[benjaminwootton]

I know crypto will be a controversial one, but in terms of potential surely even a skeptic would acknowledge it.

Decentralised Finance in particular could take a huge chunk out of retail banking, investment banking and insurance.

[Cthulhu_]

Could, but it's not going to while the people pushing it are in it for the money.

At least retail banking is controlled and guaranteed by national and international governments and banks. If a crypto exchange goes fucky for whatever reason, you're fucked. If the value of your cryptocurrency of choice varies, you're fucked.

I mean how much did a pizza cost 10 years ago vs today in BTC vs USD. In BTC it was a few BTC, now it's 0.00025. In USD it was $10, now it's $10.

There is nothing wrong with retail / traditional banking, investment and insurance. Cryptocurrencies / blockchain technology does not solve a problem.

[latexr]

OP gave a handful of examples regarding what they consider “positive impact”. You don’t even need to get past the first one (energy usage) for cryptocurrencies to be on the actively negative side of the scale.

[benjaminwootton]

I know they can’t be decoupled, but I think smart contracts have more potential than coins or tokens.

There is no reason why whole swathes of saving, lending, derivatives, fx and insurance products couldn’t be implemented as decentralised smart contracts.

I suspect the smart contracts to do all of this would use less energy than a single office block.

[astoor]

A big chunk of the people working in the "office blocks" of "saving, lending, derivatives, FX and insurance companies" are there to deal with support and exceptions. This is a feature not a bug - if something goes wrong you want it to be fixed, especially when you are dealing with large sums of money. With smart contracts, if there's a bug it can't be fixed, if your money gets lost or stolen you can't get it back, if you lose your keys then tough, etc. This is considered a feature not a bug, e.g. to quote Satoshi "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more." However, in most people's view, this would be considered a backward step, and so not an example of a technology with a positive impact.

[_benj]

Idk why this is being so downvoted but how open the crypto ecosystem is, how much access to data, how DIY it is… to me it looks like open source financials vs proprietary government issued money.

I think we have challenges with its exorbitant use of energy, but giving more access to more people regarding is a positive IMHO.

[f7ebc20c97]

Hacker News commenters have hated (and been wrong about) cryptocurrency ever since the first Bitcoin article appeared here. It's very strange. I chalk it up to some sort of Dunning-Kruger contrarian effect + demographics skewed toward cynical authoritarian statists (not sure why, since tech used to be full of libertarians).

It's all just a repeat of the negative comments over and over... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

[_benj]

I’m noticing that! It seems to that instead of straight up hate, curiosity and exploring might yield better results… but seems like this is the wrong forum for that

[f7ebc20c97]

If you find one, let me know!