Most crypto developers don't work on the cryptocurrencies that work as currencies because they're established and they want a higher return so they make yet another alt-coin.
I'm not saying there aren't good new ideas in new alt-coins/etc. I'm just saying if we're making a big deal about the number of devs, the above is the main factor.
Eh, I think it's a pretty... ambitious claim that the time for new cryptocurrencies is over.
I think that most cryptocurrencies are intentional scams, and the vast majority of the remainder are bad ideas, but there are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies released each year at this point. Out of that cesspool, I'd expect to see maybe 1 or 2 successful ideas a year. Note I didn't say "good", I said "successful"--in general I think cryptocurrencies are bad for society, but lots of things that are bad for society are successful.
This past year, I think Avalanche Consensus and Near's Deep Sharding were pretty decent ideas. I don't know if they're good enough to translate into long-term success for either coin, but I suspect in the long run, deep sharding drawing inspiration from Near will end up in Ethereum.
An idea which has been hinted at, which I think would be an improvement, would be an ecosystem which isn't programmable, but pulls successful ideas from programmable ecosystems. A few L1 chains at this point have added integrated oracles, but I don't think that takes the idea far enough. A chain with integrated UniSwap, integrated Aave, etc., and no way to add your own coins without consensus from validators, would have no scams and be more performant, while keeping the value of those products in the coin itself. It would be harder to build hype for, because you can't have a gold rush of developers coming in to build the same old coins and investors to try to get in early, but in the long run it seems more sustainable.
Creating a new e-coin has the perverse incentive of mining the low-hanging fruit in private, with the hope of it becoming valuable and making the founder(s) billionaires. I can't take seriously any e-coin that follows this path.
Crypto developers are not primarily working on alt coins. They're working on enterprise blockchains with niche applications, or working on building dapps on top of existing chains.
This article is a bit disingenuous. Optimism, Arbitrum, and Starknet are all part of the Ethereum ecosystem. Technically, Polygon PoS isn't, but Polygon zkEVM definitely is.
It's interesting to me that crypto is mostly the only place in tech where this (this is all a waste) is a widely accepted idea.
As someone else has correctly mentioned, ads (and tracking), are sadly the lifeblood of a lot of tech action and are arguably just as (if not more) exploitative. It's just slower and more subtle.
As for crypto itself, I get why it's not an attractive idea, and yes -- a very good bit of it is scam-city, but I'm compelled to admit that the cryptobros are generally correct when they describe the state of the dollar today -- even if their proposed solutions often leave much to be desired.
Isn't this expected. Bitcoin seems like a completed project, you can fine tune it to get better perf, fix security issues. Any significant architectural change is basically impossible now without breaking backward compatibility. Not only that, you have to persuade miners to use the new code. I remember the hate around increasing bitcoin block size to 8MB (to allow for faster transaction processing, on par with debit cards), which lead to creating Bitcoin Cash fork.
Bitcoin is like git basically, it works, most of the crypto fans are happy with it. Non tech people are using nice UIs without any understanding what happens to their money.
OTOH I have friends that work "around crypto", they either work on new coins that provide privacy/speed/eco-friendliness or create exchanges or create other financial stuff like crypto robo-advisors that buy/sell according to user spec algo. The scene looks similar to what hedge funds are doing on major stock exchanges.
Solana transaction fees are fractions of a cent as you can see.
Portal, which my cofounder snd I wrote, supports Solana’s transaction priority fees (which still costs less than a cent), which gets transactions into blocks faster, so less than a second as you saw in the video.
The transaction fees are based on compute rather than amount which you probably know, so it could have been a million USDC and the price would be flat.
USDC is considered the best capitalised stablecoin and Portal defaults to it (or EUROC in future) because we care about payments more than speculation.
One question I have in all of this: are people building and using these apps actually marking all transactions as capital losses or gains? [1] A big thing that stops me from even playing around in these systems is not wanting to deal with the tax hassle.
This article is a bit misleading for those who may think it’s saying most people are now coding with esoteric languages like Move or Clarity … the Ethereum Virtual Machine is an open standard and Solidity is a language and that is what is used by the vast majority of smart contract developers, even if they deploy to Polygon. It is a bit like saying most web developers and hosting companies aren’t using PHP because they are using PHP-FPM.
Most HTML developers wrote gaudy sites <blink> and <marquee> tags. But the Web went on to create trillions in wealth for the world because it was based around an open protocol, HTTP.
Most PHP developers wrote insecure garbage code, but back then businesses wanted to just have a site that works. It had some utility. But Web 2.0 went on to create even more utility for the world, even though its network effects increasingly created monopolies.
Ethereum really democratized the ability to launch a token. So that’s what the vast majority of people did. Eventually there will be real applications worldwide, and what’s more, they will be produced by factories (like UniSwap) so they’ll just be a very reliable way to distribute open source software. People don’t appreciate that smart contracts can do a LOT more than that!
https://intercoin.org/applications are examples of open source smart contracts designed to service communities, and you don’t need a token to use them. There is no ponzi, only utility. Just use them in your community — or not.
However, the last 3 years during the bull market speculators found Intercoin very uninteresting, because by contrast a tulip mania could make a lot more returns, than selling actual products to communities.
Publishing of information, distribution of information, self service, and facilitation of services were very long standing problems before the web. The web solved them cheaply and easily and it did it by design, not by coincidence. It didn't need artificial hype because it was obvious what it was good for.
Some of the comments here are like you are not even trying to understand cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Its like you just got scammed by trying to get rich fast and now all of a sudden every single crypto is a scam to you.
To the people saying theres absolutely no use of cryptocurrencies, say that to people who were able to save some of their money when fleeing war torn regions. Tell that to people who whos pay-checks are getting stolen by banks. Tell that to people who are finally getting access to loans in impoverished regions. Tell that to activists banned by governments who get to fight another day. Tell that to people who’s governments devalued their currency who has basically got cut out of a way to trade.
