You'll get nothing but up votes here on HN, a lot are still angry they missed the boat.

But solving the problem of how to transfer value trustlessly and anonymously, instantly anywhere in the world is one of the biggest breakthroughs since the Internet.

Amazing how in a few short years kids started growing up with Bitcoin and don't understand how it work or why it exists :(

You would be surprised at how efficient cryptocurrency mining is compared to other ways of storing value. And most improvements happen to reduce the overall cost of securing value (PoS, PoST, etc)

It's both a waste of compute and it also solves problems. Namely, how to transfer money without the government stopping you.

Hackernews is completely oblivious to cryptocurrencies. There we major hacks in April involving values 100x bigger than whatever gets upvoted here, and still I saw 0 posts commenting about it.

Just as an example, aave lost 295 million last month due to a hack in another protocol, and nothing was posted here.

Having dealt with hackers (not the HN variety unfort) who go to extraordinary lengths to cryptojack pennies, I completely agree. They always use Monero for some reason. In sum, what is this technology good for?

1. Illegality 2. Speculation (i.e., gambling)

So yes, +1. :-(

This talking point is so silly

I can use my compute and energy how I like, whether that’s for AI or crypto or a Minecraft server. You don’t have a right to call one “wasteful” and one not

is privacy of financial transactions not a valuable problem to be solved in your opinions?

It's solving a lot of people's problems, they just aren't your problems.

It's great for buying drugs though! (Which is funnily the only actually legitimate usecase)

Absolutely true, no one needs monero when you can have bitcoin (and lightning for private instant bitcoin payments).