Freedom to transact with other people is good. Freedom to defraud others through complex pump-and-dump, ponzi, or rugpull schemes is bad.

And it's still not widely understood that they're synonymous.

Ideological adherents of crypto deal with this fact by denying it. But ultimately you either have laws and stability, which require restrictions and regulations, or you have a scammy free-for-all that attracts opportunists and speculators who will prey on others.

There is no chance whatsoever that an unregulated system of exchange will not head in that direction. Opportunists and predators gonna opportune and prey.

TBF mainstream markets have the same issue, and the official financial industry is hardly a model of good behaviour.

But at least it's somewhat controlled, even if not by much, as opposed to not being controlled at all.

> Freedom to defraud others through complex pump-and-dump, ponzi, or rugpull schemes is bad.

Sadly, HN seems to think Crypto is only about that. HN's loss, I'd suppose. Though YC, the real motivation behind HN, seems to get Crypto[1]. So probably not that big of a loss really.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/29/the-25-crypto-startups-tha...

Not the flex you think mon ami. All you're proving is that a lot of people who wagered a lot of money have every reason to flex on crypto, and force it down people's throats.

I’m sure the majority of the users on this platform believe (at least subconsciously) that they are the smartest person they know. Many of them likely know about bitcoin since it cost less than a hundred bucks. So here’s this thing that they themselves don’t see any value in, that still _somehow_ manages to have a market cap of billions. And this _despite_ the worse economic conditions in decades.

So it’s the classic case of reality not corresponding to what one has decided it _should_ be. And this invokes defensiveness and strong emotions.

Note that if bitcoin goes to zero, there would be a lot of hodlers experiencing the same.

Binance is (likely) just a ponzi scheme built on crypto like FTX. All of this financial speculation on Bitcoin is what true crypto diehards and fanatics loathe. The goal of crypto is not for people to be rich off speculation. For the real enthusiasts the goal is to replace every dollar bill in their wallet and bank account with Bitcoin or similar currency. Every transaction--food, rent, etc.--all paid in crypto. No one really cares about a company built solely to speculate on crypto imploding.

I disagree on why people are into crypto, at least based on my own experience as a vendor (https://blog.shodan.io/accepting-crypto-a-vendor-perspective...) and every time there's a survey about why they're in crypto on Reddit. Most of them are in it for the speculation and to get rich. I'm sure there's a small contingent of Bitcoin users that are truly in it for the concept but most of them see it as their lottery ticket to get rich.

There was a reasonably punk book called Cryptonomicon which came out in the 1999. Spoiler alert: it follows a group of people loosely based on real figures who worked on cryptography in WWII, and their fictional descendants' quest to eventually create a cryptocurrency.

Thing is, the book's cryptocurrency had two important features:

* It was backed by real assets (recovered WWII gold bars).

* It did not insist on radical decentralization as a hedge against meddling by institutional powers. Instead, the currency was headquartered in an oil-rich nation which was too economically important to be invaded, and which knew that it would eventually need an alternative to oil.

The point is, cyberpunk is not the same thing as anarchy. Blockchains and defi are concepts which are being pushed by corpos. The sudden deregulation gives them a quick, easy, and arguably legal way to participate in illicit markets while bilking money out of suckers.

That book so brilliantly covered the pre-Satoshi crypto world. I love that book, which has so many interesting stories about the history of computers and the impact of technology. I always thought there should be more consideration of whether that book's author, Neal Stephenson, could have been involved in the Satoshi saga.

I’m a big fan of his work, but now that you mention it, the story of cryptocurrency in our timeline does have a Stephensonesque quality to it: brilliant world building at the start, a wild ride in the middle, and a messy and controversial ending at the finish.

Also, despite obviously sympathising with the cryptography nerds minting their own currency and going on a side quest for lost gold, Stephenson sets up his ending by having another key character rant about the ills of stored wealth versus people getting up to do stuff every day...

I mean, aside from fraud, money laundering, scams, and bribery ... what has blockchain done for us?

Circumvention of sanctions and paying of ransomware hackers. Admittedly, those two have a significant overlap with your list.

The early web was precisely like this - from scam sites that were for stealing your cc to criminal sites that openly sold illegal stuff. Beyond that, user generated content in the community forums and sites on the fringes of the internet were seen as 'littering' the Internet and a waste of space because they weren't generating any economic value, hence they did not have any 'use case'.

