[HN Gopher] The Edited Latecomer's Guide to Crypto
___________________________________________________________________
The Edited Latecomer's Guide to Crypto
Author : colesantiago
Score : 181 points
Date : 2022-03-25 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mollywhite.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mollywhite.net)
| btown wrote:
| If you're getting frustrated at how thin the commentary column
| is, make your screen width less than 1800px wide; there's a bug
| in their CSS for wider breakpoints!
| molly0x57 wrote:
| I've pushed a fix for that, apologies for wasting all your
| screen real estate!
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| These days, I mostly browse the web at 150 to 200% zoom. This
| offsets a lot of such glitches for large screens.
| paxys wrote:
| While I agree with it overall, endlessly nitpicking every line of
| an article, even unimportant throwaway ones, means people aren't
| going to stick around long enough to read your real arguments.
| trhaynes wrote:
| Does anyone know if there is a tool or platform that makes it
| easy to make/publish this type of "leave footnotes on an
| article"? The UX here is nice and simple, and I think there is
| utility in sharing feedback this way (vs. blockquotes in email,
| or Google Docs comments, etc).
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| Maybe https://hypothes.is/?
| danShumway wrote:
| Hypothesis is a really interesting platform, but in my mind
| it's kind of too community-focused. Hypothesis's restricted
| groups (https://web.hypothes.is/help/annotating-with-groups/)
| are _closer_ to what I think people would want, but to get
| them you 'll have to self-host.
|
| Not trying to throw shade at them, but I feel like their push
| for annotations is hampered a little bit by how much their
| specific implementation of accounts and permissions feels
| like yet another social network, with all of the negatives
| that entails. There are other issues as well, but that's the
| big one that kept me using the platform.
|
| That being said, there is also an Open standard for this
| stuff that I remember at the time it came out being pretty
| excited about. But I haven't seen much if any adoption of it,
| so it again makes me wonder if there's something wrong with
| it or if it's just that nobody has made anything super-
| attractive yet to take advantage of it.
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| Which standard is that? ePubs, for example, use canonical
| fragment identifiers, which could also work on HTML. I
| think hypothes.is uses them too but adds fuzzy matching
| fields so that they can match up after document changes. At
| least from what I remember
|
| I'm working on an annotation project myself, though not
| really related to what the parent commenter is looking for.
| A generic solution to the highlight/annotation problem is
| quite difficult, especially if you allow for document
| changes.
| danShumway wrote:
| https://www.w3.org/annotation/
|
| I read through the docs when they first came out but I
| don't remember all of the details anymore. Fragment
| identifiers are part of it though. I've gone back and
| forth on how much I like them, allowing for document
| changes is always going to make stuff really complicated,
| fuzzy/fragment matching is about the best you can do I
| think without the cooperation of the source you're
| annotating.
|
| It feels like annotations probably should be tied to
| specific document versions, but I also get the reasoning
| why they're not in this proposal. Unless you're self-
| hosting everything or forcing everything to go through
| the Internet Archive... it's just kind of difficult.
|
| I've been curious about trying to get annotations to work
| before using something like Matrix to handle
| accounts/groups, but not curious enough to actually try
| to build a working example.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| Yeah I was thinking the same thing. This would be a cool
| product.
| vageli wrote:
| I too would like to know. I mailed the author and if they
| respond I will let you know as well.
| daveed wrote:
| fwiw she responded to a Q about this on twitter:
| https://twitter.com/glyph/status/1507425853243756544
| molly0x57 wrote:
| It's just plain ol' HTML and CSS, plus a little JS that will
| highlight the corresponding annotation if someone clicks the
| highlighted text.
|
| https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/pug/page.
| .. https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/sass/r
| ev... https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/js/
| revie...
|
| It's all open-source, so by all means feel free to reuse it
| if you like!
| dogman144 wrote:
| > Bitcoin, which emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 financial
| crisis, first caught on among libertarians and anti-establishment
| activists who saw it as the cornerstone of a new, incorruptible
| monetary system
|
| > you'll find a bottomless well of weird, interesting and
| thought-provoking projects
|
| I hope comment-think pieces like this aren't a norm going
| forward, as that was pretty brutal to read... "Molly White: so
| brave." This comes off as Twitter-zens getting together to
| criticize an insular, tribal world not too different from their
| own. The worst part of online culture is the snark. For what it
| is worth, much of the debate on crypto comes from people new to
| the space, and the long standing critics. For a lot of folks in
| it for longer, they've given up on the debate as the same
| arguments get recycled every several years.
|
| That aside, those two quotes "get it," and I was surprised to see
| them. Crypto has turned into meme culture by and large. But, the
| tech and design considerations behind btc comes out of one of the
| most impactful techno-ideological groups out there - the
| cypherpunks, with a strong helping of post-2008 anger included.
| btc and notable other parts of crypto, and supporting technology
| codifies that group's view of the world: permissionless,
| trustless, private digital action. This is the area to understand
| when studying crypto.
|
| They viewed it as critical to build three capabilities in digital
| interactions: private browsing, private comms, private spending.
| Well, they slowly built all three - Tor, PGP/consumer encryption,
| and then BTC. Tor and consumer access to encryption has had a
| tremendous effect, even beyond intense privacy circles. BTC is
| newer, but what are the odds it won't do the same? Judging by
| history and cypherpunk movement, it seems silly to ignore it. '08
| wasn't too long ago, and not much has changed in the practices
| that caused the crash. BTC still remains a/the only warts-and-all
| viable way out of that system.
|
| For what it's worth, here is how I place a value crypto[0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439891#30441946
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Oh yeah, the same Kevin Roose who years ago claimed that early
| stage startup CEOs made a million (maybe half a million?) a year
| in cash or something absurd along those lines.
|
| I don't have anything against the guy, but he seems completely
| disconnected from reality when it comes to his writing. It gets
| clicks, but it also shows either no interest in doing real
| research, or the desire the create a one-sided narrative.
| k__ wrote:
| _" And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting
| from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush."_
|
| Can't blame them.
|
| Crypto companies are overfunded right now and don't have that
| traditional big corp gatekeeping going on.
|
| Also, many younger people never had that sweet dotcom experience.
|
| So, why not grab a swash of nice investor money in a still crazy
| industry?
| germanjoey wrote:
| The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the
| article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in
| regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying
| the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market
| price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be
| able to cash-out at that maximum price.
|
| What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is
| there a way to calculate the amount of USD put _into_ a
| cryptocurrency across a timeframe? What I 'm imagining is a
| metric like (sum of all bitcoins bought by USD purchase price) -
| (sum of all bitcoins sold by USD sale price) = amount of USD that
| has been put "into" bitcoin. That first glance, one might expect
| this number to equal zero, but it should be greater than zero
| because of the new coins created by mining.
| kayamon wrote:
| Presumably one could multiply the mining effort put in so far
| by the energy prices at that time, to calculate total... uh...
| watt-dollars or something.
