Why does cryptocurrency subjects on HN lack curious conversations?

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus.

One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster.

The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the environmental impact is just a temporary problem, that is solved when proof-of-stake is ready (which IMHO will never happen).

The tech itself is quite simple in concept with a few novel key insights in the old days (which by now are generally accepted).

So all in all, it is back to good old politics and do you believe in "it" nor not.

I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it - but I am not sure whether I just project my own skepticism ...

EDIT: typo proof-of-state -> proof-of-stake

There’s only so much to be said for retaining my curiosity after years and years of getting shouted about it by people who have no understanding of what they are peddling.

I’m actively involved in the space, I explored my curiosity through designing a few DApps, building some coins, the usual. The tech is interesting, the approach is worthwhile, the whole FOMO pyramid on top of it is just noise and I wish it would stop. I’ve never seen so much nonsense discussions about GSM, GPS or other widely used and useful systems.

When I talk to a crypto peddler, I never have to reach out for my know how as it’s never the case that the discussion progresses past THIS IS THE FUTURE NOW YOU GOTTA JUMP ON BOARD OR ELSE YOU MISS THE MOON TRAIN.

As a long time supporter and developer of cryptocurrency I myself am pretty disconnected from the space right now. Almost all of the goals we set out in the early days of Bitcoin, like "be your own bank" have failed terribly. After more than a decade all we've managed to accomplish is creating a slightly different arrangement of the same pieces.

I don't see anything interesting to be discussed about cryptos.

The initial promise of blockchain seems to have been side-lined: independent governing systems, tamper-free databases, and all the good stuff that the enthusiasts used to sell the dream to everybody else.

Nowadays it just seems like a speculative market for "get rich quick" suckers to lose their money so the other 1% to 5% who are better informed can actually make a buck.

What is there to discuss regarding cryptos according to you, OP? I am not as aggressive as other HN posters in all crypto threads (in fact I almost never engage with them even) but I just don't see them being worth a discussion in general.

So, there is a camp of people who think that cryptocurrencies are inherently bad. For these people the interesting discussions left are moot, because they do not address their main problems.

At the same time, nuanced discussion / curious discussion requires talking about downsides. Any mention of downsides also draws in the people who think its a bad idea. Moreover, it is my sense that a lot of discussions are filled with people trying to hype up their investment. These people will try to play down any downsides mentioned. The people who dislike cryptocurrency notice the people trying to downplay the downsides, and that overpowers any other discussion.

Edit: A point made by ThalesX also seems quite on point to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295405 In summary, people are tired of the over-hype that existed. Making them suspicious of any new discussion.

Here on HN, I believe there's the effect of a shouting class when it comes to crypto [1].

I think we can take it as a fact that the broad opinion of HN is that many crypto-related links satisfy the hacker's curiosity as outlined in HN's guidelines. That's why we see frequent posts on the front page. A large group is upvoting.

But when you look into the comments of the threads, I find that often the topic is discussed unfairly and in a very polarizing and political fashion. Links also disappear rapidly from HN as they get flagged heavily. I've gotten this confirmed from dang via email.

As a blogger, I've learned that for my arguments to have impact, I usually have to be fair to both sides of the spectrum, for the argument to land.

And this is what I've come to observe isn't happening in HN discussions on crypto.

It's very a very aggressive, personal and destructive controversy from both sides. A classical flamewar.

It's sad, as I think the topic could have much more depth.

- 1: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-cla...

I think it's because this community doesn't need/enjoy the speculation side of it. Most cryptocurrencies reflect on buy today, worth more tomorrow. Especially when you hop onto reddit or 4chan /biz/ communities. They don't necessarily want to understand, how or why - just that it's new and treat buying today as getting early on an IPO (like an ICO, before those were mostly barred.)

The above could be mostly because the community on here, doesn't necessarily need/want to survive on pure speculation. Sure you can do forecasting and projections, but when compared to traditional investment methods, e.g. compounding, load averaging and buying "blue" chip stocks - it seems high risk, low reward.

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Now if the conversation was more on blockchain, and what problem it solves, I can see it gain traction on here, especially when Visa wanted to hire "blockchain engineers" and when they even purchased other companies in that similar space. Also, startups, well, when they were "startups" like coinbase adding a new coin, and such, etc.

