[eric_cc]

> Examples here are (again) the cryptocurrency scene which has been pretty good at othering critics as “no-coiners” or lately with the phrase “have fun staying poor”.

I’m somebody that spends a good deal of time thinking deeply on cryptocurrencies and the implications to society. I believe they a positive, revolutionary step in the right direction of human liberty. And I’ll gladly acknowledge that it’s still speculative until it’s not.

But crypto, like any other movement, attracts total scumbags. It’s unfortunate because people who speak negatively only serve to undermine their group - whether it’s crypto or a social cause group etc. and often they, themselves, are the insecure ignorant one that don’t even deeply understand what they’re fighting for.

[sepiasaucer]

IMO the technology blockchain has only demonstrated success in 1 application which is cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency has only demonstrated success in 2 applications: speculative investment and illegal online purchases. I would include NFT’s under the speculative investment category.

These applications are obviously problematic for 3 main reasons: it wastes enormous amounts of energy, the investment is often at the expense of less tech/financial savvy people, and most people don’t want it to be easier for criminals to conduct financial transactions.

IMO, it is not a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. It is a bunch of bad apples with a few good apples mixed in. Even if your motivations in working in this space are good (not simply for your own technical stimulation/amusement), you are trading off furthering/enabling real world harm now against optimistic speculation about future positive outcomes.

[maxilevi]

I disagree. I use crypto to protect against high inflation in my country and mantain the value of the fruits of my labour. Where does that fit in your categories?

Crypto and DeFi have a lot of applications, especially in third world countries with bad financial systems.

[notahacker]

> I use crypto to protect against high inflation in my country and mantain the value of the fruits of my labour. Where does that fit in your categories?

This is obviously speculative investment.

(Even if your local currency is so horrendous it lost more value than Bitcoin this month, less volatile ways of hedging exist. Maybe you bought lower or changed cryptoassets so you've gained far more than BTC fell, but that's speculative investment and trading, not maintaining value)

[maxilevi]

Its not. I am using stablecoins to hold currencies I wouldn't be able to hold because of capital controls.

[anon9001]

So what you're saying is that you buy ETH for its utility of processing transactions on tokenized assets? And you get more value out of spending the ETH on gas than it cost you to purchase it?

That sure sounds like a useful product to me.

I think HN is so anti-crypto because so few people in the industry currently have your use-case.

Personally, I think what you're doing is exciting and helps put a value on the utility of paying to run these contracts.

[maxilevi]

Yes and it's also much easier to trade tokenized assets between people than bonds or other financial instruments.

Also the whole DeFi ecosystem allows you to use your tokenized assets in different ways, giving even more value to it.

I think many people have my use case, it's just that you can't really see it unless you live in a country with a very mismanaged central bank. Which in my opinion is becoming more and more common every day.

[alexb_]

How exactly is using stablecoin to hold money different than holding your wealth in USD? Is it an access thing?

In any case, many "stablecoins" are ponzi schemes waiting to burst. I would much rather use a government backed currency to hold wealth against inflation than something like Tether.

[maxilevi]

The difference is you can't buy USD digitally.

You say that but imo having a currency that loses 50% it's value every year is worse than holding Tether. I don't trust Tether either and thats why I am holding DAI.

[sepiasaucer]

In the absence of a stable government backed currency it seems cryptocurrency could have some value. However, cryptocurrency is also unstable. You are speculating that holding crypto will be better over some period of time than any alternative value store you can access. That may well be true, but seems like that depends on what other options you have access to and would require more rigorous analysis of the tradeoffs. For example, if you were to say “crypto is a better currency than eggs” [1], that seems likely, but eggs don’t require internet access and specialized knowledge of a particular technology.

[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/19/w...

[maxilevi]

You are assuming I use BTC or ETH directly as currency but I use stablecoins like DAI which are pegged to the USD dollar.

This allows me to hold currencies I wouldn't be able to buy because of capital controls by the government.

[sepiasaucer]

“Where does that fit in your categories?”

It sounds like it falls mostly under illegal transactions because you are using crypto for something that would otherwise be illegal (avoiding capital controls). Is it technically illegal? I don’t know. Is it ethically wrong? I guess not directly. However, I imagine there are also a lot of nefarious reasons somebody might want to avoid capital controls which crypto could also help facilitate.

[maxilevi]

It's illegal to buy dollars but not assets that track the USD dollar. Buying DAI is legal for the same reason buying USD denominated bonds is legal, they are not dollars and you are not taking them from the central bank.

And either way I don't think grouping "criminal transactions" with "stuff that's illegal in X country" is fair. At many points in history governments outlawed things that are very wrong (e.g. nazi germany) Just because someone doesn't want to succumb to corrupt institutions doesn't mean he/she is a bad guy.

[Illniyar]

Your government has capital controls (mentioned in a different response) to prevent you from purchasing foreign currency.

Which makes buying crypto (or stablecoin) illegal online purchase.

Illegal doesn't always means wrong or immoral, depends on whether the laws are good or not.

[maxilevi]

It's illegal to buy dollars.

I am buying an asset that is pegged to the USD dollar. That is not illegal neither is buying USD denominated bonds. In fact the goverment even has sold USD denominated bonds.

[Comevius]

Crypto is not practical or fair by design. It needs a steady supply of greater fools to operate, and the only future it's capable of creating is one where everything is monetized, corporatized and the wealthy is in charge, with no recourse for the rest of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

[anonporridge]

All of civilization needs a never ending supply of greater fools to keep operating and reward the early investors.

