Ask HN: What is the HN of Cryptocurrency?

[GGfpc]

Hackernews is what I would consider a website with solid discussion about technology. However it's extremely skeptical when it comes to cryptocurrency.

I'd like know if there is a similar technically minded community for crypto.

I sometimes read /r/CryptoCurrency but its mostly shilling and asking about prices, so it doesn't really interest me.

[namdnay]

HN is extremely skeptical about everything, because being skeptical about unproven things is a pretty important part of being an engineer

[astoor]

HNers are often skeptical of all new unproven technology, but have a begrudging acceptance of established and proven technology. The thing with cryptocurrency is that it has now been around for over a decade, and not delivered on any of its ever evolving promises in that time. As a result, most knowledgeable and impartial observers would say it has fundamental flaws that it will prevent it from ever being able to do so.

Speaking personally, I know I was really interested in some of the Bitcoin technology in the early days, and super excited about the idea of a "world computer" that could never be shut down with Ethereum. But the more I dug into the technology, the more I realised the gap between what was promised and what was possible was pretty much insurmountable. However, the more time I spent in tech meetups etc. and understood the human nature angle to it, the more I realised that the gap wasn't actually important - most cryptocurrency people weren't particularly interested in delivering a genuine functioning new financial system (albeit one lacking the basic consumer protections of the existing financial system) they were just interested in convincing enough people that it was possible for long enough to get rich quickly.

[oauea]

> they were just interested in convincing enough people that it was possible for long enough to get rich quickly.

A million times this. I used to be a huge bitcoin fan in the early days. It's become obvious that it's failed and will never be a usable currency. Now it's just destroying the environment as a get-rich-quick scheme for unscrupulous people.

[luka-birsa]

I've had a lot of interesting debates in the comment section and I fully agree with the OP. He's calling it skeptical, but I'd say HN is an order of magnitude more skeptical about blockchain than any other topic. I'd pick a much harsher word.

As a blockchain / crypto enthusiast I'm actually unable to have a meaningful discussion on HN. It's gotten to the point where I can't even bother to share my views in the comments as it's not worth it. People are so dismissive and set that blockchain is a scam, that every debate becomes so heated with people reiterating the same position over and over.

So I fully agree with OP - a HN-like community, where people can discuss the non-price aspect of crypto and BC would be nice. I hate reddit and twitter as most of discussions seem price driven.

[subhro]

> People are so dismissive and set that blockchain is a scam

I have never heard/read anyone on HN saying blockchain is a scam. Blockchain is a mathematical construct. If anyone says blockchain is a scam, he/she/they may as well say addition is a scam, so is subtraction.

What IS scam, in my opinion, is the ability to exchange crypto currency for tangible and non abstract products that has a meaningful value in day to day life. Crypto is not backed by any real assets, hence my problem.

[oliwarner]

Blockchain is a scam.

This is one of those "guns don't kill people" arguments. Of course blockchain isn't a scam it's just a tool, but every instance of blockchain I've seen used has been inefficient and unnecessary and better performed by other existing technology. People trying to flog their banal products as something special because blockchain is the scam.

[tjs8rj]

I’m no crypto fanatic or crypto hater, but I always found this “backed by real assets” besides the point and often dogmatic. To what extent is fiat or stock “backed by a real world asset”? What about collectibles or startup options? What about a tech company with nothing but a website and employees?

I don’t think you actually care if something is “backed by real world assets”, you’re concerned with downside risk. What is the likelihood bitcoin goes to zero within a decade? What level could it go to? It’s “fundamentals” are at least its level of intrigue with the population (much like Instagrams only fundamentals are its attention of the population).

Stock is backed by a company, fiat is backed by the govt, Instagram is backed by the attention it receives, Bitcoin as well. This is more a spectrum than a binary, and Bitcoin doesn’t seem that far off from most tech companies who’s only “real asset” is attention.

[dabrot]

> Crypto is not backed by any real assets

As is fiat money.

[bawana]

Fiat money is backed by the fear of gratuitous violence from the military of its nation.

[cyberge99]

And legal system.

[cle]

This is something I struggle with personally, because over the years I've trained my brain to look for weaknesses and reasons to say "no". It drives my wife nuts, because she sees it as being pessimistic about everything. To some extent it is, because I can very easily rattle off lists of "why that won't work" or "what's wrong with that", but it's a challenge for me to come up with lists of "why that would work".

So unsuprisingly, she's CEO of a growing and successful startup, while I still nitpick design and code reviews all day!

