Eh maybe. Sometimes the whole sector really is just bunk. When the Armenian Ponzi schemes fell apart there weren't one or two that really were raking in massive drug profits like they said they were, there was just a whole lot of nothing.

I could give a shit less about internet points, but I do love hearing contrary opinions. So downvote until you’re heart’s content, but do please comment if you disagree?

I didn’t downvote you, but I’m personally pretty skeptical that there is anything of value for me that will come out of cryptocurrencies. Even pets.com offered value for customers, it just wasn’t profitable. For the case of Google, it was always clear that search engines provided value, but Google figured out how to do it way better than its competitors. I’ll be honest, I just haven’t seen a use case for cryptocurrencies that I actually want in my life.

So I’m also really skeptical of blockchain-panacea. But there are a lot of wicked smart people (like Turing winners and shit) working on the Byzantine distributed consensus problem. It’s by no means solved, but also not proven insoluble, so kind of a toss up. And even if crypto-shitcoin mania did nothing but fund successful research into that problem it would have manifold applications outside of cyber-money.

Cyber-money is also kind of cool in that conventional electronic securities markets (which are every bit as crooked btw) don’t really innovate much because there’s no Jobs/Wozniak version of being an electronic financial market participant. When that stuff gets more efficient, everyone’s 401k compounds a little faster. So as a farm league for ARCA there’s some value there.

But the main use case that speaks to me is going from “unbanked” to “quite reasonably banked” in remittance scenarios. I live in California and sadly we put most of our crap jobs on semi-legal folks from Central and South America. Speaks a bit to their superior moral fiber that they often work hard to send every spare dollar home. Difficult to do via SWIFT, easy to do via USDC.

So, no fanboy here, but it’s not all bullshit.

More efficient remittances is a problem that can be solved without the massive negative externalities of the crypto ecosystem.

“Banking the unbanked” is a core part of the crypto narrative, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of traction in the real world. El Salvador ought to be a showcase, since it’s a dollar economy (no local currency) and the government gave crypto wallets to everyone with a $30 free money incentive. Yet crypto remittances is only a few percent of the total, IIRC, and the wallets mostly go unused.

More regulation around crypto on the remittance sender side (USA / Europe) is inevitable, and that makes the case even weaker. A non-crypto startup is probably a better, nimbler disruptor for this market than one carrying the ideological and technological baggage of crypto.

What are the massive negative externalities? Port of of Work/Waste L1s like BTC and ETH burn a fuck ton of power, but it’s climate impact is mostly in places where sketchy municipal managers with cheap coal would be burning it anyhow.

They also drive massive interest in renewables and soak up a fuck ton of otherwise wasted renewable electricity. When the aluminum market tanked with COVID the ETH boom caused a net increase in Icelandic geothermal exploitation.

Dirty mid-level PRC officials in NK-adjacent, coal rich provinces are a problem, but a different problem than BTC mining.

There’s arguable nothing on earth keeping so much renewable energy in-demand, fully-loaded, at all possible times than blockchain.

So what’s your beef?

So burning all this power is actually "good" because... we would waste this energy otherwise? That's non-sense. Everything you just said is just made up and backed by absolutely no studies. And you would need studies to prove that because it goes against everything we know about energy. If our energy consumption is increasing, then new energy supply must come up to fill that gap, and more often than not, it's not renewable.

PoW blockchain mining is like the absolute sweet spot for surplus renewables: it’s time insensitive, energy-intensive, and fucking lucrative. I’m a little reluctant to write off anything putting massive upward pressure on photovoltaic efficiency.

I don’t remember where I read the thing about Iceland, but I was trying to buy a bunch of NVIDIA cards at the time and every supplier I spoke to was like: “Iceland bro, sorry”.

If you’re just against this thing by all means be against it. I’m certainly against parts of it. But whether some sketchy-ass coal from China gets used to mine BitCoin or gets shipped to NK to run whatever godawful shit they’re up to? I hope NK is just mining BTC, because I can think of about a zillion worse things they could be doing with off-the-books coal.

Ultimately HN isn’t a speculation society, and if you really think I’m in outer space on this tell me so and I’ll carve an hour or three out of a busy work week to pull all the footnotes and resoundingly corner you with facts and figures.

