Frankly I think anything crypto-related is very unpleasant to discuss on HN (by the way why is this site called HN? Why not just "American tech news"?)
Any sign of damage done to crypto industry is met with fierce jubilation you could only compare to comments on fresh Ukrainian casualties in some Z channel in Telegram. There is zero interest in understanding the specifics. The most embarrassing, pedestrian, knuckle-dragging cases against privacy, straight out of Four Horsemen of Infocalypse, are trotted out (same as we're increasingly seeing wrt putative risks from AI; oh no, power too great for peasants to handle, we need regulation!).
I understand the extreme seediness of crypto and affiliated organizations, the intrinsic association with crime, obnoxious promotion, NFT era, SBF nonsense and more. But the degree of intellectual bankruptcy in HN discourse is at least equally repulsive and strongly suggests that there's a lot of jealousy underneath all this schadenfreude and pretense of indignation.
I think the world should have some slack. It should be hackable. There must be a crack in everything, because systems of power go bad over time. If Americans have such complete religious faith in their system, that is their choice. They attempt to enforce extraterritoriality of their regulation a bit too often, though, and they are moving in lockstep with other major hubs of power.
Crypto has enabled me to survive and escape a bad place, at least once. It allows people in countries less functional than "the West" live with a modicum of dignity, as is sometimes discussed – and met with incurious "scrutiny" to the tune of "BBC article or didn't happen" – here [1] [2]. It would be a shame if in another decade the idea that you, a regular citizen of the world without any special authority, could remotely transmit value to other people completely at your own discretion and in complete privacy (so long as you follow certain rules), without say-so of appointees of Washington or Brussels or Beijing, becomes as absurd as going outside without an always-on tracker device.
Any sign of damage done to crypto industry is met with fierce jubilation you could only compare to comments on fresh Ukrainian casualties in some Z channel in Telegram. There is zero interest in understanding the specifics. The most embarrassing, pedestrian, knuckle-dragging cases against privacy, straight out of Four Horsemen of Infocalypse, are trotted out (same as we're increasingly seeing wrt putative risks from AI; oh no, power too great for peasants to handle, we need regulation!).
I understand the extreme seediness of crypto and affiliated organizations, the intrinsic association with crime, obnoxious promotion, NFT era, SBF nonsense and more. But the degree of intellectual bankruptcy in HN discourse is at least equally repulsive and strongly suggests that there's a lot of jealousy underneath all this schadenfreude and pretense of indignation.
I think the world should have some slack. It should be hackable. There must be a crack in everything, because systems of power go bad over time. If Americans have such complete religious faith in their system, that is their choice. They attempt to enforce extraterritoriality of their regulation a bit too often, though, and they are moving in lockstep with other major hubs of power.
Crypto has enabled me to survive and escape a bad place, at least once. It allows people in countries less functional than "the West" live with a modicum of dignity, as is sometimes discussed – and met with incurious "scrutiny" to the tune of "BBC article or didn't happen" – here [1] [2]. It would be a shame if in another decade the idea that you, a regular citizen of the world without any special authority, could remotely transmit value to other people completely at your own discretion and in complete privacy (so long as you follow certain rules), without say-so of appointees of Washington or Brussels or Beijing, becomes as absurd as going outside without an always-on tracker device.
Yet this is still what crypto is about.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461837
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32291810