Personally, I try to be mindful of my kneejerk "pessimism" and skepticism, and try to balance it with optimism and acknowledging that it's a lot harder for me to identify opportunities than weaknesses.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I can very easily rattle off lists of "why that won't work" or "what's wrong with that", but it's a challenge for me to come up with lists of "why that would work"

A framework I have found to temper this instinct involves shifting from predicting whether something will or won’t work to finding the smallest, most-plausible set of assumptions which need to be true (or false) for the idea to work. You’re still identifying potential weaknesses. But instead of resolving the question around that weakness with flippant dismissal or a gut-feel guess , you’re considering how to solve it and being explicit about the boundaries between what you know, what you could learn, and what you cannot know.

[AwaAwa]

Well said. I had much the same problem, and all it took to appear more positive, was to distill the message down to "This is how it will work", rather than "This won't work no way, no how".

(I cringe inside, but my paycheck thanks me)

[namdnay]

On the plus side, if you ever move to France, you'll fit right in!

[enumjorge]

To be fair, I remember HN being initially pretty positive on Bitcoin and blockchains. That’s when crypto discussions were mostly centered around the potential of the tech. But once Bitcoin became a speculative trading darling, the distance between the hype (remember when everyone wanted to use blockchain for everything?) and the reality of what the tech could do grew bigger and bigger. I think that’s when opinions soured and you started seeing more skepticism on HN.

So yes, the HN crowd as a group aren’t cheerleaders for crypto, but IMHO it’s for good reason.

[ceilingcorner]

Sorry but no. While every community that portrays itself as “rational” would like to think that it is unbiased and skeptical toward everything, the same basic human social dynamics still apply. HN is aggressively anti-crypto to the point where I don’t even bother reading comments on related links. It’s become a Pavlovian 2 minutes hate, every. Single. Time.

[monkeyfacebag]

I don't understand. How have you determined the anti crypto sentiment is due to pavlovian hate and not rational disagreement?

[ceilingcorner]

Because literally every single topic is filled with puerile “Haha, Idiots!” comments immediately. Every single time.

[long_time_gone]

I have not had the same experience. You admit that you don't read them anymore, maybe they have changed?

[ceilingcorner]

It was a figure of speech. I still click on the links and scan the comments. The recent links about Ethereum and the large hack were prime examples. There is an extreme undercurrent of skepticism that only gets somewhat masked by HN’s culture of writing critical comments in a roundabout intellectual way. There are also a huge number of low effort hostile ones that seem like Reddit overflow.

I should add that this is hilarious considering the name of this website.

[adamrezich]

well if you think about it, there aren't very many people who are fully on-board with any given cryptocurrency, conceptually, who don't also have literally vested interests in said cryptocurrency. when you have literally vested interests in something, you're going to be defensive about your investment, possibly to the point of emotional irrationality. this makes conversation between the invested and the skeptics pretty useless most of the time—if a skeptic were to convince an investor that their cryptocurrency is bad, then they would pull out of investing in it. if an investor were to convince a skeptic that their cryptocurrency is good, then they would likely also become an investor.

put another way, there are broadly four possible types of people who would discuss cryptocurrencies on a website like this:

A) crypto fans who have invested in crypto

B) crypto fans who have not invested in crypto

C) crypto skeptics who have invested in crypto

D) crypto skeptics who have not invested in crypto

for obvious reasons, you aren't going to find many—if any—people in categories B and C, so that leaves categories A and D arguing with each other, and largely unlikely to change each others' minds—especially category A, because, again, they are literally invested in the thing they're a fan of.

[jstummbillig]

Is it though? Being a skeptic is fairly easy and not that valuable when it comes to doing stuff.

[skummetmaelk]

On the other hand being overly optimistic about ideas that are clearly silly/inefficient/worse than every other option is how you waste millions of dollars on things like solar roadways or the Dodger stadium dugout loop.

[ecocentrik]

Skepticism does not mean inaction. It's about using the energy, time and resources you have to build useful things. While cryptocurrency has defiantly inspired the masses to forfeit their money, it still hasn't proven to be much more than an elaborate wealth consolidation device.

[dkdbejwi383]

That's the idea

[agilob]

No, it's not!

[ourcat]

I agree. I see HN as a kind of "peer review" of submitted links and information.

[uberswe]

I always like to look back at the "Show HN: Dropbox" thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863) and look at the comments like "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account" :)

I think most engineers try to think more critically than the general population.

[ceilingcorner]

More likely that engineers are more likely to think that they are more critical than the general population and that basic human social facts somehow don’t apply to them.

