HN Books @HNBooksMonth

We don't need "crypto," we need _Bitcoin_. Crypto is the scam he references here. It's clear that DHH has a very thin understanding of Bitcoin and is conflating arguments about the web3/crypto/defi/nft nonsense with it. _That_ is the psyop.

If people think Bitcoin and all of the other junk (sh*tcoins) are the same thing, you're just walking into the same trap as what precipitated the nightmare in Canada.

The thing to watch for is the push for CBDCs which are state-controlled cryptocurrencies which will give authoritarians perpetual hard-on levels of control. You think freezing a bank account is bad? Wait until they can make your money expire or prevent you from transacting with anyone they deem "bad actors."

Recommended: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

⬐ rosndo

> We don't need "crypto," we need _Bitcoin_.

But Monero is objectively better than Bitcoin if you just want to pay for things.

⬐ rglover

Perhaps, but it lacks the brand recognition. Playing the technology dick measuring contest will end up confusing people and lead them right into a trap (meaning, they end up distrusting the very thing that can save them).

Bitcoin has all of the necessary pieces to get the immediate problem of government overreach and currency manipulation fixed.

⬐ anonporridge

Arguable, because monero's hash power is a negligible fraction of bitcoin's AND it's ASIC resitant, so mining on CPUs is still viable.

This makes it much more vulnerable to nation state 51% attack since they can just temporarily redirect fleets of CPUs (maybe even deputize AWS, Azure, GCP, etc) to attack the network. This kind of rapid response attack isn't feasible on bitcoin because SHA256 ASIC miners are incredibly hard to come by and the electricity required to pull it off would be enormously expensive.

Man the anti-crypto hate on HN is stronger than usual today!

> NFTs don’t prove ownership — ordinary legal contracts are just as good, and in fact better since they are heavily regulated and can be taken to courts for a central resolution when problems arise

Blockchains allow strangers to transact high-value amounts across borders, quickly, securely. The fact I can move $1 billion USDC, $1 billion in BTC, or a $1 billion-valued NFT in seconds is why it leapfrogs the slow, manual, corruptible legal system. Can blockchains be a replacement for everything the courts provide? No. Can they allow moving digital goods quickly and safely across the world? Yes, because that is what they are designed to do.

> Blockchains (which NFTs rely on) are in the best case no more secure than ‘normal’ relational database storage systems, and in most cases are less secure

This is so fantastically incorrect the author has no business speaking authoritatively on this subject. Bitcoin is incorruptible. If you disagree, go and try! A relational database only needs a central party to fail. Does everything need a blockchain? No. Tweets go in the relational database, financial assets go on the blockchain.

> Cryptocurrencies have no innate value and are only useful as a pyramid scheme, something big crypto influencers are knowingly using to profit from those who don’t realise it

This book will refute the point https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern... TLDR Bitcoin is the hardest money ever created, politicians / society cannot manipulate it, therefore store wealth in bitcoin.

> Both cryptocurrencies and NFTs cause high environmental damage, and there are no viable systems to deal with this problem due to security considerations

Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism are live now that scale Ethereum without centralization. Proof of Stake chains like Cosmos, Avalanche, Polkadot, etc. are live now. ETH2 moving to PoS will happen soon.

⬐ filmgirlcw

Please tell me what blockchain will be able to complete the block to write the transaction in seconds? Bitcoin confirmation times are at 18:29. Yes, that's obviously going to be faster than sending a wire through a bank, but stop with the hyperbole!

⬐ seibelj

Ethereum is 15 seconds, Solana is sub 1 second. Lightning network for bitcoin is speed of the internet with irreversibility.

Like most HN crypto haters, you know barely anything on this subject so you repeat a bunch of misinformation. Very common and disappointing.

⬐ NicoJuicy

15 seconds is way too much. Most of them are way too expensive compared to traditional methods and even lightning doesn't solve it for new paths.

Additionally, they are experimenting with your money on lightning since there is still the Canadian traveler problem.

And lightning goes directly against the "spirit" of Blockchain. Centralized and offchain transactions that could be stored with sqllite...

It's just a workaround causing new problems for a problem that already have been fixed.

⬐ ubercow13

>Blockchains allow strangers to transact high-value amounts across borders, quickly, securely. The fact I can move $1 billion USDC, $1 billion in BTC, or a $1 billion-valued NFT in seconds is why it leapfrogs the slow, manual, corruptible legal system. Can blockchains be a replacement for everything the courts provide? No. Can they allow moving digital goods quickly and safely across the world? Yes, because that is what they are designed to do.

