Are we really mad at scams here or is this an opportunity for a bit of projection?
Readit Newsmw888 commented on Shitcoin project tests the limits of cringe by building $600k statue of Elon web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=... · Posted by u/e61133e3
mw888 commented on Leaked documents outline DHS’s plans to police disinformation theintercept.com/2022/10/... · Posted by u/amadeuspagel
I am of two minds of this and would invite people to give me some opinions on this thing.
On one hand, I love free speech and think it is good. The innovation capable from people being ably to publish their views, congregate freely, etc. is a foundational good I believe in.
On the other hand, I'm aware that certain influential figures explicitly manipulate their speech in order to primarily amass personal power regardless of any second-order effects. E.g. cults are horrible, even though people are freely congregating, they just feel like they can't leave because of the emotional abuse these influential figures are heaping via their speech.
On a third hand, the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.
So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech? I don't want to assume that assaulting people is just the cost of free speech. That just seems so wrong to me.
Oh right, because people don’t get assaulted in places where free speech doesn’t exist. It’s totally the free speech that is causing the violence and not anything specific to any circumstance of violence or some other general state. /s
speaking of "narratives" ...
"market cap" is a terrible metric. Inflated assets often have very high market caps.
Look at the recent wave of "market cap" reductions on other stocks of questionable value like Facebook.
Market cap is not a narrative, it’s the only objective measure so far in our dialogue.
> recent
That’s great you point out the importance of long term trends, I shouldn’t even have to articulate my point now.
But why not go deeper anyways? Market cap for Bitcoin is a proxy for hashrate, which is a measure of security. Steadily increasing floor across its entire lifespan.
> I disbelief them the more they don't have any proven expertise in the domain.
So you must believe her a lot, given that she is a senior software engineer that dedicates a large part of her time to cryptocurrencies.
HN is proof itself that Software Engineering isn’t a prerequisite for expertise in the space. It’s like a construction worker talking about architecture.
The expertise relevant in blockchain are economics/game-theory and cryptography - software engineering is to cryptocurrency what typing is to writing.
I can't understand why people keep comparing internet and blockchain.
Nobody would compare a heavily constrained MySQL and the Internet, why it is any different for blockchain? It's at most that, a (bad) piece of software that allows you to store data in a convoluted way.
It's not a business, not a business model, not a revenue source, it's a piece of technology.
Muh “constraint bad” argument. Constraint on control is the whole point - you don’t even understand the explicit purpose of the thing which you critique.
Uhhh well that’s exactly what crypto “skeptics” are asking for. Disclosure requirements that bring the risk in line with the accessibility of these “exotic instruments” to the general public, and penalties to compel compliance with those requirements.
It’s a failure of culture, not legality. All crypto is open source, if it isn’t then it truly doesn’t deserve the title. Apathy on the part of investors to allow so much privilege to founders in the form of token distribution and outright control over the protocol are as unsustainable as they are preventable.
The law can come in and add friction to corruption, along with everything else, but it is only by returning to the culture in which crypto was founded that you will get anything of value - regulations or not.
>she feared crypto was going to wreak — not just on the startups and investors rushing into the field, but also people betting their life savings on tokens they’d barely researched after hearing about them online
Sorry to sound rude, but if you bet all your savings on something you saw online, something you've barely searched, than you can fall a victim to any scam you come across, online or offline. You can become a victim by investing in something at the bad time, in a bad way, so being a victim is mostly your fault.
The volatility, in one direction, is a bread and butter argument for the crypto skeptic. Most people investing in crypto know the risks, that’s exactly what draws them in, because it comes with huge potential upsides. No one is better at pointing out scams and schemes than other people in crypto.
What the skeptics fail to realize is that they often occupy just as much, if not more of a ‘team mindset’ than those engaging in the space. Their skepticism becomes more like the failed D.A.R.E. program to reduce adolescent drug use by exaggerating the virtues of abstinence and the worst case scenarios. And ironically, they can’t even articulate the worst parts, because they never engaged enough to have a deep understanding.
If you really want to find the deep dark secrets of crypto, no group will do it better than devout followers or developers of competing projects. I have read far more useful takedowns and warnings from people heavily engaged with and passionate about crypto currencies than the cynics are even capable of.
This lady is doing important work; her comments are thoughtful, balanced, not overtly cynical or vindictive, not hyperbolic, stated fairly plainly. I don't sense she's trying to get super famous from being an antagonist. Refreshing.
They are in the article - their actual website is clearly vindictive and even brags about being SEO optimized to tru p other Web3 queries. Let’s at least be self aware.
In addition to what others replied:
Crypto is one very specific thing, even at he broadest interpretation and acknowledging possible future ideas based on it. The web is more than just one order of magnitude broader and basis for a far wider and more diverse set of ideas and use cases. So to me, your comparison looks more than just a little weak.
That’s a good point against a common argument. It’s like saying cookies aren’t selling as well as eggs.
Except by 2000 there were hundreds of Web companies that had become real companies. It was obvious that Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon would survive the downturn of 2000-2001. While there were many bad ideas, there were obviously many good ideas that had become real businesses. And this was just 7 years after Congress had change the law to allow commercial activity on the Internet.
By contrast, Bitcoin is almost 15 years old, but in all this time, no one has been able to find a large-scale use for crypto, other than financial speculation and buying illegal drugs and evading national capital controls -- in other words, it remains almost entirely used for criminal activity.
You don’t like the use case for crypto, you don’t accept the narratives it’s proponents put forward and you conveniently fail to mention the objective measure of value we can actually use to compare: market capitalization. I’m sure you would believe that Bitcoin only has the market cap it has because people are speculating on it, when in reality the reason it never dies is because with each wave of speculation there are new people who store wealth in it. A subtle but important difference, objectively measurable ignored by this argument you put forth I’ve now read 100 times.
Crypto is a lot like politics - people feel entitled to their opinion on it whether they possess sophistication, competence, open mindedness or not.