I admit, I believe that Bitcoin will have an important (and positive) future in our lives. Yet every day I open HN and scan the articles I get the sense that most (not all) articles are anti crypto currency. The sum of these articles appears to me as "propaganda". Does anyone else feel the same way?
It would be interesting to know why the status quo financial system is held in such a high regard? Especially in light of the continual debasement of the dollar since it was decoupled from gold.
I for one, take this perceived negative bias as a confirmation that Bitcoin is a genuine threat to the existing financial system. When Bill Gates (and other powerful people) bad mouth Bitcoin I smell a rat. Does anyone else think this way? Am I just a dumb ass? :)
1. Proof-of-work has inherent, fundamental, no-way-to-work-around-it issues regarding scale. The more value Bitcoin holds, the more Argentina's-worths-of-energy that is needed to keep it secure. That is by design when it comes to proof-of-work. It is a guaranteed dead end. Proof-of-stake does not have that same problem, but ironically I see so much antipathy towards proof-of-stake by large swaths of the crypto community.
2. The fundamental idea that crypto can "escape" government financial controls is false. Or, at least it's no different than the fact that selling meth is also capable of evading government controls, but at huge risk. Government can make anything it wants illegal if it so desires.
This. I was thinking seriously about investing in bitcoins, but realized governments across the world won’t give up their control over people’s behavior by controlling money supply, either by minting currency or by means of interest rates.
Not everything is black and white. While the government can enact laws, and enforce those with courts and guns, on a practical level it is easier, for example, to flee a hostile country with Bitcoin than with a checking account held at a local bank.
The problem with crypto is that all that it is is speculative financial hype. The entire worth of crypto is a bet on its future utility.
The difference between the dot com bubble and web3 is that there is no web3 craigslist or geocities or usenet or altavista or webmd or ebay or amazon or anything of utility or value other than as an investment asset.
When we threw the bathwater out after the bubble crash, there were a few babies left.
13 years into the cryptocurrency bubble and I still don't see any productive use. Unless you're in the ransomware industry, or trying to evade sanctions.
Bitcoin works exactly as technically scoped. Which part of "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" is technobabble? I think its a pretty good choice of words.
> rather that HN readers see crypto's empty promises to fix existing issues for what they are: bullshit designed to lure in ever more dumb money.
I would say rather that HN readers are blinded by their own technical abilities, so much so that they think they are right when it comes to social or economic ones.
Good news is the future years will determine which theory is right. Either its "bullshit designed to lure in ever more dumb money", or its an innovation that created something that provides real value to the economy.
I promise, one of us will be deterministically wrong.
I agree with you on that. Never mind the money laundering, the criminal extortion, the unfettered grift, the ponzi schemes, the lack of regulation, smart contracts which aren't, securities sold in exchanges that aren't secure, the gross misappropriation of other's work making profit in NFT's as genius level crypto godhood, and the never ending supply of pretzel logic to convince others that while 90% of it is all shit, the 10% that isn't justifies crypto's entire existence.
Is that because they're blinded by their own technical abilities? Or do they realize its all a fraud as well and trying to make a quick buck before the regulator's swoop in?
I don't see you addressing this in your post, so I thought I'd ask.
How are we using Bitcoin? As a ponzi scheme where the earliest of investors win by bringing more people in.
How are we using Blockchains (specifically NFTs)? Outright fraud.
Ponzi schemes and fraud won't solve our social or economic woes. What few good things Bitcoin and the blockchain ever provided has been completely overwhelmed by the crap.
As a result, governments are going to crack down on these technologies hard. They've already started by taxing these virtual currencies the same way they do stocks.
HN hates on bitcoin because it’s incredibly wasteful and overhyped.
HN hates on blockchain because it’s a convoluted way of solving problems that could otherwise be done simply.
Find a way I can actually electronically teleport money to pay for something without a trusted authority, without volatility and fees and scams, and I'll be all over it. But most of us went up and down the hype cycle on bitcoin years ago, and are just watching it's vestigial promise be used to promote a scam, so we're negative about it.
Unfortunately, scammers are everywhere. I think it is my responsibility to do the best I can to avoid falling for various schemes. I hold that Bitcoin is not the cause of the scams. I unfortunately missed the early days of Bitcoin because I was concerned about being robbed and secondarily I did not understand (or even known about) the intent Satoshi had when he invented the thing...
Thank you for your feedback!
Deficit spending... sigh. I am sorry, but this idea that deficit spending is irresponsible is often tied to beliefs in gold-backed currencies, hyper inflation being inevitable due to 'money printing' and other misconceptions.
Deficit spending is not bad. Any government who did not deficit spend is basically tying both hands behind their backs. It is an incredibly useful tool that can be used as both to kick-start an ailing economy, or cool an over hot economy through higher interest bond sales. Politicians who insist on no-deficit budgets are generally scammers or populists and, in my experience, will ignore this rule once in power.
