Warn HN: I've never seen the HN community so delusional about a major tech area

[spir]

HN has been in my life since 2008.

I've seen many technology waves come and rise and go in the comment section of HN.

Almost invariably, the HN community is quite rational and curious.

Yet, the HN community's response to crypto is like nothing I've ever seen in my fifteen years of being here.

For most people in the HN community, crypto's perennial scams and dumps seem to have created an irrational level of disgust for the entire crypto industry. I believe this disgust has overwhelmed rationality and curiosity.

If you're an engineer, if you think of yourself as a curious person, but you haven't taken 30 minutes to read up on zero-knowledge proofs or stablecoin growth, or you haven't taken an hour to create a wallet and try products like Maker DAI, ENS, Compound, or Uniswap, then perhaps you aren't actually that curious, and/or you're letting your disgust of crypto scams get in the way of rational inquiry into crypto technology.

[mindcrime]

crypto's perennial scams and dumps seem to have created an irrational level of disgust for the entire crypto industry. I believe this disgust has overwhelmed rationality and curiosity.

I think there is some merit to what you say. I will certainly allow that "guilt by association" as a heuristic is a Real Thing in my mind, and all the scammy crypto-crap has put me off on anything involving "crypto", "nft", "web3", etc.

It's not just that though. It's still the case that, to date, nobody has presented me with any use-case where "crypto" in this sense really enables anything that can't be done another way. So far the best use-case for crypto still seems to be "buying drugs online in a vaguely pseudo-anonymous fashion". Oh, and conducting ransomware attacks, if you're into that sort of thing.

That said, I will take the following to heart:

but you haven't taken 30 minutes to read up on zero-knowledge proofs or stablecoin growth, or you haven't taken an hour to create a wallet and try products like Maker DAI, ENS, Compound, or Uniswap, then perhaps you aren't actually that curious, and/or you're letting your disgust of crypto scams get in the way of rational inquiry into crypto technology.

and commit to spending some time this week looking into these things, just to see if there's something there.

[spir → mindcrime]

cheers, and thank you!

[gregjor]

I spent more than thirty minutes reading about it and called bullshit. A decade into the promised crypto revolution all we have to show for it amounts to the scams and frauds you dismiss as noise. No significant blockchain applications exist. Crypto did not deliver on anonymity nor decentralization.

You can call the people who don’t share your views irrational and incurious if you want. Another more plausible explanation: we did read up and paid attention and came to a different conclusion than you have.

[uberman]

I'm an engineer, I'm a curious person. Why does it follow that I need to take 30 mins to create a snake-oil wallet? I'm curious sure, but mostly curious as to why someone thinks a hash to a public url of a gif of a catatonic monkey has any value at all let alone 6 figures.

[illiac786 → uberman]

That's being skeptical, not curious. Also a good quality, but not the one the OP is talking about.

[uberman → illiac786]

Curious does not require one to act recklessly. I'm a curious person but I'm not going to eat cat poop on the off chance that it is tasty.

[illiac786 → uberman]

nobody is saying anything about eating poop, just exploring and testing a technology without investing large sums of money in it. (Yes, that's possible)

[potamic]

Unfortunately, in the manner of your rant, you may have strengthened skeptics resolve to stay away from crypto even more. Besides the hundreds of scams abound, the past few years, a major theme of skepticism here has been around the use case of crypto in finance. I don't believe anybody's really had a discussion or a good case to make for the use of crypto in finance. When you have disagreements about your agreements or plain mistakes made, you need a resolution. This is what centralization offers. But instead of addressing the obvious, you join the queue of many peddlers before, who harp about the spectacle and chide people for not learning about the spectacle, while not showing the spectacle.

[h2odragon]

Mined lotsa dogecoin, watched the discussion of crypto with interest and amusement from then til now; I would say that my avoidance of the whole field in any serious way isn't "lack of rational inquiry" but informed and experienced realization that the only things crypto are being used for right now are mostly scams.

Perhaps more real use cases of these cool and curious mathematical tricks will emerge. Someday. But it will be a struggle for them to rise from the swampy miasma surrounding "crypto" generally.

[PaulHoule → h2odragon]

It’s an interesting Q why it took so long for Bitcoin to come around and part of it is that if you submitted a paper to a distributed systems conference about some system that couldn’t do more work with N+1 nodes than it could with N nodes they’d laugh at you.

[harikb]

(I know... I know... I shouldn't take the bait.)

Geeking out and being curious about blockchains is entirely different from ... (a) claiming they solve some real world problem (b) believing that non-reversable transactions or non-breakable contracts are a good thing.

This has nothing to do with technology involved

[PaulHoule]

Well… there was that time I broke the law in New York and bought $80 of ripple because I liked their technical vision and then…. Ripple turned out be a scam.

When brilliant people like Jimmy Kimmel and Paris Hilton are talking about something though, you really ought to take it seriously, no?

[gus_massa]

> taken 30 minutes to read up on zero-knowledge proofs

I didn't read it. It really sound interesting, but I'm not too much into cryptography. I may read it someday.

> or stablecoin growth,

Now idea what it means. I have some Argentinean pesos. AR$1=US$1, guaranty by the Argentinean government, forever.

> or you haven't taken an hour to create a wallet and try products like Maker DAI, ENS, Compound, or Uniswap,

It's like investing, isn't it? I can use the app of my bank to make investments. It has bigger interest rate, but I lose the guaranty of the government in case the bank closes.

[minimaxir]

> crypto's perennial scams and dumps seem to have created an irrational level of disgust

Said scams have invalidated any good-faith use of decentralized apps and will invalidate any attempt to publically market any related use case. The crypto community could have self-policed itself but it didn't.

[smoldesu]

I looked into it in 2014 and concluded it would be useless without meaningful abstraction between a user and a wallet. I checked back in 2 years ago and it was still the case.

Cryptocurrency is neat nerd porn, but there's a reason it still hasn't taken off after a decade of active development.

[Bubba2028]

Could not agree more with your post