Then everything suddenly changed when a few large-scale use cases appeared. User-generated content now drives the Internet. Those small sites, shops, forums evolved into giant outlets, businesses, communities.

Same with the blockchain - we do see that we can do stuff with it. We do see that it gives the technical capabilities to do more stuff. But the actual use cases are scarce and small, mostly due to the technical infrastructure not being able to support large scale activity and the crypto space and apps still not being user-friendly enough to allow the public to use anything at large.

Precisely the situation with the early web in which only those who knew could get to the forums on the fringes of the internet and use them for anything while the non-technical users were left to use the corporate sites that they would find in the 'portals' that fired up when they clicked on 'the Internet' (IE, Firefox etc - the browser icon was 'the internet').

When the infrastructure improves and/or someone finds an easy to use use case with large scale appeal, everything will turn around in a second.

There was fraud but there were useful things happening on the early web, building communities was one of those that crypto has done inadvertantly, but there were actual useful things happening with the web in the early days, it wasn't all fraud - I see hardly any use for crypto other than people benefitting (and others hurting) from the ponzi scheme aspects of it.

There is still a lot of useful things happening on the web. The quagmire of social networks or how various state and private actors anywhere on the planet (including the 'free' world) abusing the internet or the extreme fringe socioeconomic segments which were formerly invisible now becoming visible thanks to the Internet do not make the Internet a place in which less useful things are happening. All of those existed before. Its just that they were out of your sight.

> I see hardly any use for crypto other than people benefitting (and others hurting) from the ponzi scheme aspects of it

It already facilitates easy transference of funds, an investment tool, citizen-governed, transparent organizations in the form of DAOs from everywhere and anywhere on the planet - which is likely the most important thing at the moment -, impossible to censor apps and publishing on distributed databases and many other things.

Especially the DAOs are something new in human civilization's history, and them being away from your sight or you not having much insight into them does not make it any less important than online credit card payments. Which were originally invented and used by - surprise - porn sites on the early Internet.

So again it comes to the same thing that I stated in the original comment: The early Internet was similar to the blockchain space that exists now - a space that was dangerous for the ordinary non-technical citizen to enter even while it enabled many things that were at the time seen as 'useless' and 'detrimental' to the society.

I reiterate that even the user-generated content, now celebrated as the democratization of content with all its benefits and ills, was seen as 'useless spam' back then. Major publications, newspaper sites did not have any comment section. Corporate sites did not have any kind of user feedback, less, any consideration for users aside from them being able to buy whatever they were selling at the time without making any noise - after all, who were us, the plebs, to be able to comment under the article of a 6-figure/year columnist or give product feedback to an illustrious company. It took a decade for them to come around and have to submit to such democratization of content and the Internet in general after blogosphere, user-driven forums and whatnot changed the landscape. Even today NYT still doesnt permit anyone commenting under its articles.

Its absolutely the same with blockchain today - if you know about it, being savvy enough, if you follow the right stuff, you will find a lot of good stuff. If you aren't, and instead, if you see it as how old people saw the Internet back then, you will see all the bad stuff and it will be a dangerous and unnecessary place for you.

> The early web was precisely like this

I was around before the web days so I quite remember that time well. While there may have been scam sites, it was a significant minority to the main usage of the web at the time (mostly hobbyist pages and early corporate usage in addition to a lot of porn).

Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. Maybe some day someone will figure out a legitimate usage that isn't a cover for all the stuff I mentioned. It will be very interesting to see what survives after the end of QE/ZIRP.

> it was a significant minority to the main usage of the web at the time

It wasn't. Your perspective seems to be skewed just like the other commentators who think that the early internet was a 'nice place' because their usage was specifically shaped by academic research, corporate and government usage and their tech-savviness.

The public Internet was a pretty wild and dangerous place for the non-tech savvy masses. Which is one reason why the Internet did not take off to become what it is now until after mid 2000s and many business practices and trust-generating systems and services were established, along with mobile devices enabling everyone to access it.

> Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.

Blockchain is not a solution. Its a technology.

> Which is one reason why the Internet did not take off to become what it is now until after mid 2000s

Are you and I from different universes? Are you forgetting about the .com boom (and subsequent bust in 2001)? Internet was mainstream well before 2005.

You also seem to be convinced that it was dangerous - it honestly wasn't. The concept of doxing, credit card fraud and integration with modern crime simply weren't there until after it became mainstream. Got any actual citiations or data?