[doomroot]

https://stacker.news/ Is really fun if you’re interested in primarily bitcoin.

You can authenticate yourself with a tiny tiny bitcoin payment over the lightning network.

[k00b]

Hey, I'm the founder on SN. Thanks for the mention! You generated some extra traffic today.

There actually isn't a cost to using Lightning Login (lnurl-auth). It operates without really touching the Lightning Network, i.e. a channel. It just uses your Lightning wallet's key pair to authenticate you.

More on login: through the QR code (or lnurl string), I effectively send your wallet a randomly generated string, a challenge, it signs it using a deterministically derived key pair using my domain and your wallet key pair, then hits an endpoint on my server with the signature which authenticates you.

[k00b]

The site however does use the Lightning Network to provide Sybil resistance. Upvotes/posts/comments cost 1 sat, ~1/2000 of a dollar. This helps gate the site allowing mostly Bitcoiners in and imports an incentive structure - those more like in person social interactions.

Rather than staking your reputation, you're staking Bitcoin. Rather than earning just reputation, you're earning Bitcoin (your earned karma/upvotes is Bitcoin you can withdrawal from SN at anytime).

[bubersson]

Stacker News has some solid content and features. Yeah, check it out!

[deevolution]

HN is full of disgruntled haters. There are lots of DAOs that discuss crypto. I recently joined the FWB DAO https://www.fwb.help/ which has a pretty vibrant community. The one caveat is that you need to prove you own 75 FWB tokens to gain access (subject to change based on a seasonal community vote). The benefit is that it keeps spammers out. Generally the discussions and community members have been pretty high quality.

[wayoutthere]

The profit incentive in crypto created a real incentive to creating and exploiting asymmetric / proprietary information that mirrors existing finance markets. The sad truth is that this causes basically every crypto community to devolve into shilling and pricing discussions. It’s the same thing you see with stocks; anyone willing to give you insight into the market is likely playing the other side.

Even technical discussions devolve into arguments about how things will be priced; but this is all because everyone is trying to make their altcoin a meme and become rich. When success equals a huge payday and the risk to shilling is so low, it infiltrates all discussion around a topic.

[mckmk]

I'm not 100% clear if you're looking for a pro crypto currency community that has thoughtful technical discussions OR a community that is more focused about being skeptical of crypto currency. I don't know of anywhere good for the former but if it's skepticism - https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/ is the only place I know of that is focused on criticism and mocking of crypto currency and the related community.

[ArtWomb]

Rekt.news. Where else can you find this elite level of forensic analysis combined with wild speculation. Exploits will prove far more interesting historically than funding rounds in these still nascent days of early BTC adoption ;)

https://rekt.news/polynetwork-rekt/

[planb]

Searching for a bubble that reinforces your existing views is probably not the best way to learn more about any given topic.

[mhluongo]

Maybe, but I'm not learning about STARKs or other interesting proof tech on HN, nor am I seeing anything around protocol design or incentive systems... All interesting topics related to cryptocurrency.

The bias HN has here is fine if that's what the community wants, but don't pretend there aren't valuable discussions that aren't better had elsewhere.

[navd]

Pretty much Twitter at this point for me. There's too much pessimism on HN when it comes to crypto. I appreciate criticism but Twitter has all the deep thinkers

[bidirectional]

Yes. Twitter is honestly much better for most topics, as long as you do a good job of curating who you follow.

Practially any deep topic on HN is 90% just people with no expertise making pronouncements or asking for it to be explained to them. It's still worth reading for the occasional insight from the minority, though.

[sorenn111]

As someone whose asked for some technical papers to be explained a little, I find the expert digests on papers to be one of my favorite things on HN as well as experts who help put things in context

[oauea]

Ah yes those 280 character tweets lend themselves extremely well to deep thought.

[mhluongo]

Quite a condemnation that HN can't beat 280 character tweets on this topic, eh?

[oauea]

The topic of cryptocurrency scams? Don't need to a waste a lot of words on that thankfully :-)

[xboxnolifes]

This is what OP means.

[navd]

You know people link to their blog posts and stuff right?

[abetusk]

    $ echo 'Ah yes those 280 character tweets lend themselves extremely well to deep thought.' | wc 
          1      13      82

[oauea]

Yes, I could've tweeted that. What's your point? Are you convinced my comment was an attempt at deep thought? I guess on twitter it might've been considered as such?

[Zealotux]

I'm new to Twitter, always have been a Luddite when it comes to it but I'm curious to try, any advice on how to find quality accounts to follow?