In my case there isn't curiousity left. I was curious at some point, learned and explored about the subject, and made up my mind. After that there was also a period where I was curious why people were disagreeing with me, but that's gone now too, mostly because I repeatedly find their arguments make no sense.

In a nutshell, I'm all for cheaper money transfer, but I've never seen convincing arguments that it follows that bitcoin should be worth X. If I write a cheque for $60,000, that piece of paper is still worth $0.50. Just because it can be used for a transaction, it doesn't follow that it's worth as much as the amount being transferred.

Fundamentally on the one hand bitcoin has loads of negatives and very very few positives. On the other hand I can never find anyone addressing my objections in a manner that I find convincing. After much trying, I just ran out of curiousity.

I would say it's because people on Hacker News are pretty intelligent.

Either they are intelligent and manipulative and are looking to maximize their investments whatever the cost to others, the externalities, whatever… or they are intelligent and accurately perceiving the first type of intelligent person.

By now, if you're a techie nerd, to be naive about this topic would mean there's something seriously wrong with you. You should have picked a side by now as this is not complicated or ambiguous. There is only furthering crypto by any means necessary, or opposing it (increasingly, by any means necessary). It's not going to get any blurrier. If you feign naivete and curiosity at this stage you are probably being manipulative and actually in the 'furthering by any means necessary' camp…

I agree 100%, except my memory of the early crypto conversations is a bit different. I remember very little curiosity on display, and a whole lot of confidently wrong predictions of imminent collapse.

My view is that if cash is crude oil, Bitcoin and mined currencies are whale oil; competing against fusion.

The discussion here these days is basically people saying things like, whale oil is better than nuclear fusion because you can put it in your pocket; fusion is dangerous because Chernobyl; whales probably aren't that great for the environment anyway because they eat so much krill, etc. It's ignorance and delusion at best, and self interested FUD at worst.

Despite all their tech savvy, and socioeconomic advantages, most people here seem to be proudly and willfully ignorant re crypto. There are people in this thread, and indeed every crypto thread here I've ever seen, still moaning that proof of stake is a pipe dream, that proof of work / mining is necessary, that the environmental impact is too high, etc.

And that hasn't been true for at least 6 years.

Newer generations of crypto, such as Nano, are: * nearly instant (<1 second confirmation time) * more efficient than a credit card tx by an order of magnitude, and vastly more decentralized * over 6 million times more environmentally friendly than bitcoin (0.000112 kWh vs 741 kWh) * completely fee-less * mining free - there are no coins being added or taken away, they are all distributed

If you think about it, there are literally hundreds of different groups with various vested interests who would fight tooth and nail against something so superior; and for the moment it's kinda working, because the new generation of crypto sounds a bit too good to be true next to BTC. It's truly disheartening seeing those discussion get flagged, full of nonsensical arguments that are so trivial to disprove. I remain confident that truth and efficiency will win out, just like fusion will. It just might take some time, and you'll probably have to give up on the idea that this community will wise up to it any time soon.

There should be a subreddit or other forum that does have such conversations. The alternative is that there isn't one, which would make one wonder why aren't there intelligent people discussing this? Asking why where aren't intelligent discussions on HN seems to be a special case of the latter.

Because it's not two disinterested parties, it's owners versus mockers. Owners say irrational things because they've drunk the water. It's like asking why don't believers in ressurection ever have curious conversations about the impossibility of ressurection.

I think some of your premises are wrong. I don't think cryptocurrencies are especially divisive on HN. It's like a lot of other topics - a lot of different people with a lot of different feelings, some of them more strongly than others. It's not surprising that when something is new, there is a lot of curiosity around it that is different 12 years later, when it's just part of our world, and many of the "questions" have been "answered".

In addition, cryptocurrencies just happen to also have an incredible amount of real-world impact in way other technologies don't. E.g. debates on AI - not even AGI, just plain old AI, and have there been any real new breakthroughs lately, etc, also have a lot of disagreements. But while that impacts grant money and investment in some technologies, it doesn't also directly translate into billion-dollar markets and potential fraud, etc.

