[brianf0]

This is reductive. It may bear some resemblance to cash but it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

[onionisafruit]

A lot of us earned our right to be curmudgeons by getting excited about it ten years ago only to see it play out very differently from our expectations.

[deweller]

There was a lot of change-the-world ideology around bitcoin ten years ago. No it has not lived up to those perfect visions.

I don't think it is irrevocably broken. I for one think there is still a lot of potential in cryptocurrencies and public blockchains. I believe a credibly neutral store of value not in the control of any nation state is something that benefits the world.

Why can't we celebrate what is good and try to fix what is bad?

[bb88]

Basically your argument is "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good."

I think the issue I have is the crypto folk haven't wanted to fix any of it -- with the rare exception being ethereum moving to PoS. A lot of the "fixes" would break the "features".

[danShumway]

Exactly. Perfect is the enemy of the good, but sometimes terrible is also the enemy of the good. It's not that perfectionists are holding back the ecosystem, it's that the community is satisfied with terrible.

Cryptocurrency communities are aggressively hostile to improvement. Every chance to make the ecosystem better is met with pushback. It's funny you bring up PoS, because how much energy was spent (pun absolutely intended) by the Ethereum community fighting that change?

It doesn't make sense to celebrate the good and fix the bad in cryptocurrency because a nontrivial portion of its userbase actively wants it to keep its terrible qualities and will fight anyone tooth-and-nail that tries to fix its problems. It's exhausting to even have conversations about what parts of the ecosystem need improvement.

I mean, this project is still using Bitcoin, right? So clearly we're not going to fix the bad parts of cryptocurrency, because if y'all in the cryto-community were willing to fix any of the bad parts, Bitcoin of all the implementations wouldn't still somehow inexplicably be your most popular coin. Cryptocurrency is a system with a lot flaws, but its biggest problem that gets in the way of it turning into something useful is that its community that has internalized those flaws as strengths.

And honestly, that's the charitable interpretation. The less charitable interpretation is that there are a lot of bad actors in cryptocurrency communities that aren't even interested in building something useful in the first place, they're purely interested in furthering whatever scam they're working on at the moment. How much of the PoS fight was about genuine academic disagreement about centralization, and how much of that "disagreement" was just a cloak over "I think I have pretty good thing going on with this GPU farm and how dare you mess with that"?

[deweller]

There is a (loud) community of Bitcoin maximalists who fit this description for sure.

But there is a thriving ecosystem of developers who are very interested in improvement. The Ethereum (and level 2 chains) community has a culture of innovation and shipping features.

There are members of the broader Bitcoin ecosystem like this as well even if the core developers are not.

[V__]

I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. But it had over a decade to improve society and so far the main use case is: Trick people with tech-bro talk and then scam them.

[mjburgess]

Sorry, but can we just stop repeating the wildly unevidenced claims of the gullible and frauds?

Who are the 'underbanked' ? What are their needs? What are the current solutions?

There is nothing "there" in crypto. It's a scam. Go and obtain every textbook you can on amazon about blockchains, bitcoin, crypto systems etc. and investigate their authors.

I've just done that: they're all part of various crypto schemes. They all make these insane claims in passing. NONE provide any evidence, any argument, anything at all.

None provide an analysis of the current systems in question, the various alternatives, and so on -- none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem.

This is a profoundly manipulated market: all the numbers are fake, all the ideas are fake, all the people are fake.

[eimrine]

I downvoted because you are telling too loud worlds: you claim to read all the books, investigated all its authors, realized all of them has some crooked interest and especially because you fail to see any problem solved. You are such a liar.

[overthrow]

The fun part about such bombastic claims is they can be disproven with just one counterexample.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/us-government-enlists-usdc-f...

> US Government Enlists USDC for ‘Global Foreign Policy Objective’ in Venezuela: Circle CEO

Even the US government is willing to admit there are situations where crypto is the best option available.

[mjburgess]

Indeed -- all that's required is a single example.

> USD Coin (USDC) is a digital stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar.

