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Crypto is an open protocol for financial services/transactions running on decentralised hardware. Thats pretty cool and useful.

Naturally the first thing that happened was that all the scammers and get rich idiots moved in like with any powerful new technology.

It will surely take some time to get the real world usage up and the portion of moon boys/scammers down but it will happen nevertheless.

> Crypto is an open protocol for financial services/transactions running on decentralised hardware.

Except it's not. "Open" and "decentralized" are the false promises of crypto. The entire crypto market is dominated by centralized exchanges, criminal enterprises like Tether and Binance.

How is it not open when anybody can interact with it and look at the source code, state of the chain and smart contracts? The chain is decentralized as no company is hosting the servers and can pull a google on short notice. But sure, many chains have serious problems with centralization of assets, control by a single person group..... This things, in combination with regulation, have to work itself out and the situation will most likely be completely different in 5-10 years.

You're talking as a developer.

None of the exchanges influencing crypto is actually open about their business. Eg. They even try to fake audits as much as possible. Ponzi schemes, pump and dumps, fake code-audits that reveal 0day exploits at launch and other (sometimes insider) hacks everywhere! It really is a daily wild wild west show - https://rekt.news

I will never trust a currency, where malicious insiders can walk away anonymously with my money and blame it on a hack.

"Open" and "decentralized" are the false promises of computing. The entire market is dominated by centralized companies like Microsoft and Apple.

Sound stupid? That's how your statement looks to people who understand the space.

Linux and open source software started slow but every year run more of the world because they are a better way of building things

Crypto and decentralized finance is doing the same for the finance industry. There are already $250B in DeFi protocols (see http://defillama.com) all of which are open source, transparent and decentralized.

There should be % fraud/hacked in there, if you really want to compare "a better way of building things" with actual KPI's

Scammers moving in on new, powerful technologies is a function of regulartory arbitrage in the face of moving the massive boat of government. To get rid of the scam requires removing the arbitrage. Financial systems are centralized specifically because you can't regulate them without the rule of law. The IRS in the US has already required reporting crypto-asset income. All that is left is for government to ban transfers to/from anonymous wallets.

Crypto speaks to aspects of humanity which people hold near and dear.

Crypto no doubt harbors shady characters, ponzi schemes, scams. You also can't deny that there are ideas which threaten state control, monetary policy, nationalistic ideals, religion its self. Just look at the magnitude of the conversation.

Its easy to dismiss me as the ramblings of somebody caught up in the scam. But when has it been a good idea to completely dismiss ideas which can shake the bedrock of society? I'm sure dinosaurs never thought an asteroid would cause them to go extinct either.

I ask the skeptics to take a Bayesian approach to skepticism. If you think in absolutes you can never accept new information. Move your skept-o-meter from 100% to 99% and allow yourself a fraction of a sliver of consideration. It might just be one of the most important things you have done.

> If you think in absolutes you can never accept new information.

Never? Sounds a mite like absolute thinking.

More like a mathematical certainty

The basic issue with cryptocurrency is that very little of it is actually new. You talk about ideas which threaten monetary policy--except those 'ideas' were actually the typical monetary policy not a hundred years ago. So it's worth asking yourself why monetary policy was changed from your favored position before trying to convince everybody else that it should be changed back.

You know, a decade ago, I actually thought that cryptocurrency and blockchain were interesting ideas that might be well worth pursuing. But it has increasingly felt like a solution in search of a problem--it's hard to find any use cases that aren't already better solved with other solutions. And in these kinds of discussions, the cryptocurrency adherents themselves struggle to proffer any such problem that doesn't boil down to--as someone else put it--wanting to live in Galt's Gulch. Which isn't exactly a compelling problem for most of the world's population. And comments like yours aren't helping to move the needle in the direction you want it to move.

But you're not being a skeptic here, you're just gambling.

Skepticism considers the ways in which you assumptions could have plausible positive or negative outcomes.

I see the entirety of the DeFi "industry" being regulated to death considering how many of these protocols and DAOs behave exactly like securities or replicate existing legal structures; I see no reason that governments will not seek to regulate them the same way.

We can look at the claims of crypt enthusiasts as stores of value, which is coherent, for sure, but if we're willing to give it the benefit of doubt then we should consider other equally shaky technologies and tech scenes, which doesn't give me much hope by itself.

The place where crypto has, and will likely continue to show value, is in money laundering and tax and currency control evasion. There are all things that, while illegal, _definitely_ have value, so my lower bound here is the value of a digital instrument to bypass these controls, especially in countries in which such things are tightly regulated.

That's not an insignificant lower bound; it is at least as large as a big fraction of the remittance industry + shadow banking. It's just that it's really, really difficult to make an honest living in this industry.

