It's a subject that I am interested in and involved in yet I will never discuss it on Hacker News again. The attempts I made to genuinely interact related to crypto have been terrible on this website. It's unfortunate because I feel there is a very good discussion there regardless on whether you are for or against it but we don't get to see that discussion.
We have something much older then Bitcoin. It's a simple ledger who helped whom in the network. Simple case of earning points by helping others.
Economically, its complex. Coin creation is decentralised, everybody prints their own 'money'. The value of that help-currency is based on how connected you are to the globally connected transaction graph. Then we maintain fairness in this micro-economy against freeriders. See study with 160 million trust records and 95k users [1].
Interesting I'll have to study this. I'm curious how this fares in the face of well- resourced adversaries. Also funny that the guy complaining about crypto convos went straight into hate mode for "not quite crypto" without any research or support. Presumably y'all have thought through this.
I seem to remember a time when HN was much friendlier towards crypto.
But, you have to admit the crypto community hasn't done itself any favors: Hype and endless promises that never came to fruition, astronomical transaction fees, frictionful technologies, exhausting volume of promising ("world-changing!") projects that under delivered (putting it mildly), rug pulls, thefts, and other outright scams, massive use cases for money laundering and criminal activity.
Kind of hard to stay positive through all of that.
"Numerous other projects try to create a generic approach using an ICO for funding and promising the early adopters a dazzling return-on-investment. Tribler is different. rant warning. We are non-profit academics. We do not want to replace the old elite with a new crypto-currency elite. What is changed if we replace backroom deals, lobbyists, middleman, and legal monopolies with the tools of the new elite: algorithms, early investor rewards, proof-of-dominating-stake, and smart contracts? Replacing the analog world and breading digital-native inequality does not make the world a better place."
totally agreed, that's my problem with all of the bitcoin hype - it's mostly there to make the early investments more profitable which doesn't excite me much
> So like middlemen and the big businesses that exist now?
If we're talking about investing in currencies, anyone that could have made the same kind of investment in today's major currencies would have had to do it so long ago that they're dead now.
If we're talking about investing in smaller entities, then you have the opportunity to get on the ground level of a thousand companies every day. That's not something that needs crypto.
I like cryptography, the blockchain, decentralization etc. but the pitch of almost every ICO is- get in now and become massively rich (at the expense of people joining later), almost the exact same dynamic as investing in a company like Visa.
To be clear, I was referring to my parent comment about crypto discussion in general and was not making a judgement about this particular project.
But, yeah I relate to the comment in your last paragraph. There was a lot of of early talk about democratization, etc. but at the end of the day it seemed to be more about replacing the old centralized incumbents with new ones. Or, in some cases, just giving the old incumbents a new way to extend their incumbencies. There was really nothing to insulate the space from the latter. This all became really apparent during the "DeFi" craze.
I do think a lot of earnest folks got caught up in the hype and were sincerely invested in the idea of democratization. The scammers and grifters just seemed to overwhelm the idealism. The Web3 hype was probably the apotheosis, before it popped. What's interesting is how much VCs seemed to rush into that space, yet there was barely a whisper when it all came crashing down.
Kind of makes you wonder what it was really all about.
I get there is a lot of trash in the crypto finance space, but I just wanted to see and have conversations about the very fascinating technologies, ZK proofs, etc. Every time it comes up we just get drowned in a thought-terminating-cliche style discussion rehashing other (often entirely unrelated) events that happened in the past that were egregious or comical.
I hear you. Once the community turns in a certain direction, it can be hard to break through.
Some of the technologies were/are interesting. It just seemed that, even so, the applications never fully materialized. So the tech started to feel like solutions looking for problems. And, after a while, the excitement of the promise wears thin.
A lot of the proposed use cases were duplicative of existing capabilities and were frequently some variation of, "but, this is trustless/decentralized". I just don't think that was as compelling as assumed for most people who routinely give up their data, location, etc. in exchange for convenience. And, the crypto-based "solutions" frequently required tech experience and/or some inconvenience to onboard. Turns out, centralization is pretty convenient.
Then, after all of that, we're still left with some form of centralization in the form of node operators, foundations, etc.
So, there was frequently a gap between the tech and the social aspect.
Other use cases were a little grifty from the start.
> Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a clear sign of HN's bias.
Does "people don't like my idea, they must be biased" apply to murders, urethral sounding, and kicking puppies? Have you considered the possibility that some concepts earn hostility?
Ethereum is useless as a payment mechanism unless you like paying wildly varying fees, and therefore its benefits do not offset it (relatively less) energy use.
