[andersentobias]

I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position.

With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life.

Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".

With every indirection the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added which just fuels my sense of a system driven by amoral technocrats.

[drowsspa]

Maybe at the beginning. Right now they're all just trying to replicate the current system with less regulations and with them at the top, nothing punk about it.

[capableweb]

If you look at most of the new projects, this is probably true. It's startup-Chads trying to get lots of bucks quickly.

But if you look at the original, Bitcoin, it's harder to make the same argument, as arguably, there is no "them at the top" for Bitcoin.

[cplusplusfellow]

The guy who would have 25-50b worth of BTC “at the top” somehow drifted into the ether. No pun intended.

[JonathanMerklin]

I was going to correct you by saying "if you didn't intend the pun, you should have used 'aether' (or 'æther' if you're cool)" but in going to the Wikipedia article to copypaste the "æ", I learned that "alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether", which was enough news to me that I felt it worth commenting. Fair play!

[TheDudeMan]

What changes in Bitcoin are you referring to? Or maybe you didn't mean Bitcoin.

[PragmaticPulp]

> Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".

Your way of "making yourself heard" is to trade your real dollars for digital dollars?

The thing about cryptocurrencies is that you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed. Sure, you could argue that maybe at some future point the governments could possibly all band together and shut down every on-ramp to cryptocurrency, but that's extremely unlikely to happen universally across the globe. As long as some country, somewhere, allows cryptocurrency purchases then there will be a way to use them.

The narrative that you have to invest in cryptocurrency to stick it to the government is really just consumerism being applied liberally by people who want the price of their crypto to go up.

[__MatrixMan__]

> you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed

"As needed" is an interesting phrase. I'd argue that what we need from cryptocurrency is for it to move past the current phase where the only consensus it bothers with is account balances.

We need consensus about things that will help us collectively act to keep powerful entities like governments in check. As it stands, they're very good at dividing us against one another.

If you end up making some fiat along the way, that's fine, but the return on an investment in crypto is a world where the powerful are well-behaved because they're scared that the rest of us will turn our backs on the abstractions that give them power.

As it stands, that's not a credible threat, so it's reasonable to make investments that'll take things in the direction (which is, sadly, not the effect of most crypto investing).

[WallyFunk]

If you re-frame money as essentially a form of speech then 'making yourself heard' makes sense. The medium becomes the message. DeFi as the ideal, not top-down government to control the money supply with sketchy all-seeing-eye masonic symbols on the banknotes.

[salawat]

DeFI cannot coexist with either OFAC or AML in the picture.

Those are the fundamental roots of money as a top-down control mechanism. Those functions alone are responsible for making the finance sector a de-facto extension of the United States Government and an effective extension of Law Enforcement.

[sowbug]

HN is weirdly inconsistent about digital currencies. Generally pro encryption, net neutrality, open-source software, VPNs, etc. But mention "Bitcoin," and suddenly half the commenters lose their shit about the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.

Then they go back to commiserating with another Ask HN startup founder whose PayPal account was frozen.

[dheera]

> I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life.

That, and I'd also like everyone to know that money, markets, and everything are a joke. The value of USD is just what people collectively agree on it to be, not some inherent fundamental value. The same is true for TSLA stock, GME stock, ethereum, or the shitcoin-of-the-week.

[EdwardDiego]

Pretending that there aren't fundamentals behind the USD is ridiculous.

How do those people collectively agree on the value of the USD? By looking at the fundamentals - the economy of the US, the stability of its government, the likelihood that it will make good on its bonds.

[everfree]

None of those factors establish a fundamental market price for the dollar - you're simply listing the price of admission for any state-backed currency.

The dollar has declined in value by over 90% since 1933. By your metrics that must mean that the US is in catastrophic meltdown, but of course it isn't.

[EdwardDiego]

> None of those factors establish a fundamental market price for the dollar

Neither does the P/E ratio of a company, yet it's still a fundamental used to value stocks.

> The dollar has declined in value by over 90% since 1933.

Relative to which other currencies?

[everfree]

> Neither does the P/E ratio of a company, yet it's still a fundamental used to value stocks.

Earnings is used to create a valuation of a stock. Price-to-earnings is the result.

