Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto?

I really struggle with this. I'm reminded so often of the Douglas Adams quote:

> Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

> Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

> Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Do I just not get crypto?

So, I started doing the Certified Blockchain Professional course to understand the technology and hear first hand from the proponents.

I've come to the conclusion that Crypto / Blockchain just isn't solving any interesting problems. It is the epitome of a solution looking for a problem.

There's a huge amount of money being spent to convince the technologically illiterate that this is the next big thing - and I think that's morally abhorrent.

The amount of energy the space takes up is nothing short of an ecological crime against humanity.

Fundamentally, there are a couple of niche computer science problems in there - muddled in with some semi-interesting philosophy - and that's about it.

Most people here, I suspect, have seen hype-cycles come and go. Blockchain seems identical to all the other failed scams in the past.

It’s not really a technology. It can only compete with cash, in a way that’s worse by every conceivable notion.

Crypto losers will see people point out how wasteful it is, how few problems it actually solves and how many it creates, and they turn their blind eyes and wonder “Why is EVERYBODY so wrong?”

Grow up. Build something that matters. I volunteer at a soup kitchen and I’ve seen regulars disappear and come to find out, some of them get killed by gang violence. Some are hooked on dangerous drugs and can’t get access to effective programs to help them. Some turn to crime when they can’t come up with enough money from working to get off the streets. Why should ANYBODY care about crypto, when it doesn’t propose any solutions to these problems that are present as a result of the current economic system? Crypto would only make it worse, if it did anything at all!

100% of crypto is a shameless grift, and the afterlife will treat none of them very kindly.

From the Tweet:

I hope I never become as intensely default-skeptical of new technologies.

That's an absurd take. It's ten years of hype, get-rich-quick schemes and other scams, hardly new.

It's not "default-skeptical" to be questioning it after all that. The bizarre position is the wide-eyed naive butt-hurt of the tweet.

HN is actually very technology optimistic. People really think that tech can be used for good, and part of the ethos is that we should try to improve the world using tech.

The result is that HN as a whole is quite judgemental about whether people are doing that. People here will regularly tell you that AirBnB rides on externalities, Amazon treats everyone badly, and FB is destroying democracy. Basically, HN tries to hold the world accountable to the optimistic promise of technology, and to do so we have to point out some things that aren't working well.

Crypto is no different. There's some interesting stuff in there for sure, especially if you just look at the tech. But in terms of making the world a better place, it gets held to a standard just like all the tech giant firms. At the moment there's a lot of minuses on the board and we've yet to see the positives that justify the optimism.

Simple: There are a lot of computer scientists and software engineers on HN, and they understand that blockchain is an inferior technology in most (if not all) ways. Futhermore, they understand that this technology will never solve real problems better than the status quo. Therefore, they conclude, that almost all crypto projects are scam, and it disgusts them.

Because, having an above-average grasp of tech, they've looked into it and have concluded that it's just glorified bullshit.

Edit: and a scam.

Have a look back at ~2014 or so. HN was extremely bullish on Bitcoin. It sometimes took up about a quarter of the articles at any given time. It promised a bright new decentralized world and offered fertile ground for innovation. It promised to free up peer-to-peer transfers, allow some measure of anonymity in financial transactions, and perhaps even become the vehicle for microtransactions that the world so sorely needs.

Today, it is far less clear that there is something new at hand. To the extent that blockchains enable innovation, the early wins are complete and the strengths and weaknesses of the entire ecosystem largely have become clear.

In 2014, it was rather clear that blockchains had some sort of substantial potential value, something competitive with the total amount of money circulating in the world. In 2022, cryptocurrency is worth that much. Bitcoin alone is "worth" perhaps a trillion dollars, while M1 is around 20 trillion.

What we're seeing today is a lack of clarity and direction. HN was stoked on crypto when it offered something new. Today, crypto offers a lot of pump-and-dump schemes and financial curiosities, but nothing like the promise and obvious direction it held in 2014.

