Comment by latchkey
3 years ago
All industries around finance attract shady actors. In Vietnam, you get the best exchange rate for VND, by going to the gold dealers. Paypal doing shady things is par for the course. Banks going under because 97% of their deposits are over the FDIC limits is normal behavior.
Simultaneously ignoring the benefits of cryptocurrencies and the problems they are trying to solve, while only looking at the negative edges that are covered by mainstream media, seems short-sighted at best. That's the inconsistency.
Yes, all industries attract bad actors. But the cryptocurrency space seems to be largely run by bad actors. Not everyone, of course, but a disturbingly large percentage.
> Simultaneously ignoring the benefits of cryptocurrencies
I don't actually see a lot of that happening here, though.
> Yes, all industries attract bad actors. But the cryptocurrency space seems to be largely run by bad actors. Not everyone, of course, but a disturbingly large percentage.
Source? Seriously. I mean, we have CEX going down with SBF and Molly White posting anti-web3 stuff. I'm sorry, but that isn't the core fundamental technology that we're talking about here.
> I don't actually see a lot of that happening here, though.
Again... media focuses on the failures and not on the successes.
ETH moving to proof-of-stake was a massive technological advancement that only happened after many years of development, and has gone off without a hitch.
While, at the same time literally decimating all of the GPU based proof-of-work mining in a single day. Not only that, but they were able to MVP release the code without even implementing withdraw! People have trusted the developers with 0.40T dollars worth of value [0]. It is not insignificant.
Next up is some really interesting work being done with zero-knowledge proofs, which will enable the scaling phase of blockchain to happen.
Please try to get past the HN trope of 'crypto has zero purpose other than number goes up or down and bitcoin mining is destroying the planet' and look at what is actually happening in the industry.
[0] https://ultrasound.money/
> Source?
No specific source, just how it looks to me based on what I hear pro-cryptocurrency people say (mostly here).
> media focuses on the failures and not on the successes.
By "here", I meant HN, not the larger mediasphere.
> Please try to get past the HN trope of 'crypto has zero purpose other than number goes up or down and bitcoin mining is destroying the planet' and look at what is actually happening in the industry.
This comment is mis-aimed. I'm not on that trope (I see one legitimate use), and I do loosely follow the industry. I don't follow it deeply because it's not a field that is technically interesting to me, but I am interested in the ramifications to society at large.
All I'm saying is that a rather large percentage of people I see advocating cryptocurrency are not making cryptocurrency look good.
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> People have trusted the developers with 0.40T dollars worth of value
And that's the thing that causes the most cognitive dissonance. If you're going to trust someone, why not trust entities that have had hundreds of years to work out the kinks?
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