Nothing is denominated in USDC, it isnt a currency (indeed, no cryptocurrency is a currency, since none are a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_account ).

The USD is the currency here.

So the mechanism here is that people in Venezuela have a route to obtaining USD without having to use the banking system because they can sell their USDC electronically.

What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?

Venezuela already has extensive digital payment systems, and there's lots of ways of getting money directly to people today. This USDC project was just a lobbied-for newspaper story.

The story above, as all of them, is a result of intense lobbying by shysters who use these throwaway-projects to pump the value of their assets. Stories like this come out all the time, usually within 5 years there's an embarrassing write up of all those involved.

I have no doubt a huge amount of money was wasted using the UDSC "option", enriching many of those involved. Articles like the above do not tell you about the alternatives, they're written to hype crypto.

This is what i mean about the "ideas market" in crypto being as fake as the prices market: it's all manipulated. All these stories are written and released by people profoundly invested in lying to you.

[overthrow]

> Venezuela already has extensive digital payment systems

Sure, but those systems had been sabotaged by a politican/dictator named Nicolás Maduro who rejected the results of an election.

> What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?

A decentralized payments system is one that cannot be shut down by Nicolás Maduro.

Do you think the Venezuelan crisis was just a big conspiracy theory?

[peterscbrown]

"...none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem."

The price of Bitcoin in 2013 was $200. Today it's $29,000. Wouldn't you say that, at a minimum, it's doing a good job of storing value in an inflationary environment? At best it is creating some spectacular wealth which is real.

[dS0rrow]

https://github.com/monero-project/research-lab/raw/master/wh...

[csomar]

It's okay. Only you is real.

[ursuscamp]

Bitcoin, specifically, is improving society in many ways, especially in Nigeria, Argentina, the Congo, etc. Even in the West, where our money is more stable and the benefits of it are less obvious, Bitcoin mining offers great benefits to energy grids.

[big_youth]

Bitcoin mining benefiting the energy grid is an absurd statement. I live in Texas and the bitcoin mines are messing up our grid by making energy more expensive during heatwaves and freezes and when shutdown we have to pay them!

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/15/crypto-energy-texas-... https://www.govtech.com/computing/bitcoin-mining-threatens-t... https://www.utilitydive.com/news/warren-bitcoin-texas-power-... https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/texas-bitcoin-miners-paid-shu...

[ursuscamp]

Bitcoin miners don't compete for the same energy as residential and most industrial uses. Mining isn't profitable unless energy is a fraction of the price that typical consumers pay. The effect is that Bitcoin miners act as energy buyers of last resort. In other words, they buy wasted energy.

Having a buyer of last resort is good for energy grids (or any product), not bad for them. It incentivizes grid build out. Instead of worrying about whether a particular energy development will have enough demand, they can work out a deal with Bitcoin miners to sell wasted energy to them.

Industrial users of power frequently work out power agreements that will pay them in the event that they are required to shut down. This is completely normal. The difference is that Bitcoin miners are EVEN MORE flexible in that they can shut down at a moment's notice, unlike manufacturing or smelting. Again, this is good for grids, not bad.

[big_youth]

Let me get this right, your argument is that miners are better than manufacturing or smelting? So that's how mining is beneficial to the energy grid. You bitcoin clowns are really on something.

Did you read a single article. Bitcoin miners ARE raising prices for Texas citizens.

Not to mention the noise issues: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-noise-drives-nei...

I gave up caring about bitcoin around 2014 after growing out of libertarian brain rot. And sold my last 5btc in 2021 after the superbowl commercial gave me the feeling the jig was up and the last suckers were in. The sooner you come to this realization the soon you can dedicate your time better uses. Good luck.

[ursuscamp]

Your articles don't say anything about raising electricity prices for consumers, except to speculate about it. At least the NYT piece recently on Bitcoin mining cited a study saying there was a 5% increase in electricity bills because of Bitcoin mining, even if it was using secret data.