Something cool and new may yet emerge -- expect HN to get real excited when it does happen.

“I hope I never become as intensely default-skeptical of new technologies.” Bitcoin is 12 years old. HN is just a little ahead of people who just discovered it a year ago. Plus the HN audience knows a little more about technology than “crypto twitter” (they mean blockchain twitter).

I've spent a lot of time looking into it and there doesn't seem to be much actual utility there.

What there is is people saying "here's some artificial scarcity you can buy into early and make a fortune from!"

So it's a scammer haven of minimal utility. That's why.

I've been seeing a lot of kids on Twitter doing threads on things like, "What is a smart contract?", "How to transition from Web2 to Web3", and I can't help but feel like I am staring down inside a barrel that leads to a black hole.

People talk about these topics like they "truly" understand them, when there isn't much to understand in the first place. As I have said many times already on HN - it's unnecessarily complex at the very core of it, and is often spoken about through traditional marketing jargon.

"It's the future.", "But, it's decentralized!".

An example we can look at is Crypto.com - which has invested billions upon billions of dollars into the US market. Do you really think the average Joe gives a rats ass about blockchain or decentralization - the goal of these investments is to hook people on something they don't understand.

And then milk their stupidity with cheap tricks like NFTs, bullshit investments, and scam coins that come and go on an hourly basis.

It should give crypto folks something to think about. The %-age of people who know Merkle trees is probably higher on HN than among crypto users. Personally, I went from curious to skeptical twice already - once for plain blockchains, then for web3.

I still find the idea of decentralizing web services interesting it just seems to me that most projects heavily rely on their front end and not seldom on a centralized backend too (eg OpenSea, the platform for NFTs, which themselves in most cases are just links to centrally hosted resources, contrary to what most seem to believe). At that point, you just have a normal web app with horrendous UX. The idea that you can create protocols as sort of a public good is interesting in theory, but effectively it's still whoever owns the domain name (+ usually Discord server, Twitter handle,...) that effectively controls everything.

But there are some interesting approaches to mitigate that. I believe Aave hosts their app on IPFS now, Liquity has an incentive mechanism for front end hosters for their protocol. And there are some interesting aspects beyond decentralization, the ability to make binding promises to anyone is powerful.

Because ever since the Bitcoin whitepaper, the focus has completely shifted from building useful technology into speculation and grift, accompanied by scams and tribalism.

Solving the double spending problem in a completely decentralized manner is quite the achievement, but rather than embrace speculation, Bitcoin should have deterred it, keeping the price low and limiting environmental impact.

Hackernews is full of people who know what they are doing. Blind faith is rarely what we use to be who we are.

But I have to add: if you are rich enough and have money to spent, why wouldn't you believe in crypto? It's like web3: it takes a lot of knowledge to figure out what it is really about. Rich people don't have this time because they are busy. Why shouldn't we monetize this? If people really want to believe in fairy tales and it doesn't hurt anyone then you should just let them, life is probably more fun for gullible people anyways.

Most of the crypto community are non-technical people, so that's a turn off for something that should be all about tech. There is also little utility, and with stricter privacy laws it is a bad technology, since everything is public on the blockchain.

It also cost a lot more money than setting up your own server. The argument against non-crypto is that you have to trust a middle man. But most solutions to the problems crypto have is to create middle actors. Like NFT marketplaces, crypto exchanges that hold you wallet, and off-chain payment transaction systems which makes transactions faster.

Maybe a lot of the things I mention is not entirely correct, but that the other issue. It is hard for someone technical to learn about these things because most of the content online about crypto is written for non-techincal people.

I don't think they are "anti", just sceptical. Scepticism is like the brake on your car. Not the most exciting part, but handy to have.

It is mind-blowing that some programmers cannot understand that autonomous programs — software that continues running independently of control over individual hardware nodes in the network — are an incredibly powerful and compelling tool. Computers that can make commitments that last beyond the initial promises of the authors of their software.