But if you just don’t like BitCoin? Well I don’t exactly love it either, and we can leave it at that.

If putting NVIDIA cards behind some solar panels or Icelandic geothermal is such a massively lucrative operation, why did NVIDIA recently report a 52% year-on-year decline in sales of its crypto mining GPUs? It doesn’t add up.

Based on the numbers I’ve seen, I’m inclined to believe that crypto mining on renewables mostly just isn’t anywhere near profitable. The big operators all seem to be taking advantage of cheap fossil fuels. Of course if we could ban that and force mining to surplus renewables only, then fine — but it seems a long way off.

So I don’t track this closely but I’m generally of the opinion (and do correct me) that NVIDIA’s anti-mining firmware tends to last ~1 day before someone turns it into a perfectly mining-suited card. So to the extent they’re breaking out crypto cards on the quarterly? Eh, I haven’t seen a 3090RTX on Amazon or at my Best Buy at MSRP a single time since it was released, though in fairness I sucked it up and bought the ones I needed at 3.5x MSRP some time ago, maybe it’s changed.

And as to mining on geo or PV or wind or whatever not being profitable? Wind blows at night, sun shines in Arizona, and geothermal is always on. I don’t think that it’s tough to get NVIDIA gear at retail because people are running a lot of Christmas lights. I think Ethermine is making a fucking mint, but like all such “no investors welcome” type ventures, I’m only speculating.

I suspect something will come of it but it won’t actually be blockchain in the end. The reason SWIFT is difficult has nothing to do with technological reasons.

There are both technological and non-technological reasons why you’re lucky to get an international wire done in less than 2-5 days even if you’re the kind of person who has a law firm retained.

I don’t mind people having the last word in general, but a vague and inaccurate swipe at one of several substantial points that I raised isn’t really HN style.

In the spirit of giving you the last word I’d like to invite you to reply substantially.

> an international wire done in less than 2-5 days

Uh... What? Every time I transfer money from my US bank account to my European bank account it's the same story. I put in the transfer at Chase, they go "Oh, sorry, the bank is closed now because it's after 3pm in New York, because that's apparently still a thing, but we'll transfer it first thing tomorrow morning."

At 6am New York time or whatever, their shitty batch job runs, and seconds later the money is available to me in my EU bank account.

A couple of hours later I then get an email from Chase telling me that the money has been sent and I should anticipate it in about three business days.

You don't know what you don't know, and most Americans simply have no idea how much US banks suck in an international comparison. SWIFT transfers are instant when your bank doesn't suck.

I’m aware that when both banks have KYC and a pre-existing account relationship on file between US and the EU it runs as smoothly as you’ve described (which is frankly not that smoothly).

Now try a new employee, or not being white, or a million other things. The conventional international money transfer scenarios start to get some serious grit in the gears.

If you hit even one of those potholes the USDC there in 15 minutes thing has already won.

By your own admission it’s already won if it’s after 5pm (not 3) Eastern.

24/7/365: 15 minutes, 5 bucks or 50 million.

That’s better than SWIFT for you at dinner time, and for a lot of people ever.

> you’re lucky to get an international wire done in less than 2-5 days

LOL. Money can be sent internationally in a lot of places instantly. Hell, I've transferred six figures between the UK and Australia recently as well, and never waited more than a handful of hours for the mone to arrive.

This is such an enormous non-use-case for cryptocurrency it's hilarious.

> There are both technological and non-technological reasons why you’re lucky to get an international wire done in less than 2-5 days

What are the technological reasons? I can transfer EUR between different euro countries in a matter of minutes. I thought that transfers were only ever slow because of regulations, AML etc.

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about regarding international wires.

I clearly need a referral to your bankers!

You like to be snarky but it is true, you have no idea what you're talking about and it's showing. Anyone with a wise.com account can transfer fairly quickly, this problem has been solved by consumer tools a long time ago.

Jesus. I was being playful so I didn’t have to be impatient.

There is a tremendous variance in both domestic and international wire transfer complexity. If you’re an upstanding white guy with KYC in place on two banks that know each other it can take place quite quickly, unless it’s more than $10,000 in which case you’re most likely going through some additional security audit. A text if you’re lucky, a phone call asking which 2 of 5 addresses you’ve held in the last 10 years, or just an unpredictable delay.