| ianai wrote:
| Multiply the volume traded per day by the average strike price
| (or last strike price). Compare that to the total market cap.
| vmception wrote:
| > What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is
| there a way to calculate the amount of USD put into a
| cryptocurrency across a timeframe?
|
| Velocity is a very important factor that critics of asset-
| wealth ignore.
|
| When it comes to criticizing crypto-assets specifically, people
| just turn their brain off or are completely ignorant to how
| assets they respect work in order to hold crypto-assets up to a
| fictional higher standard. but even when articulating their
| standard its like "do they even know what they're talking
| about?"
|
| for example, when comparing crypto assets to currencies, due to
| the "cryptocurrency" misnomer and skeumorph in the name, the
| illiquidity and relative few transactions in comparison to the
| marketcap seems like an important area to focus on, to them,
| while completely missing that currencies are broken down into 4
| segments for this exact same reason. M1 being that tiny sliver
| used for transactions with M2 and beyond being illiquid
| allocations of the currency, the similarity of behavior
| ironically bolsters the currency aspect of crypto in what was
| supposed to be a criticism.
|
| Many of these criticisms focus on the conversion to a fiat
| currency, and neglect the ability and reality of acquiring
| goods and services and investments directly with the crypto.
|
| I see something like this over and over again.
|
| These all factor into how one would go about valuing any
| particular asset. If a replacement for marketcap was sought
| after. But "dollars in over time" is not good enough, as it
| misses how liquidity can change at any moment, and misses the
| velocity of activity within any one crypto economy.
| ludamad wrote:
| I like e.g. '2% liquidity depth' measure along with market cap,
| to show how steep the iceberg is if you start selling
| bigtunacan wrote:
| Overall, I enjoyed the analysis of the piece, but I disagree
| with their take on market cap.
|
| Amy Castor - "Yeah, market cap is a meaningless number. It
| assumes everyone bought at the current price and could cash out
| at the current price."
|
| We could just as easily apply that basic logic to any security.
| Amazon(AMZN) is ~3275 a share with a market cap of ~1.668T.
| That also assumes everyone could cash out at ~3275, but the
| reality is if selling pressure is higher than the buy side
| demand that selling shares will drive the price down as buyers
| would be able to continually bid lower. Eventually it would
| reach ~0 share price and effectively a 0 market cap.
|
| So in that sense token market cap is a fair equivalency. What
| makes a dollar worth a dollar? Crypto value at any given point
| in time is just an exchange value against fiat currencies. This
| isn't much different than an exchange value between USD and the
| Ruble; it will fluctuate.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| AMZN had $8B of shares traded today. Just under $2B of BTC
| traded hands across the major exchanges on Wednesday.
|
| AMZN is a _single ticker_ , there's several orders of
| magnitude more liquidity in equities alone than all
| cryptocurrency combined. $34B of SPY shares traded today, and
| that's a single ETF.
|
| > That also assumes everyone could cash out at ~3275, but the
| reality is if selling pressure is higher than the buy side
| demand that selling shares will drive the price down as
| buyers would be able to continually bid lower. Eventually it
| would reach ~0 share price and effectively a 0 market cap.
|
| This is wildly inaccurate.
| acdha wrote:
| > Eventually it would reach ~0 share price and effectively a
| 0 market cap.
|
| This is the misunderstanding breaking your argument: AMZN
| shares are fractional ownership of a company with assets and
| ongoing revenue. In the event of a business downturn, those
| will go down but they're not going to zero in any plausible
| scenario - even bankruptcies usually return some fraction of
| value to shareholders.
|
| This is important to understand because cryptocurrencies are
| the weakest form of a fiat currency: unlike those AMZN shares
| they have no value except for social consensus and unlike a
| sovereign currency they have no pressure creating demand --
| nobody must have them to pay taxes, there are no government
| contracts or salaries, etc. and there's no inherent value to
| a random number so there's nothing to keep that floor above
| zero.
| ipaddr wrote:
| They represent the same value prop as any stock. Any
| company could go to 0 and the floor of the exchange is
| littered with delisted companies.
|
| Amazon is big and the chances it goes to 0 are less than a
| company still making vcrs. The same can be applied to
| bitcoin.
|
| Government and other contracts could be cancelled. The
| value of assets can be lower the debt. Bitcoin has no debt
| while a company like Amazon can have billions of dollars of
| debt.
| FabHK wrote:
| > We could just as easily apply that basic logic to any
| security.
|
| Not quite. An Amazon share is a claim on future residual cash
| flows, whose net present value constitutes the (unknown)
| "true value" of the share. If Amazon falls to 1/10th of its
| current price because of some tweet by Elon or whatever other
| (extraneous, fluke) reason, lots of people would be lining up
| to buy it, because they get a stake in an actual business
| that would repay them their investment within a few years.
| So, no, it would not reach 0 share price.
|
| (So, while the argument in the article needs some refinement,
| its broad thrust is true: market cap for a publicly traded
| company is much more meaningful than market cap for a crypto
| currency.)
| nightski wrote:
| In theory it sounds so logical!
|
| Is it though? Have you actually tried to apply this in
| practice to a trading strategy? I think once you start
| trying to predict prices based on NPV of future cash flows
| this quickly falls apart, even with large behemoths like
| Microsoft, Apple, etc...
| FabHK wrote:
| I am not suggesting that you or I can compute the NPV of
| future cash flows and then value the share, certainly not
| easily. But that was not the point. The point was to
| distinguish shares (and other securities) from coins: the
| price of the former is (softly) constrained to be within
| the vicinity of their intrinsic value. Cryptos have zero
| intrinsic value.
| [deleted]
| nightski wrote:
| The distinction is meaningless to me. There were
| companies in the dot com bubble which had extremely high
| valuations which went bust as just one example among
| many. These stocks were not softly constrained at all. It
| was pure speculation and it happens all the time.
|
| I don't think it is right to call growth speculation
| "intrinsic value". The only thing that is truly intrinsic
| in my opinion is profits. But profits aren't a good way
| to measure value of an asset. Because the asset (stock in
| this case) is separate from the company itself. A company
| could generate slim profits and not grow each year. That
| has intrinsic value to the employees and customers. But
| that does little for the stock.
| mrb wrote:
| Crypto have intrinsic value: they are payment networks
| that work even where traditional systems fail. No denied
| transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for
| the underbanked. Send money truly anytime anywhere. No
| other system does this. That's the value.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This illustrates an important point to me.
|
| First of all, money or value is a purely memetic construct.
| It's a grand illusion that only exists in our collective
| network of consciousnesses and operates as an abstraction to
| efficiently keep track of favors owed.
|
| Therefore, value or money doesn't _just_ transfer with
| explicit trades, as in trading $40,000 for 1 bitcoin adds
| $40,000 of value to bitcoin. Value also transfers memetically
| and invisibly, as in many people suddenly start to believe
| that asset B has 20% more value than asset A than it did
| yesterday. No explicit trade took place to create that
| transference of value. It 's just that lots of people
| suddenly started believing that asset B was worth more favors
| that asset A. Sometimes that value is fairly easy to define,
| like by projected earnings of a company over the holding
| period of a stock. More often it's a nebulous and
| decentralized calculation of the market.
