[barking_biscuit]

I remember fondly participating in the hype around crypto in 2017 and going in on btc/eth and also building a mining rig etc. The discourse on HN back then is quite different from today. These days we've seen scam after scam, fraud after fraud, failure after failure. From a technology perspective it's neat, but the kinds of individuals it tends to attract make it seemingly not actually all that useful in wider society. These days I'm ultra skeptical of anything crypto.

[codehalo]

I don't know what "discourse" you are talking about. I've been reading about crypto on hacker news before bitcoin hit one dollar. Other than r/buttcoin and yahoo groups, this site has been one of the most anti crypto places you can visit, to the point of being an absolute embarrassment.

It has been a lesson to me about humans and intelligence since that time.

Still love the place though, but I learned never to let comments be the source of the things I need to investigate.

[bostonsre]

Could it be that a tech savvy community like hn largely understands the implications of, the actual utility of and can see through the hype of crypto currency? I would put my money on hn understanding crypto currency over any other community. It should probably be a red flag to true believers that hn is generally suspicious of it.

[j0hnyl]

Imo, it's the opposite. I just think HN's anti-crypto sentiment just hows how "normie" this community is.

[TeMPOraL]

On the contrary. "Normies" were very positive about crypto, mostly because they were used by the crypto people from the early days, as fodder for their various get-rich-quick scams.

The "anti-crypto sentiment" that was the unwavering average sentiment on HN is, to me, a point of pride, and I'm thankful for it, because it inoculated me when I was most vulnerable - early on, where it wasn't obvious yet what type of people are promoting crypto and for what reasons.

[GoblinSlayer]

Anticrypto arguments like "it can be used for crime", "you have nothing to hide", "it's easier to give my credit card to the merchant" are obviously aligned with normie mentality.

[bostonsre]

Ignoring the fact that there is massive amounts of fraud and room for crime in the crypto currency space by denigrating the opposing viewpoint doesn't progress the conversation and just keeps the tribalism and fighting at the same levels. If you truly believe in crypto currency, why not try to address the concerns and push crypto currency in a direction that would ensure wider adoption?

[bostonsre]

Why do you think that the people that understand the technology generally have a negative view about it? Are "normies" just dense? Or do you think everything is based on jealousy?

What community that wouldn't have confirmation bias would understand crypto currency better? And what are their thoughts on it?

[j0hnyl]

The folks that I'm referring to as normies in this case, even though they might be technically literate, suffer from a lack of creativity. That's what makes them normies.

Personally, I'm fully against promoting crypto as an end all be all solution to economic problems the way that many scammers do. I'm even against trying to onboard the masses.

However, I see in crypto and smart contracts a green field of opportunity to experiment with unique forms and formats of human interaction using the medium of programmable money.

For example, I like how NFTs (despite many shortcomings) play with the concept of digital ownership. I also like how defi brings us unique financial instruments like flash loans, etc.

I think draconian regulation in this space will effectively squeeze a lot of these experiments out from under legitimate actors. It's a technology that is worth playing with. I think it's better to punish bad actors rather than raise the barrier to entry for the tech.

Of course you are right that enthusiasts of the technology would have a confirmation bias, but the opposite is also true. The confirmation bias here is that this is de facto bad.

[dlubarov]

I thought I understood the technology after reading the Bitcoin paper, but later realized that there's a lot more to it. See the ZeroCash/Zexe papers, ZK rollups, optimistic rollups, BFT literature like HotStuff, or scaling research like Block-STM.

Some HNers just aren't that interested in the use cases, which is fine. But others tend to critique decades-old technology, and don't seem interested in learning about modern solutions, since their minds are made up.

[bostonsre]

Yea, I'm not sure what proportion of the negative camp is negative because of issues in early iterations like power consumption used by bitcoin which is solved with newer tech and what proportion is negative due to the use cases themselves. I do think that a lot of the tech itself is pretty elegant but I'm less certain on whether it's the right solution. I also think the fact that many in the pro camp have investments in crypto currency can muddy the waters some and it's not clear whether a person in this camp believes it can be a proper technology that can benefit humanity or if they like it because it's a historically high growth investment where they are trying to make money currently.

At least for me, my main concerns are with the seemingly short sighted libertarian implementations that don't take into account the bad actors of this world. I think there are definitely some issues with our current financial system, but I think its like democracy in that it seems to be the least bad solution. I wouldn't want to live in a world without regulation of our financial markets. It is too easy for people to defraud the little guy and for criminal organizations to prosper. Do you think there are solutions in newer technologies for those concerns?

