> only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies

Did you miss 2008, shitty CDOs?

> and an staggering amount of crime

How has BTC enabled crime more than cash?

It’s very hard to ransom a US hospital or school district from Eastern Europe (or wherever) and get paid in cash.

It’s trivial to be paid in BTC.

It’s interesting giving attribution of crime to Bitcoin and not the internet or hackers. The internet has facilitated a staggering amount of crime as well as the fiat currencies of the globe.

Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right … https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/crypto-crime-hit-an...

Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021 - https://chargebacks911.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/

And that’s just credit cards. It’s not wire fraud or other fraud.

Why do you focus on the mode of criminality and not the crime or criminals itself?

I’ll give you that Bitcoin like ALL the other value transfer mechanisms has some criminals using it but surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime.

As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention?

> The internet has facilitated a staggering amount of crime as well as the fiat currencies of the globe.

Sure, but both the internet and fiat currencies have facilitated a huge amount of legitimate activities, far, far more than crime. I would assert that the vast majority of users of Bitcoin (>90%) are either speculators or criminals (the vast majority of that majority being speculators, with some small but significant minority being criminals).

> Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right [...] Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021

Those numbers are meaningless without comparing them to the total monetary value of transactions pushed through them yearly. I suspect you'll find that, when talking about percent of total, Bitcoin fraud is higher than credit card fraud (and I would suspect that's still true if you consider other kinds of fraud in addition to CC fraud).

> surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I would suggest exactly that. The vast majority of Bitcoin use is either speculation or crime. And speculation basically destroys it as a stable store of value, which is something that's essential for a currency. Sure, there are people using it for legitimate purposes, or to get around unjust currency controls perpetrated by their governments. But I'd wager that's a tiny percentage of users, and they do so at great risk, both legally and financially.

> As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention?

Yes, absolutely. Your average person should not be investing in individual stocks. They should have the bulk of their investment assets in index funds, or at most, actively-managed funds.

Regarding specific company stocks, sure, you can always cherry-pick examples that did worse than Bitcoin. That doesn't prove anything, though. Regardless, looking at the all-time history of BTC does not inspire confidence in it as an investment, especially were I to consider opening a position today.

I disagree with nearly everything you wrote all the way down to investing in single stocks.

But I appreciate your thoughts and you sharing them.