None of this is simple or consistent or Gaussian distributed, and to the extent that I oversimplified for brevity I apologize.

I don’t think you know nothing.

But you said I did, and if that’s your true opinion? Then you can fuck right off can’t you?

I appreciate that it’s all but illegal to suggest that there might be some nuance to the whole Byzantine consensus/blockchain/cyber-money thing instead of just throwing rotten vegetables at it.

I don’t own cryptocurrency, I don’t stand to profit from anyone buying it. I find it interesting and not a 1-bit topic.

But it does tend to draw 1-bit people like hogs to a trough, and after the relentless gang-tackle by literally dozens of 1-bit minds for suggesting that there’s some substantially interesting subject matter here: I’m kind of in a place of: if you think my curiosity is not only misplaced but offensive, then fuck off and go do something more useful with your day.

> But the main use case that speaks to me is going from “unbanked” to “quite reasonably banked” in remittance scenarios.

You really need to look at solutions like M-Pesa. This feels like a solved problem.

I’ll check it out! Thanks for the pointer. I don’t have a personal need for a remittance solution (bachelor without much family), but given my geography I bump into people who do with some frequency.

Bitcoin offers "value" too - in the market economy sense. It allows you to buy illegal products and services on the DarkNet and do so anonymously (if you use one of the Bitcoin "washing" services which make it impossible to track the transfer back to you).

That is a major "value" for some people and the reason why they buy Bitcoin.

There is clearly a major use case for “cyber-money” as the new cash. What we used to call freedom we now call “privacy” and while BTC L1 is not all that private really, it at a minimum makes people feel like they have more privacy than using their Visa and not bothering to email the NSA their bank statement directly.

If they’re buying drugs for personal use? I’ve got no beef with that, the various legislatures are constantly changing their minds about that, who am I to judge?

If they’re trying to buy a hit on someone? I’m sure the authorities are on top of that with or without BitCoin.

As you can read on my sibling reply I think it’s more nuanced even than that, but to play Devil’s Advocate: even if BitCoin’s use case was only to seem a little more like cash and therefore feel a little less crowded by the equation group putting full-take on every traffic light they drive past, is that evil or bad or a scam?

Fuck I’d pay a lot more than gas fees for a truly private phone call.

It is fine to say "Yeah, yeah, I've already heard all this skepticism" but it is ridiculous to then make the leap "and therefore all of you should stop saying this stuff," which is what your comment reads like. Also, why are you singling out skepticism? Shilling is okay? Why was your comment not just "I can't believe people are still passionate about crypto, I am bored with it, you should be too."

I’ve made so many comments about why I wish we could go back to arguing about Rust vs C++ or whatever. This thing has been done to death, and the signal-to-noise ratio on it is one of the few instances where HN falls below the Reddit median.

People have a real chip on their shoulder about not being rich from owning BTC. I can identify more than most, I personally know a lot of people who have poo that doesn’t stink from owning BTC.

But it’s a deeper issue: people on here are wired up as hell over anyone who made serious cash. Which is super weird given that everyone’s all Ayn Rand.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll (unfortunately) have to say it again: the only kind of getting rich on here that’s not some kind of sour grapes is via a YC company. Because no one wants a comment history that’s going to fuck up their YC app.

And it’s so ironic because if you breathe a bad word about Ayn Rand you get downvoted to grey.

Those conversations still happen, under those posts. They might even happen more often now. I also vastly prefer those.

I'm on here a bunch and I don't see what you mean with the ad hominems. Why guess at peoples motives anyways? Even if they are indeed just jealous, I'm not sure skepticism becomes invalidated when a bad motive is established. "You almost had me convinced I was wrong but then I realized you were simply jealous." Surely we live in a world where lots of good and true things can be attributed to shit motives. That also applies to skepticism.

I think you’ve made a fair criticism: my argument is sort of “two-wrongs-not-making-a-right” at worst and badly under-contextualized at best.

There’s been a shift in tone on here over a period of time I couldn’t precisely identify, years at least.

