What does HN think about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?

[atalw]

I'm diving deep into the weeds of Bitcoin and it's very clear that it is at a nascent stage. There is a lack of easily accessible learning material and it seems like there are only a few developers in the space because you keep on seeing the same faces repeatedly.

I've been surrounded by Bitcoiners with the content I consume and study so I may be in a bubble. I'm curious what HN's opinion on the cryptocurrency space and particularly Bitcoin is. Do you think it's a sound judgement steering one's career in that direction?

[Gerito]

Technical speaking Blockchain don't solve any real problem and it's just trending like 3D television.

There are plenty of people in the world who want to become rich. And it's just much easier to follow some hype train than putting in the real work.

The hype train also triggers people and you also might get easier fun money. But they don't understand that that fun money is much less than they actually need.

In my company the people look at Blockchain who normally already do hype topics which might or not might end actually useful in a product. But you know innovation.

Technical speaking I believe it's a problem if level: you say we have a trustproblem and need something decentralized. Now someone says Blockchain solves this Problem but they either ignore the next layer or don't understand it either. Now people think Blockchain solves the trust issue without asking how and IF Blockchain actually sol es it.

Like why would I trust an arbitrary miner somewhere and a system which is also intransparent?

Blockchain hides it's issues under complexity.

And crypto is again adding complexity. Stable coin, Bitcoin, etherium, lightning, hashing, Asics, PoW, PoS etc. And when you went through all of those words then you need to think through the implications on a geopolitical level.

And while writing all of this,.I haven't mentioned the resource issue: power consumption, co2, energy stealing etc.

Or the lyers.telling things how Bitcoin mining on unused gas is helping anyone but not asking why we even allow burning it. Or why not generating Power and forcing to build a simple Powerline or whatever.

To sum it up: there is a little bit of interesting decentralization/liberation in this topic and it might be used in weird small scenarios through the hype train bit ultimately it will take ages until something relevant will come out of it and it will look different than you think it will be.

All the garbage around the tech will leech of as other things which just won't die but they will not become the unicorn they believe they are.

[Viliam1234]

The past is not a 100% reliable predictor of the future, but HN has a really bad track record at recommending whether to buy Bitcoin.

When Bitcoin went dramatically up, HN said "nope". Now Bitcoin is mostly stable, and HN seems to go "maybe". One day, when HN says "yes", it will probably be the best moment to sell.

[anon2020dot00]

This argument is based on nothing but price which is flawed.

Remember Bernie Madoff? Not saying that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme but just that price alone can be misleading and so better to assess it based on its' technical merits.

Credit to HN for not looking at the price alone and this makes HN less easy to fool.

[randomhodler84]

Bitcoin might well be the biggest invention in open internet protocols since BitTorrent. BT was a society changing tech, i consume most of my content via this protocol today.

Before that was probably email; In that one could send an instant post card to any address on a decentralized network of mail servers, bypassing the USPS, etc.

BTC been on HN since the launch, and the community has been mostly negative — most users didn’t see the point compared to the incumbent technologies. But I have live it, and watched the corruption and theft of savings by bank and government in multiple jurisdictions; when I saw that you could store value over time using the same technology as public key cryptography — a core privacy technology, I knew this would reshape society, in the same way that public key cryptography reshaped communication in the 90s. It was such a powerful tech that governments of the world wanted to stop it! Ban large keys under export law! Illegal numbers! Outlawed algorithms!

We see the same thing decades later at a different layer of the human stack, the economic layer.

Nothing is truly new, just a mix of that which came before.

We are now seeing lots of people building software and protocols to try to recreate this, but they miss certain key points of why the protocol works. Bitcoin is a special protocol, in that nothing has been able to recreate the mindshare, effort and energy since it’s creation.

[trompetenaccoun]

Many on HN seem to be suspicious or have a negative view of blockchain development in general. Then again something I notice is that a large part of HN consistently doesn't understand economics, so there's that.

>I'm diving deep into the weeds of Bitcoin and it's very clear that it is at a nascent stage.

Is this one of those time traveler messages made 10 years ago? There might be very good reasons to steer your career in the direction of cryptocurrencies but the Bitcoin boat has sailed. What interesting development do you see happen in the Bitcoin space? It's all moved on to other projects and chains that can be used for more than just storing and moving money around. Not that this in itself wasn't revolutionary, it's very much worth learning about Bitcoin and understanding why it became so popular.