As a company's earnings increase, the stock's value increases. As a country's earnings increase, there is no similar correlation with its currency.

> Relative to which other currencies?

Relative to a standard basket of goods.

[dheera]

> Earnings is used to create a valuation of a stock

Is it? Many times stocks perform well at earnings and shareholders still put on a fit and downvote its price.

Conversely, they often upvote its price based on some PR hype instead of actual earnings.

[EdwardDiego]

> As a country's earnings increase, there is no similar correlation with its currency.

Oh right, so balance of trade doesn't impact a currency's value. Interesting.

[weberer]

>Relative to which other currencies?

Relative to the USA's consumer price index.

[Retr0id]

Why not divert that interest into the world of secure private and/or anonymous chat and networking protocols?

The flow of information and ideas is more valuable than currency, and there is increasing pressure to legislate it out of existence.

[knowaveragejoe]

The overlap between the two is significant.

[Retr0id]

Right - it should be the logical pivot for anyone previously operating in the cryptocurrency space (assuming they weren't just in it for perceived profit potential...)

[sshine]

While I worked on cryptocurrencies and have changed to primarily focus on secure, private, anonymous network protocols (because the potential for speculative abuse is less, giving credit to your suggestion), I still would like to say that this is an example of whataboutism.

Money is power in a distinct way that freedom of information, in general, is not:

You don't need to believe in a (digital crypto) currency for it to hold value:

As long as someone else believes it, you can make them do things for that currency.

I believe this potency is what makes the scum of the Earth flock to cryptocurrencies.

[anigbrowl]

Secure private chat is about not being heard.

[promptdaddy]

Why divert when we could mirror

[saurik]

It is not clear to me that there is any reasonable way to implement a truly permissionless and secure decentralized anonymous protocol without using programmatic money as you need some way to fairly allocate resources. Hell: if you stare into the soul of Bittorrent long enough trying to figure out how to make it worth your while to seed unpopular files you realize that it is essentially just digital barter screaming for a way to store and transfer your good will, letting all the seeding you did on prior files help you download this new one... and, well: welcome to capitalism.

I was working on decentralized systems back as early as 2001--notably, well before Bitcoin existed--and it frankly seemed just as true back then and we didn't even know how or if it was going to be possible for anyone to make the money part work. In 2009, when Bitcoin came out, I was too busy working on my federated iOS app store alternative for it to sink in what had happened as I remember barely taking note of Bitcoin and later not taking enough note when people tried to show it to me that something important had been figured out. I am sad that I saw people I even knew working on Ethereum and still didn't join the efforts until 2017.

But like, with permissionless systems, and when all the participants are anonymous, you have a really serious problem of how to deal with freeriders and spam. To the extent to which prior attempts at such protocols have worked they either are run by centralized cabals (Tor and its ~10 directory servers managed by Roger Dingledine and his friends), is based on barter and has severe / obvious limits on its applicability (Bittorrent), or--and this is the biggest category by far--only works because it is so niche and/or new that no one has so far decided to attack it (or, worse: someone did attack it, the attack worked, but the protocol is so niche that the people who built the protocol don't actually give a shit as the attacks aren't happening in practice... this is the situation with I2P). Hell: email has even become more and more centralized and less possible to remain anonymous, in no small part due to spam.

At best, you see people try to build a kind of reputation management system based on your IPv4 address, under the assumption that those are scarce. In fact, despite Tor being largely centralized (on the aforementioned directory services run by Roger Dingledine and his friends) it also relies heavily on IPv4 address scarcity as they don't know all of the server administrators (though Roger Dingledine does claim to "personally have met" 2/3rds of them, which I find more terrifying than relieving). This, though, only really works if you use a slow accumulation whitelist model (which is how Tor manages their high-risk exit nodes) as otherwise your protocol kind of becomes irrelevant in a world of IPv6 (which Tor has in fact struggled with, though they have better options here due to the design of the directory server cabal).

