It is surprising and discouraging that a forum that is meant to be about start-ups, disruption, innovation and new ideas is so blind to one so revolutionary as cryptocurrencies.

Yes there are scams, but that is not exclusive to the cryptocurrency world, and nobody is defending those.

Yes there is too much price speculation, but there are also thousands of developers, companies and DAOs working on useful projects. We want cryptocurrencies and blockchains to be useful to people, let's focus on that.

Yes scalability is insufficient at the moment, but there are multiple blockchains with concrete and plausible roadmaps to improve it while keeping enough decentralization. Let's not focus on the limitations of today, but on the possibilities of the future. Otherwise it would be like failing to imagine Youtube in the era of dial-up modems. It's unbecoming of Hacker News.

I would like people in general, and even more here, to think twice and keep an open mind. If so many people are excited and dedicating their lives to it, isn't it possible that you missed something important?

I was very excited for Bitcoin in 2012, I mined a few on my gaming rig that was also being used for some Seti@Home and Folding@Home calculations when idle. I imagined that at some point it'd be an useful technology.

We are 10 years in, I've followed the whole scene from the outside, not really engaged in it but always keeping tabs on developments, exciting things popping up, etc. I'm thoroughly convinced the current crop of cryptocurrencies/cryptofinance should die.

I dislike the apologisers bringing up that "scams are not exclusively to cryptocurrency", yes, of course, there are scams everywhere but very few technologies live in this crossroads of lack of control and perverse incentives for greedy people to rob others. The amount of money circulating in it freely available to be scammed is also on a level different than most others. The enabling of scams with this technology is absurd.

10 years in and I still haven't really found a use-case that could come close to compensate for the amount of money that naive people have lost, I've seen complete assholes that I personally know become filthy rich, quickly, just by not having any moral compass and being enabled by this technology to steal from others.

No, I won't focus on the possibilities of the future knowing the amount of damage it creates in the present, I don't live with a Machiavellian moral of "the ends justify the means". The current means suck and there is no big push from the cryptocurrency scene to address those properly because it's been co-opted by the scammers through and through.

Does the technology itself still have some exciting features? Yes. Do I believe that it'll eventually evolve to something that is actually useful and not hostile? No, I don't believe that, not the current crop of people working on it.

> If so many people are excited and dedicating their lives to it, isn't it possible that you missed something important?

Isn't it possible that those people have misguided (or mischievous) motivations? It's not because a lot of people fall into a hype that it makes the hype validated. Even less a hype that is completely and absolutely created by pure greed.

>there are also thousands of developers, companies and DAOs working on useful projects.

It's been 10 years, and nothing useful has been made. Merely things that really promise us could be, one day, perhaps, useful. Sorry bruv, we'll only listen to that argument for so long. And I think it's been long enough.

>We want cryptocurrencies and blockchains to be useful to people, let's focus on that.

No, you have it backwards. We want things useful to people - if that's cryptocurrency and blockchain, then we want them, but if they're NOT then we don't. There's nothing intrinsic about them we want.

> It is surprising and discouraging that a forum that is meant to be about start-ups, disruption, innovation and new ideas is so blind to one so revolutionary as cryptocurrencies.

This is what happens when you put beliefs above facts. Just because you believe something doesn't make it true. If you ask a bunch of domain experts to review something, and they say it is bogus, then you are the one acting in bad faith, not them.

Don't blame them for giving you the answer you didn't want.

Instead, go be that crazy visionary and prove them all wrong. That's how science works.

Stealing $10 billion from your users is always going to get more attention than launching a shit coin named after rats.

For there to be positive coverage, something positive has to happen... like that kid on tik tok who bought a $2mil house and paid for his mortgage with the 20% interest paid on his 200k DeFi stablecoin holding. Now that there was a heartwarming and positive story.

Are you serious? Any investment that promises a guaranteed 20% annual return should be assumed to be a scam. Nobody should take a mortgage that they can’t afford to pay if the 20% magic interest vanishes. Real estate doesn’t just go up. The house value may be underwater when this financing scheme collapses and they’re forced to sell — and then their losses can easily be larger than the 200k they started with.

Mostly correct.

I had tokens stolen from a wallet using a fairly obtuse scheme involving ERC-20 token approval and a proxy contract. This is required for almost all DEX users, and really is a weakness of the EVM in that it restricts user transactions to single contract calls rather than sequences like smart contract internal transactions. There are ugly, insecure, incompatible, and expensive workarounds like smart contract wallets and exploding contract deployments. I guess I should probably raise an EIP to make this sane.

