Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
We want curious conversation here. That can only happen when people say new things. Generic denunciations like what you posted here not only are nothing new, they're as repetitive as it gets.
And if you give the scammers a platform that's not useful for anything else than building endless variations of memecoins and productless fake-tech penny stocks, what is the expected output?
Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.
It's all scams. Even if the coin itself is not a total scam, the exchanges do some of the most shady things you can imagine. They'll actively trade against their customers. They'll do insider trading, rugpull their customers, gets "hacked" by an insider and steal all your coins, etc.
Even BTC and ETH are shady. ETH should have been classified as security. BTC is an environmental disaster and centralized by a few large miners.
I don't think that it's all a scam, but I do think that it gives scammers a vehicle to con people without oversight or regulation. They also end up with "real" money which can be spent.
The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.
>The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
Citation needed. Governance and finance absolutely need human judgment recovery edge cases such as "My house burnt down containing my ID (keys) and I need access to my bank account to rebuild it"
>The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.
And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.
> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.
And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.
As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.
> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
These are all scams, too. No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.
Same as email I mean most of it is scams and ads so who cares about the tech or other people actually using it not like we are in a place tech literate enough to seperate technology and its users beyond the absolute surface.
When I studied political science and economics in college we had a lot of really intriguing discussions around the rise of fiat currency, its pros and cons, its effect on global trade, etc. Some really well thought out opinions on both sides, from "nothing is real, who cares what this piece of paper means" to people who thought it was all a "globalist" scam and that we should be giving the grocer tiny pieces of gold in exchange for bread. This was before bitcoin existed.
Post-BTC it seems like anyone who uses the term "fiat" to describe currency in any non-academic setting is about to launch into some nonsensical "bitcoin fixes this" tirade, they think everything is some jewish space laser pyramid scheme, and you wonder if they have a sovereign citizen paper license plate on their car.
"Fiat is a pyramid scheme" is a dog whistle except the person blowing it doesn't know.
dang|9 months ago
We want curious conversation here. That can only happen when people say new things. Generic denunciations like what you posted here not only are nothing new, they're as repetitive as it gets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pantulis|9 months ago
pavlov|9 months ago
aurareturn|9 months ago
Even BTC and ETH are shady. ETH should have been classified as security. BTC is an environmental disaster and centralized by a few large miners.
fullstop|9 months ago
pydry|9 months ago
im not sure whether this is gresham's law or the dynamics of a lemon market in action or what though.
hbbio|9 months ago
The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.
Arainach|9 months ago
Citation needed. Governance and finance absolutely need human judgment recovery edge cases such as "My house burnt down containing my ID (keys) and I need access to my bank account to rebuild it"
HideousKojima|9 months ago
No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.
And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.
airstrike|9 months ago
DrScientist|9 months ago
Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.
And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.
As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.
ceejayoz|9 months ago
These are all scams, too. No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.
akimbostrawman|9 months ago
Hekin upvoted kind stranger!
internet_rand0|9 months ago
[deleted]
pc86|9 months ago
Post-BTC it seems like anyone who uses the term "fiat" to describe currency in any non-academic setting is about to launch into some nonsensical "bitcoin fixes this" tirade, they think everything is some jewish space laser pyramid scheme, and you wonder if they have a sovereign citizen paper license plate on their car.
"Fiat is a pyramid scheme" is a dog whistle except the person blowing it doesn't know.
neonbrain|9 months ago
jakupovic|9 months ago
NoOn3|9 months ago