HN user
https://arthurstoor.com/
If it was just a backup against failing/weak institutions it would be relavively benign, but the problem is that it incentivises machiavellian types to undermine society and nation states for their own personal profit - see e.g. The Sovereign Individual[0].
Combined with effective accelerationism[1] you can see why we could be heading towards somewhere a whole lot worse than The Bad Place.
"It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games. Does this serve any purpose?
My personal theory is that violent video games (and films and other media) are encouraged in highly militarised societies to desensitise their populations to violence - if you normalise it so it all seems like a game or other form of entertainment, you get a lot less internal opposition when you go about killing real people in other countries.
Could be a good use for all the AI datacentres when the bubble bursts.
Given his past it is easy to imagine his keys got misplaced while on the run or met with some kind of "unfortunate accident".
In reference to the article's question: "could we turn Community Notes itself into something that's more like an economist algorithm?" My answer would be: no, as soon as you add an economic incentive to a system such as this, you break it, by adding an immediate and direct incentive for abusing and gaming it. FWIW that's why I think the concept of "credible neutrality" applied to money is a fantasy, like a neutral weapon (as soon as it is used it has, by definition, to have taken a side).
The article fails to point out that cryptocurrency has already effectively been banned (or at least delegitimised) in other major economies like China and India, so the US is in some sense just playing catch-up. At this stage, at the national level, cryptocurrency is primarily supported by mafia states like Russia, rogue states like North Korea, micro-states like various Caribbean islands, and otherwise failing states.
The irony is that Bitcoin was created in direct response to the perceived shortcomings of the traditional financial system (see the message in the genesis block), but since then the traditional financial system has cleaned itself up enormously, while cryptocurrency has had the exact opposite trajectory and is now nothing more than a magnet for actual or latent fraudsters.
Note that this is the same Worldcoin that has been going round poor countries scanning people's eyeballs with an orb in exchange for some shady cryptocurrency with the primary objective of making some billionaires richer. See e.g. previous discussions on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065 . I thought trying to turn our world into a terrifying dystopia for private profit was scary, but this article trying to sell it as something that is somehow beneficial for humanity is even worse.
Thirteen years is a very long time in technology. The "problem" with HN is that many of us have been around since the start of cryptocurrency, and have a very deep rather than superficial understanding of the technology. That means we have seen how the cycles work out (start out with something reasonable, e.g. a system for "small casual transactions" in Bitcoin's case, fail to deliver, change promises, fail to deliver, and rinse and repeat, each time with a new generation of greater fools) and understand that each new wave of promises are impossible to deliver for various technical and in some cases non-technical reasons. Unfortunately the current generation of proponents just don't have the depth of experience to understand this, and are blinded by false hope that this is their generation's breakthrough technology, so are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forebears. FWIW I don't think it'll go to zero or disappear - it satisfies a niche in some human's psyche to try to "get rich quick" with little effort - just like we've had Multi Level Marketing schemes like Mary Kay for decades, and casinos and various forms of gambling for centuries.
Yes, casinos are pretty well regulated in most countries, which is why I wrote "At best they [cryptocurrency coins and tokens] are like casino tokens". Although casinos don't have a spotless record, e.g. US$63 million from the 2016 Bangladesh Bank cyber heist is suspected to have been laundered via casinos in Manilla.
Looking for a cryptographic solution to this is certainly missing the point - it presupposes cryptocurrency coins and tokens are assets in the traditional sense, which they are not. At best they are like casino tokens - they have no intrinsic value, no legal entitlement to anything, and their use is entirely at the discretion of the issuing casino. That works fine for casinos because everything operates within the casino. The problem is that cryptocurrency wants to go outside the cryptocurrency sphere and into the real world, which is something that it is simply not designed to do. As we have seen, this leads to endless exploits, e.g. VCs and exchanges printing up billions of dollars worth of tokens, claiming they are actual assets (imagine a real casino printing chips with a total face value of $1.6 billion and claiming they had $1.6 billion in assets), convincing retail "investors" to exchange real money for those "assets", and then using that real money to gamble in different casinos.