NFTs do not prove ownership. You have not transferred ownership 'quickly and safely across the world' unless the courts back up the transfer of ownership implied by your NFT sale. NFTs cannot allow moving ownership of digital goods quickly and safely across the world because they do not prove ownership. The court can just contradict the transfer of ownership impiled by your NFT sale. They haven't made anything quicker or safer because they are meaningless. It's a fantasy until it's backed up by the courts.

⬐ NicoJuicy

Sorry, i don't think any of us can relate on the difficulty of moving a billion $ daily. Lol

I would think that moving it with checks & rules, would be a feature on such amount of money.

⬐ toolz

> Proof of Stake chains like Cosmos, Avalanche, Polkadot, etc. are live now. ETH2 moving to PoS will happen soon.

Just curious, is there a reason you've ommitted the two largest (by market cap) PoS coins (SOL, ADA) from this list?

⬐ seibelj

I was just naming some that popped in my head. There are many more as well, like those.

⬐ Jensson

> Man the anti-crypto hate on HN is stronger than usual today!

Doubt grows since crypto gets used less and less as a currency and more and more as an asset bubble. A few years ago you could go and buy a hotdog for crypto in many places, now you can't, most shops accepting crypto stopped doing it. The value is still soaring, but the legitimate everyday usages are shrinking, it is really hard to conclude that today this is anything other than a scam.

⬐ xmprt

It feels like the value of a cryptocurrency is indirectly proportional to its utility. If people are actually spending a cryptocurrency instead of holding it as a speculative investment, then the price of a coin won't go up (at least not anywhere near the rate it is now). If people want it to be used as a currency, then the price of a coin needs to stabilize but I doubt most pro-cryptocurrency people want that.

⬐ SrslyJosh

Nailed it. A useful currency with a stable value is not a good vehicle for currency speculation.

For a relatively quick read with an alternative perspective, check out The Bitcoin Standard https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

There is a logical explanation as to why bitcoin could be very valuable in our current world. It is because it cannot be inflated beyond the 21 million cap. If you have an open mind, give it a read!

⬐ loceng

Thanks for sharing. There are other viable better options that simply don't get exposure, or thought by pro-Bitcoiners, as they aren't financially aligned with their investment - though better because they would use blockchain but would be leveraging real life trust networks like of those of governments of democratically elected governments agreeing to use a specific system with other democratic nations.

⬐ cmoscoso

blockchain tech is definitely the future. /s

I have seen this kind of thinking from Andreas Antopolous as well, but actually the investment analysis is critical to understand before deciding to buy or not to buy Bitcoin. I suggest everybody who is interested in Bitcoin to read the Bitcoin Standard book.

https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

Just buy the top rated book on Amazon (or download the pdf for free):

https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

The author didn't really do serious research. I can imagine having doubts or questions after reading this book, but without basic knowledge about money there's no point in arguing (I agree with Jimmy Song's comment, but I find Saifedean's book much better researched)

Ethereum is very different from Bitcoin, so this comment is offtopic, and it's tackling a different problem space, but if you are really interested, I'm reading the Bitcoin Standard book, and I can recommend it if you really want to understand what problem Bitcoin solves. There's no simple answer, only learning about the history of money and monetary theory from a non-Keynsian view.

https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

⬐ louwrentius

I'm not looking for links to books.

I'm looking for an explanation in plain English that shows why any of this matters.

⬐ arcturus17

You will not get a satisfactory answer.

Cryptocurrencies will only make sense in cataclysmic scenarios or for very niche use cases. Trust systems (of which money is one) work well (some times very well) 99.99% of the time.

It’s certainly been useful to some people for gambling - but that use case could’ve been satisfied with a video game, or a physical casino.

⬐ earthtolazlo

I guess it depends on what you mean by cataclysmic scenarios. I can’t imagine many cataclysmic scenarios with working electricity and internet, to say nothing of mass-produced phones/personal computers.

⬐ arcturus17

I was thinking more in terms of a political or economic event where trust systems collapse but technology remains working.

⬐ odopodo

Only in cataclysmic scenarios? I'm sorry to inform you, but in such scenarios most probably cryptos won't work either, as they all depend on proper working of the internet.