| [deleted]
| dorgo wrote:
| >is a silly metric because the entire market would never be
| able to cash-out at that maximum price.
|
| On the other hand, you can't buy all coins even if you pay the
| market cap..
| mrb wrote:
| The market cap metric may seem silly to you, but it's the same
| metric used by publicly traded corporations. And there is
| nothing silly about it. All shareholders would never be able to
| cash out at the current share price, but this isn't a reason to
| disregard the market cap metric.
| acdha wrote:
| There's a key difference: corporate shares have a value
| anchored in the company's assets and revenue. The market cap
| can still fluctuate, of course, because different people will
| have different assessments of the future profitability but
| the floor is going to be based on the company's assets,
| contracts and sales predictions, obligations, etc.
|
| In contrast, cryptocurrencies have no floor because there's
| no inherent value to a random number and nobody has a need to
| pay for a specific token. If something falls out of favor,
| there's no reason to expect to find a buyer at any price.
| nightski wrote:
| Value is anchored in the equilibrium between supply and
| demand, that's it.
|
| Maybe the things you mention do drive that equilibrium. But
| I'd bet you'd have a hard time developing a profitable
| trading strategy based on those metrics alone. I know I
| have tried with little success.
| mrb wrote:
| Corporations can still very much "fall out of flavor",
| driving their revenues and assets to zero. This criticism
| isn't only applicable to crypto.
|
| And cryptocurrencies' intrinsic value is this: they are
| payment networks that work even where traditional systems
| fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to
| open. Works for the underbanked. Send money truly anytime
| anywhere. No other system does this. That's the value.
|
| In the end, there is no fundamental difference between a
| service provided by a corporation vs a service provided by
| cryptocurrencies. Both services can and do have value.
| acdha wrote:
| > Corporations can still very much "fall out of flavor",
| driving their revenues and assets to zero. This criticism
| isn't only applicable to crypto.
|
| That's technically correct but missing the point:
| cryptocurrencies are an extreme outlier in that they have
| literally nothing other than social consensus backing
| them. If you look at examples of failing companies you
| will find a few cases of Theranos-level fraud but far
| more cases where a company was mismanaged into the ground
| but shareholders received _something_ and it's not common
| for this to happen so quickly that nobody had time to
| react. The more common trajectory is something like Sears
| or RIM where the writing was on the wall for years while
| the PE guys strip-mined the corpse or someone buys it to
| go patent-trolling, where a savvy investor has plenty of
| time to exit before the end and the people at the end
| still receive a fractional payout.
|
| > And cryptocurrencies' intrinsic value is this: they are
| payment networks that work even where traditional systems
| fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to
| open. Works for the underbanked. Send money truly anytime
| anywhere. No other system does this. That's the value.
|
| This is a good example of the problem: those claims are
| either completely untrue or significantly overstated but
| you have a significant financial interest in repeating
| them because being honest will imperil your ability to
| find someone willing to pay more for your random numbers
| than you paid originally.
| [deleted]
| ChrisClark wrote:
| It's a good number to use if you are comparing different coins
| by value though. You need to know the circulating supply if you
| want to compare the price of each token.
| jaggirs wrote:
| For every btc bought there is one sold, the equation you gave
| thus adds up to zero.
| secabeen wrote:
| I would extend this concept to all non-cash financial assets.
| All of what you wrote above applies to Tesla shares, or
| Ukrainian real estate, or anything that's not currency. It
| would still be incredibly useful, but it's also based so much
| on psychology, I don't know if there's a mathematical way to
| calculate it, like there was Black-Sholes for futures.
|
| A concrete calculation for this would revolutionize finance.
| neuroma wrote:
| Agree, but, mind bender... this relationship also applies to
| currencies. A useful statistic is the volume transactions
| required to shift the price 2%, looking at an open order
| book. It gives you a notion of the available liquidity. It is
| liquidity that matters, as it allows influx and efflux
| without causing inelastic price movements.
| doogerdog wrote:
| Molly provides a great service to skeptics like me. She concise,
| easy to read, articulate and funny.
|
| I feel like I live in a world where a huge train wreck is getting
| set up. I would like to follow along but it has gotten to the
| point where I can't get myself to read many of these 'News'
| stories about a new crypto adventure. I only have a little news
| reading time in a day and the typical article about NFTs or
| whatever leaves me feeling assaulted by a hype machine. But I can
| peruse web3isgoinggreat and stay abreast of what is going on.
|
| Molly obviously has an opinion about the future of blockchain
| money but her comments all seem factual and fair to me. I'm
| pretty sure I would read her site even if I were on the other
| side of the argument.
| ewired wrote:
| > I would read her site even if I were on the other side of the
| argument
|
| It's been a great resource to confirm that I'm not falling for
| the most obvious scams (like NFTs or BNB chain scams which
| constitute a majority of web3isgoinggreat posts) nor investing
| in easily exploited projects. She perhaps inadvertently helps
| the cryptocurrency space by pointing out scam artists to avoid
| working with. There is a world of good going on outside of the
| typical bored ape garbage in the cryptocurrency space. You
| would be getting a raw deal if relying solely on her for
| cryptocurrency information.
| d13 wrote:
| It's a brilliant site, but definitely cherry-picked for
| entertainment value. It's only a small part of the whole
| picture and provides a very distorted view
| Femtio wrote:
| abetusk wrote:
| Many of the points brought up are completely valid but they're
| also heavily biased and often lack critical examination. Meaning,
| they take a stance of skeptic to the article but don't use the
| same bar for themselves.
|
| They purposefully take ungenerous interpretations of statements
| to build straw man arguments then accuse the article of making
| straw man arguments. They bring up studies and articles
| contradicting claims in the piece then dismiss the studies
| brought up in the piece as being ambiguous because they don't
| have more rigor. Often, the comments are nothing more than snide
| remarks deriding the claims without any citations while at the
| same time writing "citation needed" for various other parts of
| the article.
|
| As I said, there are many fair points in this criticism but this
| critique, and other pieces like it, are, in my opinion, not
| really trying to pursue the truth, they're written to cater to an
| audience that wants to dismiss cryptocurrency outright.
| rvz wrote:
| Precisely. Most of the points about where it doesn't make sense
| to use blockchains are valid (Social media, storing images on-
| chain, etc) but the critics themselves like to filter, dismiss
| and scream ALL of it as an entire scam, which is quite a
| dangerous assumption for them in the long term, but we'll see.
|
| Who knows if the larger cryptocurrencies will still be around
| in 10 years time due to those criticisms or will they just
| adapt and fit in to better use cases? I also dislike the hype
| around NFTs as them being a marketplace for JPEGs but not all
| of them are like this. Perhaps 90% of NFTs will crumble with
| only 10% of them still being around that have a use case.
|
| Due to a few of them having some utility, I certainly won't
| dismiss the whole thing or the technologies behind them.