Regulation will come - folks on both sides are clamoring for it. Crypto industry folks are begging the SEC to do its job, but US Gov departments need to wrap up their infighting and territory division first.

Stephen Diehl is the most eloquent skeptic I've found (stephendiehl.com/blog.html). Much of the complaints point to unregistered securities fleecing retail (absolutely happening) or just overall complaints that humans are irrational (man yells at clouds). In light of his arguments, I still side on the perspective that this is genuinely new technology capable of giving the entire globe digital property rights. It's going to be a rocky road.

You also expect to profit disproportionately from onboarding those less fortunate you refer to. How is it fair to them or anyone? Besides the technical limitations of blockchain I find the distribution of rewards grotesque.

Odd perspective to express on a website which is founded upon being early to societal trends.

There is nothing wrong with the global financial system. I can already send money electronically to anyone by way of bank transfer. In Europe, it's even easier, faster and cheaper than sending crypto.

Indeed, and wiring money overseas has also never been easier. I regularly send money from Norway to family in Africa using online remittance services (there's quite a few to pick from) and it usually takes less than 15 minutes for the money to go through (and they get a pick up notice from their bank). Because of competition, the FX rates are very good. No crypto involved.

You have a comfortable life. Many don't. Side note: what appears to be instantaneous settlement in fact, is not.

Someone who is not comfortable should stay far away from cryptocurrencies, because they may not survive the loss of all their money to a hack.

Someone who's not comfortable is probably facing the decimation of their native currency already, as what's happening in several "modern" countries at the moment.

What would you pick? Sketchy native currency with a near guaranteed loss of 80%+ or a volatile crypto asset?

People in countries that had inflation problems had ways to cope: back in the 80s when inflation was high there were money market funds that paid interest that kept up with inflation, for example. The baby boomers got rich because they could pay back their loans with cheap money. Inflation helps debtors. On the other hand, deflation destroys economies as it gets people with money hoarding it. If you look at times in history when national currencies we're going up in value those are exactly the times when the economy was collapsing.

I'm guessing this is pretty dependent on which country in Africa you're sending to. Probably not Zimbabwe?

You'd be surprised: https://www.worldremit.com/en/zimbabwe/faq/cash-pickup

Nothing wrong in your perspective? How fortunate for you.

> You also can't deny that there are ideas which threaten state control, monetary policy, nationalistic ideals, religion its self.

Phew. Yeah, we all felt that. In 2010.

Now while we're reminiscing the past, I know another one! Lets provocatively ask: Isn't the colossal energy wasting worth freedom and all? - So exciting, wasn't it? And don't get me started on Wikileaks donations!

Reality has moved on, and nothing screams ponzi scheme more, than followers repeating decade old talking points, aged like milk, into dogma. Lol, I am pretty sure the vast majority of people doesn't even want that idea of ancap freedom, unregulated markets and tax evasion.

Crypto is not just Bitcoin, and crypto is not just Proof-Of-Work. Other blockchains who can be just as decentralized and censorship-resistant exist.

(In the spirit of DRY, I think it is time we collectively write all an adversarial collaboration about crypto on some wiki page. Then I can at least just respond with a link to the rebuttal of the same tired and lazy arguments that crypto-skeptics make)

This is wrong, all PoS cryptocurrencies are extremely centralized. Try running a validator on Avalanche, see how it goes.

The merge is all but inevitable now, and it seems that there are quite a good number of validators for the Beacon chain: https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe0...

> Crypto is not just Bitcoin, and crypto is not just Proof-Of-Work.

Sure. Theoretically. Are you suggesting "crypto" isn't almost entirely proof-of-work - de facto? You think those invested care for proof-of-stake? Lol.

> same tired and lazy arguments that crypto-skeptics make

HyDrOpOweR!1! (Deprecated in 2021)

But hey, I am all for the wiki. Actually, I wonder why that hasn't happened yet...

Anyway, I don't want to make the impression all innovation in crypto fanfiction in the last decade has been lost on me! For example, I do recognize, that Bitcoin isn't promoted as currency anymore - because it utterly sucks for transactions. It's "like Gold!" now, or something. Very progressive.

> You think those invested care for proof-of-stake?

Enough to stake more than 8 Million ETH (about ~35 Billion dollars) [0]

> because it utterly sucks for transactions.

Again taking Bitcoin as a whole of crypto?

Yes, Bitcoin has failed as a currency. Yes, the "digital gold" narrative is bogus. Yes, there will be a lot of Bitcoin maxis who will have to deal with the terrible realization that their "sound money" is worthless. Can we move on now?

[0]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe0...

Is this sarcasm, or are you actually saying that freedom is not worth the spent energy?

Bitcoin is now used by El Salvador to avoid borrowing money from IMF. Is that also a ponzi scheme?

No. Yes, "freedom" ain't worth it.

