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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general. I mean think what you want about the industry, but it has definitely been a financial success. Yet HN has had a non-stop hate boner for it since 2010.

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It's wild that people can say this on the heels of widespread systemic failure like FTX, Terra, and all the other rug pulls/scams. We tried cryptocurrency; it's incompatible with our societal and governmental paradigms.

I was rooting for cryptocurrency 7 years ago, when it wasn't sold as "digital gold" or whatever asinine label people give it nowadays. I'll eat the crow and admit I was wrong to not anticipate the abuse of an open, distributed system. The landscape of cryptocurrency today is an irrecoverable mess, evidenced by the slipping valuation and hemorrhaging trade volume.

I'm sure there have been traditional businesses that were systemic failures and scams

There are billions of dollars of cryptocurrency moving around on black markets every day. It is a massive success for shady business.

Those were custodial companies. The whole point of crypto is not your keys, not your coin.

But Crypto is too complicated for 99% of the population to use directly. Given that exactly what is it useful for then?

The Stock Market is too complicated for most people but it is pretty safe for the average citizen to participate in ( and you have many levels of "participation" according to you expertise, budget and inclination).

Crypto is digital cash in the most literal sense. If you lose your wallet, the cash in it is gone. If you're mugged, the cash you give your attacker is gone. People secure little paper bills in their wallet/purse much better than they do their credit card info. If you set people's expectations correctly, that gets you 90% of the way there.

The other 10% is the fact that securing digital data is not as easy to do as physical money. However this is where hardware wallets come in, and the user experience for hardware wallets has improved considerably over the last half decade. They just need to be more widely deployed.

If 90% of your argument is that we need to move the goalposts, and the other 10% says we need to rework the UX to accompany it, maybe aiming to be digital cash isn't in crypto's best interest? That's disregarding it's volatility, missing accountability and lack of meaningful regulation.

Moving goalposts? Crypto is and always has been about self custody, from the very beginning.

Yep, I agree. Even still, millions fell for it, and because they aren't regulated (like, say, a bank or something) they were able to fuck people over on an unprecedented scale. You can try and educate people on this truth, but it doesn't matter. FTX and Coinbase bought up the advertising, exchanges are the face of crypto for the common person.

There's simply no momentum left in cryptocurrency as a software movement. An economy cannot live on HODLers and hustlers alone.

You're going to have to define success here.

People made a lot of predictions about what the impact of crypto currency or blockchains generally would be. Few of those seem to have come to pass.

Do you actually know anyone who has actually ever used cryptocurrency for a real transaction? Beyond something like buying coffee? And not for black market purposes?

Yes: me.

That depends how you define success. I don't think many consider a zero-sum game where only the winners are publicized a success.

It is objectively not a zero-sum game, which is my point. It has grown from a million, to billion, to trillion dollar industry.

Bigger doesn't prove the game is not zero sum. There is no valid underlying use for any cryptocurrency for the average person. If you take away early adopters, crypto-zealots, shills, criminals organizations and suckers, what's left is far from clear. Is cryptocurrency some transformative, post-governmental currency, controlled by the people - or the next speculative de jour - or a scam - with a better marketing strategy?

What seems clear is that when you confound speculative utopian societal changes with the underworld's dream currency, crazy things happen.

I'm sorry, but do you know what zero-sum means? Maybe go look it up. It's okay, you're one of today's lucky 10,000.

The market has grown in size. The value of crypto companies and market caps today is not literally the sum of the value of crypto companies and market caps 10 years ago. Ergo, not zero-sum. This is purely a mathematical statement about industry financials, not a moral judgement about abstract "value" in terms of societal contribution.

My implication is that ultimately crypto will go to zero - because it is worthless. When you sell something that is worthless to someone, that is a zero sum game.

> it is objectively not a zero sum game

Right, it’s actually a negative sum game because the network takes resources to secure. Thanks for pointing that out.

Haha so true, it’s pretty wild and sometimes I feel crazy not being a crypto hater on here. Don’t get me wrong, there are scams galore in the space but I think there’s a real place for crypto in the future.

I co-founded a bitcoin company. Spent the most active 5 years of my professional life there. No regrets!

Noticed the same since the early days.

Financial success while ignoring externalities? Is the amount of pollution created as a byproduct of using all the electricity not in the calculation?

Being surprised that there is a pushback against such a technology seems inappropriate or foolish.

One could make literally the same arguments about Uber and Airbnb. HN has it in for crypto specifically, for whatever reason.

Good luck trying to make a parallel argument that has the same strength.

Does Uber or Airbnb use 100,000x more resources per transaction than the standard alternative?

A significant fraction of world GDP is spent on financial services selling trust. It is not obvious that a world with trustless self-custody crypto would be more expensive than traditional finance.

Bitcoin does not scale by design. Ethereum may be different. I doubt there is a uniform hate towards the crypto world the original commenter laments about. It's probably a bit more nuanced -- as you could expect from HN (on average).

You’ve wandered into my field of expertise. Bitcoin can be made to scale to billions of concurrent users. There is a clear roadmap from here to there.

Can be, but isn't, right? What's the delay? It's been over a decade -- apparently the electricity consumption isn't a priority for the community.

Electricity consumption is the entire point of bitcoin and isn't going to change. It is what the security arguments are based on. Note that electric consumption of proof-of-work does not scale with usage though.

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