It doesn't even need to be a Madmax situation: just imagine a war between the US and China, with one of the involved causing an prolonged interruption in the communications between the two countries, as they have significant numbers of nodes/miners in most blockchains.

I'm afraid blockchains actually depend on the normal functioning of society with all its governmental structures in more ways than most crypto enthusiasts are ready to admit.

⬐ Sargos

The US and Canada could block each other and it wouldn't affect Ethereum at all. Everyone in the world including those two countries could still use it.

⬐ arcturus17

Yea my wording might not have been on point.

I was thinking of an economic or political collapse where technology otherwise remains more or less intact.

Anyway, we agree that it’s a niche scenario.

⬐ mikro2nd

The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns. Understanding this may necessitate reading some books, but in short, sovereigns have historically proven to be untrustworthy, so a trust-free form of money is a powerful notion.

⬐ prussian

so instead of sovereign powers, we should hand our monetary policy to the neo-nobility that is large stakeholders (PoS) or the sovereign granted patents in ASIC mining in PoW coins? I feel like we're just shifting who to trust and not the fact that we all have trust; haven't even touched the whole idea of having to on-ramp/off-ramp fiat on central exchanges with sovereign backed currencies.

⬐ znpy

One could argue that Ethereum like any other cryptocurrency is under the strict control of the development team, though.

Such team undergoes way less scrutiny than any trading firm or sovereign nation, probably.

⬐ callahad

> The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns.

Do you believe that any existing cryptocurrencies currently fulfill that criterion?

⬐ mikro2nd

Yes.

⬐ cosmodisk

This may not be the case with any crypto currencies soon. The entire asset class is already way beyond 'let the geeks play with it' stage. It's taxed,it can be seized and banned all together,if that's what governments want. Not quite the freedom tbh..

⬐ lentil_soup

sure, I can agree, but surely a form of money that fluctuates like crazy and needs people to read books about it to understand it is not going to convince the people that need this kind of system the most.

⬐ metalliqaz

I would like to see a scenario where not one but several sovereign fiat currencies have utterly failed and yet ETH is still useful.

⬐ louwrentius

> The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns.

Why?

Why can't you explain this in simple, easy terms?

⬐ zdkl

Simple is going to be a caricature:

Diversification of risk.

⬐ louwrentius

Have you bought a loaf of bread with Ethereum or Bitcoin? And internet is shut down btw...

⬐ arcturus17

Of all the world ills I can think of, none are caused by money as means of exchange or by trust systems more broadly. Crypto isn’t going to do anything for global warming or for rampant inequality caused by the unstoppable compounding growth of big capital (in fact it may do the opposite).

The premise that trust systems have failed humanity is flawed. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise but I doubt this will come from reading “a couple books” because as it stands I firmly believe that the idea is complete nonsense.

⬐ Sargos

> Crypto isn’t going to do anything for global warming

Actually this is a pretty good example of a problem that quadratic funding has a good chance of helping with. It's really hard to coordinate all nations on Earth but not actually that hard to coordinate people from all over the Earth. https://wtfisqf.com/

⬐ moron4hire

Actually, crypto is doing something for global warming. It's making it worse.

⬐ xiphias2

This book is the best summary that I can give you to being persuaded. Bitcoin's price movement is just a market signal that there's something deeply wrong and unfair with the current financial system. The more you learn about it, the more you can profit from the huge value transfer that's going on in front of your eyes. If you want a link, I suggest hope.com as well (as I could suggest many others, but what's important is that the ROI of learning about the reason for Bitcoin is huge).

⬐ arcturus17

> Bitcoin's price movement is just a market signal that there's something deeply wrong and unfair with the current financial system

Sorry but this sounds like the conspiracy drivel commonly heard in crypto circles. To a reasonable person, Bitcoin's price movement is a market signal of people speculating and trying to become richer - simple as. Occam's Razor, and all that.

⬐ xiphias2

That's true of every asset in the world. But it doesn't explain why Bitcoin is the best performing asset in the history of humankind for more than 10 years now. Bitcoin as a software is very simple, you can code it in a day in a high level language. But if you don't take the time to go deep on monetary history to see why a money takes over another (or not), you'll miss out on huge gains.

All reasonal people start as Bitcoin skeptics BTW, that's fine.

⬐ newswasboring

I am not arguing either way about the need for crypto currencies, but don't you think its an unfair thing to ask for a new technology [1]? Not everything can be explain in simple terms, not if you really want to explain those things. Sometimes it takes time to figure out the language to explain stuff.