We call them children.

If you don't want to participate in this ponzi, then chop wood and carry water until you can't anymore and let your body return to the earth.

[tarsinge]

I really did not like that video. There are some interesting ideas but the tone is insufferable for me, not a fan of superficial punchlines and logical fallacies wrapped as deep thoughts, no matter if I agree or not with the point.

[officialchicken]

>superficial punchlines and logical fallacies

I thought the writing and editing were excellent and well thought out. Can you give a specific example of when a logical fallacy was employed in the video?

[tarsinge]

Take the part 2: Personal comments on Vitalik, an history of scams during the period Ethereum was created but not directly related, a 100k grant Vitalik got which I fails to see the relevance too, a broad critic that can apply to any entrepreneur/programmer having a dunning kruger thinking they can easily disrupt an industry with software. Conclusion:

> In terms of improvment over Bitcoin, Ethereum has many. It's not hard. Bitcoin sucks. Ethereum solves none of them and introduce a whole new suite of problems driven by technofetishistic egotism of assuming that programmers are uniquely suited to solve society's problem.

It's nice prose but for me that part was really mostly appeal to emotions/ridicule and association/composition fallacies. To clarify the latter: scams and ridiculous marketing are a problem, but unfortunately that's not enough to make a logical point. Their proportion neither.

Again there are good points, but it's weirdly positioned. For me it's a rant, but instead it's presented as a calm scientific/neutral content which I don't find very honest (and quite ironic given the subject). But I'm not a native english speaker, so maybe it's just me misinterpreting the tone.

[yumaikas]

It is a rant, a well argued one, with a lot of salient points, IMO.

And ridicule is part of the point of text (not subtext) of the essay. Dan is making an emotional argument as much as he's making a logical one, because a lot of people will hear the emotional one where the logical one would just bounce off. Making something harmful actually seem uncool is a valid tactic, IMO.

Like, calling out Vitalik as a butthurt Warlock main is an attempt to make his origin story around the EVM seem to have a pathetic origin. Instead of applying himself to getting better at the new warlock meta, he went off and created a thing that has enabled a lot of real economic harm.

And pointing out the connection to Peter Thiel is as much about pointing out the involvement of big money in cryptocurrency as any specific character of Vitalik.

And it's not like Vitalik hasn't had a lot of chances to go "damn, the EVM is being used for a lot of harm. Maybe it wasn't worth it?"

Or maybe he has, and I (and Dan, because I think he'd have brought that up) have missed it?

[Animats]

I watched the whole thing, which is too long. He gets a bit carried away at some points, but he doesn't seem to be factually wrong.

He makes a good point - cryptocurrencies are a transfer of money from late adopters to early adopters. That's implicit in anything where "line goes up" but there is no revenue, no dividends, it's zero sum, and there's no exit.

The NFT thing seems to be on the way out. The NFT industry is Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the little guys. Axie Infinity recently crashed hard. Their Smooth Love Potion token, the one players grind for, is down to $0.01246 (was around $0.35 at peak). Their other token, Axie, is down to about half the peak. OpenSea seems to be stalling out with limited liquidity - too many items with high prices but no bids. People are frantically issuing new NFTs every day, but the available sucker supply seems to have dried up. It's hard to tell, because wash sales to pump the price are so easy in the NFT space. This whole thing is starting to look like Pet Rock 2.0.

Bitcoin and Etherium don't look so good right now. Both are around half of peak.

[alexb_]

At the end of the day, it is a video which serves to further actual discussion. There are going to be points where he gets "carried away" because that's the entire point - simply listing the facts doesn't really contribute much, the video uses the facts that we have and extrapolates a conclusion. Crypto currencies, in their current state, are just learning WHY centralized systems exist. While we all would love to be decentralized all the time (and some decentralization is a good idea!), these people end up just using centralized systems to more easily manage their "decentralized" systems.

And really, I don't think this should be surprising for most people. This is exactly what happened to Email - a decentralized system that also just happens to be 90% controlled by 1 company because people much prefer the benefits of centralization to the "freedoms" of decentralization.

[zepto]

Crypto is different because the scumbags are motivated by the currencies themselves.

[elefanten]

I suppose this was supposed to sound like a snappy argument? It’s a bland, impactless statement. Even if scumbags are infatuated with something, it can still have legitimate and beneficial uses / users.

And the comment’s wrong too… the scumbags probably want to cash their gains out to traditional currencies, they’re least likely to be in it as technology true believers.

[ricardobeat]

I think what he was trying to say is that saying "crypto attracts scumbags" puts the onus purely on consumers of the tech, when in fact a lot of the scummy behavior, hype and fraud is planned and encouraged by the people implementing the technology, not only their users. That's a significant departure from "any other movement".

[zepto]

> That's a significant departure from "any other movement".

Exactly this. There are scumbags in every movement, but crypto has structural incentives for scumbaggery that make it distinct.

[zepto]

> Even if scumbags are infatuated with something,

Nobody is taking about infatuation except you.

Obviously the comment is talking about the incentive for people to try to drive the value of their holdings up.

The scumbags are the ones who do this dishonestly.

> And the comment’s wrong too… the scumbags probably want to cash their gains out to traditional currencies, they’re least likely to be in it as technology true believers.

No. Anyone can be a scumbag. It has nothing to do with being in it for a quick buck or being a true believer or not. It’s simply about what methods one is willing to use.

So yes, Hodlers, and crypto-utopians can be scumbags too.