Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by randywaterhouse 3136 days ago
One thing I have been remarking recent conversations with other long-interested crypto-friends hasn't been about the price action, or about the drama, or about the lack of transparency on exchanges like Bitfinex -- but rather about the comparability of discussions today to those we were having in 2013. (Disclaimer: I attempt to avoid holding strong opinions in this space)

There are certainly patterns in the environment (maybe marketplace) which are repetitive and reminiscent of the early days. Confusion around price is one. Two viscerally opposed schools-of-thought is another.

One thing I think, though, that has suffered is the availability of information assessing the market structure or environment on it's merits/deficiencies without bias. This is likely hard to achieve, in general, but these days you cannot find reliable news without being sucked in to the swirl. Coindesk is pulling a CNBC-of-crypto, articles flying out every hour with opposing themes. I totally understand the model, captivating the audience, but it makes it hard to observe what's happening fundamentally (without having a grasp on the core narrative).

I continue to follow, in a casual way, but as I said continuously impressed by how the environment remains young -- trends from '13 persist to '17 and probably '18 (still young!).

4 comments

Is it possible that a large part of the back and forth of mixed article opinions is to drum up volatility? Because if that were the case it'd most benefit people who make money buying and selling on exchanges. They don't just make money when it goes up.
AND not to mention it makes money for those who own the exchanges -- volatility == more transactions and hence transaction fees.
Kudos to you for not having strong opinions. Is there ANY place you recommend for information in this space?
Coindesk is intimately linked with blockstream, the company that has gone to great lengths to take over the github repository, censor /r/bitcoin, and ultimately keep the block size limit at 1 MB so that they can profit from fees on their own 3rd party chain.
The controversy surrounding BlockStream is fairly well known, but what is the connection between them and Coindesk? I've not been following that side of things.
As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won.
Have a shred of evidence to back up your rediculous conspiracy theories?

This isn’t Reddit. If you make wild accusations, back them up.

Which part do you think is a theory? Censorship on /r/Bitcoin is trivial to test, just go there and post something about censorship, criticism of blockstream, the high fees on the main chain due to block size restrictions, etc. See if your comment stays. Don't forget to log out and check that it wasn't silently grey listed.
> Coindesk is intimately linked with blockstream,

As I said in another comment: "As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won."

> the company that has gone to great lengths to take over the github repository,

I have no idea what this is in reference to. The Bitcoin Core repo? The release manager for Bitcoin is employed by MIT DCI. The largest group of contributors is from ChainCode Labs. Of the half-dozen or so people who have commit access (a meaningless metric since no one has unilateral authority and they operate by consensus), only one works for Blockstream, and he has some sort of special contract where he is independent and isolated in his decision making capacity and can leave, with pay, at any time for any reason.

> censor /r/bitcoin,

There is no relationship I know of between r/bitcoin and Blockstream. r/bitcoin seems to like Blockstream, but that's not their fault. r/bitcoin has also had some issues with excessive moderation, but none of the mods there work for the company or are in any way tied to Blockstream afaict.

> and ultimately keep the block size limit at 1 MB so that they can profit from fees on their own 3rd party chain.

Blockstream's supposed scaling solution is Lightning, a peer-to-peer protocol where the users collect fees from each other, which they are developing in an open source basis with multiple compatible implementations and no vendor lock-in. It will probably reduce the fees paid to miners for comparable levels of transactions, but with those fees being collected by users directly. There doesn't appear to be any profit opportunity for Blockstream here except perhaps consulting income in helping people and industries setup and maintain such networks, which has been their "RedHat of Bitcoin" model from the beginning.

Theory part is this: "Coindesk is intimately linked with blockstream". As far as I know, there is no evidnece of this.
BTC is special because it's designed and desired to be a pure transaction system, separated from all of the "soft" skills like human trust. It's EVE Online with real money.

Thus, everything that makes BTC interesting for use the real world -- trying to use it to buy stuff, to put it somewhere safely, etc, it fundamentally broken by design, because none of that real world stuff has the mathematical strength of the core bitcoin protocol, and all the players are trying to operate on the assumption that none of the stuff that makes the real world work is important in the BTC world. It's an anarchic paradise, bubbles and scams as far as the eye can see.

    >  it fundamentally broken by design
Literally three comments up you are blaiming speculators for the fact it isn't being used as currency, rather than design.
This has no relevance to the comment you’re replying to except that it’s about cryptocurrency.