| Otherwise we will see yet another HN crypto post with the same
| comments and dismissals attached to them.
|
| I expect for them to easily ignore it since they are convinced
| it will _completely_ collapse in the future. I 'm not sure why
| they find it very difficult to do this but even I also think
| the majority of the hype will collapse too due to regulations,
| but the technologies (including blockchain) will still live on.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Excellent editing. I'm an otherwise fervent defender of the NYT
| (even through its many mistakes), but the lack of _basic_
| critical analysis and _obvious_ conflicts of interest in this
| piece were a bridge too far for even me.
| ilamont wrote:
| The stat that suggests 20% of adults own crypto was a stunning
| inclusion, considering there was nothing on the methodology
| used in the survey, other than the sample size ("2,200
| people").
|
| If it was online, how we even know it was that many people?
| eatonphil wrote:
| I agree this piece was embarrassingly lazy. But what were the
| conflicts of interest? Just a quick check and I can't exactly
| find him having ties to any crypto company.
| woodruffw wrote:
| From one of the footnotes: it sounds like Roose used his
| position at the NYT to boost an otherwise obscure NFT. He's
| also publicly advocated[1] for a loosening of the rules that
| newspapers have typically imposed for financial reporting (no
| ownership in/positions against the companies/assets being
| reported on.)
|
| Re-reading my original comment, I think I was too forward in
| _asserting_ that there 's a conflict of interest. But I find
| his public positions around becoming an interested party
| concerning and a potential risk to his objectivity.
|
| [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220219172535/https://twitt
| er.c...
| danso wrote:
| Yeah I'm generally open-minded to NYT articles (I'm still a
| subscriber, but at the please-dont-cancel-your-subscription-yet
| discount rate). When I read their "Crypto 101" guide last week,
| I only made it about halfway before quitting. I know a few
| things about crypto, but I just could not imagine how the NYT's
| explainer would clarify things for absolute beginners. Glad I
| wasn't totally off when thinking it felt a bit too upbeat and
| abstract.
| di4na wrote:
| Worth adding
|
| >>> And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting
| from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush.
|
| No they do not. I am an engineer in a technology heavily used by
| crypto projects and they have a really hard time recruiting.
|
| Engineers slam the door in their face the moment you tell them
| the opening is for this industry.
| [deleted]
| dogman144 wrote:
| What is seen most often is NYC or equivalent finance traders
| and executives bolting into crypto.
|
| It seems hard for firms below the Coinbase/Kraken/heavy hitter
| trading shop bar to pull serious resume hires out of SV, but
| quite a few Managing Director+ level hires moved over into
| crypto.
|
| My sense is the NYC finance realize a core aspect of crypto -
| you might not think it's money, but enough people do, and
| there's an active market for it, so there is quite a bit of
| money to be made.
| pavlov wrote:
| There's an important nuance to this: enough unsophisticated
| people think it's money, so there's lots of opportunity for
| finance people to make money.
|
| Traditional finance is well-trodden, every arbitrage
| opportunity has been tried decades ago. But crypto is full of
| doe-eyed innocents who think they're reinventing finance. Of
| course experienced traders want to take advantage of them. It
| must be more fun than ye olde eurodollar bonds, or whatever.
| twox2 wrote:
| There are financial mechanics that exist only in the scope
| of DeFi and not in traditional finance. It actually IS new
| in a lot of ways and skilled folks are teaming up to make a
| killing, not just experienced traders. Take a look at
| what's happening in the "MEV" space. None of this existed
| in traditional finance.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Ya this is more my point. Taking traditional algorithmic
| trading skills into a place specifically designed for it
| and with new market mechanisms.
|
| Whoever spends some time building DeFi/L1 protocols is
| going to make a killing jumping over to Jump/Jane
| Street/HRT in a few years with that knowledge.
| dogman144 wrote:
| > enough unsophisticated people
|
| Well, sophisticated people also think it's money, but they
| entered '12-'17 and stopped talking about it. A more recent
| example though is Neuberger Berman's entrance.
|
| The tragedy of the crypto moment is serious folks who
| didn't come from crypto made up their minds about it and
| did it a while ago, but articles like OP run interference
| against "everyone else" doing the same.
|
| Some links:
|
| https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/an-institutional-
| investors-t...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wences_Casares > Casares was
| the entrepreneur to convince Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and
| other tech veterans in Silicon Valley to invest in bitcoin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantera_Capital - scope out
| Morehead's background.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| There's money to be made in trading even when the asset
| trades at prices that are fundamentally wrong; as long as
| people are buying and selling, you will find market makers
| taking the spread. There's also money to be made in asset
| management for the same basic set of reasons.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Working for a crypto startup can be a negative on your
| resume/CV as well.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| I would not hire anybody with a crypto startup on their
| resume.
| trophycase wrote:
| Former newspaper exec probably: "I would never hire someone
| who started out writing a _blog_ "
| twox2 wrote:
| You might be surprised to learn that most of these people
| have no interest in working for you either.
| ditonal wrote:
| In the Hacker News bubble, working for anywhere is a negative
| on your CV. Amazon treats its warehouse employees badly,
| Google creates a surveillance state and bows to
| authoritarians, Facebook drives engagement with hate/dissent,
| AirBnB is causing a housing crisis by turning long term
| rentals into short term rentals, Apple has Chinese
| sweatshops, Netflix and Spotify run controversial content,
| Uber/Doordash/Lyft/Instacart exploit gig workers, etc.
|
| In reality, practically nobody cares and most employers are
| more than happy to hire experienced engineers who happened to
| work at some employers who did sketchy things.
|
| But, if we're going to drill down into the ethics of crypto
| startups, I think they come out looking pretty good in
| comparison.
|
| It's worth noting that the author of this post works at
| Hubspot which literally had an entire book written about how
| its workplace culture was highly discriminatory, particularly
| against older workers.("Disrupted: My Misadventure in the
| Start-Up Bubble ")
|
| Engineers in glass houses....
| detaro wrote:
| The "hackernews bubble" is full of people literally working
| at all these companies, so I very much doubt that's in any
| way an accurate representation of the average communities
| opinions.
| twblalock wrote:
| Most people who work at those companies don't read or
| comment on HN.
| detaro wrote:
| And most people in the US also don't read or comment on
| HN, nevertheless HN is full of people from the US.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| I'm basically a Stalinist relative to the community here,
| but among those listed, only Uber and Facebook would fall
| into don't-work-for-them-territory.
|
| The others are regularly criticised to varying degrees, but
| that doesn't mean it's impossible to work there for people
| somewhat conscious of their conscience. It comes down to
| the question "can you honestly expect to have an impact on
| the organisation, or is it more likely to hollow you out
| and make you into another one of their cynical libertarian
| defenders?"
|
| This happens to be exactly the same misunderstanding as
| calling all criticism "cancel culture".
| dvt wrote:
| > No they do not. I am an engineer in a technology heavily used
| by crypto projects and they have a really hard time recruiting.
|
| Absolutely not true and this is very typical HN bubble-speak.
| Been helping with hiring engineers for a stealth crypto startup
| for the past 6 months, and getting some of the best applicants
| I've ever seen, most coming from FAANG. To add to this
| anecdote, one of my friends (FB product manager) was telling me
| ~Oct last year that a lot of engineers are leaving her team or
| churning for either TikTok or crypto startups.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| Are thr salaries much higher? You group yourself with TikTok
| and think the engineers are leaving for something other then
| money?
| dvt wrote:
| Token offers (which a lot of crypto companies give), often
| have more upside than RSUs (especially if you're bullish on
| crypto as a whole), and _definitely_ have more upside than
| early "traditional" startup equity (which is basically
| worthless).
