Hacker News Reader

Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

I looked at your links and I still don't get it. I do want to understand. Where is the problem stated, clearly and concisely? What is the solution and why does it require crypto?

I say that as someone who read the Bitcoin paper in 2012 and was pretty excited back then.

Meanwhile online scams are a bigger industry than the illegal drug trade and bigger than the Australian economy. There are thousands of modern day slaves in call centers in Myanmar and the Philippines with fake social media profiles running pig butchering scams. That industry runs on crypto 100%. I guess that's one "problem" crypto solved.

You need some pretty convincing arguments at this point to convince me (and many others) that getting rid of this stuff wouldn't be a big win for humanity.

View on HN

The problem is relative to WHOM.

Here is the problem statement and solution for community leaders, the same class of decision makers who exited “AOL Keyword NYTimes” in favor of “nytimes.com” on this newfangled protocol called HTTP, with its servers and clients called browsers that people were downloading

intercoin.org/currencies.pdf

When they asked for a clear and concise description of your problem and solution, they are probably looking for a problem statement: a focused, 1 or 2 sentence explanation of the problem you intend to solve. You then present your proposed solution in the same form.

Hypothetical example problem statement: We want to promote ycombinator to everyone that could benefit, but banner ads make us look chintzy, directly engaging in the feral discourse on Slashdot would inevitably look unprofessional, and engaging directly through dozens of purpose-built blogs and websites is too onerous.

Hypothetical example solution statement: We should create our own simple, well-designed news site built on user submissions, and include threaded discussion capability with moderation built in at both the community and company level to keep things relatively civil. Then our audience will come looking for us.

What you offered is not a problem statement. It is a sales deck offering a, frankly, convoluted explanation of how starting a currency will solve a largely unrelated problem backed up by an unsupported assertion about the least representative sample in the world— Donald Trump.

Or, you could actually read the deck and it explains the problem.

At this point, I think this is just performative

I read it all. It's apparently supposed to be a way for celebrities to extract money from their audience by having them buy into their currency.

If you're satisfied with calling that useful, okay, I guess - to me it's deeply alarming that this is presented as a good example of a useful application of crypto.

In the broader context of crypto demand being driven essentially by digital crime and gambling, there would need to be some seriously glowing example of something good that can be done with it to shift my judgment.

For example, in the early days of Ethereum, I thought it'd be possible at some point to build truly open source, decentralized SaaS, where the deployment happens to the blockchain, and that this in turn would enable open source projects to finance themselves.

I've yet to see an example of this where the crypto aspect isn't a figleaf.

I'm very concerned that people arguing for exciting applications of crypto are involuntarily legitimizing the online crime ecosystem. Crypto in practice seems to lead to a massive transfer of assets to criminals. To an extent where that may end up destabilizing whole countries, given the market cap trajectory.

It doesn’t explain anything. It asserts a lot. Sorry I took the time to critique and give examples as a freelance business communication designer. Effective business communication requires frank feedback, and mine usually isn’t cheap, but if protecting your ego is the goal here, just keep assuming you’re doing everything right and it’s everybody else’s fault it’s not landing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com