For a lot of "investors", it's not even currency trading, not as far as I understand currency trading tactics. It really feels like it's just "number go higher" gambling.

With ponzi qualities and market manipulation to force massive speculative gain by an inner core.

I leveraged $200 to $650 in BTC a couple of years back and quit to buy a Pixel 1. It felt like gambling. Never going back.

It's like investing in gold, if anyone could invent new elements.

Except you need to convince no one gold is valuable given it was used as currency and jewelry for thousands of years. Cant use bitcoin to signify a marriage

Gold isn't intrinsically valuable as currency or jewelry. Those are cultural attachments that can disappear.

It is, however, intrinsically valuable because of its many medical and electronic applications, which means its value can never theoretically reach zero (unlike a crypto token).

People always say that. But the fact that gold was considered incredibly valuable by literally every civilization for thousands of years makes it a lot more durable than, like the English language, or books.

I mean like when the Europeans arrived in pre-Colombian America looking for gold, the people they encountered also had it as a major cultural attachment too, without any coordination whatsoever.

I’m not sure there’s a better definition of intrinsic value than that.

I gave a better definition of intrinsic value in the second paragraph: it has unique applications for extremely important categories of goods.

I agree it's not a coincidence that most societies valued gold, even without contact with each other. But that's also because of its elemental qualities.

Silver and most other shiny metals will tarnish. A lot of metals are difficult to shape into jewelry or stamped coins. And other metals are denser and heavier, making them hard to transport.

Gold is better than other metals for coins and jewelry for many reasons.

That doesn't mean its current price is 0% cultural or that that cultural element is permanent.

I agree it's likely going to last for as long as society does, but I don't think that's a guarantee inherent to gold as a metal.

> And other metals are denser and heavier, making them hard to transport.

Gold is the 8-th densest chemical element, and by far the densest element know to mankind until the discovery of platinum and tungsten (slightly less dense, but very close) in the 18th century. I don't have a source for this, but I suspect that part of its popularity was because being so dense made it impossible to counterfeit.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements (sort the list by density)

Aside of its cultural preferences (high luster, desirable yellow color), gold is valuable as jewelry because of its tarnish resistance, ability to be drawn into wires, hammered into sheets, or cast into shapes. Other than that I agree with you.

And also if the elements had no industrial or cultural utility.

There are two very important advances that cryptocurrency bring to money in the digital age:

1) digital signatures to enable transactions without exposing secrets like credit card or account numbers

2) block chains to ensure the integrity of the entire system

These are both critical for moving to a sound monetary system that does not rely on trusting institutions that operate in a legacy paradigm.

EMV/tap to pay doesn't expose credit card or account numbers. This is sufficient for most user's banking needs.

Bank ledgers generally provide better integrity for people than blockchains, because they allow fraud remediation.

The two primary advantage of cryptocurrencies in my view is semi-anonymous payments for grey/black market transactions, and international money transfers.

"Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."

This is not what happens. Trust is moved from institutions to code and math. General public has no chance to evaluate the trustworthiness of either while there is a mechanism to certify the first and not the latter.

That's what I thought I was saying.

I agree that those are both significant advances but having transactions and wallets reside on exchanges nullifies those benefits entirely. The fear early on was that you’d never be able to achieve mass-adoption due to the upfront cost of setting up a wallet and waiting on transactions. Despite crypto’s popularity today, that fear has never truly been overcome.

There are several proven cryptocurrencies with negligible setup costs and fees. For example, I have over 200,000 microtransactions on Algorand on my account. The cost is less than 1/10th of a penny each.

And yeah, we should not rely on exchanges because it does defeat the purpose.

It sucks, because there ARE crypto projects that have interesting applications, but the entire conversations about them online are about how much money the community can be making, or the disappointment that they aren't making as much as they'd like to.

You can't actually talk about the project, because once it gets too big it's just a farm for speculators. The devs don't give a shit because their project getting buzz boosts their coin's value, but it also means the project itself stops mattering.

> there ARE crypto projects that have interesting applications

Name some. Some that can't be better done with an sqlite database running on a Raspberry Pi.

I’m flabbergasted by how often HN commentators who should know better keep refusing to acknowledge the trade-offs in the technical implementations of crypto. What SQLite database running on raspberry pi is immune from seizure by relevant government authorities for helping with criminal transactions? Compare and contrast with Tornado Cash, which still works fine despite being OFAC sanctioned.

Now, you may not care for law evasion, and that’s fine. But it’s asinine to pretend that crypto tech is not better for such purposes than “an SQLite database running on a raspberry pi.”

> Now, you may not care for law evasion, and that’s fine.

I for example don't think it's a technical feature.

> Compare and contrast with Tornado Cash, which still works fine despite being OFAC sanctioned.

This is why it might just be the thing that ends unrestricted access to Internet. P2P sharing music or torrenting movies caused a lot of noise but in the end violating copyright is not a big concern compared to laundering proceeds from criminal activities.