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| In both crypto tokens and startup equity, you are
| literally gambling that there will be a liquid market for
| your asset.
|
| Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and
| pretending that is somehow different than startup equity
| is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst
| cases.
|
| Crypto growth overall does not mean _your_ token is going
| to gain value anymore than the general growth of the
| economy means that startup equity is going to grow in
| value.
| dvt wrote:
| > Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and
| pretending that is somehow different than startup equity
| is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst
| cases.
|
| Fundamentally not true. Unlike traditional markets,
| crypto exchanges work by leveraging AMM liquidity pools.
| Obviously, a token can go up/down based on supply and
| demand, but if there's liquidity you can literally
| _always_ sell. Confusing early-stage startup equity is
| _by far_ more predatory than giving someone some shitcoin
| with a vesting schedule. Any argument to the contrary is
| either disingenuous or misinformed.
|
| With traditional equity offerings, you need to worry
| about: what class of stock did you get, what's the
| vesting preference, will you get diluted, what if you get
| fired, etc. I'm hardly a crypto bro, but imo startup
| equity is one of the biggest scams around that often
| takes advantage of young and inexperienced engineers that
| don't quite understand its financial underpinnings.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The definition of liquidity is something like "the ease
| with which buyers and sellers can transact at
| transparent, stable prices".
|
| If no-one wants to buy a thing at any price, it is - by
| definition - illiquid. The notion that something for
| which there is no demand can be liquid is strange.
| dvt wrote:
| Actually, AMMs (automated market makers) work by ensuring
| that there's always a buyer (hence, "automated") as long
| as there's liquidity -- by automatically adjusting prices
| based on supply/demand.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Help me out here. I'm going to issue a hundred trillion
| MostExtraordinaryShitCoin (MESC). What's the bid for MESC
| from these AMM pools?
| dvt wrote:
| (Sorry for late reply, HN time-limits nested comment
| replies.) Basically, if you were to issue N tokens into
| an AMM, you would also need to provide the counter-party
| liquidity. So let's say you're sending 100 MESC to a
| pool, and the initial price is 0.01 USD (to keep it
| simple), you would also have to seed the pool with 1 USD.
| Once that's done, people start trading -- some other
| people might even provide liquidity (and buy LP --
| liquidity pool -- tokens) which they can earn interest
| on.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| This whole discussion starts from your response to a
| comment that "[t]okens _are_ worthless if no one wants to
| buy them", asserting that this was "[f]undamentally not
| true".
|
| But it seems very much that it is true. Did you mean to
| make a different point?
| dvt wrote:
| I'm not sure if we disagree, my point was a technical
| one: traditional markets are "order book" markets where
| for every buyer, there's a seller. Crypto exchanges use
| AMMs, where there does not need to be a buyer for every
| seller, as the AMM handles that automatically.
|
| If your point is that tokens without liquidity are
| worthless, then that's true (that's why initial
| decentralized exchange offerings always involve seeding
| liquidity pools, as mentioned). If your point is that
| tokens can get arbitrarily close to zero if everyone
| sells, that's also true.
|
| But if you get a token that's being actively traded on
| exchanges and has healthy liquidity pools and a healthy
| market cap, that certainly is a better deal than some
| percentage "equity" an early-stage startup dangles in
| front of you.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Indeed. It's the old quip about monopoly money.
| Personally, I would not be willing to accept tokens as a
| large part of my compensation full stop. I haven't dug
| into crypto offers though so I'm not sure how true that
| is. That said, unlike options, tokens almost always have
| liquidity immediately, so an engineer could (probably)
| trade their tokens for fiat value if needed where an
| individual with options would be tied down through the
| exercise process.
| vmception wrote:
| there are some very important differences that we can
| focus on, while you can stick with the similarities:
|
| 1 - token vesting contracts are often much quicker than
| startup grants, and public company RSUs. A few months to
| a year, compared to 4 years.
|
| 2 - tokens achieve liquidity much faster and more
| reliably, in comparison to startup companies of a similar
| age. this allows new organizations to compete in hiring
| against FAANGs, where employees also are receiving liquid
| things to sell.
|
| 3 - token grants can be _alongside_ startup equity. so
| its an additional part of the compensation package. As
| such there is no compromise to rant about.
|
| and just to _acknowledge_ the "issue" you care about,
| correct a market may never occur or form for the tokens,
| no different than the equity, there you go, a tiny
| disclaimer on page 34. I agree that every employee should
| be objective about that, this is the same standard with
| every kind of organization aiming to compensate partially
| in non-cash, which puts us right back at square one: pick
| the one thats both interesting and compensates well.
| insulfrable wrote:
| That says a lot more about Facebook and the type of people it
| attracts than it does about the crypto industry.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Facebook is a huge employer, it makes it hard to believe
| that if they're losing folks to crypto companies that it's
| somehow localized to Facebook. What does this have to do
| with Facebook and the "type of people it attracts"? Are you
| arguing somehow that Facebook hires a very particular type
| of engineer despite common knowledge that the folks that
| work at one FAANG will usually be willing to work on other
| FAANG companies? Or do you deny that FAANG companies have
| the number of people to make the original statement true?
| insulfrable wrote:
| Facebook is a company with shady ethic that attracted
| people willing to look the other way because the money is
| too good.
|
| But they just lost 37% on the "too good" money.
|
| So where do you think these people are going next?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yes and? The original statement was that crypto is having
| a hard time hiring, the GP rebutted that saying they're
| seeing FAANG engineers leave. You then try to make an
| ethical argument. So? What does that have to do with the
| reality that FAANG, who employes lots of engineers, is
| losing engineers to crypto? Or do we need to move the
| goalposts and scope this discussion to "ethically-
| approved" (TM) companies?
| throwaway423342 wrote:
| You work for FB or something?
| espadrine wrote:
| Facebook literally made a cryptocurrency, a crypto
| wallet, and a number of associated products.
|
| Following regulatory response, they have been downsizing
| it to a tiny speck of its former size.
|
| Them losing folks to crypto companies is the most obvious
| result of the past five years, but it has more to do with
| their strategy struggles than the overall mindset of the
| engineering population.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This hasn't been my experience at all. I feel like this is just
| pandering to group sentiment. My work (household name so we
| work with a lot of companies) has been seeing increased spend
| from crypto companies and so we've talked with a few folks from
| these companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy.
