The strong anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is still amusing. It goes way back - 13 years or more.
Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year.
If that shoe were on my foot, in addition to being annoyed I'd be curious about what I was missing.
Bitcoin doesn't have to do something useful for everyone to survive. It doesn't have to "replace fiat." It doesn't have to be a payment system. It doesn't have to "go to the moon." It doesn't even need an ETF. Bitcoin just needs to fill needs (or wants) not met by anything else. They don't even have to be your needs or wants.
Unlike every other attempt at electronic cash that came before it, Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government. I'd challenge people who hold negative views on Bitcoin to name some other systems for which this holds true.
I think that's the point that a lot of hostile commenters might be missing.
> I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin.
I thought cryptocurrency was an interesting and promising idea. But I got away from it around the time it became clear the entire space was overrun by wall-to-wall scamming. And it's safe to disregard anyone who doesn't acknowledge that.
If someone says "Yeah, it's wall-to-wall scamming, and other than that, the main use of it is for organized crime transactions, but there's this silver lining of X", then I might listen to X briefly, even though it seems irrelevant at this point.
If someone doesn't phrase their advocacy with acknowledging the massive BS, then I assume the person is just another scammer (and they might be even if they acknowledge it).
I guess what exactly do you define as scamming? In terms of outright fraud, I agree there's a lot. It shouldn't be super surprising that scammers tend to prefer decentralized permissionless financial rails, for the same reason that political extremists and pornographers were some of the biggest earliest users of the decentralized permissionless publishing rails of the early Internet.
But I wouldn't characterize all, or even most of crypto as scams. Gambling, maybe. Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling. Which you might argue is a bad thing, and certainly is dubious from a social standpoint. But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.
Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.
Now you might argue that all of these things are stupid and pointless and wastes of money, but that's a separate debate. Of the large projects in these categories almost none are outright scams. They're teams experimenting with new ways to run financial markets or move payments or train models or hedge inflation. Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.
> Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling.
They're practically indistinguishable from penny-stock scams, and they almost always involve a bunch of outright lies in their promotional materials; the only reason you can argue that many buyers aren't deceived is because lying is so rampant and expected in that space that people take it as given that the claims are going to be lies, which is hardly an argument that it's a healthy activity.
> Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.
All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in. The best cases people can come up with are sympathetic criminals like people evading capital controls. What minimal practical use of cryptocurrency there was is already in a clear decline; fewer and fewer stores are accepting it for payment, the few efforts at interesting crypto games have already collapsed...
> Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.
There's a big difference between "most" and "all". The startup sector as a whole has enough successes to balance out the failures and end up as positive ROI (and even then, a lot of startups really are scams - just not all of them).
> All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in.
The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.
Decentralized consensus is a fundamentally new computing primitive, similar to packet switched networks. Developing applications on top of new primitives is hard and long, and there will be a lot of time required just to build out usable infrastructure.
Turing complete smart contracts are only 7 years old. Layer 2 scaling is only two years old. Decentralized exchanges and other on-chain financial contracts about four years old.
Except with packet switching networks I can immediately point to the problem they are solving and can also make a guess how things will change when we create 000s of bigger and better ones. And the timeline is definitely not what you are making up here - the 70s had immense development of networks and protocols, every telco was building new networks across the country, it was most certainly not hobby stuff, there just weren't that many computers until the 80s.
What problem are we solving with decentralized consensus? How will things improve if we have a giant one? Say every mobile phone was a part of the consensus mechanism, churning Turing-complete smart contracts. Billions of nodes. What do we get out of that?
> The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.
By 1980 CompuServe had thousands of paying subscribers, both home and business - and I suspect they'd invested far less getting there than the amount of VC money that's gone into cryptocurrency. You can say the home users were "hobbyists", but they were getting real value out of the network; online chat or games might not have had a clear business purpose, but they were fun, and that's real value.
I've seen literally one niche for cryptocurrency that people seemed to actually enjoy for its own sake rather than as a crime tool or get rich quick scheme, cryptokitties, and that seems to have proven itself fundamentally unviable (either your collectibles are too cheap to be interesting, or they're too expensive to be fun). Cryptocurrency is not merely wildly unprofitable to date, it's not generating value and there is no indication that it ever will generate value.
I meet some people in crypto occasionally, and it's hilarious that most of them no longer talk about technologies, projects, applications - all they discuss is sentiment. "Oh, there's a wave of positive outlook", or "new patterns of participation are emerging". At least it's honest, I guess, instead of pretending that we are changing the world with DAOs or whatever, they are just sizing up the next bubble.
> But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.
But there's plenty of outright deceit. Many (most?) memecoins are some form of pump & dump. It doesn't really matter whether the code is openly public if the winners are chosen ahead of time by pre-allocating tokens.
Edit: Also actual gambling meets your criteria here. While the source code of slot machines is not public, it is typically audited to ensure it offers the odds that are advertised.
I agree that Bitcoin is that perfect storm of technological and financial obfuscation that's made the ideal air cover for charlatans.
However, organizations contributing to this space are trying to extend the functionality and utility of these technologies. For example, check out Chainlink https://chainlinklabs.com/research,
Other forms of interesting decentralization applications look no further than IPFS & Filecoin. https://protocol.ai/
You're not wrong; there are scams and a lot of snake oil, but don't let that deafen you to what direction thoughtful applied use of the technology can produce.
I view Bitcoin the same way I view Herbalife. I don't have any issue with the product. I'm bothered by the misleading claims made by proponents to benefit themselves.
I really didn't mind bitcoin before the price exploded, it was a curiosity and interesting experiment.
Since then, it has been used to transfer a lot of wealth using outright fraud, cons, and other criminal means.
I get paid a lot of money (fiat) to program digital payment systems, and have spent time understanding the underlying technology, as well as a holding a degree in economics. I get what crypto is and how it works, and I won't go near it.