[randomhodler84]

As far as future innovation, I’m probably most excited about transfer of arbitrary tokens via Lightning. Despite my own reluctance to trust Stablecoins as a useful financial construction, the market has spoken of their usefulness. Stablecoins offer the mirage that muggles need to board the train. Lightning is a radical construction — you need to use it to truly understand what is happening here. Everything from eth-> is trying and failing on the same ideas, bloat the block, ramp the block inclusion fees, kick the tx to someone else’s chain and roll that up and smoke it.

If you have not been following Bitcoin development you may have missed the innovation. I don’t agree that people moved on; the best minds in this space at playing with Bitcoin. The others are trying to sell each other tokens and NFTs.

[trompetenaccoun]

Lightening was first developed by Joseph Poon, a teenager who went on to work on Ethereum. He improved on his original idea with Plasma which was supposed to be deployed on Ethereum but was eventually abandoned for better more sophisticated scaling solutions.

The idea of lightening is literally just taking transactions off chain to reduce cost. That is it. So the solution to scaling the blockchain is not using the blockchain. I think this was invented already, it's called a (centralized) database.

The most amusing aspect of it is that Bitcoin supporters are trying to sell this as a big technological innovation when it's literally just circumventing the bloated chain.

[randomhodler84]

Centralized database indeed! If you really feel LN is centralized, I point at infura et al and say that EVM chains by design can exist for 99.999% of their users as centralized databases accessed over http apis.

LN is a abstracted layered approach, the only realistic scaling design that works on the internet. It was disappointing that plasma style constructions were not successful. I really believe this is where we should go, but alas there is money to be made from issuing tokens for users of your sidechain, (even ones that use ETH as gas!). Actual innovative constructions may not allow you to increase the number of tradable units, so they get less attention.

I don’t even buy the tale that the roll up chains are another layer, it’s just moving the tx off chain to another chain, which operate mostly like centralized databases.

I argue that it is not more sophisticated, rather, it is much of the same with some magical zk binding to hide the seams.

[skinnymuch]

> I notice is that a large part of HN consistently doesn't understand economics

Yes this is the problem. Not your average blockchain development.

[atalw]

Bitcoin does many things right but it's also really lacking in some fundamental ways. It still can't be used as a form of currency. There are issues with scalability, mining being centralized, and the overall UX not being there yet. It may be easy to jump on a new project which 'fixes' all of these issues in theory but when the numbers start pouring in it'll also face the same or other issues. We've seen that play out before.

Projects take time to mature. I think there is innovation in areas which are facing problems and people are working on improving it so that it can actually be viable as a currency.

[shreyshnaccount]

idk about all of HN, but imo blockchain tech in general could potentially solve some problems related to distribution, but rarely do i see projects that justify needing a blockchain. NFTs are mostly a scam.

[atalw]

What problems related to distribution?

[shreyshnaccount]

Distributing content. I hate the idea, but I can see blockchains being used with apps like Spotify to force someone to buy music before listening to it. Would also sidestep some of the practical issues of DRM. Heard snoop doggs label is going all in on smth like this.

[fuckcensorship]

Monero is what Bitcoin was supposed to be.

[randomhodler84]

I don’t know if I would agree — I think monero is what people thought Bitcoin should be; however Satoshi spoke of psuedonymity and transparency.

Don’t get me wrong, monero is an awesome protocol pushing ahead with some great constructions but it is highly experimental. The low order group bug, and the recent bulletproofs frozen vuln demonstrates that a zero-knowledge system is very fragile. Bitcoin is very robust.

[tromp]

It's not. Bitcoin was supposed to have a capped and fully auditable supply, to take 4 years to emit half the supply (Monero emitted 40% in the first year alone), to have a simple and instantly verifiable PoW, to have a UTXO set that's a small fraction of all TXOs (crucial for scalability), and to be scriptable, just to name a few.

[randomhodler84]

Agree. But I would add It’s a critical tech, and a checkpoint in current and future constructions like Grin and MW.

I wouldn’t store my wealth in it; but it is extremely useful tech that will not disappear — it’s experimentation with social and economic models on hashing as you have done with CC, for which the world has not fully appreciated yet!

[atalw]

How so? Also is Zcash similar?