| We've had lots of our own engineers churn to crypto companies
| also. Yeah they won't get the anti-crypto-bubble engineer or
| Stephen Diehl (who's been astroturfing crypto because he works
| on his own blockchain company), but there's no need to project
| your personal biases into the entire industry. It is a gold
| rush though, so there's a high likelihood it will all go bust
| soon. Let them fail if you hate them but stop spreading
| inaccurate statements.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> Stephen Diehl (who 's been astroturfing crypto because he
| works on his own blockchain company)_
|
| If you criticise crypto based on general software engineering
| experience, the cryptobros say: "You don't know what you're
| talking about!"
|
| If you criticise crypto based on experience trying to
| actually use it, the cryptobros say: "You're astroturfing!"
|
| Thus the only people allowed to discuss crypto are seemingly
| those with a financial interest in token prices going up.
| Funny how that works.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Thus the only people allowed to discuss crypto are
| seemingly those with a financial interest in token prices
| going up. Funny how that works.
|
| > Funny how that works.
|
| This rhetorical device is tiring and divisive, please stop.
| I have no interest in crypto other than some coins I bought
| years ago that constitute a negligible portion of my
| portfolio and a passing interest in IPFS. I think the space
| is full of fraud and it would take a full-time enthusiast
| to find what's not. But there's no need to spread FUD like
| the person I responded to, nor is there any reason to say
| silly things like "funny how that works" and wink
| derisively at some cryptobro conspiracy. If crypto fails it
| will fail, and then you can laugh at it all day like
| everyone does to Theranos and WeWork. Until then stick to
| factual statements. The GP claims that nobody wants to work
| on crypto. I have no idea how your "funny how that works"
| sneer has anything to do with the original claim. Stop
| moving the goalposts to score internet points in an anti-
| crypto echo chamber.
| pavlov wrote:
| You're the one implying that Diehl's criticism isn't
| valid because he has worked for a blockchain company.
|
| That's a genuinely bizarre line of argument that I've
| only ever heard in crypto circles.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Astroturfing means what?
| detaro wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
|
| > _Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors
| of a message or organization (e.g., political,
| advertising, religious or public relations) to make it
| appear as though it originates from and is supported by
| grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to
| give the statements or organizations credibility by
| withholding information about the source 's financial
| connection._
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| thank you
| throw0101a wrote:
| The source (etymology) of the phrase is a play on words:
|
| * "grass roots" support is an 'authentic' community
| response on an issue
|
| * AstroTurf(r) is an artificial playing surface used in
| some sports facilities (especially indoor ones), instead
| of a one made from real grass
|
| So "astroturfing" is the creation of an 'artificial
| community response'.
| fizzyfizz wrote:
| I was surprised by the claim about Stephen Diehl so I did a
| little googling. I don't think it's correct to say he "works
| on his own blockchain company". However, relatively recently
| he was working on smart contracts with a company called
| Adjoint.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180220171955/https://www.steph.
| ..
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y
|
| He seems to have been interested in smart contracts but found
| the current implementations appalling. He wanted to use
| functional programming, particularly Haskell, to create
| something like a smart contract with better guarantees. But
| he is also careful to say that a smart contract doesn't imply
| a blockchain; he's talking more generally about code that
| executes over distributed databases.
|
| This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't
| even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why
| that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is
| rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being
| misconstrued.
|
| That said, having examined blockchains in depth gives him
| more credibility, not less. And it would be a rather bizarre
| business model to continually decry blockchains if he was
| actually working on one.
|
| ---
|
| EDIT: Found an interview where he distinguishes cryptocoins
| from other technologies sometimes labelled web3, like IPFS.
| https://www.coywolf.news/podcast/episode-12-stephen-diehl-
| in...
|
| I think it's fair to say the guy is not an indiscriminate
| hater. On the other hand, I also personally was already
| convinced that crypto "currencies" are terrible but IPFS and
| decentralized organizations might be cool, so I guess I like
| him more now.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I appreciate your reply. You dug into a claim I made and
| lay out your criticisms dispassionately, thanks. This is
| the kind of discourse I'd like to see more of.
|
| > This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint
| doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can
| easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the
| whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his
| work is being misconstrued.
|
| Gives his passionate publishing against Blockchains I'd
| prefer he not hide this aspect of his past and actually
| talk about it. I guess I didn't know that he had moved on
| from Adjoint so that does add more credibility to his
| beliefs. But removing it from his website, removing it from
| LI, and neglecting to talk about it in public can certainly
| cast some doubt. I'm sympathetic to your view as well
| though.
| fizzyfizz wrote:
| Thank you for a response in the spirit of good discourse.
|
| Anyway, I don't even know if he _has_ moved on from
| Adjoint.
|
| I agree there's something odd about this, but I've also
| seen how people who are vocal critics on the internet
| have to be less public about their associations. Not sure
| what to think about it.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You added more data to my view and definitely made me
| think. Thanks for that!
| clpm4j wrote:
| How is OP spreading inaccurate statements? He/she shared
| their perspective, just as you have shared yours. And my
| personal experience as a tech employee in SF mirrors the OP -
| a lot of my friends and colleagues have been job hopping over
| the past couple of years, but very few to crypto. None of us
| can make broad generalizations based on our own rather
| limited points of view.
|
| Maybe you have a better view, but I don't understand what you
| mean here: _" My work (household name so we work with a lot
| of companies) has been seeing increased spend from crypto
| companies and so we've talked with a few folks from these
| companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy."_
| [deleted]
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| Opposite anecdote, I would be happy to take a 30% paycut to
| work on (some) crypto projects and actually do 60+ hours of
| work (I do like 10 hours in my cushy job now). Unfortunately, I
| am not in SV and don't have a padded a resume, and they are
| flooded with better applicants - so I can't even compete.
| woah wrote:
| Please apply: https://informal.systems/careers/
| celticninja wrote:
| Interestingly this isn't just for engineers. I know someone who
| was looking at a role offered by a crypto exchange for a
| company secretary but they were having a hard time attracting
| people from the traditional finance industry into the realm of
| crypto.
| twox2 wrote:
| What? So many of my peers are moving to crypto companies in
| droves or moonlighting as devs on crypto projects. The money is
| really good too.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I'm not directly connected to Chainlink's recruiting, but as
| far as I can tell as an employee, many engineers are
| enthusiastic about working here.
|
| https://careers.chain.link/
| cageface wrote:
| Yeah when I was job hunting recently I didn't even consider any
| crypto jobs even though there were a lot of listed openings
| using Rust and I would like to have a chance to work on a real
| Rust codebase.
| catsarebetter wrote:
| Yup that statement is factually incorrect, many silicon valley
| engineers are jumping to web2 tech companies bc the pay is so
| damn high right now, very few engineers in crypto at the
| moment.
| xmprt wrote:
| Not to mention that anytime I see extremely high pay in
| crypto companies I think the salary is overinflated because
| they are paying a large portion in tokens.