The main reason deficit spending is not an issue is that inflation eats away at debt over time. Countries, being effectively immortal, don't have to worry about retirement and so can continue to build wealth and finance debt for centuries to come.
How those loans are spent is a whole different kettle of fish.
I wish I could agree, as someone who remains eternally hopeful for crypto. Unfortunately, it's almost certainly not the case.
When half a billion dollars goes missing from the US banking system, we can follow the paper trail every time. Criminals never cash out at that scale, especially when they wire money digitally. There's always an account to find, a wire transfer to track, or another bank to contact. The centralization is their saving grace against these scams. When half a billion dollars goes missing from a DAO or someone's cold wallet, they're fucked. Those coins get tumbled and are almost certainly never seen again. The bad guys win every time, which makes it highly unattractive for any investment at scale.
Which raises the ultimatum of Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency as a whole: to hold, or not to hold? That is the question. Custody is the bottom line here, and there's no easy answer. The public will always prefer to have someone else manage their account, which removes their agency and increases the capability of private parties debasing the asset. The higher the demand, the further the centralization progresses. Unfortunately, that demand is nearly unlimited and the benefits of managing your own wallet are slim compared to the work and upfront knowledge it requires.
> It would reduce governments' ability to deficit spend, thus reduce the likelihood of financing armies that can be used for aggression... It would not eliminate wars entirely, but would make financing them very difficult.
This is completely false. There is not a single first-world country that would base the value of their currency on crypto, and having cryptocurrency exist as an independent fiat makes it extraordinarily easy to fund combat. Terrorist organizations could accept donations via untraceable coins and cash out anonymously. Extremist sects could fund themselves privately without scrutiny. Even in your idyllic example, it would only embolden countries like Russia to pillage their neighbors since they don't need to worry about the consequences of financial sanctions, being cut off from the world's banking system, or even worrying about the value of their own currency.
If anything, the world embracing crypto all at once would escalate the financing of combat to unconscionable heights.
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For those of us who live in countries with a good banking system and mostly stable currencies (which is most of hn), bitcoin isn't a necessity.
When a government is able to engage in financial retribution against its critics, its own citizenry, Bitcoin might be necessary.
That could be coming soon. If it doesn't, something like it will.
Here's the problem: you give a government an inch and they'll take a foot. Give them a foot and they'll take a yard.
The financial weaponization and surveillance policies put in place by western "democracies" are never, ever going away. They will only be expanded. Today they knock on the door of the crackpot. Tomorrow it could be your door they're knocking on. It's easy to stay blind to this simple fact until it's far too late to respond.
Since the ledger is public you can replace your elected and somewhat accountable 'government' with
* North Korea, Iran, ...
* Scientology or Jeffery Epstein's lawyers (if you are a victim looking for justice)
* the Mafia, Yakuza, Triad, ...
* Greenpeace, ACT UP, Proud Boys, ...
really anybody who wants to make your life hell. So going to crypto is going from the frying pan to the fire.
This is pretty much exactly what BTC is too and in some senses is way worse, people only need to find a way to associate wallet addresses with identity and all your financials are open to them.
There are of course options that truly do solve the censorship issue, like Monero.
> The sum of these articles appears to me as "propaganda".
Do you realize how much you sound like a conspiracy-theory propagandist yourself? Allow me to illustrate with a couple of examples.
> why the status quo financial system is held in such a high regard
I don't think I've seen anyone espouse such an opinion, and it's not necessary to be "down" on crypto. Two things can both be bad. It's kind of like the old saying: democracy is the worst system of government, except for the others.
> take this perceived negative bias as a confirmation
"Rejection as confirmation" is absolutely classic conspiracy thinking. It's non-falsifiable; the harder one tries, the firmer the conviction becomes. You might want to ask yourself which evidence would actually cause you to change your mind. Be honest with yourself. If the answer is "none" then congratulations, you've been drawn into a conspiracy theory.
> When Bill Gates (and other powerful people) bad mouth Bitcoin I smell a rat.
Odd, in a community where most people lionize financial success without regard for any ethical dimension. How does his wealth or power make his opinion less valid, other than by implying that he's part of a conspiracy?
> It would be interesting to know why the status quo financial system is held in such a high regard?
Plenty of people see problems with the status quo financial system and also with the crypto ecosystem that purports to replace it.
It’s not that I’m leaping to defend the current system. It’s that you want to replace it with something I think is worse. That’s why I’m resisting the change.
People are getting their wallets hacked, losing their savings by investing in pump-and-dump schemes, using "custodial" crypto wallets that defeat the whole purpose of crypto, raising "ICOs" that skirt securities laws, starting underground markets that sell heroin and guns, quitting their jobs to make a living in "play-to-earn" schemes that can't possibly last. It goes on and on.
