
Ask HN: Where is there so much cryptocurrency skepticism on HN? - rloomba
Whenever anything cryptocurrency or blockchain is posted, nearly all the comments label it as a &quot;scam&quot; fueled by &quot;greed&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m a bit discouraged to engage in the comments due to extremely harsh and negative attitude towards the subject. Where is all this negativity and skepticism coming from? Are people pissed they missed out investing in Bitcoin or osmething? Obviously there are a ton of scams out there, but there are also a lot of technically interesting projects. I&#x27;m just trying to educate myself and learn more...not get rich quickly.
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schoen
I'll guess the following, as someone who generally appreciates cryptocurrency:

1\. People who speculatively hold an asset have an incentive to talk it up,
even misrepresenting their own beliefs about its merits and future value.
Thorstein Veblen wrote a whole thing about how this happened with real estate
in the U.S., where people felt immense social pressure to persuade the broader
public that a particular town was great because their assets and their
friends' assets were tied up in land in that town and they all wanted their
property values to rise. It's annoying for people if they feel that they're
getting a pitch that's ultimately inspired more by someone's (possibly
undisclosed) market position than by someone's honest assessment of the
situation.

2\. Altcoin creators and early investors stand to become rich, possibly at
other people's expense, if there is sufficient interest and enthusiasm for an
altcoin, even briefly, regardless of the altcoin's level of technical or
economic innovation.

3\. There's a lot of disagreement about economic ideology and policy issues
around cryptocurrencies, familiar examples including Bitcoin's intentionally
deflationary monetary policy and Monero and Zcash's privacy. This can add an
extra level of contention and disagreement in this area, sometimes in the
background, and people may be upset by the particular choices or policy goals
that others have adopted. (And a lot of people have diametrically opposed
beliefs about whether governments should have more or less power than they do
today to set monetary policy, to monitor transactions, and to prevent
particular entities from receiving payments.)

4\. We've seen with the DAO and the current Bitcoin forks that there's also
uncertainty about governance, including a conflict between people who want to
see purely code-based rules set at the outset and enforced forever, and people
who want some kind of community to have a way to amend the rules. To some
people, the failure of meta-consensus about governance and decisionmaking is a
long-term fatal flaw in cryptocurrency communities, and a way of glossing over
something really necessary.

5\. Cryptocurrencies have experienced high rates of frauds, scams, and theft
that suggest to some people that they can't be taken seriously as a real part
of the financial system, since the risks seem unacceptably high and there
aren't straightforward ways to insure against them. Most new projects don't
directly change this situation.

6\. We've also seen tons of projects adopting blockchains that _obviously don
't need them_ because the participants in the system already trust each other
or at least already trust a common authority that they agree is allowed to
adjudicate disputes. In that case, the common authority can maintain a central
database, or the participants can maintain a simpler distributed database and
appeal to the authority to resolve any disagreements. (Maybe there are some
cases where something blockchain-like is ultimately cheaper because it simply
reduces the frequency of disputes that need to be adjudicated, but in any case
a lot of people adopting blockchains seem to miss the point about trust and
decentralization.) So there is a skepticism that says that most often when
someone used a blockchain it was probably for buzzword-compliance.

~~~
lumberjack
7\. People hoped Bitcoin could me many things, but few hoped it would become
what it is. There is no real market for legitimate businesses using Bitcoin
unless you want to open another exchange. It just became a speculative asset
that is sometimes used by criminals. I think a lot of people were just
dismayed that it did not end up being something more than it is.

------
Nokinside
There in nothing wrong with block-chain technology. It's good idea that will
find uses.

The reason why I would came out at skeptic is because its proponents are full
of shit, political and naive to the extreme and they are against government by
default. Alternatively they are cynical businessmen riding with hype.

Proponents can't distinguish different roles of money. They have never heard
of basic things like: optimal currency region, connection between balance of
payments and exchange rate, smurfing ... They think they have discovered
something else than just new payment and transaction method.

~~~
rloomba
These are the types of comments I'm referring to, why all the hate and
assuming proponents of blockchain are full of shit? Were people this skeptical
in the late 90's when the internet was coming to fruition?