> the .com boom (and subsequent bust in 2001)?

That was an event specific to the 'more corporate' web as it existed then. Big company sites and big company services were involved in that web. The Internet was limited to tech savvy people and it did not reach the masses yet. The economic activity within that space being big enough for its time does not mean that the Internet was a society-wide event, less, it was global across societies.

The user-driven blogosphere, community forums on the fringes of the internet and what little economic activity that was there did not get affected from the .com bust for example. It was something specific to a very narrow segment of the society and the economy.

> The concept of doxing, credit card fraud and integration with modern crime simply weren't there

Wow. You really dont seem to have much experience or insight (less alone having to have done actual work in) the early user-driven Internet. No surprise since how you think that .com bust was something that affected 'the Internet' - that was your perspective.

Back in the day, if you gave your credit card to a 'wrong' site, it was gone. They'd rack up debt up until your limit within a day or even hours, and you wouldnt be able to get the funds back from that 'no name' country where they used it from and transferred the funds to. People feared that a lot - that's why a lot of 'reassuring' badges and references were used at the footer or carts of any website, from BBB to 'certified' Paypal, 2checkout (then a thing) and other services. While making an ecommerce site for any client, the first thing that they would be concerned with would be that and it would take a considerable time of the project to minimize that fear factor in the clients. And it was universal - the Open Source or private installable cart or ecommerce software that originated in that era still may have 'Secure checkout' or 'This checkout is secured by SSL' etc in their uis even in their latest iterations today. Now you wont see any of that anywhere thanks to Paypal, Stripe, Amazon and plethora of others.

This fear factor made most of the economic activity limited to those 'big sites' that people could trust. The public-driven ecommerce only became a thing towards mid 2000s.

But no, I dont have any data handy. The early user-driven web wasnt something that 'serious' and 'important' institutions would care about. Im sure that someone somewhere has some statistics about early fraud, that's certain. But someone must dig and find it.

...

Our perspectives are too different due to them originating in the different parts of the early Internet. A more institutional, 'big' corporate perspective versus user-driven, chaotic, 'fringe' perspective. Having come from the latter background and now working in both sides of that divide, I can easily say that that separation of perspectives still exists today and it is the problem that causes the 'big tech' to be unable to understand larger internet user base - especially the emergent 'creator economy' - as can be seen from how every single tech giant flopped majestically in that space.

But this is a long, big discussion that I neither have time nor the enthusiasm for. So, I'll bail out. Cheers.

The blockchain is just a hard to use DB. Sure, it's "trustless", but there really isn't value in that for any kind of social interaction. The more you understand this tech, the less interesting it becomes.

The more I think about it, the more conceptually profound a trustless database (and in the case of more sophisticated chains like ethereum, execution environment) seems.

>The early web was precisely like this

Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET in like the 60s, and it was already being used by researches and US government agencies to coordinate and share information and cooperate. The internet was already decades old by the 90s, with an extensive track record of being useful. The 90s weren't an early age of the internet, it was the early age of internet security that allowed you to use your credit card through the internet and be sure it wouldn't be stolen.

Pretty much right away after that was possible, Sears had an integration to buy stuff from them over the internet. Shortly after that, Amazon was founded.

The early days of bitcoin was the 2010s, and several companies tried to integrate with it, including web stores and Steam, and they all eventually removed their integration because crypto makes terrible money, so nobody was using it.

> > The early web was precisely like this

> Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET

While the Web may be the face of the internet most people are familiar with, the “early web” is not the same thing as “the early internet” which, in turn, is not the same thing as “precursors to the internet”. It wasn't the internet, or even an internet, until non-ARPANET networks were connected (e.g., CSNET), and there wasn't a world wide web until HTML & HTTP & browsers were designed and deployed on the internet.

> Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET in like the 60s

'Early Internet' as in public usage. Not its research roots.

> The 90s weren't an early age of the internet, it was the early age of internet security that allowed you to use your credit card through the internet and be sure it wouldn't be stolen

That must be an alternate internet in an alternate timeline. From mid 90s to mid 2000s the Internet was a pretty dangerous place for any non-technical folk to use their credit cards anywhere. You must be looking from a tech-savvy person's perspective just like how you took the 'early Internet' to be ARPANET.

> crypto makes terrible money

If your understanding of crypto is limited to that, its no wonder you have the perspective that you have. Just like how many people said that the community forums back in early 2000s were 'plebs' spamming the internet.