You also have to separate "cryptocurrencies" to a few underlying actual topics that people disagree about:

1. Whether actual cryptocurrencies, e.g. bitcoin, are a good investment.

2. Whether actual cryptocurrencies are good for the world, or whether they enable fraud/scams/etc.

3. Whether actual cryptocurrencies can achieve, are achieving, or should achieve their original goals or any newer goals (e.g. replace fiat completely).

4. Whether the blockchain technology itself is interesting at all, or is it only interesting for cryptocurrencies. (This point is especially relevant in a forum of founders, given the massive amounts of creating and investment in blockchain-related startups.)

Svennek said it well, there is not much of interest left to discuss, the remaining ambiguities are up to taste, not novelty. The only interesting things are talking about whether decentralisation is a value in and off itself without e.g. equity and whether people actually inherently care about it. But those are charged topics, also because people who are all in on crypto have a material interest in pushing the idea that YES it is and YES they will. So you can't have that remaining interesting conversation in a detached manner. (In my analysis the no-coiners have much less to lose in this and so are able to have more detached conversation because if it turns out that people really go for decentralisation we can still hop on board, we won't get rich anymore but we won't drop much either - it is naive to assume that systems which wield material power and are intricately tied to the foundation for the private property rights crypto builds its use cases on would simply collapse. The same way we had banks and commodity billionaires before microsoft and google, we will have old wealth smoothly migrating into the new system - otherwise the old wealth wouldn't adopt it).

I'm going to attempt an answer, but as with all things this is only my perspective and I obviously don't speak for all HN readers.

HN is largely for founders who want to build things. That's certainly how it started, and there's still traces of that vibe around in the Show HN and startup-y threads. There's a lot more going on here now, like more code topics, AI, electric vehicles, environmental things, a little futurism, etc, but the core is and always has been startups. In itself that doesn't rule out having a reasonable conversation about cryptocurrency. There are a lot of opportunities around crypto. There are startups to found, and pain points to solve. The problem is that crypto has three significant problems for HN readers:

Firstly, a lot of people trying to make a living in crypto are purely speculating. They're not building anything. They're simply trying to "buy low, sell high". Entrepreneurs, in general, don't really have much respect for that. Founders admire and respect people who go out, found a business, and build something real that solves a real problem, even if it's a problem we don't have ourselves. Leeching off the system isn't a skill.

Secondly, a lot of crypto isn't solving a real problem. It's essentially trying to be "digital gold", but without the usefulness of gold. It's only a store of value. There absolutely are good uses for crypto, and even for things like NFTs, but most of the speculation isn't about those things. It's only the "buy low, sell high" side of things. HN is not a forex or trading forum. Again, we respect people who make things.

Lastly, no matter how you cut it, and even with the latest lightning and taproot and proof-of-stake tech considered, crypto has a massive set of problems to still to solve with its environmental, regulatory, and money-laundering issues. To be honest, to me, they look pretty unsolvable. I have a decent understanding of the tech and I can't see how you can build an anonymous system for transferring wealth around that requires significant bandwidth and CPU and not screw the planet by providing a service for drug dealers and terrorists. The fact people are trying is awesome, but I suspect they'll fail. All of the upsides of crypto are also upsides for people who want to use it for bad reasons.

All in all, cryptocurrencies are an interesting idea, and the tech seems like it could have some valid applications, but the downsides are huge. A lot of the pro-crypto people involved don't want to acknowledge that. A lot of the anti-crypto people can't see that the tech could be useful. There's no middle-ground. That makes talking about it pretty boring.

For me:

I liked the idea in the start. But in 2017 i didn't think it was a viable alternative anymore.

Many people say banks are bad, but they protect many people against fraud, Bitcoin doesn't ( eg. Chargebacks or losing access)

Banks are replaced by unknown platforms in unknown countries in many places. Which results in an insane amount of hacks ( internally or externally). Hence: https://rekt.news

If banks use it as settlement later, they won't adopt any of the existing solutions. Leaving all the current implementations of Blockchain in the dust ( the proponents of crypto don't understand this argument though).

Many non-tech minded people won't keep an offline wallet, since most people are lazy ( that's not a bad thing, it's just a fact). But in this case it can be very dangerous.

The people buying Bitcoin have no idea how it works and can easily get scammed by other people ( eg. One coin wasn't even a Blockchain and I knew people that fell for it and they couldn't be convinced that they were being scammed. They know by now though, the hard way).