| lekevicius wrote:
| This format of critique is so snarky and tribalistic. I enjoy it
| sometimes, particularly John Gruber's "translations from
| corporate bullshit" articles, but there's no point in denying
| that this format works best for preaching to the choir, not
| nuanced analysis. Original NYT article was very biased; so is
| this one.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Also a puff piece.
| ludamad wrote:
| Quoting a 2017 book about how thinly traded bitcoin is? I
| appreciate the concept but it doesn't always feel like it rounds
| out the takes. (FTR, I appreciate it's thin enough to make market
| cap misleading, but up-to-date liquidity figures would be helpful
| if we're trying to criticize market cap)
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| Bitcoin liquidity is about the same as the typical FAANG stock
| - which is pretty good. This a commentary by skeptics for
| skeptics - It is as factual as a reddit post on r/bitcoin.
|
| If people actually want facts, then that's the wrong place to
| look.
| jacinabox wrote:
| Most bitcoin have never been sold. Bitcoin is a commodity that
| is intended to serve as a store of value, and other commodities
| like gold and silver do their work as a store of value without
| an appreciable fraction of them ever being sold. So using the
| term market cap is not a misleading measure in relation to
| bitcoin; it is simply used by analogy to how it would be used
| for a company; it's not literally implying that all bitcoin is
| the equivalent of shareholder value.
| acdha wrote:
| Bitcoin is a failed currency - see the original paper. After
| around a decade of failing to find demand the big holders
| started to market it as a commodity but since there's no
| inherent value to it unless it's actively traded it doesn't
| really fit the usual meaning of that term.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Oh please do explain why it is failed?
|
| The only thing that has evolved over time, that is peoples
| time preference. There will _always_ be demand for BTC. The
| software works as it was designed, and grows stronger every
| year. Gresham's law might be the key to understanding this.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Hmm that's not quite right to say never been sold.
| https://stats.buybitcoinworldwide.com/unspent-outputs/
|
| Today, there is 1.7M unspent coinbase tx out of a emitted 19M
| coins. Once moved from a coinbase-tx, 4.3M are older than 5y,
| with 2.4M at >10y.
|
| Most Bitcoin have been sold many times in their life, but
| they do typically sleep for a long time, given the switch of
| time preference. MtGox alone would have cycled a majority of
| the coins in its short lifetime.
| vasco wrote:
| This format is interesting at first but when it starts getting to
| 5 paragraphs of dissecting each phrase, it gets too much. Reminds
| me of the someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet, point-by-point-
| repliers in internet forums circa 2006.
| [deleted]
| alex_sf wrote:
| > This format is interesting at first
|
| I agree.
|
| > but when it starts getting to 5 paragraphs of dissecting each
| phrase, it gets too much.
|
| Yeah, that's true.
|
| > Reminds me of the someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet
|
| Isn't there usually?
|
| > point-by-point-repliers in internet forums
|
| I still think it's a good format.
|
| > circa 2006
|
| What's wrong with 2006?
| librish wrote:
| Until someone has built a crypto product that creates values (for
| the purpose of this discussion it can be a good or a service
| would be willing to spend USD on even if it wasn't a crypto)
| crypto is a negative-sum game. Any USD taken out of the system
| someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the miners take
| out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed.
| anonporridge wrote:
| That's like saying the USD is a negative sum game because "any
| CNY taken out of the system someone else has to have put in,
| plus whatever the government takes out. Fortunes aren't
| created, they are redistributed."
|
| The transference, redistribution, and storage of wealth is
| itself the value of monetary networks. The more circular trade
| that doesn't need to exit the network happens, the more
| valuable the network becomes.
|
| The ultimate point of projects like bitcoin isn't to build a
| system that makes everyone rich. That would obviously an absurd
| ponzi like scheme. The point is to build an open monetary
| system for the whole planet that emerges out of distributed
| consensus rather than dictated to us by a global superpower,
| and is therefore not fragile and subject to failure when the
| superpower declines. Early investors of the network will get
| rich if it succeeds, just like early investors of any tech
| giant did. That mechanism of rewarding those who take a risk
| with their money when the future is uncertain is a huge part of
| what's driving its continued growth and success. If you didn't
| have that to bootstrap the network, bitcoin would likely be a
| forgotten oddity of a cypherpunk project that nobody ever cared
| about. But now, it's a global money that nation states are
| adopting.
|
| I do agree that most crypto projects will fail and end up
| looking like nothing more than pump and dumps to scalp investor
| money, whether from dumb VCs or retail.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >The point is to build an open monetary system
|
| A structurally impossible goal when it is deflationary in
| nature.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Why's that?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| A rational actor would never spend a deflationary
| currency since it would gain value as deflation happens.
| If everyone was rational, no money would ever change
| hands. You can't have a functional monetary system
| without liquidity or exchanging of currency.
|
| Bitcoin is a deflationary currency (for now)
| seibelj wrote:
| I find a lot of DeFi projects to be very useful, but you have a
| logical fallacy -
|
| If I buy 1% of Apple stock at $100, and later it's worth $1000
| based on the last trading price, money didn't change hands to
| make me have more USD, it's my paper wealth.
|
| If Bitcoin goes from $1 to $50k, and I never sell, I didn't
| take any money - the wealth simply grew.
| ipnon wrote:
| Applying this argument to the US dollar when it was gaining
| value relative to many other currencies before the current
| inflationary spat is illustrative. Probably all of us held
| USD during that time, but that act in itself wasn't
| productive. The increase in value came from the underlying
| institution of the US Treasury being perceived as more
| trustworthy than other similar international institutions.
| The distinction to make is between the minor deflation of USD
| and the absolutely massive deflation of BTC over the same
| time period. I think everyone would agree there is _some_
| value to a decentralized proof of work transaction ledger,
| but $50k USD is clearly the result of some mania (rational or
| otherwise). That "some value" should therefore be reflected
| in a positive price, even if that number is orders of
| magnitude less than the current astronomical price.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| If you hold something with that much volatility it's not a
| currency.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The point is that holding Apple stock is a claim of ownership
| of the assets of Apple as well as the future income of Apple,
| either in the form of dividends or stock buybacks.
|
| The activity of Apple is economically meaningful; and the
| price of Apple stock reflects that.
| trophycase wrote:
| The activity on Ethereum is economically meaningful,
| whether you believe it is or not. And let's be honest,
| Netflix or Facebook could disappear off the face of the
| earth tomorrow and productivity would arguably increase, so
| is that a negative sum game?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| OK but I'm responding to a claim about BTC.
| librish wrote:
| The activity on Ethereum has the potential to be
| economically meaningful (there's a separate discussion on
| whether or not it's the best way to do it) but I don't
| think it currently is.
|
| What is people extracting from the Ethereum ecosystem
| that isn't USD?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Why are you comparing a currency with a stock? What is the
| claim of ownership for USD for example?
