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Did they get to the hype train a few years late?


The phase after the hype dies down is called “The Slope of Enlightenment”. Hopefully that’s true for crypto, since the space has incubated a lot of good but poorly-executed ideas.

Microsoft helping climb the slope of enlightenment doesn’t sound like a half-bad idea.


Still waiting to see a single lawful useful application of crypto that's better than any alternative.


My hunch is that someday crypto will be accrued and used like frequent flyer miles or credit card rewards points. But the "better than any alternative" part is that they'll be more fungible than rewards points.


Frequent flyer miles are just a marketing gimmick. They're not "useful" as in serving an irreplaceable purpose; frequent flyer miles could be outlawed tomorrow and the world would not be a worse place in any way.


Dare I say the Ethereum Name Service?

https://ens.domains


How's that any better than using a credit card with a regular domain name service?


Ask SciHub, PirateBay, WikiLeaks, and the citizens of Iran.


Considering KYC requirements, volatility, and environmental impact not sure how crypto money in browser would be a net benefit for anyone except speculators and crypto exchanges.


If people are paying with stablecoins on top of ETH (like the ERC20 version of USDC, for example) then neither volatilty nor environmental impact is a serious problem.

The lack of KYC is a feature not a bug.


What part of the "Dozen 'stable' coin fails in the past years" lesson are you having difficulties with? There can never be a "stable" offer in this space. the stability comes from "free to print money" organisations and the only acceptable such organisations are governments (not ideal, certainly not 100% stable but the only viable one). Everything that still contributes to keep up the speculation hype value of these cryptocurrencies (and a wallet by a wellknown players does contribute to it) is a net negative.


>What part of the "Dozen 'stable' coin fails in the past years" lesson are you having difficulties with?

The part where the major stablecoins (eg. USDC or even Tether) hasn't failed yet, and the "dozen" you speak of are the equivalent of shitcoins that never had any traction in the first place.


USDC is not stable. They have long ago removed their 1 to 1 peg with the USD because it was unsustainable. They are printing money and the value is being kept up only on the speculative expectations of the market. Like all other shitcoins they can not guarantee anything when things start to go down. Noone can guarantee anything. Those shitcoins that never had any traction according to you have cost billions to the people.


Some see it as a feature yes, but it's not sustainable.

In fact I would say that we are already behind the hay day of wild west crypto and are entering the phase of regulated fiance. Investors are already discovering why some of those regulations exist in the first place (latest example FTX) and governments are done standing at the sidelines.


Kyc wouldn't have changed the ftx meltdown


> speculators and crypto exchanges

I’m pretty sure those are the two demographics that crypto is for.


Don't forget scammers and criminals


> not sure how crypto money in browser would be a net benefit for anyone except speculators and crypto exchanges.

How about the people who want to, you know buy stuff with crypto? Metamask has 10m+ downloads on the chrome store


> not sure how crypto money in browser would be a net benefit for anyone

When USD comes crashing down, not everyone has access to gold.

If there's one thing worse than absurd volatility, it's hyperinflation.


Hahahahaha. Yeah, sure cryptocurrency never comes crashing down. It certainly would never lose 60% of its value in 6 months. That would never happen. What a perfect store of value. /s


Basically all KYC and bank surveillance laws should be repealed. People deserve privacy.


I assume you're not arguing this but crypto isn't really a solution for this problem.

Regardless, I think given the wild west of crime and fraud a world without banking surveillance would allow I don't think that's a great plan, and I doubt legitimate banks would be for it either given the legal grief they would be constantly in, assuming that you still believe that assets should be able to be seized or frozen in case of identified illegal activity, and if not a bank now needs to be comfortable knowing it's enabling human trafficking and terrorism.

Why should a bank be willing to do business with you if they can't identify you?


considering that the Tax Authorities have money today, while 'bros are looking for some.. I would guess that MSFT is on the side of the money.. that means, track your INCOME and the TAX that is due. mark my words


I mean, google founded a search engine many years after the first one. Tesla created electric cars many years after the first one.

Not sure you can claim they are on the hype train or late when alot of successful companies are late followers.


I'm not arguing that crypto is dead, but adding a random crypto-related feature to Edge is not a strategy, it's a "me too" bit that just seems odd.

Brave has a built-in crypto wallet but it makes some sense in their offer, this one does not seem to.

Unless you think large amounts of people will migrate to Edge because it has a built-in wallet? It does not seem likely to me, but I'll be happy to be corrected in a few years.


That would have been my comment last October when most of us were already pretty tired of it, then there was an “NFT Winter” that lasted through the real winter which was caused by (1) the FTX blowup, and (2) the gold rush of the ignorant and indolent who suddenly thought ChatGPT would write their pitch deck for them.

Lately though I am seeing posts where blockheads are trying to rally and I think these are not written by ChatGPT because they are too disagreeable.

The thing is that crypto prices haven’t really collapsed and the true believers haven’t been punished enough to really change their behavior. I wish I could say people just quit trading so the prices aren’t real but looking at the charts I can’t really justify that but maybe it really is just the same two crypto bros trading.

As for MSFT they are usually (3) slow on the draw, and (4) work harder than anybody to annoy their users. They have been quick to get on the ChatGPT train, however, because they’ve always wanted to make Excel make up fake books for your organization, have Word write your homework and PowerPoint make your pitch deck for you with no consideration if the output is right or wrong and there is no way they’ll let another firm beat them to it.


>maybe it really is just the same two crypto bros trading.

That may be the case for some of the shitcoins, but it hasn't been close to true for BTC and ETH since institutions got into crypto a few years ago. They are still trading btw, some of them made an insane amount of money from the crash.


That’s true but trading is still thin in my mind, at least as seen by the poor tracking performance of Bitcoin ETFs.




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