Again, I would point out (not for you since your reasoning is clearly motivated, but for anyone else reading it) that Bitcoin miners overwhelmingly use electricity that would go to no other use, and thus is incredibly cheap, and would naturally be expected to have little to no effect on average electricity bills.

[lowkey]

Most Bitcoin energy contracts in Texas are structured as long-term pre-purchase agreements.

They incentivize the build out of green energy projects such as wind and solar. Projects that in many cases would never have happened without subsidies from Bitcoin miners.

When you say we have to pay them to shut down what you are really saying is that we have to pay them back for energy they already purchased.

The fact that this excess energy is available on demand to utilities ensures we have a more stable energy grid by serving as an energy storage system that we only pay for in times of severe demand.

[tsukikage]

> Bitcoin mining offers great benefits to energy grids.

In other news, breaking windows is great for the economy: it makes lots of work for glaziers!

[ursuscamp]

How is Bitcoin mining in any way a broken window?

[taeric]

"Trick people with ____ talk and then scam them" is just a financial thing. See the recent Bed, Bath, and Beyond news.

[arcticbull]

> I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked.

The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. Nobody with money has trouble accessing a bank account. There's tons of online-only bank accounts you can open, often with no fees and zero or limited minimum balance requirements. Ally or Schwab in the US. Internationally, there's Wise, and all sorts of regional options like M-Pesa in a number of African countries. Historically we've had postal banking.

The problem is a social one, for congress to solve.

It's akin to saying people are hungry because they don't have grocery bags. The issue isn't the lack of bag, it's lack of food to put into it.

[latchkey]

> The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money.

I spent 4 years in Vietnam before getting locked out due to covid. The last two were on a motorcycle traveling all over the country.

Women in the north have money. They store that wealth in gold. In order to keep it secure, they keep it in their teeth. [0]

These same women also have smart phones and really good and inexpensive 4g (probably 5g now) networking, because the government provides the telcom as a function of the military. Coverage is almost 100%, even in the most remote areas.

Those are the underbanked. They need security and they need a way to capitalize on their holdings (think collateralized Kiva loans). Crypto, today, provides that. I know it is true, because I'm doing it myself.

It is 2023, let's bring people out of the dark ages.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=vietnam+woman+gold+teeth

[arcticbull]

You should just show them wise.com where they can open a US dollar account. Wise today provides that too. The idea that you need a distributed ledger for this is straight up false and this is just trying to dredge up problems to solve for a technology that has not found any meaningful use case despite 15 years of flailing.

[V__]

> you need a distributed ledger for this

You don't need it. That doesn't mean it doesn't work as a solution. Not everyone can open a wise account. KYC makes it difficult for people without proper documents.

One can accept that most of crypto is bad, and still see that some people have some use for it (for now). Like, nuance is a thing.

[arcticbull]

And in exchange you get wild volatility swings and full financial freedom for criminals. Some things are just bad.

[latchkey]

> You should just show them wise.com where they can open a US dollar account.

These are women in the north of Vietnam who know nothing about US dollar accounts and don't even speak english.

[arcticbull]

It's localized.

[csomar]

This is a comment that says "I have no idea about the struggle of 4Bn+ people around the world when it comes to payments and banking, so I am just going to dismiss all these people as non-existent and argue that everything is fine here in the West".

[zinekeller]

This shows that contrary to your own assertion you are the one that actually don't know what you're talking about.

Technology-wise, most countries have faster methods of sending money than how US system works: FedNow is a very late welcome addition that analogous systems already exist in other countries for years, even in places where you don't expect (Nigeria, Myanmar and India of all places do have near real-time transactions). It's genuinely embarrassing that when FedNow was initially announced, most financial analysts and bankers have simply exclaimed "finally!" because that's how behind US is.

Society-wise, most people who are having monetary problems also have much more pressing life-or-death problems: there are danger where they are living (either due to conflicts or due to the general inhospitality of the place), they don't have access to clean water and food, they don't have decent work despite their best efforts, and they don't have a place to study and improve their skills. It doesn't help that their government tends to block improvements that will go to their citizens and just plunder their countries' resources. What problems does cryptocurrency solve here?