Even the original premise of Bitcoin is gone ( decentralization) and is being replaced by workarounds ( eg. Lightning and offchain wallets).

It's the same story over and over again. Now NFT's and later probably something else. The only constant is pump and dump schemes from whales and that it's the preferred destination of criminals.

In the end, it doesn't solve much and perhaps the solution for the rare case "it solved something", is just increasing internet availability to enable banking for poor people in remote areas. So they don't need to drive 3 hours ( eg. The actual problem/ solution of El Salvador and Bitcoin as a solution was a fake dogma)

"the discussions on HN are today ... two camps that are just screaming at each other." Not really... HN has made its mind up, it's become mostly indifferent to crypto. Too many unfulfilled promises over the last decade.

The screaming happens not here but on Twitter.

Curiosity happens when you are uninformed about something and something seems interesting. Once you're informed it's less interesting so there's no need to be curious.

For me it’s just not very interesting. The people I meet who seem to be interested in it seem to be primarily motivated by getting rich. This is an understandable interest, but just not something which sparks my personal curiosity. And since this initial impression has been constantly stoked for quite a while now, I think I’m naturally more receptive to learning about the downsides, like the absurd environmental impact.

There is no consensus on this topic because a lot of people just want to "get rich quick" ignoring the question of the source of richness.

Because after ~13 years, mind boggling amount of money and development time, it is still just as useless in the real world as it ever was.

To me, most of it is about the boring parts of cryptocurrency. The actual cryptography is still interesting, the financial aspects are (to me) utterly boring. And a lot of the interesting bits are only tangentially related to cryptocurrency. EG this paper[1] is interesting and potentially applicable to cryptocurrency development, but is far too specialized for most of HN to discuss (and well outside the understanding of most of the cryptocurrency enthusiasts).

The finance makes for poor discussions, and the interesting parts of the tech are too obscure for most HN readers to understand. And the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, doesn't use any of the interesting parts anyway. So of course the discussions here are crap.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1530

Why is there no curiosity here about cryptocurrencies?

Well, let's ask "what makes cryptocurrencies different from startups or programming languages?"

Crypto are financial instruments anyone can buy into. Does that explain the drought of curiosity somehow?

Startups are financial instruments but you can't buy unless you're an accredited investor -- When we talk about the latest startup, like it or hate it, close to zero of us have skin in the game. However, investors benefit from the work of curious conversations.

Articles are not financial instruments -- so when we talk about an article or topic, there's no financial aspect to it.

Driving the point home, I believe cryptocurrencies will bring that financial lens to everything, from whether an article gets read, upvoted, to whether a startup succeeds, individuals will have ownership and that will change the nature of curiosity.

If we look at the current moment there’s not much in the way of new, interesting things going on with cryptocoins tech wise or use case wise.

It’s top of mind because some people are getting rich quickly in it. What’s interesting about that?

Should we also still be talking about people making tendies on GME?

The division between those who despise a negative sum game and those who don't mind as long as they are winning is very well understood by now. What would be left to discuss?

I personally had a hope that we’ll build some new decentralized things, some real new web - more sustainable, reliable, less regulated, less censored.

My heartbeat was increasing every time I was finding some project promising to build this new network.

But every time, after lines of poetic, pure, brave, and romantic description of their mission, there was a line about their new token and why you should buy it.

With the time I’ve got the immunity to such promises and prejudice - they all are just scam projects.

I think discussion are better suited toward blockchain technology and if we are going to see any businesses using this technology to do anything cool :)

Appeals to "curious discussion" sound an awful lot like a request to omit any reference to any of the many downsides and known problems and failures of crypto in general, and instead just focus on convenient cheerful angles that pump it up.

It's not possible to have serious, informative, and insightful discussions on a topic like crypto while turning a blind eye to the elephants in the room.

What's left to say that hasn't already been said a hundred times before? The NFT stuff was fun for a while (people getting mad at right-clickers and / or not understanding that they weren't buying an image but rather--at best--a link to an image), but I don't think there's much appetite on this forum for laughing at erotic chickens.

The issue isn’t that there’s nothing left to discuss, the issue is that there’s two „opposing“ sides that will downvote the comments they disagree with, causing a chilling effect where only inflammatory comments will end up being posted. It’s exactly the reason why Facebook et al. don’t have a dislike button.

