For a while I have been losing faith in the crypto space, though I've known about it for a really long time I have never really made any significant money in it.
But I've been watching it with interest and what interested me the most was the governance aspects of it. But lately, when I look at the space, it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly. I think I am invited everyday on discord or telegram to this or that "DAO", which really are nothing but pump and dump scams with a coat of governance onto them.
I do wonder, is this a feature or a bug? Humans might be naturally greedy and maybe these hyper-marketized mechanisms simply bring out the worst in us.
But I will say, I really admire Vitalik and his vision, I read his blog and I love it. It makes me hopeful but maybe he might just be too optimistic. Things are not how we'd like them to be but how they are, this is a very important lesson in politics.
The NFT space seems to have supercharged pump-and-dump dynamic. While previously the grift seemed somewhat bound to technical people and early(ish) adopters, NFTs have brought in a tidal wave of "creators". The amount of hand waving in the NFT "chill and shill" Twitter spaces is such that I imagine arms are being dislocated from shoulder sockets.
With respect to DAOs, I still believe this is the most interesting crypto related innovation since smart contracts/dApps. I hope that the eventual bursting of the bubble doesn't throw this baby out with the bathwater. The democratization of capital raising, free flow of capital across jurisdictions, and rethinking of governance strike me as good things for all of humanity.
There are roughly two types of people who participate in (or previously participated in) the cryptocurrency space.
Those who are genuinely interested in one or more aspects (the mathematics, the technology, the smart contracts, the governance aspects, the anti-banking aspects, the innovation, and/or trustless funds transfer). And those who are primarily attracted to the space due to the potential for profit.
For the former group, it's a bug. For the latter group, it seems to be a feature.
In my experience, the former group are fading away. Either loosing interest as the space doesn't live up to promises, or driven away all the scammers and other shitty behaviour that seems to follow the people who are primarily attracted by profits.
In my own personal experience, I was attracted by the technology and really enjoyed learning about and improving on the technology. But I didn't like the general feeling of the space, so I've faded away. Even liquidated all my holdings so I never have to deal with the space again.
All of these Discord and Telegram "DAOs" are almost always scams. Crypto makes them easier, but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it.
It is hard to argue that "they don't represent crypto" when they are 90% of what people see, and many people's first exposure to it, but of course, they don't represent crypto. They bring zero innovation, except for the best marketing copy to bring in gullible victims. Real projects (for instance, zkSync) are a lot more quiet about their marketing.
> "it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly ... is this a feature or a bug?"
There is no incentive to do anything properly in cryptocurrency development because it puts monetisation before use-case, so you get all the money up front with no commitment to deliver anything (whether useful or not) and can often remain anonymous to boot. Whether you call this a bug or a feature simply depends upon how scrupulous you are.
So within 7 years of the start of Bitcoin, pretty much every original Bitcoin developer had become disillusioned, with claims like it was "an experiment" and "has failed"[0]. We're now heading towards 7 years since the start of Ethereum, and it sounds like Vitalik is now too beginning to realise that it has turned into something a lot worse than what it tried to replace, e.g. because it magnifies the most terrible aspects of human nature.
Let us not think Vitalik was some sort of saint. Etherium was launched with a massive premine which the developers awarded themselves a sizable chunk of the supply before the network even came online. Not only was this pretty scammy in of itself, it also legitimized future shitcoins having similar amounts of premine
If I'm being charitable, it's hard to see Vitalik as anything other than naive/"useful idiot" to the commoditize-everything hypercapitalist forces. It doesn't take a genius to show some restraint in opening one pandora's box after another.
Some of the Bitcoin devs realized this early on. Ethereum, for whatever reason, didn't and it's been scamville ever since.
As for Bitcoin developers, that's not really true at all. There are quite a few that are active in ecosystem development and conversation on the bitcoinhackers.org mastodon instance and a few IRC/Matrix channels.
Unfortunately, Ethereum communities still seem to socialize and organize on centralized platforms like Slack, Discord, and Twitter.
I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed. I think crypto is interesting and has utilities, but its not going to solve global social coordination.
I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.
Crypto very much suffers from a chronic case of "one bad apple spoils the barrel".
There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities. Once prices started going up and and a bunch of people started using it as a get-rich-quick scheme, that rapidly became a vicious cycle with people like me started leaving the ecosystem in disgust, and we lost what pressure existed within crypto-adjancent companies to stay true to the original goals.
This article makes it sound that Vitalik is reaching that state of disillusionment as well. Shame, he's one of the last few "true believers" I know of.