Phishing is a different issue than a fraudulent custodian going insolvent and pausing all withdrawals, though.

Not phishing, but yes; very different issue. In this case, it was reported to the FBI as a private key disclosure through an old-fashioned MS Word macro virus, but I have my doubts versus inside job.

DeFi exchanges can be rug pulled. It is also a scammers paradise.

This is false.

Unless there is a bug in the source code. But of course that can't happen, and definitely can't happen intentionally. /s

It looks like you need to pick your poison. Trust social structures or trust in code security audits. Of course you can read the code yourself, but unless you're a security researcher that's not going to be very useful.

Most people on HN are pretty well positioned in “the social structures” and well treated by them hence the belligerence and bewilderment toward anyone who wants to put their eggs in different baskets. (Generally speaking, crypto is just one example.)

Yup, I fully agree. That's why HN is so anti-crypto. It's dominated by American males in their 30s and 40s who don't understand the value proposition because they never had to deal with malicious governments, banks, or hyperinflation in their lifetime.

If I have to choose between holding USD or ETH, I'll pick the US Dollar. But if my choice is between holding and transacting in ETH vs. some third-rate local currency by a semi-corrupt government, I'd be all-in on crypto.

if my choice is between holding and transacting in ETH vs. some third-rate local currency by a semi-corrupt government

I will use dollar, gold or silver.

Except that you may not be able to because those can be banned by the government. For example, from 1933 to 1974 it was illegal for people in the US to hold gold because the government needed to raise money from its citizens. Holding gold doesn't help the government. And forget about getting your hands on US dollar.

Of course the government can ban holding crypto, but that's going to much harder to enforce since it's just bits.

Argentina has third rate currency and corrupt government. People use dollars not crypto. Same for Turkey and other countries.

You’re saying that American males in their 30s and 40s in the tech industry are generally against crypto?

I think so, yes. I believe that if you go into a typical tech company, let's say Google, and survey people above 30 about crypto, the majority will be against it, and it will be positively correlated with age, i.e. older people are more likely to be against it.

Of course I have no evidence, it's just my anecdotal experience, which doesn't count for much. I actually hope I'm wrong.

> American males in their 30s and 40s who don't understand the value proposition because they never had to deal with malicious governments, banks, or hyperinflation in their lifetime.

While not American, I can fully understand the promises (but not guarantees) of DeFi and cryptocurrencies but, I prefer to invest in popcorn futures, for now.

Because, by sheer luck I know a lot of people who worked in TradFi, and I've seen its insides and how mature it is. It's not perfect, it's not fair in some places, but it's rooted and mature. You can see the direction of it, and be prepared if you watch for the signs.

I'm investing in popcorn futures, not because I believe DeFi will fail, but watching the evangelists think that they can change a centuries old system in a decade flat.

DeFi and TradFi will merge. The end will look like TradFi, but the inner working will be a lot (but not completely) different. Believe or not, but most of the TradFi regulations are there to prevent these kinds of free falls and screw-overs.

> I'll be surprised the day there's a positive article about crypto on HN.

I am annoyed by such arguments because crypto has now existed for quite a long time, and the positives are very limited if existent at the moment. Would you mind sharing positive events occurring thanks to crypto?

> Would you mind sharing positive events occurring thanks to crypto?

DeFi continuing to issue user withdrawals regardless of market conditions and the greed of centralized financial custodians? This is the whole reason why Satoshi created Bitcoin and the blockchain in 2008.

Aside from millions of people having access to dollars via stablecoins? Or the ability to escape an oppressive government with capital controls? Or donating to organisations that aren't in the governments graces, like Wikileaks? Or preventing methane emissions via Bitcoin mining? Or...

You can indirectly rug-pull DeFi users by "gifting" them a coin into their wallet. And as soon as they interact with it, that coin's smart contract can then gamble away their funds.

That's phishing, not rug-pulling.

They do hold the funds of liquidity providers - and there have been many cases of rug pulls from new Dex’

(I’m a believer in crypto and decentralisation however)

It's a smart contact with no custodian. Nobody holds the keys to rug-pull.

I'd be very surprised if there's a positive article about asbestos either, for the very same reasons. Why attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by knowledge?