[brontoski]

The Daily Ape by Darren Lau (t.me/thedailyape) The Bankless podcast/newsletter

These are some solid news sources, if you don't have time to follow everyone on twitter

[tedk-42]

a) I hand my friend a $1 coin/note.

b) I socialise the transaction and have everyone try be the first to crack an algorithm that proves I've given my friend a cryptocoin worth $1

There's a community out there claiming one solves a bunch of problems the other had. You tell me...

[glitchc]

Stone money is where (a) looks like (b). It has been used successfully in the past, spanning multiple human generations of transactions:

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

[throw149102]

You might have more success looking for a HN of cryptography, rather than cryptocurrency. That is, if you want an understanding of the mathematics and solid discussions about the technology. If you look for discussions on the economics/finance, well it's no surprise you're only going to find pump-and-dump schemes and scams and shilling and BS.

[tarokun-io]

Personally I'd recommend to stay off of Twitter. The signal-to-noise ratio is depressing, even if you follow "the right people".

I've found more value in newsletters: - https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d... - https://ethhub.substack.com/ - https://weekinethereum.substack.com/

[ceilingcorner]

If you can deal with the finance-speak and excessive hustlerism, Bowtied Bull on Substack has some interesting commentary. Their old blog (Wall Street Playboys) was equally as interesting as it was offputting.

[ir2eis5k]

Perhaps check out 1729.com, Balaji Srinivasan's newsletter/community building effort. The project is pretty optimistic re: using cryptocurrency's properties for positive goals.

[joaovitor]

# Multireddit

I created a multireddit to this and I use it to read information on the topic. https://www.reddit.com/user/jvlg/m/cryptocurrencies/

@GGfpc I think that this is a good way of tracking a topic in depth.

# Create a youtube channel to track a topic

You can create a youtube channel per topic of interest and use it to subscribe to channels related to the topic and even publish some content on it later.

[latchkey]

Features wise, https://cryptopanic.com/ is kind of similar.

[andrewtbham]

Follow the right people on twitter. I would start by following different crypto projects or topics on twitter. And then people that have interesting tweets.. look at their feed and follow.

Here is a bitcoin topic I follow https://twitter.com/i/topics/1007360414114435072

[tarokun-io]

I did that for 3 years, then stopped.

The signal-to-noise ratio is depressing.

[k00b]

You can join us on https://stacker.news if you're into Bitcoin. I'm the maker.

It appears even this question was heavily downvoted based on its rank and timing relative to older, fewer upvoted Ask posts.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

[geraldmd]

very cool!

[freebuju]

You are on your own here. Every one you'll ever meet on crypto forums is 99% of the time trying to get you to buy whatever shiny butt coin it is that they are holding. There are no exceptions to this rule.

[meremortals]

Possibly https://www.realvision.com/ but more likely a Matrix or Discord channel I don't get know about

[oauea]

They're all scams.

[ushakov]

this love-hate relationship with all new tech is a meme on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

currently i see it happening with Kubernetes - one league absolutely loves it, another absolutely despises it

[jashmenn]

The most similar feed I've found is https://feed.rekt.news/day

But there isn't a website with comment threads that are high quality. Most of the quality crypto discussions happen in Telegram and Discord.

I've realized one of the reasons programmers dislike cryptocurrency is because they value efficiency more than they understand incentive systems. They complain that crypto is inefficient and unoptimized and miss that it's an entirely new incentive system.

There's a lot to be skeptical of in the cryptocurrency space, but a community centered around outsized gains through startups should remember that pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich.

[emodendroket]

I would consider HN a pretty pro-crypto community.

[jeanniesarah]

rekt.news

[sshine]

HN is the HN of cryptocurrency. ;-)

[knuthsat]

Yep, nothing gets me salivating as much as the idea of a digital Euro issued by the EU, implemented to be fully private (can't see sender/receiver/transaction count/transaction amounts), bulletproofs [0], combined with view keys that are single-use only when the law needs to intervene. Zero-knowledge proofs used to determine if I paid my taxes without knowing how much I earn and similar exotic behavior.

Was quite surprised something like this is possible and I love seeing new crypto tech on HN.

0: https://crypto.stanford.edu/bulletproofs/

[cody8295]

Or you could use a decentralized and fully private crypto like Monero?

[knuthsat]

Well, I wouldn't mind a centralized and fully private crypto authorized by EU. They can authorize private construction of digital Euro wallets, so that only I know the key, but require me to give them a single-use view key if law demands it.

[yewenjie]

Okay how do I find some good old threads?