This seems like a repeating pattern: brilliant tech visionaries attempting to undermine political/financial power with technology. Every time this is attempted it's subverted either by the application of power (firewalls, censorship, KYC/obscenity laws) or money (acquisitions, embrace extend extinguish, advertising[1], astroturf/spam). It seems like there might be a persistent gap in STEM education where each new generation of hackers is unaware of the underlying societal reasons why such attempts fail and convinces themselves: "this time it's going to be different".
[1] By this I mean that if a platform decides to be ad-funded, they often begin to self-censor to stay in the advertiser's good graces. Over time this gives increasing power to large advertisers to control content - see: Youtube.
> I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed.
Well, of course! If crypto is useful as a counter-balance to authoritarian governments, then the value of crypto is rooted in bad (other) government. Who wants to live in a world where all governments are shit but we can still move money around?
Crypto might be a temporary plaster over some wounds, but we still need to close the wounds.
Congratulations, you now understand how proof-of-stake works - and why it’s a bad underpinning of cryptocurrencies, although bad in a different way than proof of work. Destroy the environment or make the rich richer; pick your poison.
As someone who has been working as a blockchain developer for nearly 4 years, I find it funny when Ethereum fanboys tell me things like "L1 was not designed for this type of throughput", "the high fees are good" and similar things. You can tell they got into crypto and NFTs recently and they don't know the initial promises made by the Ethereum team at the beginning and are just trying to hold onto their hype bubble. Ethereum was supposed to be capable of handling the world's bulk of decentralized application and finance transactions, and Ethereum devs at some point where making fun of Bitcoin for having high fees, now they are making excuses such as "L1 was not designed for this." as the dApps are leaving for other chains. Truly a funny show of denial and cover-up.
It's not so much an excuse but a learned lesson: the decentralization trilemma is real.
Don't forget that Ethereum is still a research project. "Denial" and "covering-up" would only apply if the devs were still promising that the base-layer would scale by itself. But ask any serious developer and it is pretty understood that "(Complete) Decentralization, Security, Scalability... pick two" is how things will have to go.
I sincerely thought from the beginning that Ethereum was going to implode because its core conceit of running a distributed VM was too insecure. The last straw was going to a launch party for the token and seeing the kind of people that were there; one lady ecstatically saying "we're all gonna be rich" got my senses going "they're actors - they have no real ability to discuss this tech, it's gotta be a scam", and I went home and found other alts to go into.
Many years and thousands of faulty Solidity contracts later, I still haven't been entirely vindicated. I certainly missed the boat on the gains, though I still did OK overall with my other moves. As it turns out, both the type of dev and the type of investor Eth attracts have never really changed: both are a bit too awed by the raw tech and its generality to think through the application in more detail than "we can make it and you can buy it".
But hey, it worked, the party is now crowded with apes; it's probably time to exit, though, cause I can't see it staying like this forever.
"I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing" - I love this call for more active political positioning in the community. This is political, it always has been. Let's embrace it. AssangeDao and Ukraine raising millions, proof of integrity received a lot of support during this round of gitcoin grants, it really feels like the community is ready to push hard - expect to see more politicians/co-ops/unions/welfare groups forming as digital orgs with crypto backends.
I am truly and continually disappointed with the response to cryptocurrencies in this community. For a user-base that is so knowledgeable to be so pig-headed about this topic is frightening.
> powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves
It doesn't move that money. It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money.
> the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs.
Yeah, no. Those products are a) not new, and b) most of them don't require either ethereum in particular or blockchain in general. It's all speculative smoke and mirrors, chasing investor money.
> Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong
Ah yes. "You're holding it wrong". This is the only outcome of crypto in particular and blockchains in general.
> Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects.
No, it won't. Because the tech not only doesn't solve these problems, but makes these problems significantly worse [1]
> ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world
No. The ultimate goal of crypto is exactly to play million-dollar games. Just because it was used to send pretend tokens to desperate people who have no meaningful ways of using them, doesn't mean it's accomplished something meaningful in the world.
> The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method
Blockchain and efficient in one sentence.
> Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up
I can't even.
And then they talk about how he "couldn't predict this", or "couldn't foresee that", or "watched with horror and dismay" when something easily predictable happened. All the while praising him for being "fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history."
Clearly he's "fluent" as in "he can come off as knowledgable in a Twitter thread".
See the link below for how all this was clearly predicted.
Useless and inflammatory comment. You just made a list of phrases that triggered you as you read and regurgitated generalizations, baseless claims and low effort snark and, to end it on a high note, a link to a crypto smear article from 4 years ago.
> Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up
> I can't even.
