[wintom]

The real issue with all the pump and dump, fear of missing out, and all the other crazy “mooning” is that it is ruining this whole space. It is creating a reality that all the haters of cryptocurrency have been talking about for a while.

Instead of focusing on building real applications with blockchain, programmable money, and changing the world everyone is focused on trading and get rich quick schemes. This stuff could change the world it is money ripped out of government hands and it could be baked into everything we do on the internet but I am not so sure that will happen anytime soon anymore.

I am very jaded with the whole space because of all this fraud.

[Sangermaine]

>It is creating a reality that all the haters of cryptocurrency have been talking about for a while.

Or you might have it backwards: it's reality crashing against the near-religious fantasies that crypto boosters held for ideological and other reasons.

[Waterluvian]

Yeah it feels like a real-time experiment on the necessity of regulation and oversight.

[jahewson]

I’m afraid that reality has been around for a lot longer than cryptocurrency and it was quite obvious to a great many people that an unregulated global financial market was going to result in massive fraud. After all it’s a big enough problem in regulated markets!

“Ripped out of the hands of government” means “ripped out of the hands of regulators” and history has taught us exactly what happens again and again in such situations.

[zitterbewegung]

The fraud will continue until we get more and more rules and regulation. I expect the governments will step in to regulate all of this. Once we have that we will have applications that work for the public .

But I think the real innovation will be in private blockchain systems . The Hyperledger group has some exciting technology . Taking business problems you know and seeing if it will work will be really exciting.

I recommend going through their free course https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:LinuxFoundationX+L...

Even if you aren’t interested in private blockchain technology it gives you what you need to understand. From there you could just read the white papers of bitcoin and Ethereum .

[buttcoinslol]

What did you expect? Humans are greedy, full stop.

Also, governments will give up power over currency when they lose their monopoly on violence.. so .. never.

[laretluval]

The whole theory of cryptocurrency economics is based on the axiom that people are greedy. Do you really think people didn't realize this? The problem isn't that they didn't realize people are greedy, in fact they believe that more deeply than most. Rather their theories about what aggregate greediness would lead to were inaccurate at least in the short term.

[paulsutter]

Yes it’s like the 1999 dotcom bubble but worse.

Don’t worry though, soon it will be 2001. All the tourists will go home and the real work will continue.

Bram Cohen: https://gist.github.com/FredericJacobs/1614f8eb741532c3f2cb

[wsc981]

Just today I discovered Bram Cohen is actually working on a new crypto-currency in a company [0] he has setup. It should be interesting to see if he can create a better crypto that doesn't have all problems that he currently sees in Bitcoin and others. He's currently looking for devs with good algorithmic skills to join his company.

---

[0]: https://chia.network/

[bhouston]

> This stuff could change the world

We are in the dot com bubble of cryptocurrency. Real tech that has been overtaken by hype, momentum investing, and well scammers. I expect a similar type of situation to play out.

I feel like the non-existence USDT is going to be at the center of the coming crisis in cryptocurrency and I think that exchanges should face that head on, rather than letting it swallow them up. Exchanges should start to move away from USDT sooner rather than later.

[zerostar07]

Well good. If a cryptocoin is regulatable, its a failure. Let them be pumped and dumped until they re banned. It only brings the tech closer to what it has to be

[Theodores]

Many millions of people have sums of money from an inheritance or other windfall, this money sits in a bank and does not collect interest, even with low inflation it essentially depreciates. So along comes the crypto market and all of a sudden people are putting their savings in, hoping to make a quick buck on a rising market. They know it is a risk but they do it anyway.

This choice of 'scam coins' over 'fiat' is part religious cult and people get caught up believing more than they can understand about the holy blockchain, however, it also reflects badly on mainstream banking and how broken that is. Really it has been broken for at least a generation in that interest rates are dysfunctional-low.

Barely a day goes by without a scam coming to light that costs real USD, there is a ocean of difference between 'coin market value' and dollars of real money, but still this is lots of poor people losing their windfall savings. It can be a boyfriend or a brother that accesses the savings, so the purse strings are on that trust relationship. My top tip is to get into the divorce business as a lot of people are going to be arguing over 'where the bitcoin went'. They still probably won't be believing 'fiat' money is real so the carcasses left behind by the altcoin scammers should still be rich pickings for lawyers and estate agents.