>I hope I never become as intensely default-skeptical of new technologies.

You know, it's not skepticism for its own sake. You can actually read through some of the critiques you encounter and then conjure your own refutations against them rather than dismiss them without digesting them. You should also pay heed to the opinions of HN'ers more-so than any other group because it's overwhelmingly comprised of objective people who are both tech and finance savvy, which a majority of people involved in crypto are neither, ironically.

Here's a good one:

Deflationary currency & the hallmarks of a greater fool scheme: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987714.

Here's a couple of my own opinions: The idea of peer-to-peer currency is ideal in theory, but it doesn't seem to work. You still get manipulation like with traditional currency, only the manipulators cannot be identified or held accountable, and there aren't hundreds of years worth of laws and regulations and systems for preventing these crimes and judging bad actors. PoW is viable but doesn't scale, unless we figure out a way to swallow whole planets-worth of fuel by 2100 every time someone wants to buy a baguette. PoS scales, but it's just reinventing banks in the most inefficient way imaginable, replete with all the centralized ills that crypto people ostensibly desire to escape.

Crypto is a new technology contending with a very old and mature one that's working well enough - finance. And though finance has some problems (nothing is perfect), crypto has solved none of them, other than fattening the wallets of a few scammers and lucky idiots.

I would love to hear of just one time where crypto solved a problem a person or business had where modern finance could not. A real example, a thing that actually happened, not a theoretical scenario. I haven't heard of one yet.

Of course, if you're married to an idea like "crypto good; skepticism bad", then no one can help you, and if that's the case, then I'd like to let you in on something (don't tell anyone!): SCMME is pumping and we're still early: great yields, stake and earn 10000% APY - you DO NOT want to miss this.'

It was about 3-4 years ago, I was checkout out meetups at my local city and came across this launch of some new tokens/NFT. At the time, I was on a financial constraint and wanted to get a job, so I attended a lot of these to meet potential investors, employers, etc.

This dude rented out a massive mansion in the middle of the city and the tickets were like some $15 only. There were a lot of people like me, but there were a lot of old people too in the crowd. They didn't look like the rich types to me. This guy literally promised 10x ROI for every dollar invested in some crypto under his own name.

He got a lot of "pre-bookings". I was curious, read more about this dude and crypto itself and realized it wasn't as useful as people hype it to be. I tried to build some applications on top of it. It always felt I had to go out of my way to make a use case for it. Eventually, that's when I realized most people who talk about crypto are marketers or scammers like this dude.

The rest of us - we are just tired of hearing it everywhere around us when it makes no sense even in certain applications.

People with anime profile pictures tweeting about stablecoins, going to the moon and WGMI are not some youth culture vanguard. OP tweet has self-selected into an online social world consisting of people in a similar mindset and demographic to his own. Outside of this bubble, "crypto bros" are considered weird and cringeworthy.

You can read the comments on Slashdot from 10 years ago, and you'll find the same scepticism. So it's not an accident. HN's audience is probably better educated than average, and the better educated a demographic group is, the harder it is to fool.

It's not new.

It's almost as old as android and ios, but instead of changing the world like they did, it's perennially on the verge of something big, according to its proponents. The cryptocurrency revolution is just around the corner! And you should give us your money now!

Meanwhile the entire space is pretty much defined by scams, and economic projects built by people with a questionable grasp of economics and ethics.

And looking into the tech, well it's interesting(ish) in itself but it doesn't really solve any interesting real-world problems for me. PoW in particular seems like the most inelegant hack.

Cryptocurrency has been around for 13 years, and all we've seen is scams, pump-and-dumps and a way to pay for hit men.

I think the tech is really clever, but don't understand a potential use case.

* Relying on trusted parties will always be significantly more efficient than a trustless system

* Most people don't want to manage their own money and if most people are going to really in third parties to manage their coins, how is that substantially different than the current situation?