I don't know.

Crypto is a mix, though. Yes, there's lots of feedback-growth/tulip-bubble nonsense. There's also a very large amount of very real money flight being enabled. The PRC clampdown was fundamentally aimed at that trick: wealthy folks in China with a ton of RMB don't trust the government not to steal their fortune (c.f. Jack Ma). But you can't turn those yuan into anything liquid outside the country without tipping them off that you're running, then you'll end up just like Jack anyway.

But... if you can build a datacenter in China with RMB, and pay chinese workers with RMB, and buy equipment and electricity with RMB, and get *bitcoin* out, then you've evaded the trap and liquified[1] your Chinese holdings.

It's not at all clear to me how much this hole has been closed, honestly. But it's possible this is still going on at a level high enough to explain crypto's continued expansion.

That said: duh, it's a bubble and it's coming down at some point. But there's real economics happening too.

[1] Or laundered, depending on how you swing.

First, there were already various capital transfer methods for the Chinese rich before crypto exploded (also, Jack Ma wasn’t really targeted to give up his wealth or whatsoever. Legally speaking any Chinese person can only transfer up to 50K USD abroad per year, and that’s the reason for the search after capital flight mechanisms, but that’s a separate point). Second, this could not be a particular reason why the crypto market would suddenly balloon 10 times in less than a year (why would Bitcoin’s value go up if it’s only bought/mined and sold constantly in exchange for fiat anyways, in the first place?). So yeah, capital flight has always been a use case of crypto, but it far from explains the market exuberance we’re seeing right now.

Pyramid schemes like Rodan and Fields can go on forever, they will grow and contract over time, but there will always be a new group of people who are interested in getting rich. The mentality isn't much different than gambling at casinos I guess.

For those who don't know Bernie Madoff was an American financier who executed the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors out of tens of billions of dollars over the course of at least 17 years, and possibly longer. He was also a pioneer in electronic trading and chairman of the Nasdaq in the early 1990s.

How are you so confident in something you clearly don't understand.

Celsius is not decentralized finance and does not represent crypto, it is a centralized opaque company which is literally the opposite.

Decentralized Finance is all open source and transparent, everything is written to a public blockchain and almost every piece of infrastructure you can go and look at the source code yourself.

It's a far better system than anything we've built so far because it's available for all to see the inner workings.

I'm surprised hacker news, a place that's supposed to be about intellectual curiosity, has been so ignorant and dismissive of this revolution underfoot for so long.

What do you even mean by Crypto? It's like saying "Internet is probably the most brilliant scam in the history of mankind". It's so non-specific it's meaningless.

China banned cryptocurrency not because it's a scam (which it mostly is) but because it provides a way for wealthy Chinese to evade currency controls. The Chinese renmimbi currency isn't freely convertible to foreign hard currency. But Chinese residents found a loophole. They could purchase cryptocurrency mining hardware and electricity with renmimbi, then use online exchanges to sell the resulting tokens for foreign currency. The Chinese Communist Party couldn't tolerate this challenge to their authority.

There is nothing of substance in this comment; its taken you two paragraphs to say "I think its a scam and I don't like it". Moralizing and vague threats make up the rest.

Sure, let's talk shit about a new system that's largely censorship resistant (or trying to be) and call it the biggest scam in history (without any evidence) while praising the world's most authoritarian government. Hard to take you seriously.

They forgot to mention the widespread vested interest by the large number of speculators to deny/downplay the issues in every discussion ;-)

Indeed, I'm one of those folks to some extent. I've made good money from crypto. I'm not here to downplay the issues, in fact I admit there are MANY issues. That doesn't mean I brush off the whole thing as a scam or a ponzi.

EDIT: PS. I don't know much about celsius, and it might in fact be a ponzi. I'm referring to brushing off crypto as ponzi.

Define "scam" then. I am 100% sure I can buy drugs, fake IDs, CP and other illegal goods and services with crypto, how's that a scam?

Same here, even though it's increasingly hard. All my friends say I'm stupid to choose to leave out.

What about legal drugs?

Eric Schmidt just joined ChainLink as a Strategic Advisor[0]. If crypto is such an obvious scam like so many hn readers believe to be the case, why would someone like Schmidt ruin his reputation by joining a crypto company?

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/former-google-ceo-e...

Even Bernie Madoff had highly respectable people working with him.

edit: removed my comment about Schmidt not really joining, I see it announced on his Twitter.

I don't know... but I think you're wrong: https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1468308027296075778

If I understand correctly, Chainlink are selling "blockchain magic" to enterprise customers. Not exactly the same thing as the ponzi lending stuff

ChainLink is an Oracle that provides real-world data to the blockchain. They're used by smart contracts like AAVE and Compound, things a hn reader might describe as "ponzi lending stuff".