If you have an article about how crypto is positively affecting people's lives (not just the lucky ones who made some good trades and profited), then please share it on HN!
I read somewhere that a large number of Ukranians are currently holding crypto as they flee the country, as they view it as a good way to transfer funds in the midst of a lot of uncertainty. If so, I view that as a positive (assuming many of them don't end up losing their funds one way or another).
I wouldn't be surprised if most in the HN community thought some form of "blockchains are a really neat idea." It's just that the technology is in its infancy, and so far it has attracted a lot of criminals, fraudsters, and speculators. Not much to write home about.
Right now global financial system is much more stable than cryptocurrencies, and even if society collapses, Bitcoin is unlikely to take over or buy you anything. In practice, centralization is fine for most tasks, and even if something is decentralized it doesn’t always need blockchain.
Most problems can be solved with encryption, asymmetric encryption, torrenting, and consensus protocols. I honestly can’t think of any real situation where those aren’t enough and you need blockchain. (although i’m pretty sure blockchain is a combination of those…I should say, i can’t think of any real situation where things like BitTorrent aren’t enough)
And then that leads to all of blockchain’s drawbacks, mainly incredible space and computation redundancy. There are proposed and implemented ways to reduce this redundancy, but most of them actually end up redoing centralization. Even if we can somehow completely eliminate the redundancy and make blockchain almost as fast as centralization, like I mentioned, there’s still just not much benefit.
I’m not at the point where, whenever i hear blockchain, i throw my hands up and claim “useless”. Honestly, whenever I see something blockchain or web3, i usually read about it and try to see how it works. But surprisingly often I just find confusing filler text and buzzwords. And moreover, so far i’ve never found any technology where I actually thought both “this is useful” and “this needs blockchain”.
I think the value of free money is lost on most people who live in highly functioning societies where the trade-off of centralised money doesn't show its backside, and the tradeoff of decentralised money at its infancy mostly just shows the backside.
I think these hardships are the exact indicators of a dynamic new frontier. Apply caution, yes, but ignoring it might not be a good strategy either.
> I for one, take this perceived negative bias as a confirmation that Bitcoin is a genuine threat to the existing financial system.
I think you are taking things the wrong way. I, too, dislike our current financial system and want it to radically change. And I, too, hope that cryptocurrency can play a part in that. Your assumption that others feel "threatened" by cryptocurrency just because they point out the negatives isn't a good one. They are just being reasonable and fair.
> Am I just a dumb ass?
No, but be careful of becoming a shill for crypto. Don't slide down the slippery slope of ignoring things that are bad -- or claiming that they aren't -- just because crypto may align with some of your values and beliefs. I'm not saying you are. But the wording of your original post leaves one to wonder whether you value your vision of a utopian financial system above the very real tragedies occurring every day in crypto. You can both love crypto and hate those tragedies.
> It would be interesting to know why the status quo financial system is held in such a high regard? Especially in light of the continual debasement of the dollar since it was decoupled from gold.
Note: a few years ago I worked with a team developing an automated central bank intended to manage a cryptocurrency replacement for the monetary system of a sovereign state. You might note that no country has actually implemented this yet.
The status quo financial system is held in high regard because it works, and has contributed mightily to the prosperity of people at all levels. People mostly concentrate on its problems, which is good: those problems need work. But we have plenty of experience of the gold standard and its significantly worse problems. One of the points of today's cryptocurrencies is that they should behave like gold.
Long before bitcoin (or even before Chaum's work) smart people did "going back to the gold standard" analysis in the hope of justifying it. I've read papers on the costs and consequences of warehousing gold, for example. So people have really thought it through...and it sucks.
At a macro level we need simply look back at history. We have financial crashes from time to time, which is used as an argument for gold. But look at the period from the 1840s to WWI. They were wracked by both inflationary spikes (due to gold strikes in California, the Yukon, Victoria, etc) and deflationary depressions (when their economies outgrew the gold supply).
The asset base of a modern economy is much greater than the world's gold supply and anyway grows much faster than that supply becomes accessible. If your money supply can't grow in proportion to the asset base it represents, you can't possibly monetize your assets, which impoverishes everyone, even the wealthy.
And to make things worse there's an absolute amount of tokens like bitcoin. Though you can trade fractional coins, there's a floor at which the cost of validating the transaction exceeds the denomination. So for it not to be a destructive deflationary medium you need...different currencies alongside it, which in the end just means...fiat currency.
And that's simply a taste of the problems at the macro level.
Unless Satoshi shows up tomorrow and cashes out his coin I think we are not in danger of diluting the value of Bitcoin - which would be like the 'old ruse' I think.