Bitcoin isn't inherently dangerous, but the way that the crypto ecosystem convinces people to gamble on a zero sum game they don't understand is absolutely dangerous. For every bitcoin millionaire, there's someone that pumped real dollars into the system. Very real harms have, and continue, to be caused by bitcoin and crypto.
> Are you blaming bitcoin for gambling addiction and bad investing now?
No. I’m explicitly not blaming bitcoin. I’m blaming the humans that take advantage of others using the technical complexity of the crypto ecosystem to convince people that it is something that it isn’t.
The fact that you can wreck your life in Vegas or day-trading on Robinhood using dollars isn’t something I like either.
The whole point of the sentence you quoted is that bitcoin isn’t some magical wealth creator as it is frequently sold as. It’s to point out that it is a zero sum game; for every dollar someone has gotten out of the system, someone else has put a dollar in.
> for every dollar someone has gotten out of the system, someone else has put a dollar in.
That's a feature and in the fiat economy the same is almost true. If Bitcoin is a "zero sum game" then fiat is a "negative sum game" for the vast majority of participants whose money is debased.
That’s not how stocks work outside of daytrading/short term holding.
My ownership of a stock is a claim on a portion of a company’s assets and future productive addition to the economy. The stock market is a positive sum game. If I buy a share of ABC Gold mining company, it’s because I expect them to dig some actual gold out of the ground and expanding the economy. They can distribute a dividend to me after then selling that gold. No one has added any money to the stock market, but I am wealthier.
Same applies to bitcoin - no more net value needs to be invested into bitcoin and the USD price will continue to increase at ~7%, which is the rate at which the USD is being devalued through supply inflation over the last 100 years.
If I lent my bitcoin to ABC Gold Mining like you have, then I could expect to additionally receive interest on my loan.
Well Herbalife is a corporate entity, that has governing leadership that you can challenge its 'claims' because the corporate entity makes them, sells it to people who don't know better etc. Conceptually, that means that Herbalife gives people false information, they take that and perpetuate it in their MLM for their benefit.
Bitcoin, is piece of open source software that was released on the internet 13 years ago running all over the world. With no central governing entity, all driven by software consensus mechanisms.
Would you consider that you just don't like some of the organizations that have built themselves around this network making misleading claims? Rather than the technology itself?
I used a leaky analogy, so I'll explain more precisely what I mean. When someone tries to sell their MLM, they pretend that they want to help you get rich, but it's obvious that they just want to help themselves. I get the same vibe from Bitcoin enthusiasts. For example, they'll claim that Bitcoin will help the poor in countries with hyperinflation but that seems disingenuous. Perhaps it's not fair to expect the regular Bitcoin holder to actively help the unbanked thousands of miles away, but there doesn't even seem to be a curiosity in the entire Bitcoin community about whether it's actually it's actually used that way, let alone how to encourage adoption and what the macroeconomic implications of this.
I think a big component is definitely the bitterness that comes from tech savvy people being aware of when it was just getting started and watching it go from pennies to tens of thousands without buying any. I remember when it was on Slashdot all the time in the late 2000s, the hivemind agreed that it would never lead anywhere, and so I dismissed it as well. There were even Bitcoin Faucet sites where you could go and just get 5 BTC for free, no questions asked.
I still don't own any and don't want to, but there is the demon at the back of my head telling me that I could've just mined some or clicked the button on the faucet. After all we all knew about it. I know that most people wouldn't have held onto it for 14 years, but it's not a rational feeling.
The whole premise of burning energy just for “proof of work” is what I hate.
I work in architecture and year after year the industry is pushing to squeeze every last bit of energy efficiency out of everything. Meanwhile bitcoin is like “BURN SOME COAL TO ACCOMPLISH LITERALLY NOTHING USEFUL! AND KEEP DOING IT FOREVER!”
And the crypto people will always bring up “Mining gold just to make gold bars is a waste of energy too” but guess what I don’t buy gold bars either.
If people want to say “I’m a bitcoin fanboy” to justify it that’d be one thing, but there’s always this insinuation that any day it’s going to find its killer use case that isn’t already solved better by a centralized system instead of only existing to buy in hopes of the price goes up
The killer use case has existed from day 1: remove the middleman. That is banks, or goverments. That's it. There's literally nothing else to it.
Speculating on its value, while possible, has nothing to do with its purpose.
And yet here we are, discussing a Bitcoin ETF, which involves plenty of corporate middlemen and has no benefit to the Bitcoin community besides increasing Bitcoin's speculative value.
And I’m sure plenty of other people were buying and holding in exchanges like Coinbase already, instead of buying bitcoins in direct person-to-person cash transactions like the decentralization advocates imagine they will
Its purpose is to provide an escape hatch from fiat currency that steals people's wealth, available to everyone in the world, ultimately shutting down the global scam that is central banking.
It is the hardest money that mankind has ever seen, digital, with an issuance schedule that is set in stone - no select few people have the ability to effortlessly print it, stealing the wealth of the rest and corrupting the world at its core, causing third world poverty, endless wars, corrupt media etc.
It's very healthy to listen to both sides of an argument and theorise about conspiracies. It's the close-minded people programmed to laugh at them who need to self-reflect.
For one, a bitcoin wallet can't be seized by fiat by any 3-letter agency of any country.
A fair amount of it is speculative, but unlike a pure-speculative ponzi scheme it's rooted in some appreciation of intrinsic value.
I'm confused by this comment. What do you mean "seized by fiat"? Custodial wallets can and have been seized by government agencies. Cold wallet storage devices can and have been seized. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, only imputed value.
Nobody can order the bitcoin network to freeze assets of Johnny Wanted the way they can order banks and other financial institutions. Nobody can stop you getting paid even for non-criminal activities the way Mastercard/Visa do.
If you lose or surrender you private key - fair enough, but that's not the same.
