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Comment on ‘I know about lying, I do it for a living’: Ben McKenzie as crypto criticparent

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I'm confused, what damage? Dug in about what?

The damage to ordinary people. The damage to the crypto ecosystem. The damage inflicted by huge players in the crypto ecosystem, on all parties involved.

I am pretty solidly dug in against crypto now. I have not seen it used for anything besides scamming. I believe, due to the incentives at play, people championing a cryptocurrency future can not be trusted anymore than a degenerate gambler asking you to invest it all in his patented gambling strategy.

Other people, the degenerate gamblers in question, are solidly dug in for the matter of their own profits- necessarily at the expense of others. This is the side championing cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are doomed to forever be damaged by their own wreckless stupidity. They will be damaged every time they receive a hard and necessary lesson about why our financial systems have certain properties and structures. Then they will demand the cost of that lesson be externalized onto the lesser-enfranchised.

I am pretty solidly dug in against crypto now.

You got nothing better to do than be against tech. you don't even use? Seems irrational at least and probably a bit more. Honestly there is nothing there for you maybe take a walk? But for others that do believe there is use, maybe leave them be as they leave you.

You have a weird definition of rationality. If I am against Malware, a tech I don’t use, that would make me irrational? It’s completely acceptable to take an ethical stance against something you don’t use.

It’s completely acceptable to take an ethical stance against something you don’t use.

Indeed, if you decide that something is unethical, it would then be surprising if you then choose to use it. That would be irrational.

Yes it's irrational. And your example doesn't make sense either. You're equating a technology a substantial amount of people find useful with a technology only a subset of the people find useful. Thus drawing an equality between malware and crypto, without any evidence or any substance same as the poster I replied to.

Let me be real simple, just because you don't like or use something doesn't make it useless. Also drawing comparisons between unrelated technologies is just plain bad, not smart not useful but just bad.

Allow me to also be real simple: many millions or billions of dollars have been scammed away from regular people who mistakenly trusted cryptocurrency markets.

I am not saying crypto should be illegal. I am saying it's a stupid idea for a currency and it's stupid for people to trust it.

If people want to go gamble tons of money, then that's fine, but it is not an investment. No real value is being produced. It is a zero-sum gambling ring that shifts money from one pocket to anoth er. It is musical chairs with bearer bonds.

It enshrines institutional power via truly braindead deflationary policies.

Unless you're an early mover, or pump a ton of money into it later, you essentially have no capability of engaging in the space as anything more than a victim.

Just because you like something doesn't make it useful.

bunch of noise, then >Just because you like something doesn't make it useful.

Again you fail the rationality/logic test. Exactly because I like something makes it useful to me. There is no room for others in this equation. I like something, I use something, therefore it's useful.

What you're trying to do is insert your opinion, stated as a fact, into this equation. There is no room for it, nor does the equation call for it. Easiest is for you to simply stay away.

I will not. I intend to keep warning others away from crypto. I need not be bound by the paisley rules of your flawed rhetoric and worse "methods" of rationality. I will not be engaging with self-reinforcing solipsism. I will continue to present my case for why people should not put their money into the gambling horse of a predatory and wealthy few, thank you.

No argument here, I just didn't understand the comment, I still don't see a clarification from the OP so I remain confused.

Why do you think crypto enthusiasts are net negative on crypto? It is a zero sum game so there are obviously winners, just like the stock market.

So what hard lesson do you think the winners are learning exactly?

The stock market is not zero sum. Liquidity is provided so an enterprise can generate value. Thus a dollar put into the stock market generates value exceeding a dollar, creating more value in the world. Therefore the stock market is positive sum.

Cryptocurrency currently does not have a way to generate value outside of illicit activities. There are very few supply chains you can leverage using cryptocurrency to generate anything new: it's either information products (like Axie Infinity or Earth2 or any scam) or illegal products. Its high-visibility, no-trust nature makes it unsuitable for practical daily use.

I would not use an immutable, permanent, public ledger for any purchase, let alone for stuff I purchase normally and legally. The concept is laughable. It might be pseudoynmous, but such a high-fidelity and lossless record will be used for future entity resolution. (And also, as Ethereum proved with the hack of the DAO, such promises of "permanency" and "immutability" is couched in the concept of network effects and operative ownership, at least as far as any utility is concerned).

And the crypto space keeps learning hard lessons. Like, for example, what "trustless" actually means. Lots of scams based on trust in the space. Those are two different meanings of the word "trust," which I and many technical people can distinguish, but non-specialists can not. They are, inevitably, the crowd that has historically lost the most in the crypto space and will continue to keep losing. Because they have a natural counterparty, the predators and scammers in the space.

Now let's talk about the hard lessons the specialists keep learning. They keep learning what "trustless" means. The collapse of TerraLuna, Celsius, Tether, and SBF proves that nobody in the space has any clue what they're doing nor the ramifications of organizing people at scale. Vitalik Buterin was likewise also revealed as a no-talent hack when he hard-forked Ethereum after getting taken to the fucking washers during The DAO hack.

On top of all the people who learn why laws are built with an understanding that ambiguity is natural and inescapable. Arbitrariness is both a feature and a bug in natural law. Anyone who has ever been taken to the washers by someone exploiting a bug in a smart contract has learned a hard lesson about subjecting assets to algorithmic vicissitudes.

And the scammers in the space are learning hard lessons about what it means for a ledger to be permanent, immutable, and public. As entity resolutions methods get better, the same data remains perfectly amenable to novel methods.

The whole thing is a farce, from the tech to the social aspects.

How does the stock market provide liquidity after the IPO? Companies selling their own shares?

Companies are, in fact, permitted to sell additional tranches of shares after IPO. More to the point the IPO is liquidity, and shareholders are rewarded for the use of that liquidity to grow a business that sells actual goods and services to the public. Shareholders can make money from dividends paid by those profits, not just finding someone else to sell the share to

Many stocks pay no dividends.

Sure, but the shareholders legally own the R&D centre the company invests in instead or the massive pile of cash they sit on, and the companies can pay dividends, as soon as company management decides this would be the best uses of a company's assets (or the shareholders vote to remove them for someone that does).

Cryptographic tokens can't pay dividends and don't have any other sort of claims attached to them, the only possible way to extract any sort of value whatsoever is by finding someone else that wants to buy or borrow the token itself.

Eh, these days in the US they're bought back instead. Money still gets returned to shareholders, it's just more tax efficient and the gains aren't realized until the equity is sold.

Token creators can buy back tokens...

Tether collapsed?

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