Item — HN Reader

Anyone old enough to remember what the press said in the 90s about the Internet will recognize the similarities.

The Internet is full of fraudulent websites. It's full of porn. Email isn't as warm as a hand-written letter. Communicating online isn't professional. Etc.

Guess what, all those things were true but they turned out not to matter. You can do whatever else you want in a network that also carries porn. You learn to dodge fraud. Email is freaking convenient once everybody is using it, standards of behavior change, etc.

Cryptocurrency may be something or it may not. It's in very early stages. Even those who are interested have trouble following everything that is happening. But it's not even Internet-in-the-90s. It's Internet-in-the-70s. You can be skeptical about it, you can ignore it, but I don't see why someone would spend so much of their time being opposed to it.

2 comments

Internet-in-the-70s was incredibly, astoundingly useful, and people weren't in it for the potential, but because it was offering them something, _today_.

I'm not seeing a single BTC enthusiast who's out for the utility of it. They are, quite literally, all of them into it for the speculatory potential.

The same goes for all the other blockchains. Ethereum, EOS — all of them made fabulous promises of applications just around the corner, but nothing has materialized except shitty gambling and Ponzi schemes.

EOS alone raised over $1 billion in its year-long ICO. A startup that spent this much money and delivered so little actual utility would be out of business long ago. But these coins just keep going because end-user value was never the point, they're all about siphoning money from new suckers whenever there's a "crypto boom". The endless refrain of "maybe it's like the early Internet, you never know!" is an important part of this scam.

Yup, and it's the one topic where a subset of HN commenters continue to overlook an incredible amount of technical/product deficiencies, just because it could potentially make them rich. If it had actual utility, people would be spending it and not just hodling.

People are spending it. And a lot of it. You need to spend ether to put smart contracts into the Ethereum blockchain and you also pay for transaction fees with it.

I am out for the utility of it and I have lamented its volatility before (check my comment history if you'd like, even) so not "literally" all of them. I acknowledge I may be an anomaly but there is defintively a non-zero amount of people out there who do use BTC/crypto for its purported goals and not just for speculation.

And just like clockwork, whenever there are big price swings, these kind of articles attacking cryptocurrency show up on HN.

Maybe dont look into the obsolete tech? BTC isnt going anywhere in case of utility. Thats why the Maxis moved from p2p cash to store of value in just a few years. Also the speculation part is kinda needed its the only way something can have a value which is needed to have utility. It should be more balanced which will eventually happen fore some simply because real utility will drastically reduce volatility and thus makes it less interesting for speculation. Anyway BTC isn't one of them there is no utility in sight and it HAS to stay volatile to attract speculators else it drops to near zero and hashrate collapses.

> I'm not seeing a single BTC enthusiast who's out for the utility of it.

Isn't that the point of BTC. If you could see them, it would not be `pseudoanonymous` right?

I can tell everyone I use Signal for the privacy aspect without being specific about its contents.

I cannot reasonably believe that there's people actually trading on BTC out of its utility if they don't talk about it. Unless of course all that activity is fundamentally illegal, which is a definitely something I'm willing to entertain.

The internet of 1970s solved a problem.

Other than "easier to buy drugs than with cash", what problem does bitcoin actually solve?

Let's talk again when PayPal has cancelled your account.

Propping up AMD's revenues during some rough spots?