Bitcoin is doing more to accelerate the adoption of wasted energy than any corporation on the planet. It is the buyer of last resort, open to anyone.
Compare that to the fiat system, do you get to vote for who runs the Federal Reserve? Can you verify the current supply of the US dollar or the maximum limit of dollars that can be printed?
Very privileged take to assume Bitcoin doesn't "ACCOMPLISH LITERALLY NOTHING USEFUL", when millions of people are using it to save and send for 15 years, and over 100 TRILLION dollars has been settled on the network.
> Have you not noticed the J/Ghash ratio over the years?
This is completely irrelevant because the protocol is designed to scale difficulty with the hashrate. The only benefit of improving J/Ghash is to get a leg up on other bitcoin miners.
Architecture isn't useful, it's a waist of resources. Every building should be identical, we just need one type of each building usage type, then we can get rid of the architects.
Imagine thinking you can prove that an argument is settled due to price movements.
Bitcoin may go to a billion and it won't change the fundamental premise:
You can have ALL the Bitcoin in the world, all of it, and if there's no buyer outside, nobody willing to trade anything for it you have nothing.
Now use the same argument with all the land in US, all the crop in India, all the fish in the Pacific, all the gold in Russia, all the wine in France, all the bakeries in Palermo, all the cars in Sydney.
You farm, you eat, you can make jewellery and tech, you drive.
And yes, it applies to US dollars too (albeit to a minor extent). If nobody wants it you can just stare at dead national heroes on paper, or burn it idk.
Wealth does not come from money, and of all the money, you choose to speculate on the exchange price of a virtual one.
The premise will never change and crypto cultists keep fooling themselves and finding many weak and illiterate to join their ranks.
But any price movement will not change the fundamental issue.
Luckily Bitcoin can be sold on a Sunday afternoon at market price with plenty of liquidity in seconds. Good luck lining up a deal like that with the items you listed.
> Bitcoin may go to a billion and it won't change the fundamental premise:
Haha, bitcoin never even attempted to solve your "fundamental premise", and never made any such promise. Bitcoin is like fiat money in that regard, and different in other regards.
Zero sum money transfer from suckers that think that Bitcoin will one day have a breakthrough or are driven by fear of missing out and greed - of course there is another factor of ten and you also can become rich without doing any work - to early[er] adopters. A pyramid scheme.
>Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government.
If you start from scratch with a non-exchange wallet and get paid in BTC for something to it, sure. But if you want to get in with any fiat, you're going through an exchange, which means KYC, which means you definitely need the approval of the exchange (and by proxy your local government/tax authority).
It was a simple solve by governments to get crypto controlled centrally by proxy for most users this way.
> If you start from scratch with a non-exchange wallet and get paid in BTC for something to it, sure.
I believe the original idea was that, to start from scratch, you would just leave the Bitcoin software running on your computer for a while, since that software not only hosted your wallet but also contained a miner. After a while, you would get lucky and receive 50 Bitcoins.
Of course, that stopped working once mining moved to FPGA and then to ASIC; even with GPU mining software, an individual user has no hope of mining any relevant amount of Bitcoin. That bootstrap mechanism is now completely dead, and the only way to get new Bitcoins is to get them from someone, buy them in an exchange, or invest lots of money in specialized Bitcoin mining hardware.
> the only way to get new Bitcoins is to get them from someone, buy them in an exchange, or invest lots of money in specialized Bitcoin mining hardware.
Have you heard of this new technology called a "J.O.B"? It enables people to trade labor for currency.
The next ten years will be about how to earn Bitcoin through skilled labor, not mining on your PC.
> It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year.
If that shoe were on my foot, in addition to being annoyed I'd be curious about what I was missing.
There are MLM’s that have been around for over 100 years. I feel strongly that they’re all complete scams, yet they live on. Maybe I’m closed minded for not joining Amway. But I think I’m just being sensible, tbh.
What you're missing is something can be criticized even if it fulfills some needs. Drugs, gambling, crimes all satisfy some people's needs but most people have negative view on them.
> People are salty they work in tech and don't understand bitcoin.
i smell sour grapes from those people. They saw bitcoin very early on, and gave it the dismissal way back in 2008/9. That missed "opportunity" continues to bias them into thinking that their initial assessment must still be correct (for dismissing it early), otherwise they'd have to admit their dismissal as being hugely mistaken.
Sure as long as you realize its simply an opinion and not act like it's a fact that it's bad. Fundamentally it feels like every time these threads open up on HN 70% of it is bad faith, repeat arguments.
Don't like Bitcoin's Proof of work properties, check out Ethereum. Don't think that everything needs to be on one central ledger? Check out Polkadot. It feels like so many commenters here put their heads in the sand about an entire class of technology because they're caught up in their opinion as fact.
An opinion backed by mainstream economic consensus but, yes an opinion. I do not need to utilize heterodox models to justify why a hyper deflationary monetary system is a bad idea. I can base this opinion off economic fundamentals and data points showing the negative impacts such a system would have. But you probably understand this, and have justifications for why the positives outweigh the negatives. I don’t reach that opinion and we likely won’t see eye to eye on that point. You probably made this account specifically to push back on the mainstream opinions of cryptocurrencies.
> Don't like Bitcoin's Proof of work properties, check out Ethereum.
Ethereum's move to a Proof-of-Stake system was the best thing to happen to the cryptocurrency world, from an ecological point of view; however, that does not change anything about Bitcoin's energy consumption.
Someone who objects to Bitcoin due to its excessive energy use will not stop disliking Bitcoin just because an unrelated cryptocurrency became better.
I object to Bitcoin on the fact that governments regulate money, so centralization is guaranteed. Wasting any effort on fake decentralization is objectively inferior because it adds to the cost with no benefit.
I understand it perfectly and loathe it, not for the reasons people typically do, but because what it pretends to be able to do it cannot, and actually does the opposite of.
