
Ask HN: Why are so many HN readers anti-crypto ? - Lordarminius
You would think that the HN population would be a subset of the crypto community, but I have found a lot of anti-crypto sentiment here.<p>I am studying the space and welcome all shades of view.
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salawat
Define Crypto.

If you're talking Cryptography, there's quite a few buffs of it here.

If you're talking cryptocurrency on the other hand...

My objections to it tend to be based around the mechanics of it. Particularly
anything based on Proof-of-work. Computation isn't free, and anything that
predicates being a store of value based on computational work being done
misses the point. We burn resources in order to facilitate that currency
exchange. When compared to say, printing off monopoly moneu, and getting a
bunch of buy in from other people to respect it (the basis of fiat currency),
your fiat currency wins out in that cash doesn't require anything but people's
faith they can trade it to be valuable.

Other than that, and the tendency for the technology to lead to pump and dump
schemes, I just find the tendency to think that making digital financial
transactions easier/more pervasive repugnant.

Digital payments may enable expansion into previously untappable markets, but
it hasn't in the years I've worked in the field, done much but create more
middlemen to extract fees without creating anything more than a negligible
convenience value for being in a position to process the transaction.

~~~
buboard
> your fiat currency wins out in that cash doesn't require anything but
> people's faith they can trade it

Disagree. Fiat money requires an enormous expenditure to maintain its economy.
You literally need an army and authorities to protect its use, prevent
stealing, prevent counterfeits, track it and tax it. This "fiat" is huge in
man-hours and time. With blockchain you have that for basically free. It takes
an enormous amount of effort and preparation to roll out a fiat (like the
Euro) while a kid in a basement can roll out her own ICO and (even though the
coins are useless) people can still trust that they wont lose them.

~~~
salawat
Except your cryptocurrency is bootstrapped on a highly-developed industrial
product that requires extensive infrastructure to build and keep operational
to the point you can _start_ moving to the crypto currency as a means of
exchange. Think about it. In terms of both physics and logistics, you need a
functioning economic landscape in order to bootstrap your cryptocurrency based
economic landscape; and even then, what have you really gained except that now
everyone else is maintaining a copy of everyone else in the ecosystems
financial transactions. A prospect really only palatable to those who have
something to gain by being able to parse all of that data and extract meaning.

Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature. Me paying Joe 5 bucks should not be
causing bit flips to have to happen in Japan. That _feels_ free nowadays,
given, but there is real and tangible cost there, even if it isn't necessarily
physical.

Furthermore, what about your failure modes? How do you reconcile partitions in
the network leading to divergent branches over time? Throwing out 24 hours
worth of transactions by half your users isn't a terribly good model.

How about manual reversion? Care to do a blockchain transaction on paper? No
processor mind!

Something I've learned about evaluating technological impacts is that the
"Loop on! Shiny! Cool!" aspects start to give way more and more as you scale
up to get replaced with "Well, crap, we really painted ourselves into a corner
here."

I can see the applicability of blockchain to niche applications; however, I'm
simply not sold at all as to it's desirability as an overarching means of
common economic exchange (e.g. currency).

It's a ledger, and a token. It's great for assigning some value to the token,
equating it to the national currency, and then tracking your economic
exchanges with the population of users who use your stuff.

In fact, I'm not so sure the big obsession with blockchain and crypto hasn't
been subverted from it's anti-establishment/anti-regulation roots because tech
companies have started to realize how valuable the giant chunks of financial
transaction data will become given enough other information to reason from.

I mean hell, this is just off the top of the head kinda stuff.

~~~
buboard
> is bootstrapped on a highly-developed industrial product that requires
> extensive infrastructure

You can deploy a TCP/IP network on a moon base powered by solar cells.
Infrastructure wise cryptos are way easier to deploy and maintain than having
to print paper, create banks, ATMs, safes etc etc.

> what have you really gained except that now everyone else is maintaining a
> copy

No what you have gained is that instead of needing an entire army so people
can trust your currency, you have an algorithm. Cryptos are the google of
money: people trust the algorithmn because they can't trust each other.

> How about manual reversion?

Of course ideal cryptocurrencies are immutable. It should be impossible to
reverse anything. But, markets usually build insurance services on top of it,
which cover for all the things that the blockchain does not - at a cost of
course. Still better than fiat.

> Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature.

And yet most of europe has either moved into the Euro, or pegged to it. And
global central banks are more in sync than ever before. Localization is
impossible and incompatible with globalized market.

Look at the Euro crisis, it was really caused by the lack of "local" central
banking, where none of the countries had the option to devalue their currency.
There was a lot of talk and pressure about getting out of it , yet it did not
happen and people still overwhelmingly support the euro , despite the
austerity. I think this shows the resilience of a deflationary currency (the
euro is close to it). IMHO, the euro proved to be a slightly better option
than devalued currencies , the devaluation of which would cause much more
severe problems in today's globalized, self-insufficient economies than it
would in the past.

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WheelsAtLarge
10 + years of Cryptocurrency hype and no killer or even useful app gives
people the idea that it's useless. A few people have gotten rich but there's
no single useful use.

I, for one, think that Crypto is still in its development stage so I still
think that eventually there will be a use for it but it needs to evolve and
stop being a drain on the world's energy resources too.

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Ultramanoid
Great fan, student, and user of, cryptography.

Not a fan at all of resource wasting speculation schemes for no good reason
whatsoever, that I wish would stop being called 'crypto'...

