HN is all about privacy, security, never trusting Google ever ever, etc. until it comes to crypto, and then all of a sudden it's well only criminals would want that and don't you know they can probably trace you anyway etc.
this place is only good for reading about topics that don't get opinionated coverage from the media. otherwise, you just get regurgitated diarrhea from people who are incapable of forming their own opinions or keep their existing opinions in face of adversity, when the overton window shifts.
crypto got heavily bombarded with bad press at some point during COVID era - I remember seeing 2-3 articles per day on the front page here, for weeks, about how le bad it is for the environment, etc. and that was enough to change the public sentiment here from indifference to knee-jerk, Pavlovian reaction to anything related to it.
There are many objections to crypto on this site and they're almost never about privacy or security. It's disingenuous to pretend that:
- stability
- throughput
- power consumption
- taxation
- monetary policy capabilities
are all made-up objections from people watching too much cable news.
Yes, the consequence of crypto's failure to support a large subset of these is best distilled as "this is useful for criminals, grifters and not many others."