The implicit claim here is that one can claim that the internet, in some legitimate continuous sense, is 60 years old, and that it started being useful to the general public circa Y2K.

Going by that standard, decentralized blockchains have been around for about a decade... and should get two more to develop "an extensive track record" of practical applications.

I don't actually think this is a useful comparison — but it is hardly one that does a disservice to blockchain.

I think the same. What are the alternatives ?

There is no anti-blockchain attitude here. There are acknowledged use cases, as clearly documented in the NIST blockchain technology overview.

https://www.nist.gov/publications/blockchain-technology-over...

Currency is not one of those use cases. But some people keep trying to pretend otherwise because they are technically incompetent, or have a financial interest in doing so.

I don't think the NIST paper actually acknowledges ANY use cases. It does a fair job of pointing out the Oracle Problem, which is overlooked or underestimated by many, many crypto enthusiasts (and, IMHO, investors).

Currency is a real use case (there's an existence proof), and NFTs could be considered a use case, if being a "digital collector" could be considered useful and not just another way to perform pump-and-dump scams.

>There is no anti-blockchain attitude here.

This is extremely disingenuous. When I made that comment there were three others, all to the effect of "I hope the government steps in and squashes all the work being done on this utterly useless technology."

That is extremely disingenuous. Those comments were not anti-blockchain but rather anti-cryptocurrency. There is a difference.

Cryptocurrency is a particular implementation of blockchain. Those comments gave me no reason to think they were only talking about that subset (I'm also perfectly comfortable moving the goalposts anyways so the point is moot).

To be fair, Binance and most of how modern crypto is used has nothing to do with crypto's founding cypherpunk ideals.

It's not VC that's anti-crypto.

I think it's because most blockchain articles are just pushing weird scammy stuff. From a technical perspective the blockchain is an interesting concept, and I'd love to see some articles about things that aren't just scams, but there just hasn't been much of that.

I'm not anti-blockchain, although I have to say that so far the blockchain has not really been useful for anything other than crypto.

I am anti-crypto, because I know some history, and I know that the situation that existed before state-backed fiat currency and regulated banking was worse in many ways for normal people. Many crypto enthusiasts are essentially extreme financial libertarians and view crypto as the enemy of those good things, are they are trying to drag us back into a situation that is like the 1890s but with computers.

On top of that, many bad actors, scams, and manias (e.g. NFTs) have come out of the crypto movement, but few real benefits have been realized.

Binance and all the other centralized institutions in crypto that mandate KYC are anti-Cypherpunk.

I used to wonder this a lot as well. It struck me as odd that a crowd of people with whom I'd often share a lot of the same values and beliefs, would be pretty much point blank against a whole industry that I've been so heavily involved with for many years. On a few occasions, it even shook my confidence and made me wonder if I'm doing the right thing. If so many smart people are against crypto, am I the crazy one?

I have since learned to live with it. In the same way that I live with the fact that crypto is full of grifters, I've learned to live with the fact that majority of the world has a very narrow view of what the space is about. The only thing that I find unfortunate now-a-days is how quick people are to turn towards radical thoughts and approaches, without even considering that they might not know what they are talking about.

> Always been a bit perplexed by the anti-blockchain attitude here.

It's very small but _very_ loud. I surmise that the vast majority of us are curious and hopeful for blockchain tech as a socioeconomic critique.

Hacker in hacker news refers to the usage before it came to mean cybercrime.

> it is literally a venture capital messageboard...

Venture Capital is about sorting through good ideas and bad ones, and finding the diamond in the rough, or persevering when no one else thinks an idea is good -- and being proven right.

Crypto has been a thing for a while now, and is mostly imploding. A few folks made a lot of money and laughed all the way to the bank. But a lot of people are eating it, hard. I had my hopes before, but after losing $2k and watching a lot of folks around me lose more, with no hope of a real system or change coming out of this, it's hard to see what's left to support.

Furthermore a lot of blockchain use cases and opportunities are absolutely unrelated to currency. The chain may yet have uses, but at this point I'll stick to EUR, USD, or maybe Yuan.

It’s because it completely lost its tech-eyness and is just a get rich quick scheme for grifters.

Well, the hackers actually know what is going on, and the general sentiment among them is that more people are being scammed that value being delivered.

And as hackers in the positive sense of the word, this bothers us.

Having said that, I am personally hoping against hope that something will still come up that justifies at least part of the scams.