Ask HN: Why doesn’t HN have quality discussion around crypto?
What does one actually discuss about crypto.<p>Blockchain is interesting but it’s been around for decades (it’s older than Bitcoin) and no one’s really come up with any good uses for it. There’s very few uses where the decentralized nature helps over a distributed but centrally owned DB.<p>Cryptocurrencies could be interesting, but they don’t live up to any of their promises. The entire crypto currency space is going through the exact same scams and problems that regular currencies went through in the early 1900s, for which all these regulations that crypto was supposed to provide freedom from. But the entire industry is realizing the hard way that most of those regulations came about for a reason. Add those regulations back in and it’s not clear what purpose it serves. It’s very hard to discuss a technology with any sort of excitement when it’s rediscovering very well known century old problems.<p>I suspect we will see a digital dollar (and digital versions of other major currencies) and that will be the end of all the other random crypto currencies. And it’s not even necessary for digital currencies to be built on a blockchain.<p>NFTs. Well, we know NFTs are a scam because they aren’t even what they purport to be. They do not give you any sort of rights to whatever they are supposed to give you rights to. Any rights they do confer will only exist as long as they are enforced by real world legal and enforcement systems. At which point the distributed aspect is just superfluous. A centralized DB (several services could provide these DBs, so it would be a monopoly) will be much more efficient and simpler and effective.<p>Smart contracts are highly dependent on oracles. You have to place your trust on the Oracle anyways. So if you’re doing that then why not just trust the entire process on a single entity? And besides, with properly signed legal contracts you also have backup enforcement through regular legal channels, as well as recourse if someone tries to break the contract. If your smart contract also depends on the legal system, again, it’s not clear what advantage it provides over a standard contract.<p>There’s not much to discuss about crypto because there’s not much there. The entire argument in favor of crypto is “I bought this Dogecoin for $0.001 and now it’s worth $1000”. In over a decade of hype, and even longer since the technology itself existed, that’s almost the entire positive value proposition from crypto.