“Still”

I’m sure this’ll be unbiased journalism!

The very first sentence adequately substantiates “still”: the segment shed a trillion dollars in stated value last year.

tnel77

If stocks go down and you hold long-term, ultimately selling for a profit, would you describe that as “investor ‘still’ thinks he can make money on stocks”?

I respect that most of crypto is a scam, but it’s upsetting that a place like HackerNews can’t even acknowledge the good ones.

angry_albatross

What do you consider to be the good ones? I think it is likely that whatever argument you would give for most of crypto being a scam probably also applies to the ones you think are good. Crypto has caused us all as a society to waste a huge amount of electricity for very little tangible benefit.

tnel77

Personally, Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only two that I truly trust, but I’m always willing to learn about new projects.

Edit: I look forward to seeing where we are in the crypto space in 15-30 years. Looking back, I expect it to be funny hearing over and over “look at all the energy we wasted” as people shook their fists at the sky.

angry_albatross

Well, I would disagree that Bitcoin or Ethereum are doing anything useful for us. Bitcoin fails as a currency due to being impractically expensive and slow to perform transactions with. In addition, since there is no central organization to help with fraud protection you end up with a very difficult interface to use, and many ways to accidentally lose your money with no recourse. The code is easy to copy, so you end up with a mess of competing forks with no incentive to converge.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it goes. I expect it to be funny looking back in the sense that we wonder why people ever thought that bitcoin had value.

tnel77

I feel like the Lightning network addresses the ease of use and transaction cost issues, but I agree that there is still work to be done.

Regardless, this is the part where I’d tell one of my friends that I’ll buy them a beer if they’re right. Time flies so I’m sure we’ll get our answer soon enough.

angry_albatross

The main problem in my mind with the Lightning network is that in order increase transaction speed, it is reducing the decentralization by requiring participants to trust the other network operators that they create channels with. For the lightning network to really scale to a global payment system, we would need large central hubs for the payments to route through and you would end up with a poor imitation of the centralized banking system that bitcoin is attempting to avoid.

This page is a good collection of issues and criticisms of LN: https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network