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Comment by heidar | Hacker News Reader

Given what you're commenting all over this post, it's pretty clear you don't follow developments in the cryptocurrency space much.

Bitcoin is stale, there's no development or innovation happening. It has become a store of value only. The only possible solution that could change that is the Lightning network or other Layer 2 protocols.

There are plenty of other coins however that are doing super exciting innovation. Bitcoin Cash and Nano are some examples. They're actually solving problems and moving the technology forward. And they're being adopted as payment methods as a result.

It makes me incredibly sad to see how many people (especially on HN) have no idea about that, and have adopted an anti-crypto stance like it's some ideological war, constantly citing the same old tired arguments.

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Can we please dispense with the ad-hominem attacks?

I've been following cryptocurrency since 2009/2010, and I've worked adjacent to the space at one point.

There are plenty of us who were enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies before the narrative moved away from distributed systems and turned into a pure financial play for everyone involved.

> There are plenty of other coins however that are doing super exciting innovation.

The real question is: Why must they be coins?

Why can't they simply develop blockchain technology that doesn't revolve around inventing an all-new currency?

The competition for innovation is fun. The competition for everyone to buy each cryptocurrency on exchanges and then pump it across social media is not.

I'll be excited again when we can stop inventing new currencies left and right and just skip straight to distributed systems for managing our existing cash. I don't want to have to invest in 20 different cryptocurrencies out of the 1000s on the market just to be able to interact with all of the different systems. I don't want to manage my payment methods like investments. And frankly, I don't think the average person cares about the underlying innovation because they just want to speculate.

> Why must they be coins? Why can't they simply develop blockchain technology that doesn't revolve around inventing an all-new currency?

To make it trustless, provide a proper incentive model, and for security.

> just skip straight to distributed systems for managing our existing cash

That doesn't work. Fiat is tied to nation states and are under direct influence by them. One example is how after Trump's term a lot of countries have been divesting away from having so much of their reserves tied to USD.

The other thing is removal of middlemen and having transparent and predictable inflation. You can't do that with fiat. There's central banks that will always be there. Even if you distribute the processing to remove Visa and the like, you will always have the central banks there.

> There are plenty of other coins however that are doing super exciting innovation. Bitcoin Cash and Nano are some examples.

You really had me where you mentioned exciting innovation. I thought you were going to go into Ethereum, the EVM, smart contracts, DeFi, etc. But then you mention BCH and Nano lol. While I guess you can say there's advancements there over Bitcoin, in the grand scheme of the ecosystem Ethereum is where all the actual innovation is happening.

Sorry for not mentioning your favourite coin, please don't be offended. The Ethereum roadmap is exciting, so is the BCH one, I just wanted to list some examples to make it clear that Bitcoin itself does not have much interesting going on.

Can I ask you something: where do you get proper info about what's happening on crypto? Is there some honest party reporting it? Because all I've seen is "this is no financial advice" financial advice disguised as news or blogging, and the bitcoin forum. I'm saying that because I really feel only a few people are really on the loop. Thanks for any input

It's tough. It's the same issue as how to get stay informed with the news. You just kind of have to dive in and you figure out what's what. I'd lend you some resources but there's a lot going on in the space so without knowing your interest it'd be hard to send you in any direction.

Overall though I think the best thing to do is follow the people that are actually getting things done or directly involved. For example Andreas Antonopoulos has been in the scene for a long time and speaks well at various depth from the tech to more abstracted views (https://aantonop.com/). However he's mostly involved in Bitcoin. On the Ethereum side there's a few different resources from Vitalik's blog (main cofounder) to the developer roundup notes, to straight up reading their forum and proposals.

If you're wondering more about the trading side then my personal favorites that don't waste your time or try to sell you stuff are Willy Woo (@woonomic), Plan B (@100trillionUSD), and Benjamin Cowen (Youtube). Will does chain analysis for bitcoin, Plan B develops macro price prediction models, and Cowen covers a handful of assets from a mathematical and risk-adjusted return perspective.

all that innovation is cool and all, but it seems a bit egotistical to be upset that people haven't heard of your awesome cool thing when a vast vast majority of people haven't heard about or use your thing

This is a HN post where people are sharing their (mostly negative) opinions on cryptocurrencies, not the comment section on a YouTube video about knitting.

Also, I have nothing to do with these awesome cool things, but thanks for giving me credit for them.

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