Yes criminals use crypto! But these crimes didn’t magically appear because of crypto. Dont forget fiat has had a monopoly on these crimes before 2009.
[+] [-] superkuh|3 years ago|reply
I'm not saying there aren't good new ideas in new alt-coins/etc. I'm just saying if we're making a big deal about the number of devs, the above is the main factor.
[+] [-] kerkeslager|3 years ago|reply
I think that most cryptocurrencies are intentional scams, and the vast majority of the remainder are bad ideas, but there are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies released each year at this point. Out of that cesspool, I'd expect to see maybe 1 or 2 successful ideas a year. Note I didn't say "good", I said "successful"--in general I think cryptocurrencies are bad for society, but lots of things that are bad for society are successful.
This past year, I think Avalanche Consensus and Near's Deep Sharding were pretty decent ideas. I don't know if they're good enough to translate into long-term success for either coin, but I suspect in the long run, deep sharding drawing inspiration from Near will end up in Ethereum.
An idea which has been hinted at, which I think would be an improvement, would be an ecosystem which isn't programmable, but pulls successful ideas from programmable ecosystems. A few L1 chains at this point have added integrated oracles, but I don't think that takes the idea far enough. A chain with integrated UniSwap, integrated Aave, etc., and no way to add your own coins without consensus from validators, would have no scams and be more performant, while keeping the value of those products in the coin itself. It would be harder to build hype for, because you can't have a gold rush of developers coming in to build the same old coins and investors to try to get in early, but in the long run it seems more sustainable.
[+] [-] 71a54xd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Oxidation|3 years ago|reply
I'll say it, though.
What do all these coins do that's special except attempt to make money for the relevant company? What problem does alt-coin #45321 solve?
[+] [-] robbyking|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j0hnyl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not2b|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guywithahat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creese|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rom-antics|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zubairq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JStanton617|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrm4|3 years ago|reply
As someone else has correctly mentioned, ads (and tracking), are sadly the lifeblood of a lot of tech action and are arguably just as (if not more) exploitative. It's just slower and more subtle.
As for crypto itself, I get why it's not an attractive idea, and yes -- a very good bit of it is scam-city, but I'm compelled to admit that the cryptobros are generally correct when they describe the state of the dollar today -- even if their proposed solutions often leave much to be desired.
[+] [-] Beaver117|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] switchbak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PopePompus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xmarcin|3 years ago|reply
Bitcoin is like git basically, it works, most of the crypto fans are happy with it. Non tech people are using nice UIs without any understanding what happens to their money.
OTOH I have friends that work "around crypto", they either work on new coins that provide privacy/speed/eco-friendliness or create exchanges or create other financial stuff like crypto robo-advisors that buy/sell according to user spec algo. The scene looks similar to what hedge funds are doing on major stock exchanges.
[+] [-] alangibson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/portalpayments/status/162228646713646285...
Solana transaction fees are fractions of a cent as you can see.
Portal, which my cofounder snd I wrote, supports Solana’s transaction priority fees (which still costs less than a cent), which gets transactions into blocks faster, so less than a second as you saw in the video.
The transaction fees are based on compute rather than amount which you probably know, so it could have been a million USDC and the price would be flat.
USDC is considered the best capitalised stablecoin and Portal defaults to it (or EUROC in future) because we care about payments more than speculation.
[+] [-] siftrics|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobaddays|3 years ago|reply
In all seriousness, USDC comes pretty close to that i think or something built on algorand
[+] [-] photon12|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|3 years ago|reply
Most HTML developers wrote gaudy sites <blink> and <marquee> tags. But the Web went on to create trillions in wealth for the world because it was based around an open protocol, HTTP.
Most PHP developers wrote insecure garbage code, but back then businesses wanted to just have a site that works. It had some utility. But Web 2.0 went on to create even more utility for the world, even though its network effects increasingly created monopolies.
Ethereum really democratized the ability to launch a token. So that’s what the vast majority of people did. Eventually there will be real applications worldwide, and what’s more, they will be produced by factories (like UniSwap) so they’ll just be a very reliable way to distribute open source software. People don’t appreciate that smart contracts can do a LOT more than that!
https://intercoin.org/applications are examples of open source smart contracts designed to service communities, and you don’t need a token to use them. There is no ponzi, only utility. Just use them in your community — or not.
However, the last 3 years during the bull market speculators found Intercoin very uninteresting, because by contrast a tulip mania could make a lot more returns, than selling actual products to communities.
[+] [-] sublinear|3 years ago|reply
What do cryptocurrencies do again?
[+] [-] sublinear|3 years ago|reply
There's not much enlightenment to be had on this topic, so not much productivity.
[+] [-] paulpauper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubyist5eva|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colesantiago|3 years ago|reply
And yes, all of crypto is a scam. There are no exceptions.
Even if you try and resticker poker chips as chocolate gold coins and sell them to the public as with what all of crypto does.
I can't wait for hard regulations to completely kill these bullshit jobs in this scam industry, the layoffs are just the start.
[+] [-] malikNF|3 years ago|reply
To the people saying theres absolutely no use of cryptocurrencies, say that to people who were able to save some of their money when fleeing war torn regions. Tell that to people who whos pay-checks are getting stolen by banks. Tell that to people who are finally getting access to loans in impoverished regions. Tell that to activists banned by governments who get to fight another day. Tell that to people who’s governments devalued their currency who has basically got cut out of a way to trade.
Yes criminals use crypto! But these crimes didn’t magically appear because of crypto. Dont forget fiat has had a monopoly on these crimes before 2009.
[+] [-] nailer|3 years ago|reply