Right now I am trying to think of how I could use the all wonderful blockchain to help plant trees in the Northern Forest, with an app so people could sponsor a tree and have it all tied in to some fashionable blockchain thing. In this way, in fifty years time, the bits of poetry and dedications people have left for the trees will still work as there will be no central server needed.

However, I don't quite see it. If I am to help plant five million trees by getting people to sponsor the things then the blockchain can wait. My clumsy database tables and the various joins will all be magic-beaned into blockchain sexy at another time, so the forest QR codes and AR poetry works in a decentralised way, for the next few millenia, right?

So maybe I should just roll with it, work with a few altcoin scammers that know the gig is a joke and scam a few million people into buying coins 'backed with saplings' and have them feverishly land grab the whole of the North of England, desperate to plant an extra Rowan tree here or there. In that way, when it all goes tits up, there will be a forest happily growing away.

Or maybe an 'alt-coin' forest could work? 'Bitcoin Pine', 'Bitcoin Oak', 'Bitcoin Ash' - imagine the fun trading in the futures market.

[malmsteen]

In addition to my first comment... : The western-like environment is also the direct consequence of the "no regulation" aspect that crypto fans like so much. When there start being regulation everyone will leave the space precisely because there's not the hope anymore of making quick fast money...

[whataretensors]

It's not exactly fraud in the same sense as someone stealing money. It's a game that people are playing - which the pump and dumpers can lose.

A potential winning strategy is to wait until they tell you to buy and start selling.

[baxtr]

That’s why they announce the coin right before the pump

[laretluval]

You want money to be baked into everything we do on the internet?

[tetrahedr0n]

It already is. Today, the leading form of "money" used on the internet is your information to pay for your access to something.

Facebook, google, instagram, etc etc.

[malmsteen]

There's no "application" of blockchain. You'd be rather thanking thoses schemes because they are feeding the hype of what would be seems as a useless techno otherwise.

I mean come on, anything can be done without it and using blockchain just bring unessential minor improvements like decentralization that no one cares about. Prove me wrong ...

[simias]

I can think of one use for blockchains that can't easily be replicated otherwise (at least not with the same amount of security), it's proving that you knew something at some point in time. Putting something in the blockchain is like taking a picture of it with today's newspaper next to it so to speak, except you can't photoshop it.

If I made a groundbreaking discovery today, putting a sha-256 of it into the blockchain would be a very good proof later on that I actually owned it at this time.

But beyond that I agree with you. My (non-technical) girlfriend is looking into cryptocurrencies lately and she watches tons of youtube videos about it while doing her research (TEDx talks and the like). Easily 90% of the claims of "blockchain is going to revolutionize X" are easily dismissed either because the blockchain can't do what the person claims or there's an other, often simpler solution to this same issue. "Use the blockchain for food traceability", "use the blockchain to validate critical equipment firmware" etc... It sounds good as long as you don't think about it for more than 10 seconds.

The problem is that in order to realize that you need to have a rather deep technical knowledge about how the blockchain works, something 99% of people investing in crypto probably lack.

[kevinthew]

Yeah, crypto hype in fake technological improvements is part of this mess. People actually think there is intrinsic value in a public ledger (there isn't).

[tim333]

Cryptocurrencies have proved popular for drug dealing, extortion and speculation/gambling. They will probably also help with tax evasion and money laundering. Those are applications of a sort if not very positive ones. The decentralization is necessary to put the above outside government control.

[tetrahedr0n]

The applications are projects that require immutable data and wide distribution. Those developments haven't really been made yet.

Most of the discussion today about crypto developments is centered around bitcoin. But just because something utilizes a blockchain doesn't mean it has anything to do with bitcoin. Bitcoin was the first popular application built on top of a blockchain, and arguably the most radical.

[adamnemecek]

It allows you to opt out of the monetary system that's been imposed on you by your govt. This might be less of a big deal if you live in a developed country but it's a big deal if you live in an unstable country.