TC works just fine, if your definition of fine is 'I want to send my money into a black hole'.

> What SQLite database running on raspberry pi is immune from seizure by relevant government authorities

What cryptocurrency is? The answer is none, because there are several weak points to any cryptocurrency and if state agencies choose to take them seriously they can easily shut them down.

> keep refusing to acknowledge the trade-offs in the technical implementations of crypto.

No, we don't. The thing is, every time a "good application of crypto" comes up the next question is "show these to us". And invariably those "good applications" have no idea what they are doing, require centralized trusted entities to function, and can be run from a Raspberry Pi.

The only real use-case of crypto is value transfer that is immune to government interference - I don't think anyone is denying that.

But for the vast majority of businesses which interact with the real world, it doesn't matter whether the actual logic is on a bulletproof, uncensorable VM if the government can just go after the few input/output points where the system interacts with the real world.

Therefore, it's no better than just running SQLite and much worse because crypto makes significant tradeoffs (to be resistant to adversary interference) that aren't actually useful here.

- Ethereum's PKI allowed an e2ee messenger app to be built w/o a phone number https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1575248197454135296

Why do you need cryptocurrency for that? Just make a p2p app and trade public keys. The only reason Signal uses phone numbers is convenience in locating people and restoring accounts.

the pki does make life easy - ethereum address as a global unique id + seed phrase around for recovery + integrate this thing with the rest of the ethereum ecosystem (e.g. other apps can require ownership of an account on this app by looking for a signed message on chain)

Bitcoin. Ethereum. Etc.

They don't go down if you turn off your Raspberry Pi.

I also can be 99.9999% sure that they run correctly and Ethereum itself is pretty unhackable, as proven by the multi-billion bug-bounties.

The smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, unlike your PHP script, can be audited, and if marked immutable, i'm sure no malicious person/business can hack or change it, and if they do it has an auditable backlog.

> The smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, unlike your PHP script, can be audited, and if marked immutable, i'm sure no malicious person/business can hack or change it

And equally sure that any bug in there (and there will be bugs in there) is unfixable and any funds stolen through it unretrievable.

"smart contracts" are neither.

> Bitcoin. Ethereum. Etc.

This is tech. Not its applications.

> The smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, unlike your PHP script, can be audited, and if marked immutable,

Ah, to once again have a child's wonder and belief in magic. Just add th incantation "blockchain ethereum smart contracts", and all is right with the world.

Meanwhile reality [1] just in the past ten days:

--- start quote ---

Insufficient validation on an OHM smart contract at Bond Protocol allowed an attacker to drain 30,437 OHM (~$300,000) from the Olympus DAO defi protocol.

Olympus DAO wrote in an announcement that "This bug was not found by 3 auditors, nor by our internal code review, nor reported via our Immunefi bug bounty."

---

On October 14, Ethereum reached a milestone that alarms many who have pushed for blockchains as "censorship-proof" technology. More than 51% of blocks produced in the preceding 24 hours were processed by relays that filtered out transactions involving Tornado Cash

---

The defi project Earning.Farm lost 748 ETH (~$971,000) to a hacker using a flash loan attack. The project contract was missing a check that a flash loan was initiated by the protocol, so the attacker was able to instruct the project to withdraw large amounts of funds

---

Rabby Swap, a feature of the Rabby crypto wallet, was exploited a month after it was first rolled out. An attacker discovered an apparent vulnerability in the Rabby Swap smart contract that enabled them to arbitrarily transfer other users' funds.

--- end quote ---

[1] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

> i'm sure no malicious person/business can hack or change it

Words that precede every DeFi hack with a ridiculous nominal dollar value.

Wrong conclusion. The hacks never targeted the underlying platforms and security. It was always the bugs on the smart contract level. The same way you can't blame Java/Ruby/Python being insecure because of SQL injection attacks.

What useful thing do those smart contracts achieve in practice? The only place they have authority over is their respective blockchain. They are powerless in the real world, always relying on some centralized entity to sync real-world state with blockchain state, but doing so inherently throws away all the benefits of running on a blockchain, so you may as well just let the centralized entity run a good old database and call it a day.

Do you trust a single Rasperry Pi over a secured blockchain? If so, I think we can agree to disagree.

A lot of crypto projects require trust in the governing body, who are very often pseudonymous and untrustworthy

In which case it doesn't matter if it's on a Blockchain or a raspberry pi because the consensus layer being trusted is secondary

"A secured blockchain" is hilarious in concept to me. Looking at cryptographic constructions in general, 'secure' tends to mean "some multiple of the current total computing power of the world, running for hundreds of thousands to billions of years, might be able break the system".

With blockchains we have "a subset of the current compute power on the planet could start subverting it immediately".

> an overly complicated, asset-less, currency trading system, with questionable value and questionable stability.

robber barons 2.0