How is that different from what we do now?
Lightning (an L2 system on Bitcoin) is essentially a system of peer to peer exchange of signed BTC transactions, which supersede previous ones, but don't get committed to the main net. In that way, you can keep a running tab between counterparties with effectively no marginal cost until one of you decides to close the tab by committing it.
Of course, I just made a wild guess about how many net settlements between banks would happen; maybe banks don't settle up from check clearing daily, but in a world where transactions are difficult to reverse and nobody trusts anyone, you'd want to settle up regularly.
What exactly do you mean? This is exactly the one use case where cryptocurrencies do work, compared to all the other bullshit use cases cryptocurrency hypists have came up with. Doing non-centralized transactions is what it excels at.
Unclear if you're talking about Bitcoin specifically or cryptocurrencies in general, but there are cryptocurrencies that handle transactions quickly and at scale in a secure and decentralized manner. Algorand is one of those, but there are plenty of others out there that fits the requirements.
Also most market cap isn't in those "more efficient" and "more decentralized" coins.
Crypto people think it’s getting rid of visa, Western Union, and government censorship.
That's an oversight of the year.
Arguably it’s even more annoying than if we just had posts that only say “I hate crypto”. But the idea that there is no apparent reason is laughably wrong. People give a lot of reasons.
To give you an example of a HN reader with reasons to dislike most cryptocoin stuff:
- cryptocurrencies, particularly those mineable on CPUs and/or easily laundrable, provide a serious financial incentive for scriptkiddies and other hackers to go and hack systems to have them mine for coins, encrypt them in coin-extortion schemes, or steal the content of wallets they find. Basically, it's like the absence of STIR/SHAKEN on a phone network - it invites scammers to robocall people and pull scams on them.
- mining of cryptocurrencies, especially on Bitcoin and other ASIC based coins, consumes an awful lot of electricity, which has been incentive enough for multiple operators to reactivate fossil fuel plants that had already been shut.
- cryptocurrency mines of everything but proof-of-stake coins produce an awful lot of e-waste. Some of that can be repurposed (e.g. CPUs, RAM, GPUs, FPGAs) which has serious side effects on its own (such as enormous gluts in the used markets when miners drop their rigs), some of that is uneconomical to repurpose (HDDs/SSDs for proof-of-storage coins, the mining process eats through them at an insane pace) and some of that is impossible to reuse (ASICs).
- cryptocurrency mines can lock up large parts of the hardware supply because miners pay so much more than even the richest gamer can afford. One might argue that that's a natural function of a capitalist economy, but sorry when you can't get a new halfway-decent GPU for years because scalpers buy up all the stock then the market has fucking failed.
- cryptocurrencies invite undesirable people and events. There have been almost infinite amounts of these, documented on [1] - legitimate hacks, legitimate coding issues that sent coins to null addresses, rug-pulls disguised as hacks, shoddy accounting or general business practices by people who got in way over their head (MtGox) or had no idea WTF they were doing (FTX). Or NFTs which all went down the drain once the free money spigot and the novelty wore off (on top of the OG NFT Bored Ape copying and thus promoting outright Third Reich Nazi symbols and edgy far-right memes [2]).
- cryptocurrencies invite those who think it's a good idea to use them as a proxy to evade securities laws or KYC rules, luring in gullible morons in the process and leading to loss of money.
tl;dr: too much money lures in too many morons and everyone but the original "investors" loses.
* shitty people scamming other people: Yes, everyone knows. It happens with normal money as well. I regularly get "How to avoid scammers" emails from my bank too. As long as something has value someone will try to use it to scam someone else.
* mining: Yes we know, mining is bad. Nobody wants it, it's going away. Could it go away faster? Yes, but it will happen eventually. Ban mining for all I care, nobody really needs it.
The thing is, governments don't want people to get scammed, and so they act to prevent scam avenues. But unlike, say, the trad-bank system the percentage of "scam" vs "legit" operations in cryptocurrencies is drastically skewed to the "scam" side, made easier by the anonymity that cryptocurrencies provide by design.
Many early adopters are salty that nobody would listen to us and investigate the criminals we were pointing out all along.
> cryptocurrencies invite those who think it's a good idea to use them as a proxy to evade securities laws or KYC rules, luring in gullible morons in the process and leading to loss of money
Generally the criminal schemes that actually took everyone's money were so simple as to not even be securities scams. The complex non-deliverable defi contracts were something people were playing around with to make prediction markets and other useful things.
> when you can't get a new halfway-decent GPU for years because scalpers buy up all the stock then the market has fucking failed
Okay, seriously, what system would actually create more cards here, some command economy where gaming is allocated a higher value than other activities? How does the company know how many fabs to buy/lease to prepare?
> promoting outright Third Reich Nazi symbols and edgy far-right memes
I don't see a lot of value in some censorship system that makes that enforceable. Should books not have been invented until we developed a technology to make it impossible to say mean things?
I don't claim to have a solution that benefits everyone, but at least personally I prefer actual people having GPUs to have fun with them over some miners polluting the environment for a ponzi scheme with them that brings benefit to no one but a select very few.
> I don't see a lot of value in some censorship system that makes that enforceable. Should books not have been invented until we developed a technology to make it impossible to say mean things?
The Nazi crap was just the cherry on the cake. It just speaks volumes about just what kind of ideological toxicity was freely allowed to spread. Or, to use an older analogy, when a Nazi walks into a bar and isn't kicked out, well guess what you have? A Nazi bar.