First, re-read the comment you're replying to. They weren't talking about Bitcoin being used for drugs, they compared Bitcoin to drugs and crime, as the OP said all it needs to do is fulfill a need.
Second, the "you just don't understand it" argument is as old as Bitcoin itself. It's tiring. It's not new, it's not crazy complex...it's understood. It's just useless and ripe with scams.
Drugs and gambling do not hurt others. Throwing “crimes” in makes your reasoning weak. Where are you getting your data on the first two? I’m not sure you’re correct.
Please spend like 30 seconds of analytical thinking trying to poke holes in this. It's remarkably easy to disprove. The challenge is what if anything we choose to do about the harms that they can cause.
Neither drugs nor gambling, in and of itself, harms anyone but the individual doing it.
However, said individual could harm others in the persuit of drugs and gambling when their own income or savings are unable to satisfy their own cravings. But how is that any different from any other forms of harm from crime conducted for other reasons?
If you ever need an example of how drugs genuinely ruin things on a large scale read absolutely anything about the opium wars.
I do contend that "ruining families" is not a thing we should base policy on because it implies both a crazy amount of government intrusion into individual lives and because it imposes rules on everyone to make the nuclear family work.
> Unlike every other attempt at electronic cash that came before it, Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government.
But then can't you see the irony of writing that sentence when the article title is literally "Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC".
That's the thing that's so baffling to me - if you're saying BTC is so great that it doesn't need the support of government and social institutions, why the push so hard to get an ETF (multiple in fact!) when the rallying cry for crypto has always been "distributed, trustless currency".
On the contrary... bitcoin desperately needs this approval. The current (and future) price of BTC is absolutely predicated upon the greater fool theory.
The network is dependent on miners. Miners earn bitcoin but spend dollars to create it. They're dependent on price appreciation to provide the liquidity that sustains their business. Without this approval, who is going to continue to pay more for bitcoin?
> I'd challenge people who hold negative views on Bitcoin to name some other systems for which this holds true.
Pointless challenge, those aren't good qualities. Also money is worthless, unless you like looking at pieces of paper depicting death national heroes, it's worthless, don't understand why are bitcoiners fixated giving money value.
It's just meant to be traded not hoarded. It had a value when it was pegged to gold. Rich people have companies, real estate, airplanes, art, jewellery, bonds, but relatively little money.
Anyway, literally any other cryptocurrency share these properties. Some even technologically better, yet completely ignored.
> Bitcoin just needs to fill needs (or wants) not met by anything else.
That want being, in this case, the need to evade financial regulators and easily move large amounts of money untraceable. There is basically no other thing Bitcoin does better than traditional electronic cash, especially with the transaction fees reaching current values.
Is it a legitimate want? It's a complex question involving personal and political values, but let's just say not everyone who objects about crypto does so because they don't understand its real uses.
So you are comparing communication privacy to financial privacy for very large money transfers? As I've said, it's a question of political values, but I think you will find the vast majority of people not sharing that point of view.
Also, unlike Bitcoin, Signal ads strong privacy on top of a very functional base product.
Signal definitely makes life easier for terrorists and child predators; the question is whether it has decent uses whose benefits outweigh that cost. (And, while I'm cautiously in favour of cryptography, I don't think that question is by any means trivial). Cryptocurrency has no such positive use cases; the only case where it has an advantage over regular payment methods is crime.
paradoxically, bitcoin is the worse at this, since addresses are completely public. Unless you, like satoshi, keep the coin in the address and never spend it, any conversion to value that you can spend, such as cash, is going to be tracible.
> Is it a legitimate want?
yes. Unless you can prove criminality, there's the assumption of innocence.
Addresses in Bitcoin are pseudoanonymous. Many criminals have evaded prosecution for years (for example, the MtGox thieves) despite moving billions in the clear on the blockchain. You are feigning ignorance about the true nature of Bitcoin which is quite obviously designed to enable very strong privacy, as noted by even by its inventor in the original paper; let's not even discuss things like Monero and ZCash.
MtGox thieves evaded prosecution because no one was doing tracing back then. Chainalysis got started specifically to link all their activity and is now a giant graph connecting all the "pseudonymous" addresses. And the thieves laundered most of their stolen coin through exchanges, not chain transactions, strange how they didn't want that very strong privacy. There's none of that left on Bitcoin, it's been indexed, clustered and mapped.
Obviously there are technologies which enable complete privacy - and like tumblers, any that prove popular will be shut down, there's just too many negative externalities.
The state of bitcoin mixers was also very primitive back then, especially given this volume. Today, criminals can use things like the defunct ChipMixer, which distributes private keys funded in advance. So by definition there is nothing in the blockchain to follow, because the handover is done off chain.
The fact that ChipMixer was busted in an international law enforcement operation should indicate to you the nature of the beast. Just like in the case of SilkRoad, there are a myriad copy cats which are still online. It's a small piece of computer code anyone can run. So money laundry on bitcoin to a nearly untraceable level can be done by any service that can setup some kind of network connection and run a bit of computer code.
This is unprecedented in the history of finance and the main practical benefit of Bitcoin other than speculation.
I disagree with pretty much every point here, wow. ChipMixer provided a little bit of disconnect, but there was a research paper a while back that ran something like 5 transfers through it and managed to identify their mixing transactions with 90% precision. Law enforcement is most likely constantly tracking those, similar to how the NSA runs some significant percentage of Tor entry/exit nodes.
Second, recognize the enormous amount of trust required here - that the mixer will actually do proper randomization, that there will be a large number of participants, that they won't keep the logs, that they won't just up and leave with all the money. There's plenty of examples of somewhat established mixers that fail on some or all of these, and you're telling me that instead people will just send their money to be mixed by anyone that can setup a network connection and a bit of code?