Regardless, if you are building up reputation surrounding IP addresses, you know what you aren't? Anonymous (because an IP address is a location tied to a user; and, if you are able to borrow someone else's IP address, its reputation is going to be poor, almost by definition). And, sure... that's sort of OK for some kinds of protocols: in the case of Tor, you want the users to be anonymous while the servers don't at all have to be (and, in a very real sense, can't) and so they can use this largely-centralized design for the list of servers to slowly build trust in new operators whose reputation they manage by their indirect identity, and then hopefully the users can be anonymous, right? (...Right?)

But like, the users being anonymous only sort of works on Tor because the users are by-and-large actively choosing to not be brats: the servers are donating resources and they are donating it to a cause, not because they are bored; and so, if you sit around using their bandwidth and good will to do nothing more interesting than stream YouTube videos all day--as a user in the United States who is not blocked from accessing YouTube or anything--you are considered to be abusing a scarce resource and people who find out try to make you feel bad. Maybe it works? But the result undermines the premise: everyone who uses Tor is supposedly someone who needs to use Tor, which means the FBI can and in fact did (as part of XKeyScore) just flag people who go to Tor's website for extra diligence.

If you wanted the worlds' Internet traffic to flow through it, with every user using much more bandwidth from the system than it costs them to send (as their bandwidth gets amplified as it goes through multiple other nodes) you need a way to dole out this resource in a fair way, building some kind of market for the resource; and, I totally do appreciate this answer kind of sucks, but the decentralized way to build a market is... capitalism, using some kind of money to compensate people for their efforts. You will find a similar need in any decentralized system to prevent bad actors from just monopolizing all of the resources (well, unless you decide to use an IP-based reputation management scheme... which would again undermine the point).

(Note: I work on a system designed to make this eventually work in the specific case of an actually-fully decentralized market-based Tor-like mechanism. No: it isn't something I am sufficiently proud of right now to want to sit around arguing whether the thing that we deployed fully solved the problem: I am just going to say we made a lot of impact and progress and leave it at that for today... however, I am still working on this problem space, I already know how to make this stuff better, but I have been distracted with personal issues... maybe you'll see something dramatic from me in the near future. But like, I frankly see no way of making anything even similar work without money in the design; and, if you do, then I beg of you to drop everything you are doing and either build it or tell others how to build it as the world needs to have decentralized protocols and the reason almost all of the decentralized protocol design has moved into crypto is not merely because it is lucrative: it is because, for the first time, it actually feels possible there.)

But so like, I essentially dare you to show me any decentralized protocol that allows anonymous users to permissionlessly participate even if they are actively trying to gobble up resources and even if they simply hate the protocol and chose to implement it incorrectly. That Bitcoin worked was a watershed moment in this space, and it did it by starting with the idea of using capitalism to solve a kind of lazy version of the consensus problem. It isn't the be-all-and-end-all of designs and it has a lot of holes, and yet it is still working despite a ridiculous number of people trying to use it at the same time and a number of people actively wishing it didn't exist. Did it get expensive at times? Yes. But did it just turn into a bunch of worthless spam? No. Have people managed to shut it down? Not yet! And later designs have been attempting to iterate on the mechanism by adding more functionality (such as Ethereum, upon which my team was able to deploy a probabilistic nanopayments mechanism similar to the centralized Internet startup PepperCoin) or increasing the performance (I had been particularly enamored with Avalanche). There are parallel tracks designed to improve the privacy and anonymity (such as Zcash).

This is, in all honesty, the future of decentralized systems. And yes: the existence of money as one of the early essential primitives means that for every iota of progress there are people who just try to cash in on the whole thing... but I watched this space take a full decade before anyone even figured out how to build a decentralized currency, and the progress suddenly made since then has been dramatic, with people figuring out how to build any number of decentralized alternatives to centralized systems that previously would have been unheard of... even if you want to poo poo it all because it is "hard to use" or "costs more", the fact that it works is amazing and should be inspiring.

[bauruine]

Tor relies on the IPv4 scarcity to make Sybil attacks more expensive but is slowly moving away from it e.g. the number of allowed relays per IP was recently doubled from 2 to 4 and it may get doubled in the near future again.