The technical debates always got, uh, quite spirited at times, but there was a sort of “hey, so-and-so did well, good for them. With a little luck it’ll be my turn before long.”

A kind of recognition that while a little envy is only human, it’s still in the best interest of everyone to build rungs on the ladder rather than kick them out.

And that’s not completely gone, but there is this creeping zero-sum kind of sentiment that just seems to be growing over time. This kind of narrowing of all bad feelings onto lucrative/prosperous people and ventures. There are some godawful industries in the world: finance, pharma, health insurance, big agribusiness, lobbyism, the friggin Sackler family, whatever Blackwater/Xe is calling themselves now.

But that stuff is discussed quite rationally. OTOH recommender systems, internet ads, crypto-money: people get really, really heated up about that stuff.

I’m open to alternative theories than the one I’ve presented, but the way I see it mass murder via OxyContin is a way bigger deal than cryptocurrency and FB ads put together.

I don’t know how popular Alice (better known as Ayn) is around here. I disagree with a lot of her philosophy and am not charitable with my time to her fans, and I can’t say for certain I’m in a minority. The HN you get really depends on what threads you’re in, and it doesn’t surprise me that her fans show up in crypto threads; that said, I would expect (hope?) off-topic badmouthing of random people to attract downvotes in most threads.

It’s always a pleasure to run into someone who isn’t playing to the crowd. The ceaseless running gang-tackle of people who haven’t read very much does get tiring at times.

Good day to you.

> People have a real chip on their shoulder about not being rich from owning BTC.

That is a pretty bad read of the situation. As far as I can tell, most criticism here is from the perspective of "thank goodness I didn't _lose_ money on something so risky.

I don't doubt that there are people like that on here, but you definitely seem like you're projecting.

> and I’ll (unfortunately) have to say it again

No, really, you don't have to.

Let me rephrase: I have a bit of a compulsive personality on a number of dimensions, one of which is “someone is wrong on the Internet!” in the XKCD sense.

Anything to do with crypto on HN’s front page is going to be tripping over itself about whether it can be more flagrantly wrong about finance or distributed systems research.

I’m not like a recognized expert in either thing, but, I’m north of intermediate in both, and this shit drives me up the wall.

> whether it can be more flagrantly wrong about finance or distributed systems research

It's funny, because cryptocurrency 'investors' often seem to occupy the intersection between those naive on economics and those naive about technology (particularly distributed systems and databases).

I don’t own or trade cryptocurrency at all, I’m certainly not an investor in it.

But aggressive ignorance does get my dander up, so I waste time on these kinds of pointless threads fighting a losing battle against people who are just mad at BitCoin or whatever.

But you yourself are parroting pro-bitcoin ignorance, in the form of your points about bank transfer and other things. This is something that gets my dander up.

Your assertions like "there will be one or two real things that will make it."

There might be, or it might all turn out to have been a giant waste of time and resources.

International remittances are not problematic because we don't have the tech and we're all crying out for a blockchain and a volatile intermediate asset, but (where they even are still problematic at all) because of bureaucracy.

Your point about energy might be the worst - for a start Bitcoin is actually becoming dirtier, as large portions of mining moved from China to Kazakhstan last year, and are relying on the local coal infrastructure. And the second point, that it somehow drives adoption of renewables - the world as a whole is trying to switch to cleaner energy. We already have massive pressure and demand in the entire energy market as countries try to switch away from fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel power plants are either getting life extensions or just plain being brought back online to service the mining market - https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-l...

So, you wanna talk about aggressive ignorance, maybe address the log in your own eye?

Huh. Surely there’s not that many angry Ayn Randers on here. I presume most who are are teens without much life experience.

That’s quite a fair point, I tend to use Ayn Rand as a bit of a shorthand for folks who are wildly free-market but only in very specific verticals. She’s probably the most effective lobbyist against social welfare who wrote her missives literally on the dole.

My reflex to her as an example is only reinforced by her close association with Alan Greenspan who so successfully dismantled all the business-cycle shock absorbers that it’s been a real rollercoaster ever since, and who had the gall to play word games with Congress on television when questioned in that infamous testimony about the complete and utter empirical disproof of basically every policy decision he and Summers ever cornered in a dark all off K street over.

Really quite an unpleasant scene.