I'm going to need more context here on the ChipMixer claims. Let's say a tracked party deposits amount A in CM style mixer, and then receives private keys corresponding to amounts B, C, D, E, F, G, previously deposited in the blockchain, which happen to add up to A minus a random 0 to 4% mixing fee. You have full view of A and know that it's being deposited to CM with 100% confidence.
As long as nothing moves on the blockchain, and the trust requirement you mention is fulfilled, I hope you agree that, save from some bug in the implementation, you will have no idea what private keys were received by the original owner of A. It's logically impossible, since CM has already pre-deposited many more other funded private keys (in fact, the entire previous volume of their laundry) and by the definition you don't know which ones of those were disclosed to the client A. The number of combinations is a factorial of the number previous clients, the vast majority you won't know.
So the attack scenario has to be more convoluted than that, perhaps the client immediately consolidates his received keys into a single address, perhaps we assume the attacker has perfect information over all amounts A deposited, which is clearly not practical etc. But that's another discussion altogether that deals with breaking a certain implementation of finding a launderer with a certain behavior. Research papers always make bold claims to raise interest, and often deliver crypto style failures, that require "only" 2^64 attempts, so the system is "broken".
But the issue we debated above - address pseudoanonymity enabling untraceable off chain asset swaps - is already settled if you agree to the second paragraph.
But we don't have to search for those keys in all of the deposits that CM ever made - only in the ones that stopped churning and mixing. Maybe they try to control the dynamics of their lots to be statistically indistinguishable from the withdrawals - but that requires a vastly larger pool of capital and continuous operational effort, and I have a hunch they do not in fact do that.
Furthermore, if you are a client, how long are you willing to keep your money in private keys that you know CM also has? Even if you don't mistrust them, you still need to worry about the exact scenario that happened - they get busted and all their private keys get seized. So chances are those amounts leave the CM network of addresses pretty quickly, even if they don't get added up in a single address. So now all that combinatorial explosion drops down to a pretty tractable k-NN classification problem.
I would advise against making strong statements like "logically impossible" about things that seem to require a lot of very narrow conditions like perfect actor behavior and strong stationarity in order to be true.
The point is, if law enforcement needs for the launderer to mess up after the invisible off chain transfer, or for the mixer to betray them, you have already conceded that address pseudoanymity is a strong, sometimes unremovable layer of privacy. Forensics exist even for physical cash, you can trace banknote serial numbers, lift physical fingerprints or DNA etc. Yet, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to leave people cross borders with sacks of money, there is wide agreement in our society that cash offers a privacy that is very conducive to anti-social actions. Bitcoin privacy is much, much stronger than physical cash, and pushed to 11 for things like Monero or Zcash.
In the restricted scenario provided, it really is logically impossible to know the ownership transfer happened. Your attack requires knowing all inputs into the laundry, which you won't have in the general case, they'll look like any other transfers in the blockchain.
Even if a mixer is busted, I can be pretty sure they abide by their public claim to not keep any history older than a few hours after the mixing is complete, secret keys and all, because it's not in their interest for such evidence of crimes to exist.
I have not conceded anything. Many crimes would be perfectly unsolvable if everyone did everything perfectly, and yet.. You are again using "logically impossible" while insisting on a very specific condition, "not knowing all inputs into the laundry", which is very much solvable to a high degree of certainty - CM mixes so hard that their addresses are all connected to each other - I just need to send them a single transfer, watch it tumble, then connect the dots, and then list all transactions leading into that giant hairball of connections. Just read the Justice Dept complaint against CM - it has an extensive inventory of specific customers and crime proceeds, using "Company A [..] tracking approximately 118,500 bitcoin addresses associated with ChipMixer". Now how would they do that if it was so logically impossible?
And why would having a private key to an output address that no one else has touched be an evidence to a crime? They probably only delete them after the user has transferred the funds out, if they even bother.
I don't know why you are so bought into Bitcoin privacy specifically, but it holds as much water as the privacy statements in the App Store - anyone with sufficient motivation and data analysis skills can poke right through it. Monero is likely stronger, but if it can't be cracked, then as soon as it becomes big enough it will get blocked.
Ah, I see, the real ChipMixer had a major flaw. I had no idea how the entire system operated, I used it just as an example to illustrate off-chain custody handovers. My "logically impossible" scenario was that the mixer has an array of addresses on the chain funded by previous customers, and when a new customer comes in it just runs a knapsack on that set and assigns them a subset of keys. Perhaps add a single layer of coinjoins to dilute each "really bad" incoming transaction, so clients won't directly get the bitcoins laundered by kidnappers and it's transparent to the whoever is doing the tracking that the coins have been laundered.
> why would having a private key to an output address that no one else has touched be an evidence to a crime?
An address is a hash over an ECDSA public key and a public key is a computational derivation of the random private key. If you have the private key, you can derive the associated address which is publicly connected on the blockchain to known proceeds of crime that have been laundered. That they were spent or not (by an another customer than the criminal) is irrelevant, it proves that you handled them.
The only losers in bitcoin are the ones that stopped. Any 5+ year holding has been ridiculously profitable.
In gambling, the longer you continue, the more certain it is that you will lose. Bitcoin is a uniquely ironic form of gambling if it's gambling at all.
That's silly. Anyone who's dollar cost averaging bitcoin buys over a long period of time has been incredibly well rewarded. BTC is up 146% over the last 12 months, and up 15x (!) over the last 5 years.
Even if you were slow and naïve and only jumped at the 2021 all-time high, and kept buying during the next 12 months (as one should when an asset you like goes down), you'd have made your money back and then some.
I didn't say buy-and-hold for 5 years. Feel free to do the math; dollar cost averaging over 5 years would still be one of the best investments in modern times.
> Any 5+ year holding has been ridiculously profitable.
The more remarkable a short history the more likely it is not sustainable: Beanie babies, tulips, etc.