Proof of humanity is a really great project imo (especially in the face of things like worldcoins authoritarian approach). Its not perfect but it is working and doing what it says, theres around 15k people registered with many in south america earning more than their state pension. It also allows other organisations to bring 1p1v to their contracts. Theres some work to be done on privacy layers, but plans are in place. 1 move at a time.
>It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money.
If a particular item can be sold at a particular amount with predictable and transparent liquidity it is objectively worth that amount.
Ford doesn't speculate a Ford F-150 is worth $30k, they have customers lined up with cash in hand ready to buy and waiting lists (liquidity), therefore they are objectively worth $30k.
You wouldn't say 1 share of Amazon stock is speculatively worth $3,205. It's objectively worth that, because there's liquidity and an order book right now that will buy it for that price.
Your first point could be said about the NASDAQ or NYSE.
I'm not gonna respond to the rest because it's not worth the time and effort. Please go educate yourself on this topic before you hand-wave away this technology.
The article summarizes crypto’s cardinal sins. Chiefly:
> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich
So if it were a handful of Indian women it would be better?
More to the point, what was the author’s point? Are we to believe that the white men who’ve gotten rich on crypto did something untoward to get those riches? And if so, did they do the bad thing because of their genitalia skin color?
It is stunning that these kinds of lazy, unexamined biases are accepted in non-fringe media outlets.
> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams
[+] [-] jerojero|4 years ago|reply
But I've been watching it with interest and what interested me the most was the governance aspects of it. But lately, when I look at the space, it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly. I think I am invited everyday on discord or telegram to this or that "DAO", which really are nothing but pump and dump scams with a coat of governance onto them.
I do wonder, is this a feature or a bug? Humans might be naturally greedy and maybe these hyper-marketized mechanisms simply bring out the worst in us.
But I will say, I really admire Vitalik and his vision, I read his blog and I love it. It makes me hopeful but maybe he might just be too optimistic. Things are not how we'd like them to be but how they are, this is a very important lesson in politics.
[+] [-] next_xibalba|4 years ago|reply
With respect to DAOs, I still believe this is the most interesting crypto related innovation since smart contracts/dApps. I hope that the eventual bursting of the bubble doesn't throw this baby out with the bathwater. The democratization of capital raising, free flow of capital across jurisdictions, and rethinking of governance strike me as good things for all of humanity.
[+] [-] phire|4 years ago|reply
Those who are genuinely interested in one or more aspects (the mathematics, the technology, the smart contracts, the governance aspects, the anti-banking aspects, the innovation, and/or trustless funds transfer). And those who are primarily attracted to the space due to the potential for profit.
For the former group, it's a bug. For the latter group, it seems to be a feature.
In my experience, the former group are fading away. Either loosing interest as the space doesn't live up to promises, or driven away all the scammers and other shitty behaviour that seems to follow the people who are primarily attracted by profits.
In my own personal experience, I was attracted by the technology and really enjoyed learning about and improving on the technology. But I didn't like the general feeling of the space, so I've faded away. Even liquidated all my holdings so I never have to deal with the space again.
[+] [-] lekevicius|4 years ago|reply
It is hard to argue that "they don't represent crypto" when they are 90% of what people see, and many people's first exposure to it, but of course, they don't represent crypto. They bring zero innovation, except for the best marketing copy to bring in gullible victims. Real projects (for instance, zkSync) are a lot more quiet about their marketing.
[+] [-] astoor|4 years ago|reply
There is no incentive to do anything properly in cryptocurrency development because it puts monetisation before use-case, so you get all the money up front with no commitment to deliver anything (whether useful or not) and can often remain anonymous to boot. Whether you call this a bug or a feature simply depends upon how scrupulous you are.
[+] [-] astoor|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
[+] [-] cuteboy19|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armitron|4 years ago|reply
Some of the Bitcoin devs realized this early on. Ethereum, for whatever reason, didn't and it's been scamville ever since.
[+] [-] 3np|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, Ethereum communities still seem to socialize and organize on centralized platforms like Slack, Discord, and Twitter.
[+] [-] biophysboy|4 years ago|reply
I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.
[+] [-] pdpi|4 years ago|reply
There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities. Once prices started going up and and a bunch of people started using it as a get-rich-quick scheme, that rapidly became a vicious cycle with people like me started leaving the ecosystem in disgust, and we lost what pressure existed within crypto-adjancent companies to stay true to the original goals.
This article makes it sound that Vitalik is reaching that state of disillusionment as well. Shame, he's one of the last few "true believers" I know of.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|4 years ago|reply
[1] By this I mean that if a platform decides to be ad-funded, they often begin to self-censor to stay in the advertiser's good graces. Over time this gives increasing power to large advertisers to control content - see: Youtube.