[1] I know this thing is more than a decade old, but new and old are very distorted terms in technology and honestly only become apparent post facto.

⬐ eric_cc

You need to put in a little effort to learn new things. Your comments are not going to age well. Your comments will read like somebody complaining/rejecting email in the early 90's.

⬐ brighton36

If you present complexity, people assume you're smart, and give you their money to invest.

⬐ pushtheenvelope

A while ago I wrote a small essay on Crypto Finance. Perhaps you'll find it useful (or perhaps not). https://savil.in/2019/04/18/crypto-finance.html

⬐ SCHiM

In simple terms. The currencies, and related technologies al deal with the problem of transferring of money/services between parties where no centralized trust/power exists.

This is, in the words of their proponents to prevent abuse by the trusted party:

Credit card companies blocking transfers to legitimate companies on the basis of pressure from the US gov.

Banks printing money and devaluing currency of currency holders, etc.

Bailouts/handouts to undeserving private companies with public money.

Often mentioned that this freedom comes at the price of making it easier for bad guys to receive payments for various bad things, increasing their income, increasing the scope of the damage they do.

If you write a program on the eth blockchain, no party can one change the way the contract was written or execute. What is written is what it does. You can't change the TOS later or something similar. They are called contracts for this reason.

They prevent screw-overs in TOS that you have to "accept" or similar shenanigans that big corps use to screw you over, over time.

⬐ faitswulff

It seems like the benefit of not having to trust world governments or their currencies isn't that compelling for most people, who I presume almost universally already participate in said social contracts.

⬐ hypertele-Xii

I certainly trust world governments more than some random Internet community. Who's to say the whole thing isn't a scam? Has this tech been independently audited?

⬐ SCHiM

If you can break this scheme you can steal billions of dollars worth of currencies right now. If that is not independently audited by all evil hackers out there I don't know what is :)

⬐ hypertele-Xii

It's possible to create a secure scheme that is still a scam.

What guarantees do we have that the developers/maintainers won't push changes to their own benefit? Presumably they already have given themselves a bunch of starting capital that everyone else's buy-in props up, like bitcoin.

⬐ Kbelicius

> If you write a program on the eth blockchain, no party can one change the way the contract was written or execute. What is written is what it does. You can't change the TOS later or something similar. They are called contracts for this reason.

Did things change since the days of the DAO hack?

⬐ ralphc

I've heard of Ethereum "distributed apps". Is that different than currency, what is a use case for a distributed app?

⬐ Acrobatic_Road

Generally it's about eliminating counterparty risk. Compare Coinbase (centralized) with Uniswap (decentralized).

Coinbase users put their trust in a custodian. That custodian has the ability to steal from them or be stolen from. That's how MtGox went down in flames.

Uniswap users don't have to custody their funds with anyone to trade. They can use whichever they want.

Coinbase's platform can change on the whims of the company. Users have to accept this if they want to continue using the platform.

Uniswap is nothing more than a handful of small contracts which are unalterable and public. If you don't like, fork it. Don't like the official frontend? You can fork that too. Some wallets just build uniswap directly into the app. And since you don't have to sign up to use uniswap, the experience is completely seamless.

Now there's a lot more you can do with decentralized applications, but this should help get the point across.

⬐ ralphc

I'm afraid it doesn't. From my understanding, bitcoin and other currencies are just numbers or strings, correct? There are ways to check them on your computer/device to make sure that they are valid, but that is running code locally. With a distributed app, is the code passed around, or is it executed in a distributed way as well? The "forking the official frontend", is that something you just run on your machines or is it run in a distributed manner somehow?

⬐ Acrobatic_Road

>With a distributed app, is the code passed around, or is it executed in a distributed way as well?

The latter. The contracts are deployed to the blockchain itself. The output of the code is secured by ethereum's consensus rules.

>The "forking the official frontend", is that something you just run on your machines or is it run in a distributed manner somehow?

The front end is something that runs locally.

