In recent times, it seems that the reaction to cryptocurrencies here has mostly settled into either greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread or this-is-pure-snake-oil camps, with no one really adopting a neutral view, and it's hard for me to say which view is heavily dominant on Hacker News.
Speaking as someone who tends towards the latter camp, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies feel to me a lot more like a solution in search of a problem. It's been around for over a decade, and yet the only financial niches it seems to have occupied is drying up the supplies of GPUs and providing a speculative bubble. Actually using it for end-user transactions seems to have gone down from a peak several years ago, and acting as a settlement layer is a use case that everyone talks about but has never actually come about.
Speaking as someone who tends towards the latter camp, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies feel to me a lot more like a solution in search of a problem. It's been around for over a decade, and yet the only financial niches it seems to have occupied is drying up the supplies of GPUs and providing a speculative bubble. Actually using it for end-user transactions seems to have gone down from a peak several years ago, and acting as a settlement layer is a use case that everyone talks about but has never actually come about.