In a zero sum investment for every win there is a loss. Bitcoin however is highly negative sum. For every win there are far more losses. Who do you suppose pays hourly train loads of coal turned into CO2? How many years now?
Your two examples, beanie babies(4-5 yrs bubble) and tulip mania (16 months) did not even last long enough for a 5 year comparison. Bitcoin is turning 15 this year.
Unlike every other attempt at electronic cash that came before it, Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government. I'd challenge people who hold negative views on Bitcoin to name some other systems for which this holds true.
For it to be useful it does. How else does one convert from fiat to btc and back again?
This ETF doesn't mean it's a replacement of cash either.
Just so many people are holding it and there's a lot of money in it, but still less than it's peak. It will probably just go down again without news, as it did before.
It's not that the BTC futures ( since 2018) changed much, I expect a similar end result of this.
Note : I went out in 2017 as I didn't saw it's original purpose being fulfilled and it still isn't after 14 years.
Nobody is talking about paying things with crypto anymore, as far as I know.
Hacker News was pro-crypto circa 2015 when Coinbase launched.
The change of the tone here is mainly because of the changed audience. Hacker News was originally a forum for founders and hackers. Now it is a general forum for salarymen software developers.
More like people are getting tired of being reminded of missing the boat year over year but they will always be missing the boat thinking it's the top this time.
Or those people who suffered loss buying it at the top need reasons that Bitcoin should suck.
I have a feeling Bitcoin discussions can get quite more interesting in here if it had no monetary values but people can be sensitive when money is involved.
> Unlike every other attempt at electronic cash that came before it, Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government. I'd challenge people who hold negative views on Bitcoin to name some other systems for which this holds true.
This isn't actually true, BTC requires a certain amount of subsidy every ten minutes from the global economy. If that subsidy is not forthcoming it ceases to function. That subsidy is constantly increasing in terms of purchasing power.
Further, the regulatory authorities of the world have complete power over the transactions that take place on the ledger, and pretty much full visibility into and out of the ledger when it comes to their controlled fiat currencies.
Neither of the above hold true for many other cryptocurrencies, but I'm not interested in shilling for them, because the entire cryptosphere as a whole is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, largely because of attempts to force the above status quo from BTC onto the remainder, which given the multitude thereof, and the ability for them to endlessly replicate and spawn, is basically doomed to failure.
Note: I am well aware that the popular opinion of BTC is not aware of much of the above, but I didn't say "people believe x" I just said "x".
HN should be a place where bitcoin improvement protocols are routinely discussed
There should have been taproot and schnorr discussions on the frontpage for years
What people are building as betas, there should be ordinals and inscription discussions about their technical implementation
But instead we get these surface level discussions about bitcoin or crypto for over a decade now. People completely missing that there are others who had the exact same information and said “okay this is how I can improve it to more closely fulfill that vision” instead of “harumph! that will never work and I dont like it so there’s that!
What Bitcoin is really missing before it can finally take off is yet another layer of fees and rent seeking; can't wait to pay 1.5%(!) of my portfolio every year in expenses :)
This, 100%. Bitcoin has proven its value already, and it's the only tool we have against authoritarian governments that print money and steal as much as possible with taxes. You can ask people in Argentina or Venezuela about that.
Once you realize that banks are very fragile and abusive, just having this alternative is important.
Banks can deny you access to your money on a whim. Compliance, glitch, failure, whatever. You can't use your money. You can't buy food. You can't pay rent. You can't buy tickets. You can't hire a lawyer.
It's nice to have something which is based on completely different principles.
I think you'll be amazed at the extent to which BTC will be able to be controlled by strong central governments. I'd be shocked if in ten years there's not granular control over which wallets contain "tainted" bitcoin and cannot be converted to fiat except through actual money laundering. There's been a lot of consolidation of the exchanges in USA, tons of KYC controls in place now, and old-school options like localbitcoins.com or craigslist have disappeared or been nerfed beyond recognizability.
If people no longer "need" to convert BTC to fiat, this would no longer be a point of a control, but until then, governments can already and will continue to grow how much they can control BTC flow.
What about the lightning network? Or Liquid sidechain? There are lots of people working on scaling bitcoin so that it can be used like cash (low fees and anonymous).
When a user receives a payment in Cash App or Strike over the lightning network there is no way to track where that bitcoin came from. I haven't really tested that out yet, but I find the idea that bitcoin can be the rails of transferring value pretty compelling. Most people can still transact in fiat but with trustless interoperability between banks and service providers. And of course if people are happy transacting in units of bitcoin it can all be done in a trust-minimized way (with tradeoffs available for convenience, etc...).
But to your point, the government could crack down on the app stores and service providers to not support this kinda stuff.
> The question is more like: Are OK with government control?
I simply doubt that my opinion, or even that of the majority of the public, would change the outcome of what the government decides to do. They seem to be on a pro-KYC/AML/FINRA/IRS path regardless of public opinion.
Many governments attempt to force their populations to keep their savings in the nation's currency, while aggressively devaluing the currency. The richer people in those countries tend to try to get out of it via other currency holdings in offshore accounts or real estate, but the poorer set don't generally have that option. The ability to opt out of that in a way that's harder to confiscate than eg physical gold/USD is very helpful to those people.
Me guessing (as somebody who is anti-crypto): they like how it returns ~50-100% year over year pretty much.
I swear I saw some super highly upvoted comments that read as normal + level-headed in r/CryptoCurrnecy that was like "if it goes from $45k -> $100k this year it isn't even that much"
Do you ever hear Warren Buffet saying "122% yearly returns are meh"?
Yep, crypto bros will get in bed with the same banks that screwed them over in 2008 if the end goal means that the price of their coin (ahem) bags.. go up.
The whole Bitcoin 'manifesto' and sticking it to the man is just a ruse.