⬐ rzwitserloot

> prevent abuse by the trusted party

Actually eliminating this problem by using a cryptocurrency requires 2 crucial aspects:

1. The transaction being performed would have to be stateable and checkable 100% as an eth contract. Thus, if the deal is: I mail you my old iphone, and once I receive it, you shall gain a bunch of digital value, then.. how? How do you put in an eth contract that the iphone is real, not stolen, not broken? How do you protect against someone mailing you a brick? If the entire transaction cannot be _completely_ described in the contract, there are still third parties and plenty of room for scams. As far as I can tell (and I'm no expert, so I'm writing this mostly to check if my assumptions are wrong - plenty of knowledgable folks in the thread), bitcoin, ethereum et al make this _worse_: Normally if you send me a literal brick in a box, I don't have to file in court, I can just make some pictures and make a claim with the payment processor. Yes, this can be abused, but right now, today, this is more of a help than a hinder: They _DO_ prevent the 'mail a brick in a box' scams relatively well. With ethereum and such, if we code in the contract that the money will be transferred once DHL or UPS or whatnot signs off that the package was signed for, then what the heck do I do if you mail me a brick in a box? The kinds of middlemen (courts, governments, payment processors, transaction broker, etc) that can help me out are precisely the middle men that systems like ethereum are trying to eliminate!

2. That Joe Random knows how to program eth contracts and inherently knows how to ensure that the contract code seems like it has no leaks. Given that teaching someone to program is difficult, that there are many folks who don't seem to have a knack for it, and that there are lots of stories about faulty contracts that resulted in massive financial loss, I don't see how Joe Random gets to do this. Thus, Joe Random will need to rely on trusted parties: A programmer for the contract, or a website that shows standard contracts, or a security consultant that will review the contract code Joe Random wrote to ensure it is sound. If that consultant wants to scam Joe, how does Joe stop this? One could make overtures that eth itself will solve this (by using it to convey that a whole boatload of parties all sign off on 'You can trust Jane Consultant, she knows her stuff', but now you're just encoding a web of trust, which you can do just as well for current systems ('You can trust paypal, they know their stuff and will fairly treat chargebacks and complaints' [1]).

Combine the two and I'm left with the idea that the problem eth tries to solve is real, but that it is just the technical part of a more complicated solution - a solution whose human parts are not obviously solved.

In other words, yeah, eth as a concept seems misguided and mostly useless to me. But I'm sure I'm missing something.

[1] PayPal isn't particularly trusted. But that's just proof of the current system working: It's not hard to figure that out, and to get an in-depth analysis of what paypal will and won't do for you if you get scammed.

⬐ louwrentius

> In simple terms. The currencies, and related technologies al deal with the problem of transferring of money/services between parties where no centralized trust/power exists.

When does that really occur in every day life?

I understand that a seller can scam me (send a brick) or I could revoke my payment and scam the seller.

But that problem is never solved?

> Credit card companies blocking transfers to legitimate companies on the basis of pressure from the US gov.

Technology is never going to fix societial problems. Paying with dollars or crypto -> if the USA says no, and you still pay you can get fined or worse.

> Banks printing money and devaluing currency of currency holders, etc.

To keep currencies afloat and thus society operational / functioning, you mean?

> Bailouts/handouts to undeserving private companies with public money.

Technology is never going to solve human problems like that. This is not a technology problem.

⬐ nickik

It has nothing to do, absolutely nothing, with non-Keynsian history of money. Keynes didn't even write about history of money. Keynes in is book even assumed the gold standard for the most part anyway.

As somebody who studies history of economics and history of economic of thought the Bitcoin community has taken up very strange ideas about money and some views that are simply wrong.

Bitcoin is a basically a quasi-commodity and behaves much in the same way.

Thanks - I’ll check them out.

Plan B: https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-w...

Bitcoin Standard: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

⬐ IdeasVentured

While these are undoubtedly interesting reads, it should be noted that stock to flow as a predictive model is inherently flawed in that the demand side is not taken into account. There are many who like the model though, so well worth a read. It's also led to interesting efficient market hypothesis discussions which are worth looking into, I would recommend reading some of Nic Carter's work.

Edit: 'not taken into account' is probably the wrong way to say it, rather it is assumed.

⬐ xiphias2

Inherently flawed compared to what model? Have you cross checked-it with other models?

I think it's amazing how well a simple model with just 2 variables can explain the difference between Bitcoin price movements in the first few years and later years.

Time based models are so much worse that it's crazy. I don't know any model that comes even close to it.

Anyways stock-to-flow predicts that for a halving of money issuance the demand for the asset as expressed in market cap will be 8x.

If course market cap is a strange and not perfect metric for demand, but that's still the best we have for comparing assets and asset classes.