I realize there are more than enough other places to get actual discussion about crypto projects. I’m not needing HN to be another such place.
I’m just expressing disappointment that such a good community as this one, with the right type of people (smart creative thinkers, leading developers, etc) can’t seem to put together a single useful thread that is about crypto.
What are your thoughts?
Blockchain is interesting but it’s been around for decades (it’s older than Bitcoin) and no one’s really come up with any good uses for it. There’s very few uses where the decentralized nature helps over a distributed but centrally owned DB.
Cryptocurrencies could be interesting, but they don’t live up to any of their promises. The entire crypto currency space is going through the exact same scams and problems that regular currencies went through in the early 1900s, for which all these regulations that crypto was supposed to provide freedom from. But the entire industry is realizing the hard way that most of those regulations came about for a reason. Add those regulations back in and it’s not clear what purpose it serves. It’s very hard to discuss a technology with any sort of excitement when it’s rediscovering very well known century old problems.
I suspect we will see a digital dollar (and digital versions of other major currencies) and that will be the end of all the other random crypto currencies. And it’s not even necessary for digital currencies to be built on a blockchain.
NFTs. Well, we know NFTs are a scam because they aren’t even what they purport to be. They do not give you any sort of rights to whatever they are supposed to give you rights to. Any rights they do confer will only exist as long as they are enforced by real world legal and enforcement systems. At which point the distributed aspect is just superfluous. A centralized DB (several services could provide these DBs, so it would be a monopoly) will be much more efficient and simpler and effective.
Smart contracts are highly dependent on oracles. You have to place your trust on the Oracle anyways. So if you’re doing that then why not just trust the entire process on a single entity? And besides, with properly signed legal contracts you also have backup enforcement through regular legal channels, as well as recourse if someone tries to break the contract. If your smart contract also depends on the legal system, again, it’s not clear what advantage it provides over a standard contract.
There’s not much to discuss about crypto because there’s not much there. The entire argument in favor of crypto is “I bought this Dogecoin for $0.001 and now it’s worth $1000”. In over a decade of hype, and even longer since the technology itself existed, that’s almost the entire positive value proposition from crypto.
Group A makes a bold claim. Group B thinks it over, finds issues, and comes back to A with objections they need to address for B to agree.
A does not address them to B's satisfaction, or maybe just ignores them, and repeats the original claim. B objects again. A repeats the claim or adds new claims B also objects to.
After a few rounds of this, B becomes exasperated and stops giving a compete rebuttal. The longer it goes on, the shorter and more flippant B's responses get.
At some point B decides that A is acting in bad faith. Since their objections haven't been addressed, B starts to combat the claim. They reject it out of hand with no apparent effort to consider it, make aggressive counterclaims, and openly question A's motives.
New members of A, who may have never made the claim before or heard the objections, see B's immediate hostility and think they never gave the claim a chance. Some elements of A encourage this misunderstanding and make new claims that B is biased.
B sees this as further evidence of A's bad faith and starts to openly attack the group, not just their claims. A continues to say B is hostile and unfair, and also keeps making the claim.
Eventually it's just a giant mess of different subgroups at different points in this cycle and no more discussion can happen.
And the mess is hugely magnified if A or B or both are really full of bad-faith actors.
Sure it is still new even on the scale of modern history.
But it’s not really news except in the way yesterday’s Dow Jones is news. Or the way corporate scandals are news. Or the way celebrity endorsements are news.
And for me, I have already said the one interesting thing I have to say about it…so I won’t repeat it here because it can and will be taken as trolling by people with strong opinions.
Anyway, threads are supposed to be intellectually interesting, and you want useful and between that and my repetitious opining there’s not much meat on the bone…unless pump and dump counts as meat.
Good luck.
Worse, people who should know better project all kinds of illusory aspirations upon cryptocurrency that either defy definition or amount to poorly formed illogical qualifiers. What quality of commentary should one expect from such quality subjects?
You will probably dismiss my reply as exactly the kind of comment you talk about, but the answer is simple. There is no useful discussion about crypto because there's nothing useful about crypto. That's why we keep going on circles.
If countless of as you say smart, creative thinkers can't have a meaningful discussion about something, maybe the issue isn't the smart, creative, leading people, but the thing they can't seem to have anything to say about.
It's a grift, it has no practical use other than crime or as a get-rich-quick scheme for disenfranchised zoomers and millennials who want to belong to the propertied class rather than actually work for a living. The usual retort is something like 'but the blockchain itself is revolutionary!', except that figuring out what it's good for is left as an exercise to the reader.
