I am someone from a developing country who regularly used crypto either to get paid, or to pay for things online.<p>Does crypto have issues? yes. Is it good enough that in occasion it was my preferred payment method? yes.<p>Crypto community and companies are maybe bad, but if you zoom out into IT overall there is a fair share of greed and misuse. The internet is full of scams, gurus selling courses with false claims, spam emails that drain your grandpa's account, affiliate programs with 70% margin to sell fake products from questionable weight loss ebooks with health-harming diets to fragrances claiming to be perfumes that attract females supported by endless fake video testimonies, online communities encouraging hate, demoralization, and lack of belief in society.<p>Seem to me that those articles are nothing but status quo bias, does crypto has bad aspects? yes, is it worse than say internet? I don't know.
I usually brush aside these doomsday articles about crypto, but the linked article is really depressing:<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...</a><p>I remember nicer days when crypto had some value, and yes exchanges were already shady and did a lot of washing, but there was clearly a closer approximation to market sentiment and real world use cases. Nowadays everything seems to be revolve around derivatives, margin lending, yielding and staking to be margin lent again. The problem, IMO, might actually have been smart contracts.
Bitcoin is the solution to the fundamentally broken debt-driven economy. Critics don't get it because they lump it together with "cryptocurrency". While technically a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin does not exhibit any of the ponzi, scam-like shenanigans that are easily observable in shitcoins. Yes, there is a lot of crazy stuff happening with wash trading - but this is a byproduct of lack of regulation and has nothing to do with the thing that is Bitcoin. Most critics just don't understand what problem Bitcoin solves. They think it has something to do with replacing currency, or sending payments. Bitcoin is a financial freedom tool for billions of people, the likes of which do not browse Hacker News. Those people get Bitcoin instantly. They don't need articles like this one to tell them why their needs are unmet by the traditional finance system. The thing that Bitcoin critics lack is the understanding of credit markets, central banking and manipulation of money - the source of a large number of problems in the world. To them, everything is fine. Reminds me of that meme where the place is on fire and the dog is sitting in the middle of the room - that's the Bitcoin critic.
The author is a bit melodramatic. Yes there are mostly scams in the space, but that is not a bug, its a feature of less regulation.<p>Most advocates of Crypto like most critics think about Crypto from the perspective of a consumer, which is misguided. How many people, especially technically minded people, know the boring technical intricacies of the financial sector? Not many.<p>The concepts, if not necessarily the current implementations of them will be used by large financial institutions to generate better margins, help High net worth individuals to avoid taxes better and possibly some other very boring things around decentralized consensus algorithms.<p>Defi is interesting to Vanguard and Citi, not to the consumer.<p>It will not revolutionize the world, nor destroy it... like most technology it will create a few successful companies and make some people rich.<p>PS Just to be clear, it is currently a dumpster fire that needs to be regulated ASAP. But its not going to do much more than pump a bit of cash from poor people to scumbags, that is not new.
Humans are so funny. Blaming the flawed tools we create for the problems caused by using them in all of our flawed manners.<p>Bitcoin is a tool, like any other. Tools can be used constructively or destructively. The ease and affordability of transferring remittances internationally is the single most useful case for Bitcoin. In those instances value is not kept in BTC except for the duration of the transfer so it is not as susceptible to the market fluctuations. On top of that it is much faster and sometimes cheaper even for more local transactions like invoices for freelancers to be done via BTC.<p>The banking systems have failed in a lot of ways related to the above use cases. In the US it can still take days for a check or transfer to clear. Red tape and fees abound when transferring large amounts between parties. PayPal will just shutoff your account because they don't want the risk. etc. etc.<p>In the future I expect to see BTC to mainly utilized for these types of financial transfers and less as a long-term store of value. Of course like any item of value there will always be the speculation side.
> I can also assure you perpetual futures would not be allowed to trade on any exchange inside the legitimate financial system.<p>I don't disagree that the point of perpetual futures on crypto exchanges is primarily to facilitate speculation and gambling, but they're just delta 1 derivatives (track the underlying 1:1) in the form of a CFD, different in mechanism but no different in use case to regular futures, which themselves are traded widely on traditional exchanges. And these perps are quite useful to temporarily hedge holdings, even more convenient than regular futures since you don't have to bother with rollover. The instrument itself is really cool. The criticism should be directed to the high amounts of leverage which is only ever useful in a gambling context, and the marketing + gamification aspects which are clearly targeted at encouraging gambling behavior. If Binance got rid of their perpetual futures, users could still gamble all the same using Binance's regular futures contracts.
Yeah yeah. Bitcoin is an open financial network that anybody can use and nobody controls and is secured by energy. What an amazing, historical feat of human ingenuity. It's neutral and just like the internet can be used by anybody. We're not going to apologise for its energy use.
Yet another "criticism" which is entirely focused on price and groups together a bunch of unrelated people, companies and cryptocurrencies...
Interesting that articles like this are coming from everywhere at the moment, now that BTC$ is tanking. But when Bitcoin price was still going up, they were not all that popular, also not on HN.<p>It seems the moral argument for Bitcoin is positively correlated with its price.
Many of my Ukraininan/Russian friends would not be alive today if it wasn't for crypto, same goes for many journalists and innocent civilians that escaped controlling governments, war zones, hyperinflation etc. Show me another asset that you can take with you in times of crisis on a usb stick or piece of paper, and transact without middle-men globally. A significant number of people live in places where saying/doing something controversial can get your assets frozen (Canada '22) or much worse.<p>Sure BTC uses a lot of electricity, but so does the US military which is key to maintaining the $ as global reserve currency. There are many people and projects in crypto trying to do the right thing about energy (<a href="https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/" rel="nofollow">https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/</a>).<p>Dunno why you would fight against a fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system, unless you're a dictator. You won't need it, until you do.
> Hideous Monstrosity ... Greed<p>You know what's an even worse "hideous monstrosity" than Bitcoin?<p>The way in which a few hundred million egocentric if not sociopathic people in the global west have allowed themselves to become addicted to excessive consumption of unnecessary trash produced with dirty energy and emitting millions of tons of harmful substances, thereby wrecking the ecosphere on the whole planet.<p>And then one of these addicts comes along and portrays Bitcoin as if it were the worst of all evil things and "devouring the world" .. all while Bitcoin is using less than 1/700 of the world's energy consumption [1] (and some of that is renewable).<p>That's about as huge as one can fuck up prioritization of problems.<p>[1] <a href="https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons" rel="nofollow">https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons</a>
Frankly the author may have a point but calling something "demonic" rings of a bitchute rant.<p>So thanks, but no thank you, have enough "fringe truths" to deal with from enough other people...
All the people conflating "bitcoin" with "crypto" are unbelievably ignorant – or simply malicious.
Really goes to show how low hacker news has fallen...