>Roger Dingledine does claim to "personally have met" 2/3rds of them

Hey said that he knew 2/3 in the beginning so 10 years+ ago and that it's no longer the case but he would like to increase the number of relay operator he or others of the Tor Project knows again. There are in person relay operator meetups at conferences (e.g Chaos Communication Congress) and I assume that he met most of the people at such occasions. I'm not sure why this should be terrifying.

>whitelist model (which is how Tor manages their high-risk exit nodes)

I'm not sure if this ever was the case but exit nodes aren't threatened specially than other relays and there is no whitelist model for them.

[saurik]

FWIW, he had told me that five years ago. I fully admit 5 is as close to 10 as it is to 0, though ;P. But like, even if he was stuck using an old stat the idea that he wants to know all of them isn't confidence inspiring from this angle. I asked him what he would do if someone came to him with a lead pipe and threatened him with a demand to poison his directory server and he seemed confident until I asked him the same question about his family and it frankly felt like he hadn't really considered it before, which was crazy to me.

The point being, though, that Tor isn't really a decentralized design as the cabal is too small and the community is too tight: I am just listing it as a thing that clearly isn't decentralized and anonymous / permissionless in one place (the servers) and just kind of throws up its hands at the issue of dealing with a bratty set of users; it works because, by and large, not many people want to use it and not enough people are unhappy enough that it exists to DoS it out of existence.

[bauruine]

I think he said it sometimes after KAX17 so around 2022 but honestly I'm not exactly sure since when he doesn't know that much anymore maybe it has been till a few years ago and not 10.

Yeah you're right it's a small group with a lot power. I have no solution to make it decentralized but I'm pretty sure if the solution includes "money" it's not a solution I like.

[tptacek]

It is possible that there is no idea in the history of mankind less punk rock than cryptocurrency.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

Cryptocurrencies enable people to do so much more than speculate on price and trade pictures of apes.

https://cryptome.org/ap.htm

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_org...

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/09/crypto-remittances-are-a-l...

[tptacek]

That may be. But that was true of virtually everything punk rock opposed, too (that there were supposed upsides as well as obvious downsides). All I'm saying is that there's nothing punk about it. I happen also to think there's little redeeming about it as well, but I'm not prepared to lay out a case for that right now.

[twic]

Can I interest you in a Johnny Rotten NFT? https://www.johnlydon.com/mr-rottens-nfts/

[frereubu]

I think there's a good argument - made very well by Viv Albertine of The Slits in her autobiography Clothes, Music, Boys - that people outside the scene took punk too seriously. They weren't great crusaders for truth and justice, they were the court jesters who pointed out the emperor had no clothes but were mostly just having fun provoking people. Which includes John Lydon pissing people off by issuing NFTs and praising Trump. It's all the same.

[tptacek]

The Sex Pistols were a boy band, Lydon had a brief window of authenticity with PIL but has, in the last decade or so, become a caricature of himself, to the point of endorsing Thatcherism. Lydon today overtly rejects what he ostensibly "stood for" in the era of the Lesser Free Trade Hall show. You couldn't come up with a better illustration of how un-punk crypto is than a Johnny Rotten NFT.

[tptacek]

Exactly.

[everfree]

To me, they both seem to be about deliberate and organized defiance of social behavioral norms.

[danaris]

The only social behavioral norms that cryptocurrency is about defying are "people shouldn't be scammed out of their money".

[everfree]

The social norm defied is "money is to be regulated by the state". No more, no less.

Anything else is a result of what people project onto it.

[anigbrowl]

Only libertarians are so obsessed with central banking. It seems to me that crypto people willfully ignore previous history where money was not regulated by the state and people were frustrated by instability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

[everfree]

In my humble opinion, it's best to have both state-regulated money and non-state-regulated money compete. The market for money itself should be a capitalist free-market competition, survival of the fittest. This is the first time in history where that scenario may come to fruition in a big way.

People have always been stuck with one or the other. Now, state-backed monies are forced to compete and maybe it will finally breed some innovation (of note, CBDCs).

If non-state currencies fail, so be it. If state currencies fail, so be it. But the competition is important imo.

[yellowapple]

As opposed to the incumbent socioeconomic system, wherein "people should be scammed out of as much money as possible" is the rule of thumb.

[grumple]

A system that has produced 25 million millionaires in the US alone is doing a bad job of scamming people out of money.