Or the technologists that push these open source projects forward were abandoned by the very communities that used to celebrate disruptive technologies.
Bitcoin is wealth in the cloud. There's immense utility in being able to digitalize your wealth, including higher mobility and, since it is a decentralized network, assurance that it won't be inflated, confiscated and that you will have the freedom to transact it with whoever you want.
And yet if you were to visit Iran and attempt to access that wealth you'd quickly discover how little of that wealth is actually yours.
It's not just that it's in the cloud, it's the only form of wealth you can keep digitally AND only you have access and control over it.
Maybe that's fine because you're a good citizen who follows the rules, but some people are born into places where they don't get the privilege of a fair financial system, or the system changes on them.
But all this is circular logic. You can’t say something is valuable because it’s digital. Why is it wealth in the first place is the question. Wealth is something that represents concrete value.
Plenty of people have done that and captured some value. Bitcoin has the most secure network of its type and that has inherent value, it's also perceived to have value by millions of people around the world as opposed to your random fork.
Not sure if you see that it's your understanding of the world that's off here.
Money is a social construct. Other social constructs are countries and borders. They only exist due to social consensus and is a pure social construct. Social constructs do have real impact on your individual well-being though and should not be trivialized.
Gold was a currency and a store of wealth for a long time for multiple societies (even when most of those use cases you listed didn't exist). If only they had the knowledge and wisdom of epolanski from 2024 they wouldn't have made this mistake...
Pretty sure that every society that unilaterally adopted gold used it for jewellery first, and only started using it as a currency and store of wealth once its value had already been established.
Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity. Gold was introduced to humanity as an ornament, but eventually humans discovered a better use for it.
> Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity.
That is absolutely FALSE.
Good "money" requires a tiny bit of inflation, otherwise there's no incentive into spending, but hoarding.
When people start hoarding money, rather than spending or investing it, economy starts freezing.
Cryptocurrencies are a living example of that: there is absolutely NO incentive into using them to trade, only to hoard them. Why use them today if price goes up? Non sense. Indeed nobody uses them to trade, ever. There's less people spending Bitcoin for goods today, than there was in 2016 when the amount of people in the sector was a magnitude lower.
In fact, even the narrative on websites like Bitcoin's have long moved from the "currency" to the "store of value" argument.
You're compounding many wrong and false information and building an absolutely distorted idea of how money and finance works.
At the end of the day, that's history repeating itself. As wealthy people accumulate real wealth, poor people chase pieces of paper or ridiculous blockchain hashes.
> Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity.
There are all sorts of scarce things that we don't use for jewellery or see as particularly valuable. Gold has physical properties that make it specifically useful for jewellery (easy to work, doesn't tarnish, shiny, etc.).
BTC's value is the massive network securing it, and the trust in the brand's security and resistance to debasement. Its value lives in peoples' head, similar to many other assets.
These are some interesting points around its value, but it can absolutely be inflated, no? Given that most of our standards of value are tied to fiats, and that Bitcoin's exchange with said fiats is highly variable, the value of your crypto wealth can totally be out of your control.
Fortunately for most bitcoiners who got in early, it's been variable in a positive direction... But not for everyone.
Value fluctuation is not the same as asset inflation. The first relates to how much confidence people have on using BTC to represent their wealth in a given moment. The second is a decreasing of the asset's value keeping overall confidence constant.
> That's only a good thing in dictatorships, not in democracies.
Yes, Bitcoin allows you to be a dictator of your personal finances, compared to fiat, a "democratic" system, where people you never voted into power get to press a button and print as much money as they deem necessary to "stimulate" the economy.
I mean, it is the best performing asset of the last 10 years, so yeah, it seems pretty great to anyone who has a brain.
A 98% cash and 2% Bitcoin would beat the SPY returns for any 4 year period since inception. When making investments, its important to have a long term outlook. Do you just live day to day without any planning?
Nobody ever said that regulators move quickly. Bitcoin's only advantages come from temporary underregulation. After the regulation catches up, all that is left is the disadvantages.
The idea that Bitcoin can continue to operate with the disapproval of a functioning government is naive.
There's probably more comments promoting and defending Bitcoin on HN than ones questioning it.
The question I have is why do commenters feel the need to respond to any comment about Bitcoin that is not a (sometimes subtle) promotion or defense of it.
A reasonable person might think it's because Bitcoin is only valuable if increasingly more and more people buy it. If it's not increasingly popular or if, God forbid, everyone holding Bitcoin were to try to sell, all at once, it's Game Over. (Some folks will lose money and all Hell will break loose.)
If the first statement is false, and Bitcoin is valuable if it's unpopular, then there should be no logical reason why anyone would try to "defend" Bitcoin on HN. Why would anyone care. It's valuable even if no one is buying, right. If it lacks popularity, then this is of no consequence. Ignore it.
Alas, there is no way to test if second statement is true, i.e., it is Game Over if everyone cashes out their Bitcoin, other than this actually happening. Even still, there is no logical reason anyone would need to "defend" Bitcoin on HN if someone else believes this to be true. Why would it matter if other people hold or sell their Bitcoin.
And yet, there are consistently HN voters and commenters who seek to "defend" Bitcoin from anyone who has doubts or asks questions. That, in and of itself, may raise suspicions even more.
"Bitcoin doesn't have to do something useful for everyone to survive. It doesn;t have to "replace fiat". It doesn't have to be a payment system. It doesn't have to "go to the moon". It doesn't even need an ETF."
But somehow it needs to be constantly defended in every electronic discussion. It needs constant promotion. It needs hype.
No one can simply state "I am not interested in Bitcoin" in a discussion without triggering some "response". Regardless of the merits of Bitcoin, or absence of them, that is fscked up. Red flag.
