But do you actually disagree? Has the Crypto Revolution to date produced anything other than financial speculation and a slight warming of the Earth's surface?
Sure. Millions of people in the third world use crypto for payments. There's also Polymarket, very much recognized within the mainstream. And generally, crypto will continue to spawn new digital infrastructures in a sovereign space.
In addition to speculation, with longer time horizon people anywhere in the world can retain the value of what they earn by buying bitcoin with it. Also, mining it can make otherwise not cost-effective power plants cost-effective by buying the excess energy.
HN is full of engineers, founders, etc. who kind of resent that there’s a large class of people who got rich doing nothing and creating no value.
I get it but I’d say if you’re mad about Bitcoiners you should be a lot more angry about much of the financial industry and property speculators, two other huge groups that get rich without creating much value (or even by creating negative value).
There's a lot of value-free getting rich lately. People call it "late stage capitalism," but that frames capitalism as the villain when in fact it's a symptom of capitalism having created so much wealth we don't know what to do with it. The problem is that we're allocating it in incredibly dysfunctional ridiculous ways. I think what we're seeing is the symptoms of an early-stage post-scarcity society in denial.
The dysfunction arises from our clinging to scarcity-era puritanical ideas that only those who do a lot of work or do miraculous things "deserve" wealth. So we create all kinds of elaborate games and then convince ourselves that the winners of those games are somehow superhuman or superior in some Calvinist sense when they really just won a video game.
In a post-scarcity society baseline levels of wealth become like oxygen in the atmosphere. You don't "deserve" it. It's just there.
We are not quite post-scarcity yet, but we're close enough that craziness like $100k Bitcoin is possible. A few more key innovations will do it. Another order of magnitude drop in solar/battery prices and/or successful demonstration of a net-positive fusion power plant will do it. Embodied AIs that can do factory jobs will get us pretty far too, making the cost of manufactured goods almost equal to the cost of raw material inputs and energy inputs.
Believing that misallocation of capital means that we are living in a post scarcity society is a very techno optimist way of looking at things.
HN is unbelievably apolitical, apart from it's baseline tendency towards the left and whatever silicon valley demands people believe.
If you were anywhere near a post scarcity society (applies to USA) you wouldn't be hurtling towards national sovereign debt default at a rate of knots, and you wouldn't have the most expensive healthcare in the world.
As it happens, what appears to be a "post scarcity society" is just pathological misallocation of capital due to a political failure (that shaln't be spoken of here) that has the entire west circling the bowl at the moment.
I know of only one obvious dimension where the life standards of the average person have declined significantly since the 1970s: housing affordability. The entire developed world has a housing affordability crisis driven by cartel-like behavior among homeowners and bad zoning policy among other things. This is a policy failure resulting from bad regulation and undue influence / corruption.
Most other things have stayed largely the same or improved. Food is better and more varied, and while restaurants and some types of food have increased in cost they are still available. Health care is more expensive but also vastly better, especially when dealing with diseases like cancer or heart/circulatory issues. A cancer diagnosis is much less of a death sentence today than it was in the 1970s. Access to information is absurdly, exponentially better. Travel is probably about equally available. Communication capabilities are infinitely better. Appliances, gadgets, and other manufactured goods are significantly cheaper.
As person with both a finance and economics degrees, bitcoin is a successful fraud. I can list out how they use bitcoin private definitions for standard financial terms, how they do not disclose those differences in conversations with financial professionals using the standard terms and their definitions, and the bitcoin community itself is composed of people that expect someone else did the homework to validate this, but no one did. I did, it's not there. Bitcoin is a fraud designed to trap smart people that trust other smart people, who do not do their homework.
Devils advocate / steel man reply: isn't that what all currencies are?
Why does the Federal Reserve US dollar have value? Because people trust other smart people who say they've done the work and trust other smart people who work for the Federal Reserve.
Money is a thing people agree upon as a medium of exchange. It is not value itself. Value is the people, places, and things that make up the actual economy. Bitcoin has no value but neither does the USD. Can't eat them. Can't build a house with them.
My problem with Bitcoin is that I don't think a hyper-deflationary currency is a good idea. Bitcoin is even more deflationary than gold due to breakage (loss of keys) and a hard mining limit.
This is what I keep telling people. No government will use BTC because of this.There is a reason the US went off the gold standard, so they can print create money without causing inflation tied to money supply. Inflation now is not tied to money supply, but to money spending. (ie. if people did not spend money buying things there would be no increase in prices.) In the past, if you printed more money inflation would be immediate since it, in effect, immediately devalues the price of gold.
My big concern with bitcoin (like AI) is the energy costs. We have to figure those out. The biggest fraud we perpetuate is destroying the planet/climate for shareholder value. But if I was in an unstable country, I'd probably buy bitcoin (or dollars/euro dollars). Bitcoin is portable though so easier to get if your country imposes export controls.
I understand you disagree with the whole thing but blockchain has a lot of uses already. Most obvious ones are storing money or investment and transferring money. It factually works amazing for these. Assuming you believe in capitalism, people won’t put such enormous amounts of money on something if it has no use. Speculation also applies to stocks in the same way, there is no world where nvidia should be priced like this but people have some view on it and it effects the price. Same idea with blockchain, there are already use cases and it is expanding constantly. Also there is a ton of investment going into research of development of it, there is no reason why people shouldn’t invest in it by buying coins, it is factually a good investment so far if you are able to hold for long periods of time
Stats mean nothing when I use it every month for my savings and salary. As many people already do. I can also send money between countries very easily and cheap.
I understand this can be just as easily done with banking system in more developed countries but blockchain is much better other parts of the world
