[leppr]

The "Wolf of Wall Street" types and various "crypto-bros" didn't "ruin it for everyone". They tarnished the connotation of the word "cryptocurrency", and wasted a lot of people of a lot of money. But their work has been mostly orthogonal to the real work on decentralized networks being done.

> The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld

This conclusion doesn't follow, neither logically nor empirically. [1] The exact opposite actually happened: we went from the vast majority of the volume being a darknet market, to most volume being saving/speculation and non-criminal e-commerce settlements.

[1]: https://twitter.com/malekanoms/status/1626583628099784705

[arcticbull]

It's been 14 years, billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That's just fact. Time to move on.

[kkielhofner]

Thank you for succinctly saying what takes me multiple paragraphs.

One nitpick - it’s easily $10s of billions of in investment, more than likely approaching or surpassing $100s of billions.

A16Z alone has raised roughly $10b. Throw in other big VCs, a bunch of coin/crypto specific funds, likely thousands or tens of thousands of angel/seed rounds we’ve never heard of capitalizing on the hype (or just outright frauds), initial coin allocations (the Ethereum foundation alone had over $1b last I looked), etc, etc. Then there’s trying to figure how to “value” “investment” in things like ICOs and ICO 2.0 stuff like NFTs, etc.

Not to mention the tendency for crypto projects to be outright frauds from the start. OneCoin alone brought in $4b in what could be characterized as “investment” from the perspective of the victims. One incomplete analysis[0] shows this specific category of frauds (of which there are many in crypto) to be at least $26b in total.

It’s been 14 years, hundreds of billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That’s just fact. Time to move on.

[0] - https://www.comparitech.com/crypto/cryptocurrency-scams/

[leppr]

If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.

Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.

[1] https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-data/