If you're planning on front-running any issues, I doubt you'd put articles like that (which publicly exhibit an almost pathological lack of self-awareness) on your website.
There are so many red flags in that article, and that article is coming from Sequoia Capital itself. I can't understand how anyone would have invested anything at all in FTX, let alone an astonishing $1.3 billion in Series B and Series C. Does no-one at these VCs do any form of due diligence (e.g. reading the articles on their own web sites), or are they unfathomably incompetent, or living in some alternate reality from the rest of us where everything is reversed (incompetence is competence, war is peace, ignorance is strength, etc.), or is there something else I'm missing?
This sort of thing is as old as crypto itself - see e.g. "How to steal Bitcoins" with some excellent HN comments (including from one of the thieves referenced in the original article) from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365663
I remember reading in the last year about one of the crypto companies that hired an anonymous employee.
Maybe "Sifu" of DeFi protocol Wonderland[0], or "UmbralUpsilon" of Indexed Finance[1], to take just a couple of examples.
Also, how do you trust anonymous employees not to steal?
Pretty extreme example, but just look at the cryptocurrency space which is filled with stories of theft by anonymous founders or employees, e.g. "Sifu" of DeFi protocol Wonderland was actually Michael Patryn of Quadriga infamy[0] (who in turn was actually Omar Dhanani who had previously served 18 months for identity theft[1]), the "UmbralUpsilon" contributor to Indexed Finance used inside information to "steal" $11.9M in tokens[2], etc. etc.
Now if it were charities doing good work with no money involved (either received from donors or paid to employees), then I can just about imagine a case for anonymous philanthropy or whatever, but money and anonymous individuals do not safely mix. Even if they don't initially set out to steal, they might be tempted if they find they can get away with it - opportunity makes a thief.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120762
The problem is that any "legitimate" use case is negated many times over by all the illegitimate ones. It would be like saying let's legitimise terrorism because sometimes the terrorists might (just might) be freedom fighters, when in actual fact terrorism on the whole does way more harm than it does good. In the opening example, sure some money may have got through to Ukraine via cryptocurrency (although some was stolen by scammers pretending to be Ukraininans, and more much money was transferred more securely and efficiently through traditional means), but any good that did was completely undone many times over by Russia's use of cryptocurrency. Put politely, cryptocurrency is a net negative for our society and environment (by a considerable margin).
Transaction irreversability is the whole point of the "peer to peer electronic cash system": "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments... cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions ... What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud" from the opening lines of the Bitcoin white paper.
So Bitcoin was designed for micropayments, and irreversability is a feature to reduce the friction. That is fine because it was intended for "small casual transactions" which very few people are going to invest the time and effort into disputing. It even looked like it might be successful as a micropayment system at first, given small Bitcoin transactions were initially processed without any transaction fees.
The problem is that it has clearly failed as a "peer to peer electronic cash system". It is now used primarily for large transactions, which you absolutely do need consumer protections for if you are a legitimate user (indeed the fact that there aren't consumer protections has made the space so popular with fraudsters, scammers etc.). And as others have commented, the newer cryptocurrencies which attempt to offer such protections end up being worse in every conceivable way from the traditional solutions. Leading back to the original article - is there any legitimate point to cryptocurrencies nowadays?
Or (iii) try to set up a new society elsewhere, e.g. Cryptoland[0], the Crypto-Currency Seastead[1], Blockchain City[2], Bitcoin city[3], etc.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29867057
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28441794
The crypto ethos is antithetical to that of non-commercial content creators - putting a crypto wallet address on a website is like putting a big banner saying "I'm helping legitimise an environment destroying pyramid scheme to enrich myself, and I'm probably into lots of other shady stuff too", which might be fine for venture capitalists and their like, but not non-commercial content creators. Putting a donation link to something like ko-fi.com on the other hand is a better look for that sort of site.
If these scams and frauds are being fueled and legitimised by the venture capitalists, and the venture capitalists are US regulated, shouldn't the regulators be going after the venture capitalists? Even a few seconds of amateur due diligence (e.g. the time it takes to read "20% guaranteed annual return with zero risk") would have set off alarm bells, so they must have known they were aiding and abetting criminal activity.