>Proponents can't distinguish different roles of money I'm pretty naive to
this stuff, but you just listed a bunch of terms I easily googled in 2 minutes
and now have a rudimentary understanding of. Sure there are tons of things to
study in the field of finance, but I think the main idea is just a more
decentralized setup and native "internet money".

~~~
wu-ikkyu
Perhaps it is the anti-authoritarian ideological foundations of Bitcoin that
triggers much of the animosity, as GP evidences:

>its proponents are full of shit, political and naive to the extreme and they
are against government by default.

It is the "faith" or confidence that many people have in their government
which gives psychological stability to their respective fiat currency, and
Bitcoin threatens that faith

~~~
rloomba
>It is the "faith" or confidence that many people have in their government
which gives psychological stability to their respective fiat currency, and
Bitcoin threatens that faith

Appreciate that comment, I think a lot of this crypto does threaten the status
quo, which makes people a bit uncomfortable.

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nxsynonym
Partly due to the fact that a majority of the crypto "articles" posted are 90%
speculation, ICO buzz pieces, or "is it too late?" lazy question threads.

Also partly due to the fact that the technology is being overshadowed by the
fin-tech bros looking to make a quick buck, and it's reflected in the quality
and quantity of crypto related articles that are being written in the first
place.

There are still some good discussions, but for the most part people are sick
of seeing the same crap repeated daily with no critical thought or real news
to speak of.

------
PaulHoule
A little more than a year ago I went to a conference on blockchains. [it makes
my blood boil how IBM has gotten people to say "cloud", "blockchain", etc.
Even people who think IBM is pants will still talk like babies when these
subjects come around]

One clear thing to me was that Ethereum had no security story.

Well, it has a story for the security of the base challenge, an actually
interesting story that if you have five different implementations that are
evenly used, a hole in one of them won't affect the whole system (unless it
reaches 50% adoption.)

However there is no security story for applications built on Ethereum. Thus
the DAO hack, the ICO hacks, etc. Experience shows that you can't trust the
run-of-the-mill programmer to get that kind of thing right, and you certainly
can't trust bankers, traders, and fin-tech brogrammers!

There are also interesting reasons why blockchains were only developed lately.
If you went to a distributed computing conference and presented a paper about
a distributed system which did not improve it's ability to handle workload at
all when you add more nodes, you'd get laughed out of the room.

And then there are the people who talk about "fiat currency" and who think
that Bitcoin is like gold. Bitcoin is not like gold. People wanted gold 4000
years ago and they will want it 4000 years from now unless we are extinct or
unless we find an asteroid which is made of solid gold. No way are people
going to want Bitcoin 4000 years from now.

~~~
schoen
> it makes my blood boil how IBM has gotten people to say "cloud",
> "blockchain", etc. Even people who think IBM is pants will still talk like
> babies when these subjects come around

Do you mean that they got people to start using these terms as mass (like
"water") or abstract (like "love") nouns without articles?

~~~
PaulHoule
Yes

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impendia
I don't describe cryptocurrency as a "scam" or "greed". Indeed, I find the
whole subject fascinating.

But, as to where skepticism comes from -- these so-called "coins" have been
conjured out of thin air, are not backed up by anything or anyone, and have no
intrinsic value. And yet somehow they have become worth over $100 billion.

Perhaps one or more cryptocurrencies will indeed emerge as a long-term store
of value. But I think that skepticism is a quite natural reaction.

------
SirLJ
Some people lived trough the dot com bubble...

And the dotcom bubble was better, because at least the stocks had liquidity
and were traded on established stock markets...

Missing on bitcoin is equal on missing on the power ball for me...

Basically I don't see anything in the crypto world yet, one day maybe when the
technology is mature and real shares are traded on real stock exchanges, but
right now, no thanks!

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dozzie
> Whenever anything cryptocurrency or blockchain is posted, nearly all the
> comments label it as a "scam" fueled by "greed".

When it's another blockchain-as-a-cloud-serverless-service, it's usually made
by cryptographic dilettantes who don't understand what is the blockchain's
function and just want to join the hype bandwagon.