In case anyone gets confused, I am not suggesting that any commenter literally states "I am not interested in Bitcoin" and nothing else. I am using a hypothetical example of a seemingly benign statement to illustrate the idea that _all_ comments about crypto which are not positive are quickly "countered" by Bitcoin true believers. Here is perhaps a better example. Someone states, in so many words, that Bitcoin requires large amounts of electricity. Is this untrue. It is explicitly negative. It seems quite benign yet this sort of comment will almost invariably trigger a "defense". To some, that is a red flag that there is something suspicous about these "arguments" that people feel compelled to make about Bitcoin.
Check out the film "Bitconned" if you can. Slow start but hilarious in the end. What happens when some petty criminals accidentally come in contact with hordes of "true believers". online. If I am not mistaken this was the SEC's first successful prosecution re: crypto.
>No one can simply state "I am not interested in Bitcoin" in a discussion without triggering some "response". Regardless of the merits of Bitcoin, or absence of them, that is fscked up. Red flag.
If the topic is some positive news about a technology (Bitcoin or otherwise), and your only contribution is "I am not interested in this" then you'll probably trigger a response. Might also be time to revisit the commenting guidelines.
> No one can simply state "I am not interested in Bitcoin" in a discussion without triggering some "response". Regardless of the merits of Bitcoin, or absence of them, that is fscked up. Red flag.
Lol this is ridiculous. If you popped up on a hacker news thread about abortion rights and said "I am not interested in abortion rights" would you also say it is a "red flag" regardless of the merits (or lack of merits) of abortion?
If you truly have no interest then lurk. But if you choose to talk (noone is forcing you to!) then don't be surprised at responses.
Well yeah, there's no need to defend it. Literally nothing would change. I'm just against bullshit arguments such as
"any random shitcoin did this, therefore BTC goes in the same bag," or
"no! We should absolutely live in a totalitarian dystopia and have governments that track every move we make. God forbid <money launderers> <terrorists> <some other bullshit>"
More likely, so-called "tech" companies will be the ones most interested in tracking every move/transaction, a practice already familiar to them, as they can put that information to commercial use, selling online ad services. Unlike the government, they have invested in the infrastructure to gather personal information about citizens and use that information _for profit_. Nor are they bound by the same restrictions on use of collected data from citizens and laws that can potentially protect citizens against government spying. If a government wants the data from "track every move" it's guaranteed they will, to the extent they feel the need, try to have Big Tech provide them with the information they seek. History has shown they have already been quite successful at getting the information they want with Big Tech's assistance. It's only going to get continually easier as more and more information becomes centralised in a few Big Tech companies.
You don't seem as curious as you say you'd be, framing all criticism as hostility or simple antagonism. I don't think you've considered what you're missing not trying to understand why people don't care about bitcoin.
They care enough to enter every HN thread that has positive news on the industry to shit on it. Valid criticism is fine, but insightful crypto criticism on HN is rare.
Fine, you don't like crypto. Say something new or insightful or skip the comment section.
My struggle with it is mainly that it doesn’t seem to accomplish any of its goals very well, while having really big downsides. A few examples:
It’s difficult to use it for circumventing government controls, since so many of the on and off ramps are subject to regulation and it’s difficult (and expensive) to transact truly anonymously.
It sucks as a store of value since it’s so volatile.
Similar to the point above, it’s increasing subject to government regulation (namely the US) in a de facto sense.
The UX sucks, and mistakes can be super punishing. If you make a mistake then you have no recourse and everyone will applaud the code working as intended, unless the mistake is really big in which case the “code as law” folks will fork the network to rollback the mistake.
In the same vein as the item above, scams are rampart and there is very little recourse once scammed. As a result, it’s tough to see actual widespread adoption as a currency (and not just a speculative asset sitting in a brokerage account somewhere) since the level of technical sophistication needed to use it as a currency without risking wiping yourself out puts it way out of reach of most people.
It sucks for transactions, since the fees are so high and make small transactions bit feasible.
Proof of work sucks and is super wasteful.
There are probably plenty of other ways it misses the mark I’m missing as well. It frustrates me because it feels so fatally flawed, but people take it so seriously. If popular sentiment was that BTC was just a fun thing to speculate on, in the same realm as TSLA or buying short dated calls on the VIX, I would be totally on board! But trying to act like it’s a serious currency that can compete with USD or whatever just seems somewhat delusional. I think blockchain and ETH style smart contracts are super cool tech, and could have super productive applications that legitimately make the world a better, more efficient place, but BTC in its current form doesn’t check that box for me.
That's absolutely not the case, HN is mostly people who think they're geniuses because they can program computers. Read the comments on any post about a topic you know a lot about and you'll see it's full of people talking very confidently about things they know very little about. There are of course some very smart people mixed in, but it's hard to pick those people out from the noise.
Most people who are observant are well aware that there’s deep and enduring demand for ways to gamble and speculate.
It’s really easy to recognize Bitcoin filling that role like the neighborhood numbers game, pachinko, online poker, and tulip investing all have at various times in history.
Real money, like USD or Pounds etc are social in their construct. People trust them. And they don't like, but will trust banks.
btc and other coins are 'trustless', yet hostile to use, and the ecosystem is filled with the most shady people on the planet all looking to scam our parents.
No one really trusts bitcoin. And that's on of the big bitcoin problems.
Also, it doesn't live up to any of it's hype. But others have enumerated all of those faults.
Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year.
If that shoe were on my foot, in addition to being annoyed I'd be curious about what I was missing.
Bitcoin doesn't have to do something useful for everyone to survive. It doesn't have to "replace fiat." It doesn't have to be a payment system. It doesn't have to "go to the moon." It doesn't even need an ETF. Bitcoin just needs to fill needs (or wants) not met by anything else. They don't even have to be your needs or wants.
Unlike every other attempt at electronic cash that came before it, Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government. I'd challenge people who hold negative views on Bitcoin to name some other systems for which this holds true.
I think that's the point that a lot of hostile commenters might be missing.