What I learned arguing with people who dislike cryptocurrency for 3 hours on reddit

So I spent way too much time going back and forth with a bunch of people on r/programming in a post titled “Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster” and I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

I knew going in that most people in r/programming were not keen on crypto based on other posts I’ve read there. That surprised me when I first learned of it. What surprised me more was that, while members of this subreddit are obviously technical(and many of them very competent), the arguments and gripes and fears they had with regards to crypto were very similar to non-tech people.

Here are a few common arguments that came up:

• Crypto uses too much energy / “Blockchain is one of the worst human inventions ever made”

  • That was a real comment meant to hyperbolize Bitcoin’s energy usage and sheds light on just how misinformed the average person is. Blockchains do not use energy, consensus mechanisms (proof of work) use energy.
  • Blockchain does not equal proof of work necessarily, as proof of stake is also popular
  • I did not attempt to go into why I think Bitcoin's energy usage is not as problematic as many things the average person does on a day-to-day basis.
  • Many of them were under the impression that credit cards used much less energy than even a proof of stake crypto. While this could be technically true, if you’re counting credit cards, you have to account for all banking infrastructure as well. The former would not exist without the latter as credit cards need a centralized authority to function.

• There were an alarming number of people who did not think the financial system needed to be decentralized.

  • I didn’t see any solid argument for why they thought that.
  • I think most Americans agree that the system is zero-sum and set up to make centralized decision-makers richer. That's material for many other posts.

• There was a lot of talk about trust in institutions vs trust in blockchain projects

  • The sentiment seemed to be “well if I’m not trusting banks, who am I trusting”
    • The answer to this is that you’re trusting open, viewable, auditable, tested code to facilitate transactions.
    • You’re also trusting the incentives behind consensus mechanisms to disincentivize bad actors from taking over and editing the chain.

• There were a lot of comments about how, even if Proof of Stake solves the energy issue, that Proof of Work is far and away the dominant mechanism used, so the point is moot.

  • It’s kind of true, but Ethereum is moving to full Proof of Stake within the next 6 months, making Bitcoin the only substantial Proof of Work project.
  • Also, most new projects are building with PoS. To me, if energy is a non-starter for you, just stay away from Bitcoin. Don't lump every crypto into your "bitcoin is a scam category"

• I answered “what value is it currently providing” a lot, too

  • My response to that for Bitcoin is usually that the product is trustlessness. You aren’t forced to trust anyone in order to make a transaction in a secure and relatively fast manner.
  • For Ethereum, I linked to projects like AAVE, UniSwap, Axie Infinity, OpenSea, and Nexus Mutual (crypto insurance)
  • These are real products processing billions of dollars daily.

The impression I got from this experience was that non crypto people are not receiving up-to-date information about the technical progress made in the crypto space in the last few years. On average they believe that crypto has unsolvable energy problems, is valueless, and is a scam.

I don’t want anyone to go flame the thread obviously, and if you read my replies I think you’ll agree I was not being combative. I also don’t think they are dumb or operating in bad faith necessarily. I think they have created a caricature of crypto in their heads based on one or two articles and a handful of bad interactions with the crypto space (bitcoiners being too aggressive, moonbois, scamcoins).

I think we could all be a little more compassionately informative and a little less frothy in terms of the price. After all, if we all believe this technology will make a profound, positive difference in the world, the price will not have a choice but to follow.