My explanation: people on HN like to think of themselves as 'smart' and 'good with tech', but missed out on something they dismissed as pointless and now need ways to justify missing out that isn't "I may not be as smart as I thought I was"

> one group yells how great everything is while the other one is warning of the impeding doom and zero use cases.

When one side is yelling and the other side is giving warnings I think it’s fair to say that this is not really a situation where one would describe as ‘divisive.’

I think it's because no real tangible thing has come out of the cryptoverse (apart from rare exceptions like ransomware gangs cashing out tumbled coins and buying lambos and rolexes). Everything in the crypto sphere is just 1s and 0s or in the ether. Everyday Joe reads up about Bitcoin and the first thing they want is a solid physical coin they can hang on their wall. On the other hand: people use BTC to acquire illegal drugs via the darknet, so there is a case to be made for BTC being exchanged for tangible goods, albeit a tarnished one, since those drugs are banned in most countries. BTC got a bad name early on, and has yet to shake that off.

I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to banks and governments launching their own digital currency. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. If it means it's highly traceable so it can't be used for illegal things, then so be it. That's where we're heading now.

Nuanced and ‘curious’ thought gives way to what is fashionable and easy: black-and white-thinking. Extremism is sexy, empowering and rewarding for the self-righteous little person in our brains. Things are rarely clear-cut ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

Related question: Where can I go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies?

Because its been years and years, and the arguments usually boil down to something like "scarcity creates it own value", which some people find obviously correct and some people find obviously false.

The technology behind crypto is interesting, the hype (and gambling) is not

My main criticism comes from the fact that Bitcoin (and other crypto-coins) had a good several years to find a purpose, to this day, I am not aware of a single use-case where they are used to solve a real world problem.

If I had to sum up how I feel about Bitcoin (/ crypto / block chain..) - magic buzz word for the non-tech-savvy ,draw for gamblers & ego driven individuals, theme of quasi-fake money-grab startups..

I think one of the things that ruined Bitcoin is it becoming this "asset" instead of a tool to get something done, maybe proving something about a truly "free" market, maybe there's a lesson here.

Cryptocurrencies are a divisive issue, perhaps stemming from our overly-strong preferences, biases, and prejudices.

> Is there any particular reason cryptocurrencies are so divisive while other subjects are not?

At this day, end 2021, for what concerns the daily life of billion people worldwide, they are still a very small niche for first-world, trading-like unauthorised gambling? From a technical point of view, sufficient progress has been made… it is politics now, geopolitics and environment, if you like, preventing wider, global deployment, maybe?

Imo it basically became more of a money-grab and less about the potential of the technology. It also doesn't matter if ultimately all the networks or it's endpoints are centralized.

Then you also get into the government's implication (see Biden's plans), which more or less rots it.

Saying it's useless or entirely a scam is not accurate and we've seen that, but depending on how much of the hype you ate up, it either stagnated or only now some develop upon their promises(and there are a few).

Assuming we fix the complexity,effiency and speed problems, you still have a lot of work about implementing the technology from start to finish.So far we've only seen the vast majority of the development being top->down.Crypto networks that rely upon centralized services are a joke, to put it mildly.

It's because we're all a bunch of salty nocoiners that spend our days wishing we had got in on the ground floor.

As the famous saying goes: "It's hard to make a man understand something when he could have been a millionaire if he'd only understood it sooner."

/s

Because small dick energy just doesn’t work for me. Some 95% of commentary on the topic is off the rails. The 5% rarely gets a mention here.

People on Hackernews tend to be very intelligent and can see crypto for what it really is, so there’s not really much left to discuss.

Cryptocurrencies are a problem. From the environmental disaster they cause (and social problems caused by higher electricity prices due to increased demand), to tax evasion, illegal porn, or the fact that an important share of an entire generation became addicted to gambling under the guise of "technology".

The real world has problems, and crypto currencies have made some of them possible. Far from making the world any better and bringing the current financial and political system down (lol), they made the world worse. As these problems become more evident and widespread, cryptocurrencies become a political problem. The world needs to deal with the problems they cause and the political solutions will differ. That's why people argues.