[arcticbull]

Ah yes my favorite counter-argument: check your privilege.

The GDP per capita of Burundi is $221. A couple years ago a single Bitcoin transaction cost $60. The thermodynamics of these kinds of systems make them dramatically more expensive than classical finance because you have to replicate the data so many times. The only reason a Bitcoin payment doesn't cost significantly more than that is nobody's using it, lol.

It's slow, it's inefficient, and worse yet, there's no authority to help try and stabilize the currency. The worst off are hurt the most by wild volatility swings, and crypto is volatility incarnate. The promise that volatility would decrease as a function of market cap simply did not materialize.

Enough with the silly privilege arguments, let's stick to facts.

I specifically called out M-PESA because it's a regional solution to an actual problem they have. [1] And not a blockchain in sight.

[1] https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-...

[latchkey]

> A couple years ago a single Bitcoin transaction cost $60.

Ah yes let's counter an argument with something that is a couple years old.

This was brief during a time of high usage, which has also been fixed. Today, the average bitcoin transaction cost is a couple dollars.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Let's also not forget that there are a lot more chains now, where the fees are pennies.

[overthrow]

Under-banked does not mean they have no money. They obviously have some money or they would starve. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck and give 3% of their wages to a check cashing service. If it were as easy as you seem to think for them to get a bank account, those check cashing businesses all around the country would not exist.

[arcticbull]

Indeed the problem is they don't have enough money. Regardless this is a problem for congress. If we're sure they have enough money, this has historically been solved with postal banking. Let's just re-start that. [1]

Check cashing isn't just about cashing the check, it's a predatory short-term lending facility. Actually cashing a check is a solved problem.

And again, not addressed by crypto.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...

[overthrow]

You're right, this is a job for the government... but the government isn't solving the problem. "Let's just" have the government do their job. Call me when that happens.

While we sit around waiting, the private sector stepped in with a (interim?) solution. What's wrong with that?

[arcticbull]

The (a) scams and (b) insane volatility.

The folks you are alluding to who fall into this category are the least sophisticated and most desperate. This makes them easy marks. They shouldn't be buying into unregistered securities to resolve their banking problems. That's how we got the Great Depression and why we not have an SEC.

Further, these folks are disproportionately affected by the insane volatility and high fees of the crypto space.

These so-called financial products are just proxies for US dollar liquidity in the global financial system. If we had to write a prospectus I don't know anyone who isn't a money manager who could figure out how to actually deploy this sensibly. Let alone a homeless person without an address. How are they to 'do their own research'?

Something that makes the problem worse isn't a substitute for a proper solution.

In the US you generally need an account at an AML/KYC exchange to buy crypto for dollars and a bank account, so already we're off to a bad start. Or you can use a bitcoin ATM, which costs like 20%, dramatically worse than predatory lenders.

[jacquesm]

> The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money.

They might have some money but they may not have a home address.

[dragonwriter]

> Wish Hacker News wasn’t so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

Is it curmudgeonly to be uninterested in searching for problems for an overhyped solution than is sadly lacking in them? Well, fine, then I’m happy to be a curmudgeon.

[pookha]

in my mind centralized banking that can turn off your finances for societal reasons (Jinping style) and fiat-currency-backed-by-drone strike are problems that need some kind of solution. Bitcoin has persisted through multiple dips and seems to be a competitor (solution).

[jfengel]

These problems don't seem to bother the vast majority of people. There are a few use cases where they can make a genuine difference, but they're swamped by the number of people using it to circumvent a valid and (reasonably) ethical law.

As for violence, that's literally one definition of government: a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It's not just currency that derives its value from that. It includes your own physical safety and all of the coordination that allows a densely-packed society to function.

If you wish to reconsider that, you'll have to go further back than trivia like currency. You'll have to reinvent everything about the social contract that makes government work. Otherwise you're just layering a band-aid on top of a much more significant basis of your daily life.