I think Nvidia/etc missed some serious PR by not giving out tickets to buy cards via gaming and hardware sites, to be rewarded with more tickets if those cards ended up being used for gaming. However, I think it's unrealistic and unhelpful to call prices "scalping" when there are conflicting markets for a product.
> a Nazi walks into a bar and isn't kicked out
A bar is a private entity with a target clientele and limited availability. It makes sense that the patrons can be and should be curated.
> ideological toxicity was freely allowed to spread.
Now we're talking about NFTs, literally DeFi. How would you make NFTs that would allow for pro-Tibet messages, etc, and not also allow any other text/image that people want?
The correct filter is in which markets list it, and which customers buy it. It's like a disgusting book - it doesn't invalidate the very concept of libraries.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
Isn't it backwards? If I have a few (officially issued) colored pieces of paper in my pocket, I can give them away in exchange for other stuff, but if I have a cryptocoin in my pocket, there is no way I can exchange it for anything unless another party (or a majority) agrees to that exchange.
Ethereum is about 20 for the electricity usage of a few steel plants.
Cryptocurrencies have one use: to evade regulation. As soon as that use disappears so will cryptocurrencies.
Crime isnt a side-effect, it's the point.
Does this take the migration to proof of stake last year into account?
Some produce up to 3,000,000 tons, so the ethereum network would consume about 0.1% as much energy as one of those
edit: Bitcoin for comparison consumes somewhere around 100 Twh, so is comparable to 1000 steel mills (which might be more than the number of actual steel mills in operation globally?)
Sometimes, HN appears to have the collective memory of a goldfish.
On HackerNews over the years, we've seen hundreds, maybe even thousands of sob stories from people like "X payment provider has locked my account and is not giving me access to my funds"
In every case, it's pointed out that crypto might be a way for people to reduce risk of this kind of thing happening.
Yet there's some people who continue to insist with a straight face that crime is the only conceivable use of crypto.
But one could make the argument that this site is technically an example of "crime", at least legally speaking.
In blockchain, redress is impossible. That's part of why it's so lucrative for fraudsters.
The failure modes in monetary systems are human, not technological -- and blockchains fuck humans. They make the problem worse.
The sales pitch for blockchains is a lie. The problem is real, but this isnt the solution. This solves only the needs of criminals in the strongest sense: people out to get other people.
Regulation will pop these schemes and nothing will be left -- it took 10-30 years to regulate credit cards. Hopefully regulators will step in sooner here.
I notice that disgusting, wicked authoritarians that relish in their desire to achieve control over other human beings absolutely despise crypto.
If I knew absolutely nothing about crypto other than the fact that enemies of humanity hate it truly vehemently, what should my judgement of crypto be?
Or is the sucker for a sales pitch the person who parrots whatever the nice funny man on the TV tells him to think about any given issue?
If you want to be smart, don't judges technologies based on supposed virtues signalled; judge them by understanding how they work independent of how their salesmen say they work. Learn, know and understand.
Your entire world view is pretty dumb: who is signalling what I should be allied to?
That's a dumb question; and it signals that you're ripe for abuse. All you need to be sold an idea is to have it associated, by signals of virtue, with what you hate.
You're not alone. This type of gullibility is the mentality of most victims of crypto; and indeed, many scams.
80% of the crypto community is people who think they're smarter than the people scamming them -- that's the other 20%, and they're winning
Payment channels allow arbitrarily high transaction rates w/ bitcoin, I've seen demonstrations sustaining hundreds of transactions per second. A side effect of their scalability is that no one knows the actual transaction rate-- only the few transactions related to opening and closing channels are broadcast.
> Crime isnt a side-effect, it's the point.
That is false and defamatory. Please withdraw this point.
I will not withdraw this point. It isn't hyperbole.
Cryptocurrency technology has the economic and social incentive structures of ponzi and pyramid schemes; and primarily enables fraud. The purpose is avoiding the law.
The best that can be said, about the unwitting, is they aren't conscious of the incentive structures they participate in; and hence spread scams without realising it. This is indeed, how pyramid schemes work.
These libertarian ideological projects prove Hobbes point: absent governance, life in society is "nasty, brutish, and short".
The properties of these systems ruin people's lives for the sake of providing, at its "most noble", and ideological casino for people to cosplay a financial system. And that nobility is really just a pyramid scheme framing device for spreading the scam around.
The ideological window dressing is nothing more than "hey, maybe these vitmins will cure cancer. Dont you want to cure cancer?! Don't you think BigPharma is terrible?! Dont you think the healthcare system is broken?! Here, take 100 boxes of these vitamins -- everyone wants them!"
Your prior statement claimed that that "Crime [is] the point", have you weakened your position or are you just saying it another way?
How is "avoiding the law" the purpose of Bitcoin? Please connect your argument to supporting materials.
In general. Every time I heard a cryptocurrency claiming to be fast and decentralized, it either didn't live up to performance expectations or there were major caveats to decentralization. I can't comment on Algorand specifically as I gave up on following crypto.
Not because the way they work is inefficient, but because if the financial system collapsed that badly, we would not have an internet, or power, or food, most likely.
This is... not true [1]. We'd need to use something like the Lightning Network. The traditional financial system also has layers build on top of it, so it makes sense that you wouldn't only use the Bitcoin base layer.
[1] https://voltage.cloud/blog/bitcoin-education/how-many-transa...
If the current financial system stopped working and for some reason we needed to actually use Bitcoin to pay stuff, it would not be possible. Cryptocurrencies don't scale, because the way they work is extremely inefficient.