I feel like both sides should be able to agree that there are pros and cons to the different technologies and use cases, that there are some that are better for the pro camp and less negative for the against camp. Maybe pushing harder to make the cream rise to the top could make these conversations less tribal and divisive?

[JeremyNT]

I can't understand this sentiment at all. I feel like HN was absolutely part of the hype cycle.

It wasn't as bad as some forums, since some skeptical voices were present too, but there absolutely was a ton of breathless hype over the years.

Here's just one example, when stripe added bitcoin support [0]

I personally feel like HN sentiment finally "turned" on crypto only after some of the more egregious scams started going really mainstream - in the months leading up to and during the pandemic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9075945

[sillyfluke]

I distinctly remember the opposite to be the case -- that there was a positive eariy adopter hype cycle on this site for crypto in the early years.

I went back a decade and randomly clicked on a discussion and found most of the comments constructive and matter of fact. Perhaps I got lucky, but it lines up with my memory of the period.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5322752

[BLKNSLVR]

Human nature is a funny thing, and the kind of intelligence that attracts someone to the quality of discussion on HN doesn't appear to exclude them from some of the baser, competitively animalistic instincts still present down there in the basement of human DNA.

Personally, I think I can reason through a great number of things. But I still get depressed, angry, jealous, happy, enthused, etc. in ways that reason has to catch up to, before the instinctive emotion makes itself public - and sometimes reason does not or cannot catch up.

(Generally the positive ones I leave to run wild, but sometimes they need to be suppressed too).

Almost on the actual topic, I think cryptocurrency has proven it's use case in the global transfer of value without a centralised third party. And that, in itself, is pretty amazing. All the rest is the application of this technology having to work itself out.

The whole argument about criminal activity or porn or whatever is just proof of the use-case. The internet itself was accused of just being a conduit for porn not really that long ago.

Because it's related to "value (transfer)" means it should have been considered inevitable that it would attract, well, the kinds of people it has obviously and very publicly attracted. And that nicely ties off the loop of human nature...

[shermanyo]

I'm convinced if the internet was created today, most of HN would be faxing each other, decrying it as a scammers wasteland and useless technology..

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, if we had the previous Internet to go on.

It's a sobering moment when you realize that a lot of tech is actually net negative to you - not the least because it outsourced to you the work that previously was done, much more efficiently, by specialized labor.

[barking_biscuit]

This is my take too. If we knew then what we know now, we'd probably make different choices.

[perceptronas]

Exactly my way of thinking. I do appreciate cryptocurrency innovations, but so many scams and frauds made it unappealing. I ignore almost everything related to crypto now. I think the breaking point for me was Ledger leak.

[staplers]

*finance and money in general attracts these individuals, not exclusive to crypto

[rsynnott]

Even by 2017 we'd seen plenty of scams and failures. My intro to crypto watching was the late progress and collapse of the Trendon Shavers Ponzi scheme in 2011/2012, followed by the collapse of MtGox in 2014. Heady days; current crypto collapses lack the same sense of drama. It's all a bit repetitive now.

HackerNews was weirdly credulous about this stuff for a weirdly long time, but it does seem to have shifted in the last few years.

[fallingknife]

All true, but I can't get from there to people shouldn't be allowed to make their own choices about what they buy.

[amanaplanacanal]

I'm not sure what you mean here. are you saying there shouldn't be any regulation? or something else?

[fallingknife]

I feel like there should be enforcement against scams, and those people need to be punished harshly. But if you want to spend your money on something useless, that's not the government's business.

[beambot]

Wait till you read about the characters, early failures, and ultimate "success" of the central banking "too big to fail" ponzi scheme. My favorite character is Jonh Law:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist)

[methodical]

Great point- these are reasons why we have the regulation we have today in our current banking system, and why any financial system that doesn't have any ability to be regulated (i.e. crypto) is massively problematic and ends up with 99% of people being fleeced out of their assets (as we've seen in the crypto space).

[redsky880]

where are you getting this '99%' figure?

[methodical]

The number is clearly an exaggeration, and it's a bit embarrassing that I have to point that out. One of the few benefits of crypto is that it's difficult to trace (although certainly not impossible except for unique cases like XMR), so obviously nobody has the data to attest what percentage of people definitively have fallen victim to scams. However, what is known for certain is that people lost $14 billion to crypto scams last year (globally), with the average amount lost per person likely much higher than many other types of scams, considering the entire US lost $10 billion to all other types of scams last year, and the number of people in the crypto space is a small fraction of the US population. Keep in mind that the two numbers are globally vs the US alone, but I would presume the majority of the $14 billion lost were from US investors. I found more targeted studies that have numbers like 33% of people in crypto have fallen victim to scams, but I can't find the original study so I've omitted referencing it directly.