* Being able to reverse transactions in a system is actually good when theft is common

* Crypto has a strong polarizing function: most people interested in crypto are also financially invested which makes it hard to get accurate takes from knowledgeable people

Crypto is a speculative investment. It may well work out for some, however, I wouldn't advise to put more money in than you can afford to lose.

I am interested in the technology behind crypto, however, I have only seen limited use cases for it so far. The major selling point for crypto seems to be deregulation, however, having worked in Finance for over two decades I have witnessed what (too much) deregulation can result in. If crypto is here to stay, it will be end up as much regulated as money.

I suspect HN chatter adamantly against decentralized governance and value storage experiments are often by intelligent people that are simply too distracted by the loud voices of greed and hype to take an objective look at the quiet yet major technological innovations happening that will change the world forever just like the internet did.

The early 90s internet was pretty rough too and also had a lot of annoying hype and greed that made a lot of people swear it off instead of looking closer at what it could become over time.

Some 90s engineers managed to look past the short term hype and greed problems of the early interent to see the true innovations and think long term. They did very well.

The Bitcoin whitepaper started a chain reaction of demand that produced better human friendly backups for private keys like BIP39, cheap general purpose personal hardware security modules like Ledger and Trezor, better privacy with innovations like zero knowledge proofs, greener datacenters and computational effeciency improvements to reduce energy waste, and massive improvements in quorum computing patterns so no one malicious sysadmin can manipulate societially critical network services.

Visa, Mastercard, virtually every bank, supply chain companies, governments, general sysadmin teams at companies everywhere, etc, etc, have huge think thanks harvesting and incorporating technology from decentralized value storage and governance experiments that spun out of Bitcoin.

The entire field of mathematics and cryptography has gotten a massive cash injection as a result of these too. Ask anyone that works in the cryptography departments at Universities like Stanford.

Sure, traders and people who hype things without understanding the fundamentals are annoying. They annoy me too, but I look at this from my role as a security researcher. Crypto-assets have seemingly overnight generated massive demand for security technology that can reduce theft and scams online. As a result those invested in crypto-asset technology are often light years ahead in security from your typical SaaS company in other industries. Crypto-asset holders and those against them all have a common interest in a safer internet.

We would all do well to learn to find common ground instead of taking unproductive stances against major technological advancements just because the early stage versions of them are a bit rough.

There's knee-jerk generalization about cryptocurrency here. There are plenty of bad takes on Twitter and HN. That said, yes you can highlight things you do not value personally. That doesn't mean others are wrong to value them.

The above stands, even if you feel you have a superior understanding of technology. It doesn't mean you have license to generalize or an exclusive license to determine what is valuable. Others may value things differently, and that is fine.

Different strokes for different folks. Don't want to transact in cryptocurrency? You don't have to. Problem solved. Value it however you want to, but don't dismissively condemn it or generalize by calling it a scam. The claim is arrogant. Even more so when, "Because we understand tech better than..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value

Crypto is nothing but a speculative vehicle for making money. People of high intelligence (which represents most members of Hackernews) recognize this, although depending on what their vested interests are, they may or may not reveal that publicly.

In general, if you happen to have a large stake in crypto or are depending on crypto to make you significant returns, you are more likely to be pro-crypto.

If you have no stake, it’s likely because you never saw a point to cryptocurrency and never invested, so you will likely be anti-crypto or neutral at best.

The technobabble of blockchain tech does not work on highly tech-literate people of Hackernews, we know this is basically useless technology in its current form. At it’s peak it would essentially be nothing more than a globally distributed database anyone could read from or write to. But inherently this has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.

It would be a red flag IMO if hackernews was pro-crypto.

I'm not anti-crypto. But I don't care for hype. Show me the killer app.

As far as I'm concerned, cryptocurrency already has a killer app: it increases economic freedom in some parts of the world.

Is there more? I'm sure there is. But from what I've read, I'm not going to need a kitchen sink anymore because crypto's gonna solve it.

