[HN Gopher] Barry Diller says cryptocurrencies are a 'con'
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Barry Diller says cryptocurrencies are a 'con'
        
       Author : edroche
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2021-05-21 20:55 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
        
       | mullingitover wrote:
       | I get the feeling that in a couple decades we're going to put
       | them up there with asbestos and tetraethyl lead in terms of
       | negative externalities.
        
         | gengelbro wrote:
         | I live near a small airport with a lot of air traffic fueled by
         | tetraethyl lead (avgas). So it seems society hasn't really
         | caught up if it's a rich person's hobby.
        
         | nikanj wrote:
         | Or just up there with Beanie Babies as an investment vehicle
        
         | agiz wrote:
         | That is not a nice thing to say about Barry Dillers.
        
       | tisFine wrote:
       | Crypto would be more interesting if the networks offered
       | federated compute capabilities.
       | 
       | Owning crypto would be akin to owning a certain amount of
       | capacity to use the network to do work.
       | 
       | Similar to land to farm or build housing on. A foundation to
       | build applications on.
       | 
       | As is it's just another shiny thing to convert to real currency.
       | 
       | Also, keep in mind Barry Diller is hardly a non-biased voice.
        
         | lxgr wrote:
         | There might be some interesting applications, but wouldn't all
         | those applications be fully out in the open, both code and
         | data?
         | 
         | Zero-knowledge proofs and whitebox cryptography can probably
         | help, but both are a far cry from general purpose computing /
         | programming models.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-05-21 23:02 UTC)