[barking_biscuit]

I remember fondly participating in the hype around crypto in 2017 and going in on btc/eth and also building a mining rig etc. The discourse on HN back then is quite different from today. These days we've seen scam after scam, fraud after fraud, failure after failure. From a technology perspective it's neat, but the kinds of individuals it tends to attract make it seemingly not actually all that useful in wider society. These days I'm ultra skeptical of anything crypto.

[codehalo]

I don't know what "discourse" you are talking about. I've been reading about crypto on hacker news before bitcoin hit one dollar. Other than r/buttcoin and yahoo groups, this site has been one of the most anti crypto places you can visit, to the point of being an absolute embarrassment.

It has been a lesson to me about humans and intelligence since that time.

Still love the place though, but I learned never to let comments be the source of the things I need to investigate.

[bostonsre]

Could it be that a tech savvy community like hn largely understands the implications of, the actual utility of and can see through the hype of crypto currency? I would put my money on hn understanding crypto currency over any other community. It should probably be a red flag to true believers that hn is generally suspicious of it.

[JeremyNT]

I can't understand this sentiment at all. I feel like HN was absolutely part of the hype cycle.

It wasn't as bad as some forums, since some skeptical voices were present too, but there absolutely was a ton of breathless hype over the years.

Here's just one example, when stripe added bitcoin support [0]

I personally feel like HN sentiment finally "turned" on crypto only after some of the more egregious scams started going really mainstream - in the months leading up to and during the pandemic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9075945

[sillyfluke]

I distinctly remember the opposite to be the case -- that there was a positive eariy adopter hype cycle on this site for crypto in the early years.

I went back a decade and randomly clicked on a discussion and found most of the comments constructive and matter of fact. Perhaps I got lucky, but it lines up with my memory of the period.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5322752

[BLKNSLVR]

Human nature is a funny thing, and the kind of intelligence that attracts someone to the quality of discussion on HN doesn't appear to exclude them from some of the baser, competitively animalistic instincts still present down there in the basement of human DNA.

Personally, I think I can reason through a great number of things. But I still get depressed, angry, jealous, happy, enthused, etc. in ways that reason has to catch up to, before the instinctive emotion makes itself public - and sometimes reason does not or cannot catch up.

(Generally the positive ones I leave to run wild, but sometimes they need to be suppressed too).

Almost on the actual topic, I think cryptocurrency has proven it's use case in the global transfer of value without a centralised third party. And that, in itself, is pretty amazing. All the rest is the application of this technology having to work itself out.

The whole argument about criminal activity or porn or whatever is just proof of the use-case. The internet itself was accused of just being a conduit for porn not really that long ago.

Because it's related to "value (transfer)" means it should have been considered inevitable that it would attract, well, the kinds of people it has obviously and very publicly attracted. And that nicely ties off the loop of human nature...

[shermanyo]

I'm convinced if the internet was created today, most of HN would be faxing each other, decrying it as a scammers wasteland and useless technology..

[perceptronas]

Exactly my way of thinking. I do appreciate cryptocurrency innovations, but so many scams and frauds made it unappealing. I ignore almost everything related to crypto now. I think the breaking point for me was Ledger leak.

[staplers]

*finance and money in general attracts these individuals, not exclusive to crypto

[rsynnott]

Even by 2017 we'd seen plenty of scams and failures. My intro to crypto watching was the late progress and collapse of the Trendon Shavers Ponzi scheme in 2011/2012, followed by the collapse of MtGox in 2014. Heady days; current crypto collapses lack the same sense of drama. It's all a bit repetitive now.

HackerNews was weirdly credulous about this stuff for a weirdly long time, but it does seem to have shifted in the last few years.

[fallingknife]

All true, but I can't get from there to people shouldn't be allowed to make their own choices about what they buy.

[amanaplanacanal]

I'm not sure what you mean here. are you saying there shouldn't be any regulation? or something else?

[beambot]

Wait till you read about the characters, early failures, and ultimate "success" of the central banking "too big to fail" ponzi scheme. My favorite character is Jonh Law:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist)

[methodical]

Great point- these are reasons why we have the regulation we have today in our current banking system, and why any financial system that doesn't have any ability to be regulated (i.e. crypto) is massively problematic and ends up with 99% of people being fleeced out of their assets (as we've seen in the crypto space).