[Yizahi]

It's not a competitor because it can't scale at all and is a gigantic space heater too (which would be a point of discussion if the advertised functionality worked at least). So the guys governing bittoken network invented a lightning system. Which at close inspection is a highly centralised system, separate from the original bittoken network, and working exactly as current banks. People deposit btc in it, then bank (node) issues you some derivative IOUs which which you trade with others, then transactions are settled between banks (nodes) only.

Basically tokenbros are reinventing banks, only with zero oversight and governed from offshores. Amazing alternative I must say. /s

[PretzelPirate]

Exactly. The idea of cash is great: we can pay each other without intermediaries and we know that the payment we're receiving has the value it appears to.

Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom.

Digital cash that can give us the befits of paper money without the privacy drawbacks of CBDCs or 3rd party middlemen isn't a bad thing at all.

[ephbit]

> Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom.

As I understand it, the people developing GNU Taler, are trying to solve this problem and have come up with a promising system.

https://taler.net/en/

[ElevenLathe]

I'll bite: What are some of the multitude of ways that cryptocurrency can improve society if adopted?

[tphyahoo]

If bitcoin is adopted as reserve currency, it would innoculate against the existential risk of regional or even global hyperinflations.

Forever.

[ElevenLathe]

Inflation is an existential risk? When have we ever seen global hyperinflation?

[Yizahi]

Which society it would improve? No extradition offshores, with Giancarlo, Czao, Paolo, Machinski, Sun, Bankrun-Fraud and many others? Maybe so. The problem is that I belong to a different society.

[ufo]

We can also imagine the ways that Bitcoin can make society worse. Satscard already gives some suggestions in their proposed designs, several of which reference El Salvador.

[zinekeller]

Maybe it's because most of those people have actually sincerely thought about it but saw cryptocurrencies to be a worse solution than the current ones? Most cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies (just not derived from government trust) after all, and most currency problems stems from those questions of trust (so let's assume that everyone adopts one: it won't solve any societal problem).

[arcticbull]

> Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't.

That said this is a neat hack. Reminds me of what the Kong folks were doing, I bought a couple of bills as a sousvenir. [1]

[1] https://kong.cash/

[ephbit]

> I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't.

You did not specifically write it, but the way you plainly state ".. but it can't." makes it appear as if it were an evident fact that can be derived from simple reasoning available to everyone who spends some time thinking.

I'd say it is absolutely possible that "crypto" (or as I would narrow it down: Bitcoin) can improve society.

One can think of it this way: society/humanity can be seen as a very complicated board game (that's played simultaneously by all humans) with certain elements (cards, rules, ..). The rules somehow evolve during the game, some are stable some change, new elements get added from time to time.

The set of elements in the game at some certain point in time might strongly favour a very narrow set of participants which might already be in a very strong position (which could be seen as unfair). A new rule or other element in the game might counter/dampen the effects of the existing rules, so that after adding the new element there's now less tendency for concentration of success than before.

Technologies in the real world are like such new elements/rules in the game. New real world technologies (such as Bitcoin) may very well change the dynamic of the real world in a way that dampens various unfavourable outcomes.

No, one cannot easily prove whether Bitcoin does ineed have this effect.

But likewise, one cannot prove that Bitcoin certainly has only negative effects on humanity/society either.

[CrampusDestrus]

>it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger.

a dollar is a voucher for the US economy and the actual value was transferred on an immutable ledger, i.e. append-only physical reality of the universe

[mbesto]

> but it's more like a voucher

Vouchers already exist - they're called cashier checks.

> transferred on an immutable ledger.

Which isn't universally a good thing. If someone steals your voucher, there is no recourse. If someone steals a cashier's check, I can call the bank (and sovereign authorities).

Said differently, one is not equivocally better than the other. There's a tradeoff.

> Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

I wish crypto advocates would stop being such apologists on HN. It's not productive. Make your statement, explain your rationale and defend your position.

[taeric]

Stated this way, though, we reinvented credit/gift cards?