Nicholas C Weaver
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2023
1:06:36 · 128K views · Feb 28, 2022
A UC Berkeley CS 161 lecture by Nicholas Weaver on cryptocurrency and blockchains, covering how they work and the case against them. It is aimed at a computer security course audience.
HN commenters offer it as an expert, skeptical overview of what cryptocurrency actually is and its weaknesses.
5 comments from Hacker News
This lecture by Berkeley CS professor Nicholas Weaver is a fantastic overview of what cryptocurrency and Blockchain actually is and why it is a complete waste of time, energy, and money and needs to be reduced to 0: this video I used to think "well maybe there is some real application of Bitcoin" but the more I learned about it I just realized the entire enterprise is awful and the only real benefit it has is uncensored money transfer. Which is great for ransomware. Now that Bitcoin is practically controlled by under 10 miners, there really is no decentralized part of it. Bitcoin maxis say you don't need to trust anyone, but that's not true. You gotta trust the code. Trust the miners. Also what good is magic internet money if I need to keep everything in an offline cold storage wallet to be secure? The only useful application now is using Bitcoin as a honeypot in your servers to notify you if a hacker has access to your systems (you'll see it when the wallet is drained!).
I'm experienced enough to read what papers and proofs have been published, have been a programmer for longer than not, but don't take my word for it: this video So they found one way to prevent Sybil attacks that has been a well-known problem. Big deal. Update A "blockchain" is not a novel concept. The PoW system used is one way to prevent Sybil attacks when distributing work among untrusted peers, and that's it. Novel, neat, but useless. If cryptocurrencies needed defending it's because they're a solution in search of a problem. All of the problems they've found so far appeal to conspiracy theorists: people who don't trust banks, government, and all kinds of things. In the mean time the people who've benefited the most have left thousands of people bereft of their life savings and ruined their lives. My favourite right now are all the scammers who've turned around and stopped ripping off banks and old people and started targeting people who buy NFTs and adverise it on their socials. It'd be freaking hilarious to watch unfold if so many people weren't getting burned in the process.
> Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are betting the emerging Web3 space is the next generation of the internet Venture capitalists that are "betting on crypto" are not, in fact, betting on crypto. They are committing securities fraud en masse . 1/ Invest in crypto startups 2/ Let them offer tokens to the public, which are, in effect, unlicensed securities (that's the fraud part) 3/ Either wait for the value of the startups to skyrocket, or, even better, obtain the crypto tokens for cheap and resell them yourself in exchange for real money 4/ Profit! Cf. this video by a Berkeley CompSci professor this video
Unless finance institutions and laws can protect wallets and insure crypto, I will never use it. Currency is not just a number you move around, currency is deeply intertwined with how civilization works, and it requires a high amount of trust for people to use it. Trust is rather a social concept that something you can really prove mathematically. It's collective trust. Unless you can DRASTICALLY reduce mis-use with bitcoin, no one with trust it ever without a lot of expensive protective measures. A 1 hour lecture from a security professor on crypto currency: this video Something else: [LINK]
"There is only one thing cryptocurrency is good for" this video It's from author's lecture.