There are a lot of neat technologies in the world with a lot of applications. Crypto is one family of such technologies. Neat stuff, but doesn't apply to everything. And I'll happily be proven wrong, if it comes to that.

This is why I love HN.

Cryptocurrencies, quantum computers, fusion, self driving cars.

Enough time has passed. I've seen enough. They are simply scams. They will never deliver and they have no place in my news feed.

I think there is potential with many of the ideas behind it, but so far it's been inundated with scammers and gamblers. People need to build actual useful things with it which are adopted into the mainstream. The problem is that the current non-crypto way of doing things is much easier and more efficient than the crypto way. If the tooling around crypto improves significantly, it may have a chance. Otherwise, it's just not worth the time or the risk.

Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? I dont't know, let me admire my NFT's and get back to after I invest my globally accepted currency in a hashing scheme.

Crypto is anti-social. I prefer a working to build a society with trust that isn't dependent upon cryptography that no one understands.

Because a number in a computer is just a number in a computer. It has no intrinsic worth at all.

Another way of saying that is "If you can not hold it in your hot little hand or touch it, it is not yours at all.". So don't expend your work or cash on it.

This should not be flagged.

But I think the answer is that be people here understand what it is from a technical perspective; you would get the same level of anti-crypto if you went and asked a bunch of computer scientists.

It's crypto skeptical, because it's so volatile, because it's currently solely a speculation platform.

As a betting man I see value in it.

Bitcoin is like a real time index measuring the health of the cult of Ayn Rand and you can bet on how the cult is faring and if it's expanding or contracting.

Much like Tesla is a real time index measuring the health of the cult of Elon Musk and you can bet on how the cult is faring and if it's expanding or contracting.

If you are interested in sociopolitical and cultural phenomenons you have a way to make money off that expertise for the first time in decades.

If we get Saylor vs. Bezos in 2024 lots of people building prediction markets for political purposes are gonna be disappointed, because at that point people would just bet on Bitcoin or Amazon stock according to their assesment of which cult would prevail and who is gonna win.

I took a Blockchain course at university (Masters CS level). I really liked how honest the teaching chair was: They just taught us the raw material along with this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2267/

Don't get me wrong, I actually like the Blockchain Technology but I kind of have to agree with the notion that most of the "advanced" Crypto stuff is still looking for an actual problem to solve, except for Bitcoin and some of the other OG coins, the purpose of which I kind of sympathize with.

too many old farts hanging around here talking about the good ol' days of greenbacks and command prompts

Well, "crypto" is just Ponzi scams. The more interesting question is why is HN so anti-bitcoin? Looks like they don't get how harmful fiat money is to society and the environment.

One reason might be that HN is just too woke. Probably you even get censored here for saying that men are not women.

That is the case, because Engineers have a bad understand of global finance, business and money.

That’s why they don’t understand the problems that crypto is solving.

If you look at the comments here, you’ll see that many comments are saying that crypto isn’t doing anything useful.

However, crypto is literally solving the extreme problem of infinitely printable FIAT money and very slow and expensive cross-border transfers, which might be the most impfactful invention of the last 2 decades.

On top of that, crypto adds transparency, accountability, interoperability, decreases fraud in every possible market.

However, hacker news doesn’t understand that, because they simply don’t global finance, global markets, business and moneys.

I think it is the combination of 2 points:

1: It is hard to grasp.

And the majority of tech people have a hard time coping with the fact that there is something they can't grasp while some others do. We tech people think of us as smart. So accepting that others are smarter in some areas is hard for us. Especially when it is in the tech area.

There are investors who see value in crypto and put hundreds of billions of dollars where their mouth is?

It's easier to say "Bah! Idiots!" then to accept that there is something that is beyond ones mental reach.

2: Some people got very rich by grasping it early on.

This creates envy and the fear of loss. You can see a similar disdain for technology in programmers and how they think about programming languages they are not used to. They don't know the benefits of the other language and they are invested in an alternative. That creates a strong "with us or against us" drive.