[yellowapple]

Sure, until you remember the hundreds of millions of people at whose expense those millionaires became such.

[Convolutional]

> punk as f*ck

Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.

> the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added

This has nothing to do with whether Bitcoin, or some MLM scheme, or Ponzi's postal reply coupons have value or not. For over a century they've all promoted the scam as power to the little guy.

Also if you're tired of fiat money, there are alternatives - like commodities. Precious metals like gold have had use value for millennia.

[maeln]

>> punk as f*ck

> Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.

I remember fondly the very early years of bitcoins, when it was worth nothing. I was probably too naïve at the time and didn't see the libertarian agenda of a lot of people, but it really did seem like a lot of the community was made of cryptopunks, excited with this idea of a cryptographic distributed virtual currency. Something that felt like it came straight out of a sci-fi novel. At the time, I think a lot of people (including me) thought that it could maybe help people in authoritarian country, make international transfer cheaper and faster, and digitize banks which felt so behind (I remember having to still call my bank on the phone to be able to do a lot of operations).

This sadly very promptly disappeared. It should have been obvious that a lot of rule surrounding banking where there for a reason. Cryptocurrencies became widely used (and recognized) for its criminal usage, facilitating ransomware, scams, money laundering, financing terrorism and other criminal network. Sure it was fun, and innocent enough, to be able to buy a bag of weed "anonymously" from the dark web, but sadly a lot of usage was darker than that. Authoritarian country, and again it should have been obvious, didn't have much trouble regulating their usage to a point that it couldn't be safely used in a amount that was not insignifiant. But most just didn't care because it didn't actually changed anything for them. And then years and years of development, but no significant progress seemed to be made. Transaction where impossible to scale and became massively expensive and the fundamental flaw of the technology seems to be insurmontable. Ethereum came with a nice promise also, the idea of a global decentralized machine. Program that could be run "on-the-chain" and enforced contract, promising to get rid of the need of a third party. But it also became obvious that it had all the disadvantage of having no third party and none of the advantage.

The crypto community also manage to prove to a massive extent the usefulness of regulation. There was a time where every day there were multiple new cryptocurrency with a nice shiny website, a white paper full of buzzword and not much else, promising a ICO in a few days. Then once the whole pump and dump was done, it vanished from existence. Over and over again. At some point ICO where replaced by NFT. Different name, same result. After the hype (a.k.a the marketing period), you were left with a useless and worthless digital token, and the only way to get rid of it was trying hard to convince other that it was worth anything.

Although I have to say, "fake it until you make it really" seems to be a core value of any crypto-enthusiate. Despite still having no actual usefulness, outside of being a vehicule for financial speculation, so much money was dumped into the whole ecosystem that it still look like a legitimate business. Crypto.com is (was?) a prime sponsor of F1, BtcTurk had advertisement plastered all over the newly built Atatürk Airport, NFT were "brought" by very famous people, ... And in many way it was successful enough to keep attracting investment, from very serious business-suit wearing people. Will they learn from FTX ? Why would they ? They didn't learn from Mt. Gox, Theter, Ripple, the many fraudulent ICO, the obvious pump and dump. If anything, everyone turns a blind eye because at this point, you either avoid crypto like the plague, you are part of the scam, or you are the one getting scammed.

I really miss those days where it seems like a sci-fi tech. In many ways, I still want to believe, but cryptocurrencies where born on a flawed premise. They are dead, they were always dead and they will remained dead.

[anigbrowl]

Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".

Oh there are lots of ways, you just have to accept that many people's first response to noticing your existence will be to get mad at you.

[themitigating]

Since when is anything having to do with the accumulation of wealth "punk"?

[stanleydrew]

I'm not a crypto fan, but I think the argument would be that Bitcoin in particular wasn't created as a means of wealth accumulation, but rather as a means of avoiding government interference in "money." That may have been misguided, but I think that's the argument.

[everfree]

Taking initiatives to protect your life from government meddling seems to track.

[tsol]

"Punk as fuck" is a good way to describe it, given the punk aesthetic and ethos have both been thoroughly absorbed and internalized by capitalism to become just another pay-to-play subculture controlled by the most powerful.