[+] [-] the_other|4 years ago|reply
Well, of course! If crypto is useful as a counter-balance to authoritarian governments, then the value of crypto is rooted in bad (other) government. Who wants to live in a world where all governments are shit but we can still move money around?
Crypto might be a temporary plaster over some wounds, but we still need to close the wounds.
[+] [-] otterley|4 years ago|reply
Congratulations, you now understand how proof-of-stake works - and why it’s a bad underpinning of cryptocurrencies, although bad in a different way than proof of work. Destroy the environment or make the rich richer; pick your poison.
[+] [-] jbirer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rglullis|4 years ago|reply
Don't forget that Ethereum is still a research project. "Denial" and "covering-up" would only apply if the devs were still promising that the base-layer would scale by itself. But ask any serious developer and it is pretty understood that "(Complete) Decentralization, Security, Scalability... pick two" is how things will have to go.
[+] [-] syntheweave|4 years ago|reply
Many years and thousands of faulty Solidity contracts later, I still haven't been entirely vindicated. I certainly missed the boat on the gains, though I still did OK overall with my other moves. As it turns out, both the type of dev and the type of investor Eth attracts have never really changed: both are a bit too awed by the raw tech and its generality to think through the application in more detail than "we can make it and you can buy it".
But hey, it worked, the party is now crowded with apes; it's probably time to exit, though, cause I can't see it staying like this forever.
[+] [-] newacc9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
+maximalists
[+] [-] ricochet11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Existenceblinks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TradingPlaces|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twox2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigtex88|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tenoke|4 years ago|reply
Edit: and now the title has been re-editorialized a second time even though the original one isn't misleading.
[+] [-] dmitriid|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't move that money. It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money.
> the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs.
Yeah, no. Those products are a) not new, and b) most of them don't require either ethereum in particular or blockchain in general. It's all speculative smoke and mirrors, chasing investor money.
> Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong
Ah yes. "You're holding it wrong". This is the only outcome of crypto in particular and blockchains in general.
> Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects.
No, it won't. Because the tech not only doesn't solve these problems, but makes these problems significantly worse [1]
> ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world
No. The ultimate goal of crypto is exactly to play million-dollar games. Just because it was used to send pretend tokens to desperate people who have no meaningful ways of using them, doesn't mean it's accomplished something meaningful in the world.
> The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method
Blockchain and efficient in one sentence.
> Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up
I can't even.
And then they talk about how he "couldn't predict this", or "couldn't foresee that", or "watched with horror and dismay" when something easily predictable happened. All the while praising him for being "fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history."
Clearly he's "fluent" as in "he can come off as knowledgable in a Twitter thread".
See the link below for how all this was clearly predicted.
[1] https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
[+] [-] birracerveza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricochet11|4 years ago|reply
> I can't even.
Proof of humanity is a really great project imo (especially in the face of things like worldcoins authoritarian approach). Its not perfect but it is working and doing what it says, theres around 15k people registered with many in south america earning more than their state pension. It also allows other organisations to bring 1p1v to their contracts. Theres some work to be done on privacy layers, but plans are in place. 1 move at a time.
What can't you even? I think its great!
[+] [-] 0xy|4 years ago|reply
If a particular item can be sold at a particular amount with predictable and transparent liquidity it is objectively worth that amount.
Ford doesn't speculate a Ford F-150 is worth $30k, they have customers lined up with cash in hand ready to buy and waiting lists (liquidity), therefore they are objectively worth $30k.
You wouldn't say 1 share of Amazon stock is speculatively worth $3,205. It's objectively worth that, because there's liquidity and an order book right now that will buy it for that price.
[+] [-] bigtex88|4 years ago|reply
I'm not gonna respond to the rest because it's not worth the time and effort. Please go educate yourself on this topic before you hand-wave away this technology.
[+] [-] aliswe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] next_xibalba|4 years ago|reply
> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich
So if it were a handful of Indian women it would be better?
More to the point, what was the author’s point? Are we to believe that the white men who’ve gotten rich on crypto did something untoward to get those riches? And if so, did they do the bad thing because of their genitalia skin color?
It is stunning that these kinds of lazy, unexamined biases are accepted in non-fringe media outlets.
[+] [-] hunterb123|4 years ago|reply
Expected nothing less from Time...
[+] [-] InsaneOstrich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] M1rco|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Machado117|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otterley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mwattsun|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] SodiumMerchant0|4 years ago|reply
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