People will of course consider this inflammatory but it's just calling a spade a spade and we'd be better served if people put their attention and time to discuss and learn about technology that serves real needs rather than inventing harebrained financial schemes that makes 1980s Japan look fiscally responsible in comparison.
Due to the existence of crypto/real currency exchange and the casual participation of whales who dwarf the community of real users, it is completely and utterly vulnerable to real world economic trends, rendering it useless as any kind of hedge. It has demonstrated time and time and time and time again that it is ludicrously vulnerable to exploitation in a thousand different dimensions even the most fiendishly clever people can't predict, and has wasted a spectacular amount of power for no real return. It has led to a disgusting and desperate financialization of anything and everything that has social relevance, to try and smear even a smidgen of that relevance on crypto itself, as it desperately searches for a use-case to justify itself, and it has created a generation of grifters who clog our content spaces with nonsense information about it.
Truly a great pox of our time.
Almost everything else is a get rich quick scam or a bad application for a distributed concensus protocol.
A "quality discussion" around crypto by definition means excluding grifters such as Paris Hilton and Jimmy Kimmel.
It's a whole new level of greed. It used to be people just wanted to get rich. Blockheads seem to feel grievously wounded because some group of people (gamers, pet owners, classic car enthusiasts, etc.) has some money and they won't rest until they have it all.
Reddit has a ton of them as well. I don’t use other platforms but I’m sure each sphere on Twitter has them, each Facebook group has them, etc. Simply groupthink/hive mind that HN is not immune to.
* Possible fraud from Celsius execs
* Celsius leaked data
* Binance got hacked
* Crypto.com is doing less marketing
These just aren't really technological stories. What intelligent stuff is there to say about it? It's just watching some company struggle because crypto is struggling.
Compare to AI, where there have been a lot of real technological advances recently, and the discussion is generally quite engaged and interesting.
Since the crash there's been nothing but scams and hacks, so until the industry shakes out and recovers, I think it won't be popular on HN
We used to speculate on the value of Tulips, but we still want them in our gardens.
Of course this does come back to bite sometimes eg. the infamous Dropbox launch post but by and large, the mainstream startup media + HN helps form very balanced opinions on topics.
Crypto is one of those topics where the hypetrain was primarily driven by "number go up" mentality and as the hype on one side grew, HN and other tech-first communities doubled down in the other direction to maintain a semblance of balance. As the number has started going down, the laser eyes have disappeared, the calls for $100K BTC have died down, HN folks are also much less flame-baity in the discussions on the topic. The bone of contention remains that outside of tech utopias where "code is law", in real world, everyone has to deal with third parties, governments, corruption, the fed, market dynamics and what not. And the moment it hits the real world, crypto (rather the form it's taken today) broadly fails the smell test outside of speculation. Sure, there are likely applications possible and perhaps future iterations of existing ideas will prove more (for lack of a better word) useful, but it's like saying that just because a casino builds a good random number generator, it can now be called a R&D lab.
Because these types of comments take little effort to post, and to read
People who could post an interesting technical comment about zero knowledge proofs or monetary theory will be discouraged, if the responses are low effort rants like "Crypto is a scam" or "Bitcoin will destroy fiat"
So intelligent and informed people don't bother to join these discussions on HN any more
There might be a reason for that. "Crypto" (in the cryptocurrency sense, not the cryptography sense) simply isn't particularly useful.
I'm a fairly long-term crypto sceptic; I was pointing and laughing back before MtGox imploded. Back then, HackerNews was generally (and, I thought and still think) unreasonably positive on crypto. After a decade of, well, nothing much, that has changed, unsurprisingly.
And crypto has gotten very _same-y_. There's a new type of scam along every year or so, of course, but nothing much interesting has happened in a long time. I'd argue that Ethereum, while a very bad idea, was at least worthy of a good bit of discussion, say, but the thousandth dubious use case for NFTs, not so much.
Also, the structure of Hacker News is OK for discussing news but not big topics. Every thread starts over at zero.
It's unfortunate because distributed ledgers are so much fun to play with. Conceptually simple enough that you can build one from scratch in an afternoon; deep enough that, notwithstanding the hype, there remains a huge amount of room for ideas barely explored.
Imagine if Hacker News could be a place that celebrated ideas like this for the love of hacking.
I think the camps have already been formed, and nobody is looking to switch sides. I agree with you that there isn't quality discussion around crypto, but I don't know where there is. There are good essays from time to time, but not good discussion on an open forum. Which is why I just click "hide" whenever I see a crypto story on HN, and it disappears from my feed, and I don't have to wade into the river of sewage the comments inevitably become.
It's... not as good as HN. Literally 1/100th of the value add.
Shilling. Endless shilling.