The author repeatedly refers to Bitcoin as a "public good", "dependent" on a "volunteer-layer", like the crypto bros such as the article author are putting all their time and effort into running a public service for the greater benefit of society out of the goodness of their hearts with no expectation of profit. That is clearly the exact opposite of reality - they are trying to extract maximum personal profit in the shortest time irrespective of the damage they are doing to our society and environment.
So Tether has become something like an international reserve cryptocurrency, which gives them an "exorbitant privilege"[0], meaning they can do pretty much whatever they want safe in the knowledge that everyone else will do everything they can to prevent them from failing because everyone else would have too much to lose if they did fail. That has kept it going for a long time, and might (or might not) keep it going for a lot longer, but ultimately a replacement reserve cryptocurrency will come.
Something is only a sound investment if you know all sides are bound by rule of law. If you were to put money into a shell game at the local unlicenced market, then that would not be classed as a sound investment (even if you did know how to "beat the system" there's a good chance an accomplice would mug you for your winnings after you walked away). Or if you received a cold call from someone claiming to be a stockbroker with "insider knowledge" encouraging you to buy shares that they "know" are about become very valuable, that would not be classed as a sound investment.
With cryptocurrency it is the same. The combination of zero consumer protection and anonymity is the perfect breeding ground for fraud. If you were being charitable, you could call converting fiat money into cryptocurrency a gamble, but certainly not a sound investment. The only people who will try to convince you otherwise are those set to gain from the fraud.
In my view, how you earn your money affects how you value it.
Many with cryptocurrency haven't had to do any hard honest work to obtain it, e.g. the early joiners who have just had to wait as their "wealth" accrues from later joiners, or even newer joiners who have made their "wealth" from scams or rugpulls or wash trading to artificially inflate the value of their NFTs or whatever. These people tend not to value their "wealth" in the same way as the "greater fools" who have had to work hard at honest jobs to earn their fiat prior to converting it to cryptocurrency, and so don't have such a problem with the constant risk of losing everything via loss or theft or market crash or whatever.
Good analogy - portscanning and email spoofing was considered a relatively benign issue decades ago, but would be quite serious now and does lead to jail time, and I'm sure the same will be true with cryptocurrencies (unless you're in a failed state where the rule of law is a bug not a feature).
A big chunk of the people working in the "office blocks" of "saving, lending, derivatives, FX and insurance companies" are there to deal with support and exceptions. This is a feature not a bug - if something goes wrong you want it to be fixed, especially when you are dealing with large sums of money. With smart contracts, if there's a bug it can't be fixed, if your money gets lost or stolen you can't get it back, if you lose your keys then tough, etc. This is considered a feature not a bug, e.g. to quote Satoshi "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more." However, in most people's view, this would be considered a backward step, and so not an example of a technology with a positive impact.
"it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly ... is this a feature or a bug?"
There is no incentive to do anything properly in cryptocurrency development because it puts monetisation before use-case, so you get all the money up front with no commitment to deliver anything (whether useful or not) and can often remain anonymous to boot. Whether you call this a bug or a feature simply depends upon how scrupulous you are.
So within 7 years of the start of Bitcoin, pretty much every original Bitcoin developer had become disillusioned, with claims like it was "an experiment" and "has failed"[0]. We're now heading towards 7 years since the start of Ethereum, and it sounds like Vitalik is now too beginning to realise that it has turned into something a lot worse than what it tried to replace, e.g. because it magnifies the most terrible aspects of human nature.
[0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
He's the bad guy of the story because he's a billionaire who made a $1.1Gb at the expense of the ordinary people living in the UK at the time. He forced mortgage rates, for example, to shoot up to 15%, with crippling monthly payments for a large chunk of the population.
Note that the article author is a cryptocurrency cultist, so he'll be all in favour of unscrupulous people enriching themselves at the expense of others irrespective of the negative effects this might have on society or the environment or whatever.