| foobiekr wrote:
| The ability to pay taxes.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nightski wrote:
| While partly true, that is true of any asset (dollars
| in/dollars out). However your statement that fortunes are not
| created, they are redistributed is incorrect. The value is not
| a 1 to 1 relationship with inflows. The value is based on
| supply/demand. If demand outstrips supply, value goes up
| regardless of how much $ is flowing in or out. You can see
| large price swings even on days with low volume.
| lhorie wrote:
| I'm curious if this comment is a usual fare of shallow
| dismissal or if you are aware of current applications of crypto
| in the wild and consider them to be useless nonetheless.
|
| One example that comes to mind is that Docusign offers a
| product that uses Ethereum for storing evidence of contracts in
| a decentralized medium. That seems like a fairly legitimate
| application for the technology. Another example (albeit
| possibly more dubious) is BitTorrent tokens as a "currency" for
| "buying" download speed by incentivizing people to keep nodes
| running within its P2P network.
|
| Do you consider these types of applications to be negative
| sums? If so, why? Not trying to be antagonistic here, I'm
| actually curious.
| paxys wrote:
| Every large company (including my own) jumped on the crypto
| bandwagon when the tech started gaining mainstream
| popularity, but it was mostly to give their salespeople more
| content for their pitch decks instead of building features
| people would actually utilize.
|
| For the case you mentioned, is anyone actually using this
| tech for their contracts? No Docusign (or any other) document
| I have ever signed was written to any blockchain. Have any
| real legal disputes ever been resolved by looking up a public
| ledger?
| librish wrote:
| Those applications are not negative sum. My impression is
| that the total revenue for services like that is minuscule, I
| would be very interested if you have data showing something
| else.
| twox2 wrote:
| How is it negative sum, and not just zero sum?
| FabHK wrote:
| Miners are paid some $40m/day, through 1) creating more BTC
| (called "coinbase" here, "Seigniorage" more generally,
| leading to inflation) and 2) fees.
|
| For now, the $100 miners siphon off per transaction are
| predominantly from 1), so those costs are not very visible.
|
| And then of course the exchanges charging 20 to 120 bp (or
| more) for a roundtrip against money you can actually use.
| Coinbase (the exchange) alone takes around 0.4% of the entire
| crypto market cap per annum into its pockets.
| paxys wrote:
| There are middlemen extracting fees at every step
| dragontamer wrote:
| A lot of miners have access to free electricity, often
| through corrupt officials on some unsavory countries... or
| even US Army folk who are abusing their home's utility bills
| (Uncle Sam pays for that electricity).
|
| Under these conditions, the utility company has to pay for
| say $100 in electricity to make $80 of cryptocoin. But since
| the miner has "free electricity" and doesn't see these costs,
| they only see the $80 of cryptocoin that they sold off.
| jshen wrote:
| Carbon footprint, and convincing people that a JPEG is an
| asset that will go up.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| The real stuff is the waste of resources. Not just the
| carbon footprint, the staggering amount of silicon wasted
| on those. Though that sure makes GPU prices go up...
| loph wrote:
| "Crypto" to me is about cryptography, not cryptocurrencies.
|
| re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_naming_controversy
|
| and (of course) this: https://www.iacr.org/meetings/crypto/
|
| I wish that lazy people did not overload this term.
| scottiebarnes wrote:
| Language is fluid and evolves over time, get over it.
| [deleted]
| pixelpoet wrote:
| > I wish that lazy people did not overload this term.
|
| You mean like how you just used the programming definition of
| "overload" that you won't find in the dictionary?
| alligator1728 wrote:
| eropple wrote:
| _> Does it not make sense that a reporter on web3 /crypto
| should be entitled to practice owning an ENS domain, in order
| to better write about the experience from a first hand
| perspective? It would be like banning a reporter from
| purchasing their own personal domain name, out of fear it may
| skew their bias on how they write about HTTP and web
| protocols._
|
| It absolutely does not. This is what a research budget is for
| from an organization--and you can shred it/render it
| nonfunctional afterwards to avoid a personally biasing stake.
|
| As for "personal identities": I know of about half of the folks
| cited in those articles and all of them, even crypto's scariest
| nemesis (one David Gerard), have plenty of other things that
| they do and that they are interested in. Perhaps what you read
| as a "personal vendetta" is a deep understanding of what a
| rotgut industry they criticize, and that morality is not fully
| dead.
| alligator1728 wrote:
| I feel a journalist should be entitled to own their own
| personal ENS domain just like they might secure their own
| .com domain with their own personal funds. Seems wild to
| suggest that Kevin should sell his ENS domain to avoid any
| potential bias, considering it means he will have to later
| buy it back at a premium either when/if he retires (or
| changes jobs), or when/if the NYT changes their policy. (I am
| assuming (1) he actually wants to keep the ENS domain, and
| (2) he bought it with his own funds, rather than company
| dime.)
|
| I am sure they all have fulfilling lives outside of what they
| project online; but the single-track attitude and constant
| crypto snark is as tiring as the laser eyed BTC bros.
|
| Edit: just to add, if the ENS were solely to practice buying
| "nytdomaintest1234.eth" and using it, then sure I agree with
| you. I am asking this question in the context of Kevin owning
| a personal domain linked to his real life name and identity.
| flaque wrote:
| The issue with crypto is that reasonable use cases are early, and
| don't attract attention except for niche communities.
|
| There's a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has
| created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000
| cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats)
|
| But realistically, the interesting projects are very small and
| hard to find.
|
| However, scams and ponzi schemes, by their nature are very
| public, easy to find, and have lots of people talking about them
| (often for financial gain).
|
| Everyone building anything sane is so tired of having to explain
| that their thing isn't a ponzi, isn't an nft thing, and isn't
| shilling proof of work, that they don't post to hacker news, and
| so they exist outside of your bubble.
|
| Crypto is like the story of the blind scientists studying an
| elephant. The first one touches its trunk and says "it's a
| snake!", the next one touches its tusk and says "it's a spear!",
| the next one touches its side and says "it's a wall!". None have
| the correct answer, because no single party has a full view.
|
| The crypto skeptics are as irrational as the crypto optimists:
| firm believers in their own view, based on an incomplete
| information.
| Aunche wrote:
| >There's a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has
| created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000
| cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats)
|
| First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage, so I
| wouldn't exactly call it a commodity market. Also, I doubt that
| Amazon is making 99.9% profit margins, so it's more likely that
| miners are just subsidizing the cost of storage to speculate.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, it sucks. Monero for example is an actual privacy coin
| that's usable as currency but nobody seems to care. Very
| demoralizing.
|
| Bitcoin is obsolete technology at this point. It's continued
| existence does more harm than good to the cryptocurrency space
| because everyone gravitates towards it instead of better
| projects.
| eoo wrote:
| Bitcoin is as obsolete as POSIX. It's ossified, and not
| changing is a feature.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| version_five wrote:
| > precoiners
|
| This made the post
| mcbuilder wrote:
| If you